Praying to ward off another plague
Passion play site seeks new miracle
OBERAMMERGAU, Germany — There is no doubt in the mind of the Rev. Thomas Rev. Groner that what happened in his village was a miracle. He says he has proof, too. The pandemic had ravaged the village, with 1 in 4 people believed to have died. “Whole families, gone,” Rev. Groner said.
Then villagers stood before a cross and pledged to God that if he spared those who remained, they would perform the Passion play — enacting Jesus’ life, death and resurrection — every 10th year forever after.
It was 1633. The bubonic plague was still raging in Bavaria. But legend has it that after the pledge, no one else in the village died from it.
Standing in his church underneath the cross where villagers had once made their promise, Rev. Groner held out a battered, leatherbound book.
“Look,” he said, his fingers scanning a faded page with tightly packed handwriting that abruptly stops three-quarters down. “They recorded dozens and dozens of deaths and then — none.”
For nearly four centuries, the people of Oberammergau (pronounced ohber-AH-mer-gow) more or less kept their promise, celebrating their salvation from one pandemic — until another pandemic forced them to break it.
This year’s Passion play, scheduled to premiere in May and run through the summer, had to be abandoned because of the coronavirus. An epic production, cast with local residents as actors, the play would have brought half a million visitors to the village and 2,500 people — or half of Oberammergau — onto the world’s biggest open-air stage.
The production would have been the 42nd since the play’s premiere in 1634. Canceled only twice — in 1770 during the Enlightenment and in 1940 during World War II — the play has been performed once every decade and sometimes twice, for special anniversaries. It had to be postponed once before, after too many men had died in World War I to field a cast.
Now, as Easter weekend approaches, Oberammergau is praying for another miracle.
So far, the village does not have a single known case of COVID-19.
“Maybe the pledge still protects the village?” Susanne Eski, a dressmaker, said hopefully as she prepared to put costumes for the Passion play into storage one recent afternoon.
But outside Oberammergau, the number of cases has been rising, and most fear that it is just a matter of time. As of Sunday, there were more than 91,000 infections in Germany and more than 1,300 deaths.
For centuries, kings and queens, leaders and celebrities have flocked to this village in the Bavarian Alps to be immersed in the story of salvation.
Since the mid-1960s, the play has been criticized for its crude anti-Semitism, first by Jewish groups and later by the Roman Catholic Church itself. Adolf Hitler reportedly loved it and deemed it “important to the Reich.”
Christian Stuckl has directed the Passion play for three decades, gradually ridding it of its most egregious anti-Semitic symbolism and opening the cast to Protestants, Muslims and married women. He welled up with emotion when he announced that this year’s performances would be postponed by two years.
The village had been building up to this moment for a decade.
For months, hotels and restaurants had staffed up to cope with the onslaught of visitors. Local craftsmen worked overtime to sculpt the stage props. Volunteers helped sew costumes. Rehearsals brought together all age groups in the village, from toddlers to grandparents, sometimes daily.
And in keeping with an ancient village statute, many men stopped shaving a year ago to allow hair to sprout freely — A.D. 30 style.
But the rehearsals have stopped. The Passion play theater, with its 4,500 seats, stands empty. Props and costumes are going into storage.
Only the beards remain: Both village hairdressers are shut because of the coronavirus.
“If you didn’t know this was Oberammergau, you’d think this village is full of hipsters or jihadis,” joked Cengiz Gorur, 20, a son of a local restaurant owner and the first Muslim to get a leading part in the Passion play.
Mr. Gorur was cast as Judas, the play’s traditional villain, which, as the newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung recently wrote, “some outside observers find very modern, others a little nasty.” The director said he got the role for his great acting talent.
It has been more than two weeks since the postponement was announced, and a collective sense of gloom has given way to an anxious calm. Like elsewhere in Germany, Oberammergau is adapting to the new reality of life in a pandemic — but perhaps more than elsewhere, villagers are looking at their fate through the prism of their local history.
The story of the plague profoundly shaped this village, remarked Eva Reiser, who was to play Mary.
Already, the coronavirus has given new significance to the words Frederik Mayet, who was to play Jesus, had been rehearsing.
Mr. Stuckl, the director, can trace his own family back to the days of the plague. Its first victim was one of his ancestors, the caretaker of the church.
Mr. Stuckl is a lifelong Catholic but is not so sure that what happened in 1633 was a miracle. The pledge was made in October, he pointed out, just as winter set in. The plague bacterium does not do well in the cold.