Jewish American Heritage Month

How Hitler’s Favorite Passion Play Lost Its Anti-Semitism – The Atlantic

Posted By admin on August 4, 2022

It would be hard to choose the most Jewish moment in this years production of Oberammergaus Passion Play, the grand spectacle that recounts the story of Jesus Christs trial, suffering, and resurrection. Begun in 1634 and performed roughly every 10 years, the play is produced by the inhabitants of this Bavarian village located in the foothills of the Alps. Maybe it was the scene where Jesus holds a Torah scroll aloft and leads the congregation in the Shma Yisrael, the Jewish declaration of faith in a single God, or perhaps it was the Last Supper, where Jesus and his apostles recite the traditional prayers over the wine and bread in convincing Hebrew. For me, it would have to be the way that Mary, the Madonna, is greeted in one scene: How fortunate we are to have our rabbis mother with us!

An audience member might be forgiven for thinking shes watching a sitcom written by the Coen brothers rather than a play that, for centuries, numbered among modern European historys most virulently anti-Semitic texts. Hitler, who attended in the 1930s, said: It is vital that the Passion Play be continued at Oberammergau; for never has the menace of Jewry been so convincingly portrayed as in this presentation of what happened in the times of the Romans. Recognizing the plays enormous propagandistic value, the Nazi leader even considered underwriting a Germany-wide tour so that the whole country could be inflamed against the Jews, reported the Jewish Telegraphic Agency at the time.

The Oberammergau Passionsspiele traces its origin to a purported miracle: The village was spared from a plague after locals vowed to reenact the Passion of Christ in perpetuity. Depending on your point of view, its survival after World War II and into the third decade of the 21st century can seem miraculous or puzzling. In the postwar period, Germany was forced to reexamine many of its national heroes and traditions that had been tainted by anti-Semitism, including Richard Wagner and the Bayreuther Festspiele, the opera festival founded by the composer. In 2022, it does not seem hyperbolic to say that the single most important factor in the plays endurance has been the concerted effort to eradicate its noxious depiction of Jews.

As a theatrical genre, the medieval Passion Play could not be more anachronistic. The event has remained very much a curio (which is, of course, one of Oberammergaus main selling points), a step back in time to a quaint past where peasants in a picturesque Alpine village came together to express their simple and pure belief through a performance involving nearly 2,000 participants as well as horses, goats, sheep, doves, and camels. In 1934, American Expresss sales pitch for travelers to Oberammergau promised a place on earth where piety and faith will live, it seems, forever.

For most of Oberammergaus postwar period, change came slowly. The town resisted calls from prominent American and European intellectuals to tone down the plays classic anti-Semitism. The Jewish people continued to be portrayed as a bloodthirsty mob, and the high priesthood as a sinister cabal with more power over Jesuss life than the occupying Romans. In the late 1960s, after the Second Vatican Council repudiated the ancient charge of Jewish collective guilt for the death of Christ, the Catholic Church urged Oberammergau to make changes to the play. But the 1970 Passionsspiele refused to make any significant alteration to the late-19-century script then in use. It remained largely unchanged from the version that the American Reform Rabbi Joseph Krauskopf saw in 1900 and wrote about in a pamphlet a year later. Shaken by what he had witnessed, he summed up that while people are free to believe whatever they choose, that freedom does not include the privilege of building up their faith at the expense of another peoples honor.

Read: A 1922 report from Oberammergau

After the Vatican withheld its missio canonica, the official authorization for preaching, in 1970, the plays organizers made overtures to the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee, inviting them to participate in discussing amendments to the play. But while nips and tucks were made here and there (including removing the horned-shaped hats worn by the high priests), it wasnt until 1986, when a new director, Christian Stckl, then only in his mid-20s, was elected by the town council with a one-vote majority that the Oberammergau Passionsspiele began to modernize.

When I first visited this Alpine Jerusalem for the first time a dozen years ago to see the 2010 production, I walked away from the five-hour-long spectacle moved by its fluid succession of drama and music (a full orchestra and chorus performs the oratorio-like score). What the story of the Passion lacks in suspense, it makes up for with grandly staged crowd scenes that alternated with more intimate ones that turned these biblical figures into flesh-and-blood characters. Roughly 40 percent of Oberammergaus 5,500 inhabitants take part in the show, onstage or behind it; I marveled at the Passionsspiele as a heroic communal undertaking (it is arguably the most spectacular amateur theater production on the planet) rather than a religious experience.

For me this was more of an aesthetic pilgrimage. Of course, Oberammergau continues to attract the devout (visitors from American Bible Belt make up a significant audience bloc), and the productions sensitivity to scripture and attempts at historical accuracy are at least partly calibrated to appeal to the faithful. But Stckl himself told me that he has always considered the Passionsspiele to be only theater, not a religious ritual. Very often those who claimed it should be a church service were just trying to prevent anything new from being done, he explained when I ran into him at intermission. The changes he has pushed through incrementally over the past three and a half decades have been both ideological and dramaturgical. Cleaning up the plays historical anti-Semitism and foregrounding the Jewish milieu of Jesus and his followers has allowed the director to create three-dimensional characters who grapple with human problems, including oppression, betrayal, and suffering.

Revisiting the Passionsspiele this summer, this historical grounding of Jesus as a Jewish leader in his time was even more moving to me in some ways than the sound of Hebrew prayer echoing off the stage of the Passionstheater. The numerous scenes in which his religious and political tenets are vigorously discussed also deepen the plays power by bringing the greatest story ever told down from impossibly lofty heights. We see a Jesus who wants to reform Judaism from within rather than found a new religion, all against the backdrop of a repressive Roman occupation.

The dramatic core of the current production is, in many respects, the Jesus-Judas relationship, depicted as emotionally intimate and fraught. As Jesuss grassroots support grows in Jerusalem, Judas is frustrated with what he considers Jesuss reluctance to take a stronger political role. This Judas doesnt so much betray his friend as try to force a meeting between Jesus and the Sanhedrin, the Jewish authorities. In the 2022 production, Judas receives the infamous 30 pieces of silver only after Jesus has been taken into custody. Judas barges in on the High Council and accuses them of deception.

Caiaphas, Judas wails, you misled me. You betrayed and deceived me. Storming out of the High Council, Judas flings the coins back in the priests face.

Every story needs a bad guy, though; if this Judas is not the villainous traitor that he has been represented as throughout history, Stckl emphasizes the bloodthirstiness of Caiaphas, the high priest, instead. Although Pilate comes across as an unsavory thug in this production, rather than as the noble protector up against a rabble of unruly subjects, I did find it troubling that Caiaphas goes to great lengths in demanding Jesuss death.

I wasnt the only one, it turned out. Shortly after my trip to Oberammergau, I spoke with Rabbi Noam Marans, the American Jewish Committees director of interreligious and intergroup relations.

I dont think it is necessary for Caiaphas to appear vengeful towards Jesus. I think its enough for Caiaphas to be portrayed as protective of the Jewish people of his time under pressure from Pilate, said Marans, who leads the advisory group that was assembled in late 2019 with the purpose of weeding out the lingering anti-Jewish elements from the play.

Read: Europes lessons for the struggle against anti-Semitism

That group, which includes Jewish and Christian religious leaders and academics, was invited to give feedback on the script as well as the productions design. Marans called Stckl an unprecedented partner who is committed to doing whatever he can within a problematic genre to address a host of issues with relevance to German-Jewish and Christian-Jewish relations. Yet, as the depiction of Caiaphas illustrates, Stckls dramaturgical needs are sometimes at odds with the advisory groups recommendations.

That process is ongoing. Stckl, whose authority in Oberammergau is, for the time being, unchallenged, is a seasoned director willing to make changes up until opening night and sometimes even after. Several of the actors I spoke with told me that though the roles they play come laden with centuries of tradition, Stckl also gives them a lot of interpretive license. Frederik Mayet, one of the two actors playing Jesus, told me that he adds his own twist on the Judas kiss. On the days he performs, it is Mayet who kisses the actor playing Judas in the betrayal scene, which, like the current text of the play, generally includes very few stage directions.

The production I saw this summer both looked and felt fresher than it had a dozen years ago. Beyond Stckls reformist tendencieshe has also made it possible for non-Christians to appear in the play; one of this years Judases is a Muslimhe understands the need to renew the Passionsspiele if it is to survive as more than a relic from Germanys distant past. Scrubbing away the long-accrued veneer of anti-Semitism and historicizing Jesus have helped usher the play into the 21st century. As the Passionsspieles 400th anniversary approaches, I wonder how much innovation and passion will be required to sustain this monumental enterprise for another century.

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How Hitler's Favorite Passion Play Lost Its Anti-Semitism - The Atlantic