Passions and mysteries
Janet Scott considers how Oberammergau’s Passion Play has changed over the years
This year the village of Oberammergau in Bavaria will put on its Passion play for the forty-first season. In 1633 central Europe was gripped by the Thirty Years War (1618-1848), poverty and the plague, which had killed thousands – eighty in the tiny village of Oberammergau itself. After months of suffering the villagers pledged to perform a ‘Play of the Suffering, Death and Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ’ every ten years. The plague halted and at Whitsun 1634 they fulfilled their promise.
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