Customer Reviews

Oberammergau: The Troubling Story of the World's Most Famous Passion Play

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

First a disclaimer: Technically, I should not review this book because as the official translator of the revised Passion Play text into English and one of the scholars involved in the preparatory Jewish-Christian dialogue concerning the complex Oberammergau-anti-Judaism issue, I am one of the participants in the story Jim Shapiro tells, as well as one of his sources. Hence, I clearly cannot expect to be considered an objective reviewer. In addition, I bought the book not via Amazon in the United States, but in the German translation at the Jewish Museum bookstore in Vienna on my way to Oberammergau and the premiere performance of this year's Passion Play.

On the other hand, precisely because I know so much of the background, I also feel uniquely qualified to offer my opinion: the book is superb.

Shapiro is a Jewish scholar, but this is neither a Jewish analysis of Oberammergau, nor a ponderous academic treatise. It is a painstakingly researched, sensitive, and highly readable investigative report of the complex issues involved. This is not only a history of the play itself but a non-sensational exposé of the labyrinth behind the scenes of this millennial production. Supporting characters range from Vatican theologians and representatives of the Anti Defamation League to members of various village factions, Adolf Hitler, "Jud Meyer", and the Victorian intellectuals Isabel and Richard Burton. In his book, Shapiro lances countless pretensions and lights up the dark corners of rewritten history and fiction accepted and perpetuated as reality.

According to tradition, the first Oberammergau Passion Play was performed as a result of a vow the villagers made when people were dying of the bubonic plague in 1633. Afterwards, we are told, the illness subsided. However, it can be argued that the real plague was not a physical illness but a deadly disease of the soul and spirit - the kind of anti-Judaism inspired by hundreds of years of blaming "the" Jews for the death of their brother Yeshua/Jesus and calling them the "Murderers of God." The real plague was anti-Judaism masquerading as Christian piety, a deadly disease spread by denial and coverup. Passion plays became bearers of the kind of hatred that eventually erupted in the Shoah of the 20th century. If the play is to continue in the next millennium, these issues must to be faced.

As Shapiro reports, they are being faced, and the current production is the result. Shapiro dispatches assorted "sacred cows," and may consequently annoy both some Jewish and some Catholic disputants in the long standing Oberammergau controversy. But no one, I believe, can doubt that he is genuinely concerned with getting at the truth. He understands that it may be impossible for Jews and Christians to read the same text or see the same event on stage and interpret their experience in an identical manner. Otto Huber (responsible for the text) and Rabbi Leon Klenicki (ADL) may never be able to see what the other sees, but the effort of working together and trying to make this a genuinely new beginning is in itself a sign of hope.

The book includes a comprehensive bibliography and should be required reading for Jews, Christians, students of history, anyone concerned with furthering interreligious dialogue--in sum, thoughtful people everywhere.

Ingrid Shafer, Ph.D. Professor of Philosophy, Religion, and Interdisciplinary Studies University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma Chickasha, OK 73018 http://ecumene.org

Although frequently cited in connection with its visitations from and support by Adolph Hitler, the passion play of Oberammergau, Bavaria is less frequently the study of the more serious and long standing issues bound up with a theatrical presentation of the last hours in the life of Jesus. Fortunately, Shapiro's work endeavors toward such an analysis.
Reputedly first presented in 1634, the passion play of Oberammergau is the periodic product of a town that maintains that its prayers were answered when they were spared a plague then ravaging Bavaria. Using local talent the town attempts to -- every ten years -- retell the story of the passion through theatre.
On the historic level, their actions have obviously (and in varying degrees) attracted the support of the church, the state and the faithful. In this regard this book is a great companion work to James Carroll's Constantine's Sword in its attempt to track evolving Christian self identity.
On a more fundamental level, if our great canons are really inspired of the divine should this not reveal itself in our actions toward others. In a post 9/11 world can any berth be given to those who maintain hatred in the name of God or any religious work.
While history informs that Hitler's Oberammergau existed within 75 miles of a Nazi death camp, significantly Shapiro puts his focus on the modern Oberammergau. The story of the 2000 passion play, according to Shapiro was a story characterized by an attempt at Christian/Jewish collaboration.
In other words Shapiro permits the view that the modern passion play can -- as needs it must -- be told with eyes lifted toward heaven. Not of Hitler and hatred, but rather of an attempt at the divine.

The Oberammergau Passion Play has been in near-contintual production sine 1643 when (as legend has it) terrified townsfolk promised it in return for divine protection from a plague. This hoary drama seems innocent and pious enough on its surface. But after the Holocaust, as many sought the roots of the slaughter of millions of innocents, the people and traditions of Oberammergau came in for their share of scrutiny. This scrutiny topok on special urgency when the Catholic Church officially changed its position in 1965, in the landmark document "Nostra Asetate," in regard to the charge of deicide against the Jews. This book focuses on the seesaw attempts in the last 40 years to rid the play of its antisemitic elements and bring it into line with official Church teaching.

Author James Shapiro makes no secret of his Jewishness, and has produced a remarkably even-handed account of the play's history and theology as well as attempts to expunge strands of anti-Semitism and Christian triumphalism. Shapiro follows the effort of Oberammergau natives Otto Huber and Christian Struckel to emphasize the Jewishness of Jesus while making a work that traditionalists would tolerate, the public would pay to see and Jewish organizations could live with. They attempt to deal with aspects of the play that show Christianity as prefigured in Old Testament writings. This idea is odious to Jews, who bridle that this "typology" reduces their faith to a preview of coming attractions. But it remains an aspect of Christianity that is difficult, if not impossible, to dislodge.

The struggle within the Oberammergau community is the struggle of Christians everywhere. It may even be the divine mandate for our time--to use the analytical tools of our age to strip away layers of hatred varnished over gospels accounts that themselves are antagonistic toward Jews. To uproot hatred of Jesus's neighbors and family while retaining the Jesus of faith is no small undertaking. No wonder that less committed people have chosen one of two easy ways: to blame only the Jews for Jesus's death or to call all religion irrelevant. The book also details the self-serving myths surrounding the Oberammergau play's origins and the piety of the "simple peasant folk" who lived there. Oberammergau residents have not been above selling outsiders on the myth that they so inhabit their roles that they are hyper pious even out of play season. Indeed, Shapiro shows how this myth cuts both ways--ensuring the play's popularity, but trapping its actors in an impoverishing economic rigidity between cycles.

The book neither swells on nor shies away from the dark side of Oberammergau. The community, like others in Germany, tends to whitewash its Nazi past and is surprisingly blind to its deeply-seated and axiomatic anti-Semitism. One "Jesus," Nazi party member Alois Lang, played the lead role even after the war. During the war, a jet engine plant was situated just outside of town. And the notorious Dachau concentration camp was a mere 75 miles away. Some Oberammergau residents seem genuinely baffled that a play that casts Pilate as a hero and Jews as money-hungry could be seen as anti-Semitic. Even the younger residents come perilously close to reverting back to old attitudes when encountering pressure and bad press from the Jewish organizations they are courting. And in spite of the wish for residents to keep the world at bay, modernity rears its head -- Oberammergau youth are no different than other in having abandoned devotions; and married women clamor to be allowed into the play.

"Oberammergau" does wonderful job of depicting the contradictory threads that run through producing a gospel drama in an age when the old certainties--the virtue and inevitable triumph of Christianity, the eternal guilt of the Jews, the historicity of the gospels--have been called into question. In many important ways, the drama replays themes of great and global import--the rehabilitation of those who participate in evil, the need to hear the voice of the persecuted, and the need to root out wickedness from one's own heart. "Oberammergau" asks us the same question posed by its play's central figure, asking whether we have ears to hear and the purity of heart needed to break out of shackles that blind us to our own evil and to the suffering of our fellows.

Shapiro's a good writer, and he's able to spell out the implications of all the on-stage and backstage action at this weird Bavarian once-every-ten-years affair. From now on I am giving Obergammerau a wide berth in my travels. I'd rate the book even higher if it didn't feel overly rushed to me, written at white heat in the immediate aftermath of the 2000 Passion Play, so it has the slapdash end of one of those tabloid-isnpired true crime books that hit the supermarket racks a day after the crime takes place. Dr. Shapiro, you are brilliant at analysis, so next time out why not give a little more time for your thoughts to gel?

It is possible to see in this book, if you are patient with it, the same mind and authorial voice that produced "1599:A Year in the Life of Shakespeare", particularly in the humanity of the work and the intensity of its research, but Oberammergau reads as being more of an unresolved personal statement of a proposition that is never quite articulated. It is frustrating. I left wanting to know more about the author than the play or the community itself. For someone like Shapiro, this must not be unknown territory, just forbidden. There is a much more interesting book lurking just behind the scenes of Oberammergau.

I started this book but found it had nothing serious to say. It's more like a trip through the author's troubled expectations and mind. It was pleasant to read something about the famous Passion Play though, if only a weak hatchet job. Put it back on the store shelf

I'm a little concerned about Shapiro's grasp of the primary source material. Oberammergau is a place where Catholics put on a play about events re-enacted from an exclusively Christian memoir. There are the good guys, that'd be Jesus and His crew, and then there are the bad guys, that'd be the Romans and the Jews, only not the Jews who're Jesus and His crew, some other ones. See. It's a story. They are acting out a story. Perhaps someone needs to write the story in reverse. If it makes a better story we'll probably all be able to look forward to a better play.