5/27 Oberammergau and The Passion Play

When I shared our plans to go to England for three months with a friend at church, she exclaimed that we had to go to the Passion Play at Oberammergau!  I had heard of the play years ago and knew it was only presented one season every 10 years but I had forgotten about it and lost track of when it was to be presented again so I was grateful to be reminded.  Getting John to go, though, involved a bit of arm twisting, however I do believe he is glad that we decided to go.

We arrived in the Munich airport on Monday, 5/24, about noon and boarded the bus with our group to go to Bavaria, Germany where Oberammergau is.  The trip was about two hours and brought us to the village which sits at the foot of the alps.  You can imagine how beautiful is was to see the Alps just suddenly appear over the horizon while on the bus.  In contrast, the approach to the mountains was very flat with small villages in the distance with their signature red roofs.

Oberammergau is distinctive with its winding streets and many homes and stores being decorated with very old frescoes, many dating back to the 1600s.  It is also distinctive because the main occupation of the villagers for hundreds of years is wood carving - the carving itself, the retailing of it, the marketing beyond their village.  So we went with great anticipation of what we were going to see and experience.  Maybe too much. 

We had several hours before dinner so we explored the village, enjoyed a German beer outside one of the many restaurants (not as good as English ale!), and went in many shops.  The carvings are extraordinary; the theme of most is the birth and crucifixion of Christ, of course, which wasn't surprising.  What was was the repetition of the same theme to the point of boredom and disappointment.  Most of the shops had the same merchandise besides the carvings - T shirts, beer steins, key chains, etc. - all with reference to Oberammergau, of course.  I was disturbed by the little creches carved and put into half a walnut shell - in plastic!  And they were everywhere!  I guess someone buys them but we weren't tempted.  The shops that were most interesting to us were the ones that dealt exclusively with the works of one carver and in some cases his workshop would be in the shop.  This house is "Pilot's House" and the fresco depicts Jesus as he stands before Pilot.  It houses working wood carvers and their creations, for sale and not for sale.  A living museum of sorts.

So anytime that we had free, John and I spent walking the village and avoiding the shops.  We spent Tuesday morning walking along the river and venturing Way up the hill towards a crucifixion monument installed in the 1850s that we could see from the village.

John made it and here's a shot of what he saw.  Isn't that beautiful?  He also met some very fine pigs along the way and some residents as well!  He only took pictures of the pigs.

I took the low road through a residential area and had my own adventure wondering where I was going! Trying to avoid the retail and crowded area of the village, I sook out the perimeter of town and walked through the neighborhoods of the locals which is of more interest to me.  The gardens and homes were neat and all very similar - white with red roofs, dark wood balconies carved with cutouts and colorful gardens.

I found a stream whose bed was "tiled" with stone all the same color, closely fitted together- a soft golden yellow.  The sides of the stream were even and made me think that even the streams in Germany - known for its efficiency - were uniform!  The fact that this one had obviously been "tiled" reinforced that perception.  The larger river John and I strolled along beforehand was also very straight along the edges although it had a natural bed.


The play began at 2:30 Tuesday afternoon with a three hour break at 5  (it resumed at 8 to end at 10:30). About an hour beforehand, large travel buses began to arrive and people began streaming down the streets to the 4,720 seat theater.  Now picture this - the play is presented 5 times a week (not on Monday and Wednesdays) and the theater is sold out for each performance.  Somehow, 4720 people are transported, housed and fed every two days, obviously overlapping somewhere!  We were housed in the village at a fairly new hotel, many were housed in village homes and apparently since they were arriving by bus right before the performance my question of where everyone else was "kept" - was answered by that -  somewhere else!  Since there are only 5300 residents in the village, everyone is involved in some way or another.  They are either in the cast, the chorus or the orchestra - that's about 1000 right there - or they are involved in staging, building the sets, sewing costumes, etc.  The rest of the town are housing guests, manning their shops and restaurants, etc.  This picture is of people either arriving for the afternoon show or leaving for the dinner break.  It's hard to tell but it gives an idea of how many people there are in the town for each performance.

I've been trying for a couple of days now to gather my thoughts and emotions about this experience.  My expectations were that I would be very emotional during the play and would need lots of Kleenex.  My experience was that I was really curious how they got the guy who was playing Jesus up on the cross and how they made it look so realistic.  I don't know whether to be disappointed in myself  or what.  It's kind of like when I decided not to go see the movie Titanic because I knew the ending and I knew that everyone was going to die.  I haven't seen it yet despite the number of horrified folks who can't believe I haven't and feel compelled to tell me that I must go see it.  I don't want to.  I know the ending.

Same with The Play - as much as I appreciated the production which was outstanding and truly extraordinary in its presentation -  I knew the ending.  I know that Jesus died for my sins.  I know that by His Grace I have a life everlasting ahead of me.  Maybe having that faith so firmly in place is what led me to more curiosity about the staging than the message.  Perhaps because it was in German and we had to follow along with the English "libretto"; perhaps it had to do with literally being in the dark during the second half and not being able to read the translation until John thought to use the lights on our cell phones as "torches" as they say in England.  At any rate, I am overwhelmed when I think about this village and its descendants of those who made the pledge almost 400 years ago keeping the vow their ancestors made.  The hope I have is that those who don't have the faith I have and who come to see this production will have their faith restored or made new or perhaps come to the Word for the first time.

We were grateful not to be housed outside of town, but right in the middle of town in the Hotel Kopa.  Not being tour-goers but sort of do-it-yourselfers when we travel, we found that the best part was getting to know others in the group that we saw each day, maybe at each meal.  Special people like father, daughter Howard and Mary from the States (she's working in England, he's visiting), Margaret the missionary who lives in Lincoln, David and Angela who live less than two miles from us and their friends Micheal and Diane, a retired physician who says the NHS is great and his wife who live in the county of Shropshire.  Hopefully, we'll cross paths with some of them again sometime.

 

I want to add a couple of shots that show our view from our hotel room - in the daytime and during the night. The first one looks out over the roofs  of the buildings next to us.  By the way, that's not the peak John climbed!  This next one is the steeple of the Catholic church from the same window whose bells rang during the night and especially at 6AM!  Because the steeple is sort of pink, it looks like it glows from within.  When I saw this the first time, I just put my arms on the sill of the open window and stared at it for awhile.  It was so peaceful. 

In contrast to the simple exterior of this church, the interior was Baroque Rococo and was a complete shock when we went in the first afternoon.

There is so much more to share about this short trip but I fear boredom setting in on the part of my reader.  The play runs through mid-October and then is not performed again until 2020.  Should you be traveling in Europe this summer, you might see if you can fit this in somehow.  I believe you need to do it through an agency because of the logistics I mentioned before and we used McCabe Travels out of London.  You could probably Google and find others.