Abstract
Every 10 years, thousands of people from across the globe take a pilgrimage to Oberammergau. The reason for journeying to this small Bavarian town is a Passion Play, one the villagers have performed nearly every 10 years since 1634. With its cast of 2,400 actors, drawn entirely from the village’s 5,200 residents, the five-and-a-half hour play is a unique example of Christian community theatre, a tradition with roots in the Middle Ages. Although not a medieval tradition itself, Oberammergau’s Passion Play has always been marked by medievalism, which constitutes the way the Middle Ages have been used, recycled, and remade in order to serve the purposes of later periods. Medievalism operating in Oberammergau does not function solely through cultural references; crucially, it creates meaning by supplying affective encounters with an idealized medieval past. Considering medievalism as an affective force reveals that the Play event “works” for many contemporary spectators, including those who travel to the village from the U.S., by satisfying certain cross-temporal and cross-geographic cultural longings. This essay traces the force of Oberammergau’s performance tradition across centuries and continents and demonstrates how other theatre events draw upon Oberammergau’s affective medievalism in order to situate themselves within a “felt” legacy of authentic, devotional community. The discussion concludes by suggesting that engaging the affective trajectory supplied by certain medievalist events can also serve as a mode of historical inquiry into the “real” Middle Ages.
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Notes
- 1.
Leys notes that many affect theorists, especially those using evidence from the neurosciences, share “a commitment to the idea that there is a disjunction or gap between the subject’s affective processes and his to her cognition or knowledge of the objects that caused them. The result is that the body not only ‘senses’ and performs a kind of ‘thinking’ below the threshold of conscious recognition and meaning but … because of the speed with which the autonomic, affective processes are said to occur, it does all this before the mind has time to intervene” (2011: 450, original emphasis).
- 2.
- 3.
Here Kintz is referencing Grossberg (1992).
- 4.
Kintz explains: “The intensity of mattering, while ideologically constructed, is nevertheless ‘always beyond ideological challenge because it is called into existence affectively.’” Here she is quoting Grossberg (1992: 86).
- 5.
At a dinner on July 5, 1942, Hitler is recorded as saying: “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. There one sees in Pontius Pilate a Roman racially and intellectually so superior, that he stands out like a firm, clean rock in the middle of the whole muck and mire of Jewry” (Quoted in Shapiro 2000: 168).
- 6.
- 7.
The price list available on one of the main Bavarian tour company’s websites includes more lodging options, ranging from hotels to rooms in villagers’ homes. The prices for these two-night packages run from €839 to €275 ($1,031–$338, using the current exchange rate), with one-night packages ranging between €575–€199 ($706–$245) (Oberammergau Passion Play 2010).
- 8.
“The Passion Play season is known throughout the Christian world and demand for tickets and tours has usually been high. Tickets for the performance are only available in advance as part of a package with one or two nights local accommodation in Oberammergau, the neighboring villages of Ettal, and Unterammergau and other villages in the region. As Oberammergau is a big draw for incoming church groups, tour operators have had to scramble for allocations to fulfill demand” (Browne 2009). Although the point of this article is the initially slow ticket sales for the 2010 show, later reports from travel agencies and on the Oberammergau Passion Play website suggest that sales improved and tickets were difficult to obtain once the production opened.
- 9.
There are certainly financial reasons for this. According to Bayerischer Rundfunk, the state broadcast and news agency of Bavaria, the village made a net profit of €25,700,000 ($31,318,547) from the 2010 production season. Das war die Passion 2010 (2011).
- 10.
As Deana Weibel explains: “Research in the field of evolutionary biology suggests that a significant component of pilgrims’ positive responses to particular shrines … may in fact be positive responses to particular qualities of landscapes.” This response “may certainly be part of the reason that pilgrims to particularly beautiful pilgrimage centers report being cured of illness or transformed in some way” (Weibel 2012: 195).
- 11.
Brown writes: “The question isn’t whether medieval people did things differently than we do now; the question is what we as putative nonmedievalists are going to do with the difference. What stories do we tell ourselves about it? What do they do to and for us?” (2000: 548).
- 12.
For example, many churches and religious organizations in the U.S., representing a variety of Catholic and Protestant denominations, arrange group tours to the village during Passion Play season. These tours are often described in marketing materials as pilgrimages. A few examples include: Pilgrim Tours, “Oberammergau, Germany – Passion Play 2010,” http://christian-tour.org/christian_tour/oberammergau.htm; 206 Tours, “The Oberammergau Passion Play Pilgrimages,” www.206tours.com/oberammergau/; Nawas International, www.nawas.com/; Fiat Holidays, “Oberammergau 2010, www.fiatpilgrimages.net/pilgrimages/Oberammergau_2010.html; Casterbridge Church Tours, “Oberammergau 2010: An Unforgettable Portrait of Christ’s Love,” www.casterbridgetours.com/index.php/church_tours/church_tour_specialists/special_touring_events/oberammergau_2010. All Retrieved June 15, 2012.
- 13.
Based upon the articles and press reports I have read, it is unclear exactly why the production closed, but it was likely a combination of financial and logistical reasons. See Garrigan (2008).
- 14.
Sponsler devotes a section of her chapter on American Passion playing to the Black Hills Passion Play. See Sponsler (2004: 142–55).
- 15.
The production bills itself as “a modernized version of the Passion Play performed in Oberammergau, Germany.” Park Performing Arts Center (2012).
- 16.
As I will explain, the Great Passion Play is one of several Sacred Projects and these other projects are even more explicit about promoting evangelical tenets. For instance, staff members at the Sacred Arts Museum or along the Living Bible Tour regularly testify to visitors about their own spiritual rebirth, ask visitors about their personal salvation, profess biblical literalism, and refer to pre-tribulation End Times theology. I discuss this in detail in Chapter Four of my book, Sensational Devotion.
- 17.
Given his personal opinions, Smith may have originally intended to draw upon the affective force of Oberammergau’s anti-Semitic features: “With stubborn insensitivity to public feeling at the time, the Smith Foundation named the project ‘Mount Oberammergau Passion Play’ in honor of its Bavarian counter, which was then being widely criticized for perpetuating anti-Jewish stereotypes” (Long 2003: 75). Currently, marketing materials for the production downplay its connection to Smith and the play itself has been stripped of many anti-Semitic features often found in Passion imagery.
- 18.
Kovalcik writes: “The Great Passion Play is a large production. But the employees of the foundation are a family. This idea was fostered from the beginning” (2008: 111).
- 19.
In other work I discuss how Eureka Springs’ reputation as a gay-friendly town fosters a sense of cultural embattlement that, for some visitors, helps strengthen their evangelical Christian identity (Stevenson 2013).
- 20.
Diebold is quoting from Leslie Workman, “Preface,” Studies in Medievalism 8 (1996), 1.
- 21.
Harris concludes his study by asserting: “But Shakespeare’s untimely stage materials … are far more than mute fossils of dead civilizations. They enter into clamorous, global networks of agency in their pasts—and in our presents. These global networks, moreover, are not necessarily those of capitalism or superpower imperialism. If Eastern Standard Time (or EST) is the time of Washington, D.C., and hence the time of American imperial power, Shakespeare’s stage materials …allow us to produce something we might call Eastern Nonstandard Time: that is, they help confound the fantasy that insists on treating the orient and the past as synonyms partitioned from the west. And in our war-addled time, such untimely dis-orientations couldn’t be timelier” (2009: 194).
- 22.
Harris is not referring to medievalism specifically, but as I have already asserted, I interpret his ideas as relevant to the ways in which medievalism functions.
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Stevenson, J. (2015). Affect, Medievalism and Temporal Drag: Oberammergau’s Passion Play Event. In: Brunn, S. (eds) The Changing World Religion Map. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9376-6_131
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