Through My Eyes: The Oberammergau Passion Play

Editor’s Note: This is a post from Sara Sturtevant, who won first place in our recent Oberammergau contest and won a free pair of tickets for the Passion Play that is performed once every ten years. Read on to find out what Sara and her spouse thought of their exclusive experience, compliments of Viator.

I was lucky enough to win the package to see the Oberammergau Passion Play from Viator. We’ve been home for more than a month now and I still find myself thinking about this extraordinary adventure to Germany.

Neither my spouse nor I had ever traveled out of the US before, so we were very excited to have this chance to visit Bavaria in Southern Germany. We ended up spending a week in Munich, with two and a half days in Oberammergau in the middle of the trip.

We followed the directions on where and how to collect our tickets to Oberammergau. We got to the Hauptbahnhof easily and found the hotel that had the tickets for us. The lady at the desk was so relieved that our tickets had arrived that morning because we weren’t in the first set that arrived the day before. We were glad too! Since the Passionsspeile is the whole reason we came to Germany in the first place.

The tour package is great because you don’t have to stick to someone else’s timetable, everything is very self-directed. As long as we caught our train to Oberammergau, it was up to us when to leave Munich. This gave us enough time to explore Marienplatz and the Residenz in the center of Munich, and have a quick lunch.

We boarded our train to Oberammergau and spent the next two hours in a crowded train. We chose to leave mid-afternoon from Munich, which meant that the train was full of school kids and commuters headed home. If we had thought about it more, we could have left later or a bit earlier and avoided the crowds. Overall, I loved using public transit in Bavaria.

It was just after five pm when the train arrived in Oberammergau. We had a map in the instructions we were given and the place we were staying didn’t look far so we walked, suitcases rolling behind us. It was maybe ten-minute walk to the hotel from the train station. There is a shuttle, I think, but I didn’t take the time to figure that out, since we were willing to walk.

We are staying at the Gasthas Zur Rose. We were greeted warmly and checked in easily. The hostess from Zur Rose was very friendly and talked with us about where our seats were for the play and how our meal tickets worked. During our talk with the hostess, we discovered that her brother, Christian Stuckl, is the director of the play. How fantastic is that?

We went to our room on the second floor. The room was very simple, but pleasant, with a door out to a shared deck with a view of the mountains. Being very tired from the day, I took a short nap before dinner.

View of Mt Kofel from our hotel room

Our package includes all our meals so we had dinner here at Zur Rose. It was a wonderful meal, so delicious. A couple from Birmingham, England joined us and we had great evening talking with them. They were so well traveled and it was amazing to hear about all the places they’ve been. I always think it is going to be awkward and difficult to make conversation with people I don’t know at dinner, but this was fantastic.

Cath had steak and I had pike – all our food was so well prepared. All the food in Germany has been wonderful, which didn’t expect really given traditional German food isn’t something I usually eat. And I don’t really eat any meat other than fish, and sausage seems to be its own food group in Germany. Cath finally got to have a small dark beer at dinner. The monks nearby at Ettal brew the beer here. She liked it lots. Not surprisingly the beer in Bavaria is fantastic.

The next morning, I had a hard time getting going. Cath located some yummy pastry and that certainly helped. We went exploring in Oberammergau before lunch. There is a museum in Oberammergau, which is full of woodcarvings, both religious and secular. The museum was created by Lang, a local woodcarver and one of the first local merchants of local woodcarving. His store is still in the village. It is worth coming to Oberammergau just to see all the woodcarvings.

Woodcarving of Cain and Able by local artisan

After lunch with our fabulous English tablemates we headed toward the theatre. The theatre seats 4,720 people. The audience area is covered but the stage is open to the elements. We queued up in front of our gate, ‘A’ and waited for the doors to open. There were a surprising number of Americans (mostly Southerners) and lots of Britons. We show our tickets to the usher and he indicates we’re in the front row. Pretty far house left but in the front row! We were absolutely floored. We took our seats and waited for the play to begin.

The 2010 script has been updated to remove anti-Semitic references and the playing time has been moved to the afternoon and evening instead of morning and afternoon. The play is made up entirely of residents from Oberammergau. To be in the play, a person must have been born in Oberammergau or have lived in Oberammergau for at least 20 years. There are nearly 2,000 people who make this play happen every ten years.

I wasn’t sure what the quality of the Passion play would be, after all it is community theatre and in the US there are varying degrees of quality to community theatre. I needn’t have worried. The acting, singing and music are all of professional quality.

The play opens with an immense choir of at least 60 people with a narrator providing a prologue and introduction to each act. The whole play is in German, but we were given a textbook with the script in English. The play has a 60 piece orchestra, and all the music is original composition by a local priest with updates from the current music director. It is Baroque music, composed at approximately the same time Handel wrote The Messiah. The play is broken into two parts. The first part begins in the afternoon and stops around dinner time and then the second part starts at eight pm and ends around eleven pm.

One of the ways the play tells its story of the life of Jesus is through “tableaux vivants”. Tableaux vivants were introduced in the 1730′s and were quite popular in theatre during that time. In each of the scenes, people appeared immobile as if one were looking at a painting. Each scene depicted a story from the Hebrew Bible and was used to draw connections between the prophecies of the Hebrew Bible and coming of Jesus.

As a Christian, the story of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection is familiar to me. During Holy Week, we follow in Jesus’ footsteps –we enter Jerusalem with him, follow him to the Temple, keep watch with him in the garden at Gethesame, suffer with him when he is tortured and publicly humiliated by the Romans, mourn his death on the cross and then rejoice at his resurrection on Easter.

In Oberammergau’s Passion Play this familiar story is movingly and lovingly told by the people of Oberammergau. Far from some sort of strange reenactment of the life of Jesus, the Oberammergau production depicts not only the life of Jesus, but who the residents of Oberammergau are as a community. It is as much their story as it is Jesus’ and this more than anything else that makes going to see this play an act of pilgrimage for so many. I feel profoundly blessed to be able to witness their play.

We left the play and walked back to Zur Rose. The next morning, we got up, had breakfast and did some shopping for friends and family. I wanted to spend so much more time in Oberammergau before we left, but it was raining pretty steadily, so we boarded the train back to Munich.

-Sara Sturtevant

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