“PASSION PLAY 2010″

Oberammergau and its Vow

In old days, as far back, it is said, as the twelfth century, there had been a Passion Play performed in the little village, but towards the close of the sixteenth century, the wars that wasted Germany left but little time even to the dwellers in these remote highlands for dramatic representation.

One of the after-consequences of that wide-wasting thirty years’ war, a great pestilence broke out in the villages surrounding Ober Ammergau. Whole families were swept off. In one village only two married couples were left alive. It was a visitation somewhat similar to our Black Death.

While village after village fell a prey to its ravages, the people of Ober Ammergau remained untouched, and enforced a vigorous quarantine against all the outside world, Their preventive measures were for a while successful.

But then, as always, the blind instinctive promptings of the human heart broke through the most necessary sanitary regulations in the person of Caspar Schuchler. This good man, who was working in the plague-stricken village of Eschenlohe, felt an uncontrollable desire to return to his wife and children, who were living in Ober Ammergau. Whether it was that he felt the finger of death upon him, and that he wished to see his loved ones before he died, or whether he merely wished as Housefather to see that they had bread to eat and a roof to cover them, history does not record. Read more

See You in Oberammergau in 2010

The Passion Play 2010 Highlights