Focus on Issues 1984 Oberammergau Play Under Fire

A Jewish historian and a Jewish philosopher are both highly critical of the 1984 version of “Passion Play” which will be staged this summer in the West German village of Oberammergau. It will mark the 350th anniversary of the first production of the play by the villagers.

Ever since 1634, the people of Oberammergau in Bavaria have kept a promise made at the time when their village was threatened by a plague “to keep the tragedy of the passion (of Jesus) every 10 years.” The dominant theme of the play has been that the evil Jews crucified Jesus.

Saul Friedman, professor of history at Youngstown State University, the author of “No Hope for the Oppressed” and “Pogromchik,” and the author of a soon to be released book on the Passion Play, says the play, which is expected to be seen by more than 500,000 spectators this summer, will be substantially the same version presented in the village in 1980.

“On the scale of anti-Semitism, where Der Sturmer is 100 and the Sermon on the Mount is 0, I would put the 1980 play at 40,” Friedman says. “But it is much improved over 1970 where the text was 70 in anti-Semitism.”

SOME IMPROVEMENTS IN THE PLAY NOTED

While Friedman is not totally satisfied with the new expurgated version of the play — which tends to portray Jews as the people of Judas, rather than Jesus — he says that many of the improvements came about as a result of the good will of the people of Oberammergau. That good will has not gone far enough, however, he observes, since there are still distinctly anti-Jewish resonances in the latest version.

Friedman indicates that the village’s former mayor, Ernst Zwink, one of the most helpful forces in the purging of the original text, has died and his death has removed some of the urgency of the text’s revision.

SAYS NAZISM PENETRATED OBERAMMERGAU

In a preface to Friedman’s new book, “Oberammergau,” philosopher Emil Fackenheim, a professor at the Institute for Contemporary Jewish Studies, says that the 1934 version of the play belies the assertion made by many defenders of Oberammergau that Nazism never really penetrated the play. He states:

“We say the 1934 Nazi version because, contrary to all the apologies offered after 1945, to the effect that Nazism never penetrated Oberammergau, the spirit of Nazism is unmistakably present in the picture of money-greedy, plotting, bloodthirsty Jews, coupled neatly with the claim that now, anno 1934, Christians are redeemed from them and their machinations.”

Fackenheim concedes that the 1980 “cleaned up” version (which will be the text offered this summer) has eliminated some of the more “overtly offensive expressions and ideas.” But both Friedman and Fackenheim concur in their assessment of the real problem with the Oberammergau spectacle. The play shows no evidence of what Fackenheim calls “a fundamental metanoia.” This term has been inadequately translated in English as “repentance.” Fackenheim says in his preface: “The 1934 version of the Oberammergau damns the Jews explicitly. In the 1980 version this damnation is still implicitly present.”

EIGHT ANTI-JEWISH STEREOTYPES IN 1984 VERSION

In his book, Friedman identified no less than eight clearly anti-Jewish stereotypes found in the Passion Play, including avaricious money-lenders, vengeful opponents of Jesus, spiteful rabbis and pharisees, and Jewish mobs shrieking for blood.

Friedman also reports in his book that in discussions with Catholic theologians, he was told that it takes time for reconsiderations about Jewish culpability to be reflected in the popular consciousness. The results of the Second Vatican Council in 1962 has not yet succeeded in reaching totally the Oberammergau phenomenon.

In his preface, Fackenheim scores this apologetic tendency. “Just how long will it take for the ordinary Christian or German to take notice. And in the meantime, are new seeds of the old hatred being sown, for some future explosion — and a new catastrophe for Christianity, no less than for Judaism and the Jewish people?”

AN OUTSTANDING CATHOLIC THEOLOGIAN

Fackenheim identifies one Catholic theologian in Germany who has spoken out on the need for Germans to realize what they have done to their Jewish citizens, Johann Baptist Metz. Even after the war, Metz said that the Jews remained a vague cliche and that one’s views were derived at best from Oberammergau.”

Christians must at long last listen to Jews, says Metz. “This moral recollection of the persecution of the Jews touches lastly the relation of the people of this country to the state of Israel. In this respect we have no choice, and I insist in this point over against my leftist friends,” Metz declares.

“After the Jews were carried in our most recent history to the brink of total annihilation, we should be the last people in the world to accuse Jews of an excessive desire for security.

“We should be the very first to claim that they defend their state, not because of “Zionist imperialism” but rather as a “house against death,” as the very last place of refuge of a people persecuted for centuries.”

Fackenheim concludes his preface to Friedman’s new book on Oberammergau by suggesting that it is doubtful whether the play could really survive the kind of metanoia or repentance demanded by theologians such as Metz. The only possibility for the survival of the play, says Fackenheim, is if the following words of Metz are heeded:

“We Christians will never get back behind Auschwitz. And we will get beyond it, not alone and by ourselves, but only in togetherness with the victims.”