It all began with the pledge by the people of Oberammergau to act out the Passion Play once every ten years.
Pastor Daisenberger writes in his village chronicles: “The first decades of the 17th century went by in peaceful calm for the people of Oberammergau. But then followed the Thirty Years’ War with all its hardships from 1618 until 1648, which under the name of the Swedes’ War lives on the memory of the people. As early as 1631, infectious diseases spread in Swabia as well as in Bavaria. This village was spared by dutiful vigilance until the church festival in 1632, when a man named Kaspar Schisler brought the plague into the village. Faced with the great distress that the terrible illness inflicted upon the population, the leaders of the community came together and pledged to hold a passion tragedy once every ten years. From this day forward, not a single person perished, even though a great number of them still showed signs of the plague”.

During the Whitsun celebration, the people of Oberammergau held the first presentation of the “Play of the Suffering, Death and Resurrection of our Lord, Jesus Christ” on a stage which they erected on the cemetery over the fresh graves of the Plague victims.

Pastor Joseph A Daisenberger writes in his chronicles: “It is likely that the story of the Lord’s suffering was acted out before the year 1600, even in Oberammergau, as an act of religious edification, for instance during the fasting period. In my own opinion it seems as though the pledge of the community in the year 1633 didn’t intend to introduce a new, formerly unfamiliar custom, but to preserve an age-old custom for all eternity by promising to perform it regularly”.
There is no evidence for this assumption. For the years 1600-1650 around 40 passion plays are proven to have taken place in the Bavarian-Austrian area and more than 250 for the time period 1650 to 1800.

In 1662, the schoolmaster Georg Kaiser creates a transcript of the oldest surviving passion text of Oberammergau to be used in the Passion Play 1664. In 1880, it was discovered that this text was taken from two even older plays, which had been combined even before 1634.

A majority of the 4902 verses originates from a medieval passion play of second half of the 15th century, a handwritten version of which was found at the Augsburg Benedictine monastery St Ulrich und Afra, and from the passion tragedy “The passion and resurrection of Christ” of the Augsburg Meistersinger Sebastian Wild, which was distributed in 1566. It is to be assumed that the writer of the first Oberammergau play - probably a monk of Ettal - disposed of a third text. However, this compilation of excerpts from other texts was no independent act of poetry.

This original text was edited for the year 1664 and “renovated again”. The word “again” indicates that this text had been used in previous play years and that an alteration was made.

 

The 42nd Oberammergau Passion Play will take place from 14 May to 2 October 2022.

Performance days

Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. There are no performances on Mondays and Wednesdays.

Times

14 May to 14 August

Part I 14:30 - 17:00

Part II 20:00 - 22:30

15 August to 2 October

Part I 13:30 - 16:00

Part II 19:00 - 21:30