Passion at Oberammergau

It is only a folk festival. The actors beneath their specially grown beards and long hair, are simple Bavarian villagers. The script is amateurishly florid. Yet the once-a-decade production of the Passion Play at Oberammergau, Germany, has long been a byword for Roman Catholic piety -and a major international tourist attraction. Ticket demands for this season's 98 performances exceed the supply by about 1,000,000. The 500,-000 or so visitors who will throng the area are expected to spend more than $10 million -enough to keep Oberammergau going through the next nine lean years when the population shrinks to its normal 5,000, the beards and hair come off, and the town turns again into a sleepy hamlet whose principal industry is wood carving.

Swirling Controversy. Last week Oberammergau's 1970 production -the 36th in the festival's 336-year history opened amid the usual festivity, but also amid a swirling religious controversy. Since the mid-1960s, a growing body of critics have charged that the town's reenactment of Christ's passion and death defames the role and character of Jews. This spring the American Jewish Committee termed the play "fundamentally hostile to Jews and Judaism" and released a 24-page critique to support the charge. In a separate statement, seven U.S. Christian scholars -including Catholic Raymond Brown -agreed that the script "reveals the sin of anti-Semitism." Jewish groups demanded that Munich's Julius Cardinal Dopfner boycott this year's opening. The cardinal attended anyway, but at a Mass for the actors he said: "We are all agreed that the text today needs a new version."

Actually, this year's script was itself intended to be a new version. After the 1960 performance, which used a century-old text, the Oberammergauers decided to modernize and recast the whole conflict between Christians and Jews in the play. Stephan Schaller, a Benedictine headmaster in the neighboring village of Ettal, was commissioned to do a rewrite. Consulting with Jewish groups, he labored to bring the play into line with Catholic teaching since the Second Vatican Council, which decreed that the guilt of some Jews in Christ's crucifixion cannot be applied to all Jews, then or now.

Cackling Caiaphas. When Schaller submitted his script to Oberammergau's 26-man Passion Play committee, it was rejected as too bland and muted. By then there was no time for another revision, so the committee merely used bits of Schaller's version for a cosmetic touch-up on their old one. The result last week was an uneasy jumble. Some of the sweeping references to the guilt of all Jews were deleted. Others were toned down, but almost imperceptibly: the crucifixion is demanded by "the whole of Jerusalem" instead of "the whole nation." God condemns "these sinners" rather than "this folk." In a new foreword to the text, a local priest argues that the Jews of Jerusalem represent not the "Jewish people" but "all mankind, who by their sins brought about the Lord's death."

Yet Pilate, whom history records as a brutal Roman governor, still comes off as a man of compassion seeking to save Christ from the bloodthirsty Jews. This was the same basic characterization that once prompted Adolf Hitler to say admiringly, "There he stands out like a firm rock in the middle of the whole muck and mire of Jewry." One of the play's prologues still calls the Jews "a furious, blind people." The Jewish high priest Caiaphas still cackles about Christ, "I cannot rest until I have seen that his bones are broken and his body thrown into the pit of the malefactors." And the revision eliminates a Passover scene that showed how Jewish Jesus and his disciples were.

"The Oberammergauers don't want to be anti-Semitic," says Schaller, "but the development of history has passed them by." In an attempt to catch up, the townspeople have already decided on a special committee to look into further revisions for the 1980 performances. But that won't be easy. Four years ago, Director Hans Schwaighofer came up with a natural solution: revert to the artistically superior 1750 version, which pits the Devil -rather than the Jews -against Christ. The town refused and Schwaighofer quit. He now cautions: "People have a fear of changing a good thing that is making money. The whole town lives off this play. They don't dare touch it."

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