In recent discussions focusing on (what else) 'The Passion,' I've seen several people question the connection between the Nazis and the use of passion plays. The Nazis were, it's pointed out, anti-religious.
A recent article in the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent helps to clear the air on this one. Robert Leiter discusses Columbia University professor James Shapiro’s recent book, "Oberammergau: The Troubling Story of the World’s Most Famous Passion Play:"
In perhaps the most shocking pages of Shapiro’s book, the author describes just how extensive the village’s Nazi connections were. For example, of the 714 actors who performed in the play during the 1930s, many of whom were children, 152 joined the Nazi Party by 1937, “the arbitrary cutoff date used by the Allies after the war to define ‘pure Nazis.’ An unspecified number ... joined after that date.â€
As for Hitler, he first attended the Passion play in August 1930 and returned in 1934 for the 300th anniversary performance, just a year after the Nazis had seized power. At a dinner on July 5, 1942, he was recorded as saying:
“One of our most important tasks will be to save future generations from a similar political fate and to maintain for ever watchful in them a knowledge of the menace of Jewry. For this reason alone it is vital that the Passion play be continued at Oberammergau; for never has the menace of Jewry been so convincingly portrayed as in this presentation of what happened in the times of the Romans. There one sees in Pontius Pilate a Roman racially and intellectually so superior, that he stands like a firm, clean rock in the middle of the whole muck and mire of Jewry.â€
That's the connection.
Recently, the Oberammergau passion play has been undergoing some long overdue revisions in which Shapiro has been a participant. One of his duties was instructing the actors in how to recite a Jewish prayer.
As it happened, it was Shapiro who helped two German actors learn the prayer over the bread. He noted that it was 60 years beyond Kristallnacht (“Night of the Broken Glassâ€), when the only Jew in Oberammergau, Max-Peter “Jud†Meyer, as he was known by all, had been run out of town in the village’s own infamous Judenaktion.
Meyer was sent to the Dachau concentration camp, a mere 75 miles from his hometown. As it happened, the Nazi Party member who helped “escort†the village’s only Jew out of town was chosen that year to play Jesus.
At the end of his book, Shapiro wonders what poor “Jud†Meyer, who survived the Holocaust, would have made of his instructing German actors in the correct way to pray in Hebrew.
I wonder that myself. All in all, it's a very illuminating article.
