Today, we are mainly familiar with Passion Plays from places in the Alpine region. In addition to the Passion Play in the Tyrolean town of Erl, the Oberammergau Passion Play in particular is world-famous. At the premiere of the Oberammergau Passion Play in 2022, not only German textbooks were offered, but also English ones, so that spectators from the USA can follow the action. The flow of audiences from overseas had of course already begun in the 19th century. Denominational boundaries hardly played a role here. Protestant and evangelical Christians also appreciated and still appreciate the Oberammergau Passion Play. This is because it follows a sola scriptura principle with its biblical text.
The Old Testament prefigurations, which are staged in Oberammergau as silent images in impressive colour symbolism, are also well founded in the Bible. According to traditional Christian exegesis, events from the Old Testament are intended to refer to people and deeds from the New Testament. This recourse to the Old Testament is based just as much on medieval traditions as the original text of the oldest Oberammergau Passion Play, which was compiled and re-dramatised in the middle of the Thirty Years' War from the Augsburg Passion Play from the Benedictine monastery of St. Ulrich and Afra and another Augsburg Passion Play by the Meistersinger.
I.
I will come to the two Swabian source texts of the old Bavarian Oberammergau Passion Play in detail later. Firstly, it is important for us to note that the play text for the village of Oberammergau came from a large city. In the late Middle Ages and at the time of the Fuggers, the imperial city of Augsburg was one of the largest cities in the Holy Roman Empire with a population of around 30,000. By comparison, Frankfurt am Main only had 10,000 inhabitants at the same time. And in the Middle Ages, it was the large imperial and residential cities that staged Passion Plays. This had to do with financial and human resources. After all, musicians, actors and stage technology as well as security measures cost a lot of money. Accordingly, the Frankfurt City Council warned the organisers of the Frankfurt Passion Play in 1492: "But don't let them taste themselves. In other words, the organisers were warned against excessive expenditure.
The Frankfurt City Council's admonition referred to the Passion Play performance of 1492. The Passion was also performed on the Römerberg in front of the town hall in 1498 and 1506. The wooden stage also incorporated the fountain that was used for the baptism of Jesus and as a pool for one of Jesus' miracles. Otherwise, the stage set-ups were very simple. For the Sermon on the Mount, for example, Jesus climbed onto a wooden barrel. The Frankfurt Council minutes also record exactly where the box seats for the audience were.
The city councillors and mayors watched the spectacle from the windows of the Römer, Frankfurt's town hall. The noble patricians were allowed to watch from the battlements of St Nicholas' Chapel. The common people stood around the wooden stage on the Römerberg or Samstagsberg square. The place looks almost exactly the same today. Another interesting detail about the catering is that the councillors ate cherries and drank red wine at the expense of the city treasury during the performance. Cherries were served because the Passion Play was performed in late spring at Whitsun.
In Frankfurt, people feared the bad weather at Easter. Even more important, however, was probably the competition with the Frankfurt Spring Fair. Just like today, the city lived from the trade fair business. And the cash register had to be in order before the townspeople could be among themselves in the period between the spring and autumn fairs and stage the Passion for the citizens of Frankfurt. The fact that it was a civic liturgy by Frankfurters for Frankfurters is also shown by the fact that the three wooden crosses from the Passion Play were taken in a solemn procession to the public execution site in the west of Frankfurt outside the city and erected after the performances. The Passion Play crosses remained there as a memorial. The execution site in Frankfurt was called Galgenfeld at the time. It was therefore Golgotha on the gallows field.
Researchers know exactly what the city and its immediate neighbourhood looked like around 1500. The fact that today's topographical conditions of the town around the Römer are not far removed from the medieval findings is shown by the Faberplan from 1552, a pre-modern source: this bird's-eye plan by Conrad Faber von Kreuznach depicts the appearance of the town at the time of the Passion Play performances of 1492, 1498 and 1506 and also shows the gallows field with the execution site on which the wooden crosses of the Passion Play were installed.
This illustrates how passion plays became part of a staging of community inscribed in the landscape. The play text itself constructs an exclusivity by inciting hatred against Jews and mocking the country folk. The audience community was welded together by a sense of unity among the Christian Frankfurters. In the logic of this play, the Jewish community in the Judengasse and the supposedly stupid peasants from the countryside remained excluded from the urban community.
II.
But Frankfurt am Main was not the only imperial city in which Passion Plays were staged. In 2010, I was able to prove that the St. Gallen Passion Play, named after its current location, is in fact the Worms Passion Play. Since 2013, it has also officially been called the Worms Passion Play. A central passage in the play is about Jesus' healing of the blind from the Gospel of John (chapter 9). It also mentions Jews who comment on Jesus' miracles. The anonymous Jews from the Gospel become the speaking role of Salman Phariseus in the Worms Passion Play. Behind the Pharisee Salman hides the Worms anti-bishop Salman. However, we have now reached the level of imperial politics and the church politics of Emperor Louis the Bavarian.
The turbulent times of this Wittelsbach emperor are described by Umberto Eco in his novel The Name of the Rose. In the 14th century, Emperor Louis the Bavarian and the Pope were hostile to each other in Avignon. Sanctions and invectives were imposed on each other. The pope imposed an interdict on the empire and appointed counter-bishops to make the bishops appointed by the emperor impossible and discredit them. In Worms, however, the counter-bishop Salman was never able to gain a foothold with the city council loyal to the emperor. Accordingly, the Worms Passion Play made fun of the "Pharisee" Salman. This method of political actualisation is also used in the contemporaneous Frankfurt conducting role (a Passion Play rotulus), which features a "Jew Liebermann".
This Jew, Liebermann, is in fact documented in the 14th century. The message of the Frankfurt conducting role is clear: it is the contemporary, late medieval Jews who crucify Jesus. The Passion Play was generally anti-Semitic or anti-Judaic. As a real-world consequence, the Frankfurt City Council decided the following in 1498 before the Passion Play performance: "Item die Juden dis spil in iren husen lazen vnd ine einen gunnen, der sie beslieze." This translates as: "The Jews should remain in their homes during the Passion Play performance and a city guard should be deployed to lock them in and guard them." This was easy to do, as Frankfurt had the famous Judengasse, which Goethe still describes as a ghetto in Dichtung und Wahrheit. The massive wooden gate of the Judengasse could be firmly locked and the Jews were thus safe from a pogrom - and at the same time excluded from participating in the city's major events.
III.
Such a large-scale event required correspondingly large public spaces. This also applies to the Worms Passion Play. It was performed in front of the north portal of the cathedral, where even the royal or imperial court of blood was held. In this respect, the imperial procurator Pontius Pilate had his stage location there to condemn Jesus to death. In the Middle Ages, the German emperor traditionally entered Worms Cathedral through this royal portal.
This is also the site of the famous quarrel between the queens in the Song of the Nibelungs. Kriemhild and Brünhild argue over who should be the first to enter Worms Cathedral. However, in recent years, inspired by the genius loci, this dispute was staged there as part of the Nibelungen Festival. Although Passion Plays are no longer performed in front of Worms Cathedral today, the historic stage location is still used as such. This is because the Nibelungen Festival takes place there every summer. And the very first aventure of the Song of the Nibelungs reads: "ze Wormez bi dem Rîne / si wonten mit ir kraft, // in dienten von ir landen / vil starkiu ritterschaft" ("Kriemhild and her brothers lived in the city of Worms on the Rhine and had numerous strong knights as vassals").
The Worms Nibelungen Festival sometimes brings famous acting personalities to the stage. The 2019 performances featured none other than the great castle actor Klaus Maria Brandauer in the role of the grim Hagen. This spectacular festival tradition - without the inventors of the modern Nibelungen Festival realising it - has its origins in the Middle Ages, more precisely in the famous Worms Passion Play, in terms of the stage location and the phenomenon of the mass spectacle.
While Worms and Frankfurt am Main were old urban centres of the Holy Roman Empire, or more precisely powerful imperial cities, Passion Plays also took place in medieval residential cities. The Habsburg residence of Vienna was the setting for a Passion Play performance, which was staged in co-operation with the University of Vienna and the court of the Archduke. This is documented by an extract from the faculty records.
Specifically, it concerns a decision by the Faculty of Arts in Vienna, which traditionally had the most professors and students: "1432, 4 aprilis, congregatio facultatis artium ad audiendum relacionem decani, quomodo quidam magister scilicet Johannes Celler de Augusta in die cene domini, parasceves et pasce habuisset publice ludos de cena, passione et resurreccione domini in castro ducis, non obstante exhortacione decani contraria. Super quo conclusit facultas, quod de cetero nullus magistrorum facultatis ludos tales facere publice presumat sine expressa licencia facultatis; quod si quis contrarium fecerit, excludatur a facultate."
This means that on 4 April 1432, the faculty council met to discuss the case of the master Johannes Zeller from Augsburg. He had performed public passion plays at Easter time about the Last Supper, the Passion and the Resurrection. The venue was the Hofburg Palace in Vienna. The faculty decided that no one would be allowed to organise such performances in future without the express permission of the faculty. Failure to do so would result in expulsion from the faculty.
Apparently, some of his faculty colleagues were jealous of the great honour of performing such a passion play in front of the ruler in the Vienna Hofburg. The Magister, the equivalent of a professor today, had staged a courtly sacred drama with his students. This was a way of making a name for oneself at court and was just as likely to generate envy among colleagues. In any case, we learn here that students performed theatre. This was not unusual in the Middle Ages either, as the famous Parisian theology professor Jean Charlier Gerson also performed theatre with his students at the Collège de Navarre. While this went down very well in Paris, in Vienna at least the faculty was not amused.
The source from the faculty records names the location of the performance very precisely: in castro ducis, literally "in the castle of the duke or archduke". The beginnings of the Vienna Hofburg have been well researched archaeologically and are somewhat reminiscent of the Tower of London: a square ground plan with four corner towers. The depiction on the Vienna city map of 1421/22 shows comparable architecture. The complex is simply labelled: this is the purck. It had a large inner courtyard. In the inner courtyard you can imagine what must have been a wooden stage. From the towers and crenellated walls, you could easily follow the action. This Viennese Passion Play by the Augsburg master Johannes Zeller is still preserved today in the Augsburg Passion Play of the Benedictine monastery of St Ulrich and Afra.
IV.
We know from archival records that the Zeller family from Augsburg was involved in the colliery and brotherhood of the monastery of St Ulrich and Afra for several generations. The Augsburg Benedictines cultivated an intensive pastoral exchange with the citizens of the imperial city of Augsburg. This also included passion plays, for which there was a large space in the area of the monastery. If you know your way around Augsburg, the Haus Sankt Ulrich (St Ulrich's House) stands in the same place today, seen from Maximilianstraße behind the church complex.
An excerpt from the Passion Play shows Augsburg's local colour in particular: "Yetzvnd fliehend die iunger all von ihesu / dann petrus beleibt nachuolgend der schar. So Iud Lemlin seizes Iohannem by the cloak and Iohannes takes it from him and leaves the cloak behind him. Iud Lemlin speaks [...]"
In the stage directions, the scene describes the apostles' flight away from Jesus' arrest, with Peter initially remaining with his master. Then a Jew, Lemlin, grabs the apostle John by the cloak. John drops the cloak and manages to escape. The Jew Lemlin then begins to speak. Lemlin is an Alemannic form of today's "little lamb". This diminutive form belongs to the family name Lamm. There is archival evidence of this Jewish family in Augsburg in the 14th and 15th centuries. From 1438, a community leader of the same name legally organised the removal of the Jews after their expulsion by the city government. In the logic of the Augsburg Passion Play, the late medieval and contemporary Jew is therefore identical to the biblical Jew at the time of his capture. It is therefore the contemporary Jews who capture the Saviour Jesus. From there it is not far to the anti-Semitic propaganda of the Jews as murderers of God.
The end of the Augsburg Passion Play is also interesting, where the audience is called upon to sing the hymn "Christ ist erstanden" together. This well-known and probably oldest German Easter hymn turned the Passion Play performance into a kind of church service through the congregational singing, the popularity of which is enhanced not least by the play's East Swabian dialect. St Peter speaks Swabian - this is how the linguistic thrust of the Augsburg Passion Play could be summarised. The biblical events surrounding the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus are thus also linguistically close to the late medieval citizen. And this closeness is all the more impressive because the language of worship was otherwise Latin. Passion plays in the vernacular were therefore universally understood and were able to attract the urban masses in the late Middle Ages.
