6 - Dionysia in Bavaria

Summary

In the late nineteenth century, the passion play at Oberammergau in Bavaria became a major international sensation whose decennial performances attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors from across Europe and the wider world. This chapter argues that nineteenth-century observers increasingly understood Oberammergau not only as a site for the re-enactment of the biblical past, but also as a provocative example of the open-air ritual theatre they associated with Greek antiquity. Historians often associate nineteenth-century German philhellenism with Protestant elites, but this chapter shows how an unambiguously Catholic phenomenon, the Oberammergau passion play, took on special resonance among those who were inspired by the call for Dionysian theatre associated with Friedrich Nietzsche at the fin de siècle. The analysis especially focuses on three German-speaking dramatists – Richard von Kralik, Oskar Panizza and Friedrich Lienhard – for whom the purportedly Greek qualities of Oberammergau prompted reflection on the possibilities and limitations of Dionysian drama as a tool of artistic, moral and national regeneration.