Project Details
Projekt
The village of Christ. Institutional-theoretical and historical perspectives on Oberammergau and its passion play in 19th-21st centuries
Subject Area
Theatre and Media Studies
Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
German Medieval Studies (Medieval German Literature)
Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
German Medieval Studies (Medieval German Literature)
Term
from 2016 to 2022
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 321044634
The project investigates the pluralisation and stabilisation of the Oberammergau Passion Play since the 19th century in an interdisciplinary way (theatre studies, literary studies, ethnology). Based on institutional-theoretical approaches, it examines how claims to religious commitment are perpetuated in Oberammergau and how compensatory narratives absorb erosions of validity. The Passion Play, which has been regularly performed since 1634, is in the tradition of late medieval religious theatre. Of course, its pragmatic and functional parameters have shifted since then. Since the middle of the 19th century, Oberammergau has been attracting an international audience that is looked after by well-organised tourism industry. In the 20th century, National Socialist propaganda instrumented the play and the village, in the 1970s the organisers of the play began to react to accusations of anti-Semitism. When Christian Stückl became the stage director in 1990, self-marketing was intensified, and performance aesthetics and self-reflection gained an unprecedented discursive and pragmatic status. The project traces how the tension between references to tradition and changing historical and media contexts becomes negotiable in an 'institution Oberammergau'. Moreover, the project focuses not only on the play but also on perspectives on the village and the various - actors (individuals, collectives, things) as well as mediatizations of Oberammergau and its Passion Play: Documentations and commentaries of multiple media compositions and, through ethnological fieldwork, positions beyond the dominant written discourse are part of the induction basis. Thus, the project links a matter whose complexity has been widely neglected by academia to central debates of theatre and literary studies, mediology, and ethnology. By the instance of Oberammergau, it examines theatre as a place of communalization, patterns of narrativization and 'telling history', the narrative and performative construction of chronotopologies. It looks at the fields of religion and tourism and takes into account the intermedial scenography of stage and urban space.The shared horizon is the question of authentication strategies, but also options for functionalizing religiosity in contexts that conceive themselves as 'secular', 'post-secular' or even ‘multiple secular’. With the extension period applied for, the view expands to the media-historical preconditions for how the claims to the continuity of validity can be maintained in Oberammergau (pictorial regimes and pictorial hegemonies, the function of things in the village and on the stage for institutional stabilisation and transformation). The inclusion of the 2020 Passion Play period also offers a unique expansion of the induction basis.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
