Very well I came to know Frau Rutz's chiselled and expressive old face before I left Oberammergau. The front door of her house stood always open; and in a tiny kitchen opposite it,—a sort of closet in the middle of the house, lighted only by one small window opening into the hall, and by its door, which was never shut,—she was generally to be seen stirring or skimming, or scouring her bright saucepans. Whenever she saw us, she ran out with a smile, and the inquiry if there was anything she could do for us. On the day before the Passion Play she opened her little shop. It was about the size of a steamboat stateroom, built over a bit of the sidewalk,—Oberammergau fashion,—and joined at a slant to the house; it was a set of shelves roofed over, and with a door to lock at night, not much more: eight people crowded it tight; but it was packed from sill to roof with carvings, a large part of which had been made by herself, her husband and sons, or workmen in their employ, and most of which, I think, were sold by virtue of the Frau's smile, if it proved as potent a lure to other buyers as to me. If I drove or walked past her house without seeing it, I felt as if I had left something behind for which I ought to go back; and when she waved her hand to us, and stood looking after us as our horses dashed round the corner, I felt that good luck was invoked on the drive and the day.
Driving out of Oberammergau, there are two roads to choose from,—one up the Ammer, by way of a higher valley, and into closer knots of mountains, and so on into the Tyrol; the other down the Ammer, through meadows, doubling and climbing some of the outpost mountains of the range, and so on out to the plains. On the first road lies Ettal, and on the other Unterammergau, both within so short a distance of Oberammergau that they are to be counted in among its pleasures.
Ettal is one of the twelve beautiful houses which the ecclesiastics formerly owned in this part of Bavaria. These old monks had a quick eye for beauty of landscape, as well as a shrewd one for all other advantages of locality; and in the days of their power and prosperity they so crowded into these South Bavarian highlands that the region came to be called "Pfaffenwinkel," or "The Priest's Corner." Abbeys, priories, and convents—a dozen of them, all rich and powerful—stood within a day's journey of one another. Of these, Ettal was pre-eminent for beauty and splendor. It was founded early in the fourteenth century by a German emperor, who, being ill, was ready to promise anything to be well again, and being approached at this moment by a crafty Benedictine, promised to found a Benedictine monastery in the valley of the Ammer, if the Holy Virgin would restore him to health. An old tradition says that as the emperor came riding up the steep Ettaler Berg, at the summit of which the monastery stands, his horse fell three times on his knees, and refused to go farther. This was construed to be a sign from heaven to point out the site of the monastery. But to all unforewarned travellers who have approached Oberammergau by way of Ettal, and been compelled to walk up the Ettaler Berg, there will seem small occasion for any suggestion of a supernatural cause for the emperor's horse tumbling on his knees. A more unmitigated two miles of severe climb was never built into a road; the marvel is that it should have occurred to mortal man to do it, and that there is as yet but one votive tablet by the roadside in commemoration of death by apoplexy in the attempt to walk up. It was Alois Pfaurler who did thus die in July, 1866,—and before he was half-way up, too. Therefore this tablet on the spot of his death has a depressing effect on people for the latter half of their struggle, and no doubt makes them go slower.
How much the Benedictines of Ettal had to do with the Passion Play which has made Oberammergau so famous, it is now not possible to know. Those who know most about it disagree. In 1634, the year in which the play was first performed, it is certain that the Oberammergau community must have been under the pastoral charge of some one of the great ecclesiastical establishments in that region; and it is more than probable that the monks, who were themselves much in the way of writing and performing in religious plays, first suggested to the villagers this mode of working for the glory and profit of the Church.
Their venerable pastor, Daisenberger, to whom they owe the present version of the Passion Play, was an Ettal monk; and one of the many plays which he has arranged or written for their dramatic training is "The Founding of the Monastery of Ettal." The closing stanzas of this well express the feeling of the Oberammergauer to-day, and no doubt of the Ettal monk centuries ago, in regard to the incomparable Ammer Thal region:—
"Let God be praised! He hath this vale created
To show to man the glory of his name!
And these wide hills the Lord hath consecrated
Where he his love incessant may proclaim.
"Ne'er shall decay the valley's greatest treasure,