On the Cross: A Romance of the Passion Play at Oberammergau

by Wilhelmine von Hillern

And, strangely enough, all who took part in the sacred play, seemed consecrated, the plague passed them by, Ammergau alone was spared.

So the pious seed grew slowly, often with periods when it stood still, but the watchful eye can follow it in history.

Peace at last came to the world. Purer airs blew. The Egyptian hyena, satiated, left the ravaged fields, new life bloomed from the graves, and this new life knew naught of the pangs and sufferings of the old. From the brutality and corruption of the long war, the new generation longed for more refined manners, culture, and the pleasures of life. But, as usual after such periods of deprivation and calamity, one extreme followed another. The desire for more refined manners and education led to hyperculture, the love of pleasure into epicureanism and luxury, grace into coquetry, mirth into frivolity. Then came the so-called age of gallantry. The foil took the place of the sword, the lace jabot of the leather jerkin, the smoke of battle gave way to the clouds of powder scattered by heads nodding in every direction.

Masked shepherds and shepherdesses danced upon the graves of a former generation, a new Arcadia was created in apish imitation and peopled with grimacing creatures who tripped about on tiptoe in their high-heeled shoes. Instead of the mediæval representations of martyrs and emaciated saints appeared the nude gods and cupids of a Watteau and his school. Grace took the place of majesty. Instead of moral law, men followed the easy code of convenience and everything was allowable which did not transgress its rules. Thus arose a generation of thoughtless pleasure seekers, which bore within itself a moral pestilence that, in contrast with the "Black Death," might be termed the "Rosy Death" for it breathed upon the cheeks of all whom it attacked the rosy flush of a fever which wasted more slowly, but none the less surely.

And through this rouged, dancing, skipping age, with the click of its high-heeled shoes, its rustling hooped petticoats, its amorous glances and heaving bosoms, the chaste figure of the Man of Sorrows, with a terrible solemnity upon his pallid brow, again and again trod the stage of Ammergau, and whoever beheld Him dropped the flowing bowl of pleasure, while the laugh died on his lips.

Again history and the judgment of the world moved forward. The "Rosy Death" had decomposed and poisoned all the healthful juices of society and corrupted the very heart of the human race--morality, faith, and philosophy, everything which makes men manly, had gradually perished unobserved in the thoughtless whirl. The tinsel and apish civilisation no longer sufficed to conceal the brute in human nature. It shook off every veil and stood forth in all its nakedness. The modern deluge, the French Revolution burst forth. Murder, anarchy, the delirium of fever swept over the earth in every form of horror.

Again came a change, a transformation to the lowest depths of corruption. Grace now yielded to brutality, beauty to ugliness, the divine to the cynical. Altars were overthrown, religion was abjured, the earth trembled under the mass of destroyed traditions.

But from the turmoil of the throng, fiercely rending one another, from the smoke and exhalations of this conflagration of the world, yonder in the German Garden of Gethsemane again rose victoriously, like a Phœnix from its ashes, the denied, rejected God, and the undefiled sun of Ammergau wove a halo of glory around the sublime figure which hung high on the cross.

It was a quiet, victory, of which the frantic mob were ignorant; for they saw only the foe confronting them, not the one battling above. The latter was vanquished long ago, He was deposed, and that settled the matter. The people in their sovereignty can depose and set up gods at pleasure, and when once dethroned, they no longer exist; they are hurled into Tartarus. And as men can not do without a god, they create an idol.

The country groaned beneath the iron stride of the Emperor and, without wishing or knowing it, he became the avenger of the God in whose place he stood. For, as the Thirty Years War ended under the scourge of the pestilence, and the age of mirth and gallantry under the lash of the Revolution, the Revolution yielded to the third scourge, the self-created idol!