The Moral Economy of Tourism at the Oberammergau Passion Play, 1880-1922

First staged in 1634, the Oberammergau passion play became a major international tourist attraction in the late nineteenth century. Thomas Cook had a contract with the village by 1880, and by 1900 each season drew nearly a quarter of a million spectators from Europe, North America, and beyond. Oberammergau’s commercial success was potentially self-destructive because the passion play’s credibility depended on the villagers’ behaviour: they could be either a selfless Catholic community performing through religious devotion or a sealed vessel of German folk culture preserving their tradition, but not self-interested economic actors. This tension intensified at the fin de siècle and threatened to explode when Oberammergau staged a season in 1922 during the German economic crisis. Drawing on village and state archives, travellers’ accounts, and press representations, this article tracks the strategies that the Oberammergauers used to modernise for the tourist economy while attempting to sustain an aura of selfless morality.