Oxford, and was then a fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He is the author of various studies in nineteenth-century European culture and ideas, including The Gospel According to Renan: Reading, Writing, and Religion in Nineteenth-Century France.
Priest applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Oberammergau: The Passion Play and Its Audiences from the Enlightenment to the Nazis, and reported the following:
On page 99 we find ourselves in the Bavarian village of Oberammergau in 1871, immediately after the Kingdom of Bavaria has fought alongside other German armies in the Franco-Prussian War that ended with the creation of a unified German nation-state. At the outbreak of war in 1870, the village’s long-running passion play had been interrupted so that its performers could fight in the war. Given Bavaria’s strong regional identity and the village’s Catholic history, Protestant Germans from the North arrived at the resumed season of performances in 1871 expecting a degree of hostility and alienation from the local population. Page 99 presents the surprise of northern Protestant journalists when they discover the opposite: the Oberammergauers seem to be sincerely invested in German nationalism. The local politician is a pro-German Liberal, apparently elected by unanimous vote of the village. He hangs a portrait of the Kaiser in his study alongside his bust of the Bavarian King Ludwig II, and bursts into tears recalling the opening of the Reichstag. A chauvinistic poet who sees Germany’s war victory as a triumph over the Catholic spirit even celebrates the play as ‘purely Protestant’ in its meaning.Learn more about Oberammergau at the Oxford University Press website.
The Page 99 Test works remarkably well for Oberammergau. One of the major arguments of my book is that the passion play attracted an increasingly and remarkably wide range of audiences during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Crucial was the play’s capacity to attract from across Germany’s sectarian divide and to present itself as a site of national significance, rather than Catholic and Bavarian. The 1870-1 season is the culmination of the first part of the book, ‘Making the German Passion Play’, and page 99 presents some of the strongest language from Protestant admirers. My book also seeks to focus on interaction between the local community and its audiences, which is directly represented by their encounters with journalists on the page.
While Oberammergau passes the Page 99 Test, of course it only tells part of the story. The final two-thirds of the book explore Oberammergau’s development of an international audience, the debates they had over the passion play on issues ranging from commercialisation to antisemitism, and the ultimate sponsorship of the play by the Nazi government at its tercentenary performance in 1934. The path from 1871 to the end of the book is indirect, but without Oberammergau’s successful presentation of the passion play as a national site, as described on page 99, it is impossible to imagine the paths that follow out from there into the twentieth century.
--Marshal Zeringue
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