Bavarian Ramblings

Plague came to the Bavarian village of Oberammergau in 1633 and in just over a month half the population of the village, 81 people, perished. This loss prompted the remaining villagers to make a vow that if they were spared, every ten years they would perform a play depicting the life and death of Christ. From that day on there was no further loss of life from the plague. Keeping their word the villagers performed the first Oberammergau Passion Play in 1634 and they have kept their promise for 391 years. In 1680 they changed the timing of the performance to years that ended in zero and have managed to stick to that schedule except for nine occasions (one being in 1870, because of the Franco-Prussian War, and another being 2020 which was postponed to 2022 because of the COVID 19 Pandemic). 

In 1933 the Oberammergau community decided to stage a series of special out of sequence performances in 1934 to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the first play.  The Nazi party, having come to power the previous year, got right behind the event to extract as much propaganda as they could from it. They ensured that the wording "Deutschland ruft Euch! (Germany is calling you)" was printed on the official poster (right),declared that the Play should be a “national people’s pilgrimage”and reduced the entrance fees by half to encourage Germans to attend. Hitler and a bunch of his cronies attended the play.

My mother and her sister attended one of these special performances. I do not know why they chose to attend since neither was deeply religious, and as members of the Church of England they were deep into Catholic Germany. Nonetheless tavelling in Germany in 1934 must have been eye opening for two young English women from rural Kent (my mother was eighteen at the time my aunt in her mid-20s) given that Bavaria was the centre of Nazi activity at that time, yet oddly my mother never talked about it much - maybe having served through WWII she found it a difficult subject, I don't know. The only thing she ever spoke about on that trip was the time she and her sister spent in Switzerland, visiting Berne, Zurich, Zermatt and the Matterhorn.

Why am I blathering on about this? Well four reasons: First, when cleaning up recently I turned up a bunch of trinkets she had gathered on that trip - including a beautifully carved wooden crucifix from Oberammergau; second, because we are in the process of planning a European holiday next year and Bavaria is marked as a stop; third, because today is the 155th anniversary of the Battle of Wissembourg which was the first action of the Franco-Prussian War in which the reformed Royal Bavarian army fought; fourth, because it makes a nice segue into the real purpose of this post - to show off the latest addition to my Franco-Prussian War Bavarians, four boxes of which arrived on my doorstep nearly three weeks ago.

This is 2nd Battalion, 9th (Wrede) Infantry Regiment. This battalion was only slightly engaged at Wissembourg, suffering a loss of one man killed and eight wounded in the assault on the town. 

Roughly handled in the opening stages of the Battle of Wörth two days later, the battalion was fortunate to suffer only 83 casualties. It went to fight at Bazeilles, Sedan and in the Siege of Paris.