ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes travelogues to Oberammergau in magazines, travel reports, and memoirs. In particular, it focuses on those accounts (and they far outnumber the others) in which the Passion play is conceived as charismatically elevated. The experience of the play is then seen in analogy to participation in a church service, the journey is depicted as a pilgrimage, and the reporters see themselves as pilgrims. In my chapter, I trace the narrators’ rhetorical and narrative strategies to make their journeys sound more like pilgrimages and set themselves apart from the set of “others” looked down upon as mere tourists.
