ANTON LANG OF OBERAMMERGAU
While I was at home on a few weeks' visit in October, 1915, I read
in the newspapers a simple announcement cabled from Europe that
Anton Lang of Oberammergau had been killed in the great French
offensive in Champagne. This came as a shock to many Americans,
for the name of this wonderful character who had inspired people of
all shades of opinion and religious belief in his masterful
impersonation of Christ in the decennial Passion Play was almost as
well known in the United States and in England as in his native
Bavaria, and better, I found than in Prussia.
British and American tourist agencies had put Oberammergau on the
map of the world. The interest in America after the Passion Play
of 1910 was so great, in fact, that some newspapers ran extensive
series of illustrated articles describing it. The man who played
the part of Christ was idealised, everybody who had seen him liked
him, respected him and admired him. Thousands had said that
somehow a person felt better after he had seen Anton Lang. As a
supreme test of his popularity, American vaudeville managers asked
him to name his own terms for a theatrical tour.
And now the man who had imbued his life with that of the Prince of
Peace had thrown the past aside, and with the spiked helmet in
place of the Crown of Thorns had gone to his death trying not to
save but to slaughter his fellow-men.
Truly, the changes wrought by war are great!
* * * * *
In Berlin I inquired into the circumstances of Anton Lang's death.
Nobody knew anything definite. Berlin knew little of him in life,
much less than London, New York or Montreal.
Munich is different. There his name is a household word. Herr von
Meinl, then Director of the Bavarian Ministry, now member of the
Bundesrat, told me that he believed that there was a mistake in the
report that Anton had been killed.
Later, when tramping through the Bavarian Highlands, I walked one
winter day from Partenkirchen to Oberammergau, for I had a whim to
know the truth of the matter.
On the lonely mountain road that winds sharply up from Oberau I
overtook a Benedictine monk who was walking to the monastery at
Ettal. We talked of the war in general and of the Russian
prisoners we had seen in the saw-mills at Untermberg. I was
curious to hear his views upon the war, and I soon saw that not
even the thick walls of a monastery are proof against the
idea-machine in the Wilhelmstrasse. Despite Cardinal Mercier's
denunciation of German methods in Belgium, this monk's views were
the same as the rest of the Kaiser's subjects. He did, however,
admit that he was sorry for the Belgians, although, in true German
fashion, he did not consider Germany to blame. He sighed to think
that "the Belgian King had so treacherously betrayed his people by
abandoning his neutrality and entering into a secret agreement with
France and Great Britain." He recited the regular story of the
secret military letters found by the Germans after they had invaded
Belgium, the all-important marginal notes of which were maliciously
left untranslated in the German Press.
We parted at Ettal, and I pushed on down the narrow valley to
Oberammergau. The road ahead was now in shadow, but behind me the
mountain mass was dazzling white in the rays of the setting sun.
"What a pity," I thought, "that the peasant must depart from these
beautiful mountains and valleys to die in the slime of the
trenches."
The day was closing in quiet and grandeur, yet all the time the
shadow of death was darkening the peaceful valley of the Ammer. I
became aware of it first as I passed the silent churchyard with its
grey stones rising from the snow. For there, on the other side of
the old stone wall that marks the road, was a monument on which the
Reaper hacks the toll of death. The list for 1870 was small,
indeed, compared with that of _die grosse Zeit_. I looked for Lang
and found it, for Hans had died, as had also Richard.
I passed groups of men cutting wood and hauling ice and grading
roads, men with rounder faces and flatter noses than the Bavarians,
still wearing the yellowish-brown uniform of Russia. That is, most
of them wore it. Some, whose uniforms had long since gone to
tatters, were dressed in ordinary clothing, with flaming red R's
painted on trousers and jackets.
An old woman with a heavy basket on her back was trudging past a
group of these. "How do you like them?" I asked. "We shall really
miss them when they go," she said. "They seem part of the village
now. The poor fellows, it must be sad for them so far from home."
Evidently the spirit of new Germany had not saturated her.
I went through crooked streets, bordered with houses brightly
frescoed with biblical scenes, to the _Pension Dahein_, the home of
the man I wished to see. As he rose from his pottery bench to
welcome me, I felt that beneath his great blue apron and rough garb
of the working man was true nobility. I did not need to ask if he
was Anton Lang. I had seen his picture and had often been told
that his face was the image of His Who died on the Cross. I
expected much, but found infinitely more. I felt that life had
been breathed into a Rubens masterpiece. No photograph can do him
justice, for no lens can catch the wondrous light in his clear blue
eyes.
I was the only guest at the _Pension Daheim_; indeed, I was the
only stranger in Oberammergau. I sat beside Anton Lang in his work
room as his steady hands fashioned things of clay, I ate at table
with him, and in the evening we pulled up our chairs to the
comfortable fireside, where we talked of his country and of my
country, of the Passion Play and of the war.
I had been sceptical about him until I met him. I wondered if he
was self-conscious about his goodness, or if he was a dreamer who
could not get down to the realities of this world, or if he had
been spoiled by flattery, or if piety was part of his profession.
When I finally went from there I felt that I really understood him.
His life has been without an atom of reproach, yet he never poses
as pious. He does not preach, or stand aloof, or try to make you
feel that he is better than you, but down in your heart you know
that he is. He has been honoured by royalty and men of state, yet
he remains simple and unaffected, though quietly dignified in
manner. He is truly Nature's Nobleman, with a mind that is pure
and a face the mirror of his mind.
To play well his role of _Christus_ is the dominating passion of
his life. Not the make-up box, but his own thoughts must mould his
features for the role, which has been his in 1890, 1900 and 1910.
His travels include journeys to Rome and to the Holy Land. He is
well read, an interesting talker, and an interested listener. He
commented upon the great change in the spirit of the people, a
change from the intoxicating enthusiasm of victory to a war-weary
feeling of trying to hold out through a sense of duty. To my
question as to when he thought the war would end, he answered:
"When Great Britain and Germany both realise that each must make
concessions. Neither can crush the other."
The doctrine that "only through hate can the greatest obstacles in
life be overcome" has not reached his home, nor was there hanging
on the wall, as in so many German homes, the famous order of the
day of Crown Prince Rupert of Bavaria, which commences with
"Soldiers of the army! Before you are the English!" in which he
exhorts his troops with all the tricky sophistry of hate.
Anton Lang has worked long hard hours to bring up his family,
rather than accept fabulous offers for a theatrical tour of
America. He refused these offers through no mere caprice.
"I admit that the temptation is great," he said to me. "Here I
must always work hard and remain poor; there I quickly could have
grown rich. But the Passion Play is not a business," he continued
earnestly. "Nearly three hundred years ago, when a terrible plague
raged over the land, the people of Oberammergau vowed to Almighty
God that if He would save their village, they would perform every
ten years in His glory the Passion of His Divine Son. The village
was saved and Oberammergau has kept its promise. You see, if I had
accepted those theatrical offers I could never again live in my
native village, and that would break my heart."
There is carefully preserved in the town hall at Oberammergau an
old chronicle which tells of the plague. There will undoubtedly be
preserved in the family of Lang a new chronicle, a product of the
war, printed in another country, a chronicle which did not rest
content with a notice of Anton's obituary, but told the details of
his death in battle.
Frau Lang showed me this chronicle. She seemed to have something
on her mind of which she wished to speak, after I told her that I
was an American journalist. At length one evening, after the three
younger children bad gone to bed, and the eldest was industriously
studying his lessons for the next day, she ventured. "American
newspapers tell stories which are not at all true, don't they?" she
half stated, half asked.
My natural inclination was to defend American journalism by
attacking that of Germany, but something restrained me, I did not
know what. "Of course," I explained, "in a country such as ours
where the Press is free, evils sometimes arise. We have all kinds
of newspapers. A few are very yellow, but the vast majority seek
to be accurate, for accuracy pays in the long run in
self-respecting journalism." I thought that perhaps she was
referring to the announcement of the death of the man who was
sitting with us in the room. We both agreed, however, that such a
mistake was perfectly natural since two Langs of Oberammergau had
already been killed. In fact, Anton had read of his own death
notice in a Munich paper. The American correspondent who had
cabled the news on two occasions had presumably simply "lifted" the
announcement from the German papers. Frau Lang could understand
that very well when I explained, but how about the stories that
Anton had been serving a machine-gun, and other details which were
pure fiction?
She had trump cards which she played at this point. Two gaudily
coloured "Sunday Supplements" of a certain newspaper combination in
the United States were spread before me. The first told of how
Anton Lang had become a machine-gunner of marked ability, and that
he served his deadly weapon with determination. Could the
Oberammergau Passion Play ever exert the old influence again, after
this? was the query at the end of the article.
A second had all the details of Anton's death and was profusely
illustrated. The story started with Anton going years ago into the
mountains to try out his voice in order to develop it for his
histrionic task. There was a brief account of how he had followed
in the path of the Prince of Peace, and of the tremendous effect he
had upon his audiences.
Then came the war, which tore him from his humble home. The battle
raged, the Bavarians charged the French lines, and the spot-light
of the story was played upon a soldier from Oberammergau who lay
wounded in "No-Man's Land." Another charging wave swept by this
soldier, and as he looked up he saw the face of the man he had
respected and loved more than all other men, the face of Anton
Lang, the _Christus_ of Oberammergau. The soldier covered his eyes
with his hands, for never had Anton Lang looked as he did then.
The eyes which had always been so beautiful, so compassionate, had
murder in them now.
The scene shifted. A French sergeant and private crouched by their
machine-gun ready to repel the charge, the mutual relationship
being apparently somewhat that of a plumber and his assistant.
They sprayed the oncoming Bavarians with a shower of steel and
piled the dead high outside the French trenches. The charge had
failed, and the sergeant began to act strangely. At length he
broke the silence. "Did you see that last _boche_, Jean?" he
asked. "Did you see that face?" Jean confessed that he did not.
"You are fortunate, Jean," said the sergeant. "Never have I seen
such a face before. I felt as if there was something supernatural
about it. I felt that it was wrong to kill that man. I hated to
do it, Jean.--But then the butcher was coming at us with a knife
two feet long."
I finished reading and looked up at the questioning eyes of Frau
Lang and at the wonderful, indescribable blue eyes of the "butcher"
across the table, who, I may add, is fifty-two years of age, and
has not had a day's military training in his life.
"And look," said Frau Lang, "these men are not even
Oberammergauers."
She pointed to one of the illustrations which depicted a small
group of rather vicious-looking Prussians, with rifles ready
peering over the rim of a trench. The picture was labelled "Four
apostles now serving at the Front."
"And see," continued the perplexed woman, "there is Johann Zwinck,
the Judas in the play. It says that he is at the front. Why, he
is sixty-nine years old, and is still the village painter. Only
yesterday I heard him complain that the war was making it difficult
for him to get sufficient oil to mix his paint."
I was at a loss for words. "When one compares such terrible
untruths with our German White Book," declared Frau Lang, "it is
indeed difficult for the American people to understand the true
situation."
I felt that it would be useless for me at that moment to explain
certain very important omissions in the German White Book.
Anything would look _white_ in comparison with the yellow journal I
had just read. But I knew, and tried to explain that the
particular newspaper combination which printed such rubbish was
well known in America for its inaccuracies and fabrications, and
although it was pro-German, it would sacrifice anything for
sensation. But the good woman, being a German, and consequently
accustomed to standardisation, could not dissociate this newspaper
from the real Press.