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The purpose of this study is to compare the staging of the Passion Play of Oberammergau, Germany, with the staging of The Great Passion Play on Mount Oberammergau, Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Source material includes literary writings of the century concerning Passion plays, interview with the directors of both productions, and eyewitness accounts of the 1970 producation in Germany and the 1970, 1971 producations in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, U.S.A. Photographs of actors and scenes from both productions are used throughout the thesis.

My dissertation argues that African Americans in the 20th-century connected lynching and other acts of racial violence with Christ's crucifixion, which in turn fostered hope and even interracial amity by linking his resurrection with racial uplift. To illustrate this dynamic, I focus on musician, dramatist, and church leader Willa Saunders Jones (1901-79) and her Passion play, which she wrote in Chicago during the 1920s. Over the course of six decades, Jones produced her play annually in churches and later large civic theaters. Growing in size and splendor, the play remained intimately tied with the Black church. It also bore the impress of Jones's cultural training in Little Rock, Arkansas and Chicago, the city to which her family fled after a transforming brush with racial violence. The rise of her Passion play depended upon her musical success, most notably as a choral director. By focusing on a single cultural product over time and through several disciplinary lenses, my study contributes new insights into the role of sacred music and drama within the African American community. Offering a brief overview of Jones and her play, my Introduction also articulates the dissertation's two central organizing concepts: the crucifixion trope and resurrection consciousness. Chapters One and Two explain why Americans, especially of African descent, made a link between the suffering of black men in America and the crucifixion of Christ (the crucifixion trope). Chapters Three and Four indicate why Jones considered sacred music and drama to be agents of racial uplift and interracial amity. The final chapter focuses on the theme of Christ's resurrection as a metaphor that animates certain responses to racial trauma (resurrection consciousness). In addition to a wide range of secondary sources, I draw upon personal interviews, court records, genealogical records, the Black press, visual images, song lyrics, correspondence, autobiographies, plays, playbills, school records, television footage, and church publications of the National Baptist Convention, USA. "Windy City, Holy Land" should be of special interest to scholars in African American Studies, American Studies, History, Religious Studies, Theatre Studies, and Women's Studies.

Spätestens mit Erwin Panofskys bahnbrechender Arbeit über den verkleideten Symbolismus in der altniederländischen Malerei, die den Zeichencharakter ihrer minutiös-gegenständlichen Bildwelt anschaulich machte, wurde die den Werken des späten Mittelalters lang anhaftende Vorstellung eines rein aus künstlerischer Erzählfreude und Detailliebe entspringenden malerischen Realismus in Frage gestellt. In Hinsicht auf den symbolischen Wert der den Akteuren der veranschaulichten Handlung verliehenen Ausstattung findet sich in der kunstwissenschaftlichen Betrachtung allerdings noch gegenwärtig vielfach ein Umgang mit den Bildern des Mittelalters, in dem die dargestellte Bekleidung nicht im Sinne eines inhaltlichen Sinnträgers, sondern vielmehr als Zeittracht und das Kleiderbild dementsprechend als Dokumentation der historischen Moderealität gleichsam als getreues Abbild der wirklichen Welt angesehen wird. Daß man sich der kommunikativen Qualitäten der Rollenbekleidung in den massenwirksamen Bildmedien des Mittelalters sehr wohl zu bedienen wußte, können auf besonders eindrucksvolle Weise jene Quellen bezeugen, die über die Wirkungskraft der optischen Versinnlichungsmittel in den spektakulären Aufführungen der spätmittelalterlichen Passionsspiele informieren, in denen das Kostüm nicht nur Zeit und Raum des Geschehens zu bezeichnen, sondern darüberhinaus vor allem Wesen und Gesinnung der Handelnden auszuweisen hatte. In diesem Bewußtsein der KLEIDERBILDER, welche die BILDER DER PASSION in den malerischen Großrauminszenierungen der Simultandarstellungen des Kalvarienberggeschehens im ausgehenden 15. Jh. wiedergeben, möchte die vorliegende Forschungsarbeit am Beispiel der Hamburger Kreuzigungstafel aus St. Katharinen die KLEIDER DER PASSION in ihrer polyvalenten Zeichenfunktion analysieren und im Sinne der im spätmittelalterlichen DRAMA DER PASSSION inszenierten Kostümierung als permanent präsentes Informationsmedium interpretieren, das über die in ihnen eingetragenen MENSCHENBILDER Auskunft zu geben verspricht. / The long-upheld interpretation of simple pleasure in artistic narrative and love of detail to explain the use of miniscule objects to depict the world in paintings of the Old Dutch School was finally discredited by Erwin Panofskys revolutionary work on concealed symbolism. However when considering the symbolic value of costume and equipment in paintings, art historians today are still very much concerned with works from the Middle Ages in which the clothing depicted is not in keeping with the contextual weaver, but is, far more, the clothing of the time, and as such simultaneously acts as a documentation of the contemporary fashion and provides an accurate illustration of the real world. Sources which provide information of the effectiveness of the optical devices used in the spectacular performances of passion-plays in the late middle ages, in which clothing not only denotes the time and place of the event, but also the nature and direction of thought of the characters concerned, confirm most impressively that contemporary pictorical mass media quite definitely exploited the communicative qualities of costume. In this awareness of pictures of clothes, reflected by the pictures of large scale productions of passion plays performed towards the end of the 15th century, this piece of research aims - using the crucifiction panel in St Catherine's Church in Hamburg as an example - to analyse passion costumes in their polyvalent function in drawings, and to interpret the costumes used to perform passion-plays in the late Middle Ages as a permanently present medium of informationn which extends beyond the mere portrayal of charcter type.

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