Can anybody ID this statue?

[swan_tower]

This is something of a long shot, but let’s give it a try anyway.

The above picture is one my parents took in the Bavarian town of Oberammergau. My father uses it in a class he teaches, and I’m told that every time he does, somebody asks, “who’s that?” Who the statue depicts is irrelevant to the subject matter of the class, but people want to know anyway.

Problem is, my parents didn’t take a picture of the plaque below the statue (they didn’t expect it to be relevant), so they have no idea. Attempts to pop the shot into Google Image Search have helpfully informed them that it’s a picture of a statue; attempts to Google “bust in Oberammergau” and similar phrases have turned up nothing useful, even when attempted in German. So our last-ditch option is to post it here and see whether anybody can tell us who we’re looking at — possibly somebody equipped with more than Google Translate, who can conduct a more nuanced German-language search.

(No, they don’t remember where they were in Oberammergau when they took the picture, either. Otherwise I could attempt some magic with Google Street View.)

Any takers?

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[sovay]

Any takers?

I'm pretty sure it's this guy.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

You and Twitter raced each other to the finish line! Does indeed appear to be him -- I had looked up the Passion Play, but didn't think to click over to the German side and see if there were individual pages for any of the people involved with it. Thank you!

[sovay]

Thank you!

You're welcome! A search for "oberammergau bust" got me this reference and the "simple red sandstone pedestal" matched what I could see in the photo; after that it was just a matter of tracking the name. I didn't know about the Oberammergau Passion Play previously!

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Huh -- I was conducting an image search, not a general Google search. So I missed that ref.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

...wait, what? You didn't know about Oberammergau? Lawks. It was kind of a saturate in my childhood - hell, there's even a Chalet School book when they all go (and the Middles misbehave appallingly, and everyone is very shocked). We sent my mum for her 75th birthday treat, because she'd always wanted it. But yeah, if you grew up at all steeped in European religious history, it's kind of a fixture.

[sovay]

...wait, what? You didn't know about Oberammergau? Lawks.

I really don't think so. I started reading about miracle and mystery plays in college after seeing The Seventh Seal, but the ones I know best are all English. The name of the town was familiar to me, so it's possible that I ran across mentions of it, but the specific story of the Oberammergau Passion Play was not. I keep telling people that I have strange gaps in what I know.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't call that a very strange gap for those of us who grew up on this side of the pond. :-P

[sovay]

I wouldn't call that a very strange gap for those of us who grew up on this side of the pond.

Well, I know about things like the self-quarantine of the village of Eyam during an outbreak of plague in the mid-seventeenth century; it's not totally unreasonable. This one, though, no.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

As someone who also knows about Eyam, I submit that our metric for "strange gaps" may be skewed. :-)

[wshaffer.livejournal.com]

It's Joseph Alois Daisenberger, a Catholic priest and writer.

(Googling "Oberammergau monuments" and clicking around a bit turned it up.)

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Monuments! Not a search term I'd thought to use (when going through "statue," "bust," etc.)

[dr_whom]

The Internet is amazing.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

It is indeed . . . .

[apel.livejournal.com]

I have nothing to add about the statue or the clergyman it shows. But when I took German, we were taught a sentence to illustrate how Germans use glottal stops before words (and sometimes word parts) starting with vowels:

"Aber ob er über Oberammergau oder über Unterammergau kommt, ist ungewiss."

It means "But whether he comes via Oberammergau or Unterammergau, is uncertain." If you need to practice your German pronunciation, it's a helpful tool.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I saw a reference to a tongue-twister when I was looking things up -- that must be it!