Rod Serling's Night Gallery is a good call, it has that same spooky, fog-shrouded quality. Possibly the Rhine Maidens casting their nets about for the unwary sailors, dead-ahead? The tone and feeling also remind me of Goethe's Faust, on Walpurgis Eve.
The note is an original beauty from Oberammergau's historic Passion Play...
The town's residents vowed that if God spared them from the effects of the bubonic plague ravaging the region, they would produce a play every ten years thereafter for all time depicting the life and death of Jesus. The death rate among adults rose from one in October 1632 to twenty in the month of March 1633. The adult death rate slowly subsided to one in the month of July 1633. The villagers believed they were spared after they kept their part of the vow when the play was first performed in 1634.
Nazi exploitation of the 1934 jubilee season...
The special jubilee season of the Oberammergau Passion Play in 1934, marking the 300-year anniversary of the original vow to reenact Jesus' Passion and Suffering every ten years thereafter, was the first (and, it turned out, only) performance after the Nazi regime's rise to power the year previous.
Among other things, the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda ordered the official poster for the jubilee season amended to include the message "Deutschland ruft dich!" ("Germany is calling you!"), and the Kraft durch Freude scheme's discount-travel programme offered special cut-rate packages to the Passion Play, including rail fare, tickets and accommodations.
Official propaganda described the Passion Play as "peasant drama***inspired by the consecrating power of the soil", with Hitler attending a performance (and wound up endorsing it wholeheartedly as one with the Greater Anti-Semitic Agenda of the Nazi regime).
An attempt to rewrite the Passion Play script to bring it into line with Nazi ideology was rejected, however, by the more conservative element.
That's a fantastic rendering of our old friend and king of death, the reaper. That bright scarlet color really does the trick highlighting the crown and cape, and at the same time nicely brings the national-colors into play. A great bit of history to this one.
