Germans drop dour image for wild Lenten festival

Press, 16 March 1982, Page 19

Germans drop dour image for wild Lenten festival

From

A. M. CATTERALL

in Cologne

The image of the hardworking, funless German is a popular one in the rest of the Western world: Germans live to work; they cannot relax; they take life too seriously; they have no sense of humour. . It has been used as one explanation of the “economic miracle” of post-war recovery, and before that for German belligerence. Like all popular national prejudices, it has'its basis in what is really a difference of perception. But for one week of the year in large parts of the country, even that perception takes a hard knock. The six days from the Thursday before Ash Wednesday are the time for celebrating the Roman Catholic tradition of “Carnival?’ and the Catholic areas of West Germany are among its most ardent celebrators. It is a time when official city life comes to a virtual standstill and is replaced by six days of wild unrestrained living; a time when excess is the norm and anything goes, when bars stay open until the

last customer leaves and beer consumption rises by an estimated 150 per cent.

The celebrations have their origins in the feasting that preceded Lent,and for centuries were also a useful social safety valve in which savagely satirical criticism of the secular and Church authorities was allowed. For a week, . the normal order was removed and ridiculed. The keys to the cities and towns were handed over to counter-governments.

It is a tradition that Germans in the Catholic areas — and particularly in the Rhine-Main localities — guard closely. Any attempts to deprive them of any of the time’s pleasures are strongly resisted. In Cologne this year the city authorities — faced with growing financial problems — tried to reduce their usual grant of $246,000 to the Carnival organisation for the Shrove Monday procession: public pressure eventually forced a back-down. At a time of economic recession and psychological depression, such festivities

are even more important than usual. Carnival is economically important, too, attracting about one million tourists for the week, doubling Cologne’s normal population. And apart from the tourists, official expenditure on endless receptions, balls, parties and street processions totals millions.

The days of Carnival are a strange mixture of archetypal German organisation and street anarchy. Celebrations are officially opened on the Thursday (“Weiberfastnacht”) by dignitaries of the main Carnival societies and then the day turns into a pub-crawl. Every bar is crowded with singing and dancing painted fools, not caring in the least what their neighbours might think of

them. (The morning of Friday tends to be sober, for obvious reasons.)

The outward manifestations of organisations are the Carnival societies, social clubs which work throughout the year to raise money and come up with ideas for the huge street processions that are the focal point of Carnival in Cologne. The oldest society dates back to 1823; the youngest of the big ones from 1957. •For the main event this year, the parade through the centre of the city on Shrove Monday, their floats, bands and marchers stretched for five kilometres at its most compact, taking more than three hours for the head to wind its way over the 6.5 km route.

On the Sunday school groups had followed the same route, and on Tuesday it was the turn of the Carnival societies in the individual suburbs, all of them showering sweets — 55 tonnes on Shrove Monday alone — and small bouquets of flowers on the bystanders.

Bystanders is perhaps not the right word, implying as it does a passivity: nothing could have been less passive than the estimated crowd of one million that thronged the streets of the city on Shrove Monday. The vast majority were in costume of their own, often rivalling or even surpassing the splendour of the 9700 parade participants. By the time the procession had passed their particular vantage point, most were drunk, too. But despite this and the already uninhibited nature of the celebrations, Carnival is, if anything, a more law-abiding time than the rest of the year. It is no longer a time of protest (which, to get back to stereotypes, Germans now take very seriously). As the heart of Carnival land is also the main industrial area of West Germany, it might not be too fanciful to see in this ability to play to excess in one huge annual blowout, the reasons why these Germans can work in such a determined manner for the rest of the year.