Europe’s carnival season has a sinister edge
It’s the carnival season on the Continent. That means it’s time to break out the jester hats and village floats – and, naturally, to test the boundaries of taste. They don’t always lie where you’d expect.
Let’s start in Germany. This week, Angela Merkel’s anointed successor as leader of the Christian Democrats, Annegret Krampkarrenbauer (“AKK”), appeared at a comic stage chat show in Stockach, the “High Favourable Court of Fools”, and made a joke about gender-neutral bathrooms. “Mini-merkel” broke with the austere, Protestant style of the Chancellor and showed off her beer-drinking, Catholic conservatism by donning a silly hat and asking: “Anyone been in Berlin recently? You can see the café latte faction, who recently introduced lavatories for the third gender. They’re for men who aren’t sure whether they are still allowed to stand or have to sit down when they pee.”
Uh oh. Her political rivals leapt on the joke furiously, demanding an apology. Instead, on Ash Wednesday, AKK doubled down. The whole row was “madness”, she told a gathering of the party faithful, and Germans were becoming “the most uptight people in the world”.
Meanwhile, over in Aalst, Belgium, ’twas the season for breaking out the big, racist carnival floats. As part of a parade listed as a Unesco “intangible cultural heritage” event, one group dressed up as Ku Klux Klan members and handed out pots of chocolate mousse. Another group, called De Vismooil’n, decided that the “hilarious” theme for their float would be to fill it with huge models of hook-nosed, Orthodox Jews accompanied by rats, sitting on piles of money and with celebrants singing a song about “Jews getting extra-fat”.
When Jewish groups condemned the “disgusting” display, the local mayor said breezily that there was no offence meant. A reporter at the Jewish Telegraph Agency called up the float’s creator to see if there was some hidden message or nuance he’d missed. Nope. “We’ve done nothing wrong,” he was told. They sound like they’d feel right at home in the Labour Party.
In Russia, the authorities have been staging their own event: the commemoration of the death of Stalin. The ritual sees thousands of people lining up in Moscow’s Red Square to lay red carnations before a bust of the dictator. Until, that is, one man took his chance to hurl a flower at the statue and offer his own tribute: “Burn in hell, executioner of the people, murderer of women and children!” He was quickly bundled away by police.
So that’s one picture of our Continent. Telling the truth about Stalin is verboten, but depicting Jews as parasitic misers is good fun. Genderneutral bathrooms? That’s somewhere in between.