A nation divided by tail tickles and rubbing bottoms
Germany is divided again, at least until Ash Wednesday next week, between those who worship the spirit of carnival and those who emphatically do not.
Much of the Catholic south and west has ceased work for the weeklong, beer-fuelled fancy dress party, during which millions engage in rituals that include symbolic castration through tiecutting, tickling each other with perfumed calves’ tails while making purring sounds, and mutual bottom-rubbing while dressed as Prussian soldiers.
In the Protestant north and east, carnival is studiously ignored. Life goes on as normal, but is quieter and greyer than usual.
The pre-Lent festival is celebrated around the world but is particularly striking in Germany, where it clashes with an ingrained love of order, and where regional fragmentation has spawned some bizarre traditions that vary from town to town.
In Cologne, where carnival is almost as important as religion, more than a million people are expected to throng the streets to watch the country’s biggest procession on Rose Monday. It is televised live, and last year featured 12,000 performers.
Many of the floats offer political satire in the form of papier-mache figures. This year they will poke fun at British Prime Minister Theresa May over Brexit, and at German Chancellor Angela Merkel over her struggle to form a government. United States President Donald Trump will be shown driving a steamroller over Uncle Sam, and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un will be ‘‘dirty dancing’’ with a nuclear missile.
There will be processions, balls and street parties in most villages and towns across the Rhineland and as far as the Black Forest. Bus drivers, bank clerks and supermarket cashiers wear funny wigs. Town halls are besieged by carnival troupes, which seize control of councils for what they call the ‘‘Fifth Season’’.
‘‘The Rhineland has a different attitude to life. We’re a lot more easygoing,’’ said Michael EulerSchmidt, deputy director of the Cologne City Museum who will march in the Rose Monday parade.
‘‘It’s inclusive. Everyone can join in here and celebrate in their own way.’’
In Rottweil, deep in the Black Forest, carnival is more strictly choreographed. In the Narrensprung (Fools’ Procession), 4000 people wear elaborately carved wooden masks and costumes that have been handed down through the generations. They hop from one leg to another to a tune played over and over again, while making high-pitched calls of ‘‘Hu hu hu’’.
In the Rhineland, revellers dressed as 19th-century Prussian soldiers engage in Wibbeln: standing back to back, going into a half squat and rubbing bottoms. It started as a parody of the Napoleonic and Prussian troops who occupied the Rhineland.
In the western town of Viersen, the Dulken Academy of Fools holds conferences to poke fun at the clergy and the learned classes, and its ‘‘scholars’’ hop around their meeting place, an old mill, on hobby horses.
Werner Mezger, an authority on cultural anthropology at Freiburg University, said Germany’s division during carnival was inevitable given that the north and east, where the Protestant Reformation took hold, had abandoned the Catholic tradition of fasting for 40 days before Easter.
‘‘If there’s no fasting, there’s no need for a pre-fasting celebration, so carnival died out in the reformed areas,’’ he said.
The carnival spirit barely twitches in the capital, Berlin, which prides itself on being a party town but this year cancelled its only procession because of the expense. It was no great loss. Last year the capital’s parade consisted of a sorry collection of foil-covered trailers watched by a few thousand people.