Karneval!

Whew! Wednesday marked the end of the Karneval season, and I have never seen anything like it! Karneval is crazy. Imagine a combination of Mardi Gras, Halloween, and Oktoberfest, with a bit of vaudeville thrown in. Mix with lots of intensely catchy dance music and more than a bit of alcohol, and you have Karneval, when the normally rather sensible folk of Köln (Cologne, for the latin-influenced out there) and the surrounding territory erupt in happy, colorful madness. It was confusing, disorienting, exhilarating, and utterly awesome.

To understand Karneval, you have to understand its origins, which is far from easy: everybody has a story, and they're all different! Some say it is, like Mardi Gras, a kind of Going-out-of-business, everything-must-go sale on sin before Lent. Others say it is a festival for the driving out of the winter. (which didn't seem to work this year: it snowed all last week!) Still others say it was in the middle ages a time where anyone could speak their mind without being relieved of their head, or credit it as a kind of protest against the occupying French. I have no idea which of these are true, and I suspect they all are. But it really doesn't matter: Karneval requires no rationalization. It just happens, kind of as a safety blowoff of the year's tensions, a sort of societal new year's cleanout.

What was my place in this wacky week? My job was simple: march through the streets of various towns and villages with my fellow Panikorchester members and bang on a bass drum, preferably in time. You see, the chief attractions of Karneval are the numerous parades featuring marching bands, floats with themes from politics to pears throwing candy, and often a "Prince" and "Princess" of the whole thing, with quite extravagant costumes. There are a lot of these parades, due to a quirk of German geography: unlike in the US, where even in rural areas people are mostly clustered into towns surrounded by farms and quite far from each other, Germany is laid out in a more medieval plan: there are tiny "dorfs" scattered everywhere, each maybe a quarter hour of walking from each other, all with their own names and, often, fiercely defended individuality. Practically every one has its own Karneval parade, sometime in the roughly week-long season, and thus there was plenty of walking and drum-banging to be done.

But do things stop when the parade ends? by no means! School lets out for the week of Karneval, and so it is undisputedly the biggest party week on the German calendar. And here I come to another strange and unusual aspect of Karneval: Karneval music. Karneval has a large tradition of traditional songs that are played in the parades and, naturally, repeated for the dancefloor at the parties. Many of them are in Kölsch, the dialect of Köln, making them very hard to understand. Thankfully they are also all very catchy and repetitive. These songs, I think, were all written with one goal in mind: for drunken people to sing along to. Their simple rhythms and catchy choruses mean that the everygerman (who is an incredibly enthusiastic singer with the addition of alcohol) can easily sing along. Further reinforcing this theory, some of these songs have lyrics so utterly senseless that no sober person could stand them. (One popular dance tune has one line of lyrics: "Light on bicycle, light on bicycle, DY-NA-MO!" It doesn't make any more sense in German.) These songs have an amazing sticking power: I awoke most mornings with a clear head, except for the songs from last night buzzing back and forth incessantly.

In short, I don't think I have had more fun in a week here than I had last week. Certainly, I have never seen my German friends and acquaintances so happy, or so crazy. I don't think I would recommend karneval as a vacation destination, because it's so utterly confusingly crazy, but I'm certainly coming back!