Postcards from Germany: Faschingsdienstag (Fat Tuesday)

The rowdy Mardi Gras crowds in New Orleans and Mobile, Alabama, might just have to give it up to the Germans for their Fat Tuesday celebration, called Faschingsdienstag (Fasching Tuesday), Fastnacht or simply Karneval. While the biggest and best-known celebrations take place in Cologne, Mainz and Duesseldorf, the revelry can't be contained within only a few cities; areas all over the predominantly Catholic western and southwestern parts of Germany get caught up in the Karneval spirit.

Officially starting on November 11th at 11:11 a.m., Fasching's biggest celebrations take place in the week preceding the Christian calendar's Ash Wednesday. The holiday's roots are similar to those of Mardi Gras: a feast – and general indulgence in all things typically forbidden – preceded the fasting during the Christian season of Lent. Today, however, the holiday has lost much of its religious significance and has instead become a good excuse to rambunctiously turn all convention on its head.

An American stumbling upon a Fasching celebration might think that the Germans had seriously confused February with October since delight in outlandish costumes is a must during the festival. For true Fasching fans, Karneval costumes are planned months in advance. At the celebration in Mainz not even one outfit will do; multiple getups are required for the myriad outdoor and indoor parties. The typical garb can be found – cowboys, clowns and princesses – but some costumes reach into the truly bizarre, with misshapen masks and unintelligible characters thrown liberally into the mix. Costumes can be worn during several of the days preceding Tuesday, but on this day it's common to attend "rag parties" where people attempt to outdo each other with the worst looking, well, rags.

Karneval's costumed revelry-seekers come out en masse for the festival's parades, which bar no holds in lampooning the politics of the day. This year's parades featured Barack Obama dancing with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in a parody of US-German relations along with satiric denunciations of new tax laws that presented the female Chancellor – often ridiculed for her (lack of) fashion sense – in a bikini.

The Karneval parades – like ours – wouldn't be complete without candy thrown from the floats, but the Germans take it a step further, filling the shot glasses Karneval-goers hang around their necks with liquor. Although drinking is certainly a (large) part of the celebration, you don't have to be a boozer to indulge with the best. Krapfen, or jelly doughnuts, are sold at every bakery and given away generously to friends and colleagues so that after a week of sugary goodness, even the unswervingly sweet-toothed have had their fill.

Along with ignoring all other aspects of conventional behavior, Germans reverse traditional gender roles during Fasching. The Thursday before Ash Wednesday is known as Weiberfasching, or "Women's Day", and men wearing business attire had better beware. Women spend the day hunting down tie-clad males with scissors, zealously chopping away at ties. No one is immune as women take on their task with gusto, even crawling across desks or breaking into the mayor's office to attain their cloth "trophies".

The only region where Fasching seems to have maintained more of its traditional and ancient essence is in the conservative areas surrounding Konstanz, a city located near the Austrian border. It is said that Karneval-goers there see the festival as more somber than those in the Rhineland regions of Cologne, Mainz and Duesseldorf. For them the holiday is something akin to the oldest pagan "Halloween" celebrations – a time to don particularly frightening masks and fend off evil spirits in anticipation of the coming spring.

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tags: mardigras  fattuesday  fasching  faschingsdienstag  fastnacht  karneval  carnival  germany  deutschland