Abstract
At mid-morning on the Friday before Ash Wednesday, the mayor of Cologne welcomes three men in costume on a podium in Alter Markt. One is dressed as a prince, another a peasant farmer, and the third a glowing, virginal maiden (Jungfrau), and they wave to a huge crowd consisting mostly of women. At 4 in the morning on the Monday after Ash Wednesday, parades of drummers, pipers, and 200 huge illuminated lanterns fill the streets of Basel. What we have here are distinctly different variants of an extraordinary phenomenon that shares common roots: the official beginning of Cologne’s Carnival and Basel’s Fasnacht.
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Notes
Michail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), 10.
Hwa Yol Jung, “Bakhtin’s Dialogical Body Politics,” Michael Mayerfeld Bell and Michael Gardiner, eds., Bakhtin and the Human Sciences (Thousand Oaks, CA, London, UK, and New Delhi, India: Sage, 1998), 105.
Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (New York and Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997), xi.
Ibid., 160. See also John J. MacAloon, ed., Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals Toward a Theory of Cultural Performance (Philadelphia, PA: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1984).
See the essays in David Picard and Mike Robinson, eds. Festivals, Tourism, and Social Change: Remaking Worlds (Clevedon, UK, Buffalo, NY, and Toronto: Channel View Publications, 2006).
Catherine Bell, Ritual, 76. See also William H. Sewell Jr., Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago and London, UK: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
A theorist of cultural transnationalism, Peter Hitchcock asks: “Does not any claim to transnationalism risk the elision of key specificities in individual cultures that do not require and do not need the mantle of globalism to understand their textures and logics?” Peter Hitchcock, Imaginary States: Studies in Cultural Transnationalism (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 4.
Adelheid von Saldern, “Einleitung,” in Inszenierter Stolz. Stadtrepräsentation in drei deutschen Gesellschaften (1935–1975), ed. Saldern (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2005), 11–13.
Eugen A. Meier, Festfreudiges Basel: Basels Volksbräuche und Traditionen im Spiegel von Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (Basel: Buchverlag Basler Zeitung, 1992), 54ff. Also
Ute Schneider, Politische Festkultur im 19. Jahrhundert. Die Rheinprovinz von der französischen Zeit bis zum Ende des Ersten Weltkireges (1806–1918) (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 1995);
Dieter Düding, “Einleitung: Politische Öffentlichkeit—politisches Fest—politische Kultur,” in Öffentliche Festkultur. Politische Feste in Deutschland von der Aufklärung bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg, ed. Düding, Peter Friedemann, and Paul Münsch (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag, 1988), 10–24. See also
George Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich (New York: Howard Fertig, 1975).
For extensive studies of the history and practice of Cologne’s Karneval, see Joseph Klersch, Die Kölnische Fastnacht von ihren Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Cologne: J. P. Bachem, 1961);
Peter Fuchs and Max-Leo Schwering, Kölner Karneval. Zur Kulturgeschichte der Fastnacht (Cologne: Greven Verlag, 1972);
Peter Fuchs, Max-Leo Schwering, and Klaus Zöller, Kölner Karneval. Seine Bräuche, seine Akteure, seine Geschichte (Cologne: Greven Verlag, 1997). For Basel’s Fastnacht, see
Eugen A. Meier, Lukas Burckhardt, et al., eds., Die Basler Fasnacht: Geschichte und Gegenwart einer lebendigen Tradition (Basel: Fasnachts-Comité, 1985);
Dorothea Christ Blasius, Hanns U. Christen, et al., Unsere Fasnacht (Basel: Verlag Peter Heman, 1971);
See here James M. Brophy, “Carnival and Citizenship: The Politics of Carnival Culture in the Prussian Rhineland, 1823–1848,” Journal of Social History 30 (1997): 873–904, 882; and also
Brophy, “Mirth and Subversion: Carnival in Cologne,” History Today 47, no.7 (July 1997): 42–48.
Recent studies include Elisabeth Mick, Die Roten Funken—Vom Stadtsoldaten zum Karnevalsverein (Frechen-Cologne: Ritterbach Verlag, 2007), and
Michael Euler-Schmidt and Marcus Leifeld, Die Prinzen-Garde Köln. Eine Geschichte mit Rang und Namen (Cologne: Bachem Verlag, 2006).
Petra Pluwatsch, Weiberfastnacht. Die Geschichte eines ganz besonderes Tages (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2007), 48–52.
Dennis L. Rhein, of the Basel tourist office, and Felix Rudolf von Rohr, of the Fasnacht-Comité, state: “The Fasnacht in Basel is a family celebration—strangers are not welcome. It is a point of honour for every, even only moderately fanatic, active participants in the Fasnacht to make this statement their credo,” though “the three greatest days also require civilians, spectators—yes, guests.” Prologue, in Beat Trachsler and Jane Roberts, Basler Fasnacht: for Insiders and Outsiders (Basel: GS-Verlag, 1992), 7.
Max-Leo Schwering, Kölner Karnevalsorden 1923–1914: “Noblesse op Plüsch” (Cologne: Greven Verlag, 1989); Festkomitee des Kölner Karnevals von 1823 e.V., Der Kölner Karneval im Spiegel des Jahres 1987 (Cologne: Greven & Bechtold, 1988), 77–81.
Hildegard Brog, “Karnevals-Zeitung von Köln,” Die Zeit (March 3, 1995): 24. See also Brophy, “Carnival and Citizenship,” and Elaine Glovka Spencer, “Adapting Festive Practices: Carnival in Cologne and Mainz, 1871–1914,” Journal of Urban History 29, no.6 (2003): 637–657.
Carl Dietmar and Marcus Leifeld, Alaaf und Heil Hitler. Karneval in Dritten Reich (Herbig Verlag: Munich, 2010).
Michael Zepter, “Paradiesvogel und Lumpenball. Zwei Kölner Künstlerfeste zwischen 1925 and 1939 im Spiegel der Presse,” in Moderne und Nationalsozialismus im Rheinland, Vorträge des Interdisziplinären Arbeitskreises zur Erforschung der Moderne im Rheinland, ed. Dieter Breuer and Gertrude Cepl-Kaufmann (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1997), 395–432, 414–415; and Jürgen Meyer, “Organisierter Karneval und ‘Narrenrevolte’ im Nationalsozialismus. Anmerkungen zu Schein und Sein im Kölner Karneval 1933–1935,” Geschichte in Köln 42 (1997): 74–76.
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© 2014 Jeffry M. Diefendorf and Janet Ward
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Diefendorf, J.M. (2014). Princes and Fools, Parades and Wild Women: Creating, Performing, and Preserving Urban Identity through Carnival in Cologne and Basel. In: Diefendorf, J.M., Ward, J. (eds) Transnationalism and the German City. Studies in European Culture and History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137390172_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137390172_10
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