Every time I go to Germany I seem to stumble into a festival or tradition I wasn’t aware of – and no, I’m not just talking about Oktoberfest. Polterabend, where guests smash porcelain the night before a wedding; Tanz in den Mai, literally “dance into May”; the Schützenfest target-shooting festival and then Königsball, when the best marksman is crowned.
When I showed up to visit a cousin who lives in North Rhine-Westphalia (in her village, the schützen “king” has, for the past three years, been the local priest) it was just a day before Weiberfastnacht was celebrated in the main towns of Cologne and Düsseldorf. Her husband, who was born in and grew up in the region, looked at my incomprehension and explained. In Germany and much of Europe, there are numerous festivals that populate the calendar between the beginning of Lent and Easter and also mark the arrival of spring. Weiberfastnacht kicks off five days of carnival celebrations for Lent by honouring the 1824 revolt of the washerwomen. So on Weiberfastnacht, it’s fair game for women throughout Cologne to stop men wearing ties and cut them off.
Aside from the costumes and chaos of carnival in Cologne, there hasn’t been much lightheartedness in Germany recently. Support for the far-right AfD rose from 10% in March 2022 to 22% in early January 2024. (It retreated slightly after sustained protests in backlash to revelations that AfD leaders had held a secret conference on future mass deportations.) Farmers have brought protests against phasing out subsidies for diesel fuel to the streets of Berlin, and – apparently on trend for the modern Deutsche Bahn, but not at all on trend for Germany’s reputation for logistical efficiency – every single one of my trains this month was late.
None of this is unique to Germany. Support for far-right parties is rising across Europe and farmers everywhere are angry. And in other cities and regions, people are celebrating their own folklore and traditions. In Dunkirk, in France, carnival is a chance to throw (dried) herrings at a crowd of thousands from the windows of city hall, while in Alsace, the vendange (grape harvest) is celebrated in the autumn by wearing traditional dress and eating flammekueche.
Photographer Jason Gardner has spent 15 years photographing numerous types of festival traditions around the world – including from many places in Europe – and he shares them in his recently published book We the Spirits.
At a time when rightwing nationalism is in the ascendency, it is not surprising that many people may have a gut reaction against “traditions”. While I understand this response, I think there is a way in which they can be embraced to forge a more inclusive identity. They don’t have to be part of the “blood and soil” nationalism offered by the far right.
Let me explain. During my time as an undergraduate student in the US from 2008 to 2012, my small, picturesque New England liberal arts college, Amherst College, found itself in a recurring debate about cohesion, campus community and old traditions that had fallen away. In response, a small group of us who wrote for the student paper spent a weekend scouring its archives, which went back to 1868 (that doesn’t seem very old from a European perspective, but it’s one of the oldest student newspapers in the United States), to see what traditions once existed that might be brought back. (We decided it probably wasn’t feasible to resurrect the annual “kidnapping” of the first, second, and third-year class “presidents” by the senior class; we did, however, propose bringing back something called “Mountain Day”.)
Some forms of constructing identity and belonging are fundamentally exclusionary, like “we are a community because of where we were born”. But participating in a common activity – “we are a community because of what we do together’ – doesn’t have to be exclusionary in the same way.
People form ideas of who they are via their interactions with others within various social, political and historical contexts (to get all jargony, international relations scholars such as Emanuel Adler might say that identities are “intersubjectively constituted”). The philosopher Judith Butler applies the idea of “performativity” to identity construction in the context of gender studies, but it could be extrapolated more broadly. After all, what Gardner spent 15 years documenting in photographs is performance.
To put it more simply, it often feels easier for people to belong to a city, or even a region, than to a national community. For example, after nearly a decade here, Paris indeed feels like my home. Yet even though I’ve been a French citizen since 2022 – a decision I made because I knew that France had become a part of me, and I, a part of it – something in me still wonders if it is fully legitimate to tell people that I am French.
In its study Les français en quête, the sociopolitical research institute Destin Commun roughly groups French voters into different “families” according to the values they identify as driving their vision of society. Some voters, the “identitarians”, conceive of the nation “as a uniform whole, created from a set of rules and customs”, and they see it as a bulwark against a dangerous world. It should come as no surprise that these voters are the ones that form the base of support for far-right, authoritarian politicians.
In response to our fears, these politicians offer solutions to allay our worst nightmares, such as throwing up walls to block immigration and evoking traditions and folklore to enable us to retrench into a nostalgic idea of ourselves. But instead we could find in traditional costumes, songs and behaviour an opportunity to support the confident openness that modern liberal democracy demands.
There is obviously a balance to be struck – inquiring and participating in a local ritual in a way that uplifts and includes people, rather than excludes. But as far as one such tradition goes, I’ve made up my mind. If I visitCologne again on Weiberfastnacht, I’ll be sure to step off the train wearing a tie.
Alexander Hurst is a Guardian Europe columnist
