So I’m sitting here working on this book, and all of a sudden it’s getting to be time to go away to Basel, in Switzerland, for Fasnacht.
Fasnacht is a regional Swiss version of the Lenten carnival tradition, related (somewhat) to Mardi Gras and its cousins. But about Basler Fasnacht, more can be said than just that, and I’ve said some of it elsewhere, so I’ll quote:
…Fasnacht takes some explaining. It�s more than just the carnival tradition which runs through other parts of Europe. It can start the week before Shrove Tuesday, and may run through until the week after, depending on local preferences. And Fasnacht has very much its own character in each of the cities which celebrate it.
Some cities do it twice�once for the Catholic population, once for the Protestants, on different weeks (so that each group can go to the other�s party?). In Basel it�s an intensely adult preoccupation: razory verbal wit overlies the outrageous costumes, and underlies the rest of the celebration, in the form of the zeedel,the long skinny printed handbills of rude and loony dialect doggerel handed out by costumed marchers to passersby; and also as schnitzelbaengg, the sudden satirical theatre which breaks out without warning in bars and restaurants, and on the street. There are adult dangers, as well. In Basel, at Fasnacht, as long as you�re masked (meaning complete-body disguise), you can go up to anyone you know, put on a squeaky high voice, and tell them exactly what you think of them. They�ll have no comeback: traditionally, retaliation against someone who gave you a piece of their mind at Fasnacht just isn�t done.
Here, more than elsewhere, the �pressure valve� quality of carnival tradition makes itself plain�and the continuity of medieval tradition, too, when at four in the morning all the lights in the city suddenly go out, and the massed “cliques,” the formally-constituted parade groups, stand all over the city in their hundreds and thousands, drumming and fifing the Morgestraich: the slow, stately Basler call to arms. On a freezing February night, in the pitch darkness, with the drumbeats and the shrill fluting of the fifes rattling off the old buildings around you, you find it unnervingly easy to believe that you�ve fallen into the fourteenth century, and that the enemy is outside the city walls yet again, waiting to sack the place. When something of the kind might happen any year, you take your Carnival pleasures seriously. You might not taste them again…
This year, Fasnacht starts on March 10th: at 4 AM, as always. Besides my book work, I’ll try to do some blogging from there. I’ll also try to post some video. Here, as a foretaste, linked to the photo, is a little video from last year: the first couple of minutes of Basler Fasnacht. (This is Windows MovieMaker format, by the way. I’m still working out how to make the software excrete MPEGs.)
…They started a little early, last year. Normally the city’s streetlights don’t go out till the first four-o’-clock stroke of the great bell in the Muenster, but last year somebody at the power company got too excited (I think) and turned the lights off a bit early. (This is why, in the beginning of the clip, the camera bobs and swoops all over: I wasn’t ready.) You can hear the crowd go “Yeah!” — and then the fifing and drumming breaks out in a huge fugal racket as, for just these few minutes, every clique in the city plays the same piece of music, the “Morgestraich” proper: “reveille”. One small clique walks by the camera with their laderne, a painted lantern covered with satirical art by one of the city’s graphic artists.
Their costumes (hard to see in the lighting of this clip: sorry) are themed to match the lantern, and on their heads they wear lanterns with related designs, some of them lit from inside by electric bulbs, some by candles. Some also carry staffs with lighted lanterns on them. There will be at least a hundred cliques, possibly more, doing this kind of thing between 4 AM and dawn on the 10th. They will march with their laderne in a big parade, the cortege, on Monday afternoon, and again on Wednesday. Tuesday is children’s day, when parents parade informally with their children: that day the laderne are displayed in the plaza outside the Muenster, so that everybody can closely examine the astonishing artwork on them. But between Monday morning at 0400, and Thursday morning at 0400, the fifes and the drums will never stop by night or day. There’ll be food and drink in the streets, parties, balls, the huge concert of guggemusik, which is music played badly (on purpose) on massed band instruments, and general carrying on. The streets will be knee-deep in confetti every night, and it’ll all be gone again every morning. (One way you know it’s time to go back to Fasnacht is that you no longer find confetti in your clothes when you’re doing the laundry.)
Some Baslers, bored with it all, leave town.
But thousands of people come to Basel from all over the place for the Morgestraich — the largest number in recent years, on a weekend when the weather forecast was good, was 250,000 — and among them, among relatively few English-speakers, we’ll be there.
Watch this space for further developments. More details can be found at http://www.fasnacht.ch/?pm_1=21&mid=21 (check the sidebar for more English-language info). They also have a page with links to the various sources for live streaming video and audio, here.
