No blasphemy this year, bitte
28 February 2006 by Sean
Anything goes at German carnival – except religion
At carnival time in Germany anything goes — except, this year, mocking religion, a victim of the worldwide controversy over cartoons of the Prophet.
Millions of “Narren” or jesters took to the streets on Monday to party, dance and cheer as parades mocking politicians and poking fun at contemporary issues wound through big cities.
In Cologne, home to Europe’s biggest carnival parade, some 1.3 million people filled the streets, singing along with marching bands and jumping up to catch candy swirling through the air while keeping a tight grip on their beer bottles.
“Everything is allowed at this time of year and it’s a blast. We are thoroughly enjoying it,” said Daniel Kretschmer, who came from Hamburg dressed as a nun to watch the parade.
“All year long we have to listen to politicians preaching to us. This is finally a chance to get back at them.”
While political satire is encouraged, Cologne revellers took care not to cross the line and religion was a declared no-go zone amid a row over caricatures of the Prophet published first in a Danish newspaper that sparked worldwide protest.
Jacques Tilly, mastermind behind the parade in Duesseldorf that attracted 1 million people, said he regretted the limitation while acknowledging the situation had changed.
“Religion is in my eyes a delusion and hence should be mocked,” he said. “The humour depicted on the floats simply needs to have some bite otherwise there is little point.”
I keep saying this every time I see it, cuz it pisses me off. A secular news source, Reuters, simply uses the phrase “The Prophet”, as if that is acceptable to everyone reading the article. Prophet? What prophet? Whose fuckin’ prophet? My prophet is the old dude down the block who collects the bottles on Wednesday nights and spouts wisdom from behind the wheel of his rusty shopping cart. His name is Bill. Is that the “prophet” (apparently deserving of a capital “P”) that we are talking about? I think it is. He is my Prophet. Prophet Bill. Can I threaten to kill you if you make a mean cartoon about Bill?
Good for Jacques Tilly for at least saying that religion is a delusion. No kidding.
This caving in to religious extortion is pissing me off. What if atheists started threatening to kill people who disagreed with them (not that we ever would — fundies take note: this is where we are far more pious than you are, punks). Do you think people would go “Oh, let’s not offend the atheists this year. They seem upset and are even offering millions of dollars to anyone who would kill their ideological opponents. Gee. This is a sensitive issue.”
Nope. They’d actually just string us up.
To quote Penn Jillette: “FUCK!”
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28 February 2006, on 8:22 am
“ (not that we ever would — fundies take note: this is where we are far more pious than you are, punks).”
According to the CARM website, it’s because –whether we like it or not – we have gawd’s laws written on our hearts. Isn’t the self-reinforcing nature of this delusion intriguing? It is as if it is impossible for them to think of anything without hocus-pocus in it.
“ Do you think people would go “Oh, let’s not offend the atheists this year. They seem upset and are even offering millions of dollars to anyone who would kill their ideological opponents. Gee. This is a sensitive issue.”
Nope. They’d actually just string us up.”
Too right. Too frighteningly right.
28 February 2006, on 1:39 pm
Carnival never mocks any religion whatsoever. It’s just not what it does
It does, however, mock religion when it tries to stick it’s fingers in the political pie.
The picture, by the way, shows a float with Angela Merkel (Chancellor of Germany) whipping Michel. Michel traditionally symbolises the German people. The subscription of the float read: “Germany’s self-elected domina”.
It is important to notice that Reuters does a sleight-of-tongue here, though.
Carnival floats are designed months before the parade. In this case that means that it happened long before the Danish paper published the cartoons and even longer before there was a controversy in the first place. Nobody considered the “row” (tempest in a teapot, if you ask me, exemplifying the technical concept of feedback) for a float because it didn’t exist at the time.
There were no floats mocking any system of belief designed for 2006, either, if they had wanted one after the cartoons came out, they would have had to pull the one allready chosen.
If nothing else comes up, you might well see the “row” in next year’s floats, but only in the political dimensions, not in the religious ones.
A few pictures showing how religion is taken up:
http://www.wdr.de/themen/freizeit/brauchtum/karneval_2005/session/fotogalerien/duesseldorf/_mo/fotos_rosenmontag.jhtml?bseite=16
Duesseldorf, 2005
http://www.wdr.de/themen/freizeit/brauchtum/karneval_2006/session/_themen/rosenmontag/_mo/duesseldorf_fotos.jhtml?bseite=2
Duesseldorf 2006. The sign reads: “Evolution is a heresy”
http://www.wdr.de/themen/freizeit/brauchtum/karneval_2005/session/fotogalerien/duesseldorf/_mo/fotos_rosenmontag.jhtml?bseite=4
Duesseldorf. A cardinal (Meissner) lights the pyre on which a woman is burned. Her dress reads: I had an abortion. Meissner was silly enough to preach against our laws concerning abortion.
There is one additional, albeit unwritten, rule: you don’t pick on people who can’t TALK back. Satire means that you want a dialogue, not a bashing of heads.
Tilly, by the way, is not “the mastermind”. He is, however, the most controversial designer of floats. In Cologne (the capital of carnival in Germany), it’s said that the floats are so cheeky because otherwise nobody would notice Duesseldorf’s carnival at all.
2005 Tilly said, that “xenophobic and misogynic” themes were for him “off limits”.
A better quote than the one above from Tilly appears in the Duesseldorfer Anzeiger: “About this caricature-crap, we’ll bring not even a speck of dirt.”
Tilly once withdrew a float that mocked a celebrity, Rudolf Mooshammer, because Mooshammer had been murdered after the float was done.
28 February 2006, on 2:19 pm
What a great riot that would have been.
28 February 2006, on 3:13 pm
Annegrete: Thanks for that cultural lesson on German Carnival. Really interesting stuff. Let me know if I should give everyone a rundown on the Folsom Street Fair later this year.
No, seriously, that was a great lesson in how our media sources filter things through their own cultural bias, until what comes out on the other end only partially represents the truth. As someone who works in media, I blame this on a) laziness sometimes on the case of the reporter, and b) the sheer speed of deadlines in the modern media — “Must hit deadline, don’t fully comprehend, but must hit deadline!”
It’s human flaws, not conspiracies, that lead to this. That’s why we must all use the power of the Internet to seek multiple sources, professional and person, to find out our own sense of the truth.
Thanks again!
1 March 2006, on 1:13 pm
Sean: That sounds quite interesting
Seriously. I do love to hear about events all over the world and the meaning specific symbols have. The more colourful, the better 
Just today I learned what was behind the song “Iko Iko”, from an article about Mardi Gras written by a citizen of New Orleans. Little tidbits of information, that, when put together, paint a picture of humanity and what motivates humans to act the way they do. Anthropology first hand 
I don’t think that Reuter’s couldn’t have known better. Every German paper had more complete quotes. It seems Reuter’s chose to selectively quote from German papers. Why they would do that is beyond me, but I could imagine that they tailored their article to an audience that would like to see how “sensitive” Europeans were. As if!
The whole “cartoon row” is not really a matter of public interest here, in spite of the attempts of some papers (most notably a tabloid that has only a cursory acquaintance with the truth (Bild)) to create interest. Most Germans chose to react to the “row” by ignoring it to death, as Tilly did.
And of course, Merkel as domina is a far more interesting picture ;-D