Carnival in Düsseldorf

The Fifth Season blasted off today with Weiberfastnacht, where women storm into the town hall at 11:11 am. After that it is a party without end.

This will be the first Karneval (Carnival) I will experience from start to finish. Only, I missed the start. I hadn’t the faintest idea that women storming the town hall at 11:11 am started the whole thing. By the time I realized, it was too late for me to make it. It lasts for another 7 days, so I won’t miss much.

I was curious to make it down there, no matter the time. So after I realized my lesson at 4pm was canceled due to the student wanting to party instead, I headed down there on my bike.

The weather for the past few days has been everything except sunny. Rain and hale predominated the space between the clouds and cobblestone. Today was no different. Despite the weather, people were out. I started seeing feathered layers of pedestrians walking toward the altstadt (old town). Judging by their miniature leprechaun hats, Mexican sombreros, and Pocahontas cotton hide dresses, I guessed they were going to celebrate Karneval.

Last year I did get a bit of a taste of Karneval in Düsseldorf. I stayed for a few days with a couch surfing host while I was scouting around the city to see if I wouldn’t mind living here. I dressed up as a woman pirate, with a flimsy red bonnet upon my head, a clip on peace! earring and a red and white dress I tied into a bow on my back.

It’s a Karneval tradition to kiss as many people as you like during the prescribed days of celebration. So many people kiss that it’s also a tradition to lay in bed for a week afterwards transmutating into a bacterium. There’s a reason Berliners and other German capital inhabitants leave Karnival for the Rhenish.

In my wilty bonnet and my earring placed with no regard to the rules of whether you’re straight or gay and the bow around my back (which in Bavaria and the German psyche in general signifies being single), I walked with my other buddy and our couch surfing host into a bar where beer after beer and sekt (sparkling wine) after sekt were served and barriers were sliding open like the glass door to the balcony.

For years now I have been in a gorgeous relationship, and being a newcomer to the tradition, I wasn’t looking to kiss anyone, or have anyone kiss me. I was thinking mostly about women kissing me, but it turns out that my outfit attracted a different type of person. I went to university in San Francisco, knew a lot of great people who were gay and enjoy the company of humans. But never in my life have I felt as vulnerable as I did at Karneval last year.

Getting closer to the altstadt, I found myself already annoyed with the people around me. The German halloween is a lot like American halloween. Cheep popup stores sell cheep costumes that emulate lost and distant cultural dress. Hey, look! There is a Mexican in a sombrero in boots with a fake mustache yelling at a gigantic baby leprechaun with fake red hair. Both have beer in their hands, one’s in the street, and one’s on the sidewalk resisting the urge to follow the group. The Mexican is speaking fluent German the way that many post-adolescent German alcoholics do, loud, deep and indignantly; “Komm, du Idiot! Die Altstadt ist in dieser Richtung! Wir sind von da gekommen! In dieser Richtung! Ja dann viel Spaß zu Hause!” These guys look good. I wanna be their friends.

I keep riding deeper and deeper into the abyss.

Flashbacks of the night a year ago come back here and there. But it really wasn’t that bad. Dudes from a few different angles tried kissing me. I really wanted to put some pants on, and maybe a heavy, baggy jacket. I felt super vulnerable. Instantly, I simultaneously gained huge respect for women and their bravery while wearing such outfits during a night on the town (and I wasn’t even wearing high-heels), and also a feeling of bewilderment why anyone would want to get this much unwanted attention. Dude, I looked terrible and most of those guys were just having fun. I couldn’t imagine if I looked sexy and the guys around me were looking for something less friendly. I still get the shivers when I think about what women go through.

I finally arrived at the library I set up for myself as a check point. That was my excuse: I wanted to come look for a book, Karneval just happened to be there, right? Locking up my bike on a chain, I went into the building. Well damn, the library was closed. But before I left the little entryway that was open until the second set of doors I saw a sign that read, “Frauen Sicherheit Zone”. Woman security zone. I believe these zones are new and in response to the attacks on women in Cologne only a month ago.

Good, but how much help would this zone be? It was just a dead-end entryway with automatic doors. I couldn’t figure it out. I kept moving.

So now it was time to adventure into the bowels of the Düsseldorf Altstadt. That’s where the majority of Karneval takes place. Düsseldorf is famous for having the longest bar in the world. Tourists come from all over, go into a pub and ask, “Hey, we’re looking for the longest bar in the world. Can you tell us where it is?” The response is usually, “You’re in it.” Looking around the 20 sq m pub with a bar no longer than any other, the new patrons are bewildered. The point is, Düsseldorf Altstadt is one long bar. It has the longest line of separate bars consecutively placed with a few pizza ovens thrown in. The city has more than its fair share of actual breweries, from Schumacher, to Uerige, Füchschen, to Schlüssel. These are usually packed with an older crowd and operate on old customs (i.e. beer is given to you as long as you’re standing there; to stop a server from replacing your almost empty glass, place a beer mat on top of it). These breweries keep the altstadt from becoming purely for 16 year olds exploring their first post binge vomit.

The rest of the alleyways and streets are lined by various German bars, loads of Irish pubs, upscale venues that pretend to be rundown and pretend to be in Paris, dark and empty bars that no-one knows how they survive, jazz clubs (one of them is the longest operating in Germany), techno clubs, lounges, south american dance clubs, and really everything in between. The longest bar in the world makes for a perfect setting for Karneval.

I walked down one of the only streets in the altstadt that is a designated shopping street. Right away I saw my first confrontation.

Relationships go on pause for Karneval. But jealousy doesn’t. I saw some guy kissing a girl in the corner of a wall and a court yard door. A group of dudes walk by. The group goes up to the smooching pair and pulls the guy off of the girl. They’re young, by the way. All of the sudden they’re yelling, trying to explain what’s happening and trying to fight each other. I figured out nothing about whose girlfriend she was and how the group of guys knew her. I could only guess that she was kissing some other guy and another guy she was had kissed before got jealous and tried to show what he was made of. He wasn’t made of much.

The girl in the middle of it could have found herself in a bad position. I wanted to be a witness from a safe distance just in case something happened that needed an explanation. She was trying to split the boys up. I thought about the safe zone for women. The safe zone may be safer for a woman like this girl, but getting to the safe zone is the hard part. If that group of boys wanted to harm her or take her away, it wouldn’t have been hard. And if she wanted to run away from this group of men because she felt threatened, does she just leave the guy she was kissing to get beat up?

It’s clear that safe zones do do something to make an evening out safer for women, but violence against women is a worldwide phenomenon that requires a change in consciousness on the part of the men.

Three of the dudes from the group left the scene and another one walked away with the girl and the boy she was kissing. She was safe and so I continued into the guts of broken glass.

I wouldn’t stay as long as I expected.