Personally Political – Karneval

Guten Tag! I’m traveling with some of my housemates throughout Germany this week and our first stop was Karneval in Köln (Cologne). On Sunday (Valentine’s Day - Valentinstag), we saw lots of people dressed up in exotic costumes and spent a lot of time eating schnitzels and pretzels and drinking spiked coffee creations in order to keep warm. More of the same am Montag, but with a big parade. While some of the floats were reminiscent of Homecoming Parade projects, several were quite elaborate and expressed some sort of explicit political viewpoint. For example, I saw one with a “Gone with the Wind” poster depicting Chancellor Angela Merkel as a swooning Scarlett O’Hara waiting to be rescued by a predatory politician. The parade section reserved for the zoo’s 150th birthday however was meant to be more light-hearted. Most of the participants were dressed as big cats or flashy fowl, but some of the band members wore large papier-mâché black heads with bones tied into the hair and pictures of savannah landscapes painted on the back. As someone who has studied African and African-American Studies, I felt disappointed that the group organizers had resorted to essentialist images of roaming “savages” to convey their point of peaceful human-animal coexistence. Thankfully, the rest of the parade featured other more creative floats, lots of candy, and cold toes. Einschuldigung (excuse me), but I have a train to catch!