Tuesday evening was the final night of Luzern’s Fasnacht. Corrine, a friend of Anu’s from work, had invited me to come with her to enjoy the festivities. I gladly accepted and after work on Tuesday we met at the Basel SBB station to take the hour train to Luzern. Corrine grew up in Luzern and her mother still lives there. After dropping our stuff at her mothers we walked down the street to the middle of the old town. It was getting dark when we arrived, but it was still beautiful.
Luzern is on Vierwaldstättersee (or Lake Luzern) and the water comes in through town and the two half of town are connected by old Medieval bridges (some mostly rebuilt). Of course the buildings are beautiful Medieval wood-framed houses with beautiful paintings and bay windows all closely packed along the cobblestone streets. They are in great condition and I rather like visiting them in 2007 since the Swiss keep them very clean. That’s the kind of anachronism I like. The morning after Fasnacht the streets stank of beer and trash and I cannot imagine what the stench must have been like when the streets doubled as sewers.
We wandered around town among the crowds of people eating Swiss snacks and observing the interesting costumes. It’s like Halloween for all ages only ten times better. The sheer creativity and fantastical nature of the costumes keep me endlessly intrigued. It wasn’t about the dark and scary, though there were witches and scary masks, I saw no ghosts or skeletons or the normal Halloween fair in America. Of course there were princes, but more often they came with a whole family in Medieval dress. There were animal costumes and fantastic joker-type many-layered dresses. I can’t begin to describe the creativity, nor could I take many pictures in the crowd in the dark. I tried to capture two men dressed as Venetian gondola men complete with a boat!
Through all this I kept wondering that all this fun with costumes I didn’t see anything in appropriate. I suppose there’s an advantage to having an outdoor costume party in the middle of February. After three hours of wondering we encountered the first costume that I would deem inappropriate, and it wasn’t attractive at all. A bikini over bulging stocking material stuffed with quilt filling is not so voluptuous.
After my first taste of Raclette (yummy cheese scrapped over a piece of bread – no, it’s not a grilled cheese sandwich!), some spicy Wurst, garlic bread and coke we found our place on the parade route and watched the bands go by. The big attraction for Fasnacht is the 30-50 piece amateur brass bands playing popular music as loud as possible. There’s no such thing as a band nerd here. It’s a respected hobby to spend a considerable amount of time and money to be part of one of the bands that has a different outrageous costume and mask for each year. We watched the parade for about an hour and the bands kept coming and coming. Each was so totally different from the next it blew my imagination. What they had in common was a few loud drums (marching band or walking drum-set style), plenty of trumpets, some trombones, sousaphones, and maybe some clarinets and saxophones. Usually they had a leader with an enormous mask about the size of a person that displayed their theme. Then the band had either all the same mask and costume, or something of similar design and theme. The masks had holes in the mouth or chin so the instruments could be played. This led an anonymity and mysterious quality to the parade. The spectators where pushing from all around for a look, but they weren’t smiling or cheering. Obviously they enjoy it or they wouldn’t be there, but it was so strange to have such little communication between performers and audience!
Some of the costumes included silly men with bizzar expressions, a band of red hoop-skirt ladies (men included!), post office men, 18th century men in powdered wigs, pirates, police dogs, detective cats with monocles, bumper cars (yes, their heads were cars complete with working headlights), light houses (it looked like tag sale porcelain figures jammed on the head!), Pippi Longstockings, trolls, and on and on. Think Alice and Wonderland and you’ll get a sense of the fantastic and creative nature of the event.
Part of what made it so interesting is that it was the work of the community, not some paid professionals. Disney parades might be dazzling, but nothing can compare to the creativity of thousands of people working as a sort of organic whole. The floats made to follow each band were on display in the square along with other creative booths or displays (I’m really not sure what they were) and they were all done by amateurs having fun. Maybe if you cross the World’s Worst Marching Band spirit with Alice in Wonderland character you can begin to see it. I’m talking the real Alice, not the pale blues and whites of Disney’s version. The Jabberwocky existed too.
Here is a group of Star Wars like characters playing electronic music on self-made instruments. Sorry it’s dark!
YouTube has better images. Here is one of the postmen I wrote about. It’s on the internet already!
And here is a good video of craziness. After the parade the bands wonder the city playing in corners to crowds of dancing people. By the way, this music is called Guggenmusig.
Anyway, I’ve probably bored you with the detailed descriptions. It’s something that’s worth seeing if you get the chance. After four hours of wondering and eating and enjoying ourselves we retired to Corrine’s mother’s place and crashed to bed after eating the lovingly prepared cookies, doughnuts, and pineapple that was laid out for us. The music continued to play as I drifted to sleep.
The next morning we go up around 7am and as we walked to the train station we passed people in costume who had spent all night in the streets. There were even some musicians still playing. Does alcohol give the lips strength? Maybe I’ll have to try that . . .
After morning coffee with Corrine she took the train back to Basel for work and I skipped my German class for a chance to tour Luzern.
