Carnival parades roll again in Germany with satirical floats
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Loading... - Thalia Doukas
- 21 Feb 2023
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The Shrove Monday parades, among the high points of the Carnival season in Germany, began rolling through the cities of Dusseldorf and Cologne on Monday morning for the first time in three years.
The festivities also rolled again in Mainz, with more than 2,000 musicians and 137 floats parading past hundreds of thousands of revelers.
The Carnival floats in this year’s parades included satirical takes on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, among other topics. Cologne, Dusseldorf and Mainz – all along the Rhine river – are famous within Germany for hosting the country’s largest carnival celebrations.
One float depicted Russian President Vladimir Putin as the vampire Nosferatu, pushing the world through the meat grinder and kissing the devil. A float in the Shrove Monday procession in Dusseldorf, located about 45 kilometres down the Rhine, depicted Putin bathing in blood in a tub painted the Ukrainian colours of blue and yellow.
The bald-headed Wagner mercenary army leader Yevgeny Prigozhin was depicted on another denouncing the West for “Nazism” while wearing a Nazi-like armband emblazoned with the Z symbol of the Russian invasion.
Another float in Dusseldorf depicted an Iranian mullah tangled in the uncovered hair of an Iranian woman.
“I think that in bad times you need good subversive satire,” prominent Dusseldorf float-builder Jacques Tilly told dpa ahead of the parade.
Cologne’s Shrove Monday celebrations, also known as Rose Monday in Germany, are marking their 200th anniversary this year. The parade was founded in 1823 by wealthy citizens of Cologne seeking to impose a bit of order on the chaos of Carnival.
The city’s Jewish community was represented in the parade for the first time with a float celebrating 1,700 years of Jewish life in Germany.
A lead organizer of the Cologne carnival said the Jewish group’s debut entry, which had been planned for the cancelled 2021 parade, was an opportunity to reflect on how satirical carnival groups had largely embraced anti-Semitic views during the Nazi era. Read More…
