Morgenstraich: Switzerland’s Famous Carnival (Satis Shroff)

Switzerland’s famous carnival, the Morgenstraich, began on Monday morning at 4am, and is a world attraction with its magical atmosphere. The official lights of this cultural town went out and suddenly artistically decorated, self-made lanterns began to glow in the darkness that had enveloped Switzerland’s second biggest city.

The cliques of the Basler Fastnacht were gathered in their individual costumes in the narrow cobbled alleys of the olde historical town. Just before the signal was given, the motley clad people donned their outsized masks (Larven) and stood in formation like infanterists out to conquer a town, not with muskets but music. You hold your breath for a second in the darkness, even though you know that Basle vibrates with life.


Someone shouted at the top of his voice: “Morgenstraich, forwards march!” The people began to move to the melody of drums and piccolo flutes. If you didn’t want to lose contact with your near and dear ones you had to catch hands lest they be lost in the crowd. The piccolo flutes with their shrill notes are characteristic of Basle.


In the three days that follow there’s an outburst of colour, grotesque masks, music and satirical comments that are distributed on long strips of coloured paper along with tons of confetti and goodies for all and sundry. The people of Basle do it perfection, painstaking creativity and you can sense the dedication behind the celebrations.


The Rhine town vibrates to the music of the Fastnacht for three days and nights till Thursday at 3:59 according to Swiss time. The celebrations have an air of joy combined with disciplined behaviour, especially among the members of the Swiss cliques, where they see to it that no clique members starts dancing out of the disciplined formation. It is indeed the biggest flute concert in the world along the cobbled old town as they go about with their piccolos and drums---peacefully and traditionally. There’s none of the noisy ‘Narri, narro, helau’ that you hear and get to see on the German side of the Rhine.


And when you’re tired of walking around in the cold, cobbled streets of Basle, you enter one of the Altstadt Cafes where you can eat the traditional brown Mehlsuppe (flour-soup) with white Swiss wine and round onion and cheese cakes.


The Basler Fasnacht is regarded this year as an ideal chance to integrate foreign youth in the cliques, since they live in the town and their parents work who are migrants work in the area. Thomas Kessler, a guy from Zürich, who’s an admirer of the Basler Fastnacht, is also the chief of the ‘Integration Basle’ of the Security Department. He has integrated the second generation of migrant youth into the cliques because they need new members to carry out the Swiss tradition. The number of Swiss nationals taking part in the Basler Fastnacht has gone down to 20 per cent but a lot of children of the foreigners living in Basle and its suburbs take delight in the celebration and join the cliques when they reach their teens. To this effect the cliques have distributed flyers in nine languages in Basle’s schools. More and more Turks, who are actually Moslems, have been buying Fastnacht costumes for their kids so that their children have a sense of belonging to Basle’s Fastnacht tradition, which in turn is a Catholic festival. When it comes to the Basler Fastnacht, the boundaries between culture, religion and tradition seem to disappear. What counts is: do in Basle as the Basler do, namely celebrate Morgenstraich in this world-open city. And the Basler are an exuberant, fun-loving folk. Celebrating the Morgenstraich can be infectious and visitors are known to come again and again. Like yours truly for instance.


In the pre-Fastnacht days there are a lot of events in the theatres with the many cliques carrying names like: Barfiessler (barefoot), drummeli (drums) for music lovers, Pfyfferli for the friends of theatre, Mimosli for people who’re jolly, Zofinger-conzärtli for two finger concerts, which is meant for insiders, Drufftaggt for those who’d like to experiment, and the Charivari at the Volkshaus, which was originally created as an alternative to the Drummli and which was visited by Miss Switzerland Claudia Wambululu, and naturally a children’s Charivari version for the kiddies at the Theatre Basle, in which a certain Frau Fastnacht wants to do away with the Fastnacht celebrations, because she thinks that the children only think about the forthcoming Euro 08. The list of the pre-Fastnacht events seem to be longer each year.


The taverns, inns and restaurants are open all the time for the next 72 hours. The three beautiful days are called ‘drey scheenste Dääg’ in Schwyzer Deutsch. You can google or yahoo for these celebrations and events till Thursday in the internet under: http://fastnacht.ch/.


Gruezi Miteinander. Cherrio.

Fastnachtzeit in Friburg (Germany) and Basle (Switzerland) (Satis Shroff)

When we cry ‘Narri, Narro!’in Freiburg, they rejoice in Cologne, Mainz and Düsseldorf, for it is carnival-time. And the German and Swiss TV channels have mostly carnivals on their screens. But most of the people, young and old, are out in the streets of their towns and enjoying themselves with merry-making and repitition of Fasnet slogans.

In Freiburg there were the usual shoppers and pedestrians between the Kaiser-Joseph street and the town council (Rathaus) and small costumed kids dubbed “the Eckeplätzer” came with flutes, trumpets and drums what the Germans and Swiss are wont to call ‘Guggemusic.’ The knaves shouted ‘Narri, Narro’ on top of their voices, and the onlookers were treated with long red sausages, crepe,` Flammkuchen, a speciality with cheese and bacon from Alsace and, of course, American doughnuts introduced by the occupation GIs.

This was followed by the big procession of the Badische knaves organisation in the third meeting of the knaves (Narren) with 10,000 participants and many other Freiburger knaves, witches, ghoulish figures as the highlight of the Fasnet celebrations.

On Rose-Monday you are awakened the Wühlmäuse, people masked and costumed as moles at 7:30 am, and a bit later at 8:11 your are startled by the cries of the Ribblinghieler. On February 5, which is called the Fasnet-Zischdig, the celebrations come to an end, like in Tiengen where the decorated Fasnet tree is pulled down , followed by the burial of Ignaz at the Tuniberg house. The Fasnets-burning takes place at 12 o’clock in the night, which symbolises the end of the days of fasting. And on Ash Wednesday the purses and wallets are washed in front of the Freiburger town council building (Rathaus). This tradition demands that empty wallets and purses be immersed in the water of the Freiburger Bächle because till the next year the water of the Bächle is expected to turn into currency notes. What a wonderful Allemanic belief, isn’t it? And they say, if you are a stranger and fall into the Freiburger Bächle (small water-canal), which runs through the city, then you are obliged to marry a Freiburger damsel. I must admit it happened to me, and I wouldn’t change this Allemanic damsel for another. Great customs and beliefs, don’t you think so?

I like it in these times of Fasnet when people are merry, sociable, laughing and there’s a lot of clownery and no seriousness, because life is earnest enough, provided there’s not much alcohol, alcopops involved.

In the Black Forest town of Wolfach the people come out at 5:30 in the morning costumed Narren figures come wearing white night gowns, long caps and white stockings like out of a Carl Spitzberg oil painting. The people of Wolfach are woken up by a lot of noise-making using trumpets, trombones, flutes, drums and in the afternoon there’s a jolly big procession. The Germans and the Swiss like it loud with brass-bands, samba dancing, percussions-on-wheels, Gugge-music and a lot of oomph.

The Fasnet Monday begins in Rottweil at 8am with a four-hour ‘springing-of-the-knaves’ (Narrensprung). Thousands of classical costumed Narren figures come through the old gate of Rottweil and scatter themselves everywhere in the olde town historical town. The Rottweiler do it with style. In Munderking there’s a fountain around which the knaves dance at first before jumping three times into the icy waters of the fountain. They strengthen themselves with a swig of hot wine.

The highlight of the Fasnet Sunday is in Elzach at 8pm when the torch procession takes place. The torches are lit and the famous and notorious Schuddig, with his inflated pig’s bladder dangling from a stick with which he clobbers the teasing onlookers, walks along this Black Forest town---which is immersed in a ghostly light.

Swiss Fastnacht: It must be mentioned that last year’s Fastnacht celebration in Basle (Switzerland) was marred by the death of a boy, who was eagerly collecting goodies in the street and he was crushed by a procession wagon. This year the security committee has promised to be stricter so that such accidents don’t occur again. 12,000 active members of the Swiss Fastnacht will be taking part in the street parades, and this year 485 groups will be walking, dancing or driving by distributing sweets, chocolates, flying kisses and bombarding the spectators with confetti cannons to the sound of reggae, hip hop, salsa, samba, techno and other rhythms. There will be around 100 sujets or themes, a few of which are listed here: the noise-tolerance of the Basler citizens, littering (the Swiss want to keep their country clean), SVP, a political party, women and gendering, Euro 08 and global climate-problems with Swiss undertones.

You can hear the noisy Guggen music again in Lucern, the monsters dance and quite a few Luzerner are high on alcohol and sway around the sidewalks. Fastnacht, the nights of fasting, have begun in catholic Switzerland. A big bang opens the Narrenzeit with 12,000 early risers, which is 2000 more than last year, and the ‘most beautiful week of the year’ begins. No one is spared in the week of merry-making, satire and lampoonery, not even the politicians, with all their misdeeds of the past year. In traditional Luzern a person named Brother Fritschi get kidnapped and jailed in the town council hall by costumed Swiss soldiers. 500 years ago the Basler stole Luzern’s Fasnacht figure of identification, and the two Swiss cities re-enact the spectacle from those days. Brother Fritschi is put in chains for half a year, till he is kidnapped by the Basler.

On the day of Basle’s Morgenstraich, when the lights go out, people in the streets hold hands and celebrate the traditional Fastnacht, Brother Fritschi and Frau Basilea are invited as the guests of honour by the local government and peer at the Basler Fastnacht procession from the terrace of the town council.

After the long Morgenstraich, I love to have the traditional Basler Mehlsuppe (flour soup), croissant and coffee. You ought to try it too. I personally prefer the Swiss Fasnet to the German one because it’s well-organised, and when the lights go out at 5am in Switzerland’s second biggest city Basle, there’s an eerie atmosphere when the drums begin to beat, followed by the shrill and high sound of the typical piccolo flutes. When the sun shines you see isolated, masked piccolo flute players in their colourful costumes in different parts of the Swiss town playing on their flutes---oblivious of the world.