The carnival is really a wild affair in many places, often lasting three days, but sometimes several weeks. Newsweek reported:

“In the Rhineland, suddenly tolerant policemen hoisted prostrate drunks from the sidewalks and helpfully propped them up against the lampposts. ‘Es ist ja Karneval’ (It’s carnival time), they shrugged. . . .

“With reckless abandon (which invariably leads to a higher birth rate in October and November), West Germans kept their annual pre-Lenten binges going till the last minutes of Shrove Tuesday in the Rhineland and southern Germany. . . .

“In the Rhineland, . . . Karnevalfreiheit (carnival freedom) is legally recognized as an excuse for almost anything except homicide or drunken driving. . . . Munich, too, takes legal account of Fasching [carnival time] . . . ‘Go home together and forget about it,’ more than one judge has advised a divorce-seeking couple. ‘It was only Fasching.’”

That report about carnival time in Germany was made several years ago. Regarding last year’s celebration, Time magazine said: “It was to have been Munich’s gaudiest, bawdiest Fasching ever. . . . All was ready for Münchner to abandon themselves, as they always had, to a month of drinking, swiving​—judges do not consider adultery grounds for divorce during Fasching—​and foolery . . . This year, though, the party has been a flop.”

Why? What dampened the revelry in Munich? A local doctor, Emil Vierlinger, explained: “Today’s young people celebrate Fasching all year long. Any modern store sells more fantastic clothing, and they can dance more wildly and to louder music in any discothèque.” So in this age of abandon and immorality people no longer need the carnival as an excuse for riotous living, the doctor, in effect, reasoned.

German Name Significant

In Germanic countries Fasching, also called Fastnacht or Fasenacht, is the name given to the festival just preceding Lent. The term is understood to derive from fasen or faseln, which means ‘to talk nonsense,’ ‘to drivel.’ Therefore Carl Rademacher, as director of the Prehistoric Museum in Cologne, noted that the German name for the festival “would thus denote a feast of folly, revelry, licence.” And as Rademacher pointed out, this name “corresponds well enough with many customary features of the Carnival.”

The plays that are featured during Fastnacht seem to substantiate the derivation of the festival’s name from words meaning ‘to talk nonsense.’ Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend says: “The Fastnacht plays developed out of the burlesque songs and antics of the masqueraders who followed the ancient Teutonic ship-wagon processions.” Carl Rademacher also observes: “We find repeated references to the use of such ship-waggons in German towns during the Middle Ages.”

Those processions that followed a ship on wheels were reported to have been riotous affairs. A monk told of a festival in the year 1133 in which a ship cart was taken from Aachen in Germany into Holland attended by a great procession of men and women. Naked except for a short shirt, the women danced, says the monk, ‘in devilish wantonness’ around the ship cart.