01 Mai 2007

Walpurgisnacht

The night on which the witches celebrate the coming of the horned God with a dance on the Blocksberg. Closely related to the Celtic Beltane, the welcoming of the summer. In Heidelberg, it is celebrated in the Thingstätte on the Heiligenberg, with a huge night-long picnic party adorned by fire artists and folky music.
According to the local wiki, up to 15 000 people walk up the mountain every year. Most of those 15 000 bring things, to eat and drink, to sit on, to perform with or to put on if it gets cold, which makes it a very rich terrain for pickpockets and other small independent entrepreneurs. Again according to local statistics, about one in three people has something stolen.
Historically, it was a very interesting occasion. Beltane was clearly present, in the fire and the music and the night-long celebration. There is a Christian saint, Valpurga, who gave her name to the night, which fortuitously coincides with the Hexennacht, the night of the witches' dance on Blocksberg. On the modern side, the Thingstätte was built in the 1930s by the Nazis, with some supposedly old and pagan, Germanic, ideas and ideals. But best of all: it is the night before Labour Day, May 1, which is an official holiday in Germany, enabling people to suspend sleep and spend the night on the mountain. A combination of pagan summer-welcoming rituals, a Christian saint, a medieval witch-dance, a Nazi amphitheatre and a socialist holiday! Apparently, appropriation of holidays is not purely a thing of the missionary past...