Where the wild things are

Bavaria is known today for being the most traditional, devoutly Catholic corner of Germany. (We even get a public holiday for Epiphany and Corpus Christi. Score!) But before a single steeple towered over Germany, the villagers of the Bavarian Alps worshipped at the altar of nature – exalting the spirits of the mountains, the forests, and the elements.

These days, very few of the old pre-Christian traditions remain. Many of the important days on the Pagan calendar were adapted by the Catholic church into officially-sanctioned holidays (for example, Christmas replaced the Roman festival of Saturnalia). What couldn’t be Christianised was, in some cases, banned. But the isolation of the alpine villages allowed some of the ancient traditions to continue intact.

In those long-gone times, it was believed that the coming of winter brought not only cold weather and the deadening of the soil, but treacherous spirits of all kinds. Keeping these spirits at bay was the goddess Frau Perchta, accompanied by her entourage of helpers, some beautiful, some grotesque, known as the Perchten. Perchta was also said to know if children had been good or bad during the past year, and reward or punish them accordingly (sound familiar?).

Out of these beliefs came the tradition of the Perchtenlauf (Perchten run). On several sacred nights each winter, the men of the village would dress up in the fantastical guise of Perchten, and run through town expelling the evil spirits from their midst with lots of noise and mischief. Of course, each pocket of the Alps has its variations on the stories and traditions, but you get the basic idea. Gangs of dudes running through the streets, basking in the anonymity of frightening ten-kilogram masks. Much mayhem ensues.

With the resurgence of interest in Indo-Germanic culture, the Perchtenlauf has been dragged out of obscurity, and is now celebrated with renewed gusto across southern Germany and Austria. It’s even reached as far north as the outskirts of Munich. When a colleague of mine told me the Perchtenlauf was his most favourite Bavarian tradition, I had to go and check it out for myself.

In the 10,000-strong town of Kirchseeon, just outside Munich, a small but devoted group of neo-Pagan enthusiasts has been reviving the tradition of Perchtenlauf each winter for the last fifty years. Kirchseeon is only a half-hour drive from town on the autobahn, but it feels like a different world – rural and quaint. Its modest town centre is by the railway station, and narrow one-lane dirt roads link the main street to the tiny satellite communities of Riedering, Ilching and Buch, each literally only three or four blocks in diameter.

My friends Radhika and CM came with me on this adventure. We parked the car by the main street and walked through snow-steeped fields to the outskirts of Riedering, where a small crowd was gathering. There were a lot of kids there, and as the time for the Perchtenlauf approached, they were practically bursting with excitement.

After a few minutes, we started to hear rousing drumbeats in the distance. As everyone craned their necks to look out over the fields, a motley crew approached…

Hairy, wild-eyed monsters, horned devils, and savage-looking wolves made up the parade, accompanied by a marching band of drummers and cowbell players with oversized cartoon heads. It was really quite a sight!

The Perchten galumphed noisily into the village with the stream of spectators in tow. One long-snouted beast hung back with the crowd, accepting donations of coins and notes in his rather vicious-looking maw. 

The Perchten stopped at various points in the village to perform a strange ritual. They would form a pentacle with their staffs, and dance around this in a circle while singing exhortations to the spirits. I couldn’t follow the songs very well, but I did hear the word “raus” a lot, which means “get out” – so my hypothesis is that they were telling those pesky evil spirits of winter where to go.

The dances were accompanied by the musicians I mentioned earlier. Now when I said cowbell players, they weren’t each just ringing the crap out of a single cowbell like you would hear at the last mile of a fun run. No, these guys were playing what I can only describe as a xylophone made of bells. It sounded tuneful, and yet ancient and primitive at the same time. It reminded me of gamelan music.

It wasn’t all just a quaint rustic alpine song-and-dance though. The Perchten were having a field day fulfilling their secondary function of causing mayhem wherever they went. They tiptoed (if you can imagine a 6 foot 5 monster with tusks tiptoeing) behind old ladies and yelled loudly, scaring them out of their wits.

One creature stole a little boy’s hat and balanced it on one of his horns for the duration of an entire dance. For the first few seconds, the boy looked proud that his hat was the centre of attention in the dance. Then he started to get worried that he wasn’t going to get it back. His trembling lips were on the verge of emitting a wail, when the monster returned to deposit the hat on the boy’s head, gave his nose a playful tug, and then cantered back to join his fellow Perchten.

At one point, the procession passed by a small hill covered in fresh snow. One of the Perchten saw his chance, and ran up the hill overlooking the path. From this vantage point, he began to make snowballs and rain them down on the passing crowd. The children squealed with delight and began to make their own snowballs, giving as good as they got from the monsters three times their size.

And one Perchten simply went over to his wife/girlfriend and hugged her tightly, fangs and horns and all. The woman looked pleased, but still rather bewildered – kind of the same expression she would have had if her husband were roaring drunk, as opposed to dressed as a giant monster.

We got done with the first village of Riedering. The procession headed out into the fields to the next village. By this point, the Perchten and the civilians were completely mixed together on the little dirt road. A very hairy werewolf fell into step with me and put his arm jovially around my shoulder with a muffled “Grüss Gott”. (When I read that sentence over in isolation, it sounds so bizarre.) I turned to smile up at him, giving him the perfect opening to reach down and pull my winter hat over my face. Doh!

Darkness was quickly falling. The Perchten lit fiery torches and carried them during their dances, lending the scene a touch of drama.

As the action headed to the third village, we headed back to our car so we wouldn’t be wandering about the fields of rural Bavaria in pitch darkness. (In hindsight, that might have been fun. But it was so bloody cold.) We got there without being abducted by any evil spirits, so I guess the Perchten did their job!

Guten Rutsch!

I am standing on the rubble of buildings destroyed in Allied air raids. The sky glimmers fretfully with blinding flashes of light. My ears ring with loud explosions, punctuated by human cries and the yelps of traumatised geese. All I can smell is smoke.

Nope, I didn’t find a time machine to transport me back to wartime Germany. The scene I’m describing is the last night of 2009 in Munich.

New Year’s Eve, or Silvester as it’s called in Germany, is in many ways a pretty standard affair here. Everyone buggers off from work early; the streets are full of stumbling drunk people; and all the cellular networks jam up as the clock strikes twelve.

Now, I grew up in Sydney – the first really big city in the world to enter each new year. NYE is basically the one time a year that Sydney makes it onto global news bulletins, so we like to do it up big over there. Every year 5 tonnes and several million dollars worth of fireworks are blown up over Sydney Harbour – literally our fifteen minutes of fame. It’s unfailingly spectacular – the premier pyrotechnic display on the planet. You have to go camp out along the harbour at 1 o’clock in the afternoon if you want to beat the other 2 million spectators to the prime viewing spots.

So I’m not too easily impressed by fireworks. Once I moved to Seattle, I became pretty meh about the whole new year thing. Not much to write home about compared to my home town.

So why was my Silvester in Munich blog-worthy? Because in Germany, you get to light your OWN fireworks.

A lot of people have an impression of me as rather a sensible young lady, but I do also have my pyromaniacal side. When I went to a department store on the 30th of December and found the ground floor full of explosives for perfectly legitimate sale, the way forward was obvious.



With several score Euro worth of fireworks in hand, my parents and I made our way to Olympiapark, the site of the 1972 summer games. As well as housing the main stadium and several other event venues, the park is home to a giant grassy mound built over the rubble of buildings destroyed during World War Two. This hill, named Olympiaberg, is one of the highest points in Munich, which is otherwise pretty much as flat as a pancake. On a clear day the views from Olympiaberg are wonderful.



Olympiapark’s normally a pretty quiet place. I go running there a lot, because as I mentioned, it’s one of the only places in the city where I can get some hills into my training. It’s mostly joggers and dog walkers and kids on the swings. But on the 31st of December, Olympiapark is a magnet for all of Munich’s pyromaniacs.

Now, Germans have a reputation for being rather a stolid, orderly, rule-following people. And on the whole it seems fairly true. Until now I’d only noticed two major outlets for German non-conformism: they drive like maniacs on the highway, and they like to walk around and play volleyball in the nude. I have now discovered a third situation in which Germans like to go a little bit crazy: the situation in which they are in possession of legal explosives.

As early as 3pm, people were already letting off rockets in the streets. And I mean on major thoroughfares, off apartment balconies, in high density areas. I want to know how many buildings have caught fire from a rocket accidentally going through someone’s window. By 10pm, we were hearing several loud bangs every minute. And by the time we emerged from the U-Bahn station at Olympiapark, the scene I described in my first paragraph was well underway.



As we walked through the park, I almost jumped out of my skin several times as loud explosions erupted only a few feet away. Every square metre of non-flammable surface (ie. footpath) was colonised by groups of grinning revellers lighting fuses on products with names like “Dance of the Vampire”, “The Hell Fountain”, “Firefly” and “Moonshot”. The buffer zone between civilians and pyros was non-existent. Only about 30% of the people I saw lighting fireworks seemed entirely sober. We staked out a piece of territory by the lake and started our own fireworks show.

As expected, it was a LOT of fun. There was one scary moment where my rocket shot off on a sideways trajectory instead of straight upwards, but luckily it went across the lake and landed harmlessly on some wet grass on the other side. I was enjoying myself so much that by 11:45 we had already consumed our entire stock of fireworks.

But that was okay, because by this time you could see that other people’s pyrotechnics were building to a peak. As the clock ticked closer and closer to midnight, the seasoned pyrotechnicians were pulling out their big guns (literally). By 12am, the sky was absolutely chockers with fireworks and the sound was deafening. It didn’t have the professional coordination of the Sydney display, but the combined effect of thousands of Münchners’ fireworks was an equally stupendous sight. With our own bag of tricks empty, we could just sit back happily and watch the show.

Apart from being a whole bag of fun, the city of Munich's stance of outsourcing the NYE fireworks to the public is a pretty astute one, I have to say. Not only does it avoid shelling out millions of government Euro to put on a coordinated display, but it must also be a nice bump to the retail economy to start the year. Not to mention that it probably isn't worth Munich's while to try and compete with the globally televised pyrotechnic extravaganza up in Berlin.

I’ll never forget this New Year’s Eve. Open source fireworks FTW!

Other miscellaneous Silvester observations:

• The German phrase for “happy new year” is interesting. It’s “guten Rutsch” (or more fully, “einen guten Rutsch ins neue Jahr”), which means “have a good slide into the new year!”
• As if you needed any further proof how strong the drinking culture is in Bavaria, Munich has to be the only city I’ve ever seen whose official site has a page of tips on avoiding and treating New Year’s Day hangovers. Btw the German word for hangover is also fun – it’s “kater”, or “tom cat”!