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”!