Perchten, Neo-Nazis, and St. Martin, Oh my!

PROST! (if you don't look a toaster in the eyes, you get 7 years of bad sex.)

While the rest of the world binds itself ever more so tightly to the proverbial water-board of our latter day New Barbarism, some wily Germans have found solace in celebrating a lighthearted Pagan ritual, namely the Twelfth Night, a midwinter Fesitval for Perchta the Bavarian 'guardian of the beast.'

LONG LIVE MULTICULTURALISM!

On a strict diet of fish and gruel, dear Frau Perchta is said to roam the countryside of Bavaria and Austria between Christmas and the following Epiphany, checking in on children and servants along her merry way. The swan-footed maiden tenderly revisits jolly St. Nick's list of goodie-two-shoes and ne'er-do-wells, rewarding the former with a small silver coin, and the latter not with coal but rather a quick slitting of their bellies and the kind replacement of their guts with straw and stone. Young ladies are advised to pay special to spinning the entirety of their yearly portion of flax lest Frau Perchta become particularly enraged.

Black Forest! REPRESENT!

Although proto-Nazi 15th century Catholic priests condemned any celebration of Perchta, a group of enlightened 16th century men bravely revived our lovely Frau when they began assuming her dress so as to drive out bad spirits from their villages.

This is the way we ball.

I bet Alex Wiens is getting a visit from Frau Perchta AND Krampus (see below) this year.

'That's my Jesus, that's my man...' (check 3:15)

Oh, and check out these Wild Men of Oberstdorf!

Scaring young children, part of an ages old Bavarian tradition

Now, I know Germans don't like talking about Hitler, WW II or any of that concentration camp stuff (although they are still pretty good about not letting people deny that shit), but this rich Bavarian tradition has given me a little insight into the Third Reich's relentless pride in their beloved Volksland. But let's tread carefully: 'tis a tender subject for today's Deutschmen and a lot of them are all too tired of fat, loud finger-pointing Americans who come here for beer and Nazi tours.

Some relevant context:

• When I was working at the Mineral Trade show a few weeks ago, I overheard the hunchbacked, Larry Flynt-esque boss at the neighboring table talking about how this was his first time in Munich and he wanted to see the sites. Evidently, my obnoxious, rich-as-balls Canuck boss had told him about the Nazi tours, about Nazi meetings at the Hofrbauhaus, and about Hitler's 'favorite' bar; Mr. Flynt decided to verify the Canuck's claims with a bonafide German whose clever, practiced response to this indiscretion was a quick, 'Oh, I'm too young to know about all that.'
  
  
  
  
  Never too young to know about Perchta!
  
  
• H. went to the Austrian Alps with her host family, said it was beautiful and what not. I responded, well, the hills are alive with the sound of music, are they not? Her family didn't get the joke. Evidently a musical about a family of Austrian choir children escaping the Nazis with the help of their would-be nun of a nurse doesn't hold have the wide appeal in contemporary Deutschland that it does in the states.
  

A midcentury Perchta?

See, as one might say in grad-speak, Bavaria's 'scapes' (cf. Appadurai) may serve as an appropriate imaginary nexus for deproblematizing the postmodern era's new barbarism. As a supplement to the polarizing discourse of escapism/extremism, the perchen anarchically deconstruct our microfascist image-histories of self, (ie. our embodied surveillance systems of ideology), wiping out the bad spirits of hyperreal terror that obscure late capitalism's collective objet petit a: the Alps, the organic homeland ... the afterlife.

Always the good guy?

As our global media-military industrial complex (brought to you by Pepsi) of mercenaries and terrorists perpetrates its dual phallocentric Wolfenstein 3D revenge phantasy, it succeeds all too well at seducing more and more outliers into its rigged deerhunt: the feeders are everywhere and all too many parties are stalking, whether or not they know they too have grown antlers.

A Critique of Positivism?

Child war soldiers in Sierra Leone, white pride tween singers in US, Uighur and Tibetan persecution in China, neo-Nazis in Germany and Austria, and of course everywhere Islamoterrorists and CEOs: the physical tragedies of Katrina and Aceh elided with that of Michael Jackson and Anna Nicole Smith comprise a mental tableau of accelerated evening-news hyperreality whose automatons beg, work, pay and explode themselves for even an inch, centimeter, or assbā of the dear reserve surplus value, i.e. the fetishized, virginal Alps of our desire. Whether the medium is a xenophobic hate crimes or a irony-filled sitcoms, the ideological goal remains organic, non-radiated, viagra-free, pure paradise now (Did you see that movie? It was really good).

Modern marketing appeals, so far evolved beyond Bernay's (Freud's nephew) herd-instinct and subconscious manipulation, still give special place to the country, to the folksland, to tradition and heritage. It remains our pie in the sky, whether as a physical or purely imagined (remembered) realm of solace, peace.

Remember how it used to be?

But with the fall of Christianity, the West struggles to find a proper guardian for its afterlife, resorting to all sorts of violence in fear of Allah. By inverting the contemporary Fox-marketed hierarchy, by replacing Julie Andrews with Frau Perchta, we can begin to rhizomatically reconstruct reality in a post-ideological, albeit still fantastical image, that acknowledges the polarized position of the Other and its necessity for the coexistence of our respective real phantasies.

The Governess of New Barbarism

Had you fooled right?

OK, enough silly pomo talk. No one actually gets paid to slur that high-minded hypnobabble, right? Maybe I should just turn this into a poster for Munich's upcoming Nazi/Anti-Nazi Rally....

I wonder how German Neo-Nazi's feel about Tarantino.

Other things from Germany: yesterday was Saint Martin's day. Lots of school children gathered in the park nearby, all with their little lanterns, and sang songs with their parents.


Also, the store downstairs sells espresso and has a really big poster in the window that looks something like this:

Of guiltless minstrelsy?

Also, evidently the students here are occupying the university gym because they feel that 1000 euros a year in fees discriminates against the poor by not allowing them equal access to education. Keep in mind that they already have a financial aid program and a loan forgiveness program in place.

More Perchten:

Can't we all just get along?

PS. I would've included a diff EQ relating the rate of surplus value to number of Perchen but I don't have MathType. As the current exhibit at the Third Reich's Haus der Kunst says: