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Participants riding one of the many floats throw goodies to visitors. More than 100 tons of candy are passed out during the parade.

Participants riding one of the many floats throw goodies to visitors. More than 100 tons of candy are passed out during the parade. (Photos by Michael Abrams/S&S)

Participants riding one of the many floats throw goodies to visitors. More than 100 tons of candy are passed out during the parade.

Participants riding one of the many floats throw goodies to visitors. More than 100 tons of candy are passed out during the parade. (Photos by Michael Abrams/S&S)

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As a people, Germans are really good at two things: Enforcing rules and drinking. Well, they’re good at other things, too, but forget those for now.

I present these superlatives as a guy who has been scolded for driving down a street blocked off to all but local traffic, and as a guy who watched a middle-aged woman pass out and split her drunken cranium on a cathedral’s stone doorjamb.

Both happened during festivals.

The scolding happened on my own street (and wasn’t, as such, warranted). The skull cracking occurred before noon, and despite the seriousness of the situation and the large number of pedestrians wandering past, didn’t draw all that much attention.

Because, it turns out, when it comes to breaking the rules in Germany, time and location matter.

At 11:11 a.m. on Nov. 11 in Cologne, the rule book is burned and craziness ensues for the next three months. It’s the start of Fasching and, experience tells me, a bad time to crack one’s head on a church.

Fasching, or Karneval, as it’s called in Cologne, happens in what can only be described as an alternate universe. The people are laid-back and friendly, a state no doubt aided by alcohol. In fact, trying to explain this festival without talking about alcohol would be like playing tennis with your hands tied behind your back.

On the train ride home from Cologne on Nov. 11, 2007, the average blood-alcohol level among the revelers I had stumbled upon — and who stumbled over me — was in the ionosphere. Singing in my train car was high-volume and slurred, and the seats and aisles were packed too tight to move. The air was over-moist and smelled like a pub toilet.

It was not, in terms of comfort or decibel level or odor, that much different from the carnival events we had just observed.

That is not to say it wasn’t a worthwhile, mind-broadening and fun experience. It’s where outsiders learn that Germans are capable, under the right circumstances, of being just as crude as Americans during the football bowl season.

As mentioned earlier, it’s not out of character for Germans to go out of their way to point out what others are doing wrong. In that context, Fasching is both alarming and heartening.

Alarming because Fasching is tied directly to Lent, when good Christians are supposed to give stuff up for a while and behave themselves. Heartening because, for once, some Germans thought a New Yorker (your correspondent) wasn’t being silly or crazy enough. This was relayed to me by a pride of beer-swilling teenaged lions eating candy they pulled from a gutter.

Like I said — alternative universe.

In everyday life, to carry on in public as one does during Fasching would undo any aspirations to enter a life of politics, teaching, ministry or children’s television. Any shred of good judgment you might previously have been thought to have is, by Fasching, evaporated. But wearing a costume somehow absolves any carnival-related indiscretions, as if it isn’t "you" urinating into a municipal garbage can, but an honest-to-God lion.

That may explain, at least in part, the popularity of pirate costumes at Cologne’s 2008 Rosenmontag — Rose Monday — parade, during which the atmosphere was pretty much what it was some three months earlier at the beginning of the crazy season. Where pirates go, public drunkenness and degeneracy are expected to follow.

But unlike at Brazil’s Carnival, most of the costumes here are either plush or all-covering. In a weird way, it’s the costumes that end up lending Fasching a bit of decorum, at least compared with celebrations on the other side of the equator. However, it’s probably safe to conclude that the costume choices are more for practical purposes — it’s cold in Germany — and were Cologne 40 degrees latitude south of its present location, the celebration would be more like Brazil’s anatomy lesson.

Still, some in Cologne are underdressed. Most of these are in the parade, which is annually televised and features no small number of female gymnasts and some of the prettiest clowns you’ll find anywhere clamoring for attention with shouts of the traditional greeting "Kölle Alaaf!"

While all this might sound a bit like adult entertainment, it’s prudent to note that, despite the depravity, Fasching in Cologne is a family event.

Three months after the kickoff of last Fasching season, your correspondent returned to Cologne to watch hundreds of German prepubescents throw their dignity away on these same streets during the city’s rainy Rosenmontag parade. Floats carrying high-caliber cannons blasted tons of candy into the crowds along the route, where thousands of kids alternately took turns as cannon fodder, and dove into puddles for rain-drenched taffies.

Their parents and those adults without children, meanwhile, carried on in the same manner as they had months earlier: Costumed, drunk, bloody by noon.

Lent, that party stopper, started two days later.

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