Adapting Festive Practices

Abstract

Nineteenth-century Carnival enthusiasts in Cologne and Mainz staged elaborate annual celebrations intended to advertise their group identities and local status and to knit together the past, present, and future of urban life along the Rhine. In the last decades before World War I, the festive community invoked by Carnival organizers was repeatedly tested by social and ideological schisms and diluted by the proliferation of associations reflective of increasingly heterogeneous urban populations with diverging notions of how the pre-Lenten festivities should be celebrated. Cohesion was further diluted by the need to search out new sources of financial support and a wider clientele and by the year-round availability of new alternatives for entertainment and display. The greatest threat to the continued vitality of Rhenish Carnival proved to be not the attacks of its critics but rather the difficulty of reliably enlisting a committed volunteer base.