Carnival, under various names, is Germany’s ‘Fifth Season,’ featuring parades, costumes, parties and sometimes, well, often, a bit of excess and irreverence. It’s a bigger deal in Catholic Germany, and in Mainz it’s so big the city has a fountain to celebrate it. In Mainz, the carnival season is called Fastnacht, and so is the fountain.
The fountain, installed in 1967, has over 200 bronze figures connected to the city’s history and to its carnival celebrations. Among them are the trickster Till Eulenspiegel, Father Rhine, Mogontia (a mythical Mainz city goddess), a comic figure called Hans Wurst (sausage) and the ‘paragraph writer,’ a satire of bureaucrats.
There’s also a wary bronze cat hanging around at the bottom…
Carnival season starts each year on November 11th, but its highlights and wildest moments are between late January and Ash Wednesday; there’s a break in December for the Christmas and Advent seasons. In other parts of Germany it goes by other traditional names including Fasching, Karneval,
Near the fountain on Schillerplatz are two statues that are part of the Fastnacht story. One is a Guard Drummer of the Mainzer Prinzengarde, one of the prominent carnival societies; the other is a jester dancing on a ball while holding a lantern and a jester’s rattle.
