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| My gripes with Halloween in Germany | Celebrating Halloween in Germany is a relatively new phenomenon that I believe is a manifestation of the ego-centered and hedonistic state of the German society. | 2024-10-31T23:00:00+0200 | false | true | false | true |
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{{< figure src="IMGP8429_G.JPG" alt="Halloween in Jamaica Plain, 2009" title="Halloween in '09, Jamaica Plain, Boston, MA © Daniel Kraus">}}
In the three years that I lived in Boston, Massachusetts, while persuing my postdoctoral fellowship at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Halloween was a wonderful event. We had a little appartment literally under the roof of a very nice and welcoming family in Boston's Jameica Plain neighbourhood. The family was not just our landlords -- they quickly became friends. We celebrated all kinds of events together: the Red Sox' Win of the World Series in 2007, birthdays, Thanksgiving, ... and Halloween.
{{< figure src="IMGP8436_G.JPG" alt="Halloween in Jamaica Plain, 2009" title="Halloween in '09, Jamaica Plain, Boston, MA © Daniel Kraus">}}
Halloween has a long tradition in the United States and elsewhere. Where we used to live in Boston, the entire street celebrated together. The street was divided into two halves that took turns in organizing the event each year. Everybody met outside. There was live music, and of course the kids did the trick-or-treat thing. I loved it.
{{< figure src="IMGP8437_G.JPG" alt="Halloween in Jamaica Plain, 2009" title="Halloween in '09, Jamaica Plain, Boston, MA © Daniel Kraus">}}
Growing up in Germany in the 1980s, I was accustomed to St. Martin's Day on or around 11 November in commemoration of St. Martin of Tours who is said to have divided his coat to share it with a poor person.
We would walk through our neighbourhood, ring people's door bells, and when someone opened we would sing a song about St. Martin and ask for sweets. When I thought about this now and before it occurred to me to write a blog post about this, I seemed to remember that we would afterwards give most of the sweets to children in need (refugees, in fact) that had found shelter in a nearby facility. However, I now believe that we did this only on a similar occasion in early January when we celebrated Epiphany with the Star singers which also involved walking around, singing, and collecting sweets. So St. Martin's day had a lot to do with asking for sweets for our own consumption and pleasure and not so much about caring and sharing, and this is important to keep in mind. It is also important to realize that this tradition around St. Martin was a regional thing and nothing nationwide (as I learned from an article on Wikipedia).
In recent years, Halloween has grown very strong in Germany, and I believe that this is a result of deliberately injecting the tradition into our culture. Interestingly, this is also Wikipedia's view (see references in the linked article).
And that's my gripe with celebrating Halloween in Germany. There's nothing wrong with partying and having a good time with friends and family. But this event is tightly linked to buying and consuming stuff, and it is driven by "the industry". Again, there's nothing wrong in itself with "the industry" trying to sell stuff to people. But I do think that this is an example of how people can be made to do things. Just like lemmings, everybody is following suit.
Halloween in Germany, as I see it, is a festival of hedonism. It has nothing to to with sharing, it has nothing to do with taking a break and thinking about the faithful departed, but it has a lot to do with buying stuff and consuming stuff that you don't really need.
For me, Halloween in Germany is an example for the state of our society.
Having said that, I greatly enjoyed the more or less spontaneous Halloween party that we had at our neighbors' place tonight ;-)