As of: 02/20/2023 7:05 p.m
After a two-year Corona break, hundreds of thousands of fools and jesters celebrated Shrove Monday again – mostly peacefully. The political criticism of the motto car was pointed as usual. Above all, Russia’s President Putin got his fat off.
For the first time in three years, the Shrove Monday processions rolled through the foolish strongholds at the climax of the street carnival. In 2021 and 2022 the trains were canceled due to the corona pandemic, but now the highest holiday of the carnival people took place again as usual. Hundreds of thousands celebrated on the streets in mostly sunny weather.
alone in Dusseldorf According to an estimate by the Düsseldorf Carneval Committee, around 600,000 people were out and about. A spokesman for the Mainz Carnival Association assumed 550,000 visitors. A spokeswoman for the Cologne Carnival festival committee, on the other hand, said it was impossible to seriously estimate the number of spectators. But there is “a very, very large rush” – even more than in the years before the pandemic.
Thousands of people also celebrated in other cities, including Mainz in Rhineland-Palatinate and Trier, Fulda in Hesse and Köthen in Saxony-Anhalt. In Halle in Saxony-Anhalt, the train was canceled after a motto car captured a 21-year-old. She was taken to the hospital with life-threatening injuries. It was initially unclear how the accident happened.
Caustic criticism of Putin in Düsseldorf: A motto car shows the Russian President taking a “bloodbath” in a bathtub in the Ukrainian national colors.
Image: dpa
Corrosive criticism of Putin
As is so often the case in carnival, the motto wagons on the Rose Monday parades were political. The carnivalists practiced caustic criticism in particular of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. In Cologne, for example, he kissed the devil and turned the world through a meat grinder as a vampire. In Düsseldorf, the Russian President took a bloodbath in a tub painted in the Ukrainian colors of blue and yellow.
In Mainz, Putin blew a cold east wind in the direction of EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who tried to protect herself with an umbrella. On another Mainz car, a sunflower confronted a tank: “F*** you, Putin!”.
A hesitant Chancellor Olaf Scholz was taken on the horns by a billy goat on the Düsseldorf train and pushed forward – the animal was labeled “Strack-Zimmermann”, the name of the energetic chairman of the defense committee. Meanwhile, the Green Economics Minister Robert Habeck had to swallow one toad after the other: nuclear power, rearmament and gas from dictatorships.
Celebrate in mild temperatures: Hundreds of thousands attended the Shrove Monday parade in Mainz.
Image: REUTERS
Motto car with Woelki satire
The Catholic Church was also represented again: the abuse scandal in the form of a devil wanted to drag Cologne Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki away with it, but he clung to the Cologne Cathedral with all his might, causing the church building to collapse.
The focal point of the “Free Iran” float was the head of a young woman with a “Mullarsch” caught in her flowing hair. “What these women are willing to do for their freedom is insane,” said the Düsseldorf wagon builder Jacques Tilly. “I really have the utmost respect for their courage.”
The Cologne Rose Monday procession, which celebrated its 200th anniversary this year, started for the first time in Deutz on the right bank of the Rhine and then crossed the Rhine to the inner city on the left bank of the Rhine. A small dream came true for TV presenter Johannes B. Kerner, because he was allowed to ride in one of the cars in Cologne for the very first time. Born in the Rhineland, he promised not to be stingy with camels – as a child it always bothered him that “they threw far too little”.