Straubing is also slowly drying out, last week it only rained for a good half hour there. Unfortunately, the downpour pelted down in the very minutes when thousands of musicians, people wearing traditional costumes and clubs made their way to the Am Hagen fairground on Friday with magnificently decked out horse and carts and floats. The procession traditionally heralds the start of the Gäuboden folk festival, one of the biggest festivities in Bavaria. More than a million visitors are expected again by August 22nd. “Heavenly Father really showed humor there,” said Lord Mayor Markus Pannermayr, who, like many other guests, was soaking wet when he arrived at the festival site.
Certainly, everyone had been longingly waiting for the rain. “Maybe it was the Lord’s tears of joy,” speculated Pannermayr, because in Straubing nobody doubts that the Gäuboden folk festival is, according to the poet Max Peinkofer, a trumpet of paradise. All the worse that this parade festival was canceled two years in a row due to the corona. They calculated that the people of Straubing had to wait 1088 days for this day. For a city that starts counting down the days until the start of the next festival on the last day of the folk festival, an agonizing eternity.
The official opening took place on Saturday. This time, the people of Straubing had invited the Bavarian Finance Minister Albert Füracker (CSU) as a keynote speaker. Of course, this did not happen without ulterior motives, because a speaker has to bring a gift. And who should there be more to get than the finance minister? So the people of Straubing made three requests to Füracker. On the one hand, they need money for the renovation of the Carmelite monastery and for a police training center, on the other hand, the funding for a project in Straubing harbor is not enough.
Finance Minister Albert Füracker – here shortly before his opening speech at the Gäuboden folk festival – is usually immune to outbursts of humour.
(Photo: Sebastian Beck/Sebastian Beck)
Füracker, who is usually immune to outbursts of humour, but nevertheless used humorous formulations, said in the introduction that as finance minister he naturally had to keep an eye on the money. As a saver, he passed two projects on to his colleagues Aiwanger and Herrmann. However, he promised to sign the planning contract for the monastery, which triggered a similar satisfaction among the guests as the obligatory reception of the beer and chicken stamps.
The political potency of the Gäuboden folk festival can be read on the Instagram channel of Economics Minister Hubert Aiwanger (Free Voters). As soon as he moved out, Aiwanger did not fail to praise all the country women, bakers and waitresses, who are so rare anyway, for their commitment to the Schellnkönig. He linked the eulogy with some good advice (“Happy people at the festival – leave your worries behind”), which immediately earned him the recognition of the local Insta community (“Sauba Hubsi!”).
The Green politician Jürgen Trittin once canceled his appearance at short notice
The fact that only Bavarian politicians and dignitaries have been opening the Gäuboden folk festival for years is due to a scandal that the then Federal Environment Minister Jürgen Trittin (Greens) unleashed in 2004. Trittin canceled his performance at short notice, and it was not possible to find a replacement quickly. Out of necessity, the then Mayor Reinhold Perlak (SPD) and District Administrator Alfred Reisinger (CSU) opened the festival, with Reisinger castigating Trittin’s behavior with a dialect-colored angry speech. This speech fascinated the Bund Bairische Sprache language association so much that it awarded Reisinger an award for it. In 2005, Reisinger was the first recipient of the Bavarian language root, the awarding of which has been inextricably linked to the Gäuboden folk festival ever since. So far, 18 prominent representatives from politics, culture and science have been awarded the glass trophy, which is also very coveted because it is so rare and has far fewer bearers than, for example, the Bavarian Order of Merit.
The annals of the Gäuboden folk festival are full of brilliant performances, but also of all kinds of missteps. It wasn’t just Trittin that got the Straubing soul boiling. The then Federal Minister of Economics Günter Rexrodt (FDP) once needed three attempts as the keynote speaker to say correctly: “Let’s raise the bar.” Earlier, to the laughter of the audience, he had referred to the earthenware jug as “den Mass” and then as “das Mass”. His colleague in the minister, Rudolf Scharping (SPD), drew his lessons from this and opened his speech with the words: “I know that in Bavaria the measure of all things is measure.” In the wild 90s, the Federal Transport Minister Günther Krause (CDU) also stayed in Straubing. Unfortunately he didn’t know that he was in Straubing, he thought he was somewhere else.
Sometimes even the matadors of the CSU read the riot act to the people of Straubing. At the Gäuboden folk festival, Thomas Goppel made it clear to them that before they wanted to become a city of science, they should first watch BR Alpha as RTL. This statement did not do his popularity rating any good, but at least there were still enough staff in the festival tents at that time. This year there will be a lack of waiters, dishwashers and service staff at the back and front. Corona has completely messed everything up. And there is no end in sight. “The festival will definitely have an impact on the incidence,” says Mayor Pannermayr. Keeping your distance doesn’t work, at least the city gave out free self-tests. “Otherwise I appeal to people to take personal responsibility,” says Pannermayr. He himself will now hardly be found in the town hall. Worries or not – “public life in Straubing is shifting completely to the fairgrounds,” he says.