Most of the year it is just a meadow, a few hectares of empty space on the edge of the city.

A place with only one intention: to transform itself into a festival place once a year, for a week or just a weekend.

When people then stream towards the lights, the Ferris wheel from afar as a fixed point, when they immerse themselves in this overstimulation of flashing lights and fairground organ doodles, in this mixture of cotton candy and sausage smell, then it's time for the festival again.

Now the fairground will probably remain empty for a longer period of time.

The Munich Oktoberfest: canceled.

The Cannstatter Wasen: canceled.

The Dürkheim sausage market, after all the largest wine festival in the world: ditto.

There are almost 10,000 folk festivals in Germany, which, depending on the region, are sometimes called “Kirmes” or “Kerwe”, “Dult” or simply “Markt”.

Most of them either do not take place at all or in a very limited form this season.

After fair fans had to put themselves off last year, there won't be much more for them in 2021 than to remember earlier times.

Shaking crowds in the beer tent

But what is it that attracts people to the hustle and bustle between bumper cars and the ghost train? Sacha Szabo, entertainment scientist from Freiburg and probably one of the few folk festival theorists in Germany, has been thinking about this for 20 years. It was then that he came up with his subject when, as a doctoral student, he happened to get lost at the Freiburg Mass at night. Imagine the game theorist who had not been to the fairground for years and who was now amazed at this ecstasy like a strange wonderland. What caught his eye: “All these machines,” says Szabo, “which, unlike normal machines, do not produce any material goods. But an immaterial one: pleasure. "

The fairground as a place where wonderful money can be squandered, where norms do not apply and where you can shout out loud on the roller coaster, where people indulge in all kinds of noises, from alcohol to rides. Or as the sociologist says: “Folk festivals are necessary places for the extraordinary.” Szabo says these places are social cement, they create identity and community.

Exaggerated?

Anyone who once got up in the swaying mass of the beer tent, who once toasted their mutual friendship with their schoolmates at one at night, will say no.

The folk festivals are ultimately the same everywhere - the chain carousel is the “highest in Europe”, the sayings of the lottery booth owner are intrusive everywhere, “Profits!

Win!

Win! ”And, depending on the region, beer or wine is drunk.

But although these celebrations seem interchangeable, you somehow feel at home in the alleys at "your" festival.

Folk festivals are like offline tinder

And quite a few end up in front of the altar with friends from the next village - annual fairs are ideal dating places, says Szabo. If it is still terribly complicated in youth to establish intimate body contact, then off to the roller coaster: If you are already sitting in the narrow gondola, shoulder to shoulder, knee to knee, and the centrifugal forces help a little, “then it's easier to get this deliberate inadvertence to put your arm around someone. "

At the chip shop you can find out whether you can watch someone eating - an important requirement - and at the shooting range you can test whether you're lucky. The Ferris wheel, on the other hand, is the place for decelerated togetherness. "And if you are still struggling to find the right words by then, then you reach for the gingerbread heart to express what you are not wearing on your tongue," says Szabo.

In the pandemic, everyday life itself has now become "extra-ordinary": "It feels as if you are being spun around in the carousel and you only hope that the journey is over." to perceive precisely in its disdainful contradictions, then the festivals now threaten to lose this function. What will the Kirmes and Dult look like when they take place again in 2022, hopefully after three years? "In the long term, I believe that folk festivals will hardly change because they address needs that existed before Corona and will continue to exist afterwards," says Sacha Szabo. Namely to offer an escape from everyday life.