Hermann and Heino are already completely enthusiastic.

“We sit here in the sun and look at the people – just awesome!” With their black T-shirts with a sailor motif and the slogan “Oh ha, north German panic attack”, the two East Frisians – 59 and 51 years old, dark sunglasses , long gray beards – made comfortable on a bollard at the edge of the great stream of people.

It's Friday midday and the festival hustle and bustle is slowly beginning around the Nürburgring.

The traffic on the roads around the racetrack in the Eifel is getting heavier by the minute, the fans who have mostly arrived on Wednesday and Thursday are coming from the campgrounds, and the “Lidl Rock Store” is getting fuller and fuller.

Mountains of beer pallets, toast packs, shrink-wrapped sausages, canned ravioli and rubber boots are ready in the huge tent.

Hermann and Heino don't want to buy anything anymore, just look.

"I really wanted to do it again before I turned 60," says Hermann.

And because most of the Corona rules have finally fallen, his wish actually came true a few months before his birthday.

Peter Badenhop

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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Three years after the previous edition, "Rock am Ring" is taking place again this weekend.

A good 90,000 spectators are expected on the grounds of the Nürburgring in the Eifel, 80,000 more at the parallel festival "Rock im Park" on the Zeppelinfeld in Nuremberg, which is also sold out, two thirds of whom had already bought their tickets for the two previous years.

Around 70 bands are scheduled to play on each of the three stages over the three days of the festival, including the American punks Green Day, the German rapper Marteria, the Canadian blues rocker Danko Jones, the British rock trio Muse, the Italian Eurovision winners Maneskin and the Danish metal rockers Volbeat.

It is the 35th edition of the largest and best-known music festival - due to the pandemic it is taking place two years late.

Two and a half years festival abstinence

Organizers and fans at the race track in the Eifel have experienced a lot over the past few decades: sweltering heat and cold waves, downpours and thunderstorms, traffic chaos and traffic jams stretching for kilometers, the demolition after a storm, an evacuation due to a terrorist alarm, a two-year break due to a lack of spectator interest at the end of the Eighties, a two-year interlude on the old airfield in Mendig in 2015 and 2016. Once a lightning strike paralyzed the center stage, another time Campino from the Toten Hosen climbed onto the stage roof with a broken leg.

Axel Rose played Guns N' Roses until three in the morning, Moses Pelham beat the crowd, and Neil Young played until the audience was almost empty.

Basically, there was everything at the Ring that could be at such a large open-air festival - only a forced break due to a pandemic, which at times paralyzed almost all public life in the country, until the first lockdown in the Spring 2020 no one can imagine.

So now – almost two and a half years after Germany was collectively forced to work from home and on the sofa – the joy and excitement that the masses can flock to the race track, to the campsites and in front of the stages is all the greater.

"Finally partying and going wild again," Finn bursts out.

The man from Brome near Wolfsburg came to the ring with his father and a little more than a dozen friends.

He's been there three times, and he also had a ticket for 2020 - but then the pandemic came.

"Dude, I couldn't wait any longer, I was so hot," says the 21-year-old student in his blue and white Hawaiian shirt.

"And it's so nice to be back in a sweaty, dancing crowd and meet other people.