Thomas Feda still admits a certain residual nervousness when he strolled across the grounds on Ratsweg on Tuesday between the first set-ups for the 40-meter-high Ferris wheel and the already installed “Break Dancer”.

"I will probably not sleep again until after Friday", says the managing director of the municipal tourism and congress GmbH.

Then the Herbst-Dippemess' should open its doors, and there would be reason to assume that the festival atmosphere next to the ice rink can prevail until September 19th.

The last bratwurst stalls and a roller coaster will be set up these days, around 90 operators will be there when Mayor Peter Feldmann (SPD) opens the traditional folk festival on Friday at 2 p.m.

Daniel Meuren

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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Feda is a "burned child", as he himself says. Since the beginning of the pandemic, he has been standing in front of ready-to-use food stalls, carousels, roller coasters or Ferris wheels twice since the beginning of the pandemic, before a spring and autumn dip fair were canceled immediately before the official opening due to Corona. For the showmen, these were the most painful of many difficult days in the past 18 months, in which they had almost no opportunity to pursue their profession, until recently, for example, the Hamburg Cathedral or a folk festival in Worms again offered opportunities to earn money to a greater extent. "It is all the more important that we now have a perspective again and that we also have more planning security," says Thomas Roie, Chairman of the Frankfurt / Rhein-Main Showmen Association. He emphasizes,that politicians have financially well supported the around 5000 entrepreneurs in his branch and thus saved them from bankruptcy, but that now is the time to look for regulations that enable showmen to plan their work.

Legal maneuver

Roie, who himself runs a chain carousel at the Dippemess, while his wife and son are also represented with gastronomic offers on the site, is particularly pleased that folk festivals, as they are common in Frankfurt and Hesse, are now viewed differently than large beer tents. or wine festivals like the Munich Oktoberfest, which are primarily about alcohol consumption and less about fun for children. "We would have dared to do a dip measurement at very different times of Corona," he says. "These are completely different circumstances than at Oktoberfest or wine festivals, where the risk of infection is much greater." Now the first Volksfest in Frankfurt is also possible again because federal politics lifted the braking effect of an incidence value of 100 a few days ago.Otherwise the city would probably have been forced to cancel again.

In addition, the organizers have come up with a legal maneuver. The Dippemess' is declared as a temporary amusement park and is therefore subject to different regulations than a folk festival. "For the three weeks now, that's a leisure park like the Lochmühle or the Taunus Wonderland," says Mayor Feldmann. The fencing of the area, but also the restriction of visitors to a maximum of 5000 people at the same time, for example, are rules that Dippemess as an amusement park has to adhere to a little more strictly. On Ratsweg, the number of visitors is monitored with light barriers at the only entrance to the subway station and at the exit; the occupancy rate can be viewed online at any time on the Tourismus und Congress GmbH website.

From the beginning, the organizers have also worked with the 3G concept, which is now mandatory: only visitors who have been proven to be vaccinated, recovered or tested negative, who also have to carry photo ID with them, come to the site. Only children under six years of age are excluded. The mouth and nose protection in the form of a medical or FFP2 mask must always be worn where it gets tighter, such as when standing in line or in furious rides such as the roller coaster, where some tend to screeching aerosol.

For visitors who, thanks to an offer from the Red Cross on the site, even have the option of a spontaneous corona vaccination, the Dippemess should feel almost exactly the same as in previous decades, despite the requirements, even if a one-way street regulation over 1.4 Kilometers along the attractions. "Once you're in the middle of it all, it's just as fun as ever," promises Feda. From Friday on, that should also apply to him.