The Republic of Fools

And the loveliest three days of the year

In writing, we sometimes think about the city as character. Dickens’s London or Joyce’s Dublin or Fitzgerald’s New York.

But what about city as story?

Next week, Basel, Switzerland becomes just that.

From February 23 through 25, Basel will tell a tale. Of the past year. Of politics. Of global events. Of social and societal inanities.

It’s called Fasnacht.

The narrative begins in the dark, precisely at 4 a.m. on Monday (Morgenstreich). All lights in the city will be extinguished prior to the clock striking four. And it will be quiet in its fullest definition. Eerie. Then, a piccolo will sound in the ink black night, followed instantly by hundreds more, and the cliques will begin to march.

Thousands of people will be in the streets.

What makes city as story versus city as character is that Basel will actually do something. Under the guise of carnival, it will weave a tale about itself and the world.

To begin to understand carnival storytelling, you have to start with the mask. It’s the oldest ‘technology’ in use for this purpose. And of course, the Greeks had a hand in it. When they put masks on their actors, they were doing something more than costuming. They were separating the speaker from the speech. The mask allowed a single performer to embody a variety of characters or archetypes. It granted a certain permission to say things that otherwise might have consequences. The mask liberated. The wearer spoke freely. The listener focused only on what was said.

The court jester of later times or the fools in Shakespeare are also examples of the mask. Mocking the king. Talking back to the queen. Speaking truth as innocent as a child.

For 72 hours in Basel, things will be openly said that otherwise might not be so public. And one of the unique aspects of this storytelling is that it is collective. Let’s get back to 4 a.m.

In the dark of night, cliques begin the non-stop march that will last the duration of Fasnacht (72 hours). Each clique has selected a theme (known as a Sujet), decorated a lantern (Laterne), and composed a leaflet (Zeedel). There are numerous masks and costumes. Not only do groups march through the streets, playing music (drums and piccolos), but they will also perform privately in venues throughout the city.

The Laterne are beautifully painted, quite large, and satirical. Any writing on them is in the local dialect (Swiss German). Collectively these lanterns tell a broader, global story, and on Monday evening they are gathered around the Münster (cathedral) for viewing where they remain until the end of the festivities. Just as often, they also target local businesses, officials, and institutions. With a bite. No one and nothing is out of bounds.

The Zeedel is a long scroll of paper, a flyer containing rhymed, witty verse, and it is handed out. Again, it’s in Swiss German. Think of it as a cross between a political cartoon and an op-ed piece.

The city becomes a stage, and the characters are specific costumes and masks that derive from centuries past. The year’s events are the plot, and it’s a collective critique of the prior year. What’s interesting and distinctive is that the entire community is engaging in this storytelling, intertwining their plot lines as they crisscross the city and each other.

There is one more storytelling form, though I haven’t experienced it yet. Throughout Fasnacht, Schnitzelbank singers perform in the restaurants and bars of the city, delivering the rhymed satirical verse about the year’s events, hitting on the political, social, absurd. They hold up illustrated panels for the audience – this was how storytelling was done in the past when levels of literacy and education were low. Each panel hints at the theme without giving away the punchline, and the structure is exactly that of a joke: setup, misdirection, payoff. In many ways, the content has an element of public scrutiny, a questioning of civic accountability. The masked singer, performing one night only, within a centuries-old tradition of licensed misrule, can say things that no newspaper can print.

Basel has been here for a long, long time. The earliest recorded documents related to Fasnacht date from the late 1300s. The origins of this event have evolved, but the storytelling remains central. It eventually emerged to do the work of dissent, and to do so publicly.

During Fasnacht, Basel generates the narrative. It has an arc: a beginning with Morgenstreich in darkness and silence, a middle with the corteges and the noise and the satire, and the end with the close on Wednesday and the city back in spic-and-span shape on Thursday morning.

So Fasnacht turns the volume up on the multiple points of view, allowing for city as story. And the story is always about Basel, even when it is pointing to global events. The freedom to satirize, to do what local newspapers can’t, to speak truth to power in a communal way with distributed authorship, and to tell this story at the right moment, this specific moment.

Basel is a community that understands how storytelling works. It gets that mask is not concealment but openness. And it unfolds its narrative over the loveliest three days of the year. Can you hear the piccolo?

Fasnacht kicks off at 4 a.m. CET on Monday, February 23.