Bernemer Kerb (the Bornheim parish fair)

If you did not grow up in Hesse, a Kerb needs explaining. It is a Kirchweih, a church consecration fair, which in modern terms means a funfair, except that a Kerb carries a thick layer of custom that a plain carnival does not. The historian Achilles August von Lersner recorded a festival in Bornheim held for the first time on April 20, an Easter Monday, in 1608, and historians suspect the tradition is far older. The Bernemer Kerwe Gesellschaft, founded in 1932 to preserve the festival, treats 1608 as the official birth date because that is the one that can be proven. The fair later moved to August, to the Sunday between St. Lawrence's Day and the Feast of the Assumption, and it has stayed there.

Parish fairs were not always welcome. At the end of the 17th century the Bernemer Kerb was banned outright by public decree, a ban that was only lifted in 1812, possibly because by then it had become one of the most popular festivals in Frankfurt. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a Frankfurt native, attended, and the Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck was a welcome guest. The fair paused during both world wars.

Three elements make a real Bernemer Kerb. The Kerwebaum is a spruce, cut in the city forest on the Kerb Saturday with help from foresters, driven to the fairground and raised into a two-meter hole lined with concrete sleeves. The Kerwelisbeth, a symbolic figure, is burned on the Bernemer Wednesday, in the same spirit as the carnival figures burned on Ash Wednesday elsewhere in Germany. Local legend explains her as a quarrelsome wife whom the neighbors tied to a debarked spruce in the woods so they could celebrate in peace, until lightning struck the tree. That is why the Kerb tree has its bark stripped. The Gickelschmiss, roughly translated as cock-hitting, involves no animals at all: the player is blindfolded, spun around three times and sent off to smash a clay pot with a flail, to the enthusiastic unhelpfulness of everyone watching.