What do you think of this fact?
Pumpkins, witch hats, kids at the door shouting “trick or treat”: Halloween can feel like it has always been around. In Germany, though, it has only really been a thing for a little over 30 years. And the reason it got so big has to do with carnival, of all things, which was called off in 1991.
The winter without Rosenmontag
The Gulf War began in mid-January 1991. According to the newspaper inFranken, it quickly became clear that Karneval and Fasching would not happen that year. Many celebrations and parades were cancelled, including Cologne’s Rosenmontag parade. Cologne’s carnival alone draws about 1.2 million people on its main days, according to The Local.
For the costume business, that was a problem. According to PR consultant Dieter Tschorn, quoted by The Local, every week less of carnival season means about five percent less in sales. Losing an entire carnival hurt accordingly.
A holiday born from a press release
So the industry went looking for a second excuse to dress up. According to the Abendzeitung München, the carnival cancellation of 1991 was what set off the Halloween hype: the carnival business started marketing Halloween to make up for lost sales. According to the paper, the carnival section of the German toy industry association was counting on sales in the millions. Tschorn, the industry’s PR consultant, calls himself the “father of German Halloween”, according to deutschland.de.
Tschorn told The Local how small it all started: in 1994, his industry’s Halloween turnover was zero. On September 4, 1994, he sent the first Halloween press release to the German media. They picked up the topic year after year, and by the end of the 90s, Tschorn says, Halloween was already a cult. Especially in northern Germany, where carnival is hardly celebrated, many people jumped at the new chance to dress up, according to the Berliner Kurier.
From zero to millions
At the end of October 2009, according to the Abendzeitung, Halloween products brought in 29.6 million euros, including about 972,000 makeup sets. Even the pumpkin benefited: once seen as food for the poor in Germany, it has been in demand as a vegetarian delicacy since Halloween arrived.
The toy industry obviously didn’t invent the holiday. The name comes from “All Hallows’ Eve”, the evening before All Saints’ Day, and according to the Berliner Kurier, Halloween grew out of customs around that day. There is no real evidence for a link to the Celtic festival of Samhain, the paper says. But what brought it to Germany was mostly an industry that had lost a whole carnival.
Carnival got its own ghost in 1991 too: because the Rosenmontag parade was cancelled, anti-war protesters and carnival revelers marched through central Cologne together. According to koeln.de, that is where the Geisterzug, the “ghost parade”, in its current form comes from.
So if a skeleton rings your doorbell tonight, there’s a cancelled carnival parade behind it too.