The previous chapter referred to historian William McNeill's transhistorical concept of coordinated movement and sound making – as a “muscular bonding” – with the military drill, on the one hand, and community or village celebrations with dance, on the other (1995). In analysing the Schlageter myth and its commemorative festivals, I concentrated on the former category (military drill) for considering Nazi occupations of urban space in the 1920s and early 1930s. Following the Nazi takeover, as I pointed out, the national calendar was filled with a series of new events and appropriated public holidays. Such festivals, which took on increasingly elaborate forms after 1933, were specifically used to garner support and legitimisation for the National Socialist Party. Having considered examples of military-influenced events, I will now reflect on McNeill's latter category of community festivals with folk dance, which I will link to the Rhineland carnival of the interwar period.

The trend towards a festivalisation of the everyday during the 1930s will be examined through a case study of carnival celebrations in Düsseldorf. Similar to the Schlageter memorial day, carnival involves a gathering of large crowds, ritual elements and event organisation. There are also comparable call-and-response elements, songs and singing, marching bands, processions and large crowds involved in the carnival parade. Moreover, the local orientation of the carnival festival and its characteristic sounds, as I will show, were also increasingly claimed for the Nazi Party's nationalist project. Yet unlike the retrospective creation of Albert Leo Schlageter as a Nazi martyr, carnival was a pre-existing tradition that marked the changing seasons, similar to May Day or Harvest Day. Carnival also had its own historical repertoire of role-reversal, spectacle, excessive behaviour and rites of popular justice, with the election of a local prince used to stage an alternative representative of the people each year. The German carnival period suggests a different temporality, since it is commonly referred to as the “Fifth Season.” Carnival might be seen as a seasonal event, yet the developments around German carnival in the interwar period in fact illustrate how aspects of its practices spilled over the temporal boundaries of this “Fifth Season” into the rest of the year and into everyday life. The status of the “festival” under National Socialism, I will argue, provided a basis for establishing a certain continuum between carnival and violence as popular rites involving both self-affirmation and exclusion.