A German "Karneval"? You gotta be kiddin'

From "This Week in Germany":

While all eyes are on Libya and other parts of the Arab world going through breathtaking political change as we speak, a different kind of public unrest has gripped large parts of Germany. As in northern Africa, spirited citizens have defied authority, stormed the bastions of political and administrative power, and wrestled control from reluctant apparatchiks. They now rule the streets.
All this might involve a fair amount of alcohol, but, unlike the unrest in Libya, it is a completely non-violent affair. The only weaponry used by the rebel forces, who are entirely female, are scissors with which they cut off the ties of cornered bureaucrats in a time-honored ritual. With a sense of premonition and in acceptance of their fate, their victims leave their best Hermes tie at home that day and trade it in for an outdated model destined for charity. Being a good sport about it, they then join the fray and parade around with their amputated status insignia for the rest of the day. I am certain that Sigmund Freud would have a lot to say about all of this, but – not to worry – we will not get into it here.
In the Rhineland and other parts of western and southwestern Germany, “Weiberfastnacht” marks the actual beginning of Karneval, also known there “as the fifth season”. Since we Germans pride ourselves on being an orderly and well-organized people, this temporary take-over happens everywhere at the exact same: Thursday, 11.11 am. From then that point until the dawn of Ash Wednesday, when all the fun ends and dreary Lent sets in, Karneval rules supreme and not much else gets done.
My first full exposure to Karneval dates back to my initial years in the Foreign Service, when Germany was still divided and Bonn the seat of government. As a Cold War child who grew up in fear of the malevolent designs of the Soviets lurking at our borders, I was rather amazed to see operations in the Foreign Office and the other ministries grind to an almost complete halt. The disproportionally high numbers of Rhinelanders in our staff embraced the various festivities with a vengeance, while many of my colleges hailing from protestant northern Germany felt uneasy about the entire affair and used all sorts of excuses to stay at a safe distance. At any rate, not much got done anywhere else in the Federal Government, either.
I remain convinced that in 1991, when Parliament passed its vote to reinstall Berlin as the German capital, one of the underlying motives that nobody really wanted to talk about was to get government operations safely out of the party zone. The Cold War might have been over, but why chance anything for the future? In hindsight, we should all be ever so thankful that nothing went amiss and that the Soviets must have had really lousy intelligence. All they needed to do was to time their operations for the period between Weiberfastnacht and Fat Tuesday. They would in all likelihood not have risked too much. Except, of course, their ties.
Bernd von Muenchow-Pohl