The first May, a bright opposite pole to Helloween? – Diepresse.com

Anyone who rises from the Viennese Kahlenberg to the Stefaniewarte will come across an enigmatic stone. « Artist Maifeste », including three faded engravings-a hammer, a circle, a symbol that can be interpreted with imagination as a brush-and a number of years, from 1846 to 1871.

What was celebrated here? And how? Thanks to the historian Vladimir Aichelburg you can find on the net: the organizer was the Albrecht-Dürer-Verein, from which the Künstlerhaus association became in 1861. You read about moves with theater and singing, over boxes and sack hopping, about costumes from Don Quichotte to Heinrich Jasomirgott to King Mai and his court fool. The festival was called a Gschnas from 1868.

A Gschnas in May? Didn’t he belong in the carnival? Apparently not: his exuberance, suddenly interrupted by Lent, was resumed in May. Without binding to Christian, pagan or political appointments: the said artists mostly took place on May 20. The stroller would have suspected it on May 1st.

First the ring road, then the Prater

Why actually? At that time, the association that has dominated this day with the day of work, the « Fighting Day of the Working Class », as it is called in a noble left pathos language, did not exist at the time. This tradition began in Australia in 1856, in 1886 in North America – with a general strike to enforce the eight -hour day – in 1889 in England, 1890 in Vienna. With a rally – no, not on the ring road, but in the Prater. In the green. « Thousands of bourgeois and petty bourgeoisies will certainly be happy to grant the hundreds of thousands of proletarians, once the famous awakening of nature, which all poets praise and what the factory constraint notices so little, » wrote Victor Adler in the « Arbeiterzeitung ».

« Boward to May 1st! » It is said to this day, and after the deployment to the town hall, the SPÖ only invites you to the « Mercato Rosso » in front of the party headquarters and then to the Maifest in the Prater. The brass bands that accompany the march are rented out of the federal states with a few exceptions – such as the wonderful music worker chapel. From places, where the first May is not as a deployment, but in the form of a maypole and other common customs.

The bright reflection of Halloween

This holiday is an overlay, a symbiosis of two different traditions. This applies to many of our holidays. But mostly a Christian festival overlaps old, « pagan » traditions. Easter, for example, combines the festival of the resurrection of Christ – which is founded in many ways on the Jewish Pessach – with spring customs from eggs to the Easter fire. Also at Christmas, the schedule collision with pre- and non-Christian festivals, such as Sol Invictus or the Saturnalia, is not completely accidental. And All Saints’ Day was laid on November 1st – initially in Ireland in the late eighth century: on the Celtic moon festival Samhain. The like many festivals – e.g. B. Christmas – started the evening before. The interpretation of the Samhain night as an encounter between living and the dead is a basis for the Halloween, which has been booming for many years, of which is again Christian.

The counterpart in the other half of the year, the bright reflection of Samhain, so to speak, was the Celtic festival on May 1st or on the night of May 1st. The traditions of the Maypole and the Maikönigin – perhaps a rest of the veneration of a goddess of fertility – are going back to this Celtic season festival. Some etymologists derive its name from a word for light fire. The corresponding fire rites could be combined in a playful way with the torchlight procession of socialist youth, which traditionally takes place on the evening of April 30, under the motto « Future instead of crisis! ».

Social Democratic figurehead with angel wings

The special thing about May 1st is that there was no Christian festival on this date: On this festive day, old, seasonal rites are not overlaid by Christian content, but by secular, political. Whose visual language can naturally wear religious features. For example, the title page of an Austrian Maiiech script from 2001 (see illustration) about the stylized encounter of a worker (with a hammer in hand) with an intellectual (or an artist?) A female figure with angel wings, hinted gloriol and red cloth.

However, elements of the old spring festival can be found in the song of the Social Democratic first May, albeit rarely. For example, a email published in the « Arbeiterzeitung » in 1890, published by the politically committed, wrote Andreas Scheu: « Finally, winters are backed up again, and young Lenz storms up on his sun car. » It ends in eschatological exuberance: « Because we know what we want: a big, sophisticated world-solving day! »

In the « international », which is traditionally sung at the end of the SPÖ rally on the Rathausplatz, there is talk of the « last battle » instead of the « world solution », the green does not occur in it. And in the touching « song of work », the hymn of Viennese social democracy? On Rathausplatz you are limited to two stanzas, but the ten-strophy text written by the engraver Josef Zapf in 1867 describes the history of man as a covenant with the « high bride » work in a solemn arc. Nature initially occurs in the form of « Finstrer forests », through which the primeval man « crawled », « still shy and wild », then after the settlement of settlement as a « own field » that is ordered. « Who created the beneficial plow? » Is asked, the answer is clear: « The work that never creates enough. The work is up! »