A German Folk Festival
Photographs: Rudi Meisel, Timm Rautert, Michael Wolf
Report: Bernd Müllender
Text contributions: Eugen Drewermann, Herbert Engemann, Peter Maiwald
Published in 1992 by: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne

Otl Aicher had asked FSB to give the community of Brakel, its employees and itself some lasting souvenir of their home environment, one that people would still like to pick up and browse through several generations later. In search of a suitable subject, we found St. Anne’s Day (Annentag), the greatest and most ancient local folk festival around Brakel.

Three photographers of the Visum Group, Hamburg (Rudi Meisel, Timm Rautert, Michael Wolf), a free-lance journalist from Aix-la-Chapelle (Bernd Müllender) and three guest authors (the Paderborn church critic and psychoanalyst Eugen Drewermann, the curator for local culture and tradition in Brakel, Herbert Engemann and the Düsseldorf poet Peter Maiwald) were engaged to contribute to this project.

Our cooperation with Eugen Drewermann presented no problems, but his article caused a major upheaval in the small town of Brakel. It was probably not so much the article itself, a psychoanalytical interpretation of the Brother Grimm fairy-tale "The Maid from Brakel”, but rather the author’s reputation as a dreaded church critic, that turned the entire FSB project into a scandal for the inhabitants of Brakel. The parish council of the local Catholic church wrote a long letter, admonishing the then managing director of FSB. Other citizens of Brakel, such as a well-known bank manager, also expressed their profound displeasure.

This provincial farce must be seen in its historical perspective for proper understanding. As part of the ancient Nethegau region, the town of Brakel has been under the jurisdiction of the Catholic monastery and diocese of Paderborn from the early Middle Ages and is surpassed only by the Eichsfeld and Münster regions as an area of staunch Catholicism, where right or wrong is defined by what is right or wrong in the eyes of the high-ranking clergy. Perhaps the fairy tales and anecdotes collected during the Romantic period by the Grimm Brothers and their Bökendorf circle of friends in Eastern Westphalia, the Weser Hills and the hilly area around Kassel, are still on the Index even today.

Jürgen Braun then recommended that Drewermann’s critics should read "The Great Migration” by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, a book that had just been released. It describes how the inhabitants of a kraal in the African savannah consider no one but themselves as respectable human beings, while anyone outside their own community is considered a cannibal. The contents of this book convinced at least one member of the parish council, who wrote a letter of apology to FSB at the end of the year.