Easter, Eastern, Ostern

Easter, Eastern, Ostern

For a number of years, I performed the same annual ritual as Easter approached. In the grey industrial offices where I worked as an English trainer, I would commandeer a whiteboard and write the same message in large, unmissable print: Remember! It’s Easter not Eastern. From the outside, this may have seemed a rather pedantic message to display, even if it was for a room of German office workers, and you’d probably be right. After all, being pedantic is the job description of most language teachers. However, there was a method in my madness. One of the top questions I would get from my class participants as Lent began and Easter hove into view was “Is it happy Eastern or happy Easter?”, the confusion coming from the frequent mispronunciation/mistranslation of “Frohe Ostern!” (Happy Easter). Sometimes the asker would tell me a colleague had sworn on their life that it was “Eastern”, while at other times, someone presenting the monthly figures might have said it and left a room of developers scratching their heads. After fielding the same question from class participants, managers in hallways, and anyone else who heard me speak English, I decided on the whiteboard message. Perhaps it was all the Agile methodology I was surrounded by, but it certainly streamlined the process.

It was actually quite nice to finally have an Easter tradition, other than attempting to eat my bodyweight in chocolate. Despite being raised by an Anglican vicar, Easter was never really much of an event in our household growing up. If anything, it just meant we would have to go to church more. Of course, my siblings and I could all look forward to getting chocolate eggs of varying sizes, however, this was another mark against Easter, in my opinion. As the youngest, my chocolate egg would always be the smallest in the family. For decades I assumed it was my parents playing favourites, until I had my own children and witnessed the sugar-fuelled insanity of a small child on Class-A chocolate.

The lack of traditions in my own family seemed to extend to most of the people I knew. Easter was generally seen as a crap Christmas among my friends. Sure you got chocolate and school holidays, but no one was getting Ghostbusters action figures from the Easter Bunny. These formative experiences of holiday boredom, punctuated by a weekend of stomach aches brought on from inhaling chocolate, did not prepare me for Easter in Germany.

Unlike my memories of Easters past in the UK, Germany seems to take things a little more seriously. I’ve always loved the Easter decorations that can be seen in many homes here, from hand-carved Easter rabbits on doorsteps, to the ubiquitous bush decorated with plastic eggs, Germans go all out for a holiday that is seemingly an afterthought in many other places. Obviously chocolate is a big part of proceedings, but another difference is the general lack of large chocolate eggs. It’s actually far more common to see normal eggs get into the Easter spirit as supermarkets, bakeries and butchers sell pre-painted hard boiled eggs, which do look nice, if not quite as alluring as chocolate.

Not all of Germany is enamoured with celebrating Easter however. The years of the DDR have left their mark on the east of the country and it’s significant that many of the events held in cities such as Leipzig and Dresden have a distinctly secular feel. Nevertheless, it's still possible to find performances of Passion Plays there, often in the same way Germans have been doing for centuries. These live performances of the Easter story, usually including some poor actor pretending to be crucified, can be seen across the whole of the country. One of the largest national TV stations, RTL, broadcasts their own version in the run-up to Easter. 2022’s was a modern retelling, with Jesus in a duffel coat, taking selfies with his fans.

Religion for the TikTok generation aside, there are lots of different ways Germany comes alive as the weather improves and the Easter holidays begin. Most towns and cities have some kind of Easter fair/ Volksfest, with rollercoasters, funhouses, and naturally, beer tents. In Bavaria especially, there will be many people dusting off their Trachten and preparing to raise a Maß or dance on a wobbly beer bench this weekend. There’s something to be said for these events, and although they may differ in style and, and depending on the state, beer quality, they act as a unifying cultural norm.

It’s reasonable that many people may not want to sit in a beer tent and for those people there’s usually an Ostermarkt to visit instead. Germany loves an open air market, and like the Easter fairs, most cities have one. The highlight of any open air market here is not actually something as prosaic as the food or some nice Easter decorations. By far the most amusing and entertaining part of these markets is the various market stalls attempting to sell punters some marvellous new kitchen gadget.

Anyone who’s seen an infomercial or watched a shopping channel will instantly know the drill. Essentially, what you have is a very confident person attempting to sell you the “world’s sharpest scissors” or a “modern way to slice an onion”, which entails the sharpest blade ever invented, surrounded by brightly covered plastic, preferably green. I could spend hours watching these salespeople work, it’s QVC but live and in-person. I’m always mesmerised watching them cut a carrot in 2.1 seconds, while telling an audience of pensioners why the knives they’ve had at home for the last ten years are dog shit.

I’m not a gullible man, but I always find myself about to buy one of these inane tools. Usually, it’s my wife who snaps me out of my consumer trance, but sometimes, just sometimes she falls under the same spell of some shiny plastic tool that we both know deep down will be relegated to the same cupboard we keep a dust-covered sandwich maker in. Only the other day we found ourselves handing over our hard-earned cash for some such kitchen gadget. As we were discussing it, the salesperson overheard us speaking English and smoothly began to chat us up, in English. We paid and as we were about to leave, they waved and shouted after us “Happy Eastern!”.

Proofreader: @ScandiTina

Image Credit

Photo by Meghan Rodgers on Unsplash

Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash

Photo by Marco Pregnolato on Unsplash

You can't go home, you can't go back (Copy)

You can't go home, you can't go back (Copy)

On Constant Pause

On Constant Pause