duly ‘fooled’ by them: spontaneous, intense, disinhibited, comical encounters that often become abiding memories for all concerned. Thus, wherever masks are worn across the world in a variety of contexts, these magical moments arise and can also last for hours or even days, in which the real person disappears behind the disguise and thus becomes completely one with his or her mask. “No one knows who I am!” This is especially true in the traditional ‘Jester’s town’ of Elzach in the Black Forest, thirty kilometres northeast of Freiburg. The jester or fool1 remains anonymous, that is the ‘prime directive’ here and is a special feature, almost a trademark in the broad Swabian-Alemannic Fastnacht or Fasnet region. For it would be a ‘mortal sin’ if the age-old, traditional carnival figure, the so-called Schuttig of nationwide notoriety, were to appear in public without a mask, without its larval camouflage. It would probably be less offensive to many carnival devotees if someone were to run naked through the town throughout the year than on Fasnet without a mask! And in order not to be recognised, many a Schuttig, should his gait or posture betray his identity, secretly changes his ‘face,’ namely the mask, every now and then. For the variety of masks types in Elzach is simply enormous: there are grimaces, devil and beard masks, bear and fox grimaces, so-called traditional mundle, longnoses, so-called lätsch and many more besides, all appearing in myriad variations and multiple decorative styles; this includes various rare types, such as the gruesome dotegfriss (dead man’s ‘physog’), who explicitly embodies the “memento mori” admonition, i.e. “remember you must die” – itself not the preserve of Ash Wednesday – to the unfortunates who are unlucky enough to encounter him. Or, as the guild master proclaims for all those involved in the unbridled foolishness at the start of every Fasnet: “So, use the short time now so that none of you might come to regret it later …!” For many of today’s young Schuttig Fools, carnival denotes “home, security, childhood, solidarity”. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re a fox, a longnose or a 2 Helmut Kubitschek »Alt Wieber Larve (Elzacher Larve)« “Crone’s Larval Mask (Elzach Larval Mask)”
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