Lederhosen are an Argument

 “Trachten” is the name for traditional German clothing: lederhosen, dirndls, checkered shirts and sweaters with metal buttons shaped like edelweiss. But the Trachten worn by young people today are not always the frumpy skirts and aprons of the Von Trapp family before Maria got to them--they're satiny numbers worn boldly with stilettos, lederhosen with heavy metal T-shirts. It’s a national costume turned party wear: happy, kitschy, sexy, Bavarian.

Germans I’ve talked to aren’t sure to what change in Zeitgeist they should attribute the recent return to Trachten.  One woman told us that her mother wore dirndls, and that she associated interest in Trachten, forebodingly, with the 1930s. One of the concepts I teach in my Honors class is Benedict Anderson’s “imagined community” – the idea that nations and nationalisms arise primarily through a creative process in which we imagine that we are linked to others even though we will never meet them.  Rituals, pageants, and print and electronic media all facilitate these ways of imagining community.  And, of course, as our current political scene tells us, ethnic communities CAN fracture nation when their imagining becomes strong enough to turn violent.  I suppose in that sense, Trachten smacks of Bavarian nationalism.

Yet I’m not convinced that the resurgence of Trachten is a sign of scary nationalism. Kids in lederhosen and satin dirndls have grown up knowing only a Germany that is part of the European Union, part of a borderless economic and political entity. They are worried about about the power that the EU might wield over decisions that affect drugs, food, the environment, the contents of their clothes. A mega-nation, a global world, can be a lonely, more rootless place. No wonder, in a time in which it’s hard NOT to think about the constant flow of stuff and ideas and culture across borders, we tend to think about who we are, and seek solace in what we think we’ve always been.

Maybe that’s why I have a painting of the Mississippi River and an old map of my city on the wall of my dining room; why I tore up the nondescript conifers in my front yard and planted prairie grasses and native flowers; why we buy Wapsipinicon Peach tomato seeds every spring. I’m not from Iowa originally, but my mother is, and most of us need to know we are from somewhere, especially when our clothes are made in Cambodia and end up in Haiti.

You don't have to be German to get your Trachten on. Last spring, I watched the Trachten-wearers flowing  into the Mai-Dult festival, where they recognized each other as "Bavarian," if just for the night. I suppose it’s a way to forget the bigger, scarier meanings of what it might mean to be German, or Iraqi, or American, or Chinese, in the coming decades.  In the big tent at the Dult, I suspect they weren’t  thinking about the EU when they were singing “Die Haende zur Himmel,” the nutty drinking song by die Kolibris : they were thinking about how nice that guy (or girl) looked in his (or her) lederhosen, and how good the beer tasted.

If you sometimes feel so alone

Believe me, it doesn’t have to be that wayBecause tonight, we’re going to celebrate

The whole world is a community