Konrad and Alexandra (pdf) - Rolf Gross

Fashing
Munich 1905
Once a year Dionysus lands in Munich. Half-drunk, in the middle of winter, the God sails
in his vine-slung boat onto the Königsplatz and puts up at the Glyptothek, where they keep his
drinking bowl. He reigns the town for an entire month.
They call the chaotic madness that seizes the entire town Fasching. The city comes to a
virtual standstill, the streetcars run erratically, the taxi drivers nap behind the wheel, the people
grope, exhausted, along the streets like sleepwalkers in the gray fog of February. Yet at night
they wake up and hasten in grotesque costumes to another orgiastic dance to revel the nights
away without restraint.
Free love rules the days and nights, to dance with one’s spouse or girlfriend is against
the heathen order.
The Moon is waning, for twenty-eight nights Saturn rules the heavens, until on Ash
Wednesday, under a new moon, the city plunges itself into repentance with the same fervor:
Confess your sins, repent your trespasses.
At the exclusive Ball des Nations in the large ballroom of the Bayrischen Hof, whirled
and turned self-important ambassadors and diplomats, the Bavarian aristocracy, the rich and
famous, professors, artists, writers, opera stars, the entire corps de ballet. The Dahls had paid
for their tickets.
Italian beauties and gigolos, Tyrolians, Mauriskentänzer, Morris dancers, a tribe of
American Indians, fakirs and Turkish sultans, an English gentleman a la Oscar Wilde, the
Marquis de Sade, Marx and Engels, French Republicans, monks, and circus people.
Konrad had come as a Georgian villain, a splendid, black, high fur hat, curve-tipped
boots, long, tight pantalons, and a short jacket, a dagger in his belt.
He was dancing with a shapely, grey-eyed Russian beauty with two long, artificial
braids. She spoke only broken German and had approached him in Russian hoping, as she
expressed it, that this gruzinskoi costyum gavarit po russkiy, and he had not had the heart to
disappoint her.
For days Katharina had been their indulging guide to this Munich madness. The night
before they had danced till morning at the Weisse Fest at the Max-Emanuel-Brauerei in
Schwabing, a small, neighborhood brewery, to which everyone came dressed in white. All food
was white, white mustard, white radishes, Weisswürste, and Weissbier. Konrad had been
wrapped in his bed sheet, Alexandra in a scanty petticoat. The revelers had been mostly
students, few wore masks. The Ball des Nations was, by comparison, a grand affair at which
nearly all celebrants, desperately wishing to remain incognito, wore masks, especially the
women.
Somewhere lost in this eddy danced Niko and Claudia, Katharina and Friedrich, who
had arrived separately, and Alexandra, dressed as a Tcherkassian beauty straight from the
thousand-and-one Arabian nights. Immediately separated and swallowed by the milling crowd,
Konrad had not seen her since they had arrived.
They had slept only a few hours during the day. Konrad felt drugged, his sensory
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