City of All Saints

As several notable bloggers have already mentioned, this past Wednesday was Reformation Day. I celebrated the occasion in proper Protestant fashion: I went clubbing.

The club was Gebäude 9, the same venue where I experienced a rather bizarre passion play during last month's Theater Nacht Köln. A former factory turned bar and dance club, Gebäude 9 houses parties much more successfully than it does theater, particularly bad theater with painfully obvious metaphors. The play, as you may recall, was a passion play with Jesus as an indie rocker, preaching authenticity and warning against selling out. It would have been clever if it weren't so heavy-handed.

Dance clubs are an interesting experience here. Cologne is often touted as the center of gay culture in Europe, and the KölnerInnen pride themselves on being "multi-kulti." Thus I was not surprised to find partygoers of every stripe. What did surprise me was the communal experience the club offered. I am not normally a fan of drum and bass music -- I'd never even heard of it until the night before -- but somehow, the pulsing music and heavy cigarette smoke¹ combined to create an atmosphere that was almost warm. I was particularly struck by the absence of sexual tension across the dance floor. To be sure there were couples about, doing what couples ...erm, do, but the general aura was much more simple and free-spirited. It was lively, and it was fun. And that was all.

The crowd had filled Gebäude 9 from wall to wall, a somewhat surprising sight for a Wednesday. No doubt this resulted from the next day being All Saints Day. This being a Catholic region of the country, All Saints Day is an official holiday. So the next morning² I went to the Dom, the cathedral, for Mass. In the plaza in front of the Dom, I passed a street performer doing balancing tricks on a unicycle. He had gathered a sizable crowd, so I paused briefly to watch. Upon entering the cathedral, I noticed attendance was sparse, which normally would not have surprised me. It occurred to me, however, that the crowd in the cathedral was far smaller than had been on the dance floor the night before. Indeed, it was even smaller than the gathering watching the street performer outside. My surprise waned throughout the Mass. While outside the people laughed and enjoyed the spectacle, inside they murmured through the hymns without enthusiasm and beat their breasts over their "ewige Schuld," their eternal guilt.

While the Dom lacked the festivity of Gebäude 9 or the street performer, the Mass offered contemplation, a reflection on what community is all about. In his homily, the priest spoke of both the consolation and the hardship of Christianity. He spoke of finding comfort in the family of the Church, but also of living up to the demands of what that community stands for. Community, in other words, is more than just a good feeling, more than a party or a good show. He was inspiring; it's unfortunate more people didn't hear him.

I have been thinking about these rather dichotomous twenty-four hours ever since. Many people in Germany, especially the younger generation, are by and large disaffected in regards to faith. And many of the faithful are disaffected in regards to them. I doubt anyone else from Gebäude 9 went to the Dom the next day. Nor could I imagine too many of the attendants of that Mass at a drum and bass club. I have heard it said that Cologne is a city of contradictions. The city shares a history with the Catholic Church since the middle ages, and its influence has continued into the twentieth century. As recently as the Second Vatican Council, the influential Josef Cardinal Frings hailed from Cologne, bringing with him an intelligent young theologian named Joseph Ratzinger. Yet the history of diversity and "Multi-Kulti" also has a strong tradition in Cologne, evident in the city's history of commitment to art and culture, and the amazing assortment of people who live here.

I am not so sure this dichotomy is a contradiction at all. In both Gebäude 9 and the Dom, I saw the people of Cologne seeking, in different ways, the same thing: a sense of community, a sense of belonging. It reminds me of that amateurish passion play I saw at Gebäude 9 last month, with Jesus as indie rocker. Perhaps the image is not such a bad metaphor for this city, with its different groups of identical desires.

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¹Among other unmistakable aromas.

²Okay, fine, afternoon... late afternoon.