May Day

The first of May is a double-sided holiday in Austria. Its origins trace back to ancient pagan tradition, Walpurgisnacht and celebrations of the end of winter and the beginning of spring. Christianity drove off the pagan roots and made May first, rather than the evening of April 30, the important holiday, but the celebrations are still purely secular. The central piece of the celebration is the may pole, the Maibaum, which starts as an actual tree in a forest somewhere that is cut down, stripped of branches and bark except for a few branches left at the very top. The pole is then usually carved with elaborate designs and erected in the center of town, the Hauptplatz. The most important criterion for Maibäume is, apparently, the height. The taller the better.

Once the may pole is erected, tradition dictates that a group of young men from a neighboring and rival village must attempt to steal it. I have never witnessed this event, as the places where I have lived in Austria are larger cities that have lost a little bit of their old ways and that, apparently, don't really have rivals. But I have heard that the stealing is quite common in smaller villages.

On May Day, it is typical to see people decked out in national costume and demonstrating traditional folk dances, literally dancing around the may pole. There is usually a brass band, or at least someone playing accordian, and some food booths set up offering beer, sausages, and other regional favorites.






At least that's how it was where I lived last year in the small town of Bruck an der Mur. I was delighted by the festivities, the costumes, the friendly and joyous atmosphere as everyone enjoyed the holiday. And yes, of course, like all official holidays in Austria, May 1 is a day when everything shuts down, not jsut government offices and schools, but stores are closed, as well. It's one of the idiosyncracies of life you get used ot in Austria after awhile, and you learn to stock up on groceries whenever a holiday lurks around the corner.

But as aforementioned, May Day is a double-sided holiday. Thanks to the Soviets, it took on a new meaning, the Tag der Arbeit, or Labor Day. Of course, there were movements of workers before Soviet control of Eastern Europe, and many people trace the connection between May 1 and labor to these movements and demonstrations, but the Soviet Union made it an official holiday, and although Austria was never Soviet controlled, it adopted the Tag der Arbeit, too. So May 1 has become an important socialist holiday, a day for demonstrations and protest marches in priase of socialism and demanding more rights for workers. It seems to have degenerated into a day of general political protest, actually.

Here in Graz I eagerly headed down to the Hauptplatz on the morning of May 1, expecting to see the kinds of fun-loving folksy traditions I had enjoyed the year before in Bruck, but I was sadly mistaken. Graz, as the second-largest city in Austria, likes to think of itself as incredibly modern and is often chracterized as being a hot-bed of socialism, and that claim seemed believable at the Hauptplatz on May 1. Sure, there was a May pole, but the SPÖ, the Austrian Socialist Party, had taken over and was having a huge rally, complete with red balloons and streamers, party paraphanelia, political propaganda speeches and a band playing, of all things, Tina Turner covers. There was also a parade of demonstraters, pockets of people from literally all walks of life marching along with banners anouncing and denouncing various causes. There were the requisite Che Guevara T-shirted scruffy students waving communist flags and proclaiming solidarity with Cuba as well as the anti-EU set who take any opportunity to voice their grievances, but there were also elderly folks marching along with help of canes, stroller-pushing parents, disinterested young kids, and head-scarved foreigners. The only unifying factor among these disparate groups was their discontent, and, perhaps, their hope for a better world.