Even in Gastein, women sometimes participate in non-traditional roles. As far back as the 1970s, St. Nicholas was occasionally played by a female (in the Jaga Pass and Gold Pass). And Rest says that “if you ask around long enough, you’ll find a handful of females who tell you, ‘well you know, there was this Krampus totally drunk, who needed someone, so I just filled in for a half hour.” Gastein, however, presents a unique problem. “Local women know that the main problem would be the Rempler,” Rest says, “because of course here they are simply outweighed.”
Reflecting on the subject, Rest chuckles at something. “It’s probably just a rural myth,” he says. “But there have been these rumors around for years: ‘yeah, you know there is this lesbian couple, and they said they want to form an all-female Pass!”
What would happen if something like this were to occur in the tradition-bound valley? “I’d be really curious to see,” he says. “I think there’d be lot of badmouthing and people saying this and that, but I don’t think much would come of it. In the end, I think nobody would actively prevent them from doing so.”
Though Gastein is intensely traditional, unconventional practice, should it occur, would encounter no top-down resistance. There is no governing body controlling the activities of the various Krampus groups, not even a self-governing association of troupes. In other regions, groups may be required to fill out paperwork, and obtain insurance to stage public events, or be required to register individual members marching in a parade, but in Gastein, the troupes themselves exist strictly under the radar.
“There is no formal legal status for these groups at all,” Rest says. “They’re not official. They’re not associations. In a way it’s anarchic, you know—a couple 16- and 17-year-olds getting together just saying: this year we’re going to do it! And that’s it. They start looking around for masks and costumes.”
Quite apart from issues of authoritarian control, even the most well-meaning suggestion for improvements finds no official forum for discussion. “A couple years ago in Hofgastein,” Rest says, “there was a plan suggested, that it might somehow be beneficial if the Krampuslauf were to follow a particular route down a main city street. When the time came, no one showed up. Every single Pass chose instead to deliberately avoid that particular street. Even if they’d planned to use it, they switched plans, marching down a parallel street instead.”
“I like this story,” he says, “but in a way, it sounds too good to be true.” That urge not to be controlled by spectator convenience, particularly the convenience of tourists, he says, would naturally appeal to “young men in an area that is so highly dependent on tourism, one where perhaps half the guys playing Krampuses work in that industry.”
“No, we will not give in on this,” Rest says, imaging participants’ reactions. “We do everything for the tourist industry for four to five months a year, but not this thing. This is ours. We won’t turn it into another attraction for the tourist cycle.
“Again, it’s that compelling image of the Krampus in Gastein,” he muses, “this pure, incorruptible thing that is just there for itself and is done for itself, and for those who are part of the community. And I think, in a way, this is true.”
Some of the beauty of the event, for Rest, would be lost in efforts to corral the troupes and structure the spectator experience. As experienced now, it’s instead a matter of individual discovery. “It’s so spread out and all happening simultaneously. You hear bells over in another street. If you are a bit schooled in the whole thing, you know the sound of the Rempler. You can tell it’s a minute or two away. If you run now, you’ll catch the last dramatic moment. Or you can be out on the street for two days and not see a single Rempler. You feel the year was a total bore, but then you meet somebody else the next day. He has all these reports—this and this and this happened.” The event in this way is a unique personal adventure rather than the programmed mass experience of the parade, he believes. “With those parades, I just go so bored.”
In this way, the experience of the Krampus for spectators is an anarchic game with many possible outcomes. For costumed participants too, the tradition allows them entrance into a playful world where normal social cause and effect don’t apply. They become monsters armed with switches and bells, freed to act out, create tumult wherever they go, to even strike out (at least lightly) at friends, family, and total strangers.
“I think this liminal space is a very important thing, this breaking of the rules,” Rest says. “In our everyday lives, there is less and less space for excess and overflow of a certain form of unconventional vitality.” Stør Sven Dah of Wiener Neustadt says his participation as a Krampus allows just this, the chance to “live out your imagination. You slip into another role, and can let your creativity have free reign.” And this is not the ersatz fantasy of a computer game. “It’s decidedly non-virtual,” Rest points out. “Even the fur, the visceral aspects of it, the smell of it, the wildness. Everything.”
The fact that it is persons of a certain age expected to assume this role is significant to Wolfgang Böhm. He speaks of the tradition as a sort of rite of passage, one that confirms continuity between generations, the elder generation teaching and demanding commitment of the younger, “giving them purpose at a difficult time in their lives as they become adults.”
The raging Krampus perfectly embodies that emotional Sturm und Drang typical of the teenage years when most runners first don their horns. But doesn’t a developmental cataclysm like this leave some traces? Don’t we glimpse these depths occasionally even in the most well-adjusted, grownup lives?
Böhm himself has passed his wild years and no longer participates as a costumed Krampus, but he continues a passionate involvement with the tradition, traveling here and there photographing events, writing, and sharing what he experiences in books and online projects. The Krampus, he says, “caters to the dark, melancholic part of my personality.” For him, that brooding sense of fate and destiny some plan to leave behind in adolescence is still stirred by “the season of autumn and early winter—the twilight, the slowing down and the mystical feeling that foreshadows these traditional events, the tales of mythical creatures, the forests of the mountains where they lurk, and the presence of the unknown. This all has had a strong influence on me as long as I can remember.”
I know he is not alone here. He is describing a familiar thing, ever poised to return, our lost, dark Christmas.
