The Annual Summer Festival

The Annual Summer Festival is a yearly gathering at the psychiatric hospital, remembered as both a celebration and a fundraiser. Patients ran their own stalls and joined the dancing; staff, families, and visitors mingled with them. Its ordinary pleasures—hammering nails, eating, dancing—made the hospital grounds a place of collective activity, while the festival’s recurring rituals gave the day a recognizable shape.

Stalls and shared work

For two years in a row, Joachim’s family ran a stall built around a thick beam into which visitors hammered nails. Young children were given small nails and a small hammer; older participants got larger ones. Joachim was uneasy when patients struck the nailheads right beside him. The narrator’s mother worked behind the cake counter, shooing wasps away from the icing and pouring coffee with buoyant energy.

Hermann wandered from stall to stall, talking with visitors, employees, and patients. He ate a bratwurst, cake, hot almonds, and a matjes roll. Joachim liked watching him move through the festival at ease, apparently buoyed by the general approval around him. When Joachim ran over, Hermann put an arm around him, before the boy hurried back to the activities.

Some patients made the festival their own through individual enterprises. One boy, whose name Joachim could not remember—Benno or Hanno—lived in a little hut and drew portraits. Sitting for him could occupy hours; sometimes a sitter eventually got up and asked a colleague to take their place, but the artist simply continued. Joachim no longer recalled the resulting pictures, yet imagined them as faces gradually merging into one another over the afternoon. The young portraitist died, and Joachim remembered that his stall was missed.

Dancing and the changing crowd

As evening came, the tents grew crowded and the rows of seats and dance floors filled. Many patients loved German schlager, knew the lyrics, and danced with enthusiasm. People with very different styles shared the same floor. Joachim saw Hermann there, turning happily by himself, hands set firmly on his broad hips as he swayed from one leg to the other. Joachim and his brothers watched from a beer bench, embarrassed and amused by their father’s resolve.

The dancing crossed the usual divisions between roles. Employees were difficult to recognize without their medical or nursing coats; patients danced with attendants, the deputy director with the head gardener, and the commercial director with a laundress. The narrator’s mother danced with the former director of the psychiatric hospital, by then long retired. Danish tourists moved among rotating wheelchairs, while people with severe disabilities were brought onto the floor in their chairs and clapped or moved their heads to the music as they could. The festival’s social world was not arranged in a single pattern: it made room for many kinds of participation at once.

The annual count and what it funded

At ten o’clock the festival ended, and people streamed from the various stalls into the dance tent for the customary accounting. Money from jars, boxes, and cash tills was poured into a tub and counted. Hermann climbed onto the platform and announced the total through the microphone of the entertainer, who was already packing up in the background. The amount—3,435 marks and 50 pfennigs—struck Joachim as astronomical. Those present answered it with a cheer.

The proceeds had practical consequences for the hospital. They paid for table-tennis tables for the gym and a library for patients; in one especially successful year, they also funded a film projector ordered from Hamburg. Joachim later watched Tarzan with his friends on a large screen in the darkened gym on one of his birthdays. During the film, a classmate suddenly ran to a climbing rope fixed to the wall and swung across the image as a shouting shadow. The festival’s money thus carried its communal celebration into other occasions at the hospital.

Celebration in bad weather

The festival did not always enjoy summer weather. In some years, rain threatened to overwhelm it, while wind shook the stalls. Visitors and organizers continued with almost absurd confidence: nurses insisted that the sky was getting brighter even when it remained black-grey as far as the eye could see. The football pitch softened underfoot; wind blew candy floss from its stick and tore raffle tickets from people’s hands.

Even when the Halligen off the North Sea were being evacuated and patients climbing in the treetops were barely visible through the rain, the celebration went on. The festival’s gong sounded, and for Joachim that was proof enough that it was summer. That recurring, insistently cheerful sound gathers the day’s contradictions: a hospital fête exposed to bad weather, yet sustained by the people who kept showing up and taking part.