A German wedding - Polterabend

Yes, the first part of the word Polterabend should remind you of Poltergeist.

Ruckus, loud, preferably obnoxious noise, that's the verb "poltern". "Abend" is evening or night.

Polterabend is a German wedding tradition, a party of the bride & groom with friends, family, and anybody who wants to show up. That's right, anybody can come and celebrate.
This is particularly important in rural areas dominated by small towns and villages where, to this day, many of the inhabitants are related to each other.

Bachelor and bachelorette parties have taken hold in Germany in recent decades, another sign of "cultures in contact". While they may replace the traditional Polterabend, more often than not they are an additional event a few weeks before the Polterabend.
Ever since most European countries embarked on a token separation of church and state, the legal marriage ceremony takes place at town hall, religious ceremonies are secondary, the icing on the wedding cake if you will. Registrars being civil servants, the schedule is 9 to 5, Monday through Friday, so the definition of Polterabend as "a party before the wedding" hasn't been true for at least half a century - since the end of the six day work week.


In the old days before Germans took to trash separation (five different kinds for the average household), a Polterabend could become a garbage nightmare for the young couple. That's because the "Polter" part involves bringing items you can smash into a million tiny pieces, like that old earthware flower pot or all the cracked and chipped dinner plates you can find.

Without limits on what to smash for good luck, bags of shredded paper or tiny plastic pieces from the factory, long dead flowers, metal sheets and tubes, all of this could show up.

Getting this mess under control was the exclusive job of the bride and the groom. So, older Germans tell us, there were many Polterabends that turned into a stress test for the soon to be newly weds.
Alcohol used to flow in great quantities, fist fights did occasionally break out, and in some areas of the country the tradition of kidnapping the bride and holding her for ransom for a few hours was practiced in rural Germany until recently.

These days, Polterabends have become a more mellow affair. Disposing all your trash at the newlyweds has fallen out of favor, and is illegal anyway. Most guests will bring no more than one or two ceramic items to throw into a makeshift container.

People still get drunk, but there is much less drunk driving.

It is in this context that the following scene from a recent event in the hills took place.

One Polterabend, at a farm a few towns over, an eighteen wheeler semi with a tipper trailer was slowly backing into the farm yard. The driver honked the horn every few yards on his slow backward crawl to make sure that he had everybody's attention.

It worked. The partiers assembled to watch the spectacle, and the faces of the bride and the groom betrayed anxiety.
The trailer was a dump truck style, all metal container, its contents invisible.
As the air brakes hissed one last time, the driver honked briefly, rolled down the window and asked a friend in the crowd to release the back flap of the tipper.

Once the friend came back, the driver revved the engine and engaged the hydraulic telescope lift.

The wedding party had moved to the side and towards the rear of the truck to see better what it would disgorge. The bride grasped the groom's hand.

Very quietly, the tipper went up, the back gate slowly opened.

Nothing happened.

The top of the tipper was now well above the top of the cabin, a space about a yard wide had opened at the rear, the onlookers were holding their breath.

Nothing happened.

A couple of people broke the silence and started to giggle. Hey, man... He's kidding.

Then, without hardly any sound, a saucer, with a cup on - the cup glued onto the saucer, as the driver explained later - it slid out of the gate of the huge tipper. It broke as it hit the cement floor.

The laughter spread from those closest to the rear of the tipper to the front of the group.  The bride laughed, hugged the groom, who looked up at the driver.

The driver flashed a wide smile and raised his right hand. He waved it a couple of times to alert whoever was looking at him, then let go of the rope he was holding.

Instantly, the forty or so feet of enclosed metal container began to rumble. Something was tumbling down the length of the beat up green metal box, the noise rising to almost deafening with fractions of a second.

The audience was stunned into silence.

A ceramic toilet bowl came crashing out of the tipper, shattering into what seemed like a million pieces.

The driver blew the horn once more, and lowered the tipper.

The spectators broke into a roaring cacophony of laughter and cheers, and you could have seen how both the bride and the groom were drenched in sweat.

People would talk about this Polterabend for years to come.