Abstract

This short clip from a 1932 newsreel features a parade of people, mostly women, dressed elaborately in folk costume from various regions in southern Germany. They come together at an exhibition in Mannheim organized by the German Agricultural Society [Deutsche Landwirtschafts-Gesellschaft, or DLG], an annual fair that showcased the latest farming equipment, awarded prizes to the best livestock, and celebrated the economic and cultural output of rural communities. The display of traditional clothing (Trachten in German), accompanied by a suitably traditional-sounding brass band, included women from Sankt Georgen in the Black Forest who wore richly decorated bridal crowns; women from Alsace who had donned oversized bows as headdresses; women from another region of the Black Forest in their signature Bollenhüte (hats that look like big cotton balls); and women wearing Schäppel, another form of elaborate bridal crown. The segment concludes with footage of women wearing Radhauben, a headdress worn in the region around Lake Constance, on the border with Switzerland. The brief sequence also gives a sense of the large crowds that turned out to watch this parade of traditional garb, suggesting how rarely most Germans in the early 1930s had an opportunity even to see it, let alone wear it. The immediately preceding reports in this newsreel—an item on the newly formed German government under Franz von Papen and frames of the boxer Max Schmeling in training camp—may have made the shots of these rural traditions seem to viewers even more like glimpses into the past, rather than contemporary manifestations of thriving local customs.

Traditional Costume Show at the Agricultural Fair in Mannheim (1932)

Source

Speaker: A traditional costume show of southern German rural communities was part of the large agricultural exhibition in Mannheim. Farmer women from St. Georgen.

Source: Deuligton-Woche No. 23 (clip), June 1932. Bundesarchiv Filmarchiv, Filmwerk ID: 57503. https://digitaler-lesesaal.bundesarchiv.de/video/57503/635395

BArch