Early Modern Absolutist States

Frankish/Carolingian power and the Holy Roman imperial order in Central Europe.

1 chapter

1500 - 1648

The Reformation carved a confessional frontier across the southwest that still shapes which towns celebrate Fasnet and which do not. Duke Ulrich introduced Protestantism in Württemberg in 1534 and founded the Tübinger Stift seminary in 1536 to train Protestant clergy — stand in the Stift's chapel and you are inside the institution that made Württemberg Protestant. The Margraviate of Baden split along religious lines: Baden-Durlach went Protestant, Baden-Baden stayed Catholic. In Catholic enclaves — Villingen, Rottweil, the Black Forest valleys, Upper Swabia — the old Fasnet continued within the liturgical calendar; in Protestant areas, carnival customs were suppressed or attenuated. The Villingen Fasnet is first documented in 1467 (Urfehde brief), and Rottweil's Narrenzunft tradition traces to medieval roots. But avoid absolutes: the confessional frontier shaped survival patterns rather than strictly determining them, and some Protestant towns later revived Fasnet in modified form. The Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) devastated the region — Württemberg lost 57% of its population between 1634 and 1655 — leaving deep material and demographic scars visible in rebuilt city centers.

1806 - 1918

Napoleon dissolved the old order in 1806: Württemberg became a kingdom, Baden a grand duchy, and both absorbed formerly independent imperial cities and Further Austrian territories. The new borders consolidated the Catholic-Protestant patchwork into two states that would persist until 1952. Industrialization transformed the economy — the Stuttgart-Esslingen railway opened in 1845, Daimler and Bosch made Stuttgart the cradle of the automobile, and Black Forest towns like Schramberg and Oberndorf became clockmaking and arms-manufacturing centers. Yet Fasnet persisted in Catholic industrial towns: the Narrenzunft Schramberg was formally founded in 1911 (VSAN founding member in 1924), and Oberndorf's Fasnet traces roughly 500 years despite the Mauser weapons factory reshaping the town. In Haslach im Kinzigtal, the Narrenzunft — a VSAN Gründungszunft — maintained the Alemannic Fasnet tradition in a Black Forest valley town whose -ingen toponym marks Alemannic settlement continuity. The 19th century also saw a Fasnet revival movement that defined itself against the bourgeois Rhineland Karneval model, reasserting mask-centrality, dialect, and guild custodianship.

1120 - 1500

The Staufer (Hohenstaufen) dynasty held the Duchy of Swabia from 1079 and the imperial crown from 1138, making this region a heartland of the Holy Roman Empire. Climb the Hohenstaufen hill near Göppingen and look across the Rems-Fils valley — the ruined castle walls are all that remains of the dynasty's ancestral seat, but the view reveals the dense medieval landscape they ruled. The Staufer era also produced the institutions that still organize Swabian life: the Cistercian Maulbronn Abbey (founded 1147) became a model monastic economy whose pond-and-channel system you can still trace on foot. Free imperial cities — Ulm, Ravensburg, Schwäbisch Hall, Rottweil — governed themselves under the emperor, and their wealth funded the great Gothic minsters and trade networks. Ravensburg's Große Ravensburger Handelsgesellschaft traded cloth and spices across Europe. This is also the era when Fastnacht customs first appear in written records: 13th-century sources mention pre-Lent festivities, and by the 14th century, dances, parades, and Fastnacht games are documented. The Christian civitas-diaboli framework — not pagan survivals — gave these customs their theological logic, as scholars Mezger and Moser have shown.

1918 - 1949

The end of the monarchies in 1918 created the Free People's State of Württemberg and the Republic of Baden, but political instability and Fastnacht bans led Narrenzünfte to organize. The Vereinigung Schwäbisch-Alemannischer Narrenzünfte (VSAN) was founded in 1924 in Villingen — stand on the Villingen Marktplatz during Fasnet and you are where the institutional framework of modern Fasnet custodianship began. The Nazi regime brought Gleichschaltung: Fasnet was co-opted, new figure types were introduced (the Offenburg Hexenzunft, founded 1933, created witch figures with politically charged timing), and existing guilds faced pressure to conform. The Blätzlebuebe-Zunft in Konstanz was founded in 1934 — its founding during the Nazi era exemplifies the contested intersection of tradition revival and political appropriation. A 2025 Stuttgarter Zeitung investigation and a Konstanz exhibition argue that the 'today's face of the Southwest Fasnet was significantly shaped in the Third Reich,' though scholars like Werner Mezger dispute the extent. Allied bombing destroyed vast areas of Stuttgart, Heilbronn, Ulm, and Friedrichshafen; the T4 euthanasia program operated at Schloss Grafeneck. Between 1945 and 1949, the region was split into American and French occupation zones — the partition that would shape the 1952 state-formation debate.