Cologne, Germany - Germany's new restrictions on smoking in bars will not apply when rip-roaring party crowds hit the streets of Cologne Thursday for their annual carnival-season pub crawl. Every year, drinkers in fancy dress throng the city's pubs and thick smoke is part of the experience.
There's often no room inside to dance as the whole crowd simply sways to high-decibel carnival music. Drinks, and the money to buy them, must be passed overhead, hand to hand.
Police and municipal bylaws officers have more than enough to do out on the streets, stopping fights, testing drunk drivers and trying to prevent male revellers relieving themselves against walls and in gutters.
The tipsy crowds often cheer at any mischief, and can turn hostile towards men in uniform.
The carnival season begins every November 11 but only shifts up to high gear in the six days culminating in Mardi Gras. It's a semi-lawless time when people lose their inhibitions in Cologne.
The Mardi Gras date, February 5, is 47 days before the moveable Christian feast of Easter. Both dates are unusually early in 2008: the feasts have not been celebrated this early in the year since 1913.
As 2008 began, pubs in about half of Germany's 16 states were required to confine smokers to separate rooms. That ban will not take effect in North Rhine Westphalia, where Cologne is located, until July 1.
Significantly, the state legislature has decided that the ban on smoking in main rooms will never apply during traditional festivals.
And there's nothing more traditional in Cologne than putting on facepaint and joining in carnival.
While children watch costume parades and the older generation book a table at a variety show, the young crowd celebrate the six days of high carnival with all-night binges in myriad city bars.
Hubert Heller, proprietor of Heller's Bierhaus and two other leading Cologne pubs, said in an interview: "The enforceability of a smoking ban during carnival would have been just about zero."
Heller says the police will concentrate during the six days on serious crime and he believes bylaws officers will postpone minor complaints until after the organized mayhem has finished.
On-the-spot fines for smokers would be well-nigh impossible.
Heller, himself a non-smoker who adds, "I have got three women at home who smoke," believes the rebellious people of Cologne will evade the smoking ban even when it comes into force outside the carnival season in July.
"The people here won't accept a ban as calmly as they did in Ireland or Italy," he forecast.
A survey by the state's hospitality industry suggests 80 per cent of bar regulars are smokers.
One of Heller's pubs, Das Museum in a city district humourously known as the "Kwartier Lateng" (Latin Quarter), is a single large room, where it will be impossible to set aside a non-smoking section.
"I'm baffled as to how I'll keep it going," he said. "It's been suggested we turn such pubs into clubs for smokers. One could create electronic swipe cards to let in registered members only."
Other German states do not observe carnival or practice a low-key form of it with dancing or dressing up in feathers, but there are several hot spots where confrontation could flare over the smoking ban.
In Rhineland Palatinate state, the ban does not come into effect until this February 15. It's an odd date, until one realizes it was chosen to permit one last splurge of smoky carnival fun in Mainz and other big cities at the start of February.
In Baden-Wuerrtemberg state, where punctilious officials have been chasing smokers since November 1, the spirit of rebellion might just break out in Villingen, a town famed for its noisy nightlife.
At carnival time, thousands of revellers, many of them students and young workers, crowd Villingen's Faerberstrasse, a street lined with about 20 pubs. The bar owners are hoping for a temporary exemption from the smoking ban.
"If not, some guests may surreptitiously smoke in the crush. Who's going to tell them off? Our waiters will have too much else to do," forecast Sonja Scheuble, a spokeswoman for one pub, Gasthaus Ott.
At the Ott, smoking has only been allowed since November 1 in a separate furnished cellar.
Outside on the Faerberstrasse, even with floodlights and closed-circuit video, police at carnival-time may have their hands full keeping alcohol-induced violence at bay.
