The Beautiful Hell: Forty Festivals, Forty Weeks
The best moment at any festival, Christine Neder told me, is when the sun comes up. When you can barely stand, blisters on every toe, back completely wrecked, and yet the music and the light and the collective derangement of it all make it impossible to leave. You don’t walk away. You collapse on the dance floor instead.
Christine is a Berlin-based writer who spent 40 weeks attending 40 festivals across 16 countries—a project that became a book, 40 Festivals in 40 Wochen, and before that a blog called Lilies Diary. Her previous project had been "90 Nächte, 90 Betten"—90 nights, 90 different beds—so the woman clearly has a methodology for structured self-destruction. I talked to her about wild shitters, crocheted scrotal pouches, and a road trip to a daytime rave with German TV presenter Markus Kavka.
My own first festival was Rock im Park. It rained the entire time, my legs hurt, someone pissed against our tent, and the girl I was making out with instead of watching Die Ärzte—Germany’s most beloved punk band—had mud inside her underwear. I left having sworn a blood oath never to return. Christine’s first was the Melt! Festival in 2011, when she was 25, which she admits was late for a first-timer. She was lucky with the entry point: Melt! draws the kind of urban hipsters who pack matching luggage and know their skincare routines, so the brutality was cosmetic at most.
By festival twelve—Rock am Ring—she’d found what she was actually looking for. Not lineup or logistics, but the anthropology of it: how people behave when you take them out of their normal lives and strand them in a field for several days. A TV crew walked her through the initiation rites. Flunkyball, beer bong, crowd surfing. The essential sacraments. Someone also defecated in front of her car, which she takes philosophically—it could have been inside the tent.
She organizes festivals into four categories: fun, culture, music, and traditional. The range across 40 weeks ran from a strawberry festival in Plant City, Florida, complete with pig races and a beauty queen, to the Winter Party on Miami South Beach—500 shirtless, magnificently built men, none of them remotely interested in her company, because the event was a gay circuit party. She found this baffling and charming in equal measure. In the Ukraine she danced with men in crocheted scrotal pouches. She threw tomatoes at La Tomatina near Valencia, 40,000 people in a small village outside the city hurling 60 minutes’ worth of produce at each other. She celebrated an Oktoberfest somewhere in America and cheered cows coming down from alpine pastures in Switzerland.
The peak of all 40 was KaZantip, in Ukraine. KaZantip operates as its own sovereign republic—complete with president, ministers, a constitution, and a penal code. Entry requires either a visa or a yellow suitcase that has passed inspection by the Minister of Luggage. Once inside, you have five weeks of beach parties, art installations, and dance floors that look like spacecraft. The absinthe bar is designed as a chemistry lab. The toilets are UFOs. The culture, she says, is live-and-let-live: the whole republic gathers at the pier each evening to watch the sun go down together. It sounds insane. It sounds perfect.
Her worst was Sanfermines in Pamplona—the Running of the Bulls. She ran with the animals through the streets, found three minutes of narrow-street chaos tolerable, and then discovered that the six bulls you run with each morning are executed in the bullfight that evening. She didn’t attend. She describes sitting with the knowledge that an arena of 4,000 people was cheering the death of an animal, and finding it genuinely frightening—not the cruelty itself but what it says about what crowds do to individual conscience. When someone on a stage uses mass energy in the wrong direction. She doesn’t finish the sentence. She doesn’t need to.
The best band she saw across all 40 festivals was The xx at Frequency in Austria. She describes them as an emotional multiplier—whatever the people around her were feeling, the music amplified it. Joy, lust, crying, hollow staring into the middle distance. She also fell a little in love with Cro, the German rapper who performs in a panda mask, which she offered without embarrassment. The worst were a Berlin punk band called OHL and Dimmu Borgir at Wacken, the heavy metal festival in northern Germany—two experiences she appears to have filed under "necessary suffering."
On the subject of festival sex, she’s characteristically direct. She estimates about 10 percent of festival-goers are there primarily for the tent-sex opportunity, and she devoted an entire chapter of the book to it. The metalfestivals in Sweden and Wacken struck her as the most sexually charged environments—something she attributes, speculatively, to the raw meat and pig heads impaled on stakes outside the camping areas. She watched enough couples in various states of alcohol-enabled public intimacy to develop a healthy sense of secondhand embarrassment. She also offers a tactical guide for men: identify a woman in the crowd, track which tent is hers, wait for her to return from the portable toilets in a state of confusion and mild intoxication, and offer to help her find her way back. She calls this sad but true. I respect the fieldwork.
Her survival tips are practical and hard-won: tie your hair back, or spend the weekend pulling it out of strangers’ zippers and dental braces. Wear leather trousers—sweat, beer, and vomit slide right off. Bring a padlock for your tent. The wild shitters will find an unlocked zip eventually.
She financed all of it through media partnerships—writing and photographing for various outlets in exchange for tickets and flights, no cash involved. The book came together in two weeks after the final festival, written fast and hot while everything was still raw. She mentions that her mother is a fan of a German tabloid TV news show and watched Christine’s appearance on it, and there’s something almost tender about that detail—the Berlin festival nomad and her mother on the sofa together. Someone named Jason from Brandenburg sent a message saying he’d be on a singing competition and would she like coffee. She found this delightful.
What she actually gets from the letters and messages—more than sales figures or any metric—is the sense that she’s taken people somewhere they couldn’t go themselves. That the book and the blog function as a kind of proxy experience for people whose lives don’t currently allow for five weeks in a Ukrainian party republic or a tomato fight outside Valencia. She says she knows not everyone can arrange their life the way she’s arranged hers. So she takes them along. I find that an unusually honest thing for a writer to say about why they do it.
When I asked about her next project, she said she’d stopped planning. It comes as it comes. If she had one wish, she’d write a proper novel. Given that her non-fiction involves pig races, crocheted genitalia, and a philosophical crisis triggered by a bullfight, I’m genuinely curious what she’d do with invented characters and time to sprawl.