Everyone at Wacken Is Nicer Than You Expect

The clichés about Wacken turn out to be accurate. That’s the irritating part. You arrive half-expecting to find the mythology somewhat inflated, and instead you leave quietly converted, which is its own kind of defeat.

I went with a friend—Ines—to the Wacken Open Air, the annual heavy metal festival held in a small village in northern Germany that has no obvious right to be one of the world’s best-known concert destinations and yet somehow is. Slayer, Motörhead, Knorkator on the bill. Beer, fire, meat as the primary logistical categories. The full thing.

The campgrounds alone are worth the trip. Nowhere else do people apply genuine creative effort to their temporary living quarters with this level of commitment—constructed facades, themed compounds, flags of every imaginable allegiance. Within twenty minutes of arrival, a stranger handed us cold beers with the easy generosity of someone for whom this is simply what you do here. The aggression that the music promises is almost entirely absent from the crowd. Enormous but local, drunk but cheerful.

Beyond the stages there’s a full medieval village, food stands ranging from the predictable to the genuinely strange, and enough visual material to fill a week without hearing a note. We spent time just moving through it, watching. At some point I ran into the guys from Watch Out Stampede, who were voluntarily spending their festival going around collecting empty bottles to donate the deposit money to the Wacken Foundation. Professional musicians, on bottle duty, happy about it. Hard exterior, soft actual interior—the cliché, again, vindicated.

What stays with me is the quality of good humor in the place. Something about music at that volume and extremity—the kind that demands you give yourself over completely—seems to produce people who are, in person, genuinely easy to be around. I came to test a stereotype and ended up inside it. There are worse ways to spend a week.