Thunderstorms and drenching showers were not enough to deter 300,000 people from filling the streets of Hamburg at the weekend for g-move, an annual festival of thumping techno music and writhing, half-naked bodies.
A similar number gathered in Berlin's Kreuzberg district on Sunday to take part in the Karneval der Kulturen (Carnival of Cultures), a noisy celebration of the multi-cultural society.
Although local worthies claimed that the Berlin event was evidence of the successful integration of minorities in the city, most participants came for the music, food and drink rather than to express solidarity. The Christian churches and the Social Democrats each had floats in Hamburg but few among the grinning, gyrating throng were concerned with matters political or theological.
Germany, once known as a land of poets and thinkers and still a byword abroad for unrelenting glumness, is fast becoming a nation of party-loving hedonists.
Berlin's Love Parade, which takes place on July 11th, is Europe's biggest street party, attracting a million young people every year for a weekend orgy of music, dancing and drugs. The city's gays start a week of celebrations with a street festival on June 20th, culminating in the annual Christopher Street Day parade the following Saturday.
Germany is Europe's biggest market for music and films and young Germans can now choose from three home-grown music television channels apart from MTV, which now has a 24-hour German-language service. Germans take more holidays than their neighbours. Many take three annual foreign holidays.
This is all a far cry from the gloomy spirit of hard work that drove the post-war economic miracle and many older Germans view the new mood of self-indulgence with horror. And the so-called 1968 generation, who spent their youth talking about world revolution, complain that today's young Germans are irredeemably trivial.
The young might point out that many '68ers are themselves partial to a glass of Chianti and a fortnight in Tuscany and that the over-60s retired from work as early as possible and now enjoy fat pensions and numerous free services. It is also true that older Germans enjoy a party too, especially if it involves large amounts of food and drink. Indeed, while the young were cavorting in Hamburg and Berlin at the weekend, many of their parents were staggering home from the hundreds of festivals that take place in small towns throughout the country every week during the summer.
Yet there is little doubt that, even if Germans have always enjoyed themselves more than many outsiders realised, the nature of German pleasure-seeking has changed in recent years.
Much of this change is due to the burgeoning drug culture that has grown up since Ecstacy arrived on the party scene in the 1980s. Young Germans took to Ecstacy even more enthusiastically than their neighbours and, although other drugs have come into vogue, they remain as keen as ever.
Neither the media nor the government appears unduly upset at the sight of the cream of the nation's youth drugged to the eyeballs at the Love Parade each year. In some German cities, possession of small quantities of drugs such as Ecstacy or cocaine is no longer punishable, although it remains against the law.
Cities such as Berlin boast to tourists about the non-stop night life available to visitors, glossing over the fact that most revellers who are still lively after 48 hours without sleep are relying on more than high-energy vitamin drinks to keep going.
But there is more to Germany's party mood than drug-induced euphoria, as today's young Germans embrace a set of values that would have been anathema to previous generations.
Politics may be less important to them than to the 1968 generation, even though many of today's young care about issues such as the environment, animal welfare and human rights. But what distinguishes them from their forebears is the fact that the present generation of young Germans value personal freedom above almost everything else.
They may have no wish to fight for their country or to overthrow the state but the one struggle that unites young Germans, rich or poor, from the east or the west is the fight for their right to party.
