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It's complicated and not just about alcohol, but generally yes, or with their tacit acceptance. I'll use the example of a specific festivity, "Maibaum pflanzen" ("planting the May-Tree"), because it's a nice progression from young to old, but just our small town would have a low double-digit number of festivities like these (for the interested germans, the others I remember in my town were: Straßenfest, Dorffest, Gemeindefest, Wursteball, Osterfeuer, Schützenfest, Karneval, Vaterstag). Once you're 16, you'd also be allowed to drive over to other towns, which meant that there was something going on every weekend.
End of April, we would celebrate the start of spring by going into the nearby forest, cutting down a birch, and setting it up in our local neighbourhood. All neighbourhoods around would do this, with around 20 people per tree, so you would have something like 10 trees up in walking distance, and of those everyone would know literally everyone else. You'd sit down in a circle around a fire and the tree would be some meters away so that it's hard to see from the fire in the dark. There would be a game of stealing the trees from others, mostly played by teens and young adults, and next day the captured trees would be chopped into small pieces and distributed among the group, some keeping their piece as a celebration to commemorate the number of trees stolen, but usually just for burning wood.
Before you're 12, you'd generally just help decorate the tree, eat Bratwurst, play games with the other kids, maybe visiting some other trees with a group of kids. Some neighbourhoods would put up a "kid's tree" which was just a branch from the larger tree, and which would be small enough for the younger kids to steal without needing an axe. Once you're around 12, you'd be allowed to help cut and carry the tree in earnest and drink your first beer (obviously, cutting the tree was itself a beer drinking game) and help protecting the adult tree. Around 14, you'd be allowed to join the older teens when stealing adult trees (which is mostly done between 2-6 in the morning when the majority of the adults went to bed, and the few left over to protect the tree will be drunk or even sometimes fell asleep), and the older teens would let you drink your first hard alcohol with them. This would often also be the first time when you get REALLY drunk once, and you (as well as the older teens that supplied you) would be lightly punished or at least reprimanded by your parents to be more careful next time.
Around 16, you'd be strong enough to carry a tree with a group of other teens, which meant that you'd be allowed your own tree altogether. Whether you actually did this depends on whether you can organize a group of older teens/young adults large enough, a place where you'd be allowed to put up the tree, and food & drinks for everyone, including visitors. This would be the time when getting REALLY DRUNK will be fully tolerated. When I was around 17, we'd set up a tree with 6 teens my age at my parent's house (since they were away for the night at the neighbourhood's tree) and vowed we'd protect our tree by putting a nail in the tree for every finished bottle of hard alcohol and hang the bottle there, and when we woke up the entire tree was decorated fully with more than 20 bottles. We've had a few visitors, but even accounting for that it means everyone drank at least 2-3 full bottles of hard alcohol (and we also drank at other trees we visited), in addition to copious amounts of beer which is generally not even counted (we literally have the saying "you can't get drunk on beer") and which we obviously didn't even bother putting on the tree. We all had such a bad hangover that we didn't go out drinking the next day, which you'd usually do as it is worker's day with lots of bigger festivals. My parents just laughed and made fun of us.
So you usually don't drink much hard alcohol directly with your parents as a teen, it's expected of you to help organize events with friends which then allow you to get drunk. Most parents directly help supply some amount of alcohol for every celebration you throw or join, but usually you have to organize some on top of that (which isn't difficult). Drinking alone or at any time that isn't a designated known event is heavily frowned upon(except beer, since, again, it doesn't count). Some teens would only join events with their parents, and correspondingly drink much less, much later.
Interesting! Thanks for the detailed discription. It sounds fun, and also uniquely German in an interesting way.
So you were mostly drinking outside in the forest? Who bought the drinks, the older teens or the parents?
As an American, the laws for liquor were very strict, so it was hard to get any. We would occasionally have "field parties" where you drive out to some random rural location, sit around a circle, maybe a fire if someone was prepared enough to bring supplies, and pass a bottle around (usually bought by someone with a "fun" older sibling). Really a miserable experience all around I think. The more common way was that we'd go to the house of our friend who had an alcoholic single mom, wait for her to fall asleep, and then raid her liquor cabinet. Yeah... not good times. We'd also have to think of a cover story to tell our parents.
Uh, no. For may-tree planting it varied wildly since you needed lots of space, but never in the forest since you want to make a camp fire, and a camp fire in the forest while drunk is how you get forest fires. Typically it would be something like a paddock, or a large roundabout, or in someone backyard if it's large enough. For other events it would usually be some large communal building, such as the old school building.
The parents usually supply whatever is on the high end of acceptance for your age, older teens whatever is on the low end. So for, say, a 14yo, parents would supply beer and older teens would supply harder alcohol (and it would be expected of the older teens to look after him, and this can be enforced since the parents know exactly who the older teens are). But it also varied a lot depending on the parents opinion.
Yeah sounds sad. I used to believe in the idea that some things can't be enforced, such as limiting alcohol, since it fit very with my experience and we were taught in school how badly prohibition fucked up. But nowadays I think it all is just secretly revealing your preferences, or at least of society at large - limiting alcohol can't be enforced if people don't want to. But if they do, it works.
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i went to highschool in the USA in the 90s: there were mutiple parties every weekend at various houses of kids whos parents were out of town, when the weather was good we'd sometimes have huge keg parties just out of town in a sort of nature area. something like the moon tower party in dazed and confused. not infrequently, people would get a hotel room to hang out in. pretty typical to go to multiple stops on a friday or saturday night.
even i, described once by a friend of my girlfriend as being a "cool nerd", knew multiple people who could get me weed, beer or liquor. friends of a friend would rarely show up with cocaine or acid, and i knew of older people using heroin but never saw any.
this type of partying was by far the main highschool social scene, i would guess 40% of kids were part of this including most of the athletes and popular types.
looking back, it seems like a major factor was parents constantly going out of town and leaving the kids in charge of nice single family homes, kind of surprising how much that was happening
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