Blumenkübel

On August 5th, 2010, the hashtag #blumenkübel (German for flower bucket) ranked 4th on twitter's most popular tags for several hours, one place behind Naomi Campbell and beating Christopher Nolan's movie Inception. People in the US were puzzled: User brittdeezy asked: "What's up with the TT #blumenkübel? That's "flower bucket" in German right? I'm sooo lost"

What had happened?

On August 3rd, an intern who had just startet working for the German local newspaper Münstersche Zeitung was sent to an old people's home in a small town in north-western germany. At night, someone had thrown over a flower bucket in front of the building's entrance. A silly season article from a newspaper in a desperate attempt to create news in Neuenkirchen, a town where very rarely interesting things happen. And even less during holidays.

But the girl came back with a heartbreaking, gut-wrenching article. "Big flower bucket destroyed" was the headline.

The article started: "The Inhabitants of the Antonius Home for old peolple where aghast at what they saw in front of their door on thursday morning. One of the two flower pots in front of the entrance had been thrown over and shattered into pieces." She continued stating that there were "no eye-witnesses" and that the people were "sad" and "uncomprehending".

Ralf Heimann , a journalist writing for the same newspaper, then sent the message "Blumenkübel fell over in Neuenkirchen" via twitter, making fun of the old sack-of-rice-fell-over-story. What he would never have guessed: People picked up and retweeted this message and started to make fun about the incident. It would become the fastest growing twitter hype in Germany so far.

Examples:
"Mayor refuses to step down after blumenkübel# incident." by @dadamsda
"Oh my God, they killed #blumenkübel!! You Bastards!!!!" by @Sqampy
"There are unconfirmed reports that BP has closed the giant oil spill with a big #blumenkübel" by @Wideawake01

At the peak, there was more than one tweet per second with the hashtag #blumenkübel. A fact that led user order_by_rand to the conclusion: "I should have chosen a better time to show my dad the usefulness of twitter #blumenkübel"

Then, fake pictures were uploaded, suggesting that the blumenkübel is breaking news on CNN
Hollywood Stars, such as Keanu Reeves were also sad about the fate of the blumenkübel.
A radical group of environmental activist claimed responsibility for the terrorist act.

About 8 Hours after the Meme started, germanys biggest news agency dpa and almost every german online newspaper reported on the blumenkübel issue, for example Welt Online and many more.

There is also a song , a dramatic reading of the article and much more.