This month's festival pick...

Oktoberfest
Bavaria’s Shindig Has Become a Planetary Party

Earth’s biggest parties seem to center on food. Mardi Gras and Carnaval parties are one last blast of feast and fun before the somber fast of Lent. Americans’ Thanksgiving, with it’s “No thanks, Ma, I can’t eat another bite,” comes after the traditional harvest when, as the old hymn puts it, “all is safely gathered in.”

So, is Munich’s Oktoberfest, a giant beer-based party, a member of this category? Heck ja! Beer, especially in Germany, is considered a food. With its four ingredients limited by a 500-year-old purity law to water, yeast, hops and malt, German beer is like liquid bread, and Germans consider it as much a part of the table as meat and potatoes.

Apparently a lot of other people, many of them not German, share the same happy outlook. When this year’s Oktoberfest rolls around Sept. 21 through October 6, about 6 million foreigners will visit Munich to partake of endless rounds of beer, sausages, toasts, dances, parades and oompah bands. Add those 6 million visitors to all the locals who show up at Oktoberfest and it’s as though every person living in Switzerland has decided to drop in for a nip. Rio and New Orleans, eat your hearts out.

Oktoberfest started as a simple “Come on down!” invitation from Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria when he wed Princess Therese of Saxony Hildburghausen in October, 1810. Ludwig invited the citizens of Munich to party in the fields front of the city gates. There was plenty of feasting and beer drinking, as well as horse races that were repeated at the same time next year and quickly became an annual tradition. It was the races that quickly became the core event at Oktoberfest.

As the years went on, Oktoberfest began adding fair-type attractions and local breweries started setting up regular booths. By the 1890s, the booths were replaced by big tents and beer halls, which have lasted to this day and are the festival’s signature image. 

The festival has an interesting religious element to it, too. Bavaria is heavily Catholic in a country that prefers beer over wine (although many consider German Rieslings to be the finest white wines on earth). So it’s unusual to see a Catholic population embrace beer so enthusiastically, but the Bavarians seem to be able to live with the distinction. The festival itself carries on the Catholic tradition of merrymaking, in which the abundance of the earth and the provenance of God are held as frequent causes for celebration.

— Patrick Totty

For further information about the world’s largest non-wine drinking festival, Oktoberfest web site.

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