It is true that the festival known as "Oktoberfest" only takes place once a year (logically, in October), but an understanding of the life of Munich is impossible without some knowledge of this phenomenon. The festival originated when the charming but mad Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria celebrated his engagement to Princess Therese von Sachen-Hildurghausen on October 12, 1810 and forty thousand people turned out to wish the royal couple luck. Unlike the marriage, which was a comedy of errors, the party was such a huge success that the people of the city decided to adopt it as an annual affair.

The original celebrations, paid for in full by the royal treasury, included races between the wagon drivers from local beer breweries. When the races were over, the drivers and their assistants unloaded the barrels of beer from their wagons and the guests were given as much to drink as they wanted. Later, when the festival became more commercial, the breweries set up huge tents in which they could sell not only their beer but huge amounts of fried and roasted veal, pork and chicken. So successful was the event, that by 1815 the original one day party stretched into a sixteen day long celebration in which drunkenness, loudness and a certain amount of sexual promiscuity were all considered perfectly acceptable behavior.

Nearly a century and a half later, Monk Webber ,an American character in Thomas Wolfe's novel "The Web and the Rock", was alternately delighted and disgusted by what he found at Oktoberfest. He observed that "during the festival all of Munichbecame a kind of German heaven". The festival made him think in particular of the Peter Breughel picture "in which little roast pigs trot out conveniently to serve your pleasure, with knives and forks stuck conveniently in their tender, crackling hides, and with bottles dropping from the sky, and trees and bushes all blooming with growths of pastry and fruits".

In one of the beer halls, Webber saw "hundreds of tables with people sitting together devouring tons of beef, great platters of cold sliced sausages, huge slabs of veal and pork, together withthe great stone mugs that foamed over with a liter of the cold, strong October beer". It seemed to Webber, who was quite intoxicated himself, that "the world had become one enormous belly, in which there was nothing but food, glorious food and beer, glorious beer".

Not much has changed in the intervening years and whether one enjoys or despises the enormous wood pavilions, the brass bands, the drinking songs and the overall behavior of the people who visit Munich during Oktoberfest is much a question of personal taste. Personally, even though I am glad to have witnessed the phenomenon several times, I find it all a bit too Teutonic for my taste and the thousands of rowdy people drinking beer and singing songs make it difficult for me to avoid thinking about Dachau Concentration Camp which is only 12 kilometers from the city. Despite my prejudice, even I have to admit that there is a certain compelling fascination to the festival. After all, in 1998, eight million visitors consumed more than 12 million liters of beer every day and consumed in all 14 million kilos of meat and a virtual mountain of sauerkraut.

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© Daniel Rogov