Lederhosen and Consequences

Every September, Munich surrenders. The tents go up on the Theresienwiese, the beer starts flowing at ten in the morning, and six million people from roughly forty countries converge to drink quantities of lager that the human body was clearly not designed to process in a single afternoon. The dirndl comes back out. The lederhosen. The novelty foam hats. The Oktoberfest is many things—cultural tradition, tourism machine, a profoundly effective mechanism for separating visitors from their money—but above all it is a mechanism for getting people violently drunk in a context where this is somehow presented as charm.

The website München kotzt—Munich vomits—documents the aftermath with a thoroughness that suggests someone looked at all of this and decided what it really needed was a dedicated photo archive. They’re not wrong. Whatever mythology surrounds the festival—the horse parade, the ceremonial tapping of the first keg, the vague implication that this is all somehow about Bavarian heritage—the real monument to the occasion is taking place against the perimeter fence at around four in the afternoon, in a stranger’s shoes.

I’ve never been to Oktoberfest and I’m not sure I want to fix that. Paying fifteen euros for a liter of beer while someone plays an oompah arrangement of whatever the year’s hit song is has never particularly appealed to me. But there’s something almost admirable about the commitment. Six million people agreeing, simultaneously, to do this to themselves. Annually. The world is sometimes a very strange place.