The Real Oktoberfest: What Actually Happens When Germany Throws a Party
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Most people outside Germany picture Oktoberfest as a rowdy beer festival where strangers in lederhosen drain litre steins. That picture is not entirely wrong. But it misses almost everything that makes the event significant to the people who actually live there.
Oktoberfest began in 1810 as a celebration of the marriage of Crown Prince Ludwig I of Bavaria to Princess Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen. The citizens of Munich were invited to join the royal festivities on the fields in front of the city gates. Horse racing was the main attraction. Beer was secondary. The event was so successful that it was repeated the following year, and the year after that, and has continued with only a handful of interruptions — wars, cholera outbreaks — ever since.
The festival runs for sixteen to eighteen days in late September and early October, not primarily in October despite the name. The move to September was made in the 1800s to take advantage of better weather. Munich's climate in late September is still warm enough for the enormous outdoor tents — which are not tents in the casual sense, but massive temporary structures each holding thousands of people — to function as open-air spaces.
What visitors often miss is that Oktoberfest is fundamentally a Bavarian cultural festival. The beer served is exclusively brewed within the city limits of Munich by six historic breweries. The food is traditional Bavarian: roast chicken, pretzels the size of your head, Weisswurst consumed before noon as tradition dictates. The music in the tents shifts from traditional brass band oompah in the early hours to something approaching a concert atmosphere by evening.
Over seven million people attend across the sixteen days. About a quarter of them are international visitors. The rest are locals who have been going every year since childhood, meeting the same groups of friends at the same tables in the same tents, treating it less like a tourist attraction and more like a reunion.
