What I learnt about Germans as Oktoberfest made its comeback

With this year’s festival proving to be the booziest yet after a two-year absence, Ed Grenby donned his lederhosen for the opening weekend

On leaving Germany, I am asked to fill in an online form, which requests my reason for departure. I write “lederhosen”. It’s not that they look silly (though they do). It’s not that they mark me out instantly as a tourist (they don’t, actually; plenty of locals are wearing them). It’s – and I’m sorry, there’s no non-invasive way of saying this – the chafing.

Fortunately, there is a lubricant-cumemollient-cum-anaesthetic available, in 1.1-litre (two pint) doses, as I am attending the opening weekend of Oktoberfest 2022. Munich’s is the original and beeriest – founded in 1810 to mark the marriage of King Ludwig (God knows what his stag do was like) – and this year’s is being billed as potentially the wildest ever, since it swaggers back after a two-year disco nap necessitated by eine kleine deadly pandemic.

That global party-pooper is still making its presence felt in Munich: masks are compulsory on all public transport, and (rule-respecters that the Germans are) everyone complies. But the mask slips rather once you hit Theresienwiese, the 100-acre home of Oktoberfest. Here, I discover, the vibe is punters packed in 10 to a table, embraces from strangers, and generally partying like it’s 2019.

Because I am travelling alone, and also a festival first-timer, I book onto a group “guided tour” – really an ovenready international gang of beer buddies. Boris, our guide, keeps it light on the history (he reads out a couple of dates from what sounds suspiciously like a Wikipedia page) but is a very genial host, and has a skinful of insidetrack info to help us navigate the 30-odd massive beer tents and associated attractions of Oktoberfest.

In fact, few of the seven million-odd folk who attend are just here for the beer, it turns out: as well as the booze, there is a vast array of funfair rides, food stalls and fairground games, many of them traditional, and more bands than you can shake a €3 foot-long sausage at.

While still borderline sober I try my hand at the Teufelsrad, an Oktoberfest institution since 1910. (I might not have been so keen if I’d known it meant “Wheel of the Devil”.) Here, €5 (£4.40) gets you a place on a big spinning wheel, like a flattened roundabout, that goes faster and faster until everyone is flung off – or “helped” off as ropes and foam cannonballs and outsized boxing gloves are added to the mix. Things are kept fairer, and funnier, as it’s done in groups (“All the girls, five to seven years old!” “All the men, 55 to 60 years!”).

My attempt to double my chances by self-identifying as non-binary are thwarted by the lederhosen, because the traditional dirndl dress is as de rigeur for women as those deerskin britches are for men.

I’m amazed at how many people make the effort, Münchners and foreigners alike, though be wary, girls: where you tie the bow on your waist ribbon is considered a code – on the right, married; left, single; central, a virgin – though I swear I see a few ribbons migrating one way or the other over the course of the night.

With clothing, as with everything here, attendees run the gamut from tourist to purist (Miriam, managing one of the classier souvenir stalls, refuses to sell me the “wrong” kind of hat. “It’s not a carnival,” she tuts). But the organisers of the Wiesn, as Oktoberfest is known locally, have made the sensible decision to give the neo-nostalgics their own little pre-electric enclave, the Oide Wiesn, where it is forever the 1800s. That way, they don’t ruin everyone else’s fun, nor vice versa.

Even the “modern” bit is heaving with heritage, anyway. I’m lured to a lovely old 1924 wooden waltzer, the Krinoline, by the timewarpy brass music gently wafting from it – then am amazed to discover it is actually a live five-piece which plays a tune for every spin. Robert, on cornet, says he and his euphonium-wielding bandmates have been pumping out the oompah (“traditional Bavarian music”) here for 20 years.

Every tent has its own take on the appropriate musical accompaniment to alcoholic overconsumption, and they range from “full oompah”, through unironically moustached Teutonic synth duos playing plinky-plonk Europop, to amped-up roomshakers crunching out wedding-disco rock so emphatic it’s like Queen’s Don’t Stop Me

Now is the German national anthem (“Zey call me Meester FAHRENHEIT!”). Every band, however, is expected to play Ein Prosit between five and 10 times an hour (seriously) as the actions to that song involve downing your beer – and thus, very likely, ordering another one.

The drinking songs are a big part of the action, in fact. But don’t worry if you don’t know the words – or, indeed, any words. After my third mass (only foreigners call them steins, apparently), I find I can magically speak German. Or, at least, I can join in with such classic Oktoberfest lyrics as “Und ich flieg’, flieg’, flieg’ wie ein Flieger, lala-la-la-la”.

Spend the whole day here and you will hear YMCA done with a brass accompaniment half a dozen times too often (i.e. you will hear it half a dozen times); but it is the ubiquitous goodmood music, and the singalongs, and the communal dancing on the beer tents’ benches that elevate Oktoberfest from just a drinking session to something like an all-ages birthday party.

Carolin (from Munich) and Carina (from Hanover) are 28-year-old twins, swathed in pink frilly dirndls and curtains of blonde hair: “Normally we like R&B, hip-hop, real music,” says Carina, “but today there’s no band in the world I’d rather see than… [she gestures toward a pleasingly overweight ensemble of red-faced oompahmeisters].”

The boys have clearly been on the potato dumplings, and they’re not the only ones. Food plays a much more distinguished role here than it would at any British booze-up, and even at 10pm in the midst of a riotous 10,000seat beer tent, I eat some excellent kartoffelknödel myself, alongside a rib-sticking pork knuckle that feels like it could easily soak up four pints’ worth of lager.

That’s just as well, because 14million pints of the stuff are sold each year at the Weisn. (To put that into context, that is 40 times as much soft drink as is served.) Daniel, who has been filling steins here since 1991, says he reckons numbers are a little down this year – “Some people are even asking for half beer, half water,” he says, shakinghis head, 30 per cent indignation, 70 per cent pity.

The British are “good drinkers”, he says (meaning it in a very Bavarian way: that they get through serious quantities in a workmanlike fashion); the Italians are fun, but become a bit much (“After two drinks, I’m their best friend and they want to hug me”); and the Germans, of course, are the best, somewhere between the two.

I certainly find the Germans here head-spinningly convivial. “Nur ein schwein trinkt allein!” they tell me in every tent, which literally means “only a pig drinks alone”, but seems actually to translate as: “Come, join us! This round is on me!”

I can’t quite believe a beer festival can be this lovely and civilised, so come closing time (at a very adult 10.30pm), I check out an area around the back of the Weisn called Kotzberg (“Puke Mountain”). I find a few snoggers, a few sleepers and precisely one neat, discreet serving of pavement pizza. If the UK had a seven millionman lager party, I can’t help thinking the whole place would be awash with fights, broken glass and kotz.

Naturally I wake up the next morning with that old familiar “Never drinking again…” feeling. But “Weisn ’23” has a nice ring to it, nein?