A Spiritual Case for Oktoberfest

This year, I’m hosting my own table at Oktoberfest. Which is a sentence I never imagined I’d write. I got my German passport a few years ago, but it took almost 15 years of living in Munich for this city to feel like home. It happened this weekend, when I finally made peace with Oktoberfest.

As a non-beer-drinking, spiritually orientated, crowd-hating, nature-loving, deep-talk-loving South African, you wouldn’t be surprised when I tell you that finding myself seated on a hard wooden bench, shoved up against the person next to me, surrounded by 5,000 drunk people dressed like peasants was less than ideal. In fact, I’d go as far as to say I found it downright distasteful.

And yet, it’s a festival that draws roughly 7 million visitors from all over the world and is so much a part of Munich life that the locals speak about it as simply a given. Everyone is in town, everyone is going.

There is only one thing that makes this experience considerably less awful, and that is getting invited to a table in a tent. That way, you go with a bunch of people you know, or at least will meet; you don’t have to fight for a place to sit and a waiter to serve you. But mostly, and for me the biggest benefit, you’re unlikely to find yourself in a conversation with a drunk Australian in lederhosen.

Nothing against Australians, or foreigners (I am one), but I had this feeling that if I was going to be at the Wiesn, I would want to be there with the locals, the people who the festival “belongs” to. And so I made it a rule that I would only attend if I was invited to a table inside a tent.

I guess you’re wondering: if I hated it so much, why would I persist? Why would I go at all? Why wouldn’t I just ignore the whole thing?

Short answer: FOMO.

I consider myself an independent thinker with a strong sense of what I like and don’t like. I’m not afraid to be unconventional, and yet it took an event like this to make me question myself. How could 7 million people be wrong and me right? What was I missing? What wasn’t I getting? Why did so many people; Munich people, people I had come to know as intelligent, conscious, healthy people…love it so much?

Every year I went, hoping to figure it out, hoping to experience what others seemed to. But every year I came up empty. I could not shift my perspective. I still hated beer and crowds and drunk people.

Until now.

Turns out, I didn’t need to suddenly like those things in order to like the festival. It’s that I had to find a way to like what else was present: joyfulness, suspended reality and collective effervescence. I had to first be open to seeing beyond the obvious and then find a way to like these things more than I liked that part in me that has a satirical eye and a knack for seeing the absurd in things.

Oktoberfest, concerts, sporting events, festivals; these are all places where my more cynical, satirical side gets in the way. People come together to experience something collectively, and that part of me has always kept me slightly outside of it.

And while the things I notice and feel are valid, I decided that, this year, I could leave that part of me at home for a few hours.

And it worked. Turns out, it’s more than okay, and even fun, to get really stupid, merge with the crowd and experience a silly kind of basic happiness just for the sake of it.

I felt more innocent, less snarky and way more full of love than I’d allowed myself to feel in a long, long time.

And so it came to be that I was right to keep persisting in trying to love this festival. Because it felt like I couldn’t fully love Munich without loving her most beloved celebration.

And now I can say that I do.

I have two more events to go to: one with a group of friends, and one hosted by me and my partner. So, perhaps not coincidentally, the year I finally made peace with her is the year I get to host my very own table.

Fifteen years in Munich, and one unlikely reconciliation with the Wiesn later, I think I’ve finally earned my stripes as a Münchnerin.

So if you find yourself feeling separate from a group, no matter how big or small, perhaps there’s a part in you that learned it was safer somehow to do so. Can you name it? Can you see it? And can you lovingly leave it at home for a couple of hours?