A Royal Wedding … and its Consequences

The history of the Oktoberfest begins with a wedding and a horserace. The latter was held on 17 October 1810 on a meadow just outside the city gates to celebrate the marriage of Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria (later King Ludwig I) and Princess Therese of Sachsen-Hildburghausen. It was a huge spectacle accompanied, of course, by mountains of food and a river of Munich beer.

The townspeople were so enthusiastic that they named the meadow after the bride, calling it 'Theresienwiese', and repeated the festival every year from 1819. That explains why local citizens and Oktoberfest devotees refer to the festival merely as the 'Wies'n'.

Since then the horserace has disappeared, but not the beer. The festival grew more and more popular, and more and more people came to it, first from the Bavarian countryside and later from the whole of Germany. Before long it was an international event.

In 1897 the first of the 'festival tents' was set up to keep the occasional rainstorms from spoiling the fun. The picture to the left shows the 'Ochsenbraterei' tent as it looked in 1899. The Wies'n also drew an increasing number of sideshows, and before long the first merry-go-rounds. The 'public executions' at Schichtl's, the twittering of Vogeljakob, the Krinoline and the Flea Circus still exist today.
In 1910, at the one-hundredth Oktoberfest, the first beer record was set: 12,000 hectolitres of Wies'n beer (316,800 gallons). In 2000 6.6 million litres of the noble liquid (approx. 1.74 million gallons) quenched the thirsts of Oktoberfest visitors.

In 1950 Thomas Wimmer, Munich's highly popular Lord Mayor, founded a ceremony that has become a worldwide media event: each year the mayor of Munich personally taps the first keg of Spaten beer in the Schottenhamel beer tent to open the Oktoberfest, crowing the deed with the jubilant cry of 'O'zapft is!' ('It's tapped!'). Incidentally, the skill that the mayor develops over the years, and the number of hammer-blows he has to use, play a large role in his prestige among the Munich townspeople.

The Oktoberfest has moved with the times. Each year the roller coaster and the rides offer new spectacular high-tech attractions; each year people stand on tables in the beer tents, swaying to the sounds of the latest Wies'n hit. Yet it has remained a site of hallowed traditions. The Bavarians - not to mention many a foreign visitor - display their colourful local costumes and leather shorts, listening to music from the brass bands. Even the traditional riflemen's and folk dress parade is the largest and the most beautiful and historically significant of its kind in the world.