My bother and I recently returned from a lengthy stay in Germany’s most engaging city, Munich, and decided it was time to admit that the citizens of Bavaria have made a wise decision. They have decided to go along with the tourist ploy that Berlin is the city to visit if you are going to make a brief sojourn into that nasty country that only one generation ago came close to wiping out European civilization. For European cities that become apples of tourist organizers’ eyes pay a heavy, sometimes fatal, price for paving their streets with the gold left behind by the hordes. For 8 months of the year, Florence and Venice, surely two of the world’s most splendid cities, cease to exist under the conditions that once made them so splendid, as they are overwhelmed with tourists anxious to have their pictures taken in front of nude David or a yodeling gondolier or two. Really big cities, like New York, Paris or London, not to mention gigantic ones like Shanghai or Tokyo, and even somewhat isolated cities like Stockholm, Vancouver and Helsinki, can brush aside the potential carnage by offering more space than the tourists can fill. But middle size cities like Munich, full of the cultural monuments that tourists crave and sitting right on the main road of the grand tour, run the danger of sinking like Venice.
And so Munich and Bavaria, the beautiful “free state” of which it is the capital, have made a deal that convinces the rest of the world to come in once a year for a couple of weeks in late September and early October and spend its money like drunken sailors, in fact spend their weeks like that as well, and then depart deliriously happy having had a time they can hardly remember. The coffers of Munich bulge at the seams, the countryside round about counts up the spillage from the overflow, and the local citizenry returns to going about its business, having limited the damage to the 17 days of the Oktoberfest, which most of them never visit unless it’s on business, while suggesting that Berlin would be a better place to visit the rest of the year. And off they go. Meanwhile we Münchners and our Upper- and Lower-Bavarian relatives and friends spend the splendid spring, summer and autumn evenings in beer gardens and quiet corners that other places can only dream about, quaffing a liter of Augustiner, Spatenbräu or Paulaner that other breweries , content to spend their money on marketing some kind of liquid that one could not give way under the chestnut trees of Bavaria, cannot even begin to try to copy. So pass the word – be sure to visit Europe’s most wonderful city, but be sure to do it during the Oktoberfest and don’t bother visiting the Hirschgarten, Taxisgarten, or even the Hofbräuhausgarten am Wiener Platz – the other one am Platzl you should definitely visit – because all you’ll find there are boring locals.