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Oktoberfest
| Article
# : |
16645 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1989 |
1,673 Words |
| Author
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William Woys Weaver
William Woys Weaver is the author of America Eats, The
Christmas Cook, and other books. His new book, Up-Country
Dutch: Eating Well from the Land, is scheduled to appear next
year. |
No one knows for certain when the first Oktoberfest was held in America. Yet it is fairly clear from nineteenth-century archival materials that social events under the name of Oktoberfest were held from time to time in immigrant beer gardens in places like Cincinnati, New York, Milwaukee, and St. Louis as early as the 1870s.
In general, the Bayerischer Volksfestvereins (Bavarian Volksfest Clubs), with their informal nationwide network of local chapters, organized and promoted the earliest American Oktoberfests. The Philadelphia chapter, for example, held its first Oktoberfest in 1878. In places where Bavarian immigrants were not well organized, the Cannstatter Volksfestverein (Cannstatt Volksfest Club), the Vereinigte Deutsch-Ungarn (United Hungarian Germans), the Vereinigung der Donauschwaben (United Danube Swabians), or a local German sport club would organize its own substitute Oktoberfest party. All of the American versions of the Oktoberfest, however, were quite different from the Munich original and remain so to this day.
The first Bavarian Oktoberfest was held in Munich on October 17, 1810. It was organized by Max Joseph of Bavaria to celebrate the marriage of his son, King Ludwig I, to Princess Therese von Sachse-Hildburghausen. The sixteen-day fair was held in honor of the bride on a large field called the Theresienwiese, a field now surrounded by Munich's ever-expanding suburbs. The real purpose of this first Oktoberfest, aside from celebrating the royal wedding, was to bring progressive agriculture into contact with the Bavarian peasantry and to stir up nationalistic feelings for the newly created Kingdom of Bavaria. It was brilliant political
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