The Oktoberfest in Munich is simply everything you imagine it to be: drunken rancidity turned into a cultural heritage. I once witnessed the festival once, in the company of a gang of Russians who, after hoisting a beer mug or ten, decided to speed up the already fairly inevitable journey towards total lethargy: every new glass of beer came from that moment add another glass of schnapps.
It was a largely cliché-affirming event, all of them: I still vaguely remember a performance by a music band that sounded suspiciously like Münchener Freiheit, a local group that had also released a few hit parade records with us in the mid-80s, and someone who delivered came to verify whether that sticky tattoo that ended up on my neck was hopefully not a real one. At one point, the light inevitably went out, and it didn’t turn back on in my hotel room until the next morning, without the slightest realization of how I got there.
The whole ordeal came back to my mind when I saw actor Mišel Matičević chasing giant jars of beer down his throat in one go into Oktoberfest: Beer & Blood, a German historical Netflix series that goes back to the Oktoberfest 1900 edition. Matičević’s character Curt Prank, a well-to-do newcomer with a shadowy past, wants to set up a mega tent at the at that time still quite modest beer festival, and be the popular festival worn by the local middle class first push towards big commerce. But of course that doesn’t happen without a struggle: the brewers have closed ranks in a local syndicate and he needs a lot of persuasion to take his place. Read: here and there someone has to be convinced very personally, often with the loss of a body part.
It’s an expensive historical series, with the grubbyness and bloodlust of the British gangster series Peaky Blinders and the magical-realistic image timbre of the German topper Babylon Berlin. You will be served hallucinatory images, including Amazonian headhunters effectively finding a severed head, but in the Isar River that runs through Bavaria. And that one student isn’t Thomas Mann, the German writer who would make his debut with in 1901 Buddenbrooks: Fall of a Family?
There is a lot to see in it Oktoberfest: Beer & Blood, but few memorable things to experience: the story never transcends the mix between family chronicle and gangster history, with an extra melodramatic touch of a budding courtship between two young people from camps who (literally) face each other with drawn knives. The series mainly engulfs you in its feverish imagery, its excellent sets and its detailed costumes, without having much to say about it. Until you wake up the next morning and have already forgotten most of what happened. The authentic Oktoberfest experience, in short, but without the splitting headache afterwards.
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