Table manners constitute an important part of cultural competence whether you travel on business or for pleasure. Or host people from other countries in your hometown. A trifle, like how you like your beer served can leave you out, preventing you from joining in and enjoying the fun.
Say you are English and go to Oktoberfest in Munich. You like beer; it is your drink of choice. You anticipate your first mass (beer mug 1, holds 1 litre). You know how you like your beer to look, how you like it to taste. And here it comes. With a beer head a third of a mug tall. That’s how they do it in Germany. Beer should have a head. Even if you serve it at home.
Many English friends and colleagues of mine felt puzzled. Andrew even asked the waiter directly “and where is one-third of my beer?” He felt cheated. Paid for a whole litre and got two-thirds of it.
Germans coming to England and getting their pints full, clean and clear are known for asking publicans not “to kill the best there.”[i]
A colleague of mine, Karsten, sporting a rather depressed face after his first pint served “according to the local” standards at Highgate pub, which he insisted was frequented by Karl Marx, went as far as getting beyond the bar and grabbing the bartender’s hand in order to ensure he gets his beer the way he likes it. Karl Marx, still in Highgate, just a few hundred meters away down the hill, surely approved.[ii] The bartender wasn’t amused.
According to Euromonitor International data, reported by Telegraph.co.uk(Akkoc, 2014), Germany consumes an estimated 110 litres of beer per person totalling nearly 9bn litres per year in total. UK – only half of the total amount, 4.3bn litres, which translates into 67 litres per capita. Maybe beer with the head really knows better when it comes to sales?
Differences in how you serve alcohol are not limited to beer only. The British “large glass” of wine doesn’t exist in Austria. Serve it and you would be considered a low class alcoholic. You can order a “viertel” (quarter, the same 250 ml) but it will be served in the jug and the waiter will pour only something like 125 or even less in your glass.
[i]You can read more on how to pour different beer German style here: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-pour-beer-like-a-german-2015-8?IR=T
[ii] Karl Marx is buried in Highgate Cemetery East. He moved to London in 1849 and died there in 1883.
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Wherever you go, one of the things you take with you is your (table) manners. Apparently, people still dress up for special occasions. At least they think they do. The Times (UK) published today a small piece about Oktoberfest in Munich. A straightforward guide on how to offend your host. And it is not about how you hold your beer glass, or, to be precise, your one-litre mass. It is more about the inappropriate cultural appropriation of traditional dress. Or is it just having grown-up fun?
___________________________________________________________________________________ Oktoberfest backlash at ‘porn’ outfits
David Crossland, Munich | Jack Malvern
The Times
Outfits such as low-cut dresses and lederhosen have been embraced rather too enthusiastically by some British visitors to the Oktoberfest in MunichHANNES MAGERSTAEDT/GETTY IMAGES
For the people of Munich, preparations for Oktoberfest this month not only involve laying out trestle tables and rehearsing oompah bands but also girding themselves for an influx of scantily dressed British tourists.
While Britons may think that they are paying their hosts a compliment by wearing lederhosen and dirndls, German cultural figures are quietly appalled that much of the clothing is a pornographer’s interpretation of Bavarian traditional dress.
The irritation spilt over this week as a Munich-based crime author asked in a newspaper interview why so many people felt the need to dress in the Bavarian style.
“With the young women it often looks like porno dresses, short and low-cut and cheap material,” he said. “It has nothing to do with identity.”
The number of people wearing Bavarian folk costumes to the world’s biggest beer festival, which starts on September 22, has surged over the past decade.
Franz Thalhammer, 70, an accordionist and former chairman of Munich’s Georgenstoana Baierbrunn folk group, said that women’s costumes were a travesty of the real thing. “A dirndl is something nice, it can make almost anyone pretty. But some of the dresses you see these days are crazy,” he said. “You go in a tent and it’s full of paralytic Australians and Italians and they’ve forked out €250 [£224] for a complete Bavarian outfit and think they’re Bavarians. It’s as if I’d walk around half-naked and say I’m Australian.”
Fancy dress shops in Britain said that when they offered their customers a choice, they preferred sexier versions.
Ulku Stephanides, who has run the Carnival Store in Kensington, west London, for 29 years, said that female customers heading to Munich had a set idea of how they wanted to look. “For women, we have either knee-length or shorter than knee-length dresses. People used to have a normal size. Now, because models are wearing these costumes, the girls come to the shop and they say: ‘I want to look sexy’.”
Her customers also wanted to show plenty of cleavage. “That’s the new generation. Last week I was serving one girl; she was like the Queen of Sheba. She was buying a costume for £20 and taking photographs to show friends on Instagram. She said: ‘I don't look sexy enough. I have to go to Germany, to Oktoberfest’.” Some 6.2 million people attended Oktoberfest last year and drank 7.5 million “Mass” or 1 litre glasses of beer. Britons were in the top ten among foreign visitors. Many newcomers take the spontaneous decision to buy lederhosen at Munich airport.
Lederhosen made from inauthentic materials is a waste of money, a Munich outfitter saidGETTY IMAGES
Benedikt Daller, a Munich outfitter, said that lederhosen with multicoloured stitching looked plain silly, anything made of cowhide or pigskin was a waste of money because it would tear, elaborately embroidered shirts were unacceptable and neckerchiefs were an “absolute no-go”. It really has to be deerskin or goatskin, he said.
In the 1980s and 1990s anyone wearing Bavarian dress at Oktoberfest would have stood out unless they were performing in an oompah band or serving beer. Now, putting on folk costume has become a ritual of the festival, alongside queueing, trying to smuggle beer glasses past security and coping with double vision after downing the potent beer brewed exclusively for the occasion by six Munich breweries.
Michael Ritter, a researcher at the Bavarian Regional Heritage Society, suggested that young people were simply trying to find a sense of identity in a globalised world. He added that it was ridiculous to claim that there was a single authentic style because fashions changed over hundreds of years. Many designs stem from the 19th century when they became fashionable among the Bavarian and Austrian aristocracy. Mr Ritter said that the costumes raised awareness of Bavaria’s historical dress, which originated in the Alps where cattle herders needed tough leather trousers to take livestock across rough terrain and through thorn bushes.
“I know of many women who bought a cheap €50 dirndl made in the Far East and realised how pretty it looks,” he said. “Then they buy a second and a third and a fourth and go for higher quality every time.
“It’s the same with lederhosen. Our tailors are doing good business despite the foreign competition.”
For Mr Thalhammer, Oktoberfest will rise above controversies over cheap clothing. “Six million people from all kinds of nations go there and party and toast each other and there’s hardly ever any trouble,” the accordionist said. “It makes you think, why can’t the whole world be like that? But maybe it’s because they’re all drunk.”
