Oktoberfest madness: When the beer becomes a luxury item and the reaction joins in the celebration

From Saturday again: 42 hectares of Theresienwiese, seven million visitors, millions of liters of beer - and a ritual that sells itself as the Bavarian folk soul, but is above all one thing: a fully capitalized intoxication with a lederhosen costume. Anyone who looks at the spectacle soberly will not see a tradition, but a brand that can be called "coziness" while it squeezes employees, endangers women and provides the extreme right with a stage with a folklore touch.

The measure as a class question

The state capital of Munich has published the figures itself: a pint of festival beer will cost between 14.80 and 15.90 euros in 2026 - on average 2.38 percent more than in the previous year. Ten years ago, in 2015, the highest price was 10.40 euros. That's an increase of over 50 percent in a decade, significantly faster than general inflation over the same period. Anyone who works for the minimum wage or in the catering industry has to work almost half an hour for a single measure.

This is not a law of nature. The marquee operators - family-run large corporations such as Hacker-Pschorr, Löwenbräu, Käfer - calculate the prices themselves, the city only checks the "appropriateness" on paper. Increasing rent, stand rent, GEMA fees: all of this is passed on to guests through the price of beer, while the profit margins of the large Oktoberfest owners break records year after year. The Oktoberfest is by no means a folk festival in the sense of being “affordable for everyone”, but rather a redistribution mechanism from bottom to top, wrapped in traditional costumes.

Comfort as a business model

The lederhosen, the dirndl, the “Ozapft is” – all of this is sold as apolitical, harmless local folklore. In fact, “tracht” and “Bavarian identity” have been a gateway for the extreme right for years. AfD officials have their photos taken in dirndls, ethnic fraternities use the Oktoberfest as a networking area, and right-wing influencers sell “German coziness” as a counter-proposal to an allegedly “foreign-invaded” republic. Anyone who finds homeland and tradition apolitical has not been paying attention: they have always been contested terrain, and the right systematically occupies them when no one objects.

In addition, there is the other, uncomfortable pattern that appears every year in the Munich police's crime statistics and is suppressed every year: sexualized attacks in the beer tent and ride areas, women who have to fight their way through the crowd, "groping" as a supposed trivial offense in a wet and happy exceptional situation. This is not the collateral damage of too much beer, but rather the downside of an event culture that celebrates loss of control but consistently places responsibility for it on those affected.

Who pays, who earns

Those who actually keep the festival going see the least of the record sales: the waitresses who rush through crowded tents with eight or nine beer mugs at the same time, often on a tip basis and on temporary contracts; the cleaning staff wading through gallons of vomit and broken glass at night; the assembly and dismantling crews that knock the tents out of the ground in just a few weeks. They support the festival without being involved in its myth - while Wiesn host dynasties and brewery companies can look forward to new record sales every year.

Nothing in this criticism is directed against the people who want to sit in a tent with friends once a year, drink a beer and dance. The problem is not the thirst of the masses, but who makes money from it, who bears the costs and whose worldview goes along with the celebrations without being contradicted. Solidarity belongs to the waitresses, the cleaning staff and everyone who wants to feel safe at the Oktoberfest - not to the staging of "tradition" that the extreme right has long since set up as a stage.

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