Beer Doesn’t Kill Germans; Germans Kill Germans. With Beer.

It's October in Germany, and that can mean only one thing: the miracle that comes from combining water, malt, yeast and vine flower cones...

Bier hier, Bier hier, or else I will collapse

After a week and a half of mostly staying around Lynn’s sister Gail’s place or the military bases getting practical matters taken care of, on Saturday night we finally got outselves out of the house. One of Mark’s former coworkers, Dave, invited us to join him and his wife Arlene for the evening at the Canstatter Volksfest, Stuttgart’s answer to Munich’s Oktoberfest. I haven't properly fact-checked this (hey, it’s election season so who’s checking facts), but apparently this is the second largest fall festival (read: huge beer-focused event) in Germany.

Knowing that finding a parking place in the city would be even more fiendishly difficult than usual, we took the S-Bahn (commuter train) into the city. Immediately upon arriving at the festival grounds stop, we were surrounded by already-tipsy Germans wearing red and white scarves -- the VfB Stuttgart football team had apparently just wrapped up a 4-1 trouncing of Bremen... and the whole stadium came next door to the Volksfest to celebrate. Beer and soccer hooligans, one of the classic recipes for fun, fun, fun!

"We're Nummer Eins! We're Nummer Eins!"

Not being much for ferris wheels and other carnival rides (and it was only about 45º), we had a walk around the grounds, and then found a nice beerhall to grab some dinner.

Yes, that girl in the Dirndl is wearing light-up bunny ears

The tents were all completely packed, and very loud with music and drunk people. Not the oom-pah bands you'd expect, though; the first one we walked through had a rock band playing "The Time Warp" from Rocky Horror Picture Show. A thousand Germans screaming, "It's just a jump to ze left..." was as surreal as it sounds. We grabbed a seat outside in the cold and ordered up some nice, light Schwäbisch (southwestern German) grub: personally, I murdered a couple of smoked pork steaks with sauerkraut and rye bread.

Lynn is having a love affair with those spätzl, and Dave seems surprised at how good his roast chicken is

Now, normally, you have to understand that German society is very polite and reserved, and order is the guiding principle of life. At festivals like this, however, the concept of "restraint" is utterly absent -- as exemplified by the mugs of beer, which only come in one size: a maß (as in "massive"), which is about a liter.

Gail is a "limonade"-drinking lightweight

Interestingly, Germans generally have a much more healthy attitude toward alcohol than Americans. Kids are allowed to start drinking beer when they are teenagers, and as a rule they are very responsible drinkers. Most of the people at the fest were out having a great time and behaving themselves.

Nice lederhosen, dude!

Then suddenly, as we were eating, there was a crash from within the tent, and a bunch of beer-besotted ruffians came tumbling out in a melée of fists and spurting blood. Within seconds, there were security guards and Polizei officers everywhere, and sirens as paddywagons pulled up.

Yes, that's a guy with blood all over his shirt, five feet away from us

"Bad jungen, bad jungen, was machst du ven zey komm für you?"

We spent the rest of the evening finishing our drinks and watching the entertainment as the German cops chased down, clubbed, and arrested the instigators. There's an old parable I love about the nations of Europe...

Heaven is where the police are British, the cooks are French, the mechanics are German, the lovers are Italian, and the whole thing is organized by the Swiss. Hell is where the cooks are British, the mechanics are French, the police are German, the lovers are Swiss, and the whole thing is organized by the Italians.

How true.