“Hey, it’s Oktoberfest somewhere!”
You can pretty safely justify the consumption of beer at any point during the month of October with these simple words. But if you’re surrounded by centuries-old Germanic-Canadian social clubs, dragged into a Miss Oktoberfest pageant, and pursued by a mascot named Onkel Hans who looks like the lovechild of the Pringles guy and Satan, then that somewhere is the Kitchener-Waterloo Oktoberfest.
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It’s the largest Oktoberfest outside of Germany, drawing hundreds of thousands of thirsty travelers for nine days when the city turns into one enormous tapped keg. The twin cities, located two hours west of Toronto, have a long history of cultural German heritage, and as if to prove it, Kitchener was formerly known as the City of Berlin—that is, until WWI broke out and that quaint German style was no longer a good look. With anti-German sentiment pressuring the town, it was renamed in 1916 after the UK’s Secretary of State for War, Herbert Kitchener.
Photos by Aaron Wynia
But you could’ve called it Sangria and it wouldn’t have changed the fact that Kitchener and its environs had become a promised land for Mennonite German farming families migrating from Pennsylvania to live their agrarian dreams.
The legacy of Kitchener’s settlers can be glimpsed at the various social clubs that popped up in the region. It’s within clubs like The Alpine, Transylvania, Schwaben, and Concordia that the Kitchener-Waterloo Oktoberfest continues its traditions of transforming grown men into walking lederhosen sausages.
I began my Oktoberfest at the Concordia Club (which dates back to 1873 and boasts the title of largest ethnic German club in Canada) where the inspiration for the festival was first planted. Within the rustic walls of this historic building, the club had its own small Oktoberfest in 1967; when the Chamber of Commerce ordered that the city come up enticements for tourists, it set the stage for what Oktoberfest would become. So with a $200 budget, public approval, and a committee led by Darwin Clay, Richard Hermansen, and Owen Lackenbauer, Oktoberfest officially began in 1969. The Concordia Club remains a bastion of drinking, eating, and social pleasures, like a turn-of-the-century Berghain with polka instead of techno.
As with St. Patrick’s day, Queen’s Day, or any other event revolving around public drunkenness, the crowd that welcomed me to the Concordia this year was one full of red-faced males determined to drink themselves flaccid.
Inside the club’s festhallen tent, large banquet tables were cordially packed with people decked out in festive outfits that ranged from traditional to “just hit Dollarama.” As pints, schnitzels, and beer nuts were gleefully chugged, the Black Forest Band kept the place swaying with a 1930s Billboard chart of polka hits. The storied decor and vintage music gave the place a nostalgic crackle, like listening to an old gramophone, but its charms were juxtaposed with the overwhelming feeling of being stuck in a crowd of competitive drinkers.
From here I journeyed further onwards to Bingemans entertainment complex, where the inaugural Oktoberfest was held. “It used to be a lot worse,” my cab driver Dragan said of the festival-goers. He moved to Kitchener 11 years ago from Serbia and has been operating a cab since. “Six, seven years ago, you’d find people in the bushes at 5 AM. Now everything closes much quicker.”
Venues close down at 1 AM sharp now, and a special Oktoberfest police unit consisting of 70 officers maintain a heavy presence. The result? Everybody gets drunk earlier! Across from the Bingemans banquet hall stands an enormous tent dubbed the “Kool Haus.” Inside, bars, stages, and even poker tables attempt to distract you from the reality that you’ve just paid to stand in a tarped parking lot. Here, Oktoberfest’s cultural heritage gets a thoroughly modern blurring.
Dirndls are treated like sexy Halloween costumes, and hordes of university bros put the frat in haus while prepoured pints of domestic beer await swilling. The house band gets replaced by a top 40 DJ, and seeing a roomful of people in suspendered shorts and Tyrolean hats grinding on the dance floor to Lil Jon looks more like a perfectly executed YouTube mashup than reality. As the lines for drink tickets and a pungent odor emanating from a series of trailers to pee in (or on) grew, so too did my disillusionment with the whole event.
I didn’t go in expecting to get more German culture than I would from a Munich airport gift shop (I didn’t), and at Bingemans, Oktoberfest could be simply taken for what it was: a hedonistic excuse to party. But it’s essentially this same idea that served as the original impetus for Bavaria’s Oktoberfest—a royal wedding celebration that was so fun that they decided to party every year. Looking at Oktoberfest through this lens gave me a sudden clarity. It’s like Onkel Hans’s never-ending wedding, filled with guests who get too drunk, obligatory speeches, corny music, and a bunch of people who are nice enough but you’d never want to spend more than one night with. In fact, if this is what Oktoberfest is all about, then Kitchener-Waterloo nails it.
Now, please go home till next year. You’re drunk.
