How that obese bear got into his Lederhosen, I don’t know. But he deserves a hug for it.

Two months back home in the smog-filled Inland Empire really made me start craving some crisp German alpine air – and some bratwurst. So, when I spotted an ad for a weekly Oktoberfest celebration in Lake Arrowhead, a mountain town about an hour northeast of Claremont, I knew I’d found my Fall Break hotspot. Joined by Russell Page, CMC ’13, the Port Side’s Web Editor, I filled up my 2004 Hyundai Elantra with $46 of pollutant, cranked up an old Blink-182 mix and braved winding cliffs of doom en route to fake Germany.

Fake Germany was quaint. Wooden statues of obese bears cramming their hibernation guts into teeny Lederhosen greeted us. So did a “traditional” Bavarian “oom-pah-pah” band, complete with a Dirndl-clad Bierfrau attempting to yodel. The lake itself, surrounded on all sides by conifers and timber-framed, slant-roofed buildings, bore a comforting but disturbing resemblance to the Bavarian Königsee, one of Hitler’s favorite hangouts. I felt at home.

But then I tried a bratwurst. My $5 meal may just as well have been called “unidentifiable, lukewarmly-cooked pork product inside a mushy, store-bought hot dog bun with the world’s worst, inedible pickled cabbage.” The crisp and crunchy grilled brat I’d come to love during my seven months abroad had not only been Americanized, it had been abused. I felt violated – so violated that I determined, in true Oktoberfest fashion, to drink my sorrows away.

This is not bratwurst. This is a Schweinerei.

Newly 21, I headed over to the beer kiosk, hoping to find some of my German favorites: Bitburger, Henninger, Binding… anything authentic. On the tap, however, was Coors Light, the official beer of NASCAR (enough said). The more adventurous type could fill their shitty plastic beer steins with the British-brewed Newcastle or the Belgian-style Blue Moon, brewed by (who knew?!) Coors.

This Schweinerei* insulted me. It insulted me more than all the times I tried to buy a nice bottle of wine at German and Austrian grocery stores and got carded by the check-out lady (the drinking age is 16). It even insulted me more than the time the waiter at Munich’s renowned Hofbräuhaus sassed me for sassing him (in German) about why our Spätzle was taking so damn long. And in this recurring feeling of being insulted by most things German, I regained my comfort and sat back down.

I didn’t lose my temper when the faux-Bavarian band started singing in Spanish, or when they performed a tune about Arnold Schwarzenegger ditching Austria and shipping out to Cali. I’m pretty sure I was the only audience member who could understand the horribly American-accented Deutsch coming out of the lead singer’s mouth, but I didn’t care. I was in rolling-my-eyes mode.

I spent much of my time in Europe rolling my eyes, justifying the Schweinerei* I witnessed with, “Oh, Europe. You’re so silly.” And I suppose that’s how I’ll always need to approach America’s misappropriation of basically all German culture.

Good ol’ Americans waiting in line for some good German beer. Too bad all they got was Coors Light.

Much of what we deem “German” is really from Bavaria, the country’s southern region that constituted the vast majority of the U.S. Army’s post-World War II occupation zone. But Bavaria is weird. Its inhabitants speak with a funny accent and slang, tend to be Catholic (the rest of Germany is predominantly Protestant), and lean much more toward political conservatism. Basically, Bavaria is the Texas of Germany.

Wouldn’t it be weird and inaccurate if ten-gallon hats, shooting ranges and rodeos were the chief representations of America abroad? Well, that’s how I feel about Oktoberfest, initially the celebration of the 1810 marriage between Bavarian Crown Prince Ludwig and Princess Therese of Saxony-Hildburghausen. Unfortunately, few people know this historical background. Even worse, few know what a real bratwurst – washed down with a real gutes, deutsches Bier – tastes like. I’ll always cherish that.

*”Schweinerei” (German for hogwash, bullshit or a hot mess) is Editor-in-Chief Emeritus Michelle Lynn Kahn’s new weekly column on shit she learned in Europe.

Photos by Russell M. Page, Web Editor, CMC ’13

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