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September 2003

Händl with care

An Oktoberfest waitress remembers the trials and tribulations of her work

“All the girls from Australia, America and so on, come only a few days before the Oktoberfest starts, you know, they’re only here to work,” explains Mr. Steinberg from the Hofbräu brewery. He is clearly a busy man, so it makes no sense to try and find a Wies’nbedienung (Oktoberfest waiter/ waitress) through him for our feature this month. Maybe it is just a myth that there are hundreds of former Wies’n employees from the English-speaking world who came, worked and just somehow ended up staying in Munich. In the end it’s the pubs and bars, specifically those that cater to the expat crowd, that deliver. Yet Tanja, who called and said she was willing to be interviewed, sounded nothing like the kind of brawny, six-Mass-toting Sheila that we had in mind.

And she isn’t. Slender, freckled, red-haired, green-eyed, half German, half English, Tanja is pretty much pint-size herself. She grins at the idea of carrying six Mass at once. “You work at the Oktoberfest to make money. I started off carrying six, but realized I could manage ten and earn a lot more. So it was ten from day one.” Tanja worked at the Oktoberfest for three years running, from September 1999, but attributes initially finding one of the much sought-after waitressing jobs to good luck. “I phoned all the breweries in June and everyone laughed at me and said: get serious. Finally, I called Schottenhamel and they promised me work in the kitchen, but three days before Anzapfen (the inaugural beer-taping ceremony) I still hadn’t heard anything.” With a steely glint in her eye Tanja goes on to explain how she refused to let the brewers renege on their promise and after waiting in the tent for eight hours was finally given the work she had hoped for initially—serving at ten tables—the afternoon before the Oktoberfest got under way. “I had to collect my tax card, get about DM 2,000 in change and find some aprons by the next morning.

“Habt’s n Radi?“ (Bavarian for “Do you serve radishes?”), asked Tanja’s first customer. “What?” stammered our elfin waitress, who spoke no Bavarian and was already shaking with fear at what lay ahead. A fellow waiter—“I wouldn’t have been able to make it without him”—translated and Tanja, grateful but somewhat unnerved, set off to collect her first order. The stamina required to work 16 days non-stop, from 10 am until midnight and longer at weekends is undoubtedly boosted by the payment system. All the wait staff at the Festzelte (beer tents) are required to buy the food and drink they will be selling in advance in the form of tokens (500 Mass tokens at the start of the day is normal and tokens can be topped up any time). A customer ordering, say, a beer, will pay slightly more than the token price and the difference is then pocketed by the waiter or waitress who has served him. “This encourages endurance,” says Tanja. But it also meant that she kept an eagle eye on her “products.” Even when she was groped by a customer, she put down her beer before letting fly at the offender. Keeping track of the food, especially the Händl (roast chicken halves) was more difficult. A tray can accommodate up to 35 Händl at one time, making it not only heavy but unwieldy to transport in the crowded tent. “I’m small and sometimes when I held the tray up high to get past people, someone would steal one of the chickens from the back of the tray, which I couldn’t see”: a memory that causes her lips to tighten even now in annoyance.

Despite all the hardships, Tanja remembers her Wies’n days with affection. Putting socks in the freezer every morning so that they would be there to cool her aching feet after work, carrying a drunken Asian lady off the premises when she threatened to hit a companion on the head with a beer mug and even cleaning up the nightly portions of vomit served up to her by drunken customers seems less gruesome with hindsight. “I’m just finishing my studies to become a social worker and I had plenty of chances to practice my skills dealing with customers at the Oktoberfest,” she muses.

The highlight for all service staff is probably the thunderous ovation they receive from the customers and management on the final day. “Just incredible,” says Tanja, overcome with emotion for a moment. She recollects going home on her last evening in 1999, seven kilos lighter than when she had begun work, a little more than two weeks earlier and arranging her earnings, DM 10,500 in total, in piles of notes on her bed. “And then,” she says, “I burst into tears. It was the hardest-earned money I ever made.”

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