Quote of the Day (Thomas Wolfe, on Oktoberfest, A ‘Paradise of Cram and Gorge’)

“Everyone was eating; everyone was drinking. A ravenous hunger—an insane hunger that knew no appeasement, that wished to glut itself on all the roasted ox flesh, all the sausages, all the salt fish in the world, seized me and held me in its teeth. In all the world there was nothing but Food—glorious Food. And beer—October beer. The world was one enormous Belly—there was no higher heaven than the paradise of Cram and Gorge. All of the agony of the mind was here forgotten. What did these people know about books? What did they know about pictures? What did they know about the million tumults of the soul, the conflict and the agony of the spirit, the hopes, fears, hatreds, failures, and ambitions, the whole fevered complex of modern life? These people lived for nothing but to eat and drink—and they were right.”—American novelist Thomas Wolfe (1900-1937), “Oktoberfest,” originally published in Scribner’s Magazine, June 1937, reprinted in The Complete Short Stories of Thomas Wolfe, edited by Francis E. Skipp (1987)

The first Oktoberfest began in Munich, Germany, on this day in 1810. Since then, according to this brief history from Oktoberfest Tours, the celebration of this bacchanal has been moved to late September and ending in early October to allow for better weather conditions in the changeable local climate. Most similar observances of this festival around the world, including in the U.S., have followed suit.

But there are some American cities—including one I heard about this morning—that are still marking the occasion even as I write this. So, seizing on this slender occasion, I am writing this post.

The “parade of Cram and Gorge” that Thomas Wolfe described in the above passage occurred in 1928—one of a half-dozen visits he made to Germany from 1926 to 1936.  

His participation in that celebration might have been a little too vigorous, according to Ellen Apperson Brown’s April 2020 essay on Wolfe’s short story on the Website of the Thomas Wolfe Memorial: The aspiring novelist, after downing eight liters of beer, got into a drunken brawl that left him with “a concussion of the brain, 4 scalp wounds, and a broken nose,” along with trips to a police station and hospital, he confessed to his lover of the time, the American set designer Aline Bernstein.

At one point in the short story, Wolfe’s narrator, amid all the “powerful bodies” packed together in this hall, senses that “nothing on earth could resist them—that they must smash anything they came against”—a disturbing premonition of the violence that Germany would unleash under the Nazi regime in the 1930s. But, caught up in the tumult and friendship of those around him, he eventually relegates his unease to the back of his consciousness.

Wolfe would feel even more enthusiastic about the nation in 1935, when he was feted as a major literary figure—an unambiguous embrace of his work that he was not experiencing in the U.S. at the time.

But to his credit, as journalist Andrew Nagorski chronicled in Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power, Wolfe came to see the error of his ways in the summer of 1936 during the Munich Olympics, when a German acquaintance laid out for him the mounting economic pressures and violence perpetrated on Jews by the Nazis.

Wolfe’s subsequent dramatic denunciation of the Nazis in the long “I Have a Thing to Tell You” chapter of his posthumous novel You Can’t Go Home Again led to his books being banned by the regime.

Most celebrations of Oktoberfest here in the U.S. will be closer to the feeling of “imminent and impending happiness” that Wolfe felt as he walked the streets back from this night. But here’s hoping that those who don’t know how to control their appetites will refrain from this festival of food and drink.

(The image accompanying this post, of Oktoberfest 2013 held in Munich, was taken Sept. 21, 2013, by Heribert Pohl.)