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Misel Maticevic as large farmer Curt Prank: Bierburg for 6000 guests
Photo:
Dusan Martincek / ARD
As a substitute drug of its own, the thing will work anyway: This year, as the Bavarian says, the Oktoberfest will not take place due to the corona.
A few million liters of beer are not served, many celebrities will not embarrass themselves with their traditional costume experiments, countless alcohol poisoning will not happen.
And of course that is only a small selection of the gloomy aspects of the hustle and bustle at the Munich Oktoberfest, which has developed into the largest and probably best-known festival of almost civilized mankind within 210 years.
Attempts to cheat at the bar, sexual assaults, brawls by otherwise more peaceful people are definitely part of it - and the mostly male pleasures listed last also form the dramaturgical skeleton of the six-part series, in which not only a lot of barley juice but also a lot of blood is shed.
She is not cheerful.
But impressive.
It's less because of the script, which works pretty predictably.
Two families, who are stubbornly arrested in the behavior of their milieus, are driven against each other with sinister determination: The Nuremberg brewer and unscrupulous businessman Curt Prank, who wants to build a "beer castle" for 6000 guests on the Oktoberfest, twenty times the size of the usual Beer stalls at the Oktoberfest, and who intends to marry his daughter into higher circles.
And the middle-class Catholic Deibel family, whose brewery threatens to perish in the capitalist and corrupt fight for repression.
Here is murder, there is prayer, here is bribed and there at the end the knife is drawn.
In addition, as if it were a play by Shakespeare, the children of the warring families find love for one another, and so the drama takes its regular course.
"Real cannibals from German Samoa"
On the other hand: around this Romeo and Juliet plot, the director Hannu Salonen, who produced some Stellbrink "crime scenes" with Devid Striesow for Saarland radio, developed a complex and fascinatingly repulsive social panorama of the Bavarian capital around the turn of the last century.
The bohemian and artist group in Schwabing's "Wahnmoching" - starring: Thomas Mann and Franziska zu Reventlow - has excessively humid appearances, the manorial upper class of Munich revolves around themselves in their over-decorated villas late feudally, the proletariat sweats and suffers as if painted.
Even the colonialist love for the horrible natural man has its historically correct appearance: "Real cannibals from German Samoa" are presented at the "Oktoberfest 1900" - and of course first made responsible for one of the various crimes in the Oktoberfest fight.
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The story is unfolding at a considerable pace.
Short scenes, hard cuts create a pushing atmosphere, the excellent camera (Felix Cramer) surprises with ambitious perspectives, the music (Michael Klaukien) with rich style and irony - like the background music to a Wahnmochinger orgy with a variation of the psychedelic Beatles hit " Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds ".
The light and soundtrack in particular transform the drama into dream-like and fairytale-like sequences, turning the artificiality, as if it were a Caravaggio, into art and the frenzy into pleasure.
And finally the excellent ensemble ensures that the gruesome spectacle remains oppressive until the end: Misel Meticevic and Martina Gedeck as antipodes of downright antique violence, the young lovers Mercedes Müller and Klaus Steinbacher as multifaceted embodiments of adolescent stubbornness;
Maximilian Brückner as a vicious schemer, the towering Brigitte Hobmeier as a tortured heroine from the proletariat - throughout, right down to the supporting roles, the drama is both intense and subtle.
The bodies and their pains and passions rule, from the inflamed tooth to the unleashed libido, from the self-discipline of stiff citizens to the backroom party of their queer children: a heatedly staged feast of the cool look at ancestors whom one wants to keep at bay.
The six episodes of "Oktoberfest 1900" can be seen from September 15th on the first and are already available in the ARD media library.
Netflix has acquired the international rights and will distribute the series worldwide in nine languages under the title "Oktoberfest - Beer & Blood" from October 1st.
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