Munich city workers run Oktoberfest’s lost and found. The Fundbüro, as it is called in German, is famous for what has ended up there over the years, including a prosthetic leg, a wheelchair and a Superman costume.
MUNICH — Every visit to the Oktoberfest lost and found has a story behind it, but not every visitor can remember exactly what that story is.
Glasses waiting to be claimed.
Kikki Friedensburg let out a squeal of unconcealed joy on a recent afternoon at the sight of her scratched gray Samsung cellphone, which had slipped from the pocket of her traditional dirndl. It was, she conceded, hard to say exactly when over the course of a very long evening the phone had disappeared, because the 139-pound, 22-year-old student drank nearly 10 pints of strong Oktoberfest beer.
“I’d given up,” said a visibly relieved Ms. Friedensburg, who found her phone — and more important, the phone numbers of all her friends — in one of the drawers, carefully segregated by manufacturer, next to the umbrella stand that also held a pair of crutches and a fishing rod waiting to be claimed. “I just didn’t have it in me to start over with everything,” she said.
Many festival visitors do not even realize that there is a central lost and found, run by the city workers who run Munich’s year-round lost and found and reinforced by temps and interns from other departments. But the Fundbüro, as it is called in German, is locally famous for what has ended up there over the years, including a prosthetic leg, a wheelchair, a Superman costume, handwritten notes by the composer Johann Sebastian Bach and 15,000 marks in a soiled pair of lederhosen, eventually returned to the embarrassed owner who abandoned them.
But as the staff must tell teary-eyed teenage girls every year, they do not keep track of lost boyfriends.
The police, waiters and partygoers bring in the items discovered under the benches of the cavernous Oktoberfest tents, the biggest of which hold up to 10,000 singing, inebriated revelers. The half-dozen workers at the lost and found, some themselves clad in lederhosen and dirndls, peck away at old typewriters as they fill out the index cards detailing where and when the traditional Bavarian Janker jacket or brand-new iPhone was discovered, doing their best to bring order to disorder.
Oktoberfest proves that Germans can, in fact, loosen up and have fun. But they are going to have a system in place and prepare themselves for every eventuality first.
Preparedness turned into an unexpectedly significant theme at this year’s Oktoberfest after terrorist threats were made against the festival, part of an effort by Islamist militants to intimidate Germans over the country’s troop presence in Afghanistan ahead of last Sunday’s election. To discourage would-be attackers, the Munich police increased the number of officers to 700 from 400 and closed more streets around the party.
But the menacing intrusion of the outside world does not seem to have dampened the moods of visitors. Organizers estimated that in the first week of the two-week festival, which ends this Sunday, 3.3 million people, 100,000 more than in 2008, came to sample the products of the city’s famous breweries like Paulaner, Augustiner and the Hofbräuhaus. Among them they downed nearly a million gallons of beer.
Oktoberfest, which got its start with the marriage of Crown Prince Ludwig in 1810, is more than just an exercise in binge drinking and loud renditions of favorite songs like “Ein Prosit” and, somewhat improbably, John Denver’s “Country Roads.” Children dash from roller coaster to carousel rides and families dig into heaping plates of ox and chicken. But the party mood is dominant.
Strapping men in leather shorts with suspenders and brightly checked shirts and women in peasant dresses are ready to forget not just their troubles, but also their wallets and wedding rings, or as Stephan Weiler did, the keys to his apartment.
Like one of the characters in the recent hit film “The Hangover,” Mr. Weiler, 28, a bioengineer, was piecing the events of the previous evening together with the help of photographs on his digital camera. As he surveyed the white wall by the entrance studded with hooks bearing over a hundred keys, none of them his, he said he had not given up hope.
Employees said they were bracing for the coming final weekend, when thousands of people would descend on the lost and found to search for their missing objects, most operating under the false impression that it would be their last chance. In fact, the staff spends months working with consulates to return passports, banks to find the owners of A.T.M. cards and telephone companies to hand over the misplaced cellphones.
According to Maik Müller, deputy director of the lost and found, while only a fifth of all the roughly 5,000 objects lost each year are reunited with their owners, the rate of return for cellphones and wallets was between 60 and 70 percent. The remainder are auctioned off to help cover expenses or given to charities.
For Sam Sealy, 19, from Bellevue, Wash., it was relatively easy to prove ownership, since his passport was in his gray and blue backpack. An alert staff member actually recognized him from his photograph before he even made it to the counter to inquire. Mr. Sealy, who came to Oktoberfest while studying abroad in the Czech Republic, could not believe his luck, that not only his bag had been found but also his passport, iPod, camera and two $100 bills.
Mr. Sealy had to sign forms and hand over $60 to get them back — the fee is 5 percent of the value of the goods up to $725 and 3 percent after — but he said it was worth it. Praising German efficiency, Mr. Sealy said, “I’m amazed I went to a lost and found and actually found what was missing. That never happens in America.”
The stream of increasingly inebriated visitors as day turns to night can be trying for the staff at times. In one episode, a young man, unsteady on his feet, refused to leave but instead mumbled, “Nein, nein, nein,” for several minutes, before resting his head on the counter and switching to his first name, “Maximilian, Maximilian, Maximilian,” as though it were an incantation to summon his lost wallet.
An equally distraught and intoxicated young American man was escorted to the police by Tobias Wenk, 35, who works full time in the main lost and found, to get him help canceling the credit cards in his lost wallet. “We finished canceling them,” Mr. Wenk said upon returning to his station, “and the wallet was in his pocket all along.”
via Munich Journal – Raise Your Mugs to German Efficiency! – NYTimes.com.
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