Bavarians Erotic

Ask someone from Passau or Rosenheim where they are from and the first answer is often Bavaria, not Germany. Bavarians are one of the old German stems. They had a name more than a thousand years before there was a German state, and they still greet you with Grüß Gott or Servus. Their heartland is Old Bavaria: Upper Bavaria, Lower Bavaria and the Upper Palatinate, stretching from the forested Czech border to the Alps. The modern Free State also holds Franconians and Swabians, who will tell you they are something else. Across the border, most Austrians and the German speakers of South Tyrol use dialects of the same language. That traces back to the medieval duchy, whose eastern march became Austria.

The name first appears in the sixth century, attached to settlers in former Roman country south of the Danube. It is often read as "men from Bohemia," though that is debated. Charlemagne removed the last Agilolfing duke, Tassilo III, in 788. From 1180 the Wittelsbachs held Bavaria for more than seven centuries. In that time they led the Catholic League in the Thirty Years' War, took a royal crown from Napoleon in 1806, and produced Ludwig II and his fantasy castles. The monarchy ended in 1918, but the independent streak survived: in 1949 the Bavarian parliament voted against West Germany's new constitution while agreeing to be bound by it. Mia san mia, "we are who we are," still sums up the attitude.

Bavarian, Boarisch to its speakers, is an Upper German language that sits between dialect and separate tongue. A broad speaker from the Bavarian Forest can leave a visitor from Hamburg lost. It keeps old survivals, such as the plural "you" forms es and enk, which come from an ancient dual. Standard German handles school, print and government. For centuries Catholicism set the rhythm of the year, and it still marks the countryside with onion-domed churches and wayside shrines. Pilgrims walk to the Black Madonna at Altötting, and Corpus Christi processions fill village streets, even as church membership falls and Munich grows more secular.

Much of the culture lives in village clubs rather than on postcards. Villages raise a painted maypole, and their neighbors try to steal it, handing it back only after a ransom of beer and food. Around Saint Leonard's day in November, decorated horses and wagons process for the patron saint of livestock. Costume societies founded in the late nineteenth century keep Tracht and the Schuhplattler dance alive. The 1516 beer purity decree issued at Ingolstadt remains a point of regional pride. Oktoberfest, which began with a royal wedding in 1810, is the version the world sees.