Munich Flags Oktoberfest Ride Figures
- Munich's women's equality office wrote to Teufelsrad operator Elisabeth Polaczy requesting changes to three of four female advertising statues it considered too revealing.
- The alterations included covering the necklines of two dirndl-clad figures and adding a top and shoes to a Hawaiian figure, which the office said would otherwise appear
- The episode follows a 2023 case in which the Voodoo-Jumper ride operators spent €80,000 redesigning their attraction after its facade was classified as sexist and racist.
Three of the four large female advertising figures at the entrance to the Teufelsrad, an 80-year-old fairground attraction at Munich's Oktoberfest, have been repainted at the request of the city's women's equality office, which deemed the original designs too revealing.
Letters from the equality office
Elisabeth Polaczy, 80, who has operated the Teufelsrad — a spinning platform on which visitors try to resist centrifugal force — on the Wiesn for many years, confirmed she received a written communication from Munich's Gleichstellungsstelle für Frauen, the city's women's equality office. The letter proposed changes in the interest of creating, in its words, "a somewhat more diverse Teufelsrad". The objections centred on skirts considered too short and necklines judged too low on the roughly two-metre-tall statues.
What was changed — and what was not
Following the correspondence, Polaczy commissioned alterations to three of the four figures. A statue representing a Hawaiian woman, previously depicted wearing only a skirt and a flower garland, was given a top and a pair of shoes. Polaczy said the equality office had advised that showing the figure barefoot would be discriminatory. Two further figures dressed in traditional dirndl costumes had their décolletages painted over and received adjusted painted undergarments so that bare knees were no longer visible to visitors. A fourth figure — a woman in blue trousers with her right hand raised — was left unaltered.
Polaczy described her initial reaction to the city's intervention frankly. "At first I was afraid I wouldn't be allowed back on the Wiesn if I didn't repaint them," she told a Munich newspaper. "I just want peace and to run my business well."
Not the first Wiesn redesign
The episode is not without precedent at the Oktoberfest. Three years ago, the Schäfer family, operators of the Voodoo-Jumper ride, paid an estimated €80,000 from their own funds to redesign their attraction after its facade attracted sharp criticism. The imagery in question — which showed a woman whose bikini top was being taken by a monkey alongside a depiction of a Black man appearing to look at her — was classified as sexist and racist.
Oktoberfest 2026 is scheduled to run from 19 September to 4 October. The alterations to the Teufelsrad figures represent the latest instance of the city applying equality and diversity standards to the centuries-old festival's commercial displays, a dynamic that operators must now factor into their preparations well in advance of opening day.
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