The situation in Bavaria

On January 1st, the “toughest” smoking ban for the hospitality sector in Germany came into effect. The Bavarian one. Separate smoking sections are not allowed, in all bars, restaurants, discotheques and beer tents, the fascist “solution” we know from the British Islands seems to prevail.
Quite a change for the typical Bavarian “Wirtshaus”, the traditional place to drink huge steins of beer, to eat “Schweinshaxn”, to play cards and to have a smoke. Next year, beer tents, including the huge ones at the Oktober, are to follow that road to Nannyist perdition. In an unprecedented effort to ‘re-educate’ their citizens, the dominating party, the Christian-Social Union (CSU), once led by the internationally (in)famous Franz-Josef Strauß, imposed this ban on the Bavarians.

But how “tough” a ban is it at second glance? Well, the law applies to hospitality venues “as far as they are publicly accessible”. When and if only a restricted group of people may enter a room, the owner can is allowed to decide about smoking. This restricted group can be the members of a club or, for instance, the invitees of a wedding party.

Many landlords and –ladies reacted immediately or after a few weeks or months: thousands of Smokers’ Clubs have been founded all over Bavaria, many of them part of the “Association for the Preservation of the Bavarian Hospitality Culture” (VEBWK), which alone has about 80,000 customers as their members. This organization used their strength in numbers for forceful political lobbying.

Many clubs only cover one bar, restaurant or discotheque so that many people who want to go out have multiple memberships of smoker’s clubs. But we should call them ‘tolerance clubs’ instead because smokers and non-smokers alike go there and enjoy freedom.

In fact, some people even complain about their purses stuffed with so many membership cards. Others are proud of that (see picture). A mayor of a Bavarian town mentioned that his teenage daughter (a non-smokers) carries at least a handful of these membership cards with her when she goes out with her friends.

The density of tolerance clubs varies from town to town and from region to region. In the Bavarian capital, Munich, an estimated one third of all locales are clubs of that kind.

Access for tourists, e.g. readers of this blog, might be a more difficult issue. Some clubs require membership applications prior to entering the venue, others allow instant admission by signing a form at the entrance. The annual fee of the state-wide VEBWK is 12 Euros, smaller clubs often offer free membership.