World: Live & Let Live, Kiss & Letkiss

To a blare of brass and a gathering bloodbeat of drums, the dancers in the two long lines—men on one side, women opposite—hop forward, jump back, hop-hop-hop ahead, and then kiss-kiss-kiss. After that, both lines shift right so that new partners pucker into view for the next round of "letkiss," the non-dance craze that has Munich on tiptoe.

Purists and prudes insist the last labial touch should be a chaste left-right-left to the cheek. But last week, as Munich's two-month pre-Lenten fling of Fasching came to a final, beery crescendo, the partners were directly on target.

Less direct is the etymology of letkiss, a word that will some day surely give fits to footnoters for the Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles. The rhythms of letkiss are adapted from an old Finnish round dance called letkajenka, first popularized in Paris last December through a recording by Finnish Bandleader Anton Letkiss. Somewhere between the predawn unpronounceableness of letkajenka and the similarity of Anton's surname, letkiss emerged. To a lipstick-smeared man, Münchners are convinced that because of its nearly English name, letkiss is yet another happy American import.

Letkiss has already been blasted from the pulpit in Munich, and because of an incipient Asian-flu epidemic in Europe, has been denounced by doctors as a germ-spreading menace. Even the amateur sociologists have weighed in. "Now the solitary dancer, surrendering entirely to the beat, communes not only with the partner but with the entire group of revelers," says Dance Instructor Gertrude Schmidt. "Letkiss culminates in the kind of intimacy that previously would have shocked everyone."

But as far as most of Munich was concerned, it was live and let live, kiss and letkiss.