Munich: Profile
With its relaxed, almost Mediterranean ambience, Munich, the capital of Bavaria, is one of Europe’s most engaging cities, one packed with fascinating history, world-class culture and traditional food, and with the outdoor playground of the Alps just a short hop away.
The city’s genius has always been its ability to combine the Germanic talent for getting things done with a specifically Bavarian need to do them in an agreeable way. Business lunches always seem a little longer here, and office hours a little shorter. Yet no one who has witnessed the city’s impressive affluence, its dynamic car industry and its super-efficient public transport system would suggest that this refreshingly relaxed attitude was unproductive.
An old city founded in the 10th century by monks, Munich rose to prominence when the Wittelsbach dynasty made it the capital of Bavaria in the early 16th century. Much of the city’s present regal character can be attributed to them, particularly to King Ludwig I, whose rule lasted from 1825 to 1848. Less famous than a later Ludwig, the ‘Mad King’, this enlightened monarch was a generous patron of the arts, a founder of museums and galleries, and an ambitious town planner. The last Wittelsbach, Ludwig III, left his ancestors’ palatial Residenz in the heart of the city as Marxist revolution broke out in November 1918.
Restored heritage
A few years later, in 1923, it was in Munich that Adolf Hitler instigated the failed ‘Beer Hall Putsch’, and his Nazis always considered the city to be the ‘capital of the movement’. Munich has tried, however, to distance itself from this connection and retain its historical identity. After the destruction of World War II, many German cities decided to break with the past and rebuild in a completely modern style. But the authorities in the Bavarian capital chose to painstakingly restore and reconstruct the great churches and palaces of its past. There are plenty of modern office buildings on the periphery, but the heart of the old city has successfully recaptured its rich architectural heritage and charm. There are still some reminders of the ravages of war, and monuments such as the Siegestor (Victory Gate, in Ludwigstrasse) have been left in their bomb-scarred condition as a reminder of more troubled days.
Life in the Bavarian capital
Munich and Bavaria are Germany’s most popular tourist destinations. According to opinion polls, it’s also the city that Germans would most like to call home. It is not just the elegance and prosperity of the place that make it such a magnet, but the lively way of life which is best savoured in one of its many beer gardens, beer halls or just out and about on the town, particularly during the long and usually very hot summers. As the capital of the Catholic and conservative Free State of Bavaria, Munich epitomises the independent Bavarian spirit, but it is also a highly cosmopolitan city, where people from all over the world can and do feel at home.
Of course Munich also plays host to the Oktoberfest, usually the single event that most think of when anyone mentions the city’s name. Indeed, with annual consumption of 6.9 million litres of beer by 6.4 million visitors, it is a blockbuster event, quite appropriate to the oversized image the Bavarians have of their capital. It is also the most extravagant expression of that untranslatable feeling of warm fellowship known in German as Gemütlichkeit.
Cultural centre
But it would be wrong to think of life in Munich merely as one long Oktoberfest. As a result of the post-war division of Berlin, Munich became the undisputed cultural capital of the Federal Republic of Germany – no mean achievement in the face of competition from Hamburg and Cologne. The opera house and concert halls make the town a musical mecca still, especially for performances of works by Richard Strauss, Mozart and Wagner. Wagner’s patron was ‘mad’ King Ludwig II of Bavaria, who was responsible for the fairy-tale Neuschwanstein Castle in the Alpine foothills, but it was his grandfather, Ludwig I, who established the city’s cultural credentials by assembling vast collections and building huge edifices in which to store them. That legacy lives on in Munich, and the city is endowed with some world-famous art collections, from the Old Masters of the Alte Pinakothek to the main avant-garde movements represented in the Pinakothek der Moderne and Museum Brandhorst. Painters have long appreciated the favourable artistic climate of the city, particularly in the bohemian district of Schwabing, which exploded onto the international scene in the early 20th century as a centre for the Blaue Reiter school, whose ranks included Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Franz Marc.
Open spaces
The Englischer Garten, hemmed by the River Isar, is a real jewel among Europe’s great parks. The river’s swiftly flowing waters are evidence of the proximity of the Alps, where the river has its source. On a clear day, the mountains seem to lie just beyond the city’s southern suburbs. That’s when the Föhn is blowing, a famous southerly wind that gives some people a headache and inspires others with phenomenally clear creative insights – a characteristic Munich ambiguity.
When the mountains appear on the city’s doorstep, locals are reminded of the countryside from which many of them, or their parents, originated. Every weekend a mass exodus to the surrounding villages and lakes takes place: east to the Chiemsee; west and south to the Ammersee, Starnberger See and Tegernsee. In the winter many head farther south into the mountains for skiing, an integral part of Bavarian life, which most children begin learning almost as soon as they can walk.
Although Munich is undoubtedly a metropolis, and in many ways a sophisticated one, the city also retains a resolutely rural atmosphere, never losing sight of its origins in the Bavarian hinterland, and visitors can easily participate in Munich’s happy mixture of the urban and traditionally rural.
Discover more...
• Explore Munich's playground - the great outdoors of the Bavarian Alps
• Raise a Stein in one of Munich's famous beer halls
Read more from the travel guide to Germany
