Later History

Reform & Reformers -- The tides of liberalization slowly spread to Bavaria. Newspapers were founded in 1702 and 1750, and in 1751, some vaguely liberal reforms (involving issues dealing with land use, penal codes, taxation, indentured labor, military service, and more) were made in the Bavarian legislature. An Academy of Sciences, whose discoveries sometimes opposed traditional Catholic teachings, was established in 1759.

To recover from the disasters initiated prior to his reign, Prince Elector Max III Joseph, one of the most enlightened Bavarian rulers, attempted to introduce economic reforms. He inaugurated new industries, including workshops for tapestry making and cloth making. Few of them worked out; the noteworthy exception was the outfit that manufactured Nymphenburg porcelain, founded in 1758, which consistently made a profit, and still does today.

In 1771, he revised the school system, making some aspects of public education a legal requirement. During his regime, the city opened its doors to playwrights, composers, and conductors from all over Europe. Munich was the site of the inaugural performance of one of Mozart's early operas (Idomeneo) in 1781; but it wasn't particularly well received, and Mozart's request for an ongoing creative stipend from the Wittelsbach family was rejected.

The Rebirth of Conservatism -- When Max III Joseph died in 1777, his branch of the Wittelsbach dynasty died with him. The new Wittelsbach, from an obscure family branch in the Palatinate, was Karl Theodor, one of the least popular of all the Wittelsbachs. Caring little about Bavarian national destiny, he rather amazingly negotiated to cede Munich and all of Bavaria to Austria in exchange for the Habsburg-dominated Netherlands. Relief from this plan came in the form of the French Revolution.

Ironically, although he was despised as a ruler, Karl Theodor, as a builder, did many things well and skillfully, adding the Karlsplatz and the Englischer Garten to the roster of Munich's attractions. Politically, however, he continued to play his hand badly, outlawing most personal liberties and placing repressive measures on freethinkers. His death in 1799 prompted several days of drunken celebration throughout Munich.

The Age of Napoleon -- Except for distant rumblings on the western horizon and the hope it gave to Bavaria's liberals, the effects of the French Revolution of 1789 weren't immediately felt in reactionary Munich. All of that changed, however, with the rise of Napoléon. In 1799, French troops laid siege to the capital. The Bavarian court had already fled to the safety of their villas at Amberg, where they realized that they had to capitulate to Napoleon's overwhelming forces. Faced with little choice, they sided with the French dictator against their brethren in other parts of Germany. On the first night of occupation, in June 1799, French officers enjoyed a performance of Mozart's Don Giovanni in the Residenz's royal theater.

To reward his Bavarian vassal, Napoléon more than doubled the territory controlled by Bavaria (at the expense of Franconia and Swabia), thereby tripling the size of its population overnight. Bavaria was eventually made a kingdom, and in 1806, Napoléon personally conducted the coronation of Max IV Joseph as King Maximilian I.

A final irony was when the territory formerly controlled by the Bishop of Freising was swallowed up by the new Bavarian nation created by Napoléon, and the bishop's administrative headquarters -- now no more than a ceremonial shadow of its former power -- moved into the heart of its old "enemy territory" (the destruction of Freising's bridge over the Isar had led to the original founding of Munich) -- downtown Munich.

Toward a Modern State -- The new king's son, Crown Prince Ludwig (later, Ludwig I), gets the credit for establishing what is now the most famous autumn festival in the world, Oktoberfest. Originally designated as a Volksfest, it was scheduled, along with some horse races, as a sideshow of the crown prince's wedding in 1810.

Beginning around 1820, with the gears of the Industrial Revolution already starting to turn, the first foundations of a modern state were established. A Bavarian constitution was drawn up, and Munich became the seat of a newly founded Bavarian Parliament, designed to afford the citizenry more clearly defined legal rights. Not all Münchners were happy, however -- they were attached to their roster of religious holidays, complete with complicated processions and relief from workaday cares, which the new constitution swept away.

"The Athens of the North" -- Crown Prince Ludwig, inspired by an idealized version of ancient Athens, made enormous changes to Munich. The old city walls were demolished, with the exception of a small stretch that still runs parallel to the Jungfernturmstrasse. The city moat was filled in and redesignated as the Sonnenstrasse, and new neighborhoods were designed with formal parks and gardens. The prince wanted the Munich equivalent of a triumphal promenade, and commissioned the street that has been known ever since as the Ludwigstrasse.

In 1821, the Frauenkirche became the official cathedral (Dom) of the archbishops of Munich and Freising. In 1826, the university was transferred from the town of Landshut to Munich, bestowing on the Bavarian capital the status of intellectual centerpiece.

Bourgeois Munich -- By 1840, with a reported population of around 90,000 residents, Munich had been made into a neoclassical gem with a distinct identity. Munich's first railway line was laid in 1846 -- the foundation of a network of railways that soon converged on the city from all parts of southern Germany.

Initially a supporter of liberal reforms, Ludwig I gradually grew more and more conservative as his reign went on. In 1832, he began a campaign of censoring the press, repressing student activism, and stressing his role as an absolute monarch, casting himself in a romantic and heroic mold. Münchners considered his affair with actress and dancer Lola Montez even more odious than his rigid politics. All of this came to a head in the revolt of 1848. In a series of lurid events, Ludwig flaunted his affair with Lola so publicly that the fabric of the Wittelsbach dynasty itself was threatened. As the scandal raged out of control, Ludwig was forced to abdicate in favor of his son, Maximilian II.

Maximilian II continued the building programs of his father, established the Bavarian National Museum (1855), and played a role in encouraging writers to settle in Munich. One of these, Paul Heyse, was the first German to win the Nobel Prize for literature. Maximilian built an avenue (the Maximilianstrasse) in his own honor and held a series of competitions among architects for the design of such public buildings as the Regierung (Administrative Building) and the Maximilianeum (Bavarian Parliament Building).

Maximilian's role in the promotion of science, industry, and education made him one of the most enlightened despots of the 19th century. When he died in 1864, the administration of many of his programs was continued by what had developed into a massive governmental bureaucracy. The new king, Ludwig II, unfortunately, was not so beneficial to Bavaria.

Romantic Bavaria & the Dream King -- Rarely has the king of a nation so despised the citizens of his capital city as Ludwig II did the Münchners. Trouble began shortly after the new king ascended the Bavarian throne in 1864 at the age of 18. The king had become the patron of Richard Wagner, and four of Wagner's operas -- Tristan und Isolde (1865), Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1867), Das Rheingold (1869), and Die Walküre (1870) -- made their debuts in Munich. One of the many visions of the composer and his royal patron was the construction of a glittering opera house. However, this project, and its estimated cost of 6 million guilders, found little support and led to the collapse not only of plans for the hoped-for opera house, but also of the friendship between the king and the composer. A spate of arrogant public outbursts by Wagner (newspapers published his statements that the citizens of Munich had no artistic imagination) led to the composer and his lofty romantic ideals leaving Munich forever.

Curiously, although viewed as hopelessly eccentric, a bizarre member of a family riddled with other mental aberrations, Ludwig seemed to captivate an age obsessed with romanticism. Although his mania for the building of neo-Romantic castles and palaces far from the urban bustle of Munich helped bankrupt the treasury, he rarely meddled in the day-to-day affairs of his subjects and was consequently considered an expensive-to-maintain but relatively unthreatening monarch.

Actually, the lack of interest in politics on the part of Ludwig II is one of the factors that helped Bismarck, from his base in Prussia, arrange the unification of Germany in 1871. The unification transformed Berlin into the capital of a united Germany and stripped Bavaria of its status as an independent nation, a designation it had enjoyed since Napoleon's time. Some historians maintain that Bismarck helped induce the unstable king to give up his independent status by secretly subsidizing the building costs of his fairy-tale castles. Since the castles, especially Neuschwanstein, have brought billions of tourist dollars to the German nation ever since, he probably made a wise investment.

In 1886, the Bavarian cabinet in Munich stripped the 40-year-old Ludwig of his powers. A few days later, Ludwig's death by drowning in Starnberg Lake led to endless debate as to whether his death was prearranged because he planned an attempt at a royal comeback. His heir to the tattered remnants of the Bavarian throne was a mentally inept brother, Otto, whose day-to-day duties were assumed by a royal relative, Crown Prince Luitpold, who wore the much-diminished crown until 1912.

The only vestige of Bavaria's imperial past that remained was the designation of the local postal network and railways as "Royal Bavarian" (Koeniglich-Bayerisch). The Bavarian monarch was allowed to retain his position as figurehead during a transition period when real power slowly flowed toward Berlin.

Munich forged ahead in its role as an economic magnet within a unified Germany. In 1882, Munich began the process of electrifying its street lamps. Three years later, public transport was aided by a network of streetcars. And scientist Max von Pettenkofer, who discovered the source of cholera in contaminated water, was instrumental in the installation of a city water supply that was hailed as one of the best in Germany.

Artistic Ferment -- Toward the end of the century, Munich became a center of creativity and artistic ferment. In 1892, the Secession movement was founded as a protest against traditional aesthetics. In 1896, the magazine Jugend helped define Munich (along with its closest rival, Vienna) as a centerpiece of the German Art Nouveau movement, Jugendstil. In 1902, a Russian expatriate, Lenin, spent a brief stint in Munich, publishing a revolutionary magazine called Iskra. Schwabing, once a farm village, then a summer retreat for the stylishly wealthy, became an icon for the avant-garde, the home base of satirical magazines whose contributors included Thomas Mann (who spent many years of his life in Munich), Rainer Maria Rilke, Hermann Hesse, and Heinrich Mann. In 1911, Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky, later joined by Paul Klee, founded the Der Blaue Reiter group to promote and define the role of abstract art.

World War I & Revolution -- World War I (1914-18) led to more bloodshed and greater disillusionment than Europe had ever known. Hunger was rampant in Munich even in the early years of the war, and by 1918, social unrest was so widespread that a rash of demonstrations, burnings, mob executions, and brawls between advocates of the left and right became increasingly frequent. On the gray day of November 7, 1918, more than 10,000 workers mobilized for a mass demonstration, ending at the gates of the Wittelsbachs' hereditary stronghold, the Residenz. To the rulers' horror, even their guards were persuaded to join the revolutionaries, causing the dynasty's final scion to flee Munich under cover of darkness. The event marked the end of a dynasty that had ruled longer than any other in Europe.

The next day (Nov 8, 1918), Munich was declared the capital of the Free State of Bavaria (Freistaat Bayern), an independent revolutionary people's republic, led by the Revolutionary Workers Council. The conservative, so-called "legitimate" Bavarian government went into immediate exile, and Kurt Eisner, an articulate political leader who was much less radical than many of those who elected him, ruled briefly and tempestuously. Within a few months, he was assassinated on Munich's Promenadeplatz. Power shifted in a rapid series of events between centrists and leftists and ended in a horrendous blood bath when troops, sent by Berlin in 1919, laid siege to the city as a means of restoring the status quo.

The Rise of Hitler -- Conservative reaction to the near takeover of Munich by revolutionaries was swift and powerful, with long-ranging effects. After the events of 1919, and the humiliating terms of surrender imposed upon Germany at Versailles, Munich became one of the most conservative cities in Germany. Combine that with staggering inflation and a deep distrust of any Prussian interference from the despised city of Berlin, and Munich, unfortunately, became a kind of incubator for reactionary, anti-Semitic, and sometimes rabidly conservative political movements.

One of these was the NSDAP (National Socialist Workers Party of Germany), of which Adolf Hitler was a member. Hitler's early speeches, as well as the formulation of his ideas as written in Mein Kampf (My Struggle), were articulated in Munich's beer halls, including the famous Hofbräuhaus, where meetings were often held. Many members of Hitler's inner circle (including Heinrich Himmler and Hermann Göring) were from the region around Munich, and thousands of the dictator's rank and file originated from the city's long-suffering, endlessly deprived slums.

Under its reactionary civic government, Munich's cultural scene degenerated -- anything racy or politically provocative was banned, and many creative persons (including Bruno Walter and Berthold Brecht) left Munich for the more sophisticated milieu of Berlin.

After Hitler came to power as chancellor in Berlin, there was little opposition in Bavaria to the National Socialists, whose candidates swept the city's elections of March 5, 1933, and whose swastika flew above city hall by the end of the day. By July of that same year, it was painfully obvious that anyone who opposed the all-Nazi city council would be deported to Germany's first concentration camp, Dachau, on Munich's outskirts.

The headquarters of the Nazi Party was established on the corner of Brienner and Arcis streets, later to be the site of the 1938 signing by Neville Chamberlain, Daladier, Mussolini, and Hitler of the Munich Agreement. Around the same time, a torture chamber was set up in the cellar of what had always been the city's symbol of power: the Wittelsbach Palace. Hitler himself even referred to Munich as "the capital of our movement," a statement heard then, as now, with great ambivalence.

Beginning in 1935, vast sums of money were spent on grandiose building projects that followed the Nazi aesthetic. In 1937, a Nazi-sponsored exhibition, permeated with anti-Semitic, xenophobic references, Entartete Kunst (Denatured Art), mocked the tenets of modern art.

Jews then began to be persecuted in earnest. The city's largest synagogue was closed in 1938, the same year that Kristallnacht ("Night of Broken Glass"; Nov 9, 1938) resulted in the vandalism of Jewish-owned homes and businesses across Germany. In spite of the ban on Jews, some 200 of them had managed to evade the Nazi net and were still alive at the end of World War II (though the city's prewar Jewish population had been more than 10,000). After the war, Jews returned in very slow numbers to Munich since they were no longer persecuted and many still had long-rooted family ties with the Bavarian capital.

In 1939, a Marxist attempt to assassinate Hitler as he drank with cronies in a Munich beer hall (the Bürgerbräukeller) failed, and Germany (and Munich) continued the succession of aggressions that eventually led to World War II and the destruction of much of historic Munich.

World War II & Its Aftermath -- Resistance to Hitler was fatal. Nonetheless, a handful of clergymen opposed the Nazi regime. One notable opponent was Father Rupert Mayer, who was imprisoned for many years at Dachau, Germany's first concentration camp. Built in 1933 in Bavaria, Dachau became a model for other death camps, as thousands upon thousands of "undesirables" were murdered, often in the most brutal fashion there. When Allied troops, in May 1945, liberated the Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen concentration camp, they found that the priest from Munich had been transferred there and was still alive at the end of the war. Mayer has since been beatified by the Catholic hierarchy. Other heroic resistance came from the Weisse Rose (White Rose) coalition of university students and professors. At the risk of their lives, they published secret leaflets calling for the downfall of the Nazi regime. The White Rose Leaders, Hans and Sophie Scholl, Willi Graf, and Hans Huber, were later arrested and beheaded.

By the war's end, almost half of the city's buildings lay in rubble, many having been blown to pieces as early as 1942. Most of Munich's Renaissance and neoclassical grandeur had been literally bombed off the map, a fact that's easy to overlook by modern visitors who admire the city's many restored monuments.

Munich paid a high price in the blood of its citizens: About 22,000 of its sons died in military campaigns, and the civilian population of the city was reduced by almost a quarter million before the end of the war.

The Post-War Years & A Folk Hero -- The tone was set after the war by the city's mayor, Thomas Wimmer. He was much beloved by Münchners, and his weekly meet-the-people sessions, when anyone could talk to him personally, made the people in the street feel he was really their representative. His call to clean up the city met with overwhelming response -- the rubble was assembled into decorative hillocks in the city's parks.

Unlike other German cities, Munich was able to unearth the original plans for many of the demolished buildings, which were tastefully restored, even if at astronomical expense, to their original appearance. Today, the city's historic core is surrounded by the same church steeples and towers as in the past.

As capital of the Federal Land (state) of Bavaria within the Federal Republic of Germany, Munich took up its new role as focal point for trade between northern and southern Europe. Manufacturers of computers, weapons manufacturers, publishing ventures, fashion houses, movie studios, and companies such as Siemens made Munich their base. The city boomed, with a population that numbered over a million before the end of 1957. As home to BMW (Bayerisches Motoren Werke), Munich is at least partly responsible for Germany's image as home to Europe's fastest drivers.

As the city's population exploded in the 1960s, sprawling masses of concrete suburbs were thrown up hastily, designed for ease of access by cars. Older buildings were demolished to make room for yet another Munich building boom.

The obsession with rebuilding and modernizing at any price was halted when the then-mayor of Munich paid an official visit to Los Angeles. Munich's press gleefully reported that the automobile-dominated society of L.A. so horrified him that he introduced a new emphasis on historical preservation. Since then, active participation by historic-minded groups has encouraged careful renovations of older buildings.

The 1972 Summer Olympic Games were meant to show the entire world the bold new face of a radically rebuilt Munich from the premises of the innovative Olympic City. However, the terrorist attack on the Israeli athletes, and the collective murder of 11 of them, revived recollections of the recent past and left behind ambivalent memories.

In a surprise development in 2005, Angela Merkel, a conservative, became the first woman to govern modern Germany and the country's first leader to grow up under communism in the Soviet-occupied East. In a close election on September 18, influenced heavily by voters in Bavaria, her conservatives finished just one percentage point ahead of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's center-left Social Democrats, with neither party getting a majority.

Merkel campaigned on pledges to shake up Germany's highly regulated labor market and get the stagnant economy going again. She has also promised to reinvigorate relations with the U.S. Merkel faces massive problems including unemployment. Like the United States, the German economy remains strong but there are horrendous problems, including an economic slowdown. The financial burden of reunification has exerted a terrible price on Germany.