Munich: Beauty in Bavaria’s Cultural Capital

By Roberta Sandler

Antiquarium at The Residenz Photo: Martin Sandler

On the popular 1950s TV show, “Your Show of Shows,” Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, Howie Morris and Carl Reiner performed a comedy skit that has become a classic. They portrayed mechanical Bavarian figures on a gigantic Glockenspiel (clock) who suddenly revolved in the wrong direction, bumping into each other and smacking each other with hammers.

As I stood beneath Munich’s Neo-Gothic City Hall on Marienplatz, the city’s central square, I peered up at the Glockenspiel tower and was reminded of that comedy skit. The Glockenspiel’s 43 bells rang, and knights – part of the clock’s 32 life-size mechanical figures — jousted on horseback. A crowd of spectators cheered the mechanical knights.

I know about many of Europe’s emperors, monarchs and kings, but knew nothing of Germany’s early rulers (electors) until I visited Munich’s exquisite royal palaces. Munich, the capital of the Free State of Bavaria, is rich with gorgeous architecture, fascinating history and museums and artistic venues that rightfully make it Germany’s cultural capital.

Among the electors’ palaces is Munich’s 130-room, 10-courtyard Residenz, a former medieval castle built in 1358 and home to a succession of Bavarian rulers. One of its architectural highlights is a tunnel-shaped Antiquarium room decorated with ceiling frescoes and rows of marble busts. There is more opulence at Nymphenburg Palace, the summer residence of the Wittelsbach electors. Here, a central mansion links to open arcades, pavilions and galleries.

It was at Nymphenburg Palace that King Ludwig I created his Gallery of Beauties – women he bedded and/or admired for their beauty. Their portraits hang on the walls. One portrait is of the infamous Lola Montez, whose affair with beguiled Ludwig drew the public’s ire.

Successor King Ludwig II admired King Louis XIV of France, so Ludwig II modeled his Royal Palace of Herrenchiemsee (New Palace) after Versailles. The palace’s State Staircase is a decorative marvel; the Rococo-style Great Hall of Mirrors, which was lit by 1,800 candles, is lavishly exquisite. Ludwig II was deemed insane. In 1886, at age 22, he drowned under suspicious circumstances. Rumors that he was murdered were never confirmed.

Munich’s English Garden (Englischer Garten) was Europe’s first public garden. It dates to 1789 when Elector Carl Theodor converted his riverside hunting grounds into a public park. The English Garden is an explosion of Crayola-colored blooms. It is bigger than New York’s Central park and contains a Greek temple, Chinese pagoda with 7,000-seat beer garden, Japanese tea house and paths studded with flowers and sixty bird species.

Munich’s beergartens are where I found scores of happy and friendly faces as Bavarian-clad musicians played and people forked down hefty sausages at picnic tables. The Viktualienmarket, a bustling outdoor market with produce and bread stalls and a maypole and fountains, also adds festivity to the cityscape.

The city swells with art and science museums, including the Glyptothek, an impressive neo-Classical-style museum of art and antiquities. Everywhere, modern upscale shops meld harmoniously with architectural eye candy – ornamentally-detailed 16th, 17th and 18th-century churches and buildings in Greek, Italianate, Baroque and Gothic styles. In tribute to its cultural reputation, Munich has its own film festival, ballet, symphony and opera.

Marienplatz, Munich’s Central Square Photo: Martin Sandler

Munich has been a bulwark of Catholicism since it was founded in 1158. Among its 300 churches, three cube-shaped, free-standing buildings on St.-Jakobs-Platz are an anomaly: an Orthodox synagogue (Ohel Jakob), a Jewish Center and a Jewish Museum.

There are 1.3 million Munich residents, including about 9,200 Jews, many of them Russian émigrés – not the robust Jewish community of pre-Nazi days, but the three stylistically-startling buildings make a Jewish presence obvious.

The new synagogue was dedicated in late 2006. Accommodating 538 worshippers, it was designed as a translucent filigree tent ascending from a travertine monolithic pedestal. The synagogue replaces the original Ohel Jakob that Hitler ordered destroyed so that he would have a better view of the city.

The 10,000-square-foot, four-story Jewish Museum (Judisches Museum Munchen) debuted in March 2007 and has 4,300 members. The Jewish Museum features a permanent exhibit, “Voices, Places, Times—Jews in Munich,” a carpet map that breaks the city into numbered areas.

Visitors select movable numbered signs, place them on corresponding numbers on the carpet, and watch as a wall screen lights a corresponding square from the screen’s collage. Visitors then have a visual and a short narrative of the sign’s subject matter.

The #17 sign, for example, tells about Nanette Kaula. In 1829, King Ludwig I of Bavaria commissioned a portrait of 17-year-old Nanette to be added to a total 36 portraits hanging in a “gallery of beauties” in his palace, Schloss Nymphenburg which, by the way, is open for tours.

Nanette was known as Munich’s loveliest Jewess. Her father was purveyor and banker to the dukes of Bavaria and, along with other “Court Jews,” was among the elite of Munich’s growing Jewish community.

The signs and collage offer pre- and post-World War II vignettes: a Jewish family riding in a horse-drawn carriage in 1942 after a law was passed forbidding Jews from using public transport; a Jewish child (one of 10,000) whose life was saved by England’s Kindertransporter during World War II; Shoah survivors demonstrating in 1949 against an anti-Semitic letter published in a Munich newspaper and signed “forever true to Adolf.”

Visitors also learn about Jewish contributions to Munich’s art scene. Munich was Germany’s art capital in the 1800s and is still considered the Cultural Capital of Bavaria. Jewish art galleries and Jewish art collectors were part of this fold.

Glass-enclosed cases display about 140 artifacts such as a gold-embossed 18th-century Seder Tikkun Shabbat (Sabbath Prayer Book) that the museum’s director, Bernhard Purin, acquired on eBay.

In the museum’s “Voices” installation, immigrants describe their arrival in Munich—from 18th-century court Jews to east European immigrants and, later, Jews from the Soviet Union, America and Israel.

Russian émigrés Leah Shalom and her husband Moshe own a Kosher restaurant, Café Bracha, popular not only among local Jews, but among many non-Jews. The Shaloms run a brisk dining and catering business and order many of their Kosher products from Paris and Los Angeles.

Wearing a Bavarian-style dress as black as her hair, and with ruby lips contrasting with her milky skin, Leah resembles an older version of Snow White. As she rushed to complete a catering order, I asked her if she thought the presence of a Jewish Museum in Munich is a good idea.

“How can you have a Jewish Museum and not tell about the Holocaust?” she replied.

Purin, the museum’s director, explained, “We are not a Holocaust museum. “There are better places to memorialize the Holocaust. Our museum shows the diversity of Jewish people and how they were integrated into the culture of Munich .”

Certainly, the museum has been an important educational tool for non-Jewish Munichites like Karoline Graf, who told me, “The museum helped me understand things about the Jewish religion that I didn’t know. We need this museum.”

Moreover, in a city where there are few remnants of its Nazi past — like an empty lot where Nazi headquarters once stood — local schoolchildren, who now learn about Hitler and the Holocaust in their schools, regularly tour the museum. That’s a good thing because the museum has influenced the city’s younger generation to ask questions.

Gudron Mountain , a Munich tour guide says that “they feel great shame and guilt about Germany ’s past. They ask, ‘how could people have done such terrible things?’”

Yet, Munichites are proud of their city, as they should be. It stands as one of Europe ’s most beautiful cultural gems.

Roberta Sandler is an award-winning writer, author and lecturer. She is a member of Society of American Travel Writers. Her newest book is A Brief Guide to Florida’s Monuments and Memorials, published by University Press of Florida. She and her husband live in Lake Worth, FL.