My Year in Lyon: Germany: Munich

Munich has been my favorite city to visit in Germany. There is so much history here, so many museums and beer halls to visit - something for everyone. I really wish we had a least another day here - two are not enough!

We went on one of the New Europe tours, that operate on a tips-only / pay-what-you can basis in major cities across the continent. The first stop of the tour was in Marienplatz to see the Glokenspiel, which rings three times a day. There's a man whose job it is to push the button to make the action start at 10, 12 and 5 - one day during Oktoberfest last year he forgot (or enjoying the festivities a little too much...) - and all the tourists were waiting in the square with nothing happening. It's a re-enactment of 2 scenes with wooden figures and bells, which can be seen in the main tower of the Rathaus (City Hall). The first is the wedding of one of the Dukes of Bavaria, and the second is a joust between a Bavarian knight and an Austrian one. Guess who wins?

Marienplatz (named after the statue of Mary in the middle).

Glockenspiel in the Rathaus tower.

The Rathaus reminded me of the town hall in Brussels and in Vienna. I guess they were all built around the same time.

Gargoyle in the Rathaus courtyard.

Unlike many Germany cities, much of Munich was rebuilt after the bombings of WWII to look the same as it did before. In Berlin, for example, you have a lot of 1950s-1970s architecture (not the most elegant style period), but much of Munich looks like it did 100 years ago. Even though 70% of the city was leveled, it had been restored to its former glory by the time Munich hosted the 1972 Olympics. Before the bombings, the citizens of Munich went around taking photographs of the historic buildings from every angle so they could be rebuilt to look the same as they once did. For example, at the end of the war, an old man walking by the pile of rubble that used to be one of the churches near Marienplatz found a canon ball and took it home with him. Later, when they were rebuilding the church, he brought it back and they put it back up in its original place (you can see it in the photo below, a black dot above the top-right corner of the bottom window). It was originally put there by the Swedish army hundreds of years ago when they invaded the city (and were later convinced to leave it alone by the payment of 600,000 barrels of beer). It's fallen out several times since but people keep bringing it back.

St. Peter Kirche (church). It was originally supposed to have 2 towers, but they only ended up building one. They had already ordered 4 clocks for each tower however, and instead of throwing out half of them they simply put them on top of each other. A taste of German humour: when you ask somebody why there are 8 clocks on St. Peter's, they'll tell you its so that 8 people can tell the time.

The Petersplatz Viktualienmarkt, behind St. Peter's, is a lively food market and a great place to grab a bite of lunch. We stopped at a small butcher shop run by a local farmer, and tried a spicy sausage sandwich with a bottle of Augustiner beer for 5 €. Delicious!

Butcher's shop in the Viktualienmark, with old-fashioned bottles of Augustiner in the foreground.

More butchershops in the Viktualienmarkt. Meat is a very important part of the Bavarian diet.

We walked down Maximilianstrasse, the main shopping street. It's also known for the plastic surgery clinics on the upper floors above the shops.

A Porsche Carrera convertible in front of the Residenz (royal palace) on Maximilianstrasse. Quality Germany engineering!

No tour of Munich is complete without discussing the turbulent 20 years of the city's history, from the formation of the Nazi party and the Beer Hall Putsch to the end of the Second World War. I'll try to give you a brief rundown of what we learned from our guide (a history grad student). I'm writing this from memory and referring to a journal entry I wrote a few months ago, so I apologize for any factual errors.

The rise of the Nazi party grew, in part, out of the horrible economic situation of the Weimar Republic after WWI. The Treaty of Versailles forced Germany to take complete responsibility for the war (although it started as a war between Austria-Hungary and Serbia), and to pay for every stick of property damaged during the entire war. Crippled by debt, the government started printing out more and more money, and hyperinflation ensued. In 1921, one US dollar was worth 60 marks. By 1923, one US dollar was worth 34 TRILLION marks. By the time you drank a cup of coffee its price had doubled. People were burning paper money as fuel. Women would fetch their husbands pay several times a day and spend it, before it became worthless. Everyone's savings were wiped out. Our tour guide, an American grad student, was descended from Norwegian and German grandparents - from both sides of WWII. She told us about her great-grandmother, caring for six children during hyperinflation. The church took away her grandfather because his mother couldn't afford to feed him. One day she had waited in line for hours at a bakery to get a loaf of bread for her children, with two baskets full of cash. She finally got to the front of the line, and put down the baskets for a moment to pick up the bread. She reached down to get the money to pay for it, but the baskets had been stolen - the money was still there in piles on the ground. There was even a new mental disorder that emerged during this period, called "Zero stroke". This ailment commonly affected accountants and bankers, who being used to counting in thousands of billions of marks, were perfectly normal except for a desire to write endless rows of zeros.

When Hitler joined the fledgling Nazi party, there were 45 members. A month later, there were thousands. In 1923, the party tried to take over the government in the Beer Hall Putsch. It started out with taking some high level government officials hostage at a dinner function. The next day, the party organized a march in downtown Munich with thousands of people in attendance. They'd got word that the police had set up a barricade on their planned route, so they moved one street over, to Residenzstrasse. As you can see in the picture below, this street is curved:

Residenzstrasse. The Residenz is the building on the right.

The significance of this being a curved street is that the police had moved their barricade over one block in anticipation of the new route, but the marchers couldn't see them until they were nearly on top of them. Even if the people at the front had tried to stop before running into the police, the crowd behind them would have pushed them into them anyways. Nobody knows who fired the first shot, but 21 people died - 16 Nazis, 4 policemen and 1 poor waiter who caught a stray bullet a block away in Odeonsplatz. The man standing beside Hitler at the front of the march was shot to death. What would have happened if that bullet was a few inches to the side?

Hitler was put on trial for treason. He claimed he was defending the people from the traitors in the government, who had done nothing to prevent dire economic situation that engulfed the nation. "How could I be a traitor?" he said - he claimed he was defending the people's interests. He was convicted of treason and sentenced to five years imprisonment (by a judge known to be a sympathizer), of which he only served 8 months. The trial allowed him to spread his ideas among the population, as his words were featured in the newspaper every day. He was imprisoned in a comfortable suite in the Bavarian Alps, allowed visitors for several hours each day, a servant and a private secretary. This was the customary sentence for people whom the judge believed to have honorable but misguided intentions. During this time, he penned his manifesto, Mein Kampf (My Struggle). Although the Beer Hall Putsch was unsuccessful, it served increase the visibility and popularity of the party.

In the 1932 general election, over 65% of Germans voted against the Nazi party. However, due to the highly factionalized political situation and after the Reichstag had burned down (supposedly by a Communist), Hitler was asked to form a government by the President Paul von Hindenburg. One of the first things Hitler did as Chancellor was establish Dachau (near Munich) as a prison for his political enemies - the first of many concentration camps.

The history of what happened in the Beer Hall Putsch was re-written in the 1930s. All 21 people killed (including the policemen) were lauded as martyrs for the Nazi cause. The 16 marchers, who were "unarmed" (supposedly because though they carried weapons but they didn't have ammunition), were declared heroes, and the waiter and the policemen were "Nazis at heart". The policemen were said to have been shot in the back by other policemen (even though the entrance wounds were in the front). A plaque was put up on a wall on Residenztrasse to commemorate their sacrifice. Everyone passing that spot had to give the Nazi salute. There were guards stationed there, who would catch you if you didn't. You would get one warning, and if you forgot again you would disappear.

Where the plaque commemorating the "martyrs of the Beer Hall Putsch" used to hang on Residenzstrasse.

Just before the plaque on Residenzstrasse is a left hand turn into a small side street. There weren't any shops on this street, but it could be used to reach Odeonsplatz without having to walk by and salute the plaque. Although Munich was the birthplace of the Nazi party, it was also the centre of the Resistance movement. The people of Munich were there in 1923, they know what really happened. They also had to live under the Nazi regime for the longest - they were in power for 12 years, from 1933-1945. They knew there weren't "21 martyrs", and the marchers weren't unarmed as they fired on the police barricade. Hitler had also disappeared in the immediate aftermath of the shootings, and fled the scene in a stolen ambulance. The official explanation for this in the 1930s was that he had spied a little blonde Bavarian girl in the crowd just before the shooting started. She sustained a minor injury and he scooped her up and carried her away to safety. When he found an ambulance, he drove her to the hospital himself because he could do it faster than the ambulance driver. There were many people who refused to believe the party line, and would duck into this side street to get to Odeonsplatz, rather than salute the plaque.

The Nazis started catching on to why so many people started using this side street, nicknamed "Dodger's Alley" which had no shops on it. Two guards were posted under the arch in the picture below:

Dodger's Alley. 2 guards were posted under the arch on the right. Note the gold-coloured path in the bricks that ends at the arch.

The guards would stop people walking down the street, and if they didn't have a reason to be in one of the buildings on the street they would be given one warning not to walk this way again, and their name would be added to a list. If they caught you twice, you'd be sent to Dachau. Some people made the conscious decision to walk Dodger's Alley a second time, rather than salute the plaque and pay lip service to a regime they despised. The gold-coloured bricks in the picture above represent the path of the hundreds of people who's path ended at the arch, where they disappeared.

Munich has no obvious memorials like the enormous black blocks of the Holocaust memorial in Berlin. Instead, there are dozens of subtle memorials like the one in Dodger's Alley. When you notice them, it sticks with you and you have to do a little research to figure out what they represent. The point is that if you have to look it up, instead of it being explained for you, the memory of it will stick with you.

At the end of Residenzstrasse, in Odeonsplatz, there is a large portico where Hitler gave many of his speeches. To the left of the picture below, there is the Residenz (the palace of the Bavarian Kings until 1918). On the right hand side is a church. The lion on the left has his mouth open, and the lion on the right has his mouth closed. The symbolism behind these mismatched sculptures, installed long before Hitler's time, was that one should speak out against the government (represented by the palace), but be silent towards the church. I wonder if Hitler ever noticed this while he was being photographed by the press here, between the lions.

The lions of Odeonsplatz.

Our guide had a very poignant way of ending the tour. She said as important as it is to remember what happened in Munich in the 20s, 30s, and 40s, it is also important to remember that this is just 20 years in the centuries of history in this city. There is no way you can ignore the trace of Naziism in this Munich, but there is also so much more to it. Living in Munich for several years, she had never met people who wear their history on their sleeve like the Germans do. In school, children spend 10 years learning about Naziism, and in order to graduate high school, they have to visit at least 2 concentration camps. What happened in those 20 years isn't just German history, it's human history. There have been genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia, and there are still totalitarian regimes and dictatorships today. I think if everyone were to visit a concentration camp, there would be a lot less suffering in this world.

There are many top-class museums in Munich: 7 have detailed descriptions in the meager 3 pages my guide book has on this city. I did have time to visit the Deutsches Museum, the largest museum of science and technology in the world and the most popular museum in Germany. There are over 28,000 exhibited objects on an enormous range of subjects, everything from agriculture to shipbuilding, birth control to telecommunications. 2 1/2 hours was barely enough to skim the surface. Jocelyn and I are science and engineering students, so we were like two kids in a candy shop. They even had some of the equipment I used working in a lab at the U of C last summer on display. There are also three branch locations, on aeronautics, automobiles and post-WWII German research and innovation.

The Isar River, near the Deutsches Museum.

The Deutsches Museum (a very small part of it).

Cool looking machines! This was part of the electricity section.

This was a cross-section of an actual airplane. You could also walk through a cross-section of a space shuttle.

This plane belonged to the Wright brothers.

An enormous hall had dozens of ships and boats, ranging from the 14th to 19th century (and even included birch-bark canoes from Canada).

The Piano Room. There were some very interesting early pianos, as well as a huge collection of other instruments.

Inside the Frauenkirche. This is the cathedral of the Archdiocese of Munich. Pope Benedict XVI was the Archbishop here before his election as Pope in 2005.