Why even bother with the comparison to begin with, you might ask? What exactly is the point of contorting yourself to find contrasts and similarities? Why try to rationalize and benchmark, compartmentalize and organize into a hierarchy? Unstructured, unfiltered and raw impressions, gathered in real-time, requiring no reflection or thought, should instinctively bring more joy, be more fun. Maybe. Comparisons and cross-references – a way of processing the experience of discovery, simple as that – don’t seek to equalize or equate, don’t imply a never-ending, unfulfilled search for sameness and uniformity across globalizing continent. On the contrary, comparisons are for things related but dissimilar: if things were too much alike, any comparison would be redundant. Benchmarking and appraisal of dissimilar ways and places has always seemed to me like the best way to learn – systematically breaking down the facts, the opinions, the impressions, putting them back together, and organizing them in a deliberate thought process. All the more justifiable in this case since it’s Munich’s status as a top tier city that is at stake.
Leaving aside Imperial Vienna’s unmatched cultural legacy, historical mission, and status, it did seem to me like these cities had moved closer to each other over time and were finally worthy of comparison. It is entirely possible that everyday life in these cities, which consistently score in global top three in quality of life, is not that different? Still, today Munich and Vienna are much closer, nearly identical in size, and share enviable top 2-3 rank on the global quality of life league tables.
The fact that Vienna is my benchmark for Munich, and not one of two equally impressive German cities also worthy of this comparison – Berlin and Dresden – says a lot. If Munich’s relative scale, great as it is, still falls short in comparison with Vienna, it makes up for it with a more stylistically nuanced assortment of historical periods on offer. But a former Imperial capital it is not.
To avoid rightful disappointment, benchmark Munich to other urban Germany, strictly Germany, nothing but Germany. But comparisons with the city’s cultural superior to the East are tempting and memories fade over time, leaving only a fragmented a skewed picture of isolated and usually favorable highlights. Without continual nourishment by recurring visits, time itself heals, leaving an idealized, rose-tinted version of the place and its spirit. It suddenly becomes easy to connect the historical dots linearly, overlooking structural gaps in the accompanying logic. Easy to give in to superficial similarities of the cities’ current size and stature, their aerial views, their masterfully detailed setting, their over decorated and overly monumental civic and government buildings, in the process letting oneself get carried away by comparisons of Munich to Vienna, the cultural capital of the German speaking metropolitan world. A recent visit to Germany’s prettiest big city, when selective but inquisitive exploration helped me dust off my distant past impressions and mark them to market, conclusively grounding Munich for me.
Vienna has a bit bigger presence, is more ‘on the map’, more refined, and worldlier. The two Baroque capitals for centuries remained vastly different in caliber and – since the 1600s – in sophistication: the Bavarian ducal residence, impressive as it may be, not a match to Vienna’s former status as approximately the capital of Europe ex France. But if Munich ultimately caves in, buckling under the weight of the comparison, its collapse is not immediate, and not without putting up – and dragging the old Imperial capital into – a good fight.
Bavaria shares much of its history, charm and flavor with Austria. Both Duchies are Catholic, both are softer, more continental, and more Italian than other German lands – and easily the most stylish. Their photogenic and picturesque appearance, picture-perfect countryside, rich history, and singular attention to detail stand apart from the rest of Germany. Both pride themselves on their cultural scene, both have amassed some of the world’s most important classical and modernist art collections. Not to mention a more direct, if less important, connection: the last, and most popular, of Austria’s empresses was a Bavarian princess married to her relative Emperor Franz Josef, himself half Bavarian.
The two cities even shared one of their ruling dynasties. Vienna was for nearly six centuries the main seat of the Habsburg court, excluding one brief interruption involving Innsbruck and Maximilian I (not of Munich’s Wittelsbach family, the House of Habsburg had their own Maximilian I) in 15th century and one marked by Rudolph’s excursion to Prague in the 16th. The seat of a family that during four out of those six centuries – with a notable gap of 5 years in the 1740s – ruled the Holy Roman Empire, and for three hundred years at its peak reigned over an Empire from Peru to the Philippines. Initially disputed by powerful regional princes – the Hohenstaufens, the Guelphs, and the Babenbergs (the latter split into two branches, Bavarian and Austrian, during the pre-Habsburg centuries) – Munich became for many centuries, in a genuine counterpoise to the Vienna of the Habsburgs, the seat of power of the Wittelsbachs, a powerful family of German Electors: for five hundred years until the 1770’s, the seat of the family’s Bavarian branch; for a century and a half following the War of he Bavarian Succession, its Palatinate branch. The Bavarian branch produced two Holy Roman Emperors, of which one during that 5 year gap in the otherwise continuous Habsburg rule; the Palatine branch had given us powerful warrior kings of Sweden’s Golden Age. In early 17th century Munich, the big power politics of the great powers – France, Spain, and Austria – was intertwined with constant struggles of lesser international crises. The rivalry b/t the local Wittelsbachs and the Habsburgs, the family with greater influence on European history than any other, is centuries old. And if the Bavarian dynasty got to own Tyrol and to reign over Holland before their higher ranking neighbors, they lost the former to the House of Austria by the 1300’s and the latter to Burgundy then Austria in the 1400’s. This rivalry drove Munich’s rise to sovereignty, intermarriage notwithstanding, repeatedly pulled the Bavarian city into the French orbit and in conflict with the House of Habsburg, helped Bavaria emerge as the strongest of German states behind Austria and Prussia, and ultimately secured its status as a royal capital.
Never besieged by the Turks and not as much in the shadow of its rulers – Electors and later Kings of Bavaria did not cast as long a shadow as the Habsburg Emperors – Munich managed to amass a first rate installed base of Renaissance art from the late 1500’s. This period in which Munich excels is exactly what Vienna is missing: don’t look for traces of that period in its streets, and other than in the core Hofburg collections of Rudolph II moved to Vienna from Prague, the Renaissance period remains a major white space conspicuously lacking in this capital of Baroque. Munich continued to build on the classical splendor of the Renaissance: in the 1700’s, a period on which it practically wrote the book, or at least a chapter its proceeded to sponsor Europe’s most intricate phase of French and German Rococo art. Watch out for this later phase of its church and palace building, Munich’s restrained and modest in scale Baroque facades set low expectations only to shock the visitor with the full weight of overdesigned statuary, gilded bronze, and stonework in multicolor marble. The result is impressive continuity of Italianate influences spanning centuries of near continuous development that is more Prague than Vienna.
Vienna’s cityscape easily acquired its worldly and refined appearance to match the richness of its content, thanks to the harmonizing forces of the court, strong Catholic connection. A contingent of Italian architects, active in the Imperial capital, was determined to meet all that pent up demand accumulated during a lost century under the Turkish siege – for city and garden palaces for the nobility from all over the Holy Roman Empire – in the Italian Baroque, or Jesuit, style. An independent Austrian school, purely Italian in inspiration and form, was kicked off by its Imperial architect of the period Fischer von Erlach and – they divided and conquered the Vienna market of high nobility during the boom decades – Lucas von Hildebrandt, his slightly more creative and productive counterpart. Elsewhere, the Great Austrian church fortresses – abbeys of Melk, Klosterneuburg and St Florian in Lower Austria, and further afield, in Styria and even in Tyrol – happily embraced Italian features, as did the rest of Central Europe already in the Italian artistic orbit and now under added influences of the new Vienna style.
Vienna, in all its eclectic splendor, is newer, more derivative, and more historicist – while Munich, a true Art City, is more authentic, more local, and more historic. Its Neo-Greek classical town planning and architecture by von Klenze and others – celebrating, besides the fashions of the day, the recent accession of a Wittelsbach to the throne of Greece – served as a sourcebook for Theophil von Hansen, chief Ringstrasse era architect and one of Vienna’s more productive and prestigious of the Grunderzeit period. Munich, thanks to its school of painting and the Academy of Arts, also beat Paris and Vienna as the destination chosen by Kandinsky. But with all its brilliance in visual arts, Munich doesn’t begin to reach the bandwidth, match the wingspan of Vienna’s music, theater, and performing arts scene, or the intensity of its intellect from medicine to economics.
Munich, like Vienna, is old money but is more expensive and feels wealthier – no wonder, considering that few countries are as socialist as present-day Austria with its near-universal municipal ownership of flats and 37 days or so of vacation. But Munich generally punches a bit above its weight economically – it is the non-financial business capital of the world’s top four economy (Siemens, Europe’s largest company, is the most mature, not to mention BMW), it is also Germany’s applied tech hub (world’s leading non-Japanese robotics makes, Kuka, recently purchased by the Chinese, was based in nearby Augsburg, and so were the Fuggers, one of medieval Europe’s leading banking dynasties).
Munich – much of its central cathedrals, theaters, museums, and the royal residence reduced to ruins, as British and American air raids left 45% of the city destroyed and less than three percent of structures intact – today is a tale of two cities: the public and civic buildings stand meticulously restored, but the run of the mill buildings lining its central streets are mostly cheap, generic, utilitarian post-war fillers but equally shiny, thanks to all those retail storefronts. German efficiency certainly on display but attention to detail in architecture must have been all used up on the landmarks and monuments. Austrian attitude is more nonchalant, in this case it sadly embraced replace vs restore mentality in parts of Vienna that suffered from Allied bombing but added spectacular high rise developments in the past to decades.
Grounded. Ultraconservative. Solidly traditional. Compared to the imperial and worldly Vienna, Munich is less refined and more commercial – despite all that first-rate art and architecture, rich and well-curated museums, and regal old-world splendor – seems a bit simple, inward-looking, and hopelessly disinterested in the broader European past. But this historic Bavarian court city never really was in Vienna’s shadow, and didn’t have to look back and take the lead of Vienna, it always led itself – Maximilian I’s Mariensaule of the 1600s or Ludwig I’s new streets of the early 1800’s both preceded their analogs in Vienna – and in terms of artistic patronage impressively stands on its own.
Munich hosted barely a few hundred thousand inhabitants before WWI – at the peak of the most decisive period in urban development – at the time when Vienna’s population, ranked a close third on the continent, was on its way from two to three million. Many times smaller during the delusional time of Max Joseph, Ludwig, and Maximilian, between the French Revolution and the revolution of 1848, Munich never had a chance in this comparison, certainly not since the days of the Enlightenment.
And even the character of Munich’s acclaimed museums – an elegant and functional offering by the kings to the people, started by Ludwig if not Max-Joseph and completed by Maximilian II – seems hollow and condescending in comparison to Vienna’s somewhat later purpose-built public palaces of art at the epicenter of the Ringstrasse. Munich‘s uber impressive museums – the Residenz with its superb collections of Albrecht and Maximilian I aside – grand as they are, appear a bit more tentative, even utilitarian by comparison, tucked away some distance from the center, as if the Bavarian dukes turned self-proclaimed kings were hedging, unsure of their bold move. Vienna’s longest ruling sovereign famously preferred to sleep on a wooden bench, treasured the dignity of work, and strolled in the Burggarten among city dwellers – his Wittelsbach brother in law a complete opposite: a neurotic antisocial dreamer, disinterested in state and city affairs, he preferred fantastically opulent enfilades of living quarters. Perhaps the relative scale and resources of the cities are to blame but the character of the monarch may have had something to do with this difference.
A look at the culinary scene doesn’t help Munich in this comparison either. Its restaurant landscape is solid and not without interesting new or ethnic options but relatively monotonous and provincial. Even for those of us who prefer not to reach for Michelin stars or look for the bleeding edge of creativity, Munich is equally light on the cosmopolitan and top quality regional, equally heavy on the beerhall tourist fare and that of the local wurstelstand – other choices here are between fulsome, upscale, not-to-be-missed hotel breakfasts and great Christmas markets. And maybe that’s all it takes, simple but delicious street and market food, washed down by alternating batches of Munich’s most popular drink, mulled wine, and espresso. But Munich’s scene is not in any way a substitute for the range, sophistication, and creativity of Vienna’s regional domestic and international culinary offering.
Munich’s built environment is not exactly walkable or welcoming, and just darker. Stuck in a tug of war between the sculptural, village-like pedestrian maze of the Altstadt on the one hand and vast, cold, centrally planned areas to its North and East on the other, unceremoniously cut off from each other by a buffer zone created for bypassing by car rather than exploring on foot. The vast stretches of Munich‘s marquee avenues – the elegant NeoGreek and Italianate Ludwigstrasse, the Victorian Maximilianstrasse – are bold in their original layout but, in comparison with Vienna’s, seem limited in creativity and timid in execution. Where the civic and educational buildings on and near Ludwigstrasse have the critical mass and palatial proportions to compete, the relatively plain and incoherent look of its public buildings and apartment blocks gets in the way. The 19th century avenues stand largely devoid of life, a quiet admission of lack of critical mass and discerning taste in street furniture. Vienna’s superbly integrated microcosm of palace-garden-town-court – each of the facets performs at the top of its category – seems nonexistent in Munich outside the Hofgarten, and while the Bavarian capital holds its own in visual arts, where are Vienna’s parks? Palaces? Vienna’s 50 nightly live classical music venues, its theater life seem far away here.
A white space on the map of cross-border, interregional, and supranational institutions, Munich sticks stubbornly to the awkward folksiness of its hinterland, an artifact of a major city in a large country. This is the opposite of Vienna in the regional sense, which chooses to sustain a shadow of former glory mostly through outstretched and outsized influence beyond the footprint of its current territory.
Bavarian electors’ dollhouse imperialism are charming but no match to the epicenter of Europe’s former first family. A real electoral seat but a pseudo-kingdom, upgraded for geopolitical reasons, to stick a finger in the eye of the House of Austria. Created out of thin air of the French Revolution, it was pumped and dumped, exploited by Napoleon then left to struggle to find its purpose in Bismarck’s bigger scheme. The capital of self-proclaimed kingdom of Bavaria ultimately failed to live up to its status or to fill the pompous outer form with much inner content. Aside from the massive stock of art objects in its collections – but those predated this self-aggrandizing expansion – the promise of its high-brow culture and hospitality largely unfulfilled.
This comparison doesn’t get much better when one includes the darkest page in these cities’ history – both Vienna and Munich are unfortunately and irredeemably linked to Hitler – only Vienna rejected him, and Munich embraced him. Post-WWI Munich, for whatever reason, not least of which was reactionary conservatism and desire to hold onto status quo in the face of Bolshevism spreading from cosmopolitan and industrialized Berlin, offered direct and crucial support to Hitler’s movement in its formative years. Munich was instrumental in helping plant the seeds, in cultivating, incubating, and harvesting the ferment of the Nazi sentiment that spread from here to broader Germany and beyond. Imperial Vienna inadvertently inspired young Hitler: the mix of social and ethnic relations in the capital of Europe’s most complex empire was tainted by traces of Karl Lueger’s and Karl Schoneter’s fringe sentiment. But Vienna socially rejected and professionally humiliated aspiring Hitler. Despite even larger grievances, and more humiliating losses suffered in WWI, the much diminished official Vienna later disagreed with Hitler’s policies. It was ultimately coerced – top down by Germany’s invading and annexing force, passively by Austria’s Pan-Germanism – to follow, accept, adapt, and emulate, Hitler’s policies largely honed in Munich, which remained his original base and the NS party HQ. The humbled former Imperial capital was forced, at gunpoint, to reluctantly play a far lesser role than Munich volunteered to lead. All part of the mosaic of relative value.
And even Ludwig’s visionary new city, designed by Leo von Klenze, which helped set the architectonic trend for 19th century serial transformations of major European capitals, defining it in neoclassical monumental and representational terms, and Friedrich von Gartner, which beautified Ludwig’s transformation by adding the classical Siegestor triumphal arch and the Italianate Bavarian State Library and Field Marshall’s Hall, are tainted. Hitler’s master architect drew inspiration directly from Ludwig’s museum city centered on Munich‘s Konigsplatz, and while neither Ludwig nor von Klenze are to blame for who might be inspired by their designs a century later, the Frldherrnhalle became the site of Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch and later became a Nazi shrine, and Altes Rathaus the venue for the 1938 speech by Goebbels that kicked off the Kistallnacht. How can this not undermine Munich, at least a little? Vienna inspired Bismarck and Hitler alike, making them strive to make Berlin more like the Austrian metropolis, but Vienna never became a prototype for standardized totalitarian architecture the way Munich did.
