Before I visited Munich for the first time, my thinking about this city was heavily influenced by a biased one-time German colleague. To him, this heavyweight of German cities deserved mention among the most important capitals of the old world, right next to Rome and Vienna. As a metropolis of arts and science, as a bold and assertive embodiment of modernization and enlightened patronage, and as a microcosm of the European civilization itself. Others may shrug it off indifferently as simply yet another mid-size city, pretty and historic but, at best, no worse than the next. But I subscribed to this Munich-the-art-capital-of-the-world view, convinced that this rigidly managed, ritzy, and uncommonly photogenic place ought to be the jewel of Germany. It certainly was no Hanover, an unsure amalgamation that is infinitely lacking in identity and hopelessly boring. And no Cologne, a place marked by a magnificent cathedral but otherwise a wasteland of blandness. Planted in the center of the country’s most traditional and classically beautiful province – Bavaria boasts some of Germany’s most convincing old time wealth, its prettiest and most varied landscape, and as many as 80,000 protected monuments – Munich must be more than a mere jewel. A crown jewel at the very least, and of the entire German-speaking Europe. Not surprisingly: after all, Munich, as they say, is ‘where Italy starts’.
Or so I thought. Towards the end of my recent stay – a couple of decades and visits later, each filled with purposeful observation and intense reflection – to this snob of urban Germany, the jewel suddenly felt a bit different. More like a polished rock, well-built and shiny but shielded from the viewer by a slab of glass, and about as warm and welcoming.
Many cities in Europe’s South and East give a taste of former grandeur that transports you back, as if time had lost its way and got trapped there. They are well-worn, lived-in, perhaps a bit dusty and in need of touchups, and certainly past their commercial peak but authentic in their imperfect and increasingly rare beauty. Like the original squeaky floors of a historic mansion, like a slightly faded old photo. Krakow exploits this condition to perfection while Budapest neglects it beyond all expiration dates. Not Munich: a beautifully wrapped box, a bow on top, this city impresses with its packaging. But make your way past the wrapping and – far from a faded print – the Bavarian city is a freshly-printed postcard, beautifully cropped, and in near-perfect condition. Edges perfectly straight, corners rounded. Detail still sharply geometric and in vivid color. Glossy. Laminated, in an airtight protective plastic cover. And again, about as warm and welcoming. That vivid color seemed to be there only for the purposes of giving the city’s debatable reputation of Gemutlichkeit, a laid-back coziness, some street cred. But the package as a whole left a sense of something important missing, a whole dimension. Could it be the conspicuous abundance of commercialism? the ostensible lack of authenticity? of frayed edges? of any edge?
My take on this city this time oscillated between euphoria, contentment, disappointment, and near disgust, and – while this range of sentiment can ostensibly apply to any urban destination – in Munich these swings somehow didn’t seem to be particularly far apart at any given moment. Take those seemingly three dimensional stone carvings on the facades of regal Munich that on a closer look turn out to be well-executed trompe l’oeil – architectural frescos rather than true architectonics, a motif painted flat rather than sculpted – a fancy term of art for ‘optical illusion’ or fake news. This elaborate surrogate is so Munich. An artistic shortcut, an articulated simulation. Unquestionably practical and simplified but somehow innately harmonious and unassailably beautiful.
Today it is very much the antithesis of decadent, edgy, nonconformist Berlin. But the current state of affairs betrays a notorious role reversal: during most of its old regime existence and its post Enlightenment history, the Bavarian anti-Berlin had been a rather more progressive, worldlier, more dynamic city that the stuffy, official Prussian upstart could hope to be. Under the 700 year long rule of the enlightened Wittelsbach dynasty, who believed in the arts as the ultimate civilizing and ennobling force, the Bavarian capital evolved from what had been a commercial backwater next to prosperous Augsburg and Nuremberg into a real metropolis of the arts, of world class visual and performing arts, equally accomplished in things classical and modernist. After the Napoleonic Wars, the ruling family – having elevated Bavaria from an Electorate into a Kingdom with an enlightened constitutional bureaucracy – put in place their bold new urban plan, incorporated and integrated nearby towns and territories, and developed its rail network and industries. Consolidating its gains, Munich ultimately attracted more writers, playrights, and artists – and arguably of higher caliber, with Richard Wagner, Paul Klee, and Wassily Kandinsky among them – than any other city in Germany, Dresden included. Boasting more artists towards the end of the 19th century than the much more populous and important Vienna and Berlin combined, it staged famous breakaway movements like the Secession before these Imperial capitals did, and hosted iconoclastic avantgarde schools like Dada and the Blue Rider, the group of German expressionist artists.
Bismarck’s conquest and unification of Germany, the 1918 Versailles settlement, and the years of hyperinflation marked a U-turn. In a complete role reversal, Germany’s bustling center of arts and science shifted from Munich to the more tolerant Berlin – was it all built on the sands of pseudo-Imperial and, therefore, forced ambition, and so was bound to collapse? – shattering Munich‘s cosmopolitan ambitions and its delusions of grandeur. The Munich of the past one hundred years is deeply traditional and grounded, to a fault: an overdecorated capital of Germany’s quintessential ‘red state’ with all its attendant sociocultural attributes, albeit with a pretty Biedermeier face. This was perhaps never more so than in the early 1920’s, when it truly mattered, when the city of Thomas Mann and Lion Feuchtwanger sank into cultural obscurity and backwardness. No question that Munich‘s passive-aggressive, reactionary conservatism of the day – perhaps adopted initially in response to a Bolshevist revolution in the cosmopolitan Berlin – set the stage for the dark new ideological role this once enlightened metropolis would play for the next two decades. The decades when Munich, and Konigsplatz, would find themselves transformed from Ludwig I’s epicenter of the arts to the Nazi party’s main seat and forum.
This Munich remains hopelessly monoethnic, strangely homogeneous for today’s world – even for this part of Europe – and structurally lacking in diversity. Where are Germany’s foreigners? Guest workers? Are immigration rules more restrictive in affluent Bavaria than in more progressive lands to the North? Is it just Munich, and a different picture would unfold in Nuremberg and lesser towns of the province? Is it just the center of Munich, and a trip no further than to the city’s outskirts is all it would take to see migrant workers and hopefuls from the broader South and East? None of this is immediately clear when contemplating the uniformity of the city’s dwellers.
Unified even later than Italy then divided again, Germany has left room for more than one unofficial capital. United only symbolically and linguistically, it stayed fragmented over a millennium of near sovereign development, and remains in many ways decentralized and multipolar. None of its leading cities is a true capital that dominates the way London or Paris or Lisbon do, and several of them contending for a ‘capital’ status. Berlin, a leader in the arts, politics, and things on the cutting edge of culture is paradoxically devoid of large corporate presence; Frankfurt, a capital of banking and finance, lacks much of anything else; Hamburg dominates in shipping, logistics, media, aerospace, and contemporary art. Affluent Munich holds its own as the country’s undisputed bastion of classical arts – Athens on the Isar – but is also a well rounded champion of Germany’s modern industrial technology, professional services, and big business generally. It could be Germany’s true second capital if it had a little bit of Berlin’s present-day edge.
But try to parse out Munich’s conflated narratives, to filter out its darkest days of the blood and soil ideology, and you should be able to enjoy the unique cosmopolitan legacy that had shaped this city for centuries. There is much more to Munich than its Volkisch past and Oktoberfest: the Bavarian capital is by far the most classically detailed city in Germany, its exterior as Italianate – or, more precisely, Austrian, Flemish, and derivative Italian – as it is Germanic, with a friendly and more continental look than the one-dimensional cities of Germany’s North and West. This photogenic capital is the closest German lands ever came to Vienna – its art repositories jam-packed with top-tier works, its ornate skyline second to none – only in more vivid color. But the striking dichotomy of progressive, classical Munich of past centuries vs conservative, bland Munich of today may continue to weigh on the experience.
