Kaulbach Villa

An Italian garden villa for a painter-prince

The Kaulbach Villa at Kaulbachstraße 15 was built in 1887–1889 to designs by Gabriel von Seidl — the same architect who shortly afterwards built the neighbouring Lenbachhaus. Seidl drew on the Renaissance and the model of the Roman villa suburbana, creating a representative artist's villa for the painter Friedrich August von Kaulbach, one of the celebrated "painter-princes" of Munich's Fin de Siècle. Kaulbach's studio was on the first floor. Stylistically the building belongs to the same historicist era as the other villas and representative buildings of the late Prince Regent period.

1937: official seat of Gauleiter Adolf Wagner

When the original official residence on Von-der-Tann-Straße was demolished, the Nazi party looked for a new, representative building for its Gauleiter — and found it in the Kaulbach Villa. In 1937 Adolf Wagner moved in: Bavarian interior minister and at the same time Nazi Gauleiter for Munich and Upper Bavaria. He set up his office, of all places, on the first floor — where Kaulbach's studio had been.

From here Wagner set the course for the expropriation of the Jewish population and for the antisemitic exhibitions at the Haus der Deutschen Kunst. Nazi leaders such as Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels and Martin Bormann came and went in the villa. Wagner was regarded as a close confidant of Hitler — one of the few allowed to address him informally — and exploited this position shamelessly for himself. He occupied the villa until a stroke incapacitated him in 1942.

The Kaulbach Villa thus belongs to the web of Nazi sites in Maxvorstadt around the "party quarter" on Königsplatz — away from the great parade grounds, but as the personal power base of one of the most influential local functionaries.

After 1945: from forces radio to the Historisches Kolleg

After the war, an American forces radio station first moved into the building. Since 1988 it has housed the Historisches Kolleg, a research and funding institution that also works through the history of the house itself. Today Wagner's former office hosts conferences and lectures — a deliberate contrast: where injustice was once organised, open scholarly debate now takes place.