How a
quarter
is born

The defortification — 1791

Three decades before the Maxvorstadt was founded, the rumour mill was running hot. Since 1779 the word had been that the Elector Karl Theodor was planning a new city outside the Schwabing Gate: "Karlstadt" it was to be called. The Munich citizenry did not like Karl Theodor — he came from the Palatinate sideline of the Wittelsbach dynasty.

Only in 1791 did the Elector finally declare that "Munich is not a fortress, shall not be, and shall not become one". As the starting shot of the defortification, Major General Thompson — the later Count Rumford — had the bastion at the Neuhauser Gate razed, with citizen participation. The gate was renamed Karlstor. This event marked the birth of Munich's outer districts. In the years that followed the Isar-, Ludwigs-, Max-, St. Anna- and the now nearly forgotten Schönfeldvorstadt all came into being.

King Max I. Joseph — and a need for housing

With Elector Max IV. Joseph — the later King Max I. Joseph — another outsider from the Palatinate-Zweibrücken sideline arrived in Munich. He, too, was confronted with growing population pressure. The area between the Karlstor and the Schwabing Gate struck him as the ideal space for new residential development. The Capuchin monastery on the bastion at today's Lenbachplatz was still in the way — but the secularisation made it possible to tear it down.

The development plan by master builder Franz Thurn received the Elector's blessing in 1802. Strict regulations applied to new buildings: from storey and eaves heights to roof forms and façade proportions, everything was specified to the millimetre.

The master plan of 1812

In 1808 the City Planning Commission held a competition for the city expansion — even Crown Prince Ludwig submitted an entry. Karl von Fischer was eventually commissioned to revise the accepted proposal. Fischer's plans, developed in close collaboration with the landscape architect Friedrich Ludwig von Sckell, won the day. Their joint master plan was approved in 1812 — the birth of the Maxvorstadt.

The central axis was to be the extended Fürstenweg — the later Briennerstraße. Punctuated by the representative Karolinenplatz and the Königsplatz, it ran as a direttissima from the Residenz to Nymphenburg Palace. Villas with large gardens were to line this street. North of it: a quarter with a rational street grid and drastically narrower streets. South of the Briennerstraße towards Stachus: a more playful, artistic development.

Ludwig I. and the grand boulevard

In 1815 Crown Prince Ludwig met a young architect in Paris: Leo von Klenze. The two were united by a passion for antiquity. Ludwig commissioned Klenze to build the Glyptothek. Klenze was also to implement the Maxvorstadt concept: "Athens on the Isar".

Unlike his predecessors, Klenze did not shy away from radical interventions in the city fabric. He had the Schwabing Gate and the neighbouring Chedeville-Schlösschen torn down, levelled the ramparts to create the Odeonsplatz. He massively densified the building stock to make Munich feel metropolitan. And he shifted the centre of gravity northwards: not the Briennerstraße was to be the main axis, but the new grand boulevard Ludwigstraße.

Klenze versus Gärtner

Ludwig I. changed his taste — and his architects — "as the mood took him", as Klenze noted with frustration in his diary. In 1826 he tasked his Roman art agent Martin von Wagner with finding a capable architect "who can stand up to Klenze".

The capable newcomer was Friedrich von Gärtner, the son of the former Royal Court Building Director — whom Klenze had once muscled out of office. Gärtner promised a swift completion of the Ludwigstraße. With the State Library, the Damenstift, the Ludwigskirche and above all the University — together with the opposing seminary — he set new urban accents: Romanticism displaced Classicism.

The beginning and end of the Ludwigstraße were also in Gärtner's hands: the Feldherrnhalle was completed in 1844, the Siegestor in 1850. Klenze fumed and intrigued. But within twenty years Gärtner shaped an urban Gesamtkunstwerk of European rank.

Responsible for the actual execution — for what was finally put on the ground — was Gärtner's master builder Franz Höllriegel (1794–1858). The South-Tyrolean-born stonemason carried out the Ludwigskirche, the State Library and the University for Gärtner — and, under Klenze before, had shaped the building of Königsplatz, the Hall of Fame and the Alte Pinakothek. Höllriegel was the quiet second man without whom neither of the two star architects of the Ludwigstraße could have completed his work.

The Nazi era — 1923 to 1945

What had been conceived as the Wittelsbach grand boulevard became, under the National Socialists, the power centre of a criminal regime. The Hitler putsch already began on 8 November 1923 at the Bürgerbräukeller; the next morning the march ended in front of the Feldherrnhalle in Klenze and Gärtner's Ludwigstraße. From 1930 the NSDAP acquired the Barlow Palace on Brienner Straße and converted it into the "Brown House"; within a few years the "party quarter" emerged between Königsplatz and Karolinenplatz, with Führerbau, Verwaltungsbau and a total of around 50 NSDAP properties.

Paul Ludwig Troost paved the Königsplatz with 22,000 granite slabs and flanked it with two "Temples of Honour" — a staged parade ground in the middle of Klenze's ensemble. Between 1933 and 1945 the Maxvorstadt was thus the "Capital of the Movement"; its residents had to walk past what was being organised and ordered here every day. The Allied bombers saw it the same way — and made the district a preferred target.

Today the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism stands on the site of the Brown House; the Temples of Honour have been razed since 1947, their plinths preserved as "open wounds". → Dedicated chapter on the Nazi era with interactive map and nine sites.

War, destruction and "second destruction"

The Maxvorstadt — architecturally and ideologically raped by the Nazis — resembled a single field of rubble after the Second World War. Educational institutions, large breweries, administrative centres and, of course, Hitler's party headquarters had made it a preferred target of the Allied bombers. In 1939 some 22,000 people still lived here; after the war's end, just under half.

The city then set about not making the area more habitable — the land use plan provided for new office buildings instead of housing. Old buildings that had survived the war were deemed no longer fit for purpose and demolished. Many spoke of the "second destruction of Munich".

At the same time the LMU expanded into the quarter, and Munich was to become car-friendly: the Gabelsbergerstraße was to be widened to 40 m throughout. Tunnelling the Feldherrnhalle and the Veterinärstraße was discussed in earnest.

Renaissance from 1980

The Aktion Maxvorstadt citizens' initiative was founded — engaged residents rose up against further LMU expansion and against blind building zeal. Only from the mid-1970s did a rethink begin. Thanks especially to its proximity to the university, the Maxvorstadt rose again from the 1980s onwards to become a popular residential district — particularly among students.

Inner-city location, optimal transport links and high leisure value through the nearby English Garden have in recent years made the Maxvorstadt a target of the property industry — the housing market demands moon-shot prices at times. Today the quarter is home to nearly 50,000 people, with one of the lowest unemployment rates in Munich and a single-person household share of over 68 %. The Maxvorstadt is the single-person district in single-person metropolis Munich.