Munich
was radiant

"Munich was radiant"

"Munich was radiant," Thomas Mann wrote at the start of his novella Gladius Dei, published in 1902 in the Neue Deutsche Rundschau. "Yes," the supposed expert sighs at once, "Munich was radiant in Schwabing." In fact, Mann is describing in this text the life of the Maxvorstadt — Munich's pulsating heart of the bohème and the centre of Ludwig I.'s Greek revival.

Already in 1955 Tim O. Tim tried to rouse the residents in the Abendzeitung: "Maxvorstadt people, wake up! Wake up from decades of suppression, become at last aware of yourselves! Historically speaking there is no such thing as a Schwabinger, for the intellectual cradle of Schwabing stood without doubt in the Türkenstraße."

The bohème of the 1900s made no distinction between the two districts, pendulating between Schwabing and Maxvorstadt — everything north of the Odeonsplatz was simply lumped together as "Schwabing". That stuck; even officially today people gladly speak of Schwabing when they mean the Maxvorstadt. But: "Schwabing is not a place but a state of mind. That state of mind played out in the Maxvorstadt."

The Blaue Reiter

1906: Wassily Kandinsky moved to Ainmillerstraße 36 — at that time part of the Maxvorstadt (today counted as Schwabing). With his partner Gabriele Münter, Franz Marc, August Macke, Alexej von Jawlensky, Marianne von Werefkin and Paul Klee, a loose circle of artists formed that emerged in 1911 as Der Blaue Reiter.

The Munich Academy under Franz von Stuck was one of the most important art schools in Europe — Klee, Kandinsky and Albers studied here. The aesthetic break the Blaue Reiter accomplished led directly into abstraction and thus into modernism. The world's most important collection on the subject lies today in the Lenbachhaus, only a few hundred metres away.

Munich New Secession (1913)

Around the turn of the century, when the Munich art metropolis was booming and young artists felt excluded from the established associations, numerous new artist groups formed. Among them, in 1913, the Munich New Secession at Galeriestraße 26. It held its first exhibition in the artificial ice rink in the Hofgarten. In 1920 the New Secession moved into the Glass Palace, where it even received its own entrance.

The 11 Executioners

Founded in 1901, the political-literary cabaret Die 11 Scharfrichter at Türkenstraße 28 was the first German cabaret stage. Frank Wedekind performed here, Max Halbe, Otto Falckenberg. In the interested audience Christian Morgenstern, Erich Mühsam, Wassily Kandinsky and Käthe Kollwitz were spotted. A mixture of Munich wit, Berlin sharpness and Parisian chanson — the model for every German-language cabaret stage to follow.

Thomas Mann's warning — 1926

In November 1926 the Nobel laureate Thomas Mann raged in a lecture at the Tonhalle about the frightening political climate change that had taken place in Munich: "We had to experience Munich being decried in Germany and beyond as a haven of reaction, as the seat of every stubbornness and refractoriness against the will of the times; we had to hear it called a stupid city, indeed the stupid city."

The Tonhalle was destroyed in the war and not rebuilt. The Munich Philharmonic found an interim home at the Herkulessaal — and only in 1985, at the Gasteig cultural centre, did they move into a concert hall of their own.