Königs­platz

Klenze’s forum

When King Ludwig I was crown prince in 1815, he met the young architect Leo von Klenze in Paris. A few years later that encounter became an urban programme: Munich was to become Bavaria’s Athens. Königsplatz is its centrepiece. Glyptothek (Klenze, 1816–1830) to the north, State Collections of Antiquities as its counterpart (Georg Friedrich Ziebland, 1838–1848) to the south, Propylaea as a western gateway (Klenze, 1854/1862) — three buildings that quote ancient Greece and recall the Bavaria–Greece link through Ludwig’s son Otto, King of Greece 1832–1862.

The square itself was no paved expanse in the 19th century but a two-part green space with gravel paths, lawns and trees — an idea in which Friedrich Ludwig von Sckell, the creator of the English Garden, was probably involved. Brienner Straße cut through the middle. Anyone entering the square was meant to walk between antiquity, art and remembrance — educated middle-class culture as a building programme.

The “temples” and their dead

The two Honour Temples are erected on Brienner Straße between Königsplatz and Karolinenplatz — open stone pier halls without walls, facing the square. Architect: Troost; executed after his death by Gerdy Troost and Leonhard Gall. Inaugurated on 9 November 1935, the 12th anniversary of the Hitler Putsch.

Eight bronze sarcophagi are placed in each temple — sixteen in total, for the sixteen dead of the failed putsch of 9 November 1923 at the Feldherrnhalle. Nazi staging calls them “blood witnesses of the movement” and makes them the core of a pseudo-religious liturgy. Telling is position no. 8: Karl Kuhn, a head waiter who stepped out in front of his café, out of curiosity, was hit — and now, posthumously, figures as a martyr of the movement.

The 16 names

Felix Allfarth · Andreas Bauriedl · Theodor Casella · Wilhelm Ehrlich · Martin Faust · Anton Hechenberger · Oskar Körner · Karl Kuhn · Karl Laforce · Kurt Neubauer · Klaus von Pape · Theodor von der Pfordten · Johann Rickmers · Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter · Lorenz Ritter von Stransky-Griffenfeld · Wilhelm Wolf.

“Eternal watch”

Sentries of the 1st SS Standarte “Deutschland” stand in the temples day and night. Strict immobility — the standing order, it is said, was that the guards were “not even to shoo away a fly”. Every year on the eve of 9 November a torchlight procession marches from the Feldherrnhalle to Königsplatz; Hitler reads out the names of the 16 dead — “Last Roll Call” — and the assembled answer each in turn with “Here!”. Alongside the Nuremberg party rallies, it is the most important ritual event of the Nazi calendar.

January 1947

In January 1947 the US Army blew up the rising architecture of the two Honour Temples — as a denazification measure. Sources cite either 9 or 16 January; conclusive evidence is missing. The sarcophagi of the 16 “blood witnesses” were already empty by then: in 1945/46 US forces had had the bodies returned to their original graves, removing them from Nazi veneration.

The plinths of the Honour Temples — the square stone plateaus on Arcisstraße — were not blown up. They remain standing. Deliberately. Anyone setting foot on Königsplatz today walks past them.

“Slab lake”

Königsplatz itself remains, after 1947, in the stone state Troost left it in. The 20,000 granite slabs stay in place. In 1961 it is officially opened for car traffic; in vernacular it is mockingly called “Plattensee” (slab lake) or the “royal car park of the economic miracle”. For four decades cars park here between Klenze and the Nazi plinths. An open discussion about reckoning with the site does not begin until the late 1970s.

In October 1986 the Munich city council passes the resolution to redesign — preparations had been running since 1981. Landscape architect Hans Heid drafts a restoration that brings back the 19th-century state “as far as possible”: eight lawns, gravel paths, no trees in the historic arrangement — a compromise between remembrance and re-greening. In 1987/88 the granite slabs are removed. Some are reused — as paving for footpaths in the municipality of Gräfelfing, for example. The Munich City Museum keeps one original slab.