Bruckmann
Salon

A bourgeois salon

The publisher Hugo Bruckmann and his wife Elsa Bruckmann ran their salon in the Maxvorstadt from 1899 — first at Nymphenburger Straße 86, and from 1908 in the grand apartment on the second floor of the former Prinz-Georg-Palais at Karolinenplatz 5. It became one of the most popular social meeting points in the city, where “tout” Munich and visiting celebrities gathered.

The Bruckmanns' publishing interest in the esoteric, mystical and völkisch currents of the turn of the century shaped the salon: anti-modern thinkers such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Ludwig Klages and Alfred Schuler were regulars, alongside pro-republican liberals such as Harry Graf Kessler and the Romance scholar Karl Vossler. As a social centre the evenings drew literary figures such as Oswald Spengler, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Stefan George.

Elsa Bruckmann and Hitler

When the Bruckmanns heard the young Adolf Hitler at a party event at the Circus Krone in 1921, they were captivated by the “gifted orator”. Elsa Bruckmann in particular sought his company: she visited him several times during his fortress imprisonment at Landsberg after the failed putsch, and invited him to her salon at Karolinenplatz immediately after his early release on 23 December 1924.

Over the following years she became Hitler's most important patron: she taught him manners and table etiquette, dressed him fashionably and made him acceptable to Munich's polite society. She introduced him to industrialists and educated bourgeois — among them the piano manufacturer's wife Helene Bechstein and Richard Wagner's widow Cosima — and gave him a platform for agitation despite his ban on public speaking. Her guests also included later Nazi figures such as Alfred Rosenberg, Baldur von Schirach and Rudolf Heß.

The Bruckmanns were among Hitler's first financial backers. Thanks to a guarantee from Hugo Bruckmann, Hitler was able to leave his furnished room at Thierschstraße 41 in 1929 and move into the grand nine-room apartment on Prinzregentenplatz, which Elsa Bruckmann helped to furnish.

Reading and afterlife

Scholarship sees the Bruckmann salon as a “prototypical embodiment of the bourgeois salon” — precisely not a closed circle, but one that thrived on open debate, where the contradictory currents of intellectual Munich crossed. It was exactly this prestige that gave the hosts' political promotion of Hitler its effect. Rüdiger Liedtke bluntly calls the place a “breeding ground of National Socialism”.

The former Prinz-Georg-Palais at Karolinenplatz 5 still stands; today it is the seat of the Bavarian Savings Banks Association. A plaque on Karolinenplatz places the address within the Nazi party quarter of the Maxvorstadt.