“Capital
of the Movement”
1923–1945: Maxvorstadt was the starting point, administrative centre and parade ground of National Socialism. A map of the places where this history actually unfolded — and where it is being confronted today.
Munich, “Capital of the Movement”
The Nazi rise began here as early as November 1923: the failed Hitler Putsch ended at the Feldherrnhalle a few metres east of Briennerstraße. The movement later turned this defeat into its founding myth. In 1933 — barely in power — Hitler systematically built out the symbolic geography. Königsplatz became the central place of consecration: 20,000 granite slabs, sourced from every region of the Reich, paved the square; on its eastern side two “Honour Temples” staged the 1923 putschists as “martyrs of the movement”. To the west stood Klenze’s Glyptothek — the Nazis instrumentalised the classicist ensemble for their pseudo-ancient self-aggrandisement.
On the north side of the square the architect Paul Ludwig Troost erected two monumental, almost mirror-image buildings between 1933 and 1937: the Führerbau (today the University of Music and Performing Arts) and the NSDAP Administrative Building (today the Central Institute for Art History, with the State Antiquities Collections depot). It was in the Führerbau that Hitler signed the Munich Agreement in 1938. Both buildings still stand — stone memorials to an era in which Maxvorstadt was not a city of art but a city of command.
A few hundred metres to the east, at Briennerstraße 45 (Karolinenplatz), stood the Brown House — party headquarters from 1931, destroyed in the war. On its site, since 2015, stands the NS-Dokumentationszentrum: a deliberately cool, white cube by Georg Scheel Wetzel that does not imitate but informs. Around it: Stolpersteine, floor plaques, information panels. Maxvorstadt is today perhaps Munich’s densest landscape of remembrance.
And a few steps further, at Barer Straße 19 directly on Karolinenplatz, the Consulate General of the State of Israel has been based since 2011 — the only one in Germany. This proximity is no accident: where the NSDAP once ruled, a few hundred square metres now house the Federal Republic’s institutional answer to National Socialism — historical clarification and diplomatic relations with the State of Israel. A circle that closes here with full force.
Nine places,
one geography
of remembrance.
Click the red dots or the list below — each place has its own detail page with then-and-now, sources and further reading.
Nine places —
from dictatorship
to reckoning.
We had toThomas Mann · Tonhalle, November 1926
live to see
Munich denounced
as a haven
of reaction.
Seven years before 1933, Mann sensed the mood turning — and said so in public. “The truly stupid city”, he called Munich back then. Seven years later he was in exile.
Where to read on
This page shows the topography of the perpetrators and the regime. The victims’ and community perspective — the Pringsheim palais, Bernheimer, the main synagogue on Herzog-Max-Straße, memorial markers, the Consulate General of Israel — has its own page on Jewish Maxvorstadt. In situ, the NS-Dokumentationszentrum, the Bavarian Main State Archive and the research groups at the Central Institute for Art History (in the former Administrative Building) are all worth a visit.