Protestant
Maxvorstadt
A Catholic quarter — and yet a Protestant memory space. Between St. Markus and the regional church office, the Christian Kaiser publishing house and the White Rose, the Protestant history of Munich can be told in miniature. After Harry Oelke, "The Maxvorstadt — seen through Protestant eyes".
A city reformed late
For centuries Munich was demonstratively Catholic. Although Luther's writings were printed in the city as early as 1519, the first Bavarian religious mandate of 1522 suppressed the Reformation; by 1575 at the latest the last Protestant citizens had left. A lasting Protestant culture only took shape towards the end of the 18th century — and it is closely bound up with the founding of the Maxvorstadt itself.
Change came through dynasty and state: in 1799 Elector Max Joseph married the Lutheran princess Karoline of Baden, who brought a Protestant court preacher with her. The Religious Edict of 1803 placed Lutherans, Reformed and Catholics on an equal legal footing; the constitution of 1818 enshrined bi-confessionalism. In 1801 the wine merchant Johann Balthasar Michel became the first Protestant to receive Munich citizenship; in 1833, under Ludwig I, Munich's first Protestant church — a rotunda on Sonnenstraße near the Karlstor — was consecrated.
St. Markus — a church in the Kunstareal
As Munich's second Protestant church, St. Markus was deliberately placed in the young, well-to-do Maxvorstadt — on Gabelsbergerstraße 6, opposite the Wittelsbacher Palais and within sight of the Alte Pinakothek. The driving force was Dean Karl Buchrucker, who, after the founding of the Reich in 1870, wanted to consolidate Protestant influence. The four Evangelists recur as patrons of the other main Protestant churches, such as St. Lukas and St. Johannes (1913–1916).
The Second World War hit the congregation hard; the first "parish greeting" of 1949 noted that it had "suffered the greatest destruction of all Munich congregations". From a peak of around 20,000 members (1902) the parish has shrunk to about 5,800 today. St. Markus now sees itself as a city and university church with a pronounced arts and music profile — from the era of the organist Karl Richter and his Bach Choir (from 1951) to a dialogue series with the Pinakothek der Moderne. As the seat of the Protestant-Lutheran deanery of Munich it remains a centre of the quarter.
"Vertically from above" — Munich as a theological centre
The Reformation impulse to spread theology through media still echoes in the Maxvorstadt. Outstanding was the Christian Kaiser Verlag (founded in Munich in 1844). Under the publisher Albert Lempp it became the mouthpiece of dialectical theology: it published the epoch-making second edition of Karl Barth's Epistle to the Romans in 1922, the journal Zwischen den Zeiten (1922–1933) and the series Theologische Existenz heute (1933–1941). The house — whose chief editor Georg Merz also held a pastorate at St. Markus from 1926 — made Munich a theological centre of Germany, "without there being a Protestant theology faculty on the ground here".
Under National Socialism the press printed writings of the Confessing Church; it was banned in 1943. After 1945 Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison appeared here. Protestant publishing stayed loyal to the quarter: from the Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt für Bayern to the Protestant Press Association of Bavaria and on to radio and television formats.
Diaconia in the Maxvorstadt
Protestantism answered the social misery of the growing city with welfare. Dean Karl Buchrucker, a Bavarian pioneer of Protestant charity, founded the "Society for Inner Mission" in 1884. Since 1867 a Protestant deaconess institution for nursing had existed in the immediate neighbourhood of the later Markus parish (Arcisstraße 31–33, Heßstraße 22) — a Protestant counterpart to the Catholic Sisters of Mercy.
The pedagogy was strict: an affiliated training school was meant "to raise confirmed girls into god-fearing, diligent and useful servants". The aim was the "rescue" of the individual, not structural social reform. From these beginnings, via the Diakonieverein St. Markus (1918), grew today's Diakoniewerk München-Maxvorstadt.
The Protestant church and National Socialism
The largely national-conservative Protestants at first welcomed the "national awakening" of 1933; there was little protest against the opening of the Dachau concentration camp in March 1933. Only the increasingly anti-church Nazi policy from 1935 brought disillusionment and strengthened the Confessing Church. Yet it was precisely in the NSDAP's centre of power that a high potential for Christian resistance concentrated.
The publisher Albert Lempp and his "Lempp circle" helped racially persecuted Jews. Hans and Sophie Scholl of the White Rose were Protestants. The Protestant would-be Hitler assassin Georg Elser last lived at Türkenstraße 94 and worked as a joiner in the quarter — the Georg-Elser-Platz commemorates him with a light installation that lights up every night at 9:20 pm. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, too, held a service address on Schönfeldstraße through the Abwehr.
The regional church office and the Meiser affair
The proximity to the NSDAP's sphere of power on Königsplatz became a political issue in 1934. Regional bishop Hans Meiser resisted the Reich church's attempt at conformity under the "German Christian" Reich bishop Ludwig Müller. After smear campaigns and demands for his resignation, Meiser was deposed and placed under arrest on 11 October 1934. A "pious popular uprising" of Bavarian Protestants followed and forced his rehabilitation — up to a reception with Hitler on 30 October 1934.
Meiser's figure remains ambiguous: against an antisemitic tract of 1926 and some opportunism stand the preservation of the church's independence and help for pastors of Jewish descent. This tension led in 2010 to the renaming of Meiserstraße as Katharina-von-Bora-Straße (city council decision 2007, carried out in May 2010). The regional church office is thus, as Oelke writes, "a place of remembrance and learning in the best sense".
Protestant theology at LMU
Protestant traces at Ludwig Maximilian University range from the research ethos of individuals — such as the physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, who declined to patent his discovery — to the Protestant Theology Faculty, founded in 1967 as the third training site for Protestant theology in Bavaria (alongside Erlangen and Neuendettelsau). Since 2010 it has shared the "Theologicum" with the Catholic faculty. Well-known theologians such as Trutz Rendtorff and Wolfhart Pannenberg taught here.
LMU thus holds a distinction unique in Germany: it is the only academic location in the country where the three great confessional theologies — Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox — are represented together. Above it all stands Luther's Protestant educational ideal: "Where schools flourish, all is well."
Words
"Our congregation has become much smaller through the war and its terrible consequences … of all Munich congregations it has suffered the greatest destruction; whole street blocks are empty spaces."— St. Markus parish greeting, 1949
"Today's regional church office, with the seat of the regional bishop, is a place of remembrance and learning in the best sense."— Harry Oelke · Die Maxvorstadt – protestantisch gesehen, 2015
More on
history.
From the founding of the quarter through the Nazi era to Jewish Maxvorstadt — the other layers of city district 03.