Amalien­straße

Origin of the name

Since 1 December 1812 the street has been named after Princess Amalie Auguste von Bayern (1801–1877), a daughter of King Maximilian I. Joseph and his second wife Karoline von Baden. Her twin sister Elisabeth became Queen of Prussia; her younger sisters Sophie and Ludovika gave their names to Sophienstraße and Luisenstraße. In 1822 Amalie married Prince Johann of Saxony, with whom she ascended the Saxon throne in 1854; she died in Dresden in 1877. The naming of 1812 turned the streets of the new Maxvorstadt into a family portrait of the royal house – Karolinenplatz, Max-Joseph-Platz, Theresienstraße, Elisenstraße, Sophienstraße, Luisenstraße and Amalienstraße.

Before that, from 21 November 1808, the street was called Freudenstraße, at first only for the stretch between Theresienstraße and the then Löwenstraße (today Schellingstraße). Amalienstraße is thus among the oldest named streets of the Maxvorstadt. Its house numbers were reassigned in the 19th century, which is why older sources cite different numbers: the Café Stefanie, for instance, stood at the old no. 14, today's no. 25. Amalienstraße should not be confused with the "Neue Amalienstraße", the 19th-century name of today's Gabelsbergerstraße; there, at Neue Amalienstraße 66, the Dönniges couple kept their "Blue Salon" around 1850 for the northern scholars Maximilian II had called to Munich (Bäumler et al. 2015, p. 34).

History

Amalienstraße was laid out in the expansion plan of 1808 as the street parallel to Ludwig I's planned boulevard, Ludwigstraße, and long served as its rear access. When Friedrich von Gärtner built the university's main building on Ludwigstraße in 1835–1840, it extended back to Amalienstraße, and with the move of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität from Landshut to Munich (1826) the street had become the edge of the university quarter. The oldest surviving buildings date from this period: the Neoclassical apartment house with palatial façade at no. 38 ("Palais Holnstein", 1827, Franz Xaver Mayr), no. 57/59 (1827–1830, Carl Deiglmayr), no. 63 from the 1820s and no. 22 (1844, master mason Deiglmayr). In 1847 Friedrich Bürklein, architect of Maximilianstraße, built an apartment house in the early Maximilian style at no. 10. Before the destruction of the Second World War the Maxvorstadt read "like an encyclopaedia of architecture" of Munich housing: the southern Amalienstraße was still entirely shaped by the round-arch style of the Gärtner school, while from the 1870s the richer vocabulary of the Italian and then the German Renaissance spread through the northern sections of Amalienstraße and Türkenstraße (Stephan 2013, p. 56).

In the boom years after 1870 the street filled in as a continuous row of five-storey Neo-Renaissance and Neo-Baroque apartment houses: no. 41 (Heinrich Hilgert, 1882/83), no. 43 (Nikolaus Debold, 1878/79), no. 44 (Ferdinand Schratz, 1894–1896), no. 55 (Franz Xaver Renner, 1887/88), no. 65 (Paul Dietze, 1895/96), no. 67 (Franz Xaver Ilg, 1897) and the double-oriel front of no. 69/71 by Ludwig Seemüller (1899–1901). A photograph of 1906 shows the west side between Schellingstraße and Adalbertstraße with its oriels and gables in the "wedding-cake style" of the years after 1870/71; alongside the large colony of painters, many artistic photographers had settled near the academy and the university, among them court photographer Bernhard Dittmar with his studio on Amalienstraße (Stephan 2013, pp. 155–160). Public buildings followed: the brick Renaissance schoolhouse at no. 36 (Friedrich Löwel, 1886–1887), a new building with 15 classes each for boys and girls that replaced the overcrowded old school on Von-der-Tann-Straße, and the Neo-Baroque Forestry Research Institute at no. 52 (Adolf Schulze, 1898/99). At the northern end Gottfried von Neureuther placed the Academy of Fine Arts as the street's vanishing point: the idea of a new building arose in 1875, financed from the reparations of the Franco-Prussian War, and the site chosen was "the end of Amalienstraße", in the middle of a Maxvorstadt that then still ended at Hohenzollernstraße. Funding proved anything but secure and caused several halts in construction; only in 1886 did Prince Regent Luitpold hand over the building, which was overcrowded from its first day – 552 students had enrolled instead of the planned 400 (Arz 2018, p. 32). In 1906–1909 German Bestelmeyer added the university's extension wing on Amalienstraße, whose forecourt Hermann Hahn adorned with two allegorical figures in 1907–1910.

Around 1900 Amalienstraße was a centre of the bohème that is still tacitly filed under the catchier name of Schwabing, although countless artists lived in the Maxvorstadt – Ringelnatz and Kandinsky on Schellingstraße, Heinrich Mann on Türkenstraße, Henrik Ibsen and Frank Wedekind on Amalienstraße (Bäumler/Fromm 2017, p. 48). On the corner of Theresienstraße (old no. 14, today no. 25) stood the "Wiener Café Stefanie", nicknamed "Café Größenwahn" after its clientele and one of the few establishments allowed to stay open until three in the morning: Wedekind, Erich Mühsam, Heinrich Mann, Paul Klee, Gustav Meyrink, Franziska zu Reventlow, Kurt Eisner, Ernst Toller and Oskar Maria Graf frequented it, and the cabaret "Die Elf Scharfrichter" was launched here in 1901. Josef Ruederer mocked it as the one place "in the aforementioned quarter of Theresienstraße and Amalienstraße from which Young Munich takes its eagle's flight to the imperial capital" – outwardly a café like any other, inside "no cigars, only cigarettes, no beer, only Stefan George", plus women painters in reform dress and students who write poetry; the Maxvorstadt was no longer the "new Munich" but the "lower town" of the bohème (Bäumler et al. 2015, p. 37). In 1902 the pharmacist Joseph Schedel founded Munich's first homosexual association, the Munich branch of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, in his flat at Amalienstraße 16 (old numbering, today 29). In 1908 Wedekind lodged at no. 16 – the same house in which the Gymnasium teacher Gebhard Himmler and his family occupied the third floor; his son Heinrich Himmler, the future Reichsführer SS, grew up here and attended the primary school on Amalienstraße – as did, two decades later, the butcher's son Franz Josef Strauß. Alfred Andersch drew on the figure of the elder Himmler in his 1980 novella "Der Vater eines Mörders".

Under National Socialism the street became a site of resistance: the apprentice electrician Walter Klingenbeck built a clandestine radio transmitter with friends in his parents' home at Amalienstraße 44, painted "V" signs on house walls in 1941 and, after being denounced, was sentenced to death by the People's Court in September 1942; on 5 August 1943 the 19-year-old was executed in Stadelheim. Willi Graf of the White Rose rented a room at Amalienstraße 95 in 1942/43. The air raids of 1943/44 destroyed, among others, the house at no. 16; the building of the Café Stefanie was partly destroyed, and the university side and the area around no. 45 were damaged. The southern end suffered worst: the southern Amalienstraße, like Lotzbeckstraße and most of Glückstraße and Jägerstraße, had "completely disappeared" after the war (Stephan 2013, p. 69). North of it, nevertheless, an unusually dense run of historic façades survived for Munich.

David Clay Large recorded the first post-war years with a photograph of potatoes being sold on Amalienstraße in 1946 (Large 2001, p. 440). Soon afterwards a restaurant story of international reach began here: in 1955 the former head waiter Friedrich Jahn opened the "Linzer Stüberl" at Amalienstraße 23, which he shortly renamed "Weinstube zum Wienerwald". The bestseller was chicken soup with noodles; a regular gave Jahn the idea of roasting the chickens for a change, and the grilled chicken – at first made from cheap imports from the USA – turned the single Maxvorstadt restaurant into an international fast-food chain (Arz 2018, p. 40). In the 1960s the Oskar-von-Miller-Ring was built, continuing the Von-der-Tann-Straße, widened in 1937, beyond Ludwigstraße; its route destroyed or mutilated what remained of the historic fabric between Fürstenstraße and the southern Amalienstraße and amputated the street's southern end (Stephan 2013, p. 107). At the "Hotel Dachs" at no. 12, today's Hotel Max, Jimi Hendrix checked in on 16 May 1967 and spent the night in room 43; the registration form he filled in as "James Hendrix, musician" is kept in Munich's rock museum (Smith 2009, p. 47).

As the university grew, Amalienstraße became a battleground between housing and academia. The land-use plan of 1965 designated the Maxvorstadt a core zone and thus an expansion area for the city centre and the universities; the LMU was to extend as far as Theresienstraße, and to that end the Free State bought up residential houses on Schellingstraße and Amalienstraße for demolition. A "citizens' resistance" formed against this, among whose initiators was the architect Karl Klühspies; in 1968 the Münchner Forum was founded as a platform for public participation in planning (Bäumler et al. 2015, p. 16). In the same year the "antiteater" around Rainer Werner Fassbinder moved into the tavern "Witwe Bolte", Amalienstraße 87, after the group had played at the Academy of Fine Arts and at the Büchner-Theater, whose director had switched off the lights at the premiere of "Orgie Ubu". Until 1972 the back room with its stage was a place of provocation and shock – as long as the landlord had no more lucrative customers; rehearsals took place between the kitchen, the tavern hall, the cellar and a café. The troupe, organised without hierarchy on the model of the commune, financed Fassbinder's film projects with the box-office takings, and described itself thus: "We are not at home at the Münchner Kammerspiele, nor at the Witwe Bolte. We are sometimes ten and sometimes twenty" (Bäumler et al. 2015, p. 63). Despite protests, houses nos. 85, 87 and 89 including the "Witwe Bolte" were demolished; in their place Jürgen von Gagern's Amalienpassage with 203 flats and four courtyards rose in 1973–1977, itself now a listed monument. What it felt like to be pushed out of the quarter was captured by Gerhard Polt in his 1976 satire "Als wenn man ein Dachs wär in seinem Bau" about a luxury renovation on Amalienstraße: "Aha, so one is supposed to disappear – er – to clear off – yes – I understand that – but unfortunately that's not so easy – because one is still here, after all – isn't one" (Bäumler et al. 2015, p. 44). The exposed-concrete apartment block at no. 49/49a (1970–72) is also protected today.

The LMU eventually claimed the Palais Holnstein (no. 38) too and pushed out long-standing tenants; since 1993 it has served as the International Meeting Centre for Science. The old schoolhouse at no. 36 today houses the city's Fremdspracheninstitut, where a certain Silvia Sommerlath studied before she met the Swedish crown prince and became Queen of Sweden (Arz 2018, p. 25). In 2005 the Lyrik Kabinett of the patron Ursula Haeusgen moved into its new building at no. 83a; in 2018 a memorial sign for Walter Klingenbeck was mounted at no. 44. The houses and their residents are documented in detail in Joseph Hödl's street monograph "Amalienstraße. Von Häusern und Menschen" (1999), published by the Maxvorstadt district committee.

Today

Today Amalienstraße is both the back of the university and its everyday life: students commute between the Bestelmeyer wing, the institutes in the former Forestry Research Institute (no. 52) and the Palais Holnstein, and in between lie antiquarian bookshops (Kitzinger, no. 65; Rezek, no. 63; Buch & Töne, no. 46), the Hueber bookshop (no. 77), stationers, cafés and snack bars, the Amalienpassage with its courtyards, shops and the "Gartensalon" in the inner courtyard, and the Lyrik Kabinett as a literary forum. Arz's guidebook counts Amalienstraße, Türkenstraße and Schellingstraße among the "pulsating main arteries for shoppers and the coffee-thirsty" behind the university and lists some twenty establishments on Amalienstraße alone – from the Kaffee Schneller (no. 59), baking cakes since 1884, and the student pub "Schall & Rauch" at the old Wienerwald address no. 23 to Japanese, Korean, Thai and Italian kitchens and the "verrückte Eismacher" ice-cream parlour (no. 77) (Arz 2018, pp. 134–139). The street is one-way in sections, linked to the Universität and Odeonsplatz underground stations and the bus lines on Oskar-von-Miller-Ring, and heavily used by cyclists.

As a residential address it combines a central location with one of the most intact late 19th-century streetscapes in the Maxvorstadt; rents are among the highest in the city. Numerous houses are listed, so between the university and the academy the street has largely kept its late 19th-century appearance.