Augusten­straße

Origin of the name

Since 1 December 1812 the street has borne the name of Princess Auguste Amalia Ludovika of Bavaria (1788–1851), the eldest daughter of King Maximilian I Joseph by his first marriage to Auguste Wilhelmine of Hesse-Darmstadt. Her life was a piece of Napoleonic marriage politics: the Strasbourg-born princess was already engaged to the Hereditary Grand Duke of Baden when Napoleon demanded her for his stepson Eugène de Beauharnais – the price for raising Bavaria to a kingdom. The emperor wrote to the bridegroom: "I have arrived in Munich; I have arranged your marriage to Princess Auguste." In January 1806 the wedding bells rang in Munich (Arz 2018, p. 23). According to contemporary accounts, the marriage of state became a happy one, with seven children.

As Vicereine of Italy, Auguste lived in Milan until Napoleon's fall; in 1814 the couple returned to Munich, where Eugène, "stranded in the homeland of his wife Auguste of Bavaria", indulged his passions as a collector (Arz 2018, p. 76). In 1817 he was made Duke of Leuchtenberg; after his death in 1824 Auguste lived in the Palais Leuchtenberg until her own death in 1851 and was buried in St Michael's Church. The naming belongs to the group of Maxvorstadt streets named in 1812 after the daughters of Bavaria's first king – Amalien-, Luisen-, Elisen- and Sophienstraße are her sisters on the map.

The name is older than the present street: according to the Stadtgeschichte database, the southern section between Dachauer and Brienner Straße was already called "Augustenstraße" in 1808, while the northern continuation up to Theresienstraße was "Friedrichstraße"; only in 1812 was the name extended to the whole route, which was later lengthened as far as Josephsplatz. Today "Augustenstraße" is also the name of one of the nine official sub-districts of District 3, Maxvorstadt, created in 1992 (Stephan 2013, p. 12).

History

Augustenstraße belongs to the urban extension plan under which, from 1808 and on Max Joseph's orders, the chequerboard grid of the Maxvorstadt was laid out outside the gates of the old town. It marks the grid's western edge: Stephan calls it "the last street layout bound to the square grid system of the Maxvorstadt" (Stephan 2013, p. 43). Unlike Ludwigstraße or Brienner Straße, it was never a stage for royal display but an access road for gardens, workshops and modest suburban houses between the old Dachau highway and the later grand buildings around Königsplatz. The small house at no. 45 still shows what this first development looked like: a three-storey late neoclassical building of 1853, raised by a storey only in 1875 and today one of the oldest houses on the street.

The street acquired its real character in the Gründerzeit boom. From 1885 the land between Barer, Adalbert- and Nordendstraße was built up, and "the areas as far as Augustenstraße followed within a few years" (Stephan 2013, p. 51). A dense quarter of tenement blocks with courtyards and rear buildings emerged, its façades reflecting the changing styles of the decades: the richly articulated neo-Renaissance of no. 52 (1886/87) and the brick façade of no. 107 (1887/88), Karl Stöhr's corner building with tower and dormer gables at no. 39 (1895/96). How uniform the blocks could look is shown by a 1906 photograph of Zieblandstraße, whose north side between Schwind- and Augustenstraße was designed entirely in neo-Renaissance style – "the monotony of the façades heightens the linearity of the street in a special way" (Stephan 2013, p. 158). It was in this milieu that the future poet Eugen Roth, son of a Munich journalist, was born at no. 21 in 1895; in 1896 a tobacconist's opened on the street, which Arz still lists as Zigarren Diller (Arz 2018, p. 141).

Around 1900 the street gained its focal point. Because the parish priest of St Ludwig feared pastoral gaps in the ever more densely populated new districts to the north-west, he proposed a new church in 1895; the Capuchins set up a friary on Josephsplatz, and in 1898–1902 the neo-Baroque church of St Joseph was built to designs by Hans Schurr – the excavated sand and gravel went straight into the building (Arz 2018, p. 77). Theodor Fischer set the church at an angle, projecting forward, so that its tower provides Augustenstraße with "an ideal 'point de vue'" (Stephan 2013, p. 173); around the church Fischer's planning loosened the rigid grid with curves for the first time (Stephan 2013, p. 160). The southern end, too, received an accent: in 1902 the sculptor Arthur Storch's Dolphin Fountain was installed at the fork with Dachauer Straße. Jugendstil left its mark in the studio building at no. 16 with polygonal oriel and reliefs (1899/1901), Michael Heitzer's corner house at no. 37 (1904) and the Pronath House by the Rank brothers (no. 54, 1907/08); in 1906/07 Heilmann & Littmann built the residential and inn building at no. 53 on the corner of Gabelsbergerstraße, later the Regensburger Hof.

Cultural history was made at no. 89. In 1906 Hofrat Köpke took over the "Universum" variety theatre there and turned it into the Lustspielhaus – "still more variety than serious theatre", with one-act plays and songs, but without success. Eventually Eugen Robert, formerly director of Berlin's Hebbel-Theater, took over the stage and named it "Zum großen Wurstel. Grand Guignol" – much to the annoyance of Heinrich Mann, whose one-act play "Varieté" was to open the theatre and who felt he had been relegated to the Punch-and-Judy show. Robert gave way and renamed the house the Münchner Kammerspiele (Arz 2018, p. 81). One of the very first productions, Frank Wedekind's "Franziska", brought in the censors over an all too transparent veil on bare skin; in October 1912 the house opened its first season under the new name with Leonid Andreyev's expressionist "The Life of Man" (Liedtke 2013, p. 106). After a flop Robert had to go; Erich Ziegel became director and in 1915 brought in Otto Falckenberg, once a member of the Elf Scharfrichter cabaret, who took charge in 1917 and made the Kammerspiele one of the most important German-language stages (Arz 2018, p. 81).

The early 1920s were Augustenstraße's great era. Lion Feuchtwanger recommended Brecht's play "Spartakus", renamed "Drums in the Night", to the Kammerspiele, where its premiere was a great success (Bäumler/Fromm 2017, p. 182); the first night at the end of September 1922, directed by Falckenberg, made Bertolt Brecht famous overnight, and in November he received the Kleist Prize. Brecht himself staged his adaptation of Marlowe's "Edward II" here and worked as a dramaturge; for the perennially strained finances of the private theatre, the crowd-pulling guest appearances of Karl Valentin and Liesl Karlstadt mattered a good deal (Arz 2018, p. 81). Valentin first played the Kammerspiele in 1922, and it became one of his regular venues (Bäumler/Fromm 2017, p. 209). Marta Feuchtwanger recalled that her life revolved around her flat, Café Stefanie, Café Luitpold, the State Library and the Kammerspiele "in Augustenstraße" (Bäumler/Fromm 2017, p. 142). After the inflation years the house was too small and too expensive: in 1926 the Kammerspiele left the Maxvorstadt for the Schauspielhaus on Maximilianstraße, and the property at no. 89 went to the film company Emelka.

A few years later the city made a statement of modernism at no. 20/22: the municipal architects Fritz Beblo and Hermann Leitenstorfer built the Municipal Pawn Office in 1929–1931, a six-storey fair-faced brick building in the New Objectivity style. Under National Socialism Augustenstraße became a place of resistance. The merchant and First World War officer Wilhelm Olschewski, a participant in the 1918 revolution and later editor of the communist "Neue Zeitung", lived in the rear building of no. 98; in 1933 he, his son and other comrades were taken into "protective custody" without trial. Just before the war began, the Olschewskis invited like-minded people to Augustenstraße 98, where son Willy and son-in-law Otto Binder also lived; together with Hans Hartwimmer and Josef Römer they formed a resistance group, networked across the Reich, which aimed to set up factory cells, commit sabotage and distribute leaflets. In early 1942 the organisation was uncovered; Olschewski senior was beaten to death in Stadelheim prison on 30 April 1943, and his son and Hartwimmer were executed in 1944 (Liedtke 2018, p. 22). Weyerer writes that the organisation had been built up across the Reich since 1933 and was smashed by the Gestapo in 1942 (Weyerer 1993, p. 192).

The air war hit the street hard. Between the Technical University and St Joseph's "practically not one stone was left standing on another", and up to 75 per cent of the district was destroyed (Arz 2018, p. 93). On 13 June 1944 two high-explosive bombs destroyed St Joseph together with Gebhard Fugel's Stations of the Cross; only the 63-metre tower survived (Arz 2018, p. 77). No. 98 was also lost and a new building stands there today (Liedtke 2018, p. 23); the old Kammerspiele at no. 89 were destroyed in air raids. The surviving listed buildings still bear the scars: no. 37 and no. 53 were restored with a simplified roof zone and in simplified form respectively, and no. 107 was rebuilt in 1947. Because around three quarters of the Maxvorstadt's population were homeless, housing took priority; a wooden hut served as an emergency church, and St Joseph was not rebuilt until 1950–1952 (Arz 2018, p. 77). Plain post-war houses and makeshift buildings filled the gaps.

In 1980 the stations Theresienstraße and Josephsplatz on the U8 line (today the U2) gave the street a direct underground connection. In 1987 the city named the "Olschewskibogen" at Harthof after Wilhelm Olschewski (Liedtke 2018, p. 23), and on 14 October 2017 Stolpersteine for him, his son Willy and Otto Binder were laid outside Augustenstraße 98. At the southern end, in the triangle between Dachauer, Karl- and Augustenstraße, the empty premises of a furniture store were used as "Art Babel" for concerts and cultural events from summer 2011 to summer 2012; graffiti by well-known sprayers such as Loomit made it an eye-catcher "before the wrecking ball came and the massive gentrification of the area was pushed further ahead" (Arz 2018, p. 107).

Today

Today Augustenstraße is a lively residential and shopping street without grand monuments – its charm lies in the mix. Arz counts it, alongside Türken-, Amalien- and Schellingstraße, among the Maxvorstadt's "pulsating main arteries for shoppers and coffee-lovers" (Arz 2018, p. 134). His service lists, whose currency he expressly does not guarantee, record an unusual density of eateries of every cuisine here; many of them are still going, such as Café Josefina (no. 113) and the Café am Josephsplatz (no. 112), Gyoza Bar (no. 47a), Burrito Company (no. 74), Shiva (no. 96), Taverna Lakis (no. 114) and the Wirtshaus Maxvorstadt in the listed corner building at no. 53 (Arz 2018, pp. 134–138). Add to these the Tucholsky bookshop (no. 123) and the English second-hand bookshop The Munich Readery (no. 104) (Arz 2018, pp. 140–141), which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in February 2026. Some of the places on Arz's list have gone: Galerie Karin Sachs (no. 48) closed at the end of 2024 after 38 years, and Eiscafé Italia (no. 85a) and the Vu Tang Kitchen (no. 52) have also closed.

In the north, where the tower of St Joseph catches the eye, residential buildings, the Maxvorstadt public library (no. 92) and the student pubs around the Schellingstraße junction dominate; in the south, between the pawn office, the Dolphin Fountain and the new buildings in the Dachauer/Karlstraße triangle, the street is more urban and busier. Nine listed buildings recall the building period from late neoclassicism to New Objectivity, whereas nothing in the streetscape recalls the great theatre years of no. 89. The street is served by the underground stations Theresienstraße and Josephsplatz (U2/U8) and by buses stopping at Augustenstraße; the Stolpersteine outside no. 98 keep alive the memory of the Olschewskis' resistance.