Barer ­Straße

Origin of the name

The street commemorates the engagement at Bar-sur-Aube in Champagne on 26 and 27 February 1814, when, during the Wars of Liberation against Napoleon, Bavarian troops under Field Marshal Carl Philipp von Wrede, forming the Allies' V Corps, stormed the town. It thus belongs to the group of streets around Karolinenplatz that Ludwig I had named after sites of French defeats: Brienner Straße recalls the battle of Brienne on 1 February, Barer Straße that of Bar-sur-Aube, and Arcisstraße the battle of Arcis-sur-Aube on 20/21 March 1814 (Stephan 2013, p. 64). The historian Klaus Bäumler speaks of a “military self-glorification of the Bavarian monarchy” that gave the Maxvorstadt a handful of French place names tied to Bavarian victories. Wilhelm von Kobell recorded the battle in a painting in 1817.

The street received its name on 2 March 1826 by order of King Ludwig I – in the same decree that turned the former Friedrichstraße into Arcisstraße and Max-, Königs- and Kronprinzenstraße into Brienner Straße. Before that, from 1808, its sections had borne different names: “Karolinenstraße” (Karlstraße to Karolinenplatz, after Queen Karoline), “Wilhelminenstraße” (Karolinenplatz to Theresienstraße, after the first wife of Max I Joseph) and “Sommerstraße” (Theresienstraße to the field track at Türkenstraße); from 1812 the whole run was called Wilhelminenstraße. Because of the Türkenkaserne begun in 1823 it was also at times referred to as “Kasernstraße”.

History

Barer Straße is part of the street grid laid down for the Maxvorstadt from 1808; the circular Karolinenplatz marks its transition from the edge of the old town into the new quarter. On 18 October 1833, the twentieth anniversary of the Battle of Leipzig, Ludwig I unveiled Leo von Klenze's 29-metre obelisk there, dedicated to the 30,000 Bavarians who had perished in the Russian campaign of 1812 – still at Napoleon's side – and who, according to the inscription, “also” died for the liberation of the fatherland. The obelisk remains the “point de vue” of all five streets that meet at the square. South of it the street's most famous scandal unfolded: in June 1847 the dancer Lola Montez, the king's mistress since October 1846, received a town palais on the west side of Barer Straße, which Eduard Metzger enlarged for Ludwig in 1847/48; the king visited her there regularly towards evening. When Ludwig had the university closed in early February 1848, citizens and students marched on the house – “Out with the whore”, the crowd chanted – and could only with difficulty be kept from storming it, all the more so as Montez showed herself defiantly on the balcony (Liedtke 2013, p. 166). On 11 February the “Countess of Landsfeld” left Munich, and on 20 March 1848 Ludwig laid down the crown. The palais gave way in 1915/16 to a large commercial building for the Arminia insurance company, which was not rebuilt after its wartime destruction; an office and apartment building now stands on the site. A 1924 photograph of Lola Montez's former garden house adorns the cover of Bäumler's “Erkundungen der Maxvorstadt”.

North of Karolinenplatz, Ludwig's museum buildings shaped the street. On Raphael's birthday, 7 April 1826, the king laid the foundation stone of the Alte Pinakothek (Barer Straße 27), which Leo von Klenze built over ten years in Italian High Renaissance forms; for the first time on a grand scale he used skylights, an innovation copied internationally in museum buildings. Instead of on Ludwigstraße, the building was deliberately set in open fields, where in the sparsely settled terrain it looked from afar “like a colossal bar”, yet astonished on approach with its controlled monumentality (Stephan 2013, p. 39). It drew the people of Munich in crowds at once – most of them, however, because the splendid backdrop made such a fine picnic spot. Opposite, the first part of the Türkenkaserne barracks had gone up in 1823/26, accepted by Ludwig only with a heavy heart because he feared damage to the Pinakothek from explosions and fire; out of consideration for the museum the barracks front on Barer Straße remained unbuilt even after the extensions of 1872/74. In 1853 the Neue Pinakothek for contemporary art followed north of the old one, conceived by the architect August von Voit after Ludwig's suggestion to take the papal Lateran Palace as a model; its effect relied on large-scale façade paintings, but in overall design it fell clearly short of Klenze's building. Both houses were not just shrines for art lovers but classrooms for young artists who trained eye and hand by copying the masters.

Residential building followed hesitantly: until 1862 new buildings west and north of the Barer Straße/Schellingstraße crossing were as a rule forbidden, in the mid-1870s the speculator Heinrich Höch failed with his plan to cover the meadows along the extended Barer, Schelling and Adalbertstraße with apartment blocks, and only from 1885 were the plots between Barer, Adalbert and Nordendstraße released for building. In 1893 Prinz-Ludwig-Straße was cut through between Barer Straße and Türkenstraße. The street's listed buildings date from this period: the late-classicist corner house no. 3 (1860–62, Reinhold Hirschberg), the neo-Renaissance apartment houses no. 33 (1875, Johann Thomas) and nos. 37 and 39 (1876, Kilian Stützel) – no. 39 is considered “one of the few excellently preserved neo-Renaissance façades in the Maxvorstadt” – and the brick building no. 69 (1884–87, Johann Widmann). Beyond Barer Straße, in Zieblandstraße for instance, the “Old German style” ran riot with fantasy façades “from the Anker stone building set”. With the Academy of Fine Arts (1874/84) a “quartier latin” on the Paris model emerged in the block between Theresien-, Akademie-, Ludwig- and Barer Straße: large north-facing studio windows were inserted into many apartment houses – a photograph of 1911 shows one at the corner of Blütenstraße and Barer Straße – and in establishments such as the Schelling-Salon, founded in 1872 by Sylvester Mehr at the corner of Schellingstraße 54, the attitude of the bohème took shape.

Around 1900 the street was home and workplace to writers and artists. In summer 1898 Thomas Mann rented what he called an “expensive bourgeois and banker's flat” on the first floor of Barer Straße 69 from the pharmacist Adolf Dunzinger. The theatre scholar Artur Kutscher eventually moved his legendary “Kutscher evenings”, at which Ludwig Ganghofer, Frank Wedekind, Erich Mühsam, Stefan Zweig, Karl Wolfskehl and the Mann brothers read to students, to a hotel on Barer Straße. From 21 June to September 1912 Marcel Duchamp lived in a ten-square-metre room at Barer Straße 65, where the first studies for the “Large Glass” took shape; he later called Munich the place of his “complete liberation”. In 1917 Oskar Maria Graf moved into a flat at Barer Straße 37, from which he witnessed the crushing of the Soviet Republic in 1919; his private studio parties earned him the reputation of “Munich's loudest poet” in the 1920s, and he stayed until 1931. His friend the painter Georg Schrimpf lived at no. 47. The bourgeois women's movement also found its venues here: in 1899 the first General Bavarian Women's Congress closed with Marie Haushofer's pageant “Twelve Cultural Pictures from the Life of Woman” at the Catholic Casino, Barer Straße 7; the Munich Women Writers' Association, founded in 1913 by Emma Haushofer-Merk and Carry Brachvogel, met first in the vegetarian restaurant “Ethos”, Barer Straße 1, and from 1924 in the garden building of the Women Artists' Association at Barer Straße 21, demolished in 1934.

With the Weimar Republic the street became a political battleground. In “Kulturbolschewismus?” (1932) the typographer Paul Renner described a lecture evening by Alfred Rosenberg at the Catholic Casino: when the young painter Wolf Panizza dared to heckle “Where is the good modern art?”, the Nazi hall guards knocked him down with knuckle-dusters and kicked him in the stomach with their boots (Bäumler/Fromm 2017, p. 152). After 1933 the NSDAP swallowed up house after house in the block between Karl-, Barer-, Gabelsberger- and Arcisstraße – first 56, then 68 buildings; by 1939 more than 6,000 people worked in the party administrations around Königsplatz. From January 1934 Ernst Röhm's Supreme SA Command sat in the former hotels “Union” (Barer Straße 7) and “Marienbad” (no. 11), until Hitler had the SA leadership murdered in July 1934 and the office was moved to Berlin (Köpf 2005, p. 113). Nos. 7 to 16 were then taken by the “Reich Organisation Directorate of the NSDAP”, the “Head Office for War Victims” and the “Head Office for Public Health”; the Reich Chamber of Physicians resided at no. 15 from 1936 to 1945, Hitler's personal photographer Heinrich Hoffmann kept his photo shop at no. 14 until 1941, and the later Governor-General Hans Frank had lived at no. 57 since 1926. In November 1933 the Nazified Bavarian mayors marched via Lenbachplatz, Barer Straße and Karolinenplatz to Königsplatz to be sworn in to Hitler. For an NSDAP “Chancellery Building” that never got beyond its cellars, the entire fabric of Gabelsbergerstraße between Barer Straße and Arcisstraße was demolished in 1935–1938, including the modest corner house where Franz Xaver Gabelsberger, inventor of shorthand, had died in 1849. Hitler's planners further envisaged an extension of the Neue Pinakothek along Barer Straße, a “House of the German Labour Front” north of Theresienstraße and, on the barracks site, a “Square of the NSDAP” with the “Führer's” mausoleum.

The war destroyed about 70 per cent of the northern Maxvorstadt. The Neue Pinakothek, the barracks, the Arminia building, the SA complex and numerous houses were lost; the Alte Pinakothek, whose collection had been evacuated, was badly damaged. The former NSDAP buildings were taken over by the American military government until the Allied Control Council regulated their handover to German authorities in 1947. Precisely in the rubble years “the area of Sendlinger, Türken and Barer Straße was as urban as hardly any other part of Munich at that time”, recalled Walter Kolbenhoff, in whose flat at nearby Schellingstraße 48 the “Gruppe 47” was founded. From 1952 Hans Döllgast rebuilt the Alte Pinakothek with its war wound left visible and moved the main staircase away from Barer Straße to the south façade; the museum reopened in 1957, and a complete refurbishment followed in 1994–1998 (Arz 2018, p. 74). At Barer Straße 29 the Doerner Institut, named after academy professor Max Doerner, has worked since 1937 and since 1977 has conserved all holdings of the Bavarian State Painting Collections. In 1958 Rudolf Neumeister took over Adolf Weinmüller's auction house and developed it at Barer Straße 37 into the Münchener Kunstauktionshaus.

In the 1960s and 1970s the street was drawn into the pull of the “car-friendly city”: Gabelsbergerstraße was to be widened into a 40-metre east–west expressway and Barer Straße tunnelled under that crossing. Against this the citizens' initiative “Aktion Maxvorstadt” staged a tenants' march with an excavator to the town hall in 1971; the children's-book illustrator Ali Mitgutsch drew “The Maxvorstadt under Pressure” in 1972 (Bäumler u. a. 2015, p. 16). The tunnel plans were never carried out. The Neue Pinakothek reopened in 1981 to plans by Alexander von Branca; the grey, dreary Türkenkaserne, still a fixture of the quarter in the post-war years, had to make way for scientific institutes, Stephan Braunfels's Pinakothek der Moderne (Barer Straße 40), opened in 2002, and the Museum Brandhorst; only the isolated barracks gateway on Türkenstraße recalls the site's earlier history.

Since then Barer Straße has been the axis of the Kunstareal, with sculptures by Eduardo Chillida (“Buscando la Luz”) and Fritz Koenig (“Große Biga”) on the museum lawns. Since an attack on paintings in the Alte Pinakothek, almost all works there are shown behind glass. In 2012 Rudolf Herz recalled the summer of 1912 with a 17-metre concrete reconstruction of Duchamp's room on the south lawn of the Alte Pinakothek. Remembrance of the Nazi era also has an address here: in a depot of the “Initiative Stolpersteine München” at Barer Straße 34 some 300 finished Stolpersteine were stored around 2018, whose installation in public space the City of Munich did not permit. The Neue Pinakothek has been closed for complete refurbishment since 2019.

Today

Today Barer Straße is Munich's museum mile: the Alte Pinakothek, Neue Pinakothek (closed until about 2030) and Pinakothek der Moderne front directly onto it, with the Museum Brandhorst, the Egyptian Museum, the film school HFF and the Museum Reich der Kristalle (Theresienstraße 41, entrance on Barer Straße) within earshot. North of Theresienstraße it becomes the residential and pub street of the university quarter, with cafés such as “Barer 61”, the Schelling-Salon on the corner of Schellingstraße – handed over at the end of 2025, after four generations of the Mehr family, to a neighbouring innkeeper family – and the Neumeister auction house, which will close at no. 37 on 31 October 2026 after 68 years. Artists and restorers know Kremer Pigmente at no. 46 with its thousands of powdered pigments.

Tram lines 27 and 28 run the whole length of the street, and museum bus line 100 crosses it at Theresienstraße. The triangular space at the junction with Nordendstraße is to be upgraded and, following a 2026 decision, named Ali-Mitgutsch-Platz – after the illustrator who drew the Maxvorstadt “under pressure” back in 1972; Nordendstraße will become a pedestrian zone there.