Kaulbach­straße

Origin of the name

The street is named after Wilhelm von Kaulbach (1804/05–1874), one of the best-known history painters of his century. A goldsmith's son from Arolsen, he followed his teacher Peter von Cornelius from Düsseldorf to Munich in 1826, worked on the frescoes in the Odeon and the Hofgarten arcades, became court painter to Ludwig I in 1837 and from 1849 headed the Academy of Fine Arts as its director (Arz 2018, p. 147). He was famous for the "Battle of the Huns", the "Destruction of Jerusalem by Titus" and his Goethe illustrations; the frescoes on the outer wall of the Neue Pinakothek have been lost. He died in Munich's great cholera epidemic of 1874.

The name has a precise local connection: in 1844 Kaulbach moved to what was then Obere Gartenstraße and bought the artist's villa that Franz Jakob Kreuter had built for the battle painter Dietrich Monten; on Gustav Wenng's city map of 1849 the property is numbered 16½, today Kaulbachstraße 10/12 (Bäumler/Fromm 2017, p. 16). Under Kaulbach the house, with its garden and balcony terrace, became a social and artistic hub of the city. The publisher Friedrich Bruckmann, who sold reproductions of Kaulbach's tableaux of Goethe's heroines, also took premises on Gartenstraße in 1863 (Arz 2018, p. 120).

Before the renaming the street was called Gartenstraße ("Garden Street") – a name that suited the large gardens of the Schönfeld suburb. The 1814 city map already shows an Obere (Upper) Gartenstraße as far as Veterinärstraße and an Untere (Lower) Gartenstraße as far as Ohmstraße; in 1876 the two parts were merged as "Gartenstraße". According to Rambaldi's book of street names, it received the name Kaulbachstraße by resolution of the Interior Ministry of 12 October 1886 and a council decision of 6 September 1887; the older Kaulbachstraße, in existence since 1881, became Neureutherstraße at the same time. Arz and the Munich street database, by contrast, give 1883 (Arz 2018, p. 147). The honour explicitly goes to Wilhelm, not to his great-nephew Friedrich August von Kaulbach, who built his villa here from 1887 (Arz 2018, p. 28).

History

Kaulbachstraße is older than the Maxvorstadt. It belongs to the Schönfeld suburb (Schönfeldvorstadt) that Elector Karl Theodor laid out outside the Schwabing Gate. In 1789 the Schönfeld was meant to become a military garden where soldiers grew their vegetables and then to be added to the new "Theodorpark"; but Friedrich Ludwig von Sckell considered the natural bank of the Isar escarpment at today's Königinstraße the ideal boundary for the English Garden (Arz 2018, p. 6) (Arz 2016, p. 71). A new use was needed for the land already bought: in 1795 Karl Theodor had 29 plots staked out along Gartenstraße and sold on favourable terms, on condition that they were built on immediately. A villa settlement with large gardens close to the city quickly grew up (Arz 2018, p. 6). In 1803 the Schönfeld suburb had only 24 houses; by 1828 it had 176 (Arz 2018, p. 12). Surviving from this early period are the Neoclassical corner house at Kaulbachstraße 1 and the rustic block at Veterinärstraße 10/Kaulbachstraße 41–43, considered the oldest surviving building in the Maxvorstadt (Arz 2018, p. 29).

Gardens shaped life on the street. The diplomat Carl Count Moy (born 1863) remembered his parents' garden at Obere Gartenstraße 4, today No. 15: with a little hill, a pond and brook, a summer house, a skating rink in winter and an aviary; Franz Count Pocci was a regular at the annual "bock beer parties" in a white-and-blue tent (Bäumler/Fromm 2017, pp. 13–14). At night, Moy recalled, the area could be eerie when escaped convicts were rumoured to be hiding in the gardens (Bäumler/Fromm 2017, p. 15). Wilhelm von Kaulbach, for his part, enjoyed the view from his balcony terrace across Königinstraße into the English Garden – and when the trees blocked it, according to his daughter Josefa, he had his gardener lop their crowns at sunrise, disguise the fresh cuts with paint, and then invited the unsuspecting head of the garden's administration for coffee on the terrace (Bäumler/Fromm 2017, pp. 16–17). Below the terrace edge the Schwabinger Bach still flows along the western edge of the English Garden (Schiermeier 2012, p. 13).

The Gründerzeit changed the picture. From the 1870s Neo-Renaissance apartment houses rose between the villas (Nos. 34, 36, 38, 44–46), followed around 1900 by Martin Dülfer's Art Nouveau group at Nos. 22–24. In 1887 the new director of the Academy, Friedrich August von Kaulbach, bought the Moy property and had Gabriel von Seidl build him a villa modelled on a Roman "villa suburbana", centred on a 130-square-metre studio (Bäumler/Fromm 2017, p. 15) (Arz 2018, p. 28). It recommended Seidl for Lenbach's even grander artist's house on Königsplatz (Arz 2018, p. 105); at the end of the 19th century Lenbach and Kaulbach were regarded as the "painter princes" par excellence (Arz 2018, p. 104). Next door, in 1913/14, the Rank brothers built the Palais Seyssel d'Aix in the style of a French aristocratic residence in place of a Biedermeier house (Arz 2018, p. 28). The garden of Nos. 26a/b held Franz von Defregger's studio, and in 1927–1929 the Catholic student fraternity Alemannia moved into the former Cornelius house at No. 20.

North of Veterinärstraße, the old boundary with Schwabing, Kaulbachstraße became an address of the bohème. From 1902 to 1913 the editorial office of "Simplicissimus" was at Kaulbachstraße 91 (Arz 2016, p. 51); Thomas Theodor Heine, Ludwig Thoma, Frank Wedekind and Olaf Gulbransson came and went here (Liedtke 2013, pp. 112–113). In 1903 Franziska zu Reventlow, with Franz Hessel and Bohdan von Suchocki, founded Munich's first shared flat in the run-down "Eckhaus" (corner house) at No. 63, for three years a meeting place of the art scene (Liedtke 2013, pp. 230–231); Waldemar Fromm reads it as a deliberate experiment in new ways of living together (Bäumler et al. 2015, p. 38). Ricarda Huch wrote in the garden house at No. 35 from 1911 to 1927, the writer Hans Brandenburg lived at No. 43 (Bäumler/Fromm 2017, p. 147), and the young Bertolt Brecht lived at No. 63 in 1918 and frequented the circle of the theatre scholar Artur Kutscher at No. 77 (Bäumler/Fromm 2017, pp. 143–144). Ludwig Ganghofer, as a student, escaped a policeman through the garden of the State Library and over the fences of the private gardens onto Kaulbachstraße (Bäumler/Fromm 2017, p. 20).

In the Weimar Republic, of all places the property at Kaulbachstraße 10/12, once Wilhelm von Kaulbach's villa plot, became a focal point of political antagonism. Until 1933 the jurist and women's rights activist Anita Augspurg and her partner Lida Gustava Heymann lived in the garden building of No. 12. Augspurg, who had earned her doctorate in Zurich in 1897, stood as a non-party candidate on the USPD list in January 1919, in the first Bavarian state election in which women could vote (Weyerer 1993, p. 133). In 1923 the two women demanded Hitler's expulsion and were put on a "black list"; they learned of the Nazi takeover in January 1933 on a Mediterranean cruise and never returned – the Nazis then destroyed the furniture and papers in the garden house (Weyerer 1993, p. 134). Together with Constanze Hallgarten they organised pacifist groups in Munich (Weyerer 1993, p. 17); the moderate Luise Kiesselbach distanced herself from the "radical feminists around Anita Augspurg" (Weyerer 1993, p. 182). From 1928 the SPD Reichstag deputy Toni Pfülf lived in the same garden building; after "protective custody" and the collapse of the labour movement without a fight, she took her own life in her flat on 8 June 1933 (Weyerer 1993, pp. 134–135).

On the same property, at Kaulbachstraße 10, the architect Paul Ludwig Troost lived on the ground floor left from 1912 until his death in 1934. The interior designer of the Lloyd liners converted the Palais Barlow on Brienner Straße into the "Brown House" for Hitler in 1930 and in 1932 received the commission for the party buildings on Arcisstraße and the Haus der Deutschen Kunst: "Next year we will come to power! Create an ideal design for me!" (Weyerer 1993, p. 135) (Weyerer 1993, p. 143). After 1933 the regime reached into the street: on 10 April 1934 Minister-President Siebert designated Kaulbachstraße as the new seat of the nunciature, driven out of Brienner Straße, whose mission was terminated as early as the end of May 1934 (Köpf 2005, p. 77). In 1937 the Free State bought the Kaulbach Villa, which Kaulbach's widow had sold to the Corps Bavaria in 1931; Gauleiter Adolf Wagner made it his official residence (Arz 2018, p. 28). At the Berchmanskolleg, the Jesuits' Munich centre at No. 31a, worked Father Alfred Delp, an editor of "Stimmen der Zeit", banned in 1941, and a member of the Kreisau Circle; he was executed at Plötzensee in 1945 (Liedtke 2013, p. 178) (Liedtke 2018, p. 204).

The persecution of the Jews also has addresses on the street. From No. 33 Agathe van Wien and Alice Jaffé were deported to Theresienstadt in 1942 and murdered; Agathe's daughter Anneliese-Nora, a pharmacist, was taken from the Eglfing-Haar asylum to the Hartheim killing centre in 1940 and gassed there. From No. 35 Marta Maria Lichtwitz-Düren was deported to Kaunas in November 1941. The Jewish old people's home at No. 65, founded in 1905, was looted after the November pogrom of 1938, then served as a "Jews' house" and had to be vacated for the "Lebensborn" in March 1942; it was precisely here that survivors refounded the Jewish Community on 15 July 1945. After the war the American forces broadcaster AFN moved into the undamaged Kaulbach Villa and used it as a studio centre until 1984 (Arz 2018, p. 28); the garden was largely turned into a car park (Bäumler/Fromm 2017, p. 15).

After the war the street became an address of culture and scholarship. In 1949 Jella Lepman opened the International Youth Library at No. 11a, and in 1954 the Institut français moved into the Palais Seyssel d'Aix. The villa at No. 16, home in 1936–1944 of the Günther School founded by Carl Orff and Dorothee Günther, housed the University of Television and Film until 1988, whose teaching partly had to move out to the studios of BR, Bavaria and ZDF (Arz 2018, p. 85); since 1990 it has been the Orff Centre (Arz 2018, p. 28). In 1971 the Jesuit School of Philosophy moved from Pullach to Kaulbachstraße and opened its doors to all students (Arz 2018, p. 29). Finally, in 1988 the Kaulbach Villa, restored by Otto Meitinger, became the seat of the Historisches Kolleg, and its garden was re-created (Arz 2018, p. 28) (Bäumler/Fromm 2017, p. 15). The private gardens of the Kaulbach Villa, the Orff Centre and the Palais Seyssel remain among the district's "green oases" to this day (Bäumler et al. 2015, p. 21).

Today

The Maxvorstadt section between Schönfeldstraße and Schackstraße is today a quiet street of institutions, away from the traffic of Ludwigstraße: the Supreme Audit Office with the Dolphin Fountain, the Institut français, the Historisches Kolleg, the Orff Centre, the Alemannia fraternity house, the School of Philosophy with the Berchmanskolleg, institutes of LMU's business faculty at No. 45 and the Marie-Antonie-Haus women students' residence at No. 49. Behind the fences lie the large gardens that stretch as far as the State Library; they can be glimpsed from Walter-Klingenbeck-Weg, which since 1998 has commemorated the young resistance fighter executed in 1943 (Bäumler/Fromm 2017, p. 15). Students set the tone – with bagels at "Deli Star" (No. 41) and frozen yoghurt at "I love Leo" on the corner of Veterinärstraße (Arz 2018, pp. 134–135). Since October 2025, memorial markers (Erinnerungszeichen) on No. 33 have commemorated Agathe, Anneliese-Nora and Klaus-Robert van Wien and Alice Jaffé.

North of Schackstraße the street belongs to Schwabing. There, listed apartment houses with oriels and stucco (Nos. 60–96) alternate with post-war buildings; Klabund, Franz Marc and later Rainer Werner Fassbinder lived in the studio house at No. 66b. Until 1977 the friends of the "Traumstadt" (Dream City) around Peter Paul Althaus met in the painter Oswald Malura's flat at No. 75, today home to the association "Rettet die Traumstadt!" (Arz 2016, p. 68); the Alte Galerie (No. 75) and the "Arabesk" restaurant (No. 86) are part of the neighbourhood (Arz 2016, pp. 138–139). At No. 65, where the Jewish Community made its new start in 1945, is today the Saul Eisenberg care home, where the poet and eyewitness Gerty Spies died in 1997 (Bäumler/Fromm 2017, p. 30). The whole street is a station on the Maxvorstadt cultural history trail.