Ludwig­straße

Origin of the name

The street bears the name of its originator, Crown Prince and later King Ludwig I (1786–1868). On 13 August 1822 his father Maximilian I Joseph, marking Ludwig's name day and birthday on 25 August and at his request, decreed that the "Alte Schwabingerstraße" should henceforth be called "Ludwigstraße". The decree states that His Majesty had seen fit "to give the broad street that has formed in front of the former Schwabing Gate, on which several houses have already been built, the name 'Ludwigs-Strasse'" (Bäumler/Fromm 2017, pp. 38 and 47). The reigning king thus made public at an early stage how closely the project was bound up with the heir to the throne.

Its forerunner was the winding Schwabinger Landstraße, which led from the Schwabing Gate between the Residenz and the Theatinerkirche out to the village of Schwabing. For the new boulevard it was moved eastwards, widened and straightened so that the axis aimed precisely at the future Feldherrnhalle (Arz 2018, p. 9); today, as Stephan puts it, it survives "in greatly altered form" in the Ludwigstraße (Stephan 2013, p. 10). The Stadtgeschichte street database records the approval of an "äußere Schwabingerstraße" in 1818 and gives 8 August 1822 as the first mention of the new name; initially a stretch of today's Fürstenstraße also counted as part of Ludwigstraße.

A source of confusion for today's readers: between 1812 and 1826 a section of the present Gabelsbergerstraße was already called "Ludwigstraße" (Arz 2018, p. 145). The house numbers of the boulevard were also reassigned later: the Damenstift building, still Ludwigstraße 14 on the plan of 1849, is now No. 23 (Bäumler/Fromm 2017, p. 22), and the house at Ludwigstraße 17b next to the Siegestor is today No. 33 (Bäumler/Fromm 2017, p. 71). Ludwig himself had spelled out the ambition that gave the name its weight: he wanted, in an often-quoted phrase, "to make Munich a city such that no one can claim to know Germany who does not know Munich" (Large 2001, p. 12).

History

Around 1800 the area outside the Schwabing Gate was still taken up by ramparts more than ten metres high, old rights of way and tangled property relations (Huse 2009, p. 148). A first design came from Friedrich Ludwig von Sckell, who in 1815 wanted to bring the new street and the Schwabinger Landstraße together in a square ordered by rows of trees; architecturally defined spaces only arrived with Leo von Klenze, whom Crown Prince Ludwig appointed on 1 January 1816 (Bäumler/Fromm 2017, p. 38). Klenze began his designs in May 1816 – deliberately turning away from the loose, green layout of Fischer and Sckell, he relied on closed street and square frontages as a continuation of the old town (Freitag 2013, p. 33). The Schwabing Gate disappeared, Odeonsplatz was laid out in 1817 (Schiermeier 2012, p. 17), and Klenze had to buy up key plots in tough negotiations in order to pass them on to willing investors (Freitag 2013, p. 35). Among the first, of all people, was Ludwig's detested brother-in-law Eugène de Beauharnais, Duke of Leuchtenberg, whose palace Klenze built in 1817–1821 on the model of the Palazzo Farnese in Rome – the yardstick for the whole street (Arz 2018, p. 23). As to location: Odeonsplatz with the Feldherrnhalle belongs to the Altstadt (Stephan 2013, p. 49), whereas Ludwigstraße proper, with all its house numbers up to the Siegestor, lies in District 3, Maxvorstadt, whose boundary with the old town runs here at Odeonsplatz (Arz 2018, p. 15).

Klenze's southern section was meant to become a genteel residential street. He designed the façades, while the ground plan was a matter for the owner and his builder; yet Ludwig demanded a palatial appearance even for middle-class houses. Klenze's objection that "Munich is not Rome and Herr Meyer, for whom the house is being built, is no Farnese or Pitti" left him unmoved: "The windows further apart, dear Klenze, without which the grand is not grandiose" (Huse 2009, pp. 148 f.). Klenze's way out was to combine several houses behind a single palace façade (Freitag 2013, p. 39). Demand nevertheless failed to materialise: in 1831 some 1,500 flats stood empty in the Maxvorstadt (Arz 2018, p. 12), and an English visitor noted that many beautiful buildings in the "Ludwigs Strasse" were untenanted and could be had for a trifle (Bäumler/Fromm 2017, p. 39). The War Ministry (No. 14), built from 1822/23, marked the turning point: from then on only foundations and state institutions were settled along the street (Bäumler/Fromm 2017, p. 39). Originally planned at only about a third of its present length, the street was extended northwards; the War Ministry was the last building Klenze designed, and two years later he had to hand over artistic control (Freitag 2013, p. 40). In 1828 Klenze still began the Herzog-Max-Palais for the king's brother-in-law – the birthplace of the future Empress Elisabeth (Arz 2018, p. 25).

The new man was Friedrich von Gärtner. In 1826 Ludwig had asked his Roman art agent Martin von Wagner to find an architect "who can take up the lists against Klenze" (Arz 2018, p. 10); in 1827 he entrusted Gärtner, with the Court and State Library, with continuing the northern Ludwigstraße (Freitag 2013, p. 61). Klenze sneered at the "architectural sweetheart of the moment"; Gärtner's round-arched style brought a change of style (Freitag 2013, p. 41) – from the high neoclassicism of the southern part to the "Italo-Romanesque" northern part (Stephan 2013, p. 37). For the library Gärtner first considered Königsplatz, then Luisenstraße, before the choice fell – probably for symbolic reasons – on Ludwigstraße (Bäumler et al. 2015, p. 32). The king pared down the plans until only a single front remained, "without projection, without column, without portico" – Gärtner spoke of a "boring book barracks" (Huse 2009, p. 149). In 1836 the librarian Johann Andreas Schmeller mocked that wicked tongues whispered the building served only to fill "a good stretch of the grand new street that bears the King's name" (Huse 2009, p. 150). At 152 metres long, the State Library, opened in 1843, became the largest exposed-brick building in Germany (Arz 2018, p. 40). Opposite it the Salt Works Administration (1838–1843) became Bavaria's first purely administrative building (Huse 2009, p. 152), flanked by the Institute for the Blind and the Damenstift (Köpf 2005, p. 40).

Gärtner's first work on the street was the Ludwigskirche (1829–1843/44), on the sightline of what was then Löwenstraße, today Schellingstraße (Stephan 2013, p. 42). Ludwig contributed 100,000 guilders from his privy purse but insisted that the city bear the rest; the council refused until the king threatened to move the university and the seat of government elsewhere (Arz 2018, p. 38). As early as 1829 mayor Jakob Klar had complained that the king wanted to build palaces when housing was urgently needed; the church stood in the middle of meadows "where one could preach only to the sheep" (Köpf 2005, p. 39). The costs drove the municipality into bankruptcy in 1835 (Stephan 2013, p. 96). When Ludwig saw Peter Cornelius's Last Judgement, the world's second-largest altar fresco, he raged: "In short, Klenze, I tell you, this work is a real mess" (Arz 2018, p. 38). Further north the academic forum grew: the university, moved from Landshut to Munich in 1826, took over Gärtner's main building in 1840 (Stephan 2013, p. 40); opposite, he set the Max-Joseph-Stift and the Georgianum well back from the street, creating the frame for the Siegestor (Stephan 2013, p. 41). The Georgianum had been placed directly opposite the university at Ludwig's express wish (Arz 2018, p. 29).

Gärtner also designed both ends of the "via triumphalis". For the southern end it was settled in 1836 that a loggia with three arches on the model of the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence should be built; in it Ludwig honoured the generals Tilly and Wrede, laid the foundation stone in 1841 and inaugurated the Feldherrnhalle in 1844 (Bäumler/Fromm 2017, p. 40). The Siegestor, built from 1843 on the model of the Arch of Constantine and dedicated to the Bavarian army, was completed after Gärtner's death in 1847 by his pupil Eduard Metzger; the donor, by then abdicated, did not attend the inauguration on 15 October 1850 (Arz 2018, p. 30). The revolution of 1848 reached the street directly: two ministers of the hated "Lola ministry" lived in the Damenstift building; when the crowd smashed the windows they hid in a cellar under the garden mound, supplied by the caretaker (Bäumler/Fromm 2017, pp. 22 f.). The result of royal ambition was "an urban total work of art of European rank" (Arz 2018, p. 57), but also a street without shops – at Ludwig's express wish – "a street in the middle of nowhere that led nowhere"; Munich, Heinrich Heine scoffed, was "a village in which palaces stand" (Arz 2018, p. 11). The cultural historian Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl saw it as no more than a "parade street" (Bäumler et al. 2015, p. 32).

Life came to the street only gradually. Theodor Lessing remembered the turn of the century, when "the bucolic shepherd drove his flock across the Ludwigstraße" and dandelions ran riot between the paving stones in front of the Feldherrnhalle (Bäumler/Fromm 2017, p. 134). Hans Brandenburg saw in it the "royal representation of the classical city of art", and in Schellingstraße, by contrast, the "world of the people, of ordinary folk" (Bäumler et al. 2015, p. 36). In 1870 the Maximiliansgymnasium moved into the central block of the Damenstift building (Arz 2016, p. 61), and in 1894 the writer Carry Brachvogel moved in with her mother at Ludwigstraße 17b, right next to the Siegestor (Bäumler/Fromm 2017, p. 71), where she held her "tea table at the Siegestor" (Bäumler et al. 2015, p. 35). On 31 July 1888, during the procession of the centenary celebrations for Ludwig I, eight elephants from the Hagenbeck circus panicked in the Ludwigstraße; the toll was four dead and dozens injured (Liedtke 2013, p. 136). In the revolutionary months of 1919 the street became a stage: after Eisner's murder Ricarda Huch encountered groups from the working-class suburbs there who eyed her "with undisguised menace" (Large 2001, p. 138), and on 1 May 1919 the Ehrhardt Brigade, swastikas on their steel helmets, marched down the Ludwigstraße towards the Feldherrnhalle (Large 2001, p. 157). After the crushing of the Soviet Republic, Oskar Maria Graf found "the elegant crowd" on the Ludwigstraße (Bäumler/Fromm 2017, p. 139).

From 1919 the former War Ministry at Ludwigstraße 14 housed the command of Reichswehr Military District VII under General Otto von Lossow (Weyerer 1993, p. 132). On 9 November 1923 armed men of the "Reichskriegsflagge" under Ernst Röhm occupied it, with Heinrich Himmler holding the flag (Weyerer 1993, p. 209); two putschists died here (Köpf 2005, p. 60). On 10 May 1933 the torchlight procession to the book burning marched from the university to Königsplatz (Liedtke 2018, p. 36). To widen Von-der-Tann-Straße as an approach to the Haus der Deutschen Kunst, the National Socialists had the entire Klenze frontage between Galeriestraße and Von-der-Tann-Straße demolished in 1937; its place was taken by the "Central Ministry" in a "coarsened pseudo-classicism" (Stephan 2013, p. 100), while opposite, the Herzog-Max-Palais fell on the pretext of "dilapidation" (Stephan 2013, p. 103). At the northern end the "Haus des Deutschen Rechts", built by Oswald Bieber in 1936–1939, pushed in front of the Siegestor (Liedtke 2018, p. 100) – "like a bolt", as Huse puts it (Huse 2009, p. 216). In February 1943 Hans Scholl, Willi Graf and Alexander Schmorell painted "Down with Hitler" on the walls of the university, and on 18 February the Scholl siblings threw their leaflets into the atrium (Liedtke 2018, p. 106). And as late as 28 and 29 April 1945 Gauleiter Paul Giesler had members of the "Freiheitsaktion Bayern" summarily shot in the Central Ministry (Liedtke 2018, p. 150).

Bombs, artillery fire and street fighting badly damaged the Ludwigstraße in 1944/45. The State Library lost almost 500,000 volumes and 85 per cent of its fabric (Arz 2018, p. 40); in 1952 it was able to return to the restored Gärtner building (Lauterbach/Grammbitter 2009, p. 74), the extension by Döllgast, Ruf and Kirsten followed in 1966, and with the south wing the reconstruction phase ended in 1970 (Arz 2018, p. 40). St Ludwig served the Americans as a garrison church until 1949 and was rebuilt from 1954 by Erwin Schleich (Arz 2018, p. 38). Instead of the dedication to Ludwig I, the Siegestor received Wilhelm Hausenstein's inscription; since 1972 the quadriga has once again stood on top (Arz 2018, p. 30). The Leuchtenberg-Palais was demolished except for the columns with the balcony and rebuilt in the 1960s with a reconstructed façade (Arz 2018, p. 23), Schleich rebuilt the Haslauer block in 1960–1968 (Arz 2018, p. 25), and the Reichsbank shell was completed in 1949–1951 for the Landeszentralbank (Liedtke 2018, p. 182). The widening of Von-der-Tann-Straße prepared the swathe of the inner ring road, which completely reshaped the urban space west of the Ludwigstraße (Stephan 2013, p. 59); even a tunnel between Königinstraße and Ludwigstraße was discussed until citizens pushed back with the "Aktion Maxvorstadt" (Arz 2018, p. 15). The squares in front of the university were renamed Geschwister-Scholl-Platz and Professor-Huber-Platz after the White Rose (Large 2001, p. 449). From 1984 to 1993 the Ludwigstraße was on Germany's tentative list for UNESCO World Heritage; in 1985–1994 the façade of the Ludwigskirche was comprehensively restored (Hempfer 1998, p. 12).

Today

Today the Ludwigstraße is above all a street of scholarship and administration. In the south are ministries, the Bundesbank and the Main State Archives; in the middle the State Library, open daily until midnight (Arz 2018, p. 40); and in the north the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität with its institutes in the Gärtner buildings, the University Library and the atrium with the White Rose memorial (DenkStätte Weiße Rose). There are still hardly any shops – Ludwig's ban is something "that harms the street to this day" (Arz 2018, p. 36); meeting points are the two university fountains, whose gardens the city laid out in 1872 for the university's 400th anniversary (Bäumler/Fromm 2017, p. 7), and student cafés such as CADU at Ludwigstraße 24 (Arz 2018, p. 134). The Siegestor, in the words of the chanson the threshold beyond which "Schwabing begins", has long been seen as a landmark of Schwabing (Arz 2016, p. 8).

Beneath the street run the U3 and U6 underground lines (Odeonsplatz and Universität stations), with buses above; since the inner ring road was built, the main traffic has been diverted at Von-der-Tann-Straße. The traffic takes its toll on the façades: the west wind from Schellingstraße drives exhaust fumes and tyre dust against the limestone front of the Ludwigskirche (Hempfer 1998, p. 12). Several times a year the street belongs to pedestrians – during fan festivals and the Corso Leopold/Streetlife street festival, which has extended to Odeonsplatz since 2000 (Arz 2016, p. 62). The Ludwigstraße is part of the listed ensemble "Ludwigstraße/Odeonsplatz" and a station on the Maxvorstadt cultural history trail.