Luisen­straße

Origin of the name

Since 1 December 1812 the street has borne the name of Princess Ludovika Wilhelmine von Bayern (1808–1892), known as Luise, a daughter of King Maximilian I. Joseph from his second marriage to Karoline von Baden. When the street was named, its namesake was just four years old. In 1828 she married Duke Max in Bayern and became the mother of nine children, among them the future Empress Elisabeth of Austria ("Sisi"). Into the 20th century the name was also spelled "Louisenstraße". The naming belongs to a whole group of Maxvorstadt streets named in 1812 after members of the royal house – Amalienstraße, Elisenstraße, Sophienstraße and Luisenstraße commemorate four daughters of Bavaria's first king.

Before 1812, according to the Stadtgeschichte database, the sections of today's Luisenstraße carried various names assigned only in 1808: "Löwenstraße" for the stretch up to Königsplatz, "Wittelsbacherstraße" from Königsplatz to Gabelsbergerstraße and "Grasstraße" for the northern part; the Luisengymnasium's school history additionally mentions the name "Gartenstraße". The database also notes that contemporaries associated the name Luise with Queen Luise of Prussia, who had died in 1810 and was venerated throughout Germany.

The street name has in turn given rise to other names: the girls' school founded in 1822 was popularly called the "Luisenschule" only after it moved into its new building on Luisenstraße in 1901 – "the address meant that the people of Munich called it the Luisenschule"; in 1961 this became the official name Luisengymnasium. House numbers have shifted as well: the Heyse villa, today Luisenstraße 22, was no. 49 in the 1870s (Bäumler et al. 2015, p. 35).

History

Luisenstraße came into being with the expansion plan for the Maxvorstadt that Friedrich Ludwig Sckell and Karl von Fischer drew up from 1808 on behalf of Max Joseph: a chessboard grid north-west of the old town, in which Luisenstraße was laid out as one of the long north–south axes between the railway station and the northern cemetery. At first the land on the edge of town held gardens and scattered houses. At its southern end, opposite the Alter Botanischer Garten (laid out 1804–1812), the street met the site of the future railway station; in 1839 the first train to Augsburg departed from here. How close the street lay to Ludwig I's great representative projects is shown by an episode of the 1830s: when Friedrich von Gärtner was looking for a site for the Court and State Library, he first rejected Königsplatz, then considered a building on Luisenstraße and finally chose Ludwigstraße – "probably for symbolic reasons".

The defining element became Königsplatz, which Leo von Klenze laid out from 1816: Luisenstraße forms its western side with the Propyläen (1854–1862). Around 1900 the gateway alone gave access to the square; a half-height brick wall abutted the two side towers of the Propyläen and blocked the view from Luisenstraße. In 1893 the Augsburger Abendzeitung complained that this "nasty wall" prevented "the square from unfolding into the most distinguished square in Europe", and that ladies were ill advised to stroll there in the evening, since the western grounds had become "hiding places for all sorts of riff-raff" (Köpf 2005, p. 49). South of the square, Georg Friedrich Ziebland built the basilica of St. Bonifaz with its Benedictine abbey in 1835–1850; the monastery garden still reaches the corner of Karlstraße and Luisenstraße.

In 1822 Simon Spitzweg, father of the painter Carl Spitzweg, applied to the local school commission for the "establishment of a higher school for girls", arguing that knowledge became a woman as well as a man. The girls learned commercial arithmetic, French, Bavarian history, penmanship and singing – though the education was meant above all to prepare them for marriage. The school first occupied makeshift rooms and had to move six times until, in 1901, it settled into the new building by Theodor Fischer at Luisenstraße 7. By then the girls' lyceum had been placed on a par with the Gymnasium and its pupils could obtain the Abitur – but at first they were allowed to study only outside Bavaria. In 1961 the school was officially renamed Luisengymnasium, in 1969 it admitted its first boys, and in 1987 a clinker-brick extension was added (Arz 2018, p. 108). It is Munich's oldest municipal Gymnasium.

A piece of applied-arts history played out at Luisenstraße 37: from 1837 Max Ainmiller directed the Royal Stained Glass Institute here, which supplied windows to the great German cathedrals and many Munich churches, such as the Mariahilfkirche in the Au. After Ainmiller's death in 1870 Franz Xaver Zettler took over the institute but had to vacate the building in 1875, whereupon the Royal School of Applied Arts took it over; Zettler founded his own stained-glass workshop on Brienner Straße and later joined the Mayer'sche Hofkunstanstalt of his father-in-law (Stephan 2013, p. 49). North of Gabelsbergerstraße, Gottfried von Neureuther erected the new Polytechnic in 1865–1868 in the style of the Italian High Renaissance; the complex, which grew step by step towards Luisenstraße, signalled that technical thinking too had found its place in Munich. The original building survives only in old photographs: Friedrich von Thiersch extended the college in 1910–1916 with the tower-crowned south wing reaching Luisenstraße, German Bestelmeyer added further blocks in 1923–1928, and the Second World War consumed Neureuther's fabric entirely.

In the second half of the 19th century the street became the address of Munich's cultured bourgeoisie. In 1873–1874 Neureuther built the villa at Luisenstraße 22 – then house no. 49 – for the poet Paul Heyse, who had lived in Munich since 1854 at the invitation of Maximilian II and in 1856 had initiated the poets' circle "Die Krokodile" of Munich natives and immigrant "northern lights". After 1874 the Crocodiles met regularly in his villa, and in the afternoons a tea table was kept with his second wife Anna (Bäumler et al. 2015, pp. 35 and 48). Heyse lived here for thirty years and in 1910 became the first German to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature; guests such as Johannes Brahms, Theodor Fontane, Adolph von Menzel and Thomas Mann came and went. Nearby rose the house of the publisher Georg Hirth and – "as it were the architectural climax" – the Italianate town villa of the "painter prince" Franz von Lenbach, which Gabriel von Seidl built with a studio in 1887–1891 (Luisenstraße 33). Anyone walking on northwards from here, however, soon reached the regions "where the standardised tenement reigned". Around 1900 the "Cosmic" mystic Alfred Schuler also lived with his widowed mother in a spacious apartment on Luisenstraße; "Mama" gave him a generous allowance, which he topped up by passing a collection plate at his lectures.

In 1924 Lolo von Lenbach sold the villa to the city and donated parts of the collection; in 1929 the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus opened at Luisenstraße 33, and with Gabriele Münter's gift of 1957 it became the most important collection of the "Blauer Reiter". Under National Socialism the street lay directly on the party quarter: the boundary of the "separate urban district of the National Socialist movement" around Königsplatz and Karolinenplatz, fixed in 1938, ran along Luisenstraße. Hitler's planners wanted to join Luisenstraße and Isabellastraße across the Alter Nordfriedhof into a grand avenue, extend the axis to the party forum on Königsplatz and level the cemetery; part of the site was to hold a retirement residence for Hitler. Lord Mayor Karl Fiehler cut the grave period from 15 to seven years, and on 20 July 1939 Munich residents read in the municipal gazette that the cemetery was closed to burials with immediate effect – the city stood firm, and what would become of family graves remained open (Arz 2018, p. 79). The Catholic student fraternity Rhaetia, which had acquired the villa at Luisenstraße 31 in January 1933, held to a course critical of the regime under its senior alumnus Max Lebsche; Karl Stützel, Bavaria's interior minister in the Weimar years, after whom the square in front of the Luisengymnasium is now named, was mistreated by the SA and driven from office in March 1933.

The war saved the cemetery but wounded it badly: most of its buildings and part of the arcade tombs were destroyed and never rebuilt, and from 1944 the grounds were closed. In May 1945 the US Army set up an internment camp there for 114 high-ranking Nazis, dissolved three years later. In the early 1950s the idea of a road through the cemetery briefly resurfaced and dilapidated graves were cleared; only a newly formed graves commission prevented the complete destruction of the last epitaphs, and Hans Döllgast gave the cemetery its present form. Roughly 70 percent of the area around Königsplatz had been destroyed; the Rhaetia villa remained a ruin, the Heyse villa was rebuilt in simplified form in 1947–1949, and only half of St. Bonifaz was reconstructed. The gaps were filled by post-war modernist buildings that are now listed monuments themselves: the vocational school for building and craft trades by Herbert Landauer (Luisenstraße 9/11, 1952–1961), the new Rhaetenhaus with its white-and-blue sgraffito façade (no. 27, 1958), the municipal vocational school by Angerer, Hlawaczek and Lucas on the corner of Brienner Straße (no. 29, 1958–1960) and the Institute of Technical Physics by Josef Wiedemann and Franz Hart (no. 37a, 1959). In 1951, after wartime destruction and interim quarters, the university's Institute of General and Applied Geology and the Geological State Collection moved into their new building at Luisenstraße 37; ever since, the museum has had to make do with the wall cabinets in the ground-floor corridor as exhibition space.

Königsplatz got its underground station in 1980, the Elisenhof by Herbert Kochta rose at the southern end in 1984, and in 1996 Mauro Staccioli installed his sculpture "Ring" in front of the Luisengymnasium. Between 2004 and 2007 the round-the-clock guarded luxury quarter "Lenbachgärten", with offices, apartments and a five-star hotel, grew between Luisenstraße and Katharina-von-Bora-Straße on the site of the university's old chemistry building where Justus von Liebig had taught; since December 2007 the publishing group Condé Nast has resided there. A dispute flared up in 2013 over the decaying Heyse villa when its new owner sued the city, which had refused demolition; a citizens' rescue campaign backed by the media and prominent literary scholars collected 6,500 signatures and brought the villa back into public awareness. The same year the Lenbachhaus, extended by Foster + Partners, reopened with a wing of its own for Joseph Beuys, thanks to a gift from the publisher Lothar Schirmer. Since October 2022 the three-star chef Jan Hartwig has run his restaurant "Jan" in the Rhaetenhaus.

Today

Today Luisenstraße is a street of contrasts: at the southern end the Elisenhof with its offices and shops, the traffic of the station quarter and the Alter Botanischer Garten dominate; behind them lies the sealed-off "Lenbachgärten" quarter with the headquarters of Condé Nast, which Arz describes as a "foreign body" in the lively Maxvorstadt. In the middle section the street opens onto Königsplatz with the Propyläen, the Glyptothek and the Lenbachhaus, whose Kunstbau sits directly above the underground station; the museum houses the Café Ella and the Walther König art bookshop. North of Brienner Straße follow the Geological Museum of the Bavarian State Collection (no. 37) with its cabinets in the corridor, the Thiersch wing of the TU München and finally late 19th-century apartment houses up to the Alter Nordfriedhof, which has not been used for burials since 1939 and serves as a park.

Schools, universities and museums shape daily life more than retail or dining; exceptions are the restaurant "Jan" in the Rhaetenhaus, the daytime bar "Luise" (no. 49), the cafés around Karl-Stützel-Platz and the Puppenstube (no. 68), where antique porcelain dolls have been repaired and marionettes sold since the 1970s. The street is served by the Hauptbahnhof and Königsplatz underground stations and the tram lines on Karlstraße; car traffic is heavy between the station and Brienner Straße and calmer in the northern section. The residential northern part, close to the Kunstareal, the TU and the university quarter, is among the sought-after addresses of the Maxvorstadt.