Schelling­straße

Origin of the name

The street is named after the philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854), who with Fichte and Hegel was a leading figure of German Idealism and the founder of speculative natural philosophy. Schelling had close ties to Munich: in 1808 he became general secretary of the newly founded Academy of Fine Arts, in 1827 professor at the university that had just moved to Munich and at the same time president of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. He tutored Crown Prince Maximilian, who remained attached to him for life. In 1841 Schelling accepted a call to Berlin; he died in Bad Ragaz in 1854.

In the 1808 expansion plan the street was first called Jagdstraße, and from 1812 Löwenstraße after the Bavarian heraldic lion. Under that name it became the sight line for Ludwig I's Ludwigskirche: the king had the church built in 1829–1844 exactly on the axis of Löwenstraße, although mayor Jakob Klar objected in 1829 that building around Ludwigstraße and Schellingstraße was “unlikely even in 100 years” and that one could “preach only to the sheep” there. On 4 March 1857, three years after the philosopher's death, King Maximilian II, his former pupil, renamed it Schellingstraße. In the same years the neighbouring streets were named after other scholars of the Ludwig University, so the quarter north of Theresienstraße can still be read as a “professors' quarter” today.

History

Schellingstraße was laid out in 1808 in the expansion plan for the Maxvorstadt as an east–west link; in the city maps after 1812 the square grid of the new town has advanced as far as this street. Its long run from the Oberwiesenfeld is aligned exactly on the twin towers of the Ludwigskirche, which stands “directly opposite” the street and dominates it to this day. Its eastern end gained a stately closure early on: in 1833–1835 Friedrich von Gärtner built the Mines and Salt Works Administration on Ludwigstraße, whose corner block flanks the junction. Actual building followed the university's move to Munich (1826) and took decades, not least because new buildings west and north of the Barer Straße crossing were generally forbidden until 1862. A plan of 1858 by the Prussian landscape architect Peter Joseph Lenné for a park east of Barer Straße and north of Schellingstraße was shelved; the eastern part up to Barer Straße was fully built up by about 1870, the western section to Lothstraße only towards the end of the century.

The Gründerzeit gave the street its four-storey neo-Renaissance and neo-Baroque apartment houses; 21 of them are listed today, among them the corner building no. 9 (1893, master joiner Johann Sauermann), no. 62 (1889–1890, Johann Lihm) and the Art Nouveau house no. 26 by Martin Dülfer. The most splendid façades belonged to the “Princes' Houses” at nos. 83–93, which the history painter Ferdinand Wagner decorated in 1889 with scenes on “The five Bavarian rulers and their promotion of the sciences”; dull post-war architecture stands there today (Arz 2018, p. 77). With the students came the taverns: in 1872 Sylvester Mehr opened the Schelling-Salon (no. 54), at first a beer garden where funeral parties from the Alter Nordfriedhof gathered for the wake; in 1911 the family fitted out Munich's first Viennese café-restaurant with billiards in the newly built front house. In 1887 a café moved into the new house at no. 56, the later Café Altschwabing, and in 1890 Joseph Deutelmoser leased the ground floor of no. 62 for the Osteria Bavaria, one of Munich's first Italian restaurants. The antiquarian bookshop J. Kitzinger (no. 25, from 1892) and the Antiquariat Hauser (no. 17, 1911) made the street the university's bookselling row; in 1911 the master butcher Vinzenz Murr moved his main business to Schellingstraße 21, where it stayed until 1970. Around 1900 the roadway was paved with wooden blocks, the latest surface of the day.

At the turn of the century Schellingstraße lay at the heart of what is commonly called the “Schwabing bohème”: around 1900 some 200 artists were registered in Schellingstraße and Theresienstraße alone. Hans Brandenburg saw Ludwigstraße as the “royal representation of the classical city of art” and Schellingstraße as the “world of the people, of the little man”. Joachim Ringelnatz and Wassily Kandinsky lived here; Ringelnatz, house poet of the Simpl, opened the “Tabackhaus: Zum Hausdichter” at no. 23 around 1910, with a skeleton in the window and drinking after closing time – the shop was bankrupt after nine months. The “Free Literary Society”, founded in 1897, met in a beer hall on the street and gave Thomas Mann, Kurt Martens and Jakob Wassermann a platform. In the rear building of no. 33 Franz Marc had his studio until 1910, where August Macke visited him in January 1910; in the same house the photographer Heinrich Hoffmann opened his first studio in 1909. Wedekind, Rilke, Brecht and Kandinsky played billiards in the Schelling-Salon, and Lenin came here too; Thomas Mann, Stefan George, Marc and Klee frequented the Café Altschwabing, while Kandinsky, Ibsen, Oskar Maria Graf and the editors of the “Simplicissimus” went to the Osteria Bavaria. In 1911 the publisher Georg Müller built the “Munich Book Trade House M. Müller Söhne” on the street (nos. 39/41), on whose raised ground floor Paul Renner and Emil Preetorius founded the Munich School for Illustration and Book Design (Bäumler/Fromm 2017, p. 146). In 1904 the butcher Franz Josef Strauß took over the butcher's shop at no. 49, above which his son of the same name, the future Bavarian minister-president born in 1915, grew up; in 1913 Archbishop Bettinger consecrated the Aenanenhaus in the courtyard of no. 44, Munich's first Catholic fraternity house (today Villa Hampel). The poet Hans Carossa lived at no. 21 from 1914 to 1929.

The Romance scholar Victor Klemperer witnessed the revolution of 1918/19 from the Pension Berg at Schellingstraße 1; under the pseudonym “Antibavaricus” he reported on it for the Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten. His picture of the Munich bourgeoisie was formed on this street: day after day he saw an old couple leaning on cushions out of a window, watching “with the same placid, dull interest” whether revolution, war or the peace of the blue-and-white kingdom reigned below (Bäumler/Fromm 2017, pp. 136 f.).

Few Munich streets are as closely tied to the rise of the NSDAP. In the Book Trade House at nos. 39/41 Adolf Müller printed the “Völkischer Beobachter” from 1920, and in 1922 the editorial office also moved here from Thierschstraße; from August 1923 the SA headquarters was based in the block as well. The same presses produced the output of the Eher publishing house, including some ten million copies of “Mein Kampf”; the South German edition of the “Völkischer Beobachter”, which reached a total circulation of 1.7 million in 1944, was printed here until the end of the war (Arz 2018, p. 47). Even before 1933 Hans Brandenburg watched the street's small stationery shops displaying the “Völkischer Beobachter” and postcards of party leaders “stubbornly, even in times of the ban”. A few weeks after the party's refoundation in February 1925 its office moved into the rear building of no. 50, where Hoffmann had run his firm “Photographische Berichterstattung” since 1924 and offered the party a dozen rooms: Philipp Bouhler ran the business, Franz Xaver Schwarz the treasury, Max Amann the Eher publishing house, the membership card index was kept here, and the “blood flag” of the putsch hung in an SA “hall of honour”. A scheme to finance the renovation by “selling” individual bricks to supporters found little response; in 1927 the party had only 1,600 members in Munich. Nevertheless the “Reich head office” grew from four employees in 1925 to 56 in 1930, and the SA, SS and Hitler Youth were given offices of their own. In October 1929 the 17-year-old Eva Braun, an employee of Hoffmann's, met Hitler here. In 1930 the party moved to the Brown House on Brienner Straße; a weathered Reich eagle remained above the courtyard gate of no. 50. Hitler himself was a regular at the Osteria Bavaria: whenever he was in Munich he went, after visiting his architect Troost, to lunch at Schellingstraße 62 at about half past two, where Adolf Wagner, Hoffmann and Reich press chief Otto Dietrich were waiting for him. Oskar Maria Graf, sitting at the next table, noted “a lightning flicker in the eyes of Hitler, who hated us ‘intellectual beasts’ without restraint”. It was here that Hitler had Unity Mitford invited to his table on 9 February 1935. The Schelling-Salon, by contrast, remained closed to him: Engelbert Mehr, who had taken over the tavern in 1911 as the youngest restaurateur in the city, refused him the rooms, reputedly over unpaid bills. Hitler's plans for a mausoleum would finally have remodelled the entire block between Brienner Straße and Schellingstraße, Ludwigstraße and Barer Straße.

There was resistance on the same street: at Schellingstraße 78 the tax adviser Hermann Frieb and his mother Paula lived on the second floor, from 1933 the Munich contacts of the social-democratic group “Neu Beginnen” with the exiled SPD in Czechoslovakia. From 1939 the group planned attacks on railway lines vital to the war effort and laid down arms depots; in spring 1942 it was broken up. Hermann Frieb was executed at Stadelheim on 12 August 1943 and his mother sentenced to twelve years in prison; since 2009 a plaque on the house commemorates them both (Liedtke 2018, pp. 194 f.).

The air raids of 1944 hit the Aenanenhaus and the upper floors of no. 56, while the Schelling-Salon and the Osteria kept their interiors and even the Book Trade House survived largely undamaged. The last issue of the “Völkischer Beobachter”, dated 30 April 1945, never reached the kiosks. The Americans seized the printing works; on 5 October 1945 the type of “Mein Kampf” was melted down to print the first Süddeutsche Zeitung, and on 17 October 1945 the US military government's “Neue Zeitung” first appeared here, with Erich Kästner as arts editor and Alfred Andersch and Walter Kolbenhoff on the staff. Kolbenhoff's flat diagonally opposite at no. 48 became a “literary and political corner” where Kolbenhoff, Andersch, Hans Werner Richter and Wolfdietrich Schnurre laid the foundations of the Gruppe 47 in 1947 (Bäumler et al. 2015, p. 61). A few years later the Springer group moved into the Book Trade House with “Bild München”, which made it the focus of the Easter riots of 1968: after the attempt on Rudi Dutschke's life on 11 April hundreds of demonstrators blockaded the delivery of “Bild”; on 15 April a cobblestone struck the press photographer Klaus Frings in front of the building so severely that he died two days later, and the student Rüdiger Schreck also lost his life. Uwe Timm recorded the night in “Heißer Sommer”, Yaak Karsunke in the poem “störendes geräusch”. In 1970 the complex was converted into offices and flats.

The post-war decades made the street the student mile for good: the Atzinger (no. 9, a tavern since 1925) was regarded as the university's “outsourced seminar room”, and the LMU bought the house in the 1970s. At the same time the “battle of the houses” began over the state-owned buildings Schellingstraße 5, 7 and 9 and Amalienstraße 38–48, whose misuse the city council recorded on 23 May 1979; Fritz Grundner and Sepp Hödl documented the fortunes of no. 5 from 1856 to 1986. In 1993–1995 Beate Passow and Andreas von Weizsäcker covered the bullet holes in the brick façade of the university building at the corner of Ludwigstraße with glass as “Wounds of Memory”; in 2005 Joachim Jung set five “windows” into the wall at the corner of Türkenstraße recalling the filled-in Türkengraben canal. The bookshop of the Christian Kaiser publishing house at no. 3, where the Protestant theological faculty was also based, closed in 1993. Since the 1990s the university has consolidated: LMU institutes and lecture halls at nos. 3, 4 and 12, the TUM School of Education at no. 33, the Philologicum (2019) in the Gärtner building. The Schelling-Salon, to which Bavarian television devoted the film “Grüß Gott, liebe Gäste” in 1998, is run in the fourth generation by Evelin Mehr and houses Munich's only billiards museum. Old shops are vanishing: the Antiquariat Hauser gave way to a café, the Antiquariat Kitzinger moved to Amalienstraße in 2021, the Café Altschwabing became the restaurant Mozzamo in 2022; the Atzinger and the Alter Simpl survived insolvencies in 2023/24 with new operators.

Today

Today Schellingstraße has three faces. The eastern section between Ludwigstraße and Barer Straße is the university street, with lecture halls, libraries, bookshops (such as Words' Worth, no. 3), snack bars and the traditional restaurants Atzinger (no. 9), Schall & Rauch (no. 22), Schelling-Salon (no. 54) and Osteria Italiana (no. 62); the citizens' office of the Maxvorstadt district committee is at no. 28a. Between Barer and Schleißheimer Straße it becomes a shopping street of small shops, bakeries and eateries; west of Schleißheimer Straße up to Lothstraße it is almost purely residential, with the State Institute for School Quality and Educational Research (no. 155) as its largest occupant.

Bus routes 58, 68, 153 and 154 run along the street; the underground stations Universität (U3/U6) and Josephsplatz (U2) lie at its ends, and trams 27/28 cross at Schleißheimer Straße. The eastern part is among the busiest pedestrian areas of the Maxvorstadt; the location is in demand, rents and commercial rents are rising, and the displacement of long-established shops has been a recurring topic in the district committee for years.