Theresien­straße

Origin of the name

The street is named after Therese von Sachsen-Hildburghausen (1792–1854), who married Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria in 1810 and became Queen of Bavaria on his accession in 1825. The public festivities for her wedding in October 1810 grew into the Oktoberfest, and the meadow became the Theresienwiese. The queen kept her Protestant faith, was regarded as a politically astute adviser to her husband and was exceptionally popular. She died of cholera in Munich in 1854.

The street came into being with the planned layout of the Maxvorstadt after 1808. The 1880 address book records that between 21 November 1808 and 1 December 1812 its sections were called “Feldweg”, “Musenstraße” (Fürstenstraße to Türkenstraße), “Windstraße” (Türkenstraße to Arcisstraße) and “Pfeilstraße” (Arcisstraße to Schleißheimer Straße), before the whole run from Ludwigstraße to Schleißheimer Straße was named “Theresienstraße” on 1 December 1812 – two years after the wedding of the then crown princess. The year 1912 given in the German Wikipedia appears to be a transposition error. That the street was still largely a field track in its early years fits the picture the local literature paints of the early Maxvorstadt: a loose garden suburb in which the military occupied large areas and uniforms were a natural part of the street scene.

History

Theresienstraße belongs to the rectangular street grid that Friedrich Ludwig Sckell and Carl von Fischer designed for the Maxvorstadt from 1808. Its first large buildings, however, were not town houses but military structures: as early as the Napoleonic Wars, large residential and stable barracks went up on Theresienstraße, extended towards Arcisstraße in 1816 to house 300 soldiers and 777 horses. The latrine buildings in particular annoyed the neighbours, and rents in the area fell dramatically. In 1835 a huge explosion shook the military grounds: the artilleryman Stanislaus Schmitt, worn down by the harassment of his instructors, blew himself up together with the powder tower, and hardly a house between Karlstraße and Türkenstraße was left undamaged. A percussion-cap factory built next door in 1839 made the area even less attractive (Arz 2018, pp. 12 f.). Nonetheless the eastern sections near Ludwigstraße were built up early with middle-class housing: the classicist apartment houses at Theresienstraße 14 and 16 (c. 1828, “in the Klenze style”) still show the era of Ludwig I.

For more than a century the street's most dominant structure was the Türkenkaserne. King Max I Joseph had planned a veritable military quarter around the new Königsplatz; only in 1823 did he approve the budget for the barracks in the block bounded by Türkenstraße, Gabelsbergerstraße, Barer Straße and Theresienstraße. In November 1824 the first soldiers of the 2nd rifle company of the 1st Line Infantry Regiment “König” moved into the first construction phase. Just two years later Ludwig I halted further expansion because he had chosen the site opposite for his Pinakothek and feared damage from explosions and fire; Leo von Klenze was to continue planning the complex and create a park as a transition to the Pinakothek. The first wing on Türkenstraße was followed in 1872/73 by a southern wing on Gabelsbergerstraße and only in 1874 by a northern wing on Theresienstraße, while the front on Barer Straße remained unbuilt out of consideration for the Pinakothek (Stephan 2013, p. 51). Sanitary conditions must have been modest – popular parlance soon called Türkenstraße nothing but “Wanzenallee” (bedbug alley). Opposite, Ludwig I had the Neue Pinakothek built in 1846–1853 to plans by Friedrich von Gärtner and August von Voit; its large exterior murals in encaustic by Wilhelm von Kaulbach paid homage to Ludwig I as a patron of the arts, and it opened on 25 October 1853 as the world's first museum of contemporary art.

Around the middle of the 19th century scholars and inventors lived here: the philologist Johann Andreas Schmeller lived at Theresienstraße 9 from 1836 until his death in 1852, and submarine pioneer Wilhelm Bauer is said to have lived at no. 69. In 1865–1868 Gottfried von Neureuther built the Polytechnic School on Arcisstraße, today's Technical University, whose neo-Renaissance building was a congenial counterpart to the Alte Pinakothek; a photograph of 1882 shows behind it the iron skeleton of a panorama rotunda then under construction on Theresienstraße. In 1867 the pharmacist Otto Pachmayr, who had trained under Max von Pettenkofer and worked in the royal court pharmacy, founded a mineral-water and lemonade factory; in 1873 he bought the factory and residence at Theresienstraße 33, where the firm's headquarters remain to this day. In 1871 the poet Christian Morgenstern, son of a landscape painter, was born in the apartment house at no. 12. Tram tracks were laid in 1882; line 2 ran through the street until 1943, and after the war line 37 (the “Ruinenschleicher”) until 1961.

The Gründerzeit brought richly articulated façades such as the terracotta-clad neo-Renaissance houses nos. 68 and 72, the corner building no. 93 (1897) with the “Scharfes Eck” tavern and the neo-Baroque residential and commercial building no. 40 (1899–1900, Ludwig Herrmann). Particularly lavish was the Rococo façade of the residential and commercial building no. 36, recorded in a photograph of 1905; that the smartly dressed façades often belied the real quality of the housing is shown by a 1921 view into the dreary rear courtyard of no. 30, with a studio window on its top floor. There were many studios in the street: the art historian Wolfgang Ruppert counts around 200 registered artists in Schellingstraße and Theresienstraße alone around 1900. In the western section Franz von Stuck took his first studio at Theresienstraße 148; Prince Regent Luitpold is said to have been a welcome guest there – once, so the story goes, he dropped in unannounced during a life-drawing session, and Stuck asked the model to stay just as she was (Arz 2018, p. 82). Hugo von Habermann and the Polish painters Władysław Czachórski and Franciszek Ejsmond also had studios there. In spring 1898 Thomas and Heinrich Mann shared lodgings at no. 82.

On the corner of Amalienstraße stood the Café Stefanie, opened in 1895 by the master confectioner Karl Oberdorfer and named after his wife; it owed its nickname “Café Größenwahn” (Café Megalomania) to Franziska Countess zu Reventlow. It was one of the few Munich establishments allowed to stay open until three in the morning and became a second home for writers, actors and students: here people debated, played chess, drew, made music, wrote and frequently lived on credit (Bäumler et al. 2015, p. 51). The list of regulars runs from Johannes R. Becher, Kurt Eisner, Leonhard Frank and Paul Klee via Gustav Landauer, Heinrich Mann, Gustav Meyrink and Erich Mühsam to Erwin Piscator, Roda Roda, Ernst Toller and Frank Wedekind. At its tables the ideas of the “Elf Scharfrichter” were born, Germany's first political cabaret, which premiered on 12 April 1901 at nearby Türkenstraße 28 – as were the endless programme debates that led to its demise in 1904. Together with Kathi Kobus's Alter Simpl on Türkenstraße, the Stefanie formed the centre of the Schwabing and Maxvorstadt bohème. In “Links wo das Herz ist” Leonhard Frank left an unforgettable description of the overcrowded main room with its glowing coal stove, musty upholstered benches, red plush and the waiter Arthur, who noted his guests' debts in a tattered little book.

From 1914 to 1929 the physician and writer Hans Carossa lived at Theresienstraße 46. In the revolution at the end of the First World War the soldiers of the Türkenkaserne sided with Kurt Eisner; in 1919 the last regiment moved to new barracks on the outskirts, a year later the state police took over the premises, and the Nazi regime used the complex for military purposes again. The Nazi era left other traces in the street too: the office of Hitler's favourite architect Paul Ludwig Troost, who turned the Königsplatz into a stone centre of power, lay “practically round the corner” at Theresienstraße 148. The “urban district of the National Socialist movement” demarcated in 1938 extended as far as Theresienstraße; on the barracks site Hitler planned a “Platz der NSDAP” with his own tomb, and north of Theresienstraße a “House of the German Labour Front” (Köpf 2005, pp. 123, 131). The Second World War hit the street exceptionally hard: the Café Stefanie fell victim to a bomb, the Neue Pinakothek was reduced to a ruin, and the partly destroyed barracks served for some years as housing and commercial space before being demolished for good; only the Türkentor with a plaque to the “glorious Royal Bavarian Life Regiment” was left standing. According to the München-Wiki, only the 16 buildings listed today survived out of some 160 older ones.

Reconstruction gave the street a new face. In 1951/52 Sep Ruf built the eight-storey residential high-rise at nos. 46–48 on the corner of Türkenstraße for the “Nuremberg Association for the Relief of the Housing Shortage”, Munich's first residential tower. For the critic Hans Eckstein it was “of the greatest importance for planning and building in Munich, so strongly dominated by a conservative local spirit” (Huse 2009, p. 220). At the western end, the first house of the Maßmannplatz student housing estate had already gone up in 1948 – without a building permit but with the support of the city and the US Army – to designs by the architecture student Werner Wirsing, today a listed symbol of a modernist reconstruction. The Heyne publishing house, which had fled Dresden, took rooms in the former Türkenkaserne in 1950. For the TU, the “Hochvolthaus” and the Institute of Electrical Engineering went up at Theresienstraße 90 in 1957–1965, where the Ohm monument of 1895 was also re-erected. The 1965 land-use plan designated the Maxvorstadt as a core area: the LMU was to expand as far as Theresienstraße, and the Free State bought houses on Schellingstraße and Amalienstraße for demolition – citizen resistance, from which the Münchner Forum emerged in 1968, slowed these plans. On the barracks site the LMU nevertheless moved into the institute buildings at nos. 37–41 in the 1970s; shortly before the Mineralogical State Collection moved into no. 41, burglars stole a large number of its best pieces in 1972. The southern part of the site was long known as “Roncalliplatz” as the venue of the Roncalli circus. On 18 October 1980 the Theresienstraße U-Bahn station opened beneath the Augustenstraße junction, and in 1981 the postmodern new Neue Pinakothek designed by Alexander von Branca opened.

Since 2002 the rest of the barracks site has filled with museums: the Pinakothek der Moderne (Stephan Braunfels) and, in 2009, the Museum Brandhorst by Sauerbruch Hutton, whose entrance is at the corner of Türkenstraße and Theresienstraße. In terms of traffic the street long remained one-way; that rule was lifted in 2018, and in 2021 the pop-up cycle lanes introduced in 2020 were made permanent.

Today

Today Theresienstraße is a street of science and museums: in the east are the LMU institutes and the Museum Brandhorst, in the middle the Kunstareal with the Neue Pinakothek (closed for a complete refurbishment since 2019, reopening expected around 2030), and in the west the main and north campuses of the TU München. The Museum Reich der Kristalle of the Mineralogical State Collection (no. 41, entrance on Barer Straße) shows glowing geodes, petrified wood and samples of Martian meteorites in a darkened room. The Elisabeth Sandmann publishing house is at no. 40, the specialist bookshop Karl Rau for architecture, construction and graphic art at no. 100. A piece of commercial history lives on at no. 33: the Otto Pachmayr beverage business has bottled mineral water since 1867, makes its own brand of lemonade, offers a refill service for soda siphons and still occupies its original premises, decorated with old advertising posters.

With its galleries – at nos. 18, 19, 25, 46, 48 and 56, among others – and its restaurants, parts of the street count among the “pulsating arteries for shoppers and the coffee-thirsty” of the university quarter. The Brasserie Tresznjewski at no. 72, which Arz still listed as an “indestructible and much-loved gastronomic institution”, closed after 32 years at the turn of 2024/25; since February 2025 a new team has run “Kneipe 80” there. Since 2021 the street has been a cycling axis with continuous marked cycle lanes and only one car lane in each direction; the U2 stops at Theresienstraße station on Augustenstraße. Housing is concentrated in the western section between Luisenstraße and the Maßmannpark, where post-war buildings mix with the few surviving Gründerzeit houses and the listed hairdresser's “Salon Charlotte” (no. 158). The Maßmannpark at the end of the street, renovated in 2009, with its popular skate park and the Maßmann monument of 1876, forms the green finale.