University
Quarter

History

Where lecture halls stand today, there were meadows, gardens and fields outside the city gates before 1800. Only the edict of 6 July 1808 opened the area beyond the Schwabing Gate for a planned city expansion — named after the commissioning King Max I. Joseph. His son and successor Ludwig I. turned the plan into a programme: Munich was to become "a city that brings honour to Germany".

The main work was taken on by two architects who heartily distrusted each other: Leo von Klenze, the antiquity-loving Classicist, and Friedrich von Gärtner, who preferred Italy as a model. Both immortalised themselves on the Ludwigstraße. Gärtner was responsible for the northern section — the Ludwig Maximilian University, the Bavarian State Library, the Ludwigskirche, the Siegestor (completed 1850). Klenze shaped the southern section with the Feldherrnhalle and the Odeon. The Ludwigstraße thus became the first systematically planned grand boulevard of a German city — and has remained so to this day.

In 1826 Ludwig I. moved the Landshut university to Munich. The quarter was no longer just a stage for representation, but a place of study — a connection that has shaped the eastern area to this day. The LMU grew, and with it the bookshops, cafés and student halls in the side streets. Ludwigstraße became a forum; Türkenstraße and Schellingstraße became the student backstage.

The Nazi era hit the University Quarter with full force. On Geschwister-Scholl-Platz in front of the LMU, Hans and Sophie Scholl distributed leaflets of the White Rose in February 1943 — were caught, arrested, executed four days later. The bronze pavement inlays of scattered leaflet facsimiles are among Munich's most moving memorial places. After the air raids, the Ludwigstraße lay in ruins; its reconstruction preserved the Klenze and Gärtner façades, behind which the university, library, academy and three ministries today work again as if the rupture had never happened.