Wandering Around Germany: Munich

Has it really taken me this long to post about one of the most popular cities in Germany? Granted, we were there about a month before its famed Oktoberfest, but this city boasts history and culture year ’round. In the four days we spent there in August, 2022, we barely scratched the surface!

München, as it is known in the German language, is the home of the Monks, first founded as a monastic settlement around 750. The name München can be found in records as early as 1156. It is the capital of the German state of Bavaria. After the Second World War, much of the city was rebuilt according to the original city plans and in the old style. As you tour Germany, you will find that many cities were built in a more modern style and lost their unique, historic beauty.

While planning our three-week road trip through Germany in 2022, I had planned to spend a good deal of time in Munich, because it would be the setting for my next book. While I am not an author who focuses strongly on setting (I’m all about characters), I did want to let their surroundings sink in. Its a good thing I did: as it turned out, Munich was the home-base for my next three books.

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One of the stereotypes you hear from time to time is that Germans love to walk: “they walk everywhere.” In that spirit, we spent most of our time going from place to place zu Fuss (on foot). As you can see, bike riding is also a popular form of transportation, much more so than in the States:

After settling into our hotel the first evening, we wandered around a bit. Tucked away in a corner, we found Zum Dürnbräu, a place with a 500-year history and the perfect spot to enjoy a meal on a warm night in August.

On the way back to our hotel room, we spotted the quintessential Polizei station. Really, can’t you see this as the setting for a Munich-based police show? (Fun fact: I studied Criminal Justice for 2 1/2 years in college).

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High on my agenda was to spend some time in Giesing, which is the Munich neighborhood where my fictional Schmidt family resides in the Gott Mit Uns Series. It has a residential feel with single-family homes.

I wanted to wander aimlessly and just be in the Schmidt family’s setting. However, I had some difficulty expressing this to my concrete-thinking husband… amazingly this is the only thing that even remotely turned into what resembled an argument the entire three weeks we were there. (In his defense, I get it. Perhaps our future trips to Germany should involve some solo excursions!)

After only a little bit of wandering, we headed for a commercial area and bought Kuchen, then wandered around some more… slightly less aimlessly.

Our hotel was a solid 50 minute walk from Giesing… without diversions along the way. Naturally, though, I figured in a couple of diversions.

I like to visit cemeteries in Germany because there are often interesting memorials in them. In the München Ostfriedhof, there is a huge memorial cube, on which four different remembrances are written.

The first face of the stone drew my attention the most: To the Dead of the Revolution, 1919. This was the year after the First World War ended. Germany was in turmoil–and most of Europe was facing the threat of communism.

We know a little about the Red Scare in the United States. But in 1918, with things so unstable, it seemed a very real possibility that communism would crash like a wave into central Europe, taking hold as it did in Russia. The prospect actually appealed to many people, especially in Germany. The new Weimar Republic was despised on both ends of the political spectrum–many saw the new democratic leadership as no leadership at all. The new government was bound and determined to fight the communists, desperate enough to call on the right-wing paramilitary groups (militias, aka the Freikorps) to fight alongside the army in bloody battles to quell the uprisings.

I refer to this period of time a little bit in The Prodigal Sons, but writing a book that actually takes place during this period is on my Bucket List. Many people don’t realize the severity of the violent political turmoil in Germany, and all the small conflicts that took place throughout Central and Eastern Europe after the Great War. Some historians even refer to the period between 1914 and 1945 as another Thirty Years War. Perhaps that is not an exaggeration.

If this all sounds a bit familiar, I recently talked about it in my review of Ernst von Salomon’s The Outlaws. If it doesn’t sound familiar and you are just dying for more interwar history, you can read the review.

Back to the stone memorial: another face bears a memorial to fallen members of the Resistance to the Nazi movement, 1933 to 1945.

What is striking is that the other two faces are memorials to individuals: Kurt Eisner was the president of the short-lived Socialist (Communist) Free State of Bavaria, assassinated by a right-wing nationalist. Ernst Toller was a leftist German-Jew who became the leader of the even shorter lived Bavarian Soviet Republic in 1919. He was eventually exiled by the Nazis in 1933.

This stone sits quietly in the midst of a civilian cemetery, and bears witness to Germany’s desire to remember. The cemetery also hosts a memorial to local men who fell in the First World War. The text below the two lions bears their names:

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One entire day in Munich was devoted to a two-part tour of Third Reich sites. It was well worth the money. The first part took us out of the city to Dachau. I am not sure why, but there are few pictures from our time there. Perhaps we felt that it would be wrong to focus on snapshots… perhaps we were just trying to reconcile with the enormity of the matter. Perhaps we were just trying to pay attention to our tour guide.

I do want to acknowledge something here: for a brief moment, I felt a tension between my German heritage and being ashamed of the past. A distant echo of the collective guilt that is all-too-familiar to the Germans of the last few generations. Yes, by the time of the Second World War, my ancestors had already been in the United States between 50 and 90 years, but still, a seed of understanding was planted that day.

Dachau was not built with the intention of imprisoning Jews. It was one of the first camps, designed not for murder but for the discipline of political enemies of all types, primarily communists.

As I said, there are not many pictures of Dachau. For the parts that are sobering, there are other parts that are truly beautiful.

After our return to the city, we grabbed a quick lunch and met up for the second part of our tour, Third Reich sites around Munich. Our guide was excellent, a native German who had a balance of sobriety and humor about the whole thing. He kept referring to the major players in Nazi Germany as “these guys” and specifically stated that Göring was a “piece of work.” Such an uncomfortable familiarity does come from having to research, lead tours, and field questions about the Nazis day in and day out. I highly recommend him if you’re ever in Munich; his name is Jason.

As I have shared before, Germany has chosen to handle the past differently than many nations: rather than squirrel the truth away in a corner, Germany has created what they call remembrance culture in which they openly acknowledge the past in an effort to learn from it. I am sure you have heard the slogan “Never Again.”

Below is Munich’s monument to the victims of National Socialism (Nazi is a shortened form of the original Party name, Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or National Socialist German Worker’s Party). The sentiment of the text on the memorial is: In memory of the victims of Nazi Tyranny. Pursued because of their political beliefs, pursued because of their race, pursued because of their religion, pursued because of their sexual identity, pursued because of their disabilities.

These tours are incredibly popular. Everyone wants to understand the past. For us in the US, where our media is saturated with WW2 books, films and documentaries, the whole thing can still feel a bit… fictional sometimes. It is not so in Munich, where the vestiges of Nazism still remain.

Below is one of the few surviving examples of Nazi architecture (honestly, its hideous). This was the Führerbau, where Hitler and his closest staff had offices. It is now a music and theater school!

The following two pictures are of the Feldherrnhalle, on the Odeonplatz in Munich. This place held special honor because it was the site of a shootout between the army and the Nazi supporters following the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. What initially sounds like it could have been an explosive and exciting street fight was really no more than a thirty second volley of fire. But because sixteen Nazis died “martyr’s deaths” that morning, it became a sacred memorial during the Third Reich, constantly guarded by the SS, to whom passersby were expected to give the Hitler salute.

In my fiction, this is where Ernst Schmidt got the head injury that sent him home to his mother’s house (and to his son, seven-year-old Jakob). This is also the place Jakob, Lothar, Josef and Teiwaz would be sworn into the SS eleven years later.

At the end of our day-long tour, we got talking about dinner. Naturally, many of our group planned on going to, or had gone to, the Hofbräuhaus, Munich’s most famous beer hall. The better place, our tour guide said, is the Augustiner-Keller, farther away from the city center but well worth the trip. “That is where the locals go.”

It was a 36 minute walk… and well worth it! If you want to experience the feel of a German Biergarten in the summer, this is the place to do it. A large, lovely, wooded setting with table service close to the kitchen and counter service for those farther out. Plus, there is a huge playground on-site.

As I said before, the goal of our stay in Munich was to get a feel for the lives of my Munich-based characters: Ernst, Jakob, Emmy, Christian, and, for a short time, Friedrich. Do you recognize the shot below?

It would originally become the background for The Prodigal Sons:

For all the things we didn’t see, we did fit in a trip to the Viktualien Markt, a top stop in Munich:

I also snapped a few pictures of the Christian graffiti:

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Our Sunday departure came all too quickly. This is where I had planned to do laundry, and while our clothes dried we enjoyed Turkish coffee at a little cafe next to the laundromat:

As we tried to make our escape on Sunday, we found many of the roads closed off because of the Eurogames: specifically, a road bike race. You will not believe the sound these guys made:

However, being locked down in Munich for a few extra hours did have its advantages: we had time to explore a little in the English Garden, Munich’s equivalent of Central Park. I wish we’d had more time there!

The Isar River, which runs through the English Garden, also has surfing:

We also had an opportunity to find the Siegestor, which Emmy mentions briefly in The Rubicon. Smaller but reminiscent of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, with its own Quadringa, it was completed in 1852 as a memorial to the Bavarian Army.

After being nearly destroyed in World War II, its rear face was left blank, save for a few words calling for peace: “Dedicated to victory, destroyed by war, urging peace.” (Wikipedia’s translation).

As with Berlin, there were endless things we could have done in Munich. Again, that simply provides a very convenient excuse to go back! Alas, we did finally make our way out of the city, heading north.

Bavaria as a whole is beautiful, with a very different feel than other parts of Germany. One can’t miss the quaint churches in the countryside…

The flourishing hops…

Or the Hühnerbus…

For the time being, however, we would have to say goodbye to southern Germany. New adventures awaited us in Leipzig!