Tag Archives: Munich

Germany 7: Munich Part 3 – Two pinakothek galleries in one, and the Munich City Museum

Posted on October 18, 2022 | 1 comment

It was difficult to decide which of the several world-class art galleries in Munich to visit, but time constraints limited us to one. Our choices included the Alte Pinakothek (according to Collins, “pinakothek” means “a place where works of art are displayed and stored,” and after all these posts about Germany you probably already know that alte means “old”), the Neue Pinakothek, the Pinakothek der Moderne, and a few other galleries whose names do not include the word “pinakothek.” We decided to visit the Neue Pinakothek, mainly to see several specific artists whose works are included there – including the German Romantic landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich.

The Neue Pinakothek isn’t all that new: it was created by Bavarian King Ludwig I and opened in 1853. It was bombed during World War II and like so many other German landmarks, has since been rebuilt. It contains what is considered one of the most important collections of 19th-century (particularly European) art in the world.

Only after we’d taken a streetcar to the museum quarter of Munich did we discover that the Neue Pinakothek is closed for several years (!) for renovations. Disappointed but undefeated, we decided to visit the nearby Alte Pinakothek instead. The Alte Pinakothek features Old Masters from the 14th to 18th centuries and is one of the oldest art galleries in the world. How bad could it be?

Much to our surprise and pleasure, we discovered that a lot of interesting pieces from the Neue Pinakothek are on display in the Alte Pinakothek while the former gallery is closed. We also learned that on Sundays, admission to galleries and museums is only one euro! How civilized is that?

The reduced admission price did mean that there were a lot of people lined up to get into the gallery, and the facility itself was very crowded, but it also meant that we had the opportunity to see a number of amazing pieces in the Alte Pinakothek collection that we would never have seen if the Neue gallery had been open. So it was a win, win.

Klimt, Margaret Stonebrough-Wittgenstein

The Munich Museum

Later that day, we returned to the older part of the city and visited the Munich City Museum (Münchner Stadtmuseum), a (mostly) fun review of arts and crafts and other artifacts relating to Munich history. There you can see replicas of the “Morris Dancer” sculptures which date from 1480 and are the most valuable pieces in the collection – too valuable to actually display, it seems.

According to the Stadtmuseum website, the creator of these figures, Erasmus Grasser, was described by his peers as a “disruptive, promiscuous and disingenuous knave,” but perhaps they were just jealous: he was the one who got the lucrative commission to create a heraldic ceiling design and several coats of arms for Munich’s new city hall as well as creating the dancer figurines. (The Museum’s website includes far better images of them than I was able to get through the glass display cases.) The original figurines were removed from their locations and put into safekeeping in 1931.

Rally on Koenigsplatz in Munich, 09.11.1936

The Stadtmuseum does not ignore the fact that Munich is the city where the Nazi Party had its roots. An exhibition that traces the rise of National Socialism is located in an adjacent facility, with a separate entrance. It includes artifacts and uniforms from the Nazi era and extensive information on how the Nazi regime began in Munich.

The displays were difficult to look at, particularly as many of them called to mind what is happening in the United States right now.

Munich the Marvellous

Germany is a country made up of several distinctive regions. The architecture, cuisine, and traditions are quite different in Munich than they are in Frankfurt, Dresden or Berlin.

Munich is the capital of the state of Bavaria (in which Bayreuth is also located), and after a few days there, I had a much better sense of the meaning of the term “Bavarian.” It helped that we’d caught sight of a few guys in the altstadt wearing lederhosen, and later saw masses of fans of the FC Bayern Munich football team piling onto transit en route to a game. But it was something more basic – the look and the feel of the city – that made Munich such a delight, and utterly unlike any other place in Germany.

Even within Munich there are many different cultures and experiences. As I mentioned previously, the hotel we stayed in (The Mirabel) was located in a Turkish area. The hotel itself was very modern and very German, with a breakfast that would have pleased King Ludwig I or II. But one of our best meals was in a Turkish restaurant half a block away.

Munich is a lovely city and I wish we’d had time to see much more of it.

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Posted in Germany 2022, Mary's Travel Blogs

Tagged Alta Pinakothek, art galleries, Bavaria, Erasmus Grasser, Münchner Stadtmuseum, Munich, Munich City Museum, Neue Pinakothek

Germany 6: Munich Part 2 – The Jewish Museum and the Residence Museum

Posted on October 9, 2022 | 4 comments

On August 27, our first full day in Munich, we saw two museums that could not have been more different. The first was a spare and dramatic testimony to the enduring presence of Munich’s Jewish community, and a damning record of the many efforts that have, for centuries, been intended to exterminate it. The second was (yet another) lavish demonstration of what happens when powerful people use vast amounts of public money to beautify their personal environments.

Munich’s Jewish Museum

We arrived at Sankt-Jakobs-Platz just as the Saturday morning services at the magnificent Ohel Jakob Synagogue were ending. The synagogue, the museum and a community centre, all completed in the mid-aughts of this century, form a focal point for Munich’s Jewish community. The synagogue stands a few blocks from one that was destroyed in 1938, and while it would be wonderful to think that the kind of thinking that leads to such devastation has been confined to history, that is not the case: in 2003 authorities uncovered a plot by neo-Nazis to bomb the cornerstone ceremony for this new facility, and “security concerns also led to the decision to house a memorial to the more than 4,000 Jews of Munich who were killed in the Holocaust in a tunnel between the synagogue and the community centre” (Wikipedia).

One of the people we chatted with out front of the synagogue observed that it looked like a tefillin box.

Inaugurated in 2007, the Jüdische Museum München is a stunning building with a see-through main floor that features a book/gift shop and a cafe. The permanent exhibition on the lower level is both elegant and moving. It includes an audio installation called Voices, which allows visitors to hear the stories of some of the thousands of Jews who have moved to Munich in the past 200 years. Other installations showcase the accomplishments of Jewish residents of Munich (including a Nobel Prize in Chemistry) and the lovely objects associated with Jewish rituals and traditions.

Two installations bring home the historically precarious nature of life itself for Munich’s Jews – one a chronology of significant events, another a display created by the renowned comics creator Jordan B. Gorfinkel, a former New Yorker who worked at DC Comics for many years, where he helped to create the Batman series.

The upper levels of the Jewish Museum house temporary exhibitions. One that engaged me for quite a while was called Heidi in Israel. It demonstrates how Johanna Spyri’s 1880 novel – about a young girl who is overwhelmed by loneliness when she is taken away from her grumpy but beloved grandpa and from their home in the Swiss Alps, and sent to work in the city – struck a particular chord with children living in what is now Israel, many of whom were European Jews who were coming to terms not only with homesickness, but with the whole concept of “homeland.” The novel was first translated into Hebrew in 1946, and has appeared in various forms to acclaim in Israel ever since, including as a radio drama and a play. Of course, Heidi is beloved by children everywhere and has been translated into many languages: one of the museum’s guides and I shared a moment when we realized that we had both read and loved the book within a few years of one another – she in Germany, and me in Canada.

I was intrigued to read on Wikipedia that “As an alternative to the mandatory national military service, young Austrians have the opportunity to serve as Austrian Holocaust Memorial Servants at the Jewish Museum Munich.”

Munich’s Residence Museum

The Munich Residenz is the former palace of the Wittelsbach monarchs of Bavaria, who occupied the facility from 1508 to 1918 – i.e., for more than four hundred years. This gave them time to acquire an awful lot of stuff. (Part of the palace was destroyed during World War II, but most of what was bombed has been rebuilt and restored.) It is no surprise to learn that this is the largest city palace in Germany, because it is huge. It includes ten courtyards and 130 rooms, and our feet wore out long before we tired of looking at the profusion of furnishings, artworks and decorations.

These photos depict only a small sample of the treasures on display at the Residenz.

Exterior of the Treasury, with the Residenz palace on the left

And that was Saturday.

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Posted in Germany 2022, Mary's Travel Blogs

Tagged Heidi, München, Munich, Munich Jewish Museum, Residenz Museum Munich

Germany 5: Munich, Part 1 – The Old City, including the Amazing Rathaus

Posted on September 30, 2022 | 3 comments

In Munich, I had one of the best surprises of our entire trip. There were many sights and landmarks in Germany that I knew in advance I would like to see (most of which I did), but when we emerged from Munich’s subway system into Marienplatz I experienced a moment of sheer delight that was totally unexpected. As I said on Facebook at the time, it was the closest I’ve come to a spontaneous scream since the Beatles were on The Ed Sullivan Show.

It was August 26, and we had arrived at Munich’s massive hauptbahnhof (train station) from Bayreuth mid-afternoon, then rolled (dragged) our suitcases two (long) blocks to our hotel. The Mirabell, at the corner of Goethestrasse and Landwerstrasse, turns out to be located in an area with a lot of Turkish restaurants and shops. After settling into our room, we wandered around the neighbourhood a bit, then decided to take the subway to Marienplatz, the central square in the historical section of Munich. (Munich’s wondrous transit system includes the S-Bahn on the surface, the U-Bahn underground, and a host of connecting trams and buses, most of which meet either at or under the Hauptbahnhof. Everything we wanted to see in Munich was easily accessible from our hotel.)

At the Marienplatz stop, we got off the train and took the escalator up to street level, thinking we would emerge into a plaza with some nice old Bavarian buildings surrounding it. Instead, this was the gasp-inducing sight that greeted us:

Marienplatz has been the central square of Munich since 1158, and the massive Neues Rathaus (New City Hall) has been its prime attraction since 1874. (Parts of the building were damaged in the air raids of 1944 and were rebuilt following the war.) We took dozens of photos of this remarkable neo-Gothic building (of which I will spare you 99%), and when we went back the following day we waited in the square to witness the chiming of the hour from the Rathaus-Glockenspiel. To the great delight of tourists like us, this attraction features figurines that emerge from the central tower three times a day, enacting stories from Bavarian history,

Here’s a short sample of what the glockenspiel looks like in action. The top section depicts a 16th century joust that was held to honour the marriage of a Bavarian duke to a member of the House of Lorraine. The lower section shows coopers “danc[ing] through the streets to ‘bring fresh vitality to fearful dispositions’” during a plague in the early 1500s. In 2022, we can easily relate to the need for such distractions.

In addition to the New City Hall, Marienplatz is the site of the Old Town Hall (Altes Rathaus), the Marian column (the pillar you can see in the top photo in front of the Rathaus, with the gold statue of the Virgin Mary at the top of it), and many shops and restaurants. Nearby sights include the Frauenkirche and Peterskirche, neither of which we had time to tour.

The day after our arrival, we took a tram rather than the subway to the Old City. As we walked from the tram stop back to Marienplatz, we came across the Asamkirche, which I’d seen mentioned in my travel guide, and went in to have a look. This late-Baroque style church was built for the private use and “salvation” of its designers, two brothers – a sculptor and a painter. Wikipedia reports (albeit in a statement with no citation) that “Due to public pressure, the brothers were forced to make the church accessible to the public.” I did wonder what sins might have led the brothers to believe that they needed to create such opulent facilities in order to save their souls, but I’ve been unable to find the answer to that question.

One of the entrances to the Old City in Munich

Also near Marienplatz is Munich’s Viktualienmarkt where since the 1800s, large crowds of tourists and Münchners have gathered to eat sausages and pretzels and other tempting treats prepared by local vendors, to drink beer and listen to live music, and to purchase fresh meats, cheese, eggs, fruits and vegetables, as well as plants, honey, herbs and spices and a lot of other things.

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Posted in Germany 2022, Mary's Travel Blogs

Tagged Asamkirche, Glockenspiel, Marienplatz, Munich, Munich Viktualienmarkt, Rathaus

Tag Archives: Munich