Munich: history, monuments, and art

Front matter

HISTORY, MONUMENTS.

_ ___ ID ART

CORNELL

Contents

CHAPIBB

I. QENIDS LOCI pAaE 1

HISTOBY

Chapter I

" The only city whose people look happy " — this casual characterisation of Munich by a traveller of experience and ripened judgment at once discloses the genius of the place. Munich is the city of happiness and contentment, placid as a village, rich in opportunities as a metropolis ; quiet, spacious, clean, and leisurely. Through her streets no one hurries save the green Isar, rolling rapidly from springs under the blue glacier ice toward the Black Sea. Everywhere the colour of tranquillity and rest meets the eye, the green of the cool north which prevails in every Bavarian scene. One may walk mile after mile through the heart of the city, without losing the freshness of green turf and the grateful shade of trees. Winding ways lead on for hours through the English Gfarden, most natural and syifipathetic of urban parks, until, imperceptibly, they merge into the outlying country. The gardens along the banks of the Isar, varied with bosky glens and brightened by waterfalls, brooks, and miniature lakes, are the triumph of landscape gardening.

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And the green spaces here and there in the midst of the city, the Hofgarten, with its festooned walks and caf^s where one w^hiles away his time under the trees, the copious fountains and graceful bridges with their wealth of sculpture, each contributes its share toward giving Munich an outdoor summer charm ofPered by no other city. Moreover, the width and notable cleanliness of the modern streets, the eclectic variety of the architecture, and the narrow w^ays and quaint houses of the older city, emerge with singular felicity from their verdurous setting. There are no great distances to be traversed ; all is compact ; the best, as it should be, in the centre. There are no oppressive contrasts between vulgar riches and sordid poverty, neither East End nor East Side. The princes of the royal house, the great nobles, the solid burghers, and the men who labour for a daily wage, brush elbows with one another upon the streets, while the great democracy of the beer cellars knows no distinction of class. The conductors of the trams bid you a pleasant adieu as you descend from the car, and the cabby wishes you good-morning before he proceeds to ask your direction. " Gemiithlichkeit " reigns, the indispensable but untranslatable virtue of South Germany. One quickly learns to feel that this is a city in which it is good to live. The words of M. Jean Chantavoine, in his excellent monograph upon Munich, suramarise the city's charm with the vivid sympathy born of understanding : "The life of Munich, so simple, so cordial, so varied, where work is so easy and leisure so largely distributed, where intelligence and good taste receive so much gratification, without the least strain or irritation of the nerves ! '

For Munich possesses a distinct atmosphere of her own, and exercises a charm proper to herself. True, at first glance, the newcomer is apt to be disappointed. He is probably a tourist, his memory freshly stored with impressions of the most beautiful scenes and buildings in Europe. If he come from Paris or London, even from Berlin or Vienna, he may dub Munich "slow" — which it is ; or provincial — which it is not. Moreover the weather frequently does its best to hide the city's charm ; in Munich, especially during the high season of tourist travel, it rains often, hard, and long, and the genius loci does not reveal itself in wet or gloomy weather. Again, the architecture of Munich is intrinsically neither correct nor impressive. The connoisseur in architecture — a pose which we all affect somewhat when we travel — is shocked both by the general use of stuccoed brick instead of stone, and by the clumsy imitations of classic building. For the streets of Munich have been described as note-books of travel by Bavarian kings. Among these architectural notes are copies of the temples and Propylea at Athens, the Loggia dei Lanzi and the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, the Basilica of St. Paul at Rome, and the Capella Palatina in Palermo. Munich's one medieval Gothic Church, the Frauenkirche, is not an adequate embodiment of its style ; there are few good specimens of German Renaissance ; the turreted gates of the old wall have been defaced, badly restored, and robbed of their barbicans, towers, and machicolated battlements. The baroque and rococo of the Italian period are in most part dubious examples of a dubious style ; while the fine patrician houses which the tourist has seen at Nuremberg and

Augsburg are conspicuously absent. In general, although Munich has a continuous past reaching far back into the Middle Ages, she is scantily endowed with monuments of the older and better architectural schools. And while much of the modern building is wholly admirable, much again is wholly unfortunate, overladen with tasteless and meaningless decoration ; witness the flamboyant and ludicrous New Palace of Justice, of which a humorous murderer is reported to have said, as he was led from his prison to the scaffold : " Take me by the Neue Justiz Palaat that I may have one more good laugh before I die ! "

Nevertheless, in spite of all that may justly be said in detraction of Munich's outward garb, in spite of every shock experienced at the vagaries of her architecture, the city puts forth a subtle charm, and rarely fails to change her critics into lovers. But we shall better grasp the secret of this charm, the key to this transformation of disappointment into affection, of criticism into appreciation, when we have looked more closely at the face of Munich, with her setting and background, entered somewhat into the ways of her people, and made acquaintance with the spirit which dominates her life.

Munich is situated near the centre of the monotonous Bavarian plain, which slopes imperceptibly from the highlands of Tyrol to the Danube, wateced by streams flowing northward out of the lakes which lie, an emerald cincture, under the shoulders of the Alps. Like Rome and Florence, London and Paris, Munich owes her existence and her character to a river. "From her high-mountain cradle " the Isar rushes, clean and cold, through the heart of the city — a turbulent flood, now shorn and parcelled into a dozen lesser streams controlled by sluices, but beyond the lower bridges floating on in majestic integrity, straight as an arrow toward the horizon. Immediately above the city she emerges from a narrow gorge upon sandy flats, over which she strains along through shallow channels easy to ford. Here at the ford, during the eighth century, if we may trust tradition, the abbots of the cloister at Tegernsee stationed an outpost of their rich abbey, thus fastening upon the settlement its permanent name which, in its varying forms — Muniha, Munichia, Monaco, Monchen, Miinchen, Munich — means the Place of the Monks. Here, 1158 A.D., again because of the ford, Duke Henry the Lion established and fortified a station where toll could be levied upon the convoys of salt from Reichenhall. And Munich's visible character, no less than her origin, is determined by her river. The Isar is the source and centre of that dominance of green which sets this city apart from others. Munich wears, not as Frankfort a garland, but a broad sash of green as her distinguishing mark.

Without it she were drab, inconsiderable, dull ; with it she is raised to another plane, a thing of beauty, a joy for ever. So, too, plain and mountain tell the tale of Munich's being. If the city set upon a hill cannot be hid, neither may the city rising out of the midst of a plain be missed. All the roads of the plain lead to her. From the fertile champaigns and moors she draws subsistence and riches ; they are her servants, bringing their best as offerings. Over them she rises, crowned by tower, spire, and dome, a stately mistress. But especially do the mountains recur again and again, as we consider the story of Munich's origin and her present character. Salt dug from caverns in the mountains' sides brought her into existence, wealth of metals and tall, fair pines floated down the river to swell her riches. Knights, men-at-arms, and pikemen passed and repassed her in countless armies, led by the German King of the Romans, to work his will upon the Cisalpine land, which gave him crown and title, and to wrest imperial unction from the hand of an unwilling Pope. Over the passes which may be descried from the high places of Munich wound the caravans, bearing to the northern barbarians silks of Lombardy, cloths of Florence, precious things and costly spices for which the argosies of Venice held the gorgeous East in fee. From over the mountains came to the cities of Bavaria, and thence to the strongholds of the North, all that the word " culture " stands for — religion, learning, and the arts. And to-day, more than ever before, Munich is a centre through which the dwellers in the North enter the mountains, to find refreshment among their lakes, fir-clad slopes, and glaciers, or swiftly to pass along the ancient Roman highway leading into the land which is the inner shrine of beauty.

For the genius of Munich, medieval and modern, is inseparable from her proximity to Italy. She is the meeting-place of North and South, of German strength with Italian graciousness, of thought and beauty. The South has set a permanent mark upon Munich ; the most casual tourist can scarcely fail to note in her a certain brightness and joyousness absent from other German cities. Even the imitations of Greek and Italian buildings, those architectural memories of royal travel, emphasise this note, and arouse our sympathy though they may offend our sense of aesthetic propriety. Of all northern cities, Munich is the nearest Italy; from Munich alone are visible the snowy peaks which sever North from South; and this lay of her land has helped both to determine the character of her life and to weave the web of her charm.

But the peculiar charm of Munich, indicated and characterised by her outward aspect, is more fully disclosed in the life and genial ways of her people. To a foreign eye the citizens of one German town do not difEer saliently from the citizens of another, save in the broad distinction between North German and South. But the Miinchener — if one be permitted the use of an indispensable German term — is a highly individualised type. He shares the temperament of all South Germans — placid and easy-going, humorous and obstinate ; but he has ways and idiosyncrasies native to his home and hearth. He sees life as pre-eminently a pleasant thing ; he will not be hurried, has no inordinate desire to amass riches or to better his position, observes the sense of the Greek proverb, "Nothing too much." His attitude toward life, both instinctive and reasoned, is in sympathy with Leo X.'s comment upon his election to the Papal office, " Since God has given us the Papacy, let us enjoy it." But the Miinchener's enjoyment is tempered with discretion and selfrestraint. He recognises the value of ideal factors in our existence ; consequently religion, art, and intellectual culture hold high place in his palace of life. He is the most consistent yet judicious of hedonists. Though he fall far short of the calm, serene poise of Hellenic life, though he suggest the sensuous, earth-born deities rather than the Olympian gods, he at least re-echoes the simplicity, the naturalness, and the reasonable idealism of the Greeks. In Munich, one may fairly say, men see life steadily and see it whole ; if their ideals be not among the clouds they are the more consistently approximated.

Such a bearing toward life makes for contentraent and simplicity, not for great achievements or transfiguring personalities. Bavaria's part in the making of German history has never been proportionate to the country's size and nurubers. The roll of Germany's great names — the masters of Renaissance painting and sculpture, the great romantic poets, the immortal Twelve of modern music, statesmen and philosophers — numbers few Bavarians and not one child of Munich. Contentment, geniality, humour, do not develop the atmosphere in which revolutionary thoughts and heroic ideals thrive ; for the son of Munich the life of the Superman is too strenuous. That highpriesthood of the intellect to which Germany lays just claim has its shrines north of the Danube,

Yet Munich is content : content to enjoy the gifts of labourers in other vineyards ; content with her pleasant streets, green places, and hurrying river ; with the music, the poetry, and the art offered at her altars by the children of other homes ; content with the highlands and lakes, the odorous forests and picturesque villages which surround her. She is at least pre-eminent in humour, in the Rabelaisian wit of her populace, the stinging satire of her caricaturists. The Miinchener sits in his beer-cellar or his caf^ under the trees, smiling broadly over the foibles of the rest of Germany and the barbarian Outlanders — the humours of the tourists who throng his haunts in summer, the last imperial sensation from Potsdam, the stiff, self-satisfied ..Berliner, the grasping Saxon. For he is convinced that the best things in life are his ; that hetter than these others, he knows how to enjoy them: is not his existence easy, generous, and geihuthlich ? Are there not ten holidays in June afid half as many more at Christmastide, the i.)p^toberfest in autumn and the carnival in winter, Easter and Whitsun holidays in the "spring, a dozen Feste and Festspiele in the sum- *mer? Are there not theatres open the year round, concerts everywhere, indoors and out, ten picture-galleries and museums, the English Garden and the banks of the Isar to saunter along on pleasant afternoons? And is not the ubiquitous, ever -flowing beer the best brewed, even in GernJaiiy ? Why should he strive to set the crooked straight?

With a touch of banter, yet truthfully, the Germans style Munich the City of Beer and Art. About these commodities revolve the two characteristic features of Munich's life — das Bierleben and das Kunstleben. We have already glanced at the easy geniality of the "Beer-life," and only need some acquaintance with the " Art-life " to round out our introduction to the spirit of the place. The practice of the arts commonly follows the paths marked out by political and commercial movement. Munich stands apart from these, yet the more she has declined in political importance and neglected commercial opportunities, the higher she holds her head as the city which alone appreciates and lives for the beautiful. The Imperial Fiat has said, " Let Berlin be the source of aesthetic as well as political and commercial light " ; and Dresden still enjoys her priceless collections ; nevertheless, the city which watches over the gates of Italy maintains her primacy in the sphere of art. Furnished with a longer pocket and the metropolitan name, Berlin worsts her in competition for such ancient marbles and old masters as find their way into the auctionroom, and lures her actors and musicians into the foggy north. But the atmosphere of aesthetic culture may not be created by such means in an uncongenial environment. That the Bavarian kings of the nineteenth century, whose chief delight lay in their patronage of the arts, succeeded in developing such an atmosphere in their capital was due to the natural responsiveness of the sensuous yet idealistic Munich temperament to the appeal of the beautiful. For the Miinchener, loving pleasure in all its forms, takes unfeigned joy in beautiful objects and emotions. He is as sensitive to aesthetic suggestion as he is conscientious and methodic in the fulfilment of his self-appointed duty toward every form of art. His local pride and keen sense of municipal life have furthered the efforts of his rulers ; he is not merely proud of his city's name in the arts, but also convinced of his own capacity to criticise and appreciate. He has done his part in making good the boast of King Ludwig I. : "I will make of Munich such a city that, without knowing her, no one may truthfully say that he knows Germany." Probably no other city possesses, proportionate to her numbers, so many public collections devoted to painting, sculpture, and archeology ; in none are these public collections so faithfully frequented by citizens of every class, who criticise with the conscious air of one who knows. Moreover, the people of Munich have taken a

GENIUS LOOI 11

significant step forward in the arts by their appreciation of the value of plastic decoration. Painting and sculpture began here" to take their rightful places as adjuncts of architecture. By their adornment with sculpture, painting, and stuccoed relief, the newer buildings in Munich, whether domestic or commercial in character, discover a systematic attempt to make art an inevitable element in the daily existence. This tendency toward freeing the arts from the limitations of museums and galleries is the most hopeful and healthy sign in contemporary aesthetic movement ; in no city has it gained such headway as in Munich. Here sculpture and painting, seen in their true character as decorative, are gradually changing the utilitarian bareness of modern building, and taking their proper place among the influences which environ the com.munity's everyday life. That much of this decoration should be poor is inevitable : that it exists suffices to show that the people of Munich have become sensitive toward the true function of the plastic arts, assigned to them their natural place in the ordering of our lives. And, further, it is a notable fact that, in a commercial age, one great city should be conscious of herself as a centre of art rather than as a centre of industry. To Munich it may be accounted sufficient merit that she has succeeded in creating an atmosphere in which the fine arts breathe freely and find themselves at home — a normal vital element in the life of the people, not a delicate exotic carefully nursed by a few elect souls. There are other communities whose sense of plastic beauty is more instinctive, possibly more discriminating ; none fulfils her duty towards the beautiful so faithfully, nor, upon the whole, so successfully as Munich ; in none other do the arts live so freely, so closely in contact with the general life.

The atmosphere of ancient Athenian c\ilture, its impregnation with intellectual and aesthetic elements, is frequently expounded for our amazement : the tanner and the sausage-seller, held up to immortal scorn by Aristophanes, were competent critics of Phidias and Sophocles, capable of arguing a difficult point with Socrates, of maintaining their political convictions against Demosthenes. Some degree of such assthetic impregnation is in the atmosphere of Munich — this city which has been called the "Isar- Athens." Artistic culture is not something apart from the mass of her people, but a factor present to their daily existence. Merely to live in the Bavarian city is to free ourselves somewhat from our modern self-consciousness towards the pursuit of the beautiful, to feel that art is as essential to life as work or play. The artist may not draw from the atmosphere of Munich inspiration to create a masterpiece: he is at least conscious of surroundings congenial to his pursuits, knows that if his work be good it will meet with understanding and appreciation. The student — even that most casual of students, the sightseer — will find no royal road to culture, but he will feel the incitements of companionship to stir his blood, and many a quickening of his mental vision. For the secret of the charm of Munich, in so far as it is sought in her Art-life, lies, not in the magnitude of her accomplishment, but rather in this impregnation of the community's intellectual atmosphere with aesthetic elements, in the organic relation between her art and her life.

These things, then, are the determining factors in the charm of Munich which draw us to her and make us loth to leave her — the lay of the land, the life of the people, the lure of the arts. For the Bavarian capital is cosmopolitan, crowded with adopted children : North Germans, who have settled by the Isar because here one draws his breath more easily than in the angular North ; English and Americans, attracted by the facilities for education ; Russians, who find it convenient to set another frontier between themselves and Siberia; painters, sculptors, musicians, men of learning and idlers — but above all students, of every nationality, every science and art. This is the inevitable question which one member of the foreign colony puts to another : " What are you studying?" And these thousands of Outlanders come to Munich, one and all for the same reason — the charm of the city. There is -not one among their ostensible pursuits which may not elsewhere be followed as well, if not better. The lure which charms them is Munich herself, the attractiveness of her site and surroundings, the freedom and geniality of her life, her preoccupation with the beautiful and the ideal. But once within her walls, and acquainted with her peculiar charm, they are held captive by a final spell, more elusive and yet more pervasive than those which we have traced to nature, man, and art: the sense that here life itself has become a fine art, inclusive of each lesser factor. For the Bavarians, above all the citizens of Munich, have moulded their life into an articulate and reasoned art. Life itself is their masterpiece — the life which is lived naturally, happily, and ideally. It is the merit of Munich that she has brought to its fine flower this, the most difficult, yet most desirable of the arts. Hereby she exercises her most subtle, most potent charm : herein is disclosed to the curious inquirer the essential spirit of the place — Genius Loci.

HISTORY

Chapter II Dukes And Blectobs In Munich

As Munich was the last of all the South German cities to acquire municipal importance, so is her history the shortest. Unlike Vienna, Salzburg, and Regensburg, the Bavarian capital knows no memories of ancient Roman times; unlike Nuremberg and Augsburg, she cannot look back upon the fruitful and active life of the German free cities ; unlike her ultramontane neighbours, the Lombard communes, she had no patrician families whose feuds and rivalries weave a picturesque tale to attract the attention of the student by its many-coloured web. Throughout more than six of the seven centuries of Munich's existence her story is but a background against which princes of the house of Wittelsbach emerge, sometimes in clear, sometimes in blurred outline. That story is best read, not in the crabbed pages of her ancient annals, but in the more vivid records revealed in her monuments and art; of these the reader will find some account in the chapters of this book which treat of the architecture and historical collections of the city. The chronicle of Munich's municipal life is dull and obscure, for the memorials of the city reflect the lives rather of absolute princes

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than of the burgesses of a free commune. Until the rulers of Bavaria were raised to the dignity of a royal style there were but few in the long line of dukes and electors^ whose names or whose achievements are vital to" an understanding of their city's history. Of these few we shall briefly recount the story in the following pages, dwelling only upon those salient figures whose memories are visibly preserved in the Munich which we see to-day.

Despite the comparative youth of Munich, the city lies in the heart of Old Bavaria, surrounded on every hand by villages which were among the earliest Teutonic settlements south of the Danube. The Bavarians were a branch of the Swabian stem of primitive Germans, and were known to the Romans as the Marcomanni — Men of the Mark. During the period of the Roman Empire the Marcomanni dwelt north of the Danube in what is now Bohemia ; about the year 500 A.D. they emigrated as a nation to their present home, forgetting their ancient name and calling themselves Bajuvarii — men from the land of Baja (Bohemia). During the two hundred and fifty years which followed this migration the Bajuvarii struggled to assert themselves as an autonomous nation by the side of their stronger neighbours, the Franks and the Lombards. But their national aspirations were crushed by Charles the Great; Bavaria was incorporated into the Carolingian Empire, and from 788 until the latter part of the twelfth century led a chequered existence as one of the component duchies in the German Kingdom and Holy Roman Empire, administered by imperial officials bearing the title now of count, now of duke. During the twelfth

DUKES AND ELECTORS IN MUNICH 19

century the duchy was ruled by hereditary dukes of the house of Welf. The last of this line, Duke Henry the Lion, was at once the founder of Munich and the only prince associated with the city's history who did not bear the name of Wittelsbach.

Munich owes her existence to a deed of rapine. Since 903 the Isar village of Oberfohring had belonged to the rich and powerful Bishops of Freising, who fortified it, built a bridge over the river, and levied toll upon the convoys of salt from Reichenhall. Jealous of the lucrative income yielded by the toll station, Henry the Lion attacked Oberfohring, demolished bridge and fortification, and obliged the salt carriers to cross the Isar three miles further up the stream, at Muniha, which may have been a village, but was more probably a monastic hospice established by the wealthy monks of Tegemsee. Here the duke built a new bridge, established a toll station, market, and mint. In the State archives of Munich a fragment of parchment, dated June 14, 1158, records the imperial ratification of this act of violence.

The little community, born thus of salt and water, grew rapidly, but soon lost her truculent Welf master ; in 1181 Henry the Lion was deposed by Frederick Barbarossa and the house of Wittelsbach set over the land which it has held from that day to this. The first of the line was Otto of Wittelsbach, who had long faithfully served the Emperor Barbarossa both as warrior and diplomat. His house claimed descent from an ancient Bajuvarian family which took its name from a castle near Aichach in the very heart of Old Bavaria. The earlier dukes of the line figured

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After the death of her Emperor, Bavaria fell upon evil times. A period of wild confusion followed, in which brothers, uncles, and nephews fought with one another and brought ruin upon a land already devastated by the plague. The dukes of Bavaria adopted the fatal expedient of dividing the duchy between various members of the prolific ducal family. Rival duchies were established in the neighbouring towns of Landshut and Ingolstadt, and the succession becomes a confused tangle of meaningless names and reigns, without significance for the history of the capital. As we shall later see in reviewing her architectural history, Munich at this time enjoyed a brief outburst of that medieval town life whose evidence was the great Gothic church of Our Lady. But upon the whole the march of medieval culture, fostered in other communities either by the development of active commercial life in the free cities or by the solicitude of brilliant princes in their capitals, left Bavaria by the wayside. She was a land of farms and country life, her dukes dull of wit and absorbed in incessant domestic bickerings. It was only at the end of the reign of Albrecht the Wise, in 1506, that the ruinous custom of partitioning the duchy was abolished by the establishment of the law of primogeniture.

The first fifty years of the sixteenth century saw both the Reformation and the Peasant Wars. The Reformation took root in some quarters, notably in the free cities and in certain mountain districts, but Munich in particular and Bavaria as a whole remained true to the older faith. In the last half of the sixteenth century the art of the Renaissance was introduced into Bavaria and encouraged by the patronage of the first of her humanistic dukes, Albrecht V. But in Germany the light of the new birth, already at high noon in the countries south of the Alps, was merged into the sombre glow which burst into ilame with the fires of the Reformation. Bavaria wasted her intellectual resources and material substance in the attempts to check the progress of the Reformation and in the activities of the Jesuits and the Inquisition. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries she shared the calamity of all Germany, whose civilisation and development were retarded and set back by a succession of senseless and barbarous wars.

This period saw the reign of the great Elector, Maximilian I., whose consummate abilities might have brought his country to a high place had his lot been cast in happier times. He was eminent as statesman, general, and administrator, and during the early and peaceful years of his reign accomplished much for the well-being of his country and people. In 1609 he became the head of the Catholic League of the Empire, and in 1618 the Thirty Years' War broke out. The earlier campaigns were a series of victories for Bavarian arms under Maximilian's great general, Tilly. With the advent of Gustavus Adolphus upon the Protestant side the fortunes of war were reversed, and Bavaria, no longer victor, became victim ; the Swedish king destroyed the Catholic army at Leipsic, marched south through Bavaria, and received the keys of Munich upon the heights of Gasteig in May, 1632. After the death of Gustavus Adolphus the aspect of the war again changed, but at its close Bavaria was a waste. The population was reduced one-half,