🇩🇪 Germany · South (Bavaria and the Black Forest)
Munich is where Germany relaxes. After the pace of the north and the historical weight of Berlin, the Bavarian capital greets you with its cheerful, sensual character: beer gardens under the chestnut trees, litre steins of beer, overflowing markets, people in Lederhosen and Dirndl not only at the Oktoberfest, and a quality of life that puts it year after year among the best cities in the world to live in. But it would be a mistake to take it for a simple city of beer and folklore: Munich is also one of Europe's cultural capitals, with first-rate museums, opera, royal architecture and a dense history that includes some very dark pages of the twentieth century.
In the centre is the Marienplatz, with the neo-Gothic New Town Hall and its famous Glockenspiel of turning figures; the Frauenkirche with its two onion-domed towers, symbol of the city; the Residenz, the lavish palace of the kings of Bavaria; and the Viktualienmarkt, the open-air food market. A step away beats the Englischer Garten, one of the largest urban parks in the world, where surfers ride the standing wave on the river Eisbach all year round. And beyond wait Nymphenburg palace, the Deutsches Museum — the largest museum of science and technology in the world — and the Pinakotheken, with centuries of European painting.
This guide walks through Munich with a practical, honest eye: how to see the great landmarks and enjoy beer culture without falling into caricature; how to understand the Oktoberfest properly (it starts in September, entry to the tents is free but it pays to book a table); how to make the most of the transport and the trips to the Alps; and also how to approach, with respect, the Dachau memorial, a place of remembrance half an hour from the centre that is an unavoidable part of the history of this city and of Germany.
Munich was born around 1158, when Duke Henry the Lion founded a settlement beside a bridge over the river Isar, in a place where some monks lived (hence the name München, 'of the monks', and the 'Münchner Kindl', the monk on the city's coat of arms). In 1180 it passed to the Wittelsbach dynasty, which would rule Bavaria for more than 700 years, until 1918. Munich grew as a ducal capital and then, from 1806, as the capital of the Kingdom of Bavaria. In the nineteenth century, kings such as Ludwig I turned it into an 'Athens on the Isar' full of museums, avenues and neoclassical buildings, and in 1810 the first Oktoberfest was held, to celebrate a royal wedding. In the twentieth century, Munich was the setting for turbulent episodes: the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic of 1919, violently crushed; the rise of Nazism, which made the city its cradle and its 'capital of the movement', with the failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923; and also pockets of resistance such as the student group the White Rose. Sixteen kilometres away, the Dachau concentration camp was built in 1933. The city was badly damaged by Second World War bombing and was rebuilt respecting its historic layout. In 1972 it hosted the Olympic Games, overshadowed by the terrorist attack on the Israeli team. Today Munich is a prosperous metropolis, technological and traditional at once. The full history is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Southern Germany: Bavaria and the Wittelsbach dynasty, with Ludwig II's fantasy castles; Munich, birthplace of Nazism but also of the White Rose resistance; Nuremberg, imperial city of the Nazi rallies and of the trials that condemned them; and the legendary Black Forest.
Read the history of South (Bavaria and the Black Forest) →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Munich's history begins with a bridge, a bit of salt and a monk. In the twelfth century, salt was an extremely precious commodity — it preserved food — and the routes it travelled were rigidly controlled and taxed with tolls. Around 1158, the powerful Duke Henry the Lion, of the House of Welf, had a bridge over the river Isar belonging to the bishop of Freising destroyed and built one of his own a few kilometres further south, in a place where some monks lived, to divert the lucrative salt traffic there and keep the revenue.
That settlement beside the bridge took its name from the place: 'apud Munichen', 'by the monks', which became München, the German name of the city. From that origin comes its emblem too, the 'Münchner Kindl', the figure of a monk (now turned into a child) that appears on the city's coat of arms and in countless urban details. The conflict with the bishop was settled when the emperor Frederick Barbarossa arbitrated in Henry's favour, and the date of the imperial document, 14 June 1158, is officially considered Munich's birth certificate.
The city's destiny changed forever in 1180, when Henry the Lion fell out of favour with the emperor and lost his territories. The duchy of Bavaria then passed to the House of Wittelsbach, a dynasty that would rule Bavaria for more than seven hundred unbroken years, until 1918: one of the longest dynastic runs in European history. The Wittelsbachs made Munich their residence and capital, walled it, gave it markets and privileges, and began building the Residenz, the town palace that would keep growing for centuries. The medieval city prospered as a commercial and ducal centre, survived fires and epidemics, and gradually wove the Bavarian identity — Catholic, festive and proud — that still defines it.
For centuries, Munich was the capital of a duchy and then of an electorate. The great leap came with Napoleon: in 1806, in the reorganisation of Germany, the elector Maximilian IV Joseph of Wittelsbach was raised to king, and Bavaria became an independent kingdom with Munich as its capital. The city's greatest era of urban splendour was beginning.
The man chiefly responsible for the transformation was King Ludwig I, who reigned from 1825 to 1848 and wanted to make Munich a new Athens, 'the Athens on the Isar'. A lover of classical and Italian art, he had broad avenues laid out and an extraordinary set of neoclassical buildings raised: the Ludwigstraße, the Königsplatz with its Greek temples (the Glyptothek and the Propylaea), the Pinakothek to house the royal painting collection, the university. Under his reign and those of his successors, Munich filled with museums, churches and palaces and established itself as a cultural capital of the first rank. Ludwig I's reign ended abruptly in 1848: his scandalous affair with the dancer and adventuress Lola Montez, on top of that year's European revolutionary wave, forced him to abdicate.
One event from the previous reign would mark Munich forever. On 12 October 1810, to celebrate the wedding of Crown Prince Ludwig (the future Ludwig I) to Princess Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen, a great popular festival was organised with a horse race on an open field outside the city, which in the bride's honour was named the Theresienwiese ('Therese's meadow'), the 'Wiesn' Munich residents still use today. The party went down so well that it was repeated the next year, and the next, until it became the Oktoberfest, today the biggest popular festival in the world. Later, Ludwig I's grandson, King Ludwig II, the enigmatic 'mad king', would leave his mark less on the city than on fairy tales: obsessed with Wagner and with architecture, he ruined the coffers building fantasy castles such as Neuschwanstein, before drowning in circumstances never cleared up in 1886.
The twentieth century brought Munich a whirlwind of political violence. Germany's defeat in the First World War brought about, in November 1918, the collapse of all the German monarchies. In Munich, revolution broke out before anywhere else: on 7-8 November 1918, the socialist politician Kurt Eisner led an uprising that deposed the Wittelsbach dynasty — after 738 years of rule — and proclaimed the 'Free State of Bavaria' (Freistaat Bayern), a name Bavaria keeps to this day. The last king, Ludwig III, fled the city.
What followed was a chaotic and bloody period. Kurt Eisner was murdered in the street in February 1919 by a far-right aristocrat, and in the power vacuum the most radical sectors took the initiative: in April 1919 a Bavarian Soviet Republic (Bayerische Räterepublik) was proclaimed in Munich, a brief revolutionary government of communist and anarchist inspiration, with workers' councils on the Russian soviet model. It lasted barely a few weeks. At the start of May 1919, regular army troops and right-wing paramilitary militias (the Freikorps), sent by the central social democratic government, entered Munich and crushed the Soviet Republic with extreme harshness: there were hundreds of deaths, summary executions and ferocious repression.
That trauma had lasting consequences. The revolutionary violence and its brutal repression left Munich and Bavaria deeply polarised and turned to the right. In the resentment, the fear of communism and the climate of national humiliation after the war, fertile ground was found by a recently demobilised agitator who was starting to frequent the city's beer halls to deliver incendiary speeches: Adolf Hitler. Munich, the cheerful city of beer and art, was becoming the laboratory of the most criminal movement of the century.
Munich was the cradle of National Socialism. It was here that Hitler joined, in 1919, a small party he refounded as the Nazi Party (NSDAP), and where the movement took root in the atmosphere of the beer halls and postwar revanchism. On 8 and 9 November 1923, Hitler attempted his first coup: the so-called Beer Hall Putsch (Bürgerbräu-Putsch or Hitlerputsch). From the Bürgerbräukeller beer hall, Hitler and his followers — with the support of General Ludendorff — proclaimed a 'national revolution' and the following day marched towards the centre intending to seize power. The Bavarian police stopped them with gunfire by the Feldherrnhalle: four policemen and sixteen putschists died. The putsch failed and Hitler was imprisoned, but in prison he wrote 'Mein Kampf' and the trial gave him national exposure. The Nazis would later turn that failure into a founding myth of the regime.
When Hitler came to power in 1933, he honoured Munich with the title of 'Capital of the Movement' (Hauptstadt der Bewegung). The city filled with Nazi headquarters and monuments, and barely 16 kilometres away, at Dachau, the regime's first concentration camp opened in March 1933, the model for all that would follow. In 1938 it was in Munich that the Agreement was signed handing Hitler the Czechoslovak Sudetenland, in a vain attempt by the European powers to avoid war.
But Munich was also the setting for one of the most luminous pages of German resistance. At the Ludwig Maximilian University, a group of students led by the siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl and their professor Kurt Huber formed the White Rose (Weiße Rose) in 1942, an underground movement that wrote and distributed leaflets calling on Germans to rebel against Nazi tyranny and to oppose the regime's crimes. On 18 February 1943, Hans and Sophie were caught throwing leaflets from the balcony of the university atrium. Arrested by the Gestapo, they were tried summarily and guillotined a few days later; Sophie was 21. Their courage became an eternal symbol of moral conscience in the face of barbarism. Today, a memorial of bronze leaflets set into the ground in front of the university — the Geschwister-Scholl-Platz — recalls their sacrifice.
As the symbolic heart of Nazism and an industrial centre, Munich was the target of heavy Allied bombing during the Second World War. Dozens of air raids, above all between 1942 and 1945, destroyed much of the old town and of the city; thousands of people died and much of the heritage was left in ruins. When American troops entered Munich at the end of April 1945, they found a devastated city.
Postwar reconstruction was, as in Nuremberg, a matter of debate, and Munich mostly chose to recover its historic appearance: the Marienplatz, the Frauenkirche, the Residenz and the great churches were rebuilt largely respecting the medieval layout and silhouettes, instead of remaking the city in a purely modern key. That decision explains why the centre of Munich still keeps its old atmosphere today. The city recovered quickly during the German 'economic miracle' and flourished again as an industrial, technological and cultural hub, home to large companies such as BMW and Siemens.
The great moment of postwar international exposure came in 1972, when Munich hosted the summer Olympic Games. West Germany wanted to show the world a democratic, open and peaceful nation, very different from that of 1936, and it built a modern Olympic park with a spectacular glass and steel canopy. But the Games were overshadowed by tragedy. In the early hours of 5 September 1972, a commando of the Palestinian terrorist group Black September stormed the Olympic Village, killed two members of the Israeli team and took nine others hostage. After a day of negotiations, a botched rescue attempt by German police at the Fürstenfeldbruck airfield ended in disaster: the nine Israeli hostages, five terrorists and one policeman died. The 'Munich massacre' shocked the world, marked the start of high-profile international terrorism and left a deep wound; today a sober memorial in the Olympic park honours the victims.
Out of that dense and contradictory history — medieval founding, royal splendour, revolution, Nazism, resistance, destruction and rebirth — came today's Munich: a prosperous, technological metropolis that, without giving up its Bavarian tradition, its beer gardens and its Oktoberfest, looks its twentieth-century past in the eye, with memorials recalling Dachau, the White Rose and the victims of 1972. It is a city that learned to be cheerful without forgetting.