BOXES 53-55: Munich and Bavarian Alps

You are seeing the Bavarian Alps from a balcony of Neuschwanstein, King Ludwig II of Bavaria's fairy-tale castle. That other castle, perched on the smaller hill below, is the royal family's older residence, Hohenschwangau,. I was on the first leg of my second trip to Europe, in the summer of 1972.

My friend Mike Bavar was a lover of Art Nouveau, and he had managed to collect an original Tiffany lamp and several original Sarah Bernhardt posters by Alphonse Mucha, in days just before such art became prohibitively expensive. He was in contact with Jiri Mucha, the Czech artist's son, who lived in Prague, to arrange a meeting in person and perhaps purchase a poster from Jiri's stash left over from his father's death in 1939. Mike invited me to join him in meeting Jiri (pronounced Yir-zhi), and I jumped at the chance. After further planning, an itinerary took shape: I would fly from Cleveland to Munich to meet Mike; then we would fly to Prague, take a bus from there to Vienna, and trains to Venice (where Mike was planning to interview a retired opera star) and Rome (to visit a college friend of Mike's who was an art historian and spent every summer there). For the last part of the trip I would meet my New York friend Estie, who was staying in London, and we would do a driving trip through the Scottish Highlands; I'd return home via Glasgow.

This time I took only a couple of photos from the plane as we approached Munich (compared to the many shots of England as we approached Heathrow on my first trip abroad):

My hotel was near the main train station (Hauptbahnhof). Below is the view from my hotel window, followed by a shot of the Stachus, the plaza officially known as Karlsplatz, with its fountain and Palace of Justice--the first landmarks of Munich seen by just about anybody arriving from the Hauptbahnhof. Beyond the Stachus is the Karlstor, a gate leading into the heart of the Old City:

I recall strolling through the gate and enjoying the spectacle of the pedestrian avenue, though I did feel a bit as if I were on Main Street Disneyland. Many of the older buildings had, after all, been destroyed during WWII and rebuilt or replicated fairly recently. (I had less of a sense of this "newness" during my later visits to Munich, in 2003 and 2012, either because the street had acquired a patina of age since 1972 or because many European cities had "brightened" themselves by cleansing their genuinely old buildings.)

For some reason I didn't take any pictures on this first walk into the Old City; my next shots are of sights on the opposite (i.e., eastern) edge of it. The first of these, which I'll include despite the glare, shows an Amazon statue in front of the Villa Stuck. (Franz von Stuck was a German Symbolist/Art Nouveau painter and sculptor; I'm guessing that Mike especially wanted to see the artist's home/museum, though I don't remember going inside.) Just to the west of it is a monument dating from the 1890s: the Friedensengel (Angel of Peace). I see that I'm wearing an odd but comfortable jacket that I bought from a clearance rack in Cleveland before I left on the trip. To the west of the monument is the River Isar, and bordering it is the huge English-style park called the Englischer Garten.

The next day we took a tram to the outskirts of Munich to see the Nymphenburg, the Versailles-style grand palace and gardens of the rulers of Bavaria. My own interest in seeing it was mainly because of its use in one of my favorite movies, Last Year at Marienbad:

The Nymphenburg gardens did look recognizably like the locale of the movie, though they were brilliant in the sunshine instead of gloomy and haunted. The first picture below shows the palace as one arrives (i.e., from the parking lot)--actually, just part of the palace, since it was too wide to take in all at once. The next shot was taken from the garden side of the palace, looking out into the French-style expanse. Two more shots show the palace in the distance as I walked down toward the elegant water feature--the Grand Cascade--facing the palace at the other end of the parterre and canal. Beyond these waters are some English-style gardens with a "Temple of Apollo."

Back in the center of Munich I took a few pictures of prominent landmarks and also one

of a mystery structure: if anyone can identify it, please let me know. The next photo is of St. Michael's Church (completed 1597), located along the promenade leading to the Frauenkirche (Cathedral of Our Lady), which you see towering in the background. Those looming towers date from the late 1400s, their unusual domed caps from a little later.

Continuing on from the Frauenkirche, you arrive at the spectacular neo-Gothic "New" Rathaus (City Hall), a Victorian Era building replacing an older structure:

Startlingly different in design but completed only a decade before the Rathaus, the Propylaea was a monument to a time when the younger son of the King of Bavaria was King of Greece (but got kicked out just as the monument was completed). It anchors one side of a huge square where the state art museums of Munich are located.

Mike and I also visited one "lesser" but excellent art museum, the Lenbachhaus, which houses the "Bridge" and "Blue Rider" schools of German painting of the early 1900s. There is now a Modernist expansion of the place, but here you see the house and its fountains as they stood in 1972:

One art space I did not take a picture of was the Nazi-era Haus der Kunst, a plain, ugly building near the Englischer Garten but valuable for its huge exhibition space. In connection with the Olympic Games later that summer, they were offering a gargantuan show called World Cultures and Modern Art. Among many features, one room had Van Gogh paintings next to Japanese woodcuts, another juxtaposed Picasso artworks and African masks and sculptures, while tapes of related Western and non-Western music were piped into various spaces. Here's the cover of my English edition of the catalogue, which features Monet's painting of his wife in a kimono; the 7-1/2-foot-high original greeted us at the entrance to the exhibit.

Mike and I spent hours at the show, then walked through parts of the nearby Englischer Garten, which, like an echo of the art show, contains a famous pagoda-shaped tower. In the photos below you also see the Schoenfeldwiese (Beautiful Field Meadow) and a brook flowing through the park.

We took one full-day side trip when we were in Munich, to see the two most famous castles associated with "mad" King Ludwig II of Bavaria. The guided bus tour, taking us toward the southern border of Bavaria, included a stop at the rococo pilgrimage Wieskirche:

The ride became increasingly scenic as we approached the Bavarian Alps and finally got our first glimpse from the bus window of Ludwig's fairytale fantasy castle Neuschwanstein:

The bus parked below the royal family's older residence, Hohenschwangau, seen in the next photo below. After looking up at it and over to Neuschwanstein in the distance,we began our uphill walk, taking in the Bavarian countryside as well:

From the terrace level of Neuschwanstein we could see the nearby rugged mountain slopes. Note the footbridge in the next pic:

The assorted shots that follow were taken as we approached the castle and were given a tour of the inside (which has smaller rooms than you might think--more cozy than regal, with kitchy murals of scenes from Wagner operas on most walls). The swan motif was everywhere--for example, the swan etched or painted on one window:

Next we got a tour of Hohenschwangau. My main memory of this tour is our being shown Wagner's piano and Mike getting scolded by the tour guide when he played a chord from Parsifal on it as our group was leaving the room. But here's a photo of me standing outside the palace, followed by fountains (swan, lions) and scenic views:

The tour ended with our having time to stroll around the nearby lake. This must have been our last full day in Germany, because my next pictures are of us arriving in Prague--quite a different world from prosperous Munich .