First thing was to master the tram system,
which proved remarkably easy. A short walk through the train station—a notably clean and well organized affair. Looking at the destinations of the sleek machines in orderly line-up at the platforms, Ellie began to dream of trips to Paris, Venice, Rome… Emerging at the far side, we found the tram stop that we'd been told would take us out to the fabulous, 17th century Schloss Nymphenburg and its surrounding park. Take a look:
We found a long elegant approach to the sumptuous palace, along waterways graced with dozens of swans and well-stocked with fish.
Armed with tickets to both the palace and the park, we decided on the latter first, and took a long walk through the formal gardens to where they gave way to natural forests,
lakes and meadows, dotted here and there with little “burgs”—a “pagoda” designed in Chinese style; a hunting lodge complete with chapel, one of the first, apparently, to be designed specifically as a “ruin”; a summery bathhouse with a huge, sunken indoor swimming pool dating from the eighteenth century; a lovely single-story lodge with richly baroque décor;
and a carriage house with huge, elaborately gilded carriages and sleds for the aristocratic family who once owned and lived in this extraordinary estate. It was when we reached the carriage house with its extravagant display of ostentatious transportation--not to mention the porcelain collection, upstairs--that I began to wonder: who did these people think they were? I like to think I would have been among the revolutionaries!
Sated with glorious excess, we returned, via tram again, to the city center, where we walked from the Karolinenplatz with its dark obelisk to the Koenigsplatz,
a formal, neoclassical civic center whose vast open plazas and temple-like buildings evidently appealed to Hitler’s sense of pomp: it was here that the Nazi movement first took root and power. We passed an archeological site
where the basement of the “Brown House,” the Nazi party headquarters, was revealed, along with posters reminding the contemporary citizens of Munich that they still have some catching up to do with Berlin in un-burying the too easily forgotten past. Ellie and I recalled our visit to the Terror Museum there, in Berlin, where they had dug out the old Gestapo headquarters from the rubble of World War II to act as a museum and a memorial to those who were imprisoned and tortured there.
Right on the corner of the Koenigsplatz, we came to the museum we had been looking for—the Lehnbachhaus, former residence of the artist Franz von Lehnbach, now the repository of a stunning collection of art from the Blaue Reiter group from the early twentieth century: Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Paul Klee, Jawlensky, and many others whose names are less well known. As always, I was humbled to find outstanding paintings by artists whose names I did not even know. The small museum—a comfortable size to visit in a couple of hours and come away enriched—was also astounding in the adventurousness of its installation design. (I liked particulary the neon work of a contemporary artist on the facade of the building:
the words in blue neon--if you enlarge the image by clicking on it--read "You can imagine the opposite.") The floor of the Jawlensky room, for example, was slathered in neon rainbow colors echoing the colors he favored in his work
which reached up the walls and playfully splashed over a mock painting, complete with mock descriptive label attached to the wall. Elsewhere, in other galleries, the walls were brilliant pink, blue, green, and even a camouflage pattern of black and white.
Besides the Blaue Reiter collection, we found an interesting contemporary wing, with works by Warhol, Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter and other luminaries, along with some interesting work by newer artists like Erwin Wurm, whose playful constructions using common articles of clothing are always surprising and delightful. We were the last ones out of the museum at six, and spent a few more minutes
in the delightful, still sunlit garden that surrounds it. Then a long walk down broad, tree-lined avenues to the Alte Stadt, the old city—now much reconstructed,
following the destruction of World War II—and spent a couple of hours wandering the streets.
We sat down for dinner in a noisy Munich beer hall filled with raucous football fans—celebrating some event of which we seemed to be the only ones uninformed. Good, simple fare: tasty Wiener sausages accompanied by a sweet-and-sour cabbage salad and a German potato salad; and a quick stop for gelato on the way back to our hotel.
