Destination
Germany......
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Munich:
Munich was an artistic city, with both an academic and anti-intellectual tradition, princely painters and revolutionaries. Lenbach and Stuck built palatial villas in the best parts of town; artists were encouraged to participate in the civic life of the city. But the failures and the dissidents, the residents of ivory towers and subversives all lived in Schwabing. "Wahnmoching" was the name Countess Reventlov - an intimate of the Schwabing crowd - gave to the village which was slowly encroaching on the city. The image of Schwabing as a "Bohemia" - a place of laid-back living for talented misfits who spend most of their time working on the decorations for an unend|ing series of trendy parties in their lofty garrets - is of course an idea which many people who live nowhere near the place find hard to shake.
There is a grain of truth to the concept of Bohemian Schwabing, as there is to all clichés. Yes, many artists, painters, writers, filmmakers, and their associated advertising people, journalists, publishers, and gallery-owners do indeed live in Schwabing. But for the out-of-towner who strolls the streets expecting to feel something of all this, disappointment is the reward. These are bare, fairly long big city streets. When Schwabing and the surrounding fields were still in a state for urban development, art nouveau was in style, a style which attempted to reconcile art and artisanship with industrial forms of production.
Property developers, whose dream was to create an entirely new city neighbourhood out of think air, put themselves in the hands of art nouveau architects. These architects created a very specific, unmistakable style of building for the large apartment blocks which were erected one next to the other. At first, the coarse, rough rendering of the exteriors made the place look a bit like Salzburg, before it was decided to paint the façades in pastel tones, very light yellows, blues, pinks: "charmeuse colours" would be an apt description for the buildings in Schwabing. They are relatively tall, five floors and more being the rule, and for buildings dating from before the First World War the windows are remarkably small. This latter feature was probably meant to lend the buildings something of the Biedermeier, the farm, but, instead, they come across more as a little cramped, asthmatic even: tiny witch's-house windows in high walls which, because of their pastel colours, seem rather fragile, almost as if the houses are unable to breathe. Their floors are tiled like oldfashioned butchers' shops, the stairways are of a jaundiced wood, like that found in smalltown police stations throughout Germany. Nonetheless, the residents find these rows of very similiar streets full of a peculiar individuality. More than streets, they are institutions. When a Schwabinger mentions "Elisabeth Strasse" he is not simply speaking of an address in one of the city's more desirable neighbourhoods, he is also deliberately connoting everything that that name brings with it, everything he knows is hidden behind the magic of the name "Elisabeth Strasse". For an out-of-towner, the description of these streets in Schwabing arouses an incredible sense of expectation, yet when he then finds nothing that meets such expectations he in no way feels disappointed, he feels guilty: perhaps he has no business being in such a special place as Elisabeth Strasse, he's obviously one of the uninitiated, proof positive that all the beauty of the area should indeed be hidden from those who don't live here; they just can't appreciate it. Once in a while you do come across one of the really old-fashioned beerhalls, raw, cold, undecorated, a mixture of small-farm podginess and proletarian ugliness, attractive, in other words, for your easel-toting painting types. It is here that the spirit of Schwabing can still be found in residence, a spirit which otherwise is merely blown through the bare streets by the föhn. It is here that this spirit can still sit around, in a place which is itself a masterstroke of contradiction: completely unmoving and at the same time rebellious. So much so, that for those capable of letting themselves drown in concentration they may very well hear again, above the din of clanging steins, the buzz of swarming flies.
Schwabing:
The Spirit of Bohemia
Schwabing sounds wide and open, like a small farm. The smell of the pig pen is in this word, dark hallways odorous of milk, swarms of flies, a dilapidated outhouse in a farmyard surrounded by mud, a neg|lected, snarling dog on a rattling chain leash; the word reeks of noodle soup, stale beer, and fat cigars. Many of the places which used to be villages around Munich but have long since been incorporated into the city end in -ing." In this part of the world, however, an -ing" has no pleasant Chinese ring to it, nor anything elegant as in the "ding-ding" of toasting champagne glasses. No, it carries more the sound of a tinny ting-a-ling bell that one would encounter at a railroad station in a one-train-a-day town or an old one-room schoolhouse. The area around Munich is flat, lacking all contour, until the lakes and mountains finally begin. Such planes afford the villages an open and formless aspect. The houses grow out of the ground like the sugar beet that surrounds them, the wind whistling between buildings. Schwabing itself is not a strictly defined, boundaried thing, but rather a lose amalgamation absent of any structure or town wall, a collection of buildings which doesn't really fit in with the city itself but is closely connected with it in its existence as a provider of all sorts of services.
One can still see where Schwabing came from. The Schwabing church is still there, flanked by a couple of smaller buildings, which today look wonderfully toy-like standing in the heart of a great city, but which must have seemed shabby and dismal at the time they were built. How small Munich still was at the turn of the last century, the farmland began just outside the Siegestor. In front of the gates of this city, first raised to royal status during the reign of King Ludwig I, it was only the broad width of the streets, cut through the sugar beet and potato fields, which suggested a new part of town would arise here, spread out between the hamlet of Schwabing and the Munich city limit. Schwabing was already enjoying a questionable reputation, as the little houses in the village had a large number of Bohemian occupants, penniless and unable to find cheap digs in the constrained confines of the city.
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