German Autumn

Cold Day in Munich

Cold Day in Munich i A Sunday in early winter in Munich, with a cold sun. The long Prinzregentenstrasse, from which one of the unhappiest heroes of world literature once started his journey towards death in Venice, lies deserted in the frosty morning light. There is nothing in the world so deserted and lonely as an empty main street on a cold morning in a bombed city. The sun glitters on the gold of the angel of peace, the angel of peace which divides Prinzregentenstrasse into two monumental gradual slopes down to the bridge over the Isar and which Hitler should have been able to view from his house on Prinzregentenplatz. The gardens in the old ambassadorial palaces lie full of tumbled pillars. On the newly frozen ice of the sports arena a few early-morning Americans are skating, but diegrime Isar is green as usual and far down under the bridge some bombs have made a jigsaw puzzle out of a pond. The dirty Jeep lurches along the endless street. The severe-looking government building is there, between well-roasted facades of ruins; that is where 83 Minister-President Dr Hogner spends several hours a day playingwith the idea of letting Bavaria renounce its connection with the rest of Germany, according to a theory which says that Prussia has twice brought Bavaria to a state of ruin and should not be allowed the chance of doing so a third time. Bavaria, cold-bloodedly sending evacuees from Hamburg, Hannover and Essen back to the total impossibilities of their native cities, is of course a selfish, hardhearted and tough region, but that is not the whole truth. At least a quarter of the truth is that Bavaria has no feeling of belonging to the rest of Germany and that - in spite of a general belief to the contrary there was a not insignificant degree of passive resistance to Nazism in Bavaria. But not far from Prinzregentenstrasse lie the ruins of the Brown House. The first bloody Hitler putsch was played out in Munich in 1923 and the remains of Burgerbraukeller still testify that the history of Nazism has deep roots here. No doubt, says the humorous native of Munich, but perhaps that is because of the fohn in spring, that wind from the mountains which gives the whole of Munich an intolerable month-long headache; he points out too that after the Nazis had made it compulsory for pedestrians to bare their heads as they passed Feldherrenhalle, where the memorial to the sixteen victims of the putsch was set up, the density of the pedestrian traffic in that once so thronging part of Munich noticeably diminished. On Prinzregentenstrasse lies too die Export-Schau, accommodated in one of those sexless pseudoclassical Hitler buildings which do not look ancient until they are ruins. The Export Exhibition is a 84 sadistic arrangement where the city authorities, with a remarkable psychological insight and for an entry fee of one mark, display what Bavarian industry can achieve, that is, what Bavarian industry can export to America. There, bombed-out housewives can look at fine dream-like porcelain they will never eat off; big bottles stand full of real German beer which one can no longer drink; and lengths of splendid fabrics hang which one is forbidden to touch. For anyone poor and hungry this must feel like landing up in a disastrous dream, where everything is certainly unreal as in a dream, but where the dreamer is constantly aware of his own hunger and his own poverty. II A few minutes away from Prinzregentenstrasse is Konigsplatz, that desert built by the architects of Nazism, which more than most other examples of the type reveals the lack of style, the desolation and the patent sadism of the Nazi ideals. One enters through narrow openings in a broken triumphal arch or between the two elevated marble tombs of the sixteen Munich martyrs, where their zinc coffins, eight in each grave, lay buried until the Americans on their arrival moved them to an unknown alternative site. The former graves are flanked by two huge palaces, characteristic buildings of the Hitler period, that look like mausoleums in honour not of any particular death but of death itself as a principle. In one of these mausoleums the Munich Agreement of 1933 was signed. At that time the triumphal arch was still whole and it is easy to close one...