Wittelsbacherplatz: Ruins, Rubble and Reckoning
Why is it significant?
Step into the calm square with the bronze horseman in the middle, framed by stately pale palaces. The rider is the Elector Maximilian the First, cast to a design by the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen and set up in 1839.
Key Facts
| Place | Wittelsbacherplatz: Ruins, Rubble and Reckoning |
|---|---|
| Address | Wittelsbacherplatz, 80333 München, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.14370, 11.57620 |
| Part of Walk | Munich 1918-1945: The Nazi Era, Its Victims and the White Rose |
| Generated | Generated |
Step into the calm square with the bronze horseman in the middle, framed by stately pale palaces. The rider is the Elector Maximilian the First, cast to a design by the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen and set up in 1839. Everything around you looks as if it has stood here undisturbed for two centuries. It has not.
Munich was hit by more than seventy air raids during the Second World War. Thousands of people were killed, and by 1945 most of the old town lay in ruins. The palaces around this square were burned-out shells. What you see is a reconstruction, and that was a choice. Many German cities rebuilt in a modern style after the war. Munich decided to restore its historic streets and facades, so that the city would look like itself again.
And the rubble had to go somewhere. Women and men cleared it brick by brick, the famous Trümmerfrauen, and much of it was carted north of the city and piled up into hills. Those hills, landscaped and planted, later became the park of the 1972 Olympic Games. When you see people sledging or watching a concert there, they are sitting on the ruins of the old city.
Look around at the palaces on the square. After the war the Siemens company moved its headquarters from divided Berlin to Munich, and this square became its address. During the war Siemens, like many German companies, had used forced labourers and concentration camp prisoners, including women from the camp at Ravensbrück. Around the year 2000, Siemens joined other German firms in founding a fund to compensate surviving forced labourers. It came late, decades late, but it came.
That is the uncomfortable thing about this square. The beauty is real, and the reckoning behind it is real too, and neither cancels the other. Now leave the square to the north-east and walk up Ludwigstraße, the grand avenue, to the long building with four seated stone figures on its front steps.