Alter Simpl: The Bulldog's Tavern

Why is it significant?

Find the old corner tavern on Türkenstraße with its dark wood and its painted sign. The name over the door, Alter Simpl, is short for Simplicissimus... and before it was a tavern, Simplicissimus was the most dangerous magazine in Germany.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Find the old corner tavern on Türkenstraße with its dark wood and its painted sign. The name over the door, Alter Simpl, is short for Simplicissimus... and before it was a tavern, Simplicissimus was the most dangerous magazine in Germany.

In 1896 a young publisher, Albert Langen, launched a satirical weekly here in Munich and named it after the rogue hero of a seventeenth-century novel. Its emblem was a red bulldog with bared teeth, drawn by Thomas Theodor Heine, and it bit everyone: the Kaiser, the generals, the priests, stiff Prussian officers and comfortable Bavarian burghers. A young Thomas Mann even worked in its editorial office for a while, before Buddenbrooks made him famous.

In 1898 Kaiser Wilhelm the Second made a grand journey to the Holy Land, and the magazine answered with a mocking poem and a cartoon. The poem was by the playwright Frank Wedekind, the drawing by Heine. Both men were convicted of insulting the monarch and spent months locked up, and Langen had to flee abroad for several years. Sales, of course, shot up. In the Kaiser's Germany nothing sold satire quite like a prison sentence.

In 1903 a landlady called Kathi Kobus opened this tavern and borrowed the magazine's famous name. It became the living room of Schwabing's bohemia, and the story goes that more than one painter settled his bill with a picture. From 1909 a former sailor who wrote under the name Joachim Ringelnatz worked here as the house poet, reciting his strange, funny, melancholy verses to the guests night after night. The anarchist poet Erich Mühsam was a regular at the tables.

Imagine the smoke, the clatter of beer mugs, a poem shouted over the noise, and a policeman pretending not to listen. The magazine is long gone, but the name has survived two world wars. Now head north through the quiet streets of Maxvorstadt and across Georgenstraße, about ten minutes on foot, to a market square named after an empress.