Biederstein: Schwabing's Back Door to the English Garden
Why is it significant?
Here the city simply stops. Past the last houses of Schwabing, the meadows and old trees of the northern English Garden roll away to the east, and the cold, quick water of a canal fed by the river Isar slides along its edge. For the bohemians of 1900 this was the back door of their world.
Key Facts
| Place | Biederstein: Schwabing's Back Door to the English Garden |
|---|---|
| Address | Biedersteiner Straße, 80802 München, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.16400, 11.59400 |
| Part of Walk | Munich's Schwabing: Blue Riders, Bohemians and Banned Poets |
| Generated | Generated |
Here the city simply stops. Past the last houses of Schwabing, the meadows and old trees of the northern English Garden roll away to the east, and the cold, quick water of a canal fed by the river Isar slides along its edge.
For the bohemians of 1900 this was the back door of their world. They came out here to walk, to argue, to recover from the night before. The northern part of the park, far quieter than the famous south with its tower and its little temple, was where Schwabing went to breathe.
And in the spring of 1919, the poets briefly ruled Bavaria. After the revolution that ended the monarchy, a short-lived council republic was proclaimed in Munich, and among its leaders were writers from these very streets: the playwright Ernst Toller, the anarchist poet Erich Mühsam, the philosopher Gustav Landauer. It lasted only weeks. Government troops and Freikorps units crushed it at the beginning of May. Landauer was murdered, and Toller and Mühsam were sent to prison for years. Toller wrote some of his best-known plays in his cell, and they were performed in theatres across Germany while their author stayed locked up.
Fourteen years later, the darkness came back for good. Mühsam was murdered in the Oranienburg concentration camp in 1934. Thomas Mann and Ernst Toller went into exile; the pictures of the Blue Rider were mocked as degenerate. Schwabing's bohemia was scattered across the world, and Munich needed decades to learn to be proud of it again.
Yet look at what survived: a tavern named after a magazine, a street where the Blue Rider was born, a villa saved by its neighbours, a square named after a failed act of courage. Remember the sentence you put in your pocket at the Academy? Schwabing was never just a place... it was a state of mind, and you have just walked right through it. The English Garden is in front of you. Go on, walk in.