Elisabethmarkt and the Countess of Wahnmoching
Why is it significant?
Follow your nose into the little square of market stalls and wooden huts: cheese, flowers, bread, sausages, and regulars who look as if they have bought their radishes from the same stall for forty years.
Key Facts
| Place | Elisabethmarkt and the Countess of Wahnmoching |
|---|---|
| Address | Elisabethplatz, 80796 München, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.15630, 11.57460 |
| Part of Walk | Munich's Schwabing: Blue Riders, Bohemians and Banned Poets |
| Generated | Generated |
Follow your nose into the little square of market stalls and wooden huts: cheese, flowers, bread, sausages, and regulars who look as if they have bought their radishes from the same stall for forty years.
The Elisabethmarkt is one of Munich's permanent food markets, the everyday cousin of the famous Viktualienmarkt, and it has stood on this square since the early twentieth century. The square is named after Elisabeth, the Bavarian princess born in Munich in 1837 who became Empress of Austria... the Sisi of the films. When the market came, Schwabing had only just been swallowed by the growing city, and the people in its tall new apartment blocks needed somewhere to shop.
Few of those people were poorer, or more cheerful about it, than Countess Franziska zu Reventlow. She had broken with her aristocratic family in Husum, on the North Sea, and came to Munich in 1893 to become a painter. She ended up living on translations, odd jobs and, frankly, on charm. In 1897 she had a son, Rolf, and refused to name his father. In a Catholic city with strict ideas about women, she lived exactly as she pleased.
Her revenge on Schwabing was literature. With her friend Franz Hessel she put out a little satirical paper mocking the solemn circle around the poet Stefan George and the self-styled Cosmics, who dreamed of ancient pagan rites in Munich drawing rooms. And in her novel of 1913, Mr. Dame's Notes, she gave the district a new name: Wahnmoching... roughly, Madness-ville. Everyone in town recognised everyone in the book.
She left Munich in 1910 for the shores of Lake Maggiore and died there in 1918, only forty-seven years old. But her nickname outlived her, and so did the legend she helped to write. Now walk a couple of blocks north-east to Ainmillerstraße, where a painter and his partner were about to change the history of art.