Kaiserplatz and St. Ursula: The Quiet Tenant Called Lenin
Why is it significant?
In front of you rises St. Ursula, a big church of pale stone with a dome and a slender bell tower, looking as if someone had lifted it out of Renaissance Florence and set it down among the apartment blocks of Schwabing.
Key Facts
| Place | Kaiserplatz and St. Ursula: The Quiet Tenant Called Lenin |
|---|---|
| Address | Kaiserplatz 1, 80803 München, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.16150, 11.58030 |
| Part of Walk | Munich's Schwabing: Blue Riders, Bohemians and Banned Poets |
| Generated | Generated |
In front of you rises St. Ursula, a big church of pale stone with a dome and a slender bell tower, looking as if someone had lifted it out of Renaissance Florence and set it down among the apartment blocks of Schwabing.
It was built between 1894 and 1897 by the architect August Thiersch, and it tells you exactly when Schwabing stopped being a village. In 1890 the city of Munich swallowed it whole. Farmhouses gave way to five-storey blocks, the little old parish church was far too small, and the newcomers wanted a church that looked like a city. A whole new quarter grew up around this square in barely twenty years.
Among the newcomers, in 1900, was a quiet Russian with a high bald forehead and a reddish beard, living under false names because the Tsar's police were looking for him. He took rooms on Kaiserstraße, the street running off this square, and was later joined by his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya. To the neighbours he was simply a polite foreign tenant.
From Munich, with a few comrades, he edited the revolutionary newspaper Iskra, the Spark, printed on thin paper and smuggled into Russia. Its motto came from a poem by an exiled Decembrist: from a spark, a flame will be kindled. Here, at the end of 1901, he began to sign his articles with a new pseudonym: Lenin. And here he wrote the pamphlet What Is to Be Done?, the blueprint for a tightly disciplined party of professional revolutionaries. In 1902 he moved on to London. Fifteen years later that blueprint took power in Russia.
It is one of history's odd jokes. The bohemians in the taverns around him talked revolution loudly every night, and changed almost nothing. The quiet tenant on Kaiserstraße said very little... and changed the century. Now walk south-east towards Leopoldstraße, to the beginning of Franz-Joseph-Straße, where a very different writer set up home.