Münchner Freiheit: A Square Named for a Failed Uprising
Why is it significant?
Here Leopoldstraße opens into a wide, busy square, with a modern canopy over the tram and bus stops, cafés on the corners and the U-Bahn rumbling somewhere under your feet. The name sounds like a slogan: Munich Freedom. In fact it is a memorial. Until 1946 this was Feilitzschplatz.
Key Facts
| Place | Münchner Freiheit: A Square Named for a Failed Uprising |
|---|---|
| Address | Münchner Freiheit, 80802 München, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.16200, 11.58650 |
| Part of Walk | Munich's Schwabing: Blue Riders, Bohemians and Banned Poets |
| Generated | Generated |
Here Leopoldstraße opens into a wide, busy square, with a modern canopy over the tram and bus stops, cafés on the corners and the U-Bahn rumbling somewhere under your feet.
The name sounds like a slogan: Munich Freedom. In fact it is a memorial. Until 1946 this was Feilitzschplatz. It was renamed after the Freiheitsaktion Bayern, the Bavarian Freedom Action, a group that in the very last days of the war tried to end the fighting before the city was destroyed.
On the night of 27 to 28 April 1945, with the American army close, men around Captain Rupprecht Gerngroß seized radio transmitters near Munich and broadcast a call to rise up against the Nazi regime and to surrender. In many towns people hung out white flags. But the uprising collapsed within hours, and the regime struck back savagely: in Munich and in towns across Upper Bavaria, people who had answered the call were shot or hanged. Two days later, American troops entered the city.
So the name of this noisy square is a quiet reminder that courage does not always win, and is worth remembering anyway. After the war Schwabing's cafés filled up again, and the square became the gateway to its nightlife. Look for the bronze figure of a man sitting at a café table: the actor Helmut Fischer, who played Monaco Franze, the charming, idle Munich detective of Helmut Dietl's television series of 1983.
Dietl's scripts, sharp, funny and full of Munich dialect, are as much a portrait of Schwabing as any novel, and his Monaco Franze, the eternal gentleman who never quite grows up, is a Schwabing type you may still spot on these terraces. Dietl went on, in 1986, to make Kir Royal, a savage comedy about Munich high society and the gossip columnist who feeds on it. Now cross the square to the east, towards the little Wedekindplatz in the old heart of the village.