Seidlvilla: The House the Neighbours Saved

Why is it significant?

Here on Nikolaiplatz, set back in its own patch of garden, stands a handsome villa from the early 1900s, with tall windows and a steep roof that seems to belong in a country town rather than in the middle of a city.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Here on Nikolaiplatz, set back in its own patch of garden, stands a handsome villa from the early 1900s, with tall windows and a steep roof that seems to belong in a country town rather than in the middle of a city.

The Seidlvilla was built in 1905, in the years when villas with gardens still stood between the new apartment blocks of Schwabing. Most of them did not survive the century. Bombs took some; money took many more. By the 1970s Schwabing's fame had made its land extremely valuable, and old houses were falling to make room for offices and expensive flats.

This villa was meant to go the same way. Instead, people from the neighbourhood organised, protested and kept on protesting, until the city stepped in and the house was saved. After a long restoration it reopened as a cultural centre run by an association of local residents, with readings, concerts, exhibitions and talks. In a district famous for its artists, the neighbours fought to keep one place where culture was still made by the people next door.

And that is the great paradox of Schwabing. The poets came because it was cheap. The poets made it famous. And the fame made it expensive, until the poets could no longer afford to live here. Almost every generation since 1910 has announced that the real Schwabing is dead, and that only people looking for it are left. Even Erich Mühsam, who had known the old bohemia from the inside, wrote his memoirs of it in the 1920s as if he were composing its obituary.

Yet the readings go on in this house. On almost any evening, somewhere inside, a writer may be trying out a new story on a row of neighbours on folding chairs... which is exactly how Schwabing began. Now walk north to the big, busy square where Leopoldstraße opens out: the Münchner Freiheit.