Munich's Schwabing: Blue Riders, Bohemians and Banned Poets

From the Academy of Fine Arts to the edge of the English Garden: the Simplicissimus tavern, Kandinsky's Blue Rider flat, Thomas Mann's first family home, Lenin's Munich years and a square named for a failed uprising

Munich · 11 stops · 25 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. 1. Academy of Fine Arts: Where Schwabing Began

   Akademiestraße 2, 80799 München, Germany

   Stand on Akademiestraße and let your eyes travel along the long, pale palace in front of you: the grand double staircase, the rows of arched windows, the figures along the roofline. Just to the south rises the triumphal arch of the Siegestor, the full stop at the end of royal Ludwigstraße. On that side of the arch, Munich bowed to its kings. On this side, it learned to misbehave.

   This is the Academy of Fine Arts. It was founded in 1808, in the first years of the Kingdom of Bavaria, and in 1886 it moved into this Renaissance-style palace designed by Gottfried von Neureuther. Students poured in from all over Europe and even from America, and most of them were broke. They could not afford the elegant flats of the old town, so they rented attics and studios in the fields to the north... in a farming village called Schwabing. Within a generation, that village was the most famous artists' quarter in Germany.

   Picture who climbed those steps around 1900. A Russian in his thirties called Wassily Kandinsky, who had turned his back on a career in law to paint, joined the class of the painter Franz von Stuck. In the very same class sat a Swiss music teacher's son, a fine violinist himself, named Paul Klee. Franz Marc, a Munich boy, studied here too. And a few years later came a student born in Greece to Italian parents, Giorgio de Chirico, who fell under the spell of the brooding, dreamlike paintings of Arnold Böcklin that he saw in Munich.

   Glance back at the Siegestor before you go. It was built to honour the Bavarian army, wrecked by bombs in the Second World War, and restored with a new inscription: dedicated to victory, destroyed by war, urging peace. It is a fitting gate for this walk, which belongs to people who preferred pens, paintbrushes and very long evenings to parades.

   People used to say that Schwabing was not really a place at all... it was a state of mind. Keep that sentence in your pocket. Now walk west along Akademiestraße and turn left into Türkenstraße, where the artists went to drink.

2. 2. Alter Simpl: The Bulldog's Tavern

   Türkenstraße 57, 80799 München, Germany

   Find the old corner tavern on Türkenstraße with its dark wood and its painted sign. The name over the door, Alter Simpl, is short for Simplicissimus... and before it was a tavern, Simplicissimus was the most dangerous magazine in Germany.

   In 1896 a young publisher, Albert Langen, launched a satirical weekly here in Munich and named it after the rogue hero of a seventeenth-century novel. Its emblem was a red bulldog with bared teeth, drawn by Thomas Theodor Heine, and it bit everyone: the Kaiser, the generals, the priests, stiff Prussian officers and comfortable Bavarian burghers. A young Thomas Mann even worked in its editorial office for a while, before Buddenbrooks made him famous.

   In 1898 Kaiser Wilhelm the Second made a grand journey to the Holy Land, and the magazine answered with a mocking poem and a cartoon. The poem was by the playwright Frank Wedekind, the drawing by Heine. Both men were convicted of insulting the monarch and spent months locked up, and Langen had to flee abroad for several years. Sales, of course, shot up. In the Kaiser's Germany nothing sold satire quite like a prison sentence.

   In 1903 a landlady called Kathi Kobus opened this tavern and borrowed the magazine's famous name. It became the living room of Schwabing's bohemia, and the story goes that more than one painter settled his bill with a picture. From 1909 a former sailor who wrote under the name Joachim Ringelnatz worked here as the house poet, reciting his strange, funny, melancholy verses to the guests night after night. The anarchist poet Erich Mühsam was a regular at the tables.

   Imagine the smoke, the clatter of beer mugs, a poem shouted over the noise, and a policeman pretending not to listen. The magazine is long gone, but the name has survived two world wars. Now head north through the quiet streets of Maxvorstadt and across Georgenstraße, about ten minutes on foot, to a market square named after an empress.

3. 3. Elisabethmarkt and the Countess of Wahnmoching

   Elisabethplatz, 80796 München, Germany

   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.

4. 4. Ainmillerstraße 36: Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider

   Ainmillerstraße 36, 80801 München, Germany

   Stop in front of number 36, a solid, respectable apartment house of the kind built all over Schwabing around 1900. Nothing about it shouts revolution. And yet, from around 1908 until the summer of 1914, a flat in this house was one of the engine rooms of modern art.

   Wassily Kandinsky lived here with the painter Gabriele Münter, his partner and former student. They were not married... he still had a wife back in Russia, which was quite enough to set Munich's tongues wagging. In the country town of Murnau, where Münter bought a house in 1909, the two of them painted the Bavarian hills in blazing, unnatural colours, and Kandinsky began to let the objects in his pictures dissolve altogether.

   In 1911 the local artists' association rejected one of his enormous canvases for its winter show. So Kandinsky and his friend Franz Marc walked out and organised their own exhibition, which opened that December at Thannhauser's gallery in the city centre. They called themselves Der Blaue Reiter, the Blue Rider. Years later Kandinsky explained the name with a shrug: they both loved blue, Marc loved horses, and he loved riders. Their almanac of 1912 put children's drawings, Bavarian paintings on glass, art from Africa and Oceania and new music by Arnold Schoenberg side by side.

   Then came August 1914. As a Russian citizen, Kandinsky had to leave Germany within weeks. Marc and his friend August Macke went to war and never came back. Münter was left with a mountain of paintings. Through the Nazi years, when this art was branded degenerate, she kept them hidden in her house at Murnau... and in 1957, on her eightieth birthday, she gave them to the city's Lenbachhaus.

   A few doors along, at number 32, Paul Klee lived for many years, and near the end of the First World War the poet Rainer Maria Rilke rented rooms in this same quiet street. Now carry on north to Kaiserplatz and its tall church tower.

5. 5. Kaiserplatz and St. Ursula: The Quiet Tenant Called Lenin

   Kaiserplatz 1, 80803 München, Germany

   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.

6. 6. Franz-Joseph-Straße: Thomas Mann Starts a Family

   Franz-Joseph-Straße 2, 80801 München, Germany

   Stand at the beginning of Franz-Joseph-Straße, just off the traffic of Leopoldstraße, where tall apartment houses from around 1900 line up like well-dressed burghers waiting for a tram.

   In 1905 a twenty-nine-year-old writer from Lübeck, Thomas Mann, married Katia Pringsheim, the clever daughter of one of the richest families in Munich, and the young couple moved into a flat here at number 2. Mann already had a famous novel behind him: Buddenbrooks, published in 1901, the saga of a merchant family's decline. Now he was trying to become a respectable family man... which, for a writer who had spent years in Schwabing's rented rooms, was its own kind of adventure.

   And the family came quickly. Erika was born in 1905, Klaus in 1906, Golo in 1909... three children who would grow up to be actors, novelists and historians in their own right. Mann worked at his desk every morning with the discipline of a bank clerk, and here he wrote Royal Highness, published in 1909, a fairy tale about a lonely prince who marries a fabulously rich heiress. Nobody in Munich missed the parallel.

   Mann's love for this city was complicated. In 1902 he had published a story, Gladius Dei, that opens with two words every Münchner knows: München leuchtete... Munich was shining. Then the story turns, and a gaunt young man in a dark hooded cloak rages against the luxury and the art shops of the city. The shining city and the dark visitor... read today, it feels almost like a warning.

   In 1910 the growing family moved on, and in 1914 into a villa by the Isar. In 1929 Mann received the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1933, abroad on a lecture tour, he was warned not to come home, and he never lived in Munich again. Now step back onto Leopoldstraße, where a giant white figure is striding along the boulevard.

7. 7. Leopoldstraße: The Boulevard and the Walking Man

   Leopoldstraße 36, 80802 München, Germany

   Look up at the white giant striding along the pavement: a faceless man as tall as a five-storey house, caught in mid-step and going nowhere.

   This is the Walking Man by the American artist Jonathan Borofsky, set up in 1995 outside the headquarters of a big insurance company. Borofsky is better known for his Hammering Men, giant dark silhouettes that hammer away in Frankfurt, Seattle and other cities; this one, for a change, simply walks. It is around seventeen metres tall, and people in Munich have argued ever since whether it is an insult to the boulevard or its perfect symbol: always on the move, never quite arriving.

   Leopoldstraße was Schwabing's catwalk. Lined with poplars, cafés and terraces, it was where the bohemians of 1900 strolled, and where, after the Second World War, a new generation came to see and be seen: students, jazz fans, painters, film people, and tourists hoping to spot a real live artist. In the 1960s Schwabing was one of the most fashionable addresses in West Germany, and this boulevard was its stage.

   On a warm June night in 1962, the stage turned into a battlefield. Police moved against a few young street musicians playing late on the pavement, the crowd took the musicians' side, and for several nights thousands of young people and the police clashed in these streets. The Schwabinger Krawalle, the Schwabing riots, shocked the city. Afterwards Munich's police began to develop a calmer way of handling crowds, built on talking first, which became known as the Munich line.

   Some historians see those nights as an early rehearsal for the student revolt of 1968. Others remember a handful of guitar players and a summer that got out of hand. Probably both are true. Now leave the boulevard and head east into the quiet side streets, to a little villa that its neighbours refused to let die.

8. 8. Seidlvilla: The House the Neighbours Saved

   Nikolaiplatz 1b, 80802 München, Germany

   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.

9. 9. Münchner Freiheit: A Square Named for a Failed Uprising

   Münchner Freiheit, 80802 München, Germany

   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.

10. 10. Wedekindplatz: The Playwright Who Scandalised Munich

    Wedekindplatz, 80802 München, Germany

    Step into the small square behind Münchner Freiheit, ringed by old houses and bars, where the streets still follow the crooked lines of the farming village Schwabing once was.

    The square is named after Frank Wedekind, the most notorious playwright in Munich around 1900. He had a restless life behind him: born in Hanover, raised in a castle in Switzerland, and for a while writing advertising copy for the Maggi soup company. His play Spring Awakening, written in 1891, shows teenagers destroyed by adults who refuse to tell them anything about sex. It was so shocking that it waited fifteen years for its first performance, in Berlin in 1906. His Lulu plays, about a woman who wrecks every man who tries to possess her, caused scandal after scandal.

    Wedekind was a performer too. In 1901 he joined the Elf Scharfrichter, the Eleven Executioners, one of the very first cabarets in Germany, in a small hall on Türkenstraße. There he stood with his guitar and sang his own ballads, harsh, funny and grim, in a flat, unsettling voice. Audiences were half appalled, half enchanted, and his spell behind bars for the Simplicissimus poem had only made him more famous.

    When Wedekind died in March 1918, a young student called Bertolt Brecht, who had admired him in Munich's theatres and taverns, wrote a moving farewell. Much of Brecht's own style... the ballads, the guitar, the cold, mocking eye... grew out of what he learned from Wedekind. Brecht studied in Munich in those years, and in 1922 his first play to reach the stage, Drums in the Night, opened at the Munich Kammerspiele.

    So in a way, the whole of twentieth-century political theatre has a grandfather on this little square. Look around at the bars that fill it on warm nights. The scandal has moved on, but the tradition of the late, loud, slightly dangerous evening has not. Now follow Feilitzschstraße east towards the edge of the English Garden, for the last stop.

11. 11. Biederstein: Schwabing's Back Door to the English Garden

    Biedersteiner Straße, 80802 München, Germany

    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.