Die beste Bildung

I didn’t know much about the Kingdom of Bavaria before this trip to Munich. To be exact, I knew two things: (1) Frederick the Great sent the Prussian Army to an area few kilometres away fromVienna during the War of Austrian Succession, so as to save Bavaria from the wrath of the Austrian army; and (2) The crazy King Ludwig II built the castle which was an important inspiration for Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. Needless to say, I had no idea how powerful the Wittelsbach dynasty of Bavaria once was, and was very surprised by the magnificence of both Schloss Nymphemberg and Schloss Schleißheim. They were of course no match for the Habsburgs’ Schloss Schönbrunn and the Bourbons’ Château de Fontainbleau (two palaces I visited with my parents seven years ago), but still a lot more impressive than what I expected them to be. So on Monday, I decided to go with Keith to one last palace in Munich – that being the Residenz, located right in city centre, next door to the Bayerische Nationaltheater.

We started our tour in the Cuvilliés-Theater, built by Elector Maximilian III in the 1750s and used as the main venue for opera and theatre performances in the city before there was a Bayerische Nationaltheater. It was considerably smaller than the Nationaltheater, but the architecture was no less remarkable. Unlike the Nationaltheater, which impresses the visitor by its enormous grandeur, Cuvilliés-Theater is interesting because the Rococo-style decorations are extremely intricate and elaborate. Each of the carvings that graced the pillars and balconies was uniquely designed, representing themes from classical mythology and the four seasons. Note that all the drapery that you see in the picture below are not velvet. They were actually carved meticulously out of wood, and the carpentry is so well done that I didn’t notice the material until I heard a tour guide pointing it out to our group. The theatre is actually still used for performances nowadays – if I had found out earlier, I would definitely be looking for tickets!

Our next stop was the Schatzkammer (Treasure Chamber). True to its name, we had to walk through a pair of half-a-metre-thick metal doors to enter and see the crown jewelry, porcelain and metalware that was on display. In addition former possessions of the Wittelsbach family, there also were foreign artifacts such as French tableware, English crowns and Persian carpets. The brilliance of all those shimmering gemstones and reflective material got a little bit overwhelming towards the end, but I must say this was very eye-opening.

Finally we saw the former palace itself, which I must say was more impressive than Nymphenburg and Schleißheim put together. My favourite part was the Antiquarium, simply because I have seen nothing like it in comparable palaces. Inside this 66-m long hall were numerous busts of figures from both classical mythology and history, created either in Greco-Roman times or during the Renaissance. I asked a member of the palace staff to take a photo of the two of us in the hall, and he actually made everybody else move out of the way so that we would be the only ones in the picture. It’s a pity that he wasn’t a very good photographer.

A few rooms in the palace had been destroyed by Allied bombing during WWII, and have since been converted into exhibition rooms for smaller imperial household items. A few of them housed the Wittelsbach Chinese and Japanese porcelain collection, which is one of the largest of its kind. I was very amused to read that due to language barriers the Wittelsbach took many liberties in interpreting Chinese art - Guanyin statues were taken as statues of the Virgin Mary, and more strangely, Chinese guardian lions were actually mistaken as dogs.

As we left the palace through the nearby Hofgarten (Court Garden), we encountered an extremely talented street musician called Roman Setschko playing Vivaldi’s Winter on the Knopfakkordeon (chromatic button accordion). From afar it looked like a normal accordion, but instead of a keyboard it had many buttons, resulting in a greater range and allowing more notes to be played at a time. I had never seen such an instrument before, and the fact that this deceptively simple instrument could play such complex melodies just blew me away.

Before meeting up with the rest of the group at a restaurant called Da Claudio near the Ludwig-Maximillian Universität for a “Pizza Montag” dinner (which has become quite a ritual), we took a walk in the Englischer Garten. I had been there with Professor Jennings on the first week, and on that occasion both Sarah and I drank a little too quickly in the Biergarten there – so we were feeling rather tipsy in the presence of a professor. In spite of that, I was still very eager for a second visit. The Englischer Garten is one of the world’s largest urban parks, beating even NYC’s Central Park in terms of area, and it is very, very beautiful.

The Chinesischer Turm (Chinese Tower, which doesn’t really look that Chinese) was closed, so we couldn’t go up and get a view of the whole park, but we had a good time all the same. I could live in Munich for a year just for the sake of this park, and I believe that if you were there in person, you would agree too.