Wednesday, October 26, 2011

By the Monks' Place (Germany #11)

MUNICH--None in sight right now, but this city’s delightful native name, München, means "by the monks' place," a reference to the Benedictine order of monks who founded it.
I’m sitting at a small outdoor pizza café next to Hotel Carat, where I arrived from Nuremberg about 5:30 p.m.  It’s very pleasant here. All half dozen tables are full. The customers look like locals, perhaps working people from the neighborhood stopping off for a coffee or beer before going home.
A vivid yellow sun is beginning to drop below the tall rooftops. Tall straight poplar trees line this busy boulevard. Across the street is a park. Leaves are falling gently on the sidewalk. The middle of the walk is reserved as a bicycle lane and it is heavily used by mostly young backpackers, who might be students; they have the look--jeans, dark colors, casual. They seem to favor fancy leather shoes, or boots.
There’s heavy, purposeful pedestrian traffic, too. Some women push baby carriages, others walk dogs. Unchained bikes lean carelessly against boxwood shrubs that surround the ivy-choked tree trunks. I can detect no hint of poverty or fear. Not too surprising--the city is ranked among the top ten in the world for its quality of life and is a magnet for migration.
Munich’s economy is booming, driven by the information technology, biotechnology, and publishing sectors. And the crime rate is lower here than in Germany’s two larger cities, Berlin and Hamburg. Located on the elevated plains of Upper Bavaria on the River Isar north of the Bavarian Alps, Munich’s population is 1.35 million.
When Bavaria was reunited in 1506, Munich became its capital. In 1871, it became part of the modern German state. After WWI, the city was at the centre of much political unrest. In 1919, a Communist takeover was attempted. After that, Munich became a hotbed of extremist politics, among which the Nazis rose to prominence.
In 1923 Hitler and his supporters staged the Beer Hall Putsch here, an attempt to overthrow the Weimar Republic and seize power. The revolt failed, resulting in Hitler's arrest and the temporary crippling of the Nazi Party, which was virtually unknown outside Munich. But when Hitler took power in 1933, Munich again became a Nazi stronghold and the first concentration camp was built at Dachau, ten miles from the city.
It was during meetings in Munich that Britain and France tried to appease Hitler by letting him annex part of Czechoslovakia, leading up to WWII. Munich was also the base of the White Rose, a student resistance movement from June 1942 to February 1943, whose core members were arrested and executed. The city was heavily damaged by 71 allied air raids. After U.S. occupation in 1945, Munich was completely rebuilt.

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