Cobble and Other Stones

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I first visited Munich in 1970 and have been back a few times since.  But I’ve seldom really concentrated on the city itself.  Typically, I’ve stayed in the vicinity and focused on Austria or the Bavarian Alps.  Today, though, with our friends from the cruise ship and with another couple, friends of our friends whom we’ve met previously and who are joining us for the rest of this trip, we latched onto a walking tour of central Munich, old Munich.  It was superb.  The “guide” was a young American fellow who had come over in 2016 to do a master’s degree in German cultural history (presumably at the University of Munich).  He finished the degree in 2018, but has stayed on here.  I could tell that his German is quite good, and his knowledge of local history and culture is excellent.  I learned a lot about aspects of the city that I would not have noticed on my own.

We started off in the remarkable Marienplatz, before the impressive Neues Rathaus (the New City Hall) and beside the Altes Rathaus (the Old City Hall).  We watched the famous Glockenspiel, of course, and also visited the nearby Petruskirche (the Church of St. Peter), where, to our delight, not only the organ but an orchestra and a full choir were beautifully accompanying a mass for Pentecost Monday or Whit Monday — yesterday, Sunday, having been Whitsun or Whitsunday or Whit Sunday (German Pfingsten), which is to say Pentecost itself.  (The English term whit seems to have come from the white clothing worn by those who were baptized on the holiday, which was formerly one of the three chief baptismal “seasons” of the ecclesiastical year.)

The Petruskirche, which is the oldest parish church in Munich, sits atop a small hill known as the Petersbergl.  It’s the highest point in the city, and required an exhausting ascent of perhaps three feet from the Marienplatz.  The first church built on the site was founded in the year 1158. The church as it exists today, however, substantially dates — despite serious bomb damage during the Second World War that required major repairs — to the second half of the thirteenth century, and specifically to work undertaken following a major city fire that occurred in 1327.

We walked through the old cattle market, the Rinderplatz, where a remnant of the medieval city wall still stands, and through the open food market, formerly a farmers’ market, known as the Viktualienmarkt.  We also visited the famous Hofbräuhaus, probably the most renowned beer tavern in the world.  (I still remember a song from German class in high school:  “In München steht ein Hofbräuhaus!  Eins, zwei, g’suffa!”)  I’m afraid that the Hofbräuhaus is pretty much wasted on me, alas, although I enjoyed the visit.  I liked the inscription over one of the interior arches:  Durst ist schlimmer als Heimweh (“Thirst is more terrible than homesickness”).  Given my paternal family’s history and my own enjoyment of cold beverages (particularly spring water and chocolate milk), who knows what would have happened if I weren’t a Latter-day Saint?  I might have spent much of my life under a bridge, relaxing with a bottle in a brown paper bag.

I wasn’t particularly happy, though, to see a Hard Rock Cafe directly across the street from the Hofbräuhaus.  It painfully reminded me of Salzburg, where a McDonald’s sits more or less directly — and rather blasphemously — across the narrow little alley from Mozart’s Geburtshaus, his birthplace.  The painful memory, though, comes from the fact that I once ate there, many years ago.  I had spoken to a Church Jugendtagung, a youth conference for college-age Latter-day Saints from Switzerland and Austria and Bavaria, there in Salzburg.  Food was provided for participants.  But I ended up talking with a constant stream of attendees after my remarks and, by the time those conversations had come to a close, all of the food was gone.  So my wife and I went out in quest of a bite to eat, but no restaurants remained open by that hour.  Except McDonalds.  It seemed a sacrilege but, as we might say, hunger is more terrible than homesickness.  So we went in, and we ate.

The tour continued around to the Residenz, one of the former palaces of the long-time Bavarian royal family, and the late-seventeenth-century Theatine Church of St. Cajetan, which is so Italianate in style that some use it to illustrate their description of Munich as “the northernmost city of Italy.”

With our friends, we eventually went back to the Viktualienmarkt for lunch.  I had Wienerschnitzel with German potato salad, washed down with Apfelschorle (carbonated apple juice).  My wife ordered a sausage plate with sauerkraut, and we shared.  I was in bliss.  Pure Alpine German-ness!  (It’s been a while.)  My wife and I later returned on our own to the Petruskirche, where we bought a simple guidebook and spent a fair amount of time walking around it and looking at the details of its sculptures and paintings and its dramatic high altar.

I have a much better feel for the heart of Munich now than I ever have before, and I found the city unexpectedly attractive.  Of course, the fact that it was a beautiful day certainly didn’t hurt much.

By the way, I noticed lots and lots of shirts with a Rolling Stones theme out and about in the city today.  More than random chance should dictate.  Suspicious, I just now checked their website.  It turns out that they’re on a sixtieth-anniversary tour, and that they played in Munich’s Olympic Stadium just last night.  Amazing that they’re still around.  At my begging, my remarkably kind brother took me and at least one friend — I can’t even remember now who it was — to hear the Stones in Long Beach in 1965.  (I was several years away from being able to drive myself.)  The opening acts were Paul Revere and the Raiders and, much more to my liking, the Byrds.  Man, I’m old!  But Mick Jagger and Keith Richards are even older!  I remember girls around me screaming so loudly that we could scarcely hear the music.  I recall thinking how badly that much screaming must hurt, and wondering why they had even bothered to come.  At least once, the police had to restrain a girl who had dropped down from behind onto the stage and who was running toward Charlie Watts.

Incidentally, too, walking around the city has reminded me of something:  I respectfully request that nobody erect an open-air bronze statue of me after my demise.  Nothing seems less dignified to me than being memorialized as a public roost and restroom for pigeons.

Posted from Munich, Germany