Munich

• 1. Introduction

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  Munich draws over six million visitors to a single festival every autumn, when Oktoberfest spreads across 85 acres of a meadow called Theresienwiese. The beer poured there comes from just six breweries, and the whole tradition traces back to a wedding in October 1810. That is the version of Munich most outsiders picture. The reality underneath is older and stranger. The first written record of the place dates to 1158, when a duke burned down a rival's bridge to seize control of the salt trade. The name itself comes from monks. As of the 30th of November 2024, more than 1.6 million people live here, making it the third-largest city in Germany after Berlin and Hamburg. How did a tiny monastic settlement become the wealthiest city in the European Union by GDP per capita among cities over a million people? Why was it once called the Capital of the Movement, and what shadow does that name still cast? And how does a city heavily bombed in war end up named the world's most liveable, all while sitting on a gravel plain north of the Alps?

• 2. Monks And Salt

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  Zu den Munchen meant to the monks, and that phrase named a tiny 10th-century monastic settlement that would become Munich. The Old High German word Munche gave the modern name Munchen. Long before the monks, the river Isar served as a prehistoric trade route, and in the Bronze Age Munich ranked among the largest raft ports in Europe. Bronze Age settlements up to four millennia old have been found, along with Iron Age Celtic traces near Ramersdorf-Perlach.

  Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony and Bavaria, founded the town to control the salt trade. He burned down the rival town of Fohring and its bridges over the Isar, then built a new toll bridge, customs house, and coin market closer to his own home. Historians date this around 1158. Otto of Freising, whose bridge had been destroyed, protested to his nephew, Emperor Frederick Barbarossa.

  On the 14th of June 1158, in Augsburg, the conflict was settled in Duke Henry's favor. The Augsburg Arbitration named the disputed location as forum apud Munichen. Henry kept his bridge but was ordered to pay the Bishop of Freising a third of his income as compensation. That date is now considered the official founding day of Munich.

  In 2012, archaeological digs at Marienhof Square turned up vessel shards from the 11th century, proving the settlement is older than the 1158 arbitration. Old St. Peter's Church near Marienplatz is also believed to predate the official founding. The town received city status and fortification in 1175, and after Henry the Lion fell from grace, Otto I Wittelsbach became Duke of Bavaria in 1180.

• 3. The Wittelsbach Centuries

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  Louis IV, a native of Munich, was elected German king in 1314 and crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 1328. He granted the city a salt monopoly with staple rights, securing extra income. The town grew on a gravel plain where the Isar split into streams that supplied drinking water, defense, and power for mills. In the 15th century, Munich's largest Gothic church, the Frauenkirche, rose in just 20 years from 1468.

  Bavaria was reunited in 1506 after the War of the Succession of Landshut, and Munich became its capital. Duke Albrecht V built the Antiquarium in 1568 to hold the Wittelsbach collection of Greek and Roman antiquities in the Residenz. He appointed the composer Orlando di Lasso to direct the court orchestra and drew Italian musicians to the court.

  Duke William V earned the city the name German Rome and presented Charlemagne as a Wittelsbach ancestor. Known as the Pious, he commissioned the Jesuit Michaelskirche and had the Hofbrauhaus built in 1589, the prototype for beer halls across Munich. The Catholic League was founded in the city in 1609.

  The Thirty Years' War brought hardship. In 1632, King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden occupied Munich. The bubonic plague ravaged the city in 1634 and 1635, despite Maximilian I's plague ordinance. Later came Habsburg occupations in 1704 and 1742. When Elector Karl Theodor invited Count Rumford, Benjamin Thompson, to Munich in 1785, the city gained social reforms including workhouses for the poor. In the 1790s, Munich became the largest German city to remove its fortifications.

• 4. Capital Of A Kingdom

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  Maximilian IV Joseph became the first king of the new Kingdom of Bavaria in 1806, after an alliance with Napoleonic France. The state parliament, the Landtag, and a new archdiocese settled in the city. In 1802, the king had secularised Bavaria, dissolving monasteries and selling church lands for revenue. He also seized the right to brew beer, granting a monopoly to the wealthiest brewers in exchange for heavy taxes.

  In October 1810, a beer festival on the meadows outside Munich celebrated the crown prince's wedding to Princess Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen. With its parades in regional dress, the event grew into the annual Oktoberfest, now held at Theresienwiese. The first railway station opened in 1839 with a line to Augsburg, and by 1849 a newer Central Train Station was complete.

  Ludwig I ascended the throne in 1825 and commissioned architects like Leo von Klenze to design neoclassical museums. Klenze supervised the Propylaea between 1854 and 1862, and the Maximilianeum began in 1857. These grand projects earned Munich the names Athens on the Isar and Monaco di Bavaria. By contrast, when Ludwig II became king in 1864, he stayed aloof from his capital, preferring his castles in the countryside.

  The reign of Prince Regent Luitpold, from 1886 to 1912, brought intense artistic activity. At the turn of the 20th century, Munich became a center for the Jugendstil movement, which took its name from the local magazine Die Jugend. In 1911, the expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter formed in the city, with founding members including Gabriele Munter.

• 5. Capital Of The Movement

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  Three bombs fell on Munich during French air raids in 1916, the same year BMW produced its first aircraft engine in the city. The public limited company BMW AG was founded in 1918, with Camillo Castiglioni owning a third of the share capital, and relocated its headquarters to a Munich factory in 1922. After World War I, the city sat at the center of political unrest.

  Kurt Eisner, the first republican premier of Bavaria, was murdered in February 1919 by Anton Graf von Arco auf Valley, and the Bavarian Soviet Republic was proclaimed. The November 1918 revolution ended Wittelsbach rule. In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler described his political activism in Munich after November 1918 as the Beginning of My Political Activity.

  In 1923, Hitler and his supporters staged the Beer Hall Putsch, an attempt to overthrow the Weimar Republic. The revolt failed, leading to Hitler's arrest and the temporary crippling of the Nazi Party. When the Nazis took power in 1933, they created their first concentration camp at Dachau, 16 kilometers north-west of the city. Munich became known as the Hauptstadt der Bewegung, the Capital of the Movement.

  The party acquired 68 buildings around the Konigsplatz, and construction on the party headquarters, the Brown House, began in September 1933. The Haus der Kunst was the first building Hitler commissioned. The 1938 Munich Agreement was signed here between Nazi Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Italy. On the 8th of November 1939, Georg Elser planted a bomb in the Burgerbraukeller to assassinate Hitler, who had left minutes before it went off.

  Resistance also lived in the city. Munich was the base of the White Rose student movement, whose core members were executed after Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans were caught distributing leaflets at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat. Around 50 percent of the city was heavily damaged by bombing across 71 air raids over five years. US troops captured Munich on the 30th of April 1945.

• 6. Rebuilt And Reinvented

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  Over a thousand refugee camps held 151,113 people in Munich in October 1946, after the expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe. The city was completely rebuilt to a meticulous plan that preserved its pre-war street grid. In 1957, Munich's population surpassed one million, and the city earned the nickname Heimliche Hauptstadt, the secret capital.

  The Free State of Bavaria used the arms industry as the kernel of its high tech development. Since 1963, the city has hosted the annual Munich Security Conference at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof. The politician Franz Josef Strauss held strong influence from the 1960s to the 1980s, and the Munich Airport, which opened in 1992, was named in his honor.

  After winning the bid in 1966, Mayor Hans-Jochen Vogel accelerated construction of the U-Bahn and S-Bahn for the 1972 Summer Olympics. A subway line to the Olympic Park was completed in May 1972, three months before the opening. Those Games were scarred by the Munich massacre, when gunmen from the Palestinian group Black September took members of the Israeli Olympic team hostage and murdered 11 Israeli athletes.

  The FIFA World Cup final was held at the Olympic Stadium in 1974. Munich emerged as the leading German high tech region during the 1980s and 1990s, with low unemployment and high per capita income. It later hosted matches for the 2006 FIFA World Cup, and both UEFA Euro 2020, postponed a year by the COVID-19 pandemic, and UEFA Euro 2024.

• 7. A City Of Sound And Screen

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  Richard Wagner premiered Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg in Munich between 1870 and 1871, a popular success backed by his patron Ludwig II of Bavaria. He premiered at the Hoftheater, now the National Theatre Munich, home to the Bavarian State Opera and the Bavarian State Orchestra. Composers including Mozart, Carl Maria von Weber, Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, and Carl Orff have all worked in or near the city. Strauss's tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra and Orff's Carmina Burana were created in the area.

  Munich was the center of Krautrock in southern Germany, with bands such as Amon Duul II, Embryo, and Popol Vuh from the city. In the 1970s, the Musicland Studios drew the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, and Queen to record there. Giorgio Moroder, who invented synth disco, and Donna Summer both lived and worked in the city, and in the late 1990s DJ Hell helped develop Electroclash through his International DeeJay Gigolo Records label.

  Vladimir Lenin wrote What Is to Be Done? while living in Schwabing, then a bohemian cultural metropolis. The satirical magazine Simplicissimus, founded in 1896 by Albert Langen and Thomas Theodor Heine, became a key organ of the Schwabinger Boheme. The cabaret performer Karl Valentin, active between 1910 and 1940, earned the nickname Charlie Chaplin of Germany.

  Munich shaped German cinema too. The New German Cinema movement counted Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Edgar Reitz, and Herbert Achternbusch among its authors. The Bavaria Film Studios, founded in 1919, grew into one of Europe's largest, where Wolfgang Petersen made both Das Boot in 1981 and The Neverending Story in 1984.

• 8. Wealth, Beer, And Liveability

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  Munich ranked first in Germany and third worldwide in the 2018 Mercer survey, and was named the world's most liveable city by Monocle's Quality of Life Survey 2018. It is the wealthiest city in the EU by GDP per capita among cities over a million inhabitants, and among the most expensive German cities for real estate and rents. Purchasing power is highest among large German cities, at 26,648 euros per inhabitant. In July 2020, unemployment stood at 5.4 percent, the lowest of any German city over a million people.

  The city's economy rests on high tech, automobiles, services, information technology, biotechnology, engineering, and electronics. BMW, Siemens, Allianz SE, and Munich Re are headquartered here, alongside Traton, MTU Aero Engines, Linde, and Rohde and Schwarz. As a financial center it ranks second only to Frankfurt, home to HypoVereinsbank and the Bayerische Landesbank. Munich is also the largest publishing city in Europe, home to the Suddeutsche Zeitung.

  Weissbier and Helles define the local glass. Helles, a pale gold lager, has largely replaced the darker Dunkel that was typical in the 19th century. Starkbier is the strongest, with alcohol from 6 to 9 percent. The Munich Weisswurst was invented in the city in 1857 and is traditionally served before noon with sweet mustard and pretzels. Beer gardens function as a melting pot for all walks of life, with large ones in the Englischer Garten and the Hirschgarten, the latter founded in 1780.

  FC Bayern Munich is the most successful football club in Germany. The ice hockey club EHC Red Bull Munchen won DEL championships in 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2023. The Eisbach standing wave draws river surfers, who hold the Munich Surf Open on the last Saturday of July. In October 2025-66 percent of Munich citizens voted in favor of bidding to host the 2036, 2040, or 2044 Olympic Games, a campaign focused on ecological solutions and existing infrastructure.