Münter and Murnau

Self-portrait, Gabrielle Münter

To be begin with Gabi, she took a summer home here in 1909, which two years ago was turned into a delightful and insightful museum in honor of her residence there with other Blaue Reiter artists like Alexej Jawlensky, Marianne Werefkin and Kandinsky, who was her lover until he dumped her in his eagerness to get back to Russia at the beginning of World War I. (She waited for him quite pathetically in Scandinavia, but he never came.)

The most surprising aspect of the house is the painted folk furniture the painter left behind when he left. Even astonishing is the photo of Kandinsky in local lederhosen, pretending with a rake to be farmer! She later lived there with the art historian J.Eichner until her own death in 1962 at age 85. Barbara Schneider at the news agency next to the Hotel Post still remembers her as a gentle, fragile and penniless pensioner. The house has many of her works, a splendid video where you can explore every aspect of her life, including her two years in America (her mother and father lived in Texas for several years) with her sister Emmy in 1899-1901.

The two year old museum, alas, is open only from 2 to 5 in the afternoon. But it attracted 80,000 visitors in its first year, and plans to expand as finances permit. The only mini-museum of equal elegance and intellectual substance is the one on Van Gogh in the village of Auvers-sur-Oise, where the Dutch painter spent his last days.

But to get a full picture of her and her circle, you must visit the Schloss Museum. (It has an absolutely lovely cafe in an encircling little forest of trees, where I come down from my Muenter highs, morning, noon and night--their roasted duck is a specialty of the owner/chef Joseph Girg, who amiably wanders from table to table in search of satisfied customers.)

The Museum has many more samplings of her work from beginning to end. It also describes visually how a landscape school of painting emerged there in the early 18th century as middle class people began to get their sublime kicks savouring the nearby lake and the astonishingly beautiful foothills of the Alps. Beginning on July 21, there is a major retrospective of her graphic work, with an excellent catalog. It runs til November.

But this is also the centennial of a remarkable Nazi fighter, Odeon Horvath (1901-37), and he is the subject of special symposia beginning in September. In March 1933, Horvath was eating in the dining room of the Hotel Post (since 1632, and still run by the Wagner family) when Hitler's first speech as Chancellor was being broadcast live from the Sports Palast in Munich. Horvath shouted to shut the damn radio off at which point SS troops beat him senseless, and he fled to Paris that very night.

His diplomat parents sold their house after a few months and followed him into exile. Alas, during a thunderstorm on the Champs Elysee, a falling branch struck him dead. The exhibit explains the Nazi movement in Murnau. (There is a splendid book on his literary efforts on sale for 15 DM.) There are standing exhibitions on the natural history of the region, and especially about early mining activities there.

Ordinary people (as opposed to landscape painters!) came to Murnau for the Staffelsee, a bucolic 15 minute walk from "downtown" Murnau. As a kid who grew up on pristine Lake Huron, I found its murky waters unswimmable, and its "beaches" sandless. But it was full of swimmers, until a sudden thunderstorm cleared it out in a few minutes.

I did enjoy heartily, however, a cool Karg, the town's most famous white beer. And the breezes were not polluted. Meanwhile, back in beautiful downtown Murnau, the locals were celebrating the first year of a auto free walker zone--with professional Dixieland by amateur musicians, Oompah band music from the local school, and mouth-watering white sausages tempting everyone from the grills stationed along the street.

We stayed at the Hotel Post, which began in the seventeenth century as a relay for fresh horses for the mail. Today, the owner Nicholas Wagner is a genial host who on Saturdays serves the generous buffet to give his hausmeister a long weekend. It was only 80 DM per person, and situated neatly between the train station and the Schloss. Don't miss the Nicholaskirche, next to the Schloss. It is the most moving Baroque church I have ever visited.

I usually find Baroque too much of too much, with everything looking tacked on. This church is a really integrated work of art. Gabi's grave (and Eichner's) are in its graveyard. We walked off to the station fully satisfied, to catch the five o'clock train to Munich, where we stayed at the InterCity Hotel in train station for 235DM, a weekend special. Insist on a room away from the street. It was insomnia noisy.

From there you can walk to the City Center where diverse musical buskers amused and amazed the perambulists, and where German TV was setting up for the next day's broadcast Mass for the golden jubilees of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and his brother. More interesting to us was the Free Opera in the open air in front of the Opera House, with Zubin Mehta conducting the Bavarian State Radio Orchestra in Beethoven's Seventh and a prodigiously talented 12 year old Japanese violinist playing his violin concerto. There were all kinds of people (and dogs!!) enjoying these treats under a full moon.

We withdrew to the nearby Nuremberg Restaurant, where I gorged on calf's liver covered with thin strips of onions fried and on a bed of puree potatoes. My friend had decadently delicious duck. It's a gemutlich type beer hall place where you seated with strangers, who turned out to be friendly out of town visitors, a head nurse in the children's hospital and a librarian from Seattle, their old friend a professor of law from Santa Clara, and German couples from Berlin and Stuttgart. It was a gas.

Sunday we visited the "Cool Gaze" exhibition at the nearby HypoAustellungsHalle, a eye-dazzling collection of paintings from the1920's, what we Americans call Precisionist painting and the Germans call it the New Objectivity and other Euros other names. But that is another story. By the way when I couldn't sleep, I sauntered across the street to EASY EVERTHINGS, a 24 hour Internet cafe, where you can catch up on your e-mail for a measly 5DM for four hours time! But Munich is another, more complex story.

If you ever visit Munich, don't ever miss Murnau.