A walk through history
Three tours of Munich that nobody else can give you.
Five years in the archives. A collection of original sources. Twelve people at a time.
A walk through history
Five years in the archives. A collection of original sources. Twelve people at a time.
Munich has spent its whole existence building itself and pulling itself down again. Walls, monasteries, a ducal tomb, entire streets. Most of what mattered here is no longer standing where it was put.
These tours go and find it. Not anecdotes and not the stories the free tours repeat to each other, but the archive record of what was actually here, read on the ground where it happened.
They are not wrong, exactly. They are what everyone says, handed from guide to guide until nobody thinks to check. The water was bad, so they drank beer. A duke passed a law to keep the beer pure. The same five stops, the same jokes, twice a day.
The real history of this city sits in the Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv and the Stadtarchiv München, and it is stranger and better than the version told on the street. A duke who bankrupted a country building his own grave. A brewing monopoly that was really a question of who ruled. A city that has spent eight hundred years demolishing itself on purpose.
These tours were built the other way round from the rest. The research came first, five years of it, for a book still being written. The tours are what came out of it. Which means the route is an argument rather than a circuit, and the answers do not stop where the script does.
Three walking tours through Munich, covering eight hundred years of the city. No highlights loop, no umbrella, no forty strangers.
The largest monument in Bavaria was finished, and then never built. The pieces are still out there.
The history of brewing in Munich, from the monastery brewhouses to the six names left on every tap.
From a bridge burning in 1158 to the city you stand in today, the complete history of Munich and everything that shaped it.
A woodcut from 1493 of a city that no longer exists. A map drawn in 1613. The ordinance every guide in Munich quotes and almost none have read.