Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864

It was a part of the plan that the ceremony of laying the foundation of a new bridge over the Isar should be performed by the king. This was deemed specially appropriate, because the springing up of the city had depended upon a bridge over the river to draw thither the trade which had gone to the old Freising. This occurred on Sunday, and I did not see it. I never heard, however, but that his majesty acquitted himself as well in this stone mason's work as he does in the affairs of court or state—just as well, perhaps, as one of our more democratic Chief Magistrates, accustomed to splitting rails or other kinds of manual labor, would have done. I took a walk with my children at evening, and met the long line of court carriages returning, followed by a procession on foot, the archbishop, with some church dignitaries, walking under a canopy and distributing, by a wave of the hand at each step of his progress, his blessing to the crowds which thronged both sides of the broad street. Some, perhaps, prized this more than we did, but I do not suppose that there was anything in the nature of the blessing or in the will of the benevolent prelate to turn it from our heretical heads.

The other parts of this celebration consisted in dinners, plays in the theatres, a meeting at the Rathhaus, at which were read papers on the development of Munich for the seven hundred years of its existence, and a procession, the whole occupying about a week. I shall only notice specially the procession, and in connection with it the art exhibition for all Germany, which closed at the same time, having been in progress for three months; for the two greatly contributed to each other.

The illustrated weekly, published at Stuttgart by the well-known novelist Hacklaender, under the title of Ueber Land und Meer, refers to these festivities in the following terms:

'Munich, the South German metropolis of art, was, during the closing days of September, transformed into a festive city. The German artists had assembled from all parts of the country, that they might, within those walls, charmed by the genius of the muses, wander through the halls in which the academy had collected the best works of German art, and take counsel upon the common interests, as they had formerly done at Bingen and Stuttgart. The artists and the magistracy vied with each other in preparing happy days for the visitors—an emulation which was crowned with the most delightful results. The artists' festival, however, was but the harbinger to the the city of the great seventh centennial birthday festival of the Bavarian capital, which had been so long in preparation, and was waited for with such impatience. Concerts and theatres opened the festal series. Services in all the churches of both confessions consecrated the coming days, and the laying of the foundation of the new bridge over the Isar, leading to the Maximilianeum, formed, historically, a monumental memorial for the occasion. Favored by the fairest of weather, the city celebrated the main festival on the 27th of September. It was a historical procession, moved through all the principal streets of the city, and caused departed centuries to pass in full life before the eyes of the citizens and the vast assemblage of strangers there present. It was no masquerade, but a true picture of the civilization of the city, from its first appearance in history to the present day—'a mirrored image,' says a chronicler of the festival, 'of times long since gone by.

'The twelfth century opened the procession—representations of the present time in science, art, and industry, as developed under the reigns of Lewis and Maximilian, which have been so promotive of all that is great, closed it up. But one voice was heard in regard to the success of this festival.'

The plan was to let representatives of the people for this whole period of seven hundred years pass before the eyes of the spectators in the fashions and costumes of their respective ages, bearing the implements or badges of their several guilds or professions. The preparation had been begun months beforehand. Artists had been employed to sketch designs. The best had been selected. The costumes were historical. We see sometimes in every part of our country, costumes extemporized from garrets for old folks' concerts and other like occasions, but generally they do not correspond with each other, or with the performances. The result is committed to accident. The actors wear what their meagre wardrobes of the antique furnish. The wider the divergence from present fashions the better. Chance may bring together the styles of a dozen successive periods, and render the whole without coherence. In such an exhibition our interest is felt simply in the grotesque. It shows us how a countenance familiar to us is set off by a strange and outlandish costume. It represents no history. Such was not this procession. Its front had twelfth century costumes of peasants, burghers, and even the ducal family. So down to the very day of the festival; for statues of the present royal family on open cars closed up the long line. It did not seem indeed quite right that the successive ages of the dead should pass before us living, and the living age alone lifeless. In one part of the procession was an imperial carriage of state drawn by six horses, a man in livery leading each horse, with all the necessary footmen, outriders, and outrunners. The whole was antiquity and novelty happily combined. The costumes and insignia of all classes, with the tools and implements of all handicrafts, from the day when Duke Henry and Bishop Otho, seven hundred years before, had had their petty bickerings about the tolls of a paltry village, down to the present day, the whole transformed into a living panorama, and made to pass in about four hours before the eye.

To set forth great things by small, a bridal pair remove from the East and settle in our Western wilds. In a score of years they return to their native place, wearing the very garments in which they had stood up and been pronounced husband and wife. The picture is equal to a volume of history and one of comedy, the two bound in one. But here, instead of a score of years we have a score of ages, reaching back to a period farther beyond that great popular movement in which modern society had its birth, than that is anterior to our own age. If all the costumes, fashions, implements, and tools of the house, the shop, and the field, insignia and liveries, from those of the first Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam, down to those of New York's belles, beaux, and beggars of the present day, should be made to pass in review before us, how absurdly grotesque would be the scene! That veritable 'History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrick Knickerbocker,' has perhaps shaken as many sides and helped digest as many dinners as almost any book since Cervantes gave the world his account of the adventures of his knight Don Quixote, and yet this great historical work hints but a part of that picture, though doubtless greatly improved by the author's delicate touches, which would pass before us in a procession illustrating two centuries of New York's history. Using such hints, the reader may partially judge of the impression made by this setting forth of seven centuries of a capital of Central Europe, and yet one can hardly tell, without the trial, whether he would rather smile at the grotesqueness of the pageant, or be lost in the profound contemplation of the magnificent march of history reënacted in this drama.

This procession spoke but to the eye. It was but a tableau, dumb, though in its way eloquent. It detailed no actions; it only hinted them. It simply presented the men who acted, clad in the outward garb, and bearing the tools and weapons of their day. The cut of a garment, the form of a helmet or halberd, a saddle or a semitar, a hoe or a hatchet, or the cut of the hair or the beard, may speak of the heart and soul, only, however, by distant hints. But just as the representation is less distinct and detailed, is it a mightier lever for imagination to use in raising again to life centuries which had long slept in the dust. The superstructure of history, indeed, which we should rear upon such a basis, would be wide of the truth on one side, just as the narratives and philosophical disquisitions which come to us under that name are on the other. History generally relates those things in which all ages have been most alike—the same which have 'been from the beginning and ever shall be'—the intrigues of courts and of diplomacy—varied mainly by the influence of the religion of the Bible, as at first persecuted, then rising by degrees to a rank either with or above the state, and becoming a persecuting power, and then finally modifying and softening down the native rudeness of the human race, until mutual and universal tolerance is the result; court life, diplomacy, and war, however, remaining and still to remain the perpetual subjects of historical composition. But between this elevated range and the humble one of burghers' tools and costumes, lies a boundless field of aspect, variegated with all the forms which checker social and domestic life. Oh!—thought a little group of American spectators occupying a room near the corner of Ludwig and Theresien streets—could we but rend the veil of time which conceals Munich's seven hundred years of burgher and peasant life, how odd, how rude a scene would present itself! The reader's fancy may make the attempt. I will aid a little if I can, and there was indeed some material furnished in addresses prepared for that occasion, and in some other papers which have come into my hands.

The people of that little village on the banks of the Isar were but the owners and tillers of the barren soil. Nearly a century (1238) after Henry the Lion had surrounded it with walls, and a local magistracy had been chosen; when two parishes—those of St. Peter and St. Mary—had been already long established, we find a schoolmaster signing, doubtless by virtue of his office, a certificate of the freedom of a certain monastery from the city customs. That the school teacher must, ex officio, sign such papers, spoke volumes. How few could have had the learning, for it must indeed be done in Latin. And then the history of the city runs nearly a century back of this date. What was the burgher life of that first century of Munich's history? It is but the faintest echo that answers. Schools there were at that day and long before. Nay, the cloister schools were already in decay; but more than three hundred years were yet to elapse before the rise of the Jesuit schools. Three hundred years! How can we, of this age of steam, estimate what was slowly revolving in society in those years? In 1271 we find an order of the bishop of Freising requiring the parish rector to have a school in each parish of the city; half a century later than this we meet documentary evidence that school teaching had assumed a rank with other worldly occupations, and was no longer subject to the rector of the parish. If I could but set the reader down in a school room of that day, I might forego any attempt to portray the times; but, alas! I cannot. He would, however, doubtless see there groups of boys—for I half suspect that this was before girls had generally developed the capability of learning—the faces and garments clean or smutty, showing the grade of social progress which had been gained, for we may presume that the use of soap and water had been to some extent introduced, and if so, I have erred again, for the dirty and the ragged did not go to school. These could do without education. We should see, too, the beaming or the dull and leaden eye—if, indeed, the eye spoke then as now—proclaiming the master's success or failure. And then the schoolmaster, the chief figure in the group, would be found to have the otium cum dignitate, and especially the former, in a higher sense than is now known. And what was the staple information which circulated among the people? Of this we know more. It was made up of adventures of knights, miracles wrought by the host, by crucifixes and Madonnas, and apparitions of saints, leading some emperor or prince to found a church or monastery—a kind of history which few churches or other religious institutions want. If there was less of life in the humanity of that age than we have at present, there was as much more in other things; for even those holy pictures and statues could move their eyes and other parts. They found various ways of expressing approbation of the pious, and frowning upon scoffers. Crucifixes and Madonnas, carried by freshets over barren fields, brought fertility. The devil, too, figured more largely in the narratives of days before printed books formed the basis of education. He generally appeared in the persons of giants and witches, which latter were his agents by special contract. Their freaks had all shades of enormity, from the slight teasing of the housewife in her baking and churning to the peril of life and limb and endless perdition. The devil sometimes coming in one of these forms endangered the lives of the quiet people of the city by formally dismissing the watch between the hours of eleven and twelve o'clock at night. So hundreds of things which he has become too genteel in our day to practise.

The founding of the city was near the close of that great movement known as the crusades. What a world of material these furnished to be used in popular education! The feats of knights, instead of assuming distinct forms and being stereotyped and told to them in books, were surrendered to the popular mouth for preservation and propagation. Saints, angels, and demons attached themselves from time to time to these circulating myths. Original characters often dropped out, and the discrimination of the wisest believer in the real and ideal, became confused. Then came the period of the Hussite war. This gave rise to many a miracle of divine judgment. The Bohemian mocker of the holy mass, or of some wonder-working statue of the Virgin, is pursued with divine vengeance. The Jews—how suggestive the name, in the history of mediæval Europe, of mystery, miracle, and murder!—were early allowed to settle in Munich. They were assigned to a particular street. In the year 1285 a story was started—it had been long stereotyped, and editions of it circulated in every part of Christendom—of the murder of a Christian child. A persecution of the Jews was the result—one hundred and forty were burned in their own houses—and the poor Israelites must doubtless suffer without redress, although many of them were then, as they now are, bankers and brokers to the spiritual and temporal lords. Not far from the same time the ducal mint was destroyed, because the people were enraged to find the metal in their coin growing alarmingly less. For this the city must pay a fine.

From our first knowledge of this town it continued gradually, but very slowly, to advance in intelligence—we should rather say from century to century than from year to year; for during this period progress was too slow to be perceptible, unless the observation were verified by the pillars erected to mark the boundary lines between successive centuries. The inquirer into the past often sighs out the wish that art had found a way to transmit full impressions of all departed generations to the latest living one. Perhaps he prudently limits the desired favor to himself, otherwise the wish would not be wise; its realization would place every lazy observer upon the same level with the studious investigator. The cumbrous details, too, of sixty centuries piled upon one mind would crush it, unless human nature were a very different thing from that which we now behold. It is in accordance with a wise plan of Providence that the deeds of past ages should perish with them, except the few needed to cast their gleam of light upon the world's future pathway. We are made capable of rescuing just enough for the highest purposes of life, not enough to overwhelm and burden us in our march toward the goal before us. It is thought by some that the point and finish of the ancient Greek authors, as compared with the moderns, is attributable to the fact that they were less perplexed with accumulated lore and the multiplication of books and subjects of study. Their minds were not subject to the dissipating effects of large libraries, and daily newspapers with telegraphs from Asia, Africa, and Hesperia. I shall not discuss this question. The amount of information handed down from past ages even now is but as the spray which rises above the ocean's surface to the vast depths which lie below. The historical fossils of those ages are therefore left to exercise the genius of the Cuviers of historical inquiry. As that naturalist could, from a single bone of an extinct animal species, make up and describe the animal, so have inquirers into the past succeeded in picturing a departed age from the few relics left of it. Hence we are treated occasionally with such agreeable surprises in the march of history as the discovery of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Nineveh. The genius of our Wincklemanns, Champollions, Humboldts, and Layards has found a worthy field. Such days as that I am attempting to describe, representing seven centuries of a modern capital before the admiring eyes of the present generation of its people, become possible. Instead of the monotony of a perpetual observation, we have the charm of alternate lulls and surprises.

This picture has a further likeness to the naturalist's description made from the fossils of extinct genera of animals. In the latter the animal is made to stand before us. We have the data necessary to infer his habits. But we see him not perfect in his wilderness home of unnumbered ages past. We see him not the pursuer or the pursued; we hear not the fierce growls or the plaintive note of alarm or distress. These we must imagine. So, too, the slowly and peacefully moving train which passes our windows, setting forth the sleeping centuries of this city. There is the emperor in state—dukes in ducal magnificence—knights in armor with horses richly and fancifully caparisoned—citizens in the dress of their times—the various mechanics' and traders' guilds, with their implements, their badges and their banners, with priests thickly scattered through the whole line, which is ever changing as the representatives of one age succeed those of another. The whole is calm and quiet. The fierce contests, the angry broils, private and public—now throwing the whole city into a ferment of innocent alarm, now deluging its streets with blood—the rage of plagues, sealing up the sources of human activity, and causing the stillness of the grave to settle over the scene—all these we must supply; and surely the thoughtful mind is busy in doing this as it contemplates the passing train. We conceive rival claimants for the ducal throne, contending, regardless of dying counsel, until death again settles what death had thrown open to contest. Everything which has ever transpired on the theatre of the world's great empires, may be conceived as enacted on this narrower stage. The difference is less in talents and prowess than in the extent of the field and the numbers of actors.

From the period of the Reformation down we can form the picture with more distinctness. Seehofen, son of a citizen of Munich, while a student at Wittenberg, received Luther's doctrine, and through him many of his townsmen. The most learned and able opponent whom the Reformer had to encounter was John Eck, chancellor of the Bavarian University of Ingolstadt—one of the most renowned at that day in Europe—which, by removal to the capital, has now become the University of Munich. In 1522 Duke William, of Bavaria, issued an edict forbidding any of his people to receive the reformed doctrine. Bavaria, therefore, remained Catholic, and Munich became the headquarters of German Catholicism. The electoral duke, Maximilian, of Bavaria, was head of the Catholic league which carried on the 'Thirty Years' War' against the Protestants under Gustavus Adolphus, king of Sweden, in the early part of the seventeenth century. The city is full of sayings derived from this whole period, such as to leave us no ground to wonder that few Catholics are inclined to become Protestants. The only Protestant church in the city was built within the last thirty years. It is but a few years since the house was still shown in Scudlinger street, in which Luther, in his flight from Augsburg, whither he had been called to answer for his teaching before Cardinal di Vio in 1518,8 stopped, his horse all in a foam, to take a drink, and in his hurry forgot to pay for the piece of sausage which he ate. In the market place was a likeness of Luther and his 'Katherl.'9 There are also numerous derisive pictures, such as the Reformer riding upon a swine, with a sausage in his hand, which, however, all originated in the mockery of the Jews, who were afterward compelled to surrender some of them to the leading spirit of the Reformation. At Saurloch, a little distance south of Munich, there were still, in 1840, to be seen pictures of Luther and his wife in a group made up of chimney sweeps, buffoons, and many others of the class. As this age passed before the eyes of the spectators, they would doubtless give it new life by attributing to it the spirit exemplified in these choice and tasteful pictures and sayings, amusing at this day, doubtless, to both parties.

The period of the 'Thirty Years' War' and the visit to Munich of Gustavus Adolphus has left more sayings and monuments, and thus do more honor to the people. After the Catholic victory near Prague, in 1620, the elector celebrated a public entry into the city amid the jubilations of the people and the Jesuits. A pillar was erected in remembrance of the victory, and dedicated, eighteen years afterward, to the Virgin, in accordance with a vow. The city was also variously adorned. The rejoicing was somewhat premature. In 1632 the duchess and ducal family had to remove to Salzburg for safety, whither they carried with them the bones of St. Benno, the patron saint of the city, and other valuables. The king of Sweden entered the walls under a promise, which he had made in consideration of three hundred thousand florins, to be paid to him by the people, to secure them against fire, sword, and plunder. Ladies freely gave up their precious ornaments to make up the amount. But they failed. The conqueror took forty-two priests of the religious orders, and twenty respectable citizens, as hostages for the payment. These wandered around with his camp for three years, and then all returned except four, who died during the time. The traditions of the people give the king credit for having strictly abstained from plunder, and executed the only man who transgressed his rule, although the citizens failed on their part. How beautifully the brilliant and the glorious mingle with the sad and the sombre in the picture which we form of this age as the passing train brings it before our minds! How religion, variously tinged with the sable hues of superstition, wrought upon that age! The Swedish king, the moment victory turns in his favor, dropping upon his knees in the midst of the dead and the dying, the clouds of smoke and dust as yet unsettled, pours out his soul in fervent prayer and thanksgiving.10 He but represents his army and his age. The Catholic army are not less devout in their way. Germany is full of monuments and sayings of this period. Those of Munich are of the Catholic side. There stands in a public square an equestrian statue of colossal size, in bronze, of the elector Maximilian, head of the Catholic League—his pillar to the Virgin still stands—and the great general of the League, Count Tilley, represented in bronze, is among the prominent objects viewed by the visitor to this capital. On the other hand, the greatest organization in Europe for the aid of Protestants in Catholic lands, having branches everywhere, bears the name of Gustavus Adolphus. Let the reader then conceive the visions which flit through the minds of the spectators as this age passes in review before them.

But here I shall close this part of the picture. The description of the city as it now exists belongs in other connections. It has been suggested, as greatly adding to the interest of this birthday festival of the capital, that it concurred in time with the exhibition of the art of all Germany in the Crystal Palace. Although the two had no natural connection, yet they became so intertwined in fact as not easily to be separated. I shall therefore just touch upon the art display.