The following is an excerpt from the Time-Life Great Cities Series, published in 1980: Munich. This is an absolutely wonderful book. Bailey's writing is informative and interesting, and there are hundreds of wonderful color photos by Stefan Moses. The book is out of print, but used copies may be found and purchased at Amazon.com, and other used book outlets. I very much recommend that anyone interested in the city of Munich purchase the book.

In the course of numerous postwar visits as a civilian in the 1950s and 1960s, I learnt more about the real Munich. It was a good period to do so. Over those years, the ancient city gradually acquired a new veneer: the addition of modern buildings, expanding industries and motorways that testify to the city's still-burgeoning economy. For the newcomer, it is necessary to penetrate this overlay if the underlying character of the city is to be observed and understood.

One thing that I found vital to this appreciation was a grasp of what it means to be a Bavarian. Quite simply, Bavarians take it for granted that they are "the best". They know it in the same way that Scots or Texans know it. Like Scotland, Bavaria was for centuries an autonomous country. It was first a duchy and eventually a kingdom, with a history spanning more than a thousand years. Though recognizing its dependence on the rest of West Germany, it has a unique stature, Texan in quality, that comes in part from its sheer size. Measuring almost 30,000 square miles, it is the biggest state in either West or East Germany. Bavarians talk in superlatives: their mountains are Germany's highest, their beer the best, their music the lustiest, their accent the most distinctive, their festivals the most uproarious and their football team, Bayer Munchen, the most consistently successful.

Munchners are sustained by the feeling that their city, as well as their state, is without peer. It boasts world-famous collections of paintings and antiquities, Germany's largest library and largest university, the world's biggest museum of science and technology, and an internationally acclaimed group of film-makers. It combines--uniquely in present-day Germany--cultural strength with economic strength.

Munich is the third-largest West German city, its population of 1.3 million surpassed only by Hamburg's and West Berlin's. The city has its network of freeways, soaring over bridges and diving through underpasses, in inner and outer rings that act as hubs for the high-speed autobahns that reach out to other cities. It is also the third-largest industrial city in West Germany. Its rapid growth in the 1950s and 1960s, in both population and production, owes much to the transfer into it of people and investment, especially from Berlin, as a result of the postwar partition of Germany. So much of Berlin's role did Munich inherit that, when the news magazine Der Spiegel published an article on Munich in 1964, it dubbed the city "Germany's secret capital". The catch-phrase stuck and soon became a routine way of describing Munich's special role.

But underneath the surface of wealth and bustling industry is a subtler essence, the most fundamental qualities of which, it seems to me, are the ways in which the city is affected by its geographical position. Munich is set right in the centre of Europe and there is, in addition, a close interaction between the town and the countryside immediately surrounding it. The city reflects these two distinctive facets in its culture, in the character of its people-indeed, in its very feel.

Munich is the pivot on the east-west axis between Paris and Vienna, and on the north-south axis between Berlin and Rome. To northerners, it is the first city of the south; and to southerners, the first city of the north -- to all, a delightful point of transition, where lifelong dreams of distant journeys suddenly promise to be fulfilled. The signposts at the city's major road junctions foreshorten the geography of Europe. I can never see the sign for the autobahn to Salzburg, only 70 miles away on the Austrian border, without feeling an anticipatory thrill; for beyond the baroque jewel of Salzburg lies Venice, scarcely five hours away from Munich by car, or an overnight ride on the train. To the east stands Vienna, now no longer the centre of a widespread empire but a city at the eastern extremity of Western Europe. Beyond Vienna lies the Iron Curtain-Budapest and Prague. To the north-west of Munich is the Black Forest and beyond, nestling on the far side of the Rhine, is the French cathedral city of Strasbourg.

Being so far south, Munich was in the past always one of the first cities of Europe to feel new winds of thought and style coming from Italy. Both the 16th-Century Jesuit Michaelskirche and the 17th-Century Theatinerkirche -the beautiful Italianate church opposite the Residenz that was built by the Elector Ferdinand Maria to celebrate the birth of an heir in 1663attest to the readiness with which Munich adopted the baroque style that was later naturalized into a characteristic South German form.

Even Greece, shimmering in the middle distance of the northerner's imagination, is adumbrated in the neoclassical architecture of a number of Munich's 19th-Century buildings, such as the original National Theatre and the Glyptothek sculpture gallery, erected by the city's philhellene Wittelsbach rulers. A Wittelsbach prince-Otto, son of Ludwig I-even became King of Greece when that country at last escaped in 1832 from subjection to the Ottoman Empire.

Munich is infused not only with the cultures of north and south, but also with the countryside in which it is set. One of its special delights is the River Isar, which draws its icy waters from the Austrian Alps only 30 miles away, and speeds through the Bavarian landscape in a light-green rush of water over a bed of sand and silver-white pebbles. Being so near its mountain source, the river is too shallow for navigation and thus remains free from industrial pollution. The waters are of startling clarity-as refreshing, as bracing to the sight as to the touch. Munich accommodates its river in a succession of styles: in one section a series of huge, shallow concrete steps soften the river's fall, and in another the Isar is allowed to keep its natural banks, with a park on one side and an esplanade on a natural rise along the other. Here, near the very heart of a large city, you can find fishermen in high rubber boots fly-casting in midstream.

North-east of the,city centre, in Munich's spacious English Garden--an 18th-Century landscaped park about double the size of Hyde Park in London--the Isar suddenly loses its single-mindedness and runs playful riot through the broad river-meadows in a network of diversionary streams where mallard ducks ride the gentle rapids. Rusticity is preserved and resurgent. The racing speed of the water is enough to remind you that it has come freshly from somewhere steep. The Isar, crisp and bright, brings into the city the feel of the nearby great mountains, even in winter when mist and clouds so often wrap them into invisibility.

That Munich can retain the atmospehere of a country town owes something also to the fact that the unhurried pace of the countryside has been deliberately built into the most recent fabric of the growing city. In 1972, for example, the year the Olympic Games were held in Munich, a large part of the old central area was banned to all private motor traffic and converted into a mainly pedestrianized zone. Unlike some similar districts elsewhere, the zone-large as it is-is easily accessible; in the central Marienplatz is the broad but unobtrusive access to a Ubahn station-a link in the metro system that, in 1971, was installed as part of the improvements stimulated by the impending Olympics. Delivered to the very middle of the area, people whose ears have been accustomed to the din of traffic gratefully reattune themselves to the quieter sounds of voices and footsteps. Water gently splashes in the square's fountain; and perhaps the strains of a small band mingle with the voice of one of the many buskers; while, occasionally, a bell-like tone can be heard as a city tram warns of its approach.

This central area is especially popular in the summertime when it is blooming with flowers, but, to me, it is just as attractive in winter when clusters of people, pausing at the stalls that sell roasted chestnuts or heaped-up tangerines, form an almost medieval scene.

A consequence of the interaction of town and countryside is that Munich retains something of a village atmosphere. Not for nothing was it referred to until recently as the Millionendorf, the village of a million people. The traditional qualities of its inhabitants-indeed of the inhabitants of Bavaria as a whole-make nonsense of most cliched preconceptions about what Germans are like. The differences between the North Germans and the South Germans are extensive and ill-defined, but they are freely acknowledged to exist and are even proudly claimed, especially by Bavarians from the country's heartland in the mountainous south, who consider themselves Bavarians first and Germans second.

Instead of being stolid, Protestant conformists, the inhabitants of southern (Upper) Bavaria are predominantly Catholic, relaxed and individualistic. They share with their neighbours, the Austrians, many traditions and characteristics, both, social and cultural-from their natural gaiety and the similarity of accent to their devout Catholicism. In north and east Germany -especially in Prussia-tenant farmers with few rights toiled until the 19th Century on the vast estates of warlike nobles; by contrast, most of the peasants of Upper Bavaria, and the farmers of the agricultural lands to the north in Lower Bavaria, have a long history of independence. Under the Wittelsbachs, they were free, landowning subjects who, on the whole, regarded their rulers affectionately, until their last king abdicated in 1918.

Munich has always been a "country town". There is a tradition of close contact and mutual respect between the urban population and the country residents. The ruler used to spend the winter in the city, occupying the Residenz, but the summer would send him and his family to one of their palaces in the surrounding countryside. Artists, drawn by the beauties of the rural scenery, were also a familiar presence among the country people and, at least from the early, 19th Century, various writers, many of them city-dwellers, have brought a knowledge and understanding of the country's communities back to Munich. Whenever I go into a bookshop in Munich, I am struck by the number of customers leafing through books in the section marked "Bavarica"--a category covering everything from food and drink to poetry, folklore and treatises on history and architecture.

As you might expect, Munich has its village carnivals, even if they are on a scale befitting a Millionendorf. An American journalist, James P. O'Donnell, once wrote of a conversation he had with a Viennese friend:

"If all the world dreams about Vienna," O'Donnell asked, "what city do you Viennese dream about, when the mood is on?"

"If the mood is beauty," came the reply, "we dream of Paris. Paris has everything except the Alps. If the mood is beautiful women, we dream of Budapest. . . But if the mood is just plain Gaudi, fun for the fun of it, we don't have to dream. We can take the overnight express to Munich."

That answer is just as true today. No fewer that 116 days a year are set aside by the city elders of Munich for festivals, feasts and observances of one kind or another. These include Bavaria's 14 official holidays (more than in any other region of Germany), plus a whole succession of carousals that have evolved during Bavaria's 400 years of beer-producing history.

All Munich's festivals run on beer; it is the city's life-blood. Bavarians know that their beer is the best in the world. The city's unofficial anthem runs "In Munchen steht ein Hofbrauhaus-eins, zwei, gsuffa!" (In Munich stands a court brewery-one, two, and down it goes!) and Bavarians have all the pride of a people who practically invented the drink; in the 16th Century, one of their rulers became the first to lay down official guidelines for proper brewing. Rightly, therefore, beer spans all classes. It is the common man's drink, but may also be the Bavarian equivalent of a snob wine.

I won't give you a consumer guide to Munich's beers-whole books have been written on the subject-but will content myself by telling you that there are basically two kinds of beer: the original dark, malty, full-bodied, sweetish Dunkles, served at room temperature, and the more recent, paler Helles, which is served chilled. But there are a score of varieties of increasing strengths, from Marzenbier, with an alcoholic content by volume averaging 5.5 per cent, to a whole series of brews that signify their extra punch with the ending "-ator"on their names. The world's strongest beer is Kulminator; boasting a prodigious 13.2 per cent alcohol, it is brewed in Kulmbach in northern Bavaria.

I said beer was the city's life-blood and that's no idle metaphor. It flows through the heart of Bavarian politics as well as its social life, as is shown by the very phrase a "beer-hall politician": a demagogue who appeals to the masses. The beer-halls are Munich's largest meeting-places; and they were used by politicians of all persuasions for years before the Nazis gave them such an infamous connotation. The trend started in the 1890s, when technical advances in the industry compelled breweries to merge and abandon their traditional, small installations in the centre of the city for vast, costefficient factories in the suburbs and the countryside. Doing so meant that large premises in the centre were left vacant, and the breweries wisely saw that these could be valuable outlets for their own products. Rapidly, the original sites were converted into outsized pubs that can, in some cases, hold as many as 5,000 people at a time.

So important is beer to the citizens of Munich that there are festivals, such as Strong Beer Time in March and Bock Beer Time in May, that exist solely to promote the consumption-on an enormous scale-of special brews. The biggest'of all the festivals, simply because it lasts so long, is Fasching, as the national New-Year carnival is called in southern Germany. Fasching is the carousal to end all carousals-or would be if this were not Munich. It is the German Catholic panacea, a ritual revelry to enliven the deadly months of January and February. It begins on Twelfth Night, by tradition in the artists' quarter of Schwabing, and ends only on Ash Wednesday about six weeks later, by which time it has involved the whole city.

During this period, everyone has a ball or, more usually, several. There are well over a hundred official Fasching events, offering a wide choice: the Chrysanthemum Ball, the Press Ball, the Munich Laundresses' Ball, the Pretzel-Makers' Ball, the Butchers' Ball, the Policemen's Fasching Ball, the Milkmaids' Ball. The great majority are masquerades with a premium on the exotic and the bizarre. (One Pied Piper of Hamelin became the talk of the town when it was discovered that the dead rats hanging by their tails from various points on his costume were real.) In addition, many Munich families play host to at least one Fasching party during the season.

During Fasching a man or a woman can escape for a while, forget himself or herself for weeks on end, play a new part in another life-in short, live the masquerade. Moral lapse is not just tolerated, it is encouraged. For a purpose, the Church adopted or incorporated the pagan rites that make up Fasching: the provision of a grand relief from everyday life. Fasching is ceremonial group therapy run wild.

A highlight of the carnival is the dance of the women on Shrove Tuesday at the Viktualienmarkt (Food Market). Here the ladies of the marketelderly butcher women, greengrocers and fishmongers, masked and garishly costumed and ever so slightly drunk-do a burlesque of Fasching. Dancing a bacchanal in a witches' chorus amid overturned cases, baskets and barrels throughout the market, they swing salted herrings over their heads and into the crowd, chant bawdy songs and stick bright feathers into the rumps of plucked geese and chickens. "Be careful you don't fall!", I once heard a spectator cry to a crone who was being particularly acrobatic on top of a huge barrel. "I cannot fall any further," cackled the grandmother in reply. "I am long since a fallen woman."

Predictably, Munich also hosts the greatest beer festival in the world, the annual Oktoberfest -- 16 days of carousal, of drinking, overeating, singing, dancing, country-fair amusements, unbridled revelry, drunken scuffling and downright mayhem.

The Oktoberfest was born in 1810, on the occasion of the marriage between Crown Prince Ludwig-the future Ludwig I, perhaps Munich's most important ruler-and a Saxon princess, Therese won SachsenHildburghausen. It was suggested that a horse-race should be held to celebrate the nuptials; and the race was so popular that the King decided it should be held every year. The racecourse was built in a vast meadow on the city's south-western outskirts and, in honour of the new Crown Princess, it was named Theresienwiese-Therese's Meadow.

Within a few years, farmers had added an agricultural show at which they entered their prize bulls in competitions. Eventually the horse-race itself was abandoned, the whole meadow being taken over by tents, sideshows and the milling crowds. As was the custom among Bavarians, a special beer, Marzenbier, was brewed annually for the occasion and, when people complained that the drink in their mugs was constantly being watered down by early snowfalls and autumn rains, the opening date was brought forward to accommodate them. Hence the fact that the Oktoberfest now begins in late September.

The festivities are presided over by a huge statue representing Bavaria. The 60-foot-high goddess-clad in a vaguely classical toga with an animal skin cinched round on top, and carrying a laurel wreath-stands on a prominence at the side of the meadow. She was poured in brass by the caster, Ferdinand won Miller, on the orders of King Ludwig 1. Though Ludwig was a lover of the arts and set Munich squarely on the path of becoming a place devoted to them, it is universally conceded that "Bavaria" is not a work of art. To me, at least, she looks like Mae West in a bearskin.

The wreath she bears was for the victors, I concluded, since the Oktoberfest inevitably evolved quite quickly into a marathon of contests to determine who could drink the most draught beer (at Munich festivals the beer is sold only on tap), eat the most barbecued chicken or sausages or, for waitresses, who could carry the greatest number of Masskruge-heavy beer mugs each holding a litre of ale.

This honour once belonged to Rosa of the Braur6sl beer tent who was able to cany 21 full Masskruge at a time. This gives a very good idea of the general dimensions of typical Munich beer-hall waitresses. "It is amazing that anything so big can move so fast!" I heard one Oktoberfest patron observe. And an Irish-American journalist once apostrophized these waitresses as "flat-footed ballerinas of beer" -- a reference both to their comfortable flat footwear and their Bavarian dirndl skirts that make them look like members of a giants' corps de ballet.

Then, too, each Oktoberfest competes with its predecessors. Pertinent and impertinent statistics for each year are totted up and publicized as though the Oktoberfest were some sort of World Series. In one recent year, for instance, a total of some four million litres of beer and 500,000 barbecued chickens were consumed during the 16 days of the festival.

The sheer raw energy of the festival is staggering. On my first visit I can remember watching two young, rather small men doing their tipsy best to demolish one another with their bare fists when one of them, going into a clinch, looked at me balefully and said "Do you want to get in on this?" Now, I stand just under six-foot-four, and anyway I was holding a mug of beer in one hand and a sausage and bun in the other, and my mouth was full of all three. I remember wondering vaguely, as a purely practical matter, how I would go about accepting the invitation, and how each of us might come out of it if I took them seriously. The effects of the Oktoberfest beer had softened both fighters so much that they were quite unable to inflict any real damage even on each other. In the end I said nothing; and the brawlers, quite unperturbed by my lack of response, simply went on punching one another.

Present-day levels of violence notwithstanding, it is this improbable scene that has stuck in my mind, typifying what the Oktoberfest should be: a beery, zany, but harmless romp. For the Bavarians--in their unshakeable self-confidence, their conviction that their way of life is the best--possess the secret of a special wisdom: the importance of not being earnest.

See "A View on Cities - Munich" for a quick tour with photos.

Read also William Boston's Appreciation of Munich as the "Most Livable City."

AND: Munich, Germany's Hotspot (NY Times Article)

AND: One Englishman's Jaundiced View of Oktoberfest