Ludwigstraße
Now one of the most picturesque places in all of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Ludwigstraße is a festive tourist destination — not only for its shops, museum, restaurants, and church, but for the lüftlmalerei covering (almost) every building up and down the street.
The first documents to mention a permanent settlement here are from 2000 years ago, in 15 AD, when this area was part of the Roman province Raetia.
At that time, a trade route from Venice to Augsburg crossed through the Alps by an old mule track. The Romans turned that path into a road, and fortified the route — the Via Claudia Augusta — establishing an outpost here in the foothills on the German-side of the Alps, called “Partanum.”
After the fall of the Roman Empire at the end of the 5th century, Bauevarii began to take hold here, and the area soon became known as “Bavaria.”
When the first Christian church was built here, it was referred to as the “Partanum Kirche” (in German, the “Church in Partanum”).
However, since the locals spoke Bavarian — not Latin — the original Latin label was lost.
Over time, the name of the church overtook the name for the town and became condensed into a single word: “Partenkirchen.”
For the largely illiterate population, signs for the town required a visual depiction — rather than using words or letters — so the words for a “parted” (“Parten“) “church” (“Kirchen“) was represented by the image of a chapel with an axe at its center — an axe symbolically cutting the church into parts, or “parting the church.”
While “Partanum” eventually became “Partenkirchen,” its main street — which still follows that ancient Roman road — is now known as “Ludwigstraße,” named for King Ludwig II, who often stayed overnight in the nearby Schweizerhaus on Sonnenbergstraße when he passed through on his way to Schachen.1
During the Crusades, German nobles and their soldiers passed through here on their way to the Holy Lands.
One such Crusader, was the Holy Roman Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa, who, legend has it, bent the knee to the Duke of Bavaria, Heinrich the Lion, here in 1176.
Four years later, in 1180, after Friedrich Barbarossa ousted that Duke and replaced him with Duke Otto I of the House of Wittelsbach, Duke Otto I fortified this still well-traveled trade route by building a new castle on a hill overlooking Partenkirchen — the Werdenfels Castle.
The castle and control of the lucrative trade route were transferred to the Prince-Bishopric of Freising in 1294. Control of this important European trading route by the Freising archbishopric enabled the population of the County of Werdenfels — named for the nearby castle — to become relatively wealthy.
During this “Rotthandel,”– or the days when trade goods came over the Brenner Pass through the Alps from Italy by ox-carts and horse-drawn covered wagons — hotels, traders, stables, and warehouses stood here beside fields and farmhouses.
With the population ravaged, first by the Black Plague (1347-1351), and then by the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), the War of Spanish Succession (1701-1714), and the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815), the town here never grew very large.
What’s more, by 1802, when the county of Werdenfels was incorporated into the kingdom of Bavaria, the trade route through the Alps was no longer a source of income.
In 1834, as Adolph von Schaden noted in his travel guide published that year, Taschenbuch für Reisende durch Bayerns und Tyrols hochlande, Partenkirchen had no “more than a thousand inhabitants in 259 houses.”2
Unlike the nearby towns of Mittenwald and Oberammergau, the lüftlmalerei one finds here today are relatively new. What few buildings there were here, with however many lüftlmalerei on them, were twice destroyed by devastating fires — first in 1811, and then again on December 5, 1865.
However, tourism and Alpine sports soon became the town’s draw.
Such a draw, in fact, that Garmisch and Partenkirchen — separated for centuries by the Partnach River — were combined on January 1, 1935, by order of the Führer for the Winter Olympic Games in 1936.
After the Second World War, tourism became the main focus of the industry here.
And all of those events — everything that has ever made up what Partenkirchen has become — is painted in the lüftlmalerei on the buildings of Ludwigstraße today.
Today, there are far too many remarkable stories — and far too many lüftlmalerei — on this street to try to fit them all into a single webpage . . .
. . . So, instead, I’ve broken my tour of the buildings on Ludwigstraße into four parts:
- Adam, Peter, & Anton Jocher. Die Strassennamen von Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Adam Verlag, 2001, p. 110: "Es steht zu vermuten, daß die Straße zum Gedenken an König Ludwig II benannt wurde. Übernachtete er doch oft im nahe gelegenen Schweizerhaus (Sonnenbergstraße) und durchfuhr nächtens den Markt auf seinem Weg zum Schachen."
- von Schaden, Adolph. Taschenbuch für Reisende durch Bayerns und Tyrols hochlande, dann durch Berchtesgadens und Salzburgs Gefilde, nebst Beschreibungen Hohenschwangaus, Casteins, des Salzkammergutes und Bodensees. Josephlindauer’sche Buchhandlung, München, 1834, p. 11: "Dieser Markt, 28 Poststunden von München entfernt und allgemeinem Borgeben nach das alte Parthanum oder Partenum der Römer, ist eine Poststation und zählt in 259 Häusern mehr als tausend Einwohner."