St.-Martin-Straße
Prominently displayed on the wall of St.-Martin-Straße 17 — the head office of the Toni Biersack family rental car company — a large lüftlmalerei of Hockey player Anton “Toni” Biersack painted in his prime as a hockey player for the local SC Riessersee team, with the mountains and the ruins of the Werdenfels castle behind him, by Michele Nardiello, 1997.
A local athlete, Biersack (1927-2007) was born and died in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. From 1948 to 1959 he played on the local hockey team SC Riessersee. As a member of the national team, he played in the 1953 and 1954 Ice Hockey World Championships, and in the 1956 Winter Olympics in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy.
In 1989 he was inducted into the German hockey Hall of Fame.
St.-Martin-Straße 27.
Saint Anthony in a medallion by Georg Kornbichler.
St.-Martin-Straße 29.
Sebastian Pfeffer, 1982.
Patrona Bavaria, Saint Anthony, pastoral scene.
St.-Martin-Straße 43.
On the wall outside St.-Martin-Straße 47, an image of Saint Florian painted by Gerhard Ester in 1991.
St.-Martin-Straße 66.
St.-Martin-Straße 69, Haus St. Martin.
Patrona Bavaria.
St.-Martin-Straße 70.
Saint Martin by Franz Winterhöller, 1971.
At St.-Martin-Straße 120, on the outside walls of the American Armed Forces Edelweiss Lodge and Resort, there are three massive lüftlmalerei of rustic scenes by Michele Nardiello — a young Bavarian man impressing (or frightening) his girlfriend by picking an edelweiss flower (the namesake of the resort) from the cliffside while out on a picnic, a wedding wrapping around a corner, and a pastoral scene of regular rural life in old Garmisch.
Unlike the rest of the town, one cannot just wander up to these lüftlmalerei. The Armed Forces Recreation Centers Resorts serve members of the U.S. Armed Forces, authorized guests and their families, and security at the gate will only allow authorized users onto the grounds.
As English travel writer Charles Boner described poetically in a footnote in his 1853 travelogue, Chamois Hunting in the Mountains of Bavaria:
Edelweis--Gnaphalium Leontopodium--a flower met with only on some of the highest mountains in certain parts of Tyrol and Bavaria. It is to be found in Berchtesgaden, and on the Scharfreuter in the Hinter Riss. It is much valued for the snowy purity of its colour, as well as on account of the difficulty of getting it. The very name, "Noble Purity," (edel, noble, weiss, white,) has a charm about it. Strangely enough it always grows in a spot to be reached only with utmost peril. You will see a tuft of its beautifully white flowers overhanging a precipice, or waving on a perpendicular wall of rock, to be approached but by a ledge, where perhaps a chamois could hardly stand. But it is this very difficulty of acquisition which gives the flower so peculiar a value, and impels many a youth to brave the danger, that he may get a posy of Edelweis for the hat or the bosom of the girl he loves ; and often has such a one fallen over the rocks just as he had reached it, and been found dead, in his hand the flower of such fatal beauty, which he still held firmly grasped.
His 150 year-old footnote seems to describe Nardiello’s mural at the front entrance of the Edelweiss Resort perfectly — right down to the precarious placement of the young man’s right foot and the fatal danger of falling rocks.
