(I’m including songs I heard while moving through in Europe in 1985. I’d like to say that I recall music of local origin, but alas, my brain wasn’t always trained for it…yet.)
Previously: Euro Pilgrimage ’85, Ch. 7: Vienna and the dawning of a Habsburg fixation.
A fascination with history brought me to Europe in 1985.
The trip wasn’t about bicycling, because I wasn’t engaged in that pursuit (yet). It certainly wasn’t about drunken mayhem (I was too cautious) or hooking up, which for me was a once-per-decade, Halley’s Comet, coin-flip sort of purely accidental occurrence.
Rather, my prevailing vibe was a recurring syllabus of Western Civilization & Culture 101.
Copious quantities of classics were absorbed through daily doses of architecture, art and museum visits. I sought pottery, paintings and panes of stained glass, and remained the wide-eyed student throughout. Every last moment was new to me, and each day felt like I was being shaken to the core and reborn.
It gradually dawned on me that history is forever interwoven with the here and now. Whenever I emerged from the European past ― usually stooping, given that few medieval buildings were constructed with 6-foot, 4-inch Americans in mind ― the contemporary European present immediately reappeared.
How had the Europeans gotten from there to here, and why did we Americans turn out so differently?
Europe was indeed old, but also relentlessly topical. In Istanbul, soldiers with machine guns were posted at street corners near the Topkapi Palace, presumably because of heightened tensions since the Turkish-Kurdish conflict in 1984.
At the youth hostel in Basel, I chanced upon an environmental activist concerned about pollution in the Rhine. I’d been in Greece for a spirited election, and everywhere spent time with travelers my age or younger who wanted to discuss Palestinian liberation, nuclear free zones, refugee rights and organic farming.
English-speaking Europeans invariably circled around to current events in the political sphere. After all, the continent was still divided into armed camps, and a sizeable chunk of it remained Communist. In 1985, Europe was four decades removed from its uneasy post-WWII settlement, but the various “-isms” still mattered.
As an American, I was expected to answer criticisms of President Ronald Reagan, which I tended to do by heartily agreeing with the arguments of my interlocutors, seeing as they couldn’t be any more opposed to Reagan than I was.
As the days passed during my first trip abroad, I could feel the balance of my consciousness shifting. There was a realization that “now” is never more than an ephemeral snapshot, and history a continuum as opposed to a postcard. Strauss seamlessly morphed into Bruce Springsteen, whose music could be heard daily by the same Viennese who had been alive when Freud still kept office hours near the Ring.
I started thinking less about how things used to be, and more about how they were now, and yet there was a prominent exception to the rule: Beer.
In 1985, the last thing I wanted was for European beer to be “modern,” because at that precise time in America, “modern” beer was only barely drinkable beer, an insipid liquid concocted from water, powdered school paste and excessive marketing, and little else. The situation was changing, to be sure, but for the moment beer absolutely needed to be old-fashioned in Europe — or else, why had I come to Europe?
Vienna, historically a European brewing monolith, was considered to have lost the thread somewhat during its post-Habsburg era, and yet the city still offered just enough of the sought-after throwback Central European beer culture to whet my appetite for Salzburg, which was only a stone’s throw from Bavaria and Mecca (well, Munich).
And yes, I was ready for this cultural shift. When it came to beer, touring these corners of Central Europe meant catching up, not only in recent terms from Greece, Turkey and Italy, but in the sense of my entire drinking life, because coming of age in the Ohio Valley meant witnessing the very nadir of beer culture in America on a depressing, first-hand basis.
Beer in the Louisville metropolitan area during the period of my youth came from two broad American brewery groupings, either national or regional, each producing precisely the same light, lighter and lightest golden lager beers. These were only distantly related to lager’s Old World heritage in Germany and Central Europe, and were “Lite years” removed from pre-Prohibition pilsner adaptations in America, which at least bore a vestige of similarity to the ancestral European template.
By the time I entered university in 1978, fewer than 100 brewing companies remained in the United States. Isolated alternatives to the status quo were still only dimly visible to a fly-over Hoosier. Fritz Maytag had successfully revived Anchor Brewing in San Francisco; the pioneering New Albion had come and gone in the 1970s, and Sierra Nevada launched in 1979. There were a few others in the Pacific Northwest, New England and Colorado, but it remained that Southern Indiana emphatically was not to be confused with Seattle, Boston or Denver (see here for more: 40 Years in Beer).
Our mentor Michael “The Beer Hunter” Jackson had taught us that during colonial times, American brewing reflected norms from the British Isles. From the 1850s on, when Germans began coming to the United States in large numbers, their brewing and beer drinking traditions traveled with them. Soon most larger American cities as well as many smaller ones possessed breweries that took their procedural, technical and atmospheric cues from the time-tested Central European playbook, as adjusted for American crops and climates.
And it was a lovely thing while it lasted.
But xenophobic sentiments in World War I merged handily with teetotalism, and the idiocy of Prohibition sealed the deal, obliterating American beer culture for decades afterward. When brewing returned, it had been stripped of its past and subjected to the unrestrained greed of postwar capitalism.
The imperial-era postwar American preference for bland, manufactured uniformity forcibly wrenched beer from its fresh, local foundation, rendering it into watery oblivion, subjected also to the multitudinous regulatory irrationalities of the Bible Belt’s rampant superstitions.
Nonetheless, in the days of my youth there remained a dusty patina of vaguely recognizable German character to local legacies and customs of beer and beer drinking, like a ghost ad on an old brick building.
After all, Oertel’s, Fehr’s and Wiedemann were not names traceable to Guatemala or Japan. Family trees connected them to Germany in a larger sense, and often specifically to Bavaria, the southern region of Germany, where lager brewing and its social vocabulary were first developed.
In 1985, these faint murmurs were as good as it got in the Louisville metropolitan area. I knew almost nothing of the English ale-making tradition, which was being surreptitiously reinvented by the nascent “microbrewing” movement. Belgium was a place for waffles, not Trappists, the latter as yet largely unknown outside their monasteries of origin.
Fortunately, my bosses at the package store allowed me to stock a few imports, and while the pickings were slim, I was able to compare them to Jackson’s descriptions and begin learning something. As these and other educational nuances were supplemented by frequent samplings and accompanying travels, beer became my life’s work.
In 1985, most of this was yet to come, and so the passage to Munich began with a train from Vienna to Salzburg and Austria’s mountainous Alpine region.
In addition to Salzburg’s scenic mountain setting, the city had earned a reputation as a center of art, music and culture. Mozart was born there, and the composer’s image was synonymous with brightly packaged marzipan sold all over town. The Sound of Music had been filmed in the region. The Hohensalzburg Fortress, a thousand-year-old castle, overlooked the fairytale facades of the Old Town. Ancient subterranean salt mines were located nearby (“salz” is salt in German).
I crammed as much into the daylight hours as possible, touring the fortress and a salt mine, hiking up and down the Mönchsberg (one of five “mountains” in Salzburg; the other four are Kapuzinerberg, Rainberg, Festungsberg and Hellbrunner Berg), and even venturing a half day’s pre-emptive visit to Munich (1), where I’d be meeting cousin Don.
But in all honesty, I’d set my sights on just one attraction: the Augustiner Bräustübel, a venerable tavern and garden where the beer now known as Müllner Bräu has been brewed and served for four centuries ― for those keeping score, well before the United States was founded.
On my first day in Salzburg, safely ensconced in the excellent International Youth Hostel (still thriving today as Yoho Hostel, 9 Paracelsusstrasse, a ten-minute walk from the train station), I made a short orientation stroll through the Old Town, scribbled a few notes, and set off to find the Augustiner.
As the name indicates, it was an Augustinian monastery until those monks evaporated, then the Benedictines took over. Brewing would have remained a constant; think of beer as automatic ecumenicalism.
Eventually I happened upon the complex of buildings comprising monastery, brewery and beer restaurant, all perched on the north side of the Monchsberg. I was using a paper map to navigate narrow hillside lanes, and didn’t know there was a far larger primary entrance further down the hill. The house numbers told me the brewery and beer garden had to be close by, and in a state of excited youthful muddle, my first choice of doorways was utterly mistaken.
I stepped across a threshold; through a partly ajar door, a choir could be seen and heard practicing. One of the choir members saw me, and immediately understood. He good-naturedly gestured: out, and to the left. The actual entrance was minimally signposted according to American custom, just a normal hanging sign like those marking an English pub, and here I was, expecting garish neon.
(For photographs from my 2003 visit to the Augustiner, go here: Hip Hops: One fine day at the Augustiner Bräustübel in Salzburg, Austria.)
I went inside, down a wide flight of stairs to a long corridor lined with various kiosks leased by local vendors. The Schmankerlgang, or delicatessen arcade, provided all sorts of food, including pretzels, sausages, schnitzel, cheeses and more. Bread was purchased and I pointed at something that looked good, which I’m wagering in retrospect was Eieraufstrich, a cheesy mustard egg spread.
Indoor drinking rooms were located off to the side, sumptuously appointed in wood, with tile stoves and stained glass windows. But it was out in the leafy beer garden that I fell in love with a way of life, one experienced at the Augustiner for the very first time.
In mid-afternoon on a weekday, hundreds of beer lovers were seated at tables, shaded by towering chestnut trees, surrounded by stone walls and stucco, virtually all of them drinking malty Marzen-style lager brewed and aged only yards away.
It was entirely self-service, as I recall, or maybe everyone merely enjoyed the time-honored ritual of getting their own beer.
Having no idea what to do, I imitated the people in front of me. A cashier took Austrian schillings (plastic wasn’t accepted and Euros didn’t exist), and handed me a receipt. Upon choosing a liter (33.8 ounces) ceramic mug from the freshly washed public stack, I rinsed it in a fountain of cold water, handed mug and receipt over to aproned men who were pouring the deep golden/amber beer from a tap embedded in a wooden barrel, and prepared for nirvana.
Teens drank alongside elderly men. There were playing cards, songs for singing, chicken bones and carts filled with emptied mugs. Strangers shared tables and bought rounds. Worldwide languages were spoken. I ate, drank, used the WC, drank some more, and returned the following nights to do it again, each time walking 25 minutes back to my lodging, feeling perfectly safe and wishing every bit of it were possible back home.
In the decades since, I’ve visited dozens of similar beer gardens in Central Europe. Some proved superior to the Augustiner (where my most recent stop was in 2003), but it’s the first time you always remember, and looking back, I remember almost nothing else about Salzburg in 1985.
Next was Munich, where there were dozens of places just like the Augustiner. Would I survive?
It took more than a month of continental roaming, but finally the time had come for perhaps the main event on the calendar of my emerging Euro consciousness: Bavaria’s beer paradise. I equipped myself to ask for the bill at restaurants and bars like this: “Die Rechnung, bitte!”
However, what I’d be getting in return was less a reckoning than a reality check. The financial jolt was not unexpected. In fact, I’d taken notes and budgeted in preparation, and the landing, while soft enough, was still noticeable.
Greece, Turkey and Italy had proven to be refreshingly affordable, but it was clear that as I moved northward, this would change. In Vienna and Salzburg, the independent hostel prices had been so reasonable that with a modicum of restraint in food and drink, the budget stayed balanced. The challenge would begin in earnest in Germany.
Simply stated, money was not a negotiable proposition. Periodic splurges had to be planned with laser precision, and it was vital to maintain a daily undertow of expenditures according to plan. Between traveler’s checks and a debit card, I had just enough money to average spending no more than $25 a day for roughly three months, with $5 – $10 more each day for the concluding Scandinavian segment.
There was no Plan B, although as previously mentioned, it helped that the exchange rate for most European currencies in the summer of 1985 was praiseworthy to the point of unprecedented (three Deutschmarks to one U.S. dollar, for starters). This was as good as it would get for some years to come.
Still, from Germany forward, bargains would be few, and it was time to consistently deploy the full arsenal of budget travel tricks outlined in Europe on $25 Dollars-A-Day and Let’s Go: Europe, as well as gleaned from conversations with fellow travelers. For instance, it’s always a good idea to carry a few Ziploc plastic freezer bags, although this explanation first necessitates a “preferred lodgings” digression.
I stayed in many youth hostels. Understandably, youth hostel breakfasts (when available) tended to be basic. There’d be coffee and tea, some rolls, butter and jam, and maybe fruit. They tended to be adequate for the price; sometimes inclusive, other times a la carte.
My budgetary priority for Munich was to stay in an officially registered IYHF hostel. I knew in advance that it likely would be my only chance in Bavaria, given that Bavarian hostels did not accept guests over the age of 25. I was as yet 24 and fully qualified, but to my disappointment, bunks were exceedingly tight, as in none whatever.
(The major drawback to hostels was the frequency of stays by large groups of younger schoolchildren during high season, and this was the precise situation in Munich.)
In the end, I was compelled to stay in an actual hotel opposite Munich’s train station, Hotel Europäischer Hof, albeit it in a tiny closet of a room, with communal toilets and showers down the hall, and for double the price of a hostel bunk.
But it was clean and private, and there was a nice surprise in store. The saving grace of my hotel room was the breakfast buffet at no extra charge, which was something to be expected at hotels in Germany and Netherlands. On the first morning it seemed as though I’d entered the wrong hall by mistake.
Bountiful was an understatement, and available beverages and edibles included coffee, tea, juice, milk, quark, yogurt, fresh fruit, bread, rolls, eggs, muesli, ham, salami and cheese. I ate as intemperately as possible, and my discreet deployment of a freezer bag each morning meant that lunch became a seamless extension of breakfast.
Granted, I didn’t often stay in reputable establishments like this, of the type affording such creative buffet options for secretive carryout ― and be aware that double dipping wasn’t part of the plan from the hotel’s perspective.
I’d budgeted for Munich, knowing how important it would be to drink beer there, and hoping that if I met Don, he’d buy a few rounds (we did meet, and he was providentially generous).
All hail the plastic freezer bag!
In an era of railpass holders, Munich’s Hauptbahnhof (main train station) was the obvious focal point of arrival and departure for most visitors to the city. A country bumpkin like me soon learned that Munich Hbf. also served as crossing point for numerous U-Bahn (subway), S-Bahn (suburban rail) lines, and surface transportation.
The S-Bahn was operated by the German state railway, and so it was eligible for use with a railpass, but not the subway, which had its own tariff regime. Travelers confusing their U’s and S’s were sometimes spotted paying on-the-spot fines.
Just outside the Hauptbahnhof, city buses queued and fixed track trams rattled past. As in Vienna, the transit options were fairly bewildering. It should suffice to say that literally, one could get anywhere in Munich (or Germany, or Europe) from the Hauptbahnhof without need of a private car.
This fact alone changed my life.
As with airports, big urban train stations of the time were complete one-stop shops. A traveler could get a hot shower, buy fresh produce and snacks, peruse the latest in electronics and video gear, or pick up a newspaper from just about any European country. At the same time, these train stations struck me as gritty, evocative and genuine, invariably more “real” than plasticized airports, which by virtue of their isolated locations always felt artificial and contrived by comparison.
Train stations were organic and connected, not hermetically sealed, perhaps precisely because they served as daily crossing and congregating points for ordinary people from all walks of life, generally of the sort who don’t routinely commute to work, go shopping or visit grandma using an airplane. Beginning around 1989, Munich’s Hauptbahnhof was extensively remodeled and modernized, evidently as part of a long-term European goal of making train stations into sleek, antiseptic, carbon copies of airports.
It is a trend I detest, and a colossal refurbishment is underway yet again at Munich Hbf as I write in 2025. The next time I visit Munich, there’ll be a huge glass architectural gemstone, and I’ll yearn for the good old days, which brings me to the art of drinking beer in a train station the old-school way.
There I was in Munich, a city where all self-respecting beer tourists were supposed to submit to the ritualistic visit to the Hofbrauhaus (yes, Don and I did it), and then make the rounds of various beer gardens, tap rooms and traditional restaurants (for me, these came during later trips when I was better funded), one of the most enduringly totemic chapters in my beer travel narrative was a fatal attraction to the Imbiss (snack bar) by Gleis (track) 16.
The Imbiss, as it was laid out in a 1960s or 70s format, has long since been extinct. As of 2018, the approximate square footage there had been transformed into huge (and posh) deli-style eatery. To be honest, Gleis 16 wasn’t all that much during its heyday, but during the 1980’s this simple, functional train station concession stand was a genuine Munich destination for budget travelers the world over.
There were two long windows with outside counter space, plentiful tile and stainless steel, beer taps, kitchen equipment for preparing basic food, and several customarily greasy, though by necessity crisply efficient, employees in blue smocks. In front of the Imbiss were a handful of wooden tables that resembled smaller, elongated versions of the telephone wire spools that used to litter backyards in the Georgetown of my youth.
Standing at the tables during morning, evening and night were locals, tourists, commuters, vagrants and assorted hangers-on, the majority of them savoring the Imbiss’s only true specialties: Cool Hacker-Pschorr golden Helles lager, and a portion of delicious Leberkäse, a high-quality form of all-meat bologna for the discriminating aesthete, cut from a warm deli-sized square loaf, weighed and priced, and served with a crusty roll and plenty of spicy mustard.
True, there were other choices. I also sampled Munich’s signature Hefeweizen and Weisswurst (wheat ale and white sausage) combo with sweet mustard. For all I know, there may have been soft drinks and sweets, but no matter.
The Imbiss at Gleis 16 seldom disappointed, representing old-fashioned egalitarian functionality for the benefit of the city’s everyday transit users, as well as short-term visitors like us, for whom it was a fine and refreshing perch to observe life’s rich pageant. In retrospect, it can be surmised that the ongoing Cold War inadvertently helped to preserve older ways in Central Europe. When the thaw came, and various planetary communications revolutions arrived, change came quickly.
But for the time being, there were liter steins of beer, various and sundry sausages, Deutschmarks and Pfennigs, aspects of unfathomable etiquette that became second nature before the last glass was poured, and a constant flow of conversation, information and education.
German beer traditions can be pleasing so long as it is remembered that much of what Americans know about Germany actually pertains to Bavaria, and much of what they know about Bavaria actually applies to Munich alone. For example, “beer halls” in the sense of the Hofbräuhaus generally do not exist in matching scale outside the city of Munich.
Fortunately for me, in 1985 a beer hall even larger than the Hofbräuhaus was a brief home away from home as Don and I wandered the city. It was called Mathäser Bierstadt (“beer city”), and was tied to Löwenbräu.
The Mathäser was cavernous, filled with nooks, cellar, byways, gardens, banquet rooms and snugs, and it was decidedly more down to earth than the Hofbräuhaus, perhaps less attractive to well-heeled tourists, but comfortably frayed around the edges, with an earthier composition of native German barfly that we absolutely adored and related to.
At its post-WWII peak, there were 5,335 seats at the Mathäser. Is it possible to be a dive bar if there’s room enough for 5,335 drinkers?
The Mathäser as I experienced it during my trip (and again famously in 1987, 1989 and 1995) was built in 1892 on the site of a previous beer hall and brewery. Löwenbräu bought the premises in 1907, and the brewery was closed in 1915. Amid chaos at the conclusion of World War I, the short-lived Munich Soviet Republic actually was headquartered at the Mathäser, confirming the usefulness of the city’s larger beer halls as event venues.
Wikipedia’s summary is impeccably understated: “After the revolution was crushed, the Mathäser returned to its original function as a beer pub.” To me, the Mathäser Bierstadt was tops. It felt like the 1950s, or as I imagined the 1950s might feel.
Unfortunately, the Mathäser perished in 1996. A few years later the site was transformed into an ultra-modern cinema and entertainment complex. I walked past it in 2004 and 2018, and bowed in reverence for what it used to be.
Dubbed American movies probably are showing now, and outside the cinema, you’ll see imported Miller and Corona throughout the city. The Oktoberfest lagers become ever lighter, and beer tastes colder on each trip. There’s a Hofbräuhaus franchise in Newport, Kentucky, and more than 20 others throughout the world.
The memories are fond, indeed, though now increasingly balanced by melancholy. But the short video embedded here, as shot at the Mathäser in 1989, is simply amazing.
When I shared it with Dick Nixon at Twitter, he became emotional. So was I.
As proof of Mathäser Bierstadt’s lasting impact, I close this installment with an update of sorts from the years following the 1985 trip to Munich. Specifically, during the time of my NA Confidential blog’s widest reach, I devoted a post to the Mathäser and received upwards of 50 comments from all over the world, some landing years after the post in question first appeared.
The best of these comments, which continue to affect me deeply, testify to a universality of spirit, and to the social and cultural significance of the Munich beer hall as a “third space” for people of all ages and walks of life. Following are these testimonials.
They no longer make beer halls (read: “beer culture”) like the Mathäser, and we’re poorer for their absence. There is real, and there is Disney. You know which I’ll be choosing.
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D said …
I share your sentiments totally and with equal sadness. In the winter of ’62-’63 while working in the banquet hall and night club at the Hotel Bayerischerhof, the Mathäser (I agree with that spelling too) was THE BEST.
My daughter, Meghan, is about to embark on a trip to Munich … here is what I wrote her today July 29, 2009:
“Your upcoming trip to Germany is bringing back some pretty strong memories, one of which unleashed a flood of emotion when I just discovered, a few minutes ago, that my all-time favorite Beer Hall in Munich, the Mathaeser (which used to be a stone’s throw from the main station, the Hauptbahnhof, and the main traffic circle, Karlsplatz — colloquially known to us locals as Stachus) has been torn apart and has become a modern, artificial multiplex cinema and urban bar/restaurant center.
“That is a fucking crime.
“Meg, this breaks my heart and I’m crying as I write this and knock back a couple of Labatt Blues, saddened that a place which was so central to my experience in Munich has been so abused and all I am left with is my memories of so many wonderful wild nights there with my best friend, Andy.
“The Mathaeser was a HUGE, and I mean massive open beer hall (held 3000+) with a boxing ring type stage in the middle upon which performed various wonderful oompahpah bands with their ‘blasmusik’ …I can hear them now … “Heute blau und morgen blau und oooooooooober morgen wiederrrrr!” (‘Sad today and tomorrow sad too and the day after all over again!’).
“Perfect to sing when you are half wasted on huge steins of frothy beer straight ‘vom fass’ (from the spring or barrel) interspersed with shots of schnapps dispensed by hefty aproned waitresses with an aluminum bucket full of ice containing a bottle or two of schnapps over their muscled arm. In the same hand they held a tray of shot glasses. They just wandered through the crowd pouring shots which we sometimes just dropped into our steins, glass and all, depth charge style.
“(A depth charge was a mine dropped on submarines in WW2 … when it reached a certain depth it exploded, hopefully on top of a German submarine. Those schnapps ‘charges’ were pretty devastating too!)
“All the while singing lusty (lustiger) German beer drinking songs, arms locked with those of complete strangers and rocking rhythmically back and forth, row-the-boat style, on the benches on which we all sat, twelve to a table.
“Then, if you were hungry you could retire to one of many satellite rooms off the main hall which served ‘eintopf’ of wonderfully tasty linzensuppe (lentil soup) served with semmeln (rolls with sesame seeds), soup guaranteed to make you fart for a week.
“Oh Meg, those were great times. We were so broke but managed to have such memorable times.
“The Mathaeser’s ( pronounced mattayser) rival was the Hofbrauhaus….after which the famous song was sung…
“In München steht ein Hofbräuhaus (Hofbroyhouse)
Eins, zwei, g’suffa …(pronounced zuffah)
Da läuft ( loyft) so manches Fäßchen ( fessschen) aus:
Eins, zwei, g’suffa …
“translated….
“In Munich is the Hofbrau pub–
One, two, drink up!!
So many kegs flowed out of it
One, two, drink up!!!
“To us it never rivalled the wildness of the Mathaeser. Hitler spoke here and you could feel, even in 1962/3, an undercurrent of angry, cold, nastiness, as opposed to the Mathaeser’s good old German friendly spirit (gemütlichkeit = gemootlichkite).
“But, today it is all that is left and the service sucks and they steal your change if you aren’t careful but it is still a must in Munich.
“Prost !!!”
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P said …
Thanks for your reminiscences of the Mathäser Bierstadt, which also left me with a feeling of melancholy for great times gone forever.
I caught the overnight train from London to Munich in the summer of ‘75 looking for a holiday job. Having spent all the first day in a fruitless search for work, I was heading along Bayerstrasse back to the Hauptbahnhof to collect my stuff in anticipation of having to sleep in the park for the night when I tried one last time at the hotel right next to the Mathäser, Hotel Stachus. It worked and I got a bellboy/washer-up/night porter/general dogsbody job for the summer.
My duties basically consisted of anything that nobody else wanted to do, such as washing up for breakfast. Now, standing over a hot, steaming sink at 7.30 am on a warm summer’s morning washing up for 150 Swedes may not sound like a lot of fun, but the perk of the job was the handily-placed fridge, packed with deliciously cold half-litre bottles of Löwenbräu.
I have not drunk beer at that time of day before or since, but never has the golden nectar tasted so sweet or slipped down so effortlessly and however much I drank, I never felt drunk because I was sweating so much from the hot kitchen it just seemed to go straight through the system. This was going to be a great job.
The Mathäser was a constant presence. It was so close you could see into it at the back because the kitchen windows of the hotel looked straight down onto it. The oompah bands were generally audible in the background at most times of the day and night, and even during the hours when it was closed there was always activity or movement of some sort going on and the place seemed to be reassuringly alive and breathing even if it was now at rest, like a friendly giant slumbering in the background.
As you would expect, the Mathäser had a huge kitchen (or apparently five kitchens. Whenever a large party arrived at short notice and the hotel was short of food, I would be sent round from the hotel to pick up a few hundred frozen Schnitzel. The head chef knew me and would just add a couple of ticks to the slate as I staggered out under the load, a mere drop in the ocean of the vast quantity of supplies at his disposal.
There were plenty of other large beer-halls and beer-gardens in Munich, usually displaying the arms of the brewery to which they were attached: Spaten, Paulaner, Franziskaner, Hacker-Pschorr come to mind and I selflessly devoted many hours to a thorough investigation of the particular qualities of each of their different brews: Pils, Export, Export Dunkel (always my favourite but you don’t seem to be able to get it now, not the same stuff anyway) and so on.
But none had the all-encompassing warmth and down-to-earth openness of the Mathäser. You walked in and it was always busy and unaffected: all life seemed to be there simply enjoying itself and to have been there enjoying itself for eternity, like a timeless tavern scene painted by one of the Dutch masters. But after a moment’s surprised contemplation, you realised that all you had to do was find a small space in those vast, cavernous rooms, sit down and get the Fräulein to bring you the first Maß, and you became a part of that eternal scene yourself.
The Mathäser was not sophisticated, but it was genuine, and it is indeed a tragedy that it has been replaced by a soulless, glass-and-aluminium ‘entertainment’ complex, where the closest you can get to a decent drop is a miniscule amount of beer served in a champagne glass at some frigging café. They don’t know what they’re missing …
E said …
Thank you for your wonderful memories and for stirring my own deeply felt memories of youth.
On my nineteenth birthday, a Sunday in June 1968, I found the Mathaeser Bierstadt of Munich by accident. Walking on the street outside with my buddy, a fellow soldier from the 24th Infantry Division, we entered an alcove, drawn by the wonderful smells of cooking sausage. Then, from somewhere, I heard music. We explored further, up a staircase and opened two huge doors–and there it was–beer-drinkers heaven. It was 11AM on a Sunday morning and there were two thousand people in the place! DRINKING BEER! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!
We were two dopey kids, but we stumbled upon one of the greatest beer-drinking joints in the world! And I love beer. For the next year, it became my favorite place in Munich, our home away from home. We would take the #6 trolley to Karlsplatz, walk toward the Hauptbahnhof and there we were. It was, at one time, in the Guinness Book of Records. More beer was served in that building, in one year, than anywhere in the world.
Everything the previous posters wrote was right-on about the place. I have the warmest of memories the place of how kind the people treated a young soldier. I can’t believe it’s gone. That makes me very sad.
Again – thank you for the memories.
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J said …
My partner and I lived and worked in Munich in ’78-79. The Mathäser was our favourite watering hole by a country mile and believe me we sampled a few! Saturday nights at the Mathäser were always packed with incident. It was a place that you felt was steeped in history, very down to earth and REAL compared with the tourist traps.
We were so happy that on a visit ten years later very little had changed and we naively expected it to be ever thus. I only found out its fate today (April ’11) after a search on Google Earth/Streetview. We are devastated that it has gone. I thought that Müncheners of all people were a breed that valued what they had.
So sad.
—
In 1985, our days in Munich were filled with long walks, museum visits, a day trip to Füssen in the Bavarian Alps for the bus up to King Ludwig’s Neuschwanstein castle, and periodic visits to the Imbiss at Gleis 16 for refueling.
It was the last time I’d see Don during the 1985 trip, but we’ve met and traveled together numerous times in the years since. In the summer of 2025, Don is headed to Europe for six weeks at age 80, making his usual rounds. I hope to be doing the same, fifteen years from now.
Next: Euro Pilgrimage ’85, Ch. 9: Lizard King in the City of Light — and on to Ireland.
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(1) It’s funny what you remember. During the brief train ride from Salzburg to Munich, I shared a compartment with a school teacher from Singapore who was escorting a student tour group; he’d gone back to Austria to reclaim luggage accidentally left behind by one of his charges.
