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‘Fisch und Schlüssel’ (Fish and Key) is a punchy public sculpture in Munich’s Maxvorstadt district, standing on Ferdinand-Miller-Platz directly in front of St Benno Church. It was created by the sculptor Iskender Yediler and installed in 2005, with the artwork being an aluminium cast showing a fish carrying a key. In the photo, I think I’ve managed to capture the key element beautifully, although I accept that the fish element isn’t entirely visible.

The motif comes from the legend of St Benno, Munich’s patron saint, who was banished during a conflict over the ex-communication of Henry IV and so Benno told his canons to chuck the cathedral keys into the River Elbe. The key was found inside a freshly caught fish a few years later which surprised and delighted a lot of people…. Angry Protestants desecrated Benno’s tomb in Meissen in 1539, so the Wittelsbach dynasty (perhaps known best in the UK because of Sophia of Hanover, who is an important figure in the family tree of the British monarchy) promptly elevated him to become the patron saint of Munich.

This is the former Führerbau, which is where the Munich Agreement was signed on 30 September 1938. This deal was agreed by Nazi Germany, Britain, France and Italy, handing the Sudetenland, which was Czechoslovakia’s fortified and industrial border region, to Hitler. Czechoslovakia weren’t at the table to discuss the matter and the British Neville Chamberlain and French Édouard Daladier accepted the transfer to avoid immediate conflict. Germany occupied the Sudetenland in October 1938, stripping Czechoslovakia of key defences and heavy industry and leaving it strategically crippled. Chamberlain also signed a brief Anglo-German declaration with Hitler expressing the wish for peaceful relations, hence the famous “peace for our time” line on his return to London.

The peace agreement didn’t hold, but Chamberlain perhaps didn’t really have much choice here. There was a chance in his mind that the peace agreement might work, but with hindsight it was inevitable that it would fail given Hitler’s evil intent. The document was signed in Hitler’s office, which is still there and used by the University of Music and Performing Arts Munich who now occupy the building. The building had been constructed between 1933 and 1937, part of the Königsplatz project that was part of Hitler’s architectural vision for the city.

The city authorities would have ideally liked to have demolished all of the Nazi era buildings, but they already had a shortage of usable structures post-war and there was nothing wrong with this one other than its association with evil. But, for me to see this building was sobering, it’s not that long ago that Chamberlain turned up here in the hope that he could avert a war. There’s no obvious connection with the past other than for this subtle sign which is in German, Czech and Slovak, a gesture towards the attack on their nations that was agreed here.

And the side of the building which was used by the US after the war as the central point to return artwork and cultural items stolen by Nazis back to their owners. It was given to the University of Music to give it a more positive use and to try and free it from its past. The more modern building to the right of the photo is the NS-Dokumentationszentrum, which during Hitler’s time was known as the Brown House.

As we were driving by, we thought that we’d pop into BMW Welt to see what the hype seemed to be about given the very positive on-line reviews. This is effectively a decadent car showroom which is free of admission, located opposite to the BMW Museum. This is the heart of Bayerische Motoren Werke and their global HQ, despite huge efforts being made by Dereham Town Council to get them to relocate to the centre of Norfolk.

Some BMW cars.

I was surprised just how busy this whole arrangement was.

An old BMW car. I don’t think I’ll start a blog about cars if I’m being honest.

The Rolls Royce Spectre, which apparently retails in the UK for a third of a million pounds. That’s a lot of Greggs.

You can personalise your Rolls Royce should you wish.

Richard didn’t like it as it wasn’t British enough.

The Rolls Royce Cullinan, which is a little cheaper, but it still seems a lot of money for a car to me. Not that I’m in the market to buy a car, but I wouldn’t dare leave it anywhere in case it was scratched, vandalised or just stolen.

This was Richard’s favourite car.

Looking over the ground floor of the building.

A BMW motorbike.

We didn’t have time to go in, but this is the BMW Head Office on the left and the museum building on the right, both of which are located opposite to BMW Welt.

BMW Welt is an impressive building insomuch as it’s clearly a popular place to visit. They had a few cafes, but they had rather forgotten to provide sufficient seating, but I’m sure anyone actually wanting to buy a car would be given a free hot drink. I did wonder whether if Richard bought a Rolls Royce whether they’d buy us lunch, but then he declared he didn’t like the designs and so that plan went out of the window. I suspect that I would be more engaged with this if I knew anything about cars of motorbikes, but it was an interesting place to see and especially as it was free.

This is one of the exhibits at the museum which questions what the visitor thinks about them being present, noting “what kind of feelings do these traces of the past trigger in us?” as they’re cutlery from the Brown House which was formerly on this site. The Brown House (Braunes Haus) was the Nazi Party’s headquarters in Munich, set on Brienner Straße between Karolinenplatz and Königsplatz. The building began life in 1828 as a neoclassical city palace, later known as Palais Barlow, designed by Jean-Baptiste Métivier. In May 1930 the NSDAP bought it, financed in part by donations and loans from industrialists such as Fritz Thyssen and Friedrich Flick and they then had architect Paul Ludwig Troost refit the villa into a suitably imposing party HQ. It opened for business in early 1931 and served as the movement’s nerve-centre until the end of the regime. The house was badly damaged in wartime bombing, effectively destroyed, and its ruins were cleared in 1947. For decades the plot remained an empty scar in a quarter that had also included the Führerbau and other party buildings framing Königsplatz, a showpiece space the Nazis had reworked for rallies and ceremony.

The Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism (NS-Dokumentationszentrum) opened here in 2015, bringing a more positive use to the previous empty space. This seems the ideal place for exhibits such as this to be displayed, they’ve survived for nearly a century now and they may as well be on display in locations which explain the war and the reasons for it. It’s an intriguing survival and the Brown House is where the Blutfahne, or Blood Flag, was stored and Hitler had offices, the centre of where the Nazi movement grew in the early 1930s. If forks from the Brown House can trouble us, it is because they expose how the regime embedded itself in rooms that felt safe and respectable.