Bavaria

Bavaria is the setting of Hugh Legat’s recollection of a walking holiday with Paul von Hartmann after their 1932 finals. Planned as an escape into the countryside and an opportunity to visit Hartmann’s girlfriend, the trip instead brings the two young men into the turmoil surrounding a political rally in Munich; in Legat’s memory, even a holiday in a small town cannot remain separate from events overtaking Germany.

The planned holiday

Hartmann had booked the tickets during Hilary term in 1932. The plan followed a visit by the two friends to Legat’s mother, who lived in a cottage in Stow-on-the-Wold. She disliked Germans on principle but had adored Paul, a detail that gives the proposed holiday a personal connection as well as an itinerary. Back at Balliol College, Hartmann suggested showing Hugh countryside different from the Cotswolds, and explained that they could meet the girlfriend he had in Bavaria.

The journey was imagined as a break from Oxford life, ending with finals and turning toward landscape and companionship. Neither friend anticipated that political events would alter the atmosphere of the vacation before they arrived. Their plans had been made while life at Oxford seemed to continue as usual, without their accounting for the dissolution of the Reichstag by Hindenburg and the general election it provoked.

Munich and the politics of the holiday

The pair reached Munich on the same summer day that Adolf Hitler addressed a huge rally outside the city. They tried to set politics aside and continue their holiday, but Legat recalls that there was no escape even in the smallest town. The memory gathers a succession of public confrontations: marches and counter-marches by the Sturmabteilung and the Iron Front, demonstrations outside buildings, and political arguments in cafés.

The streets also carried the struggle in printed form. Nazi posters appeared during the day, bearing slogans that proclaimed Adolf Hitler’s ascendancy and called Germany to awaken; leftists tore them down overnight. A meeting in a park ended with mounted police charging the crowd. These details make Bavaria more than a rural destination in Legat’s account: the holiday’s intended distance from public affairs collapses into visible, recurring signs of political conflict.

Legat’s recollection of the visit

The friends’ attempt to avoid politics failed most sharply when Leyna insisted they stand outside Adolf Hitler’s apartment. When Hitler appeared, she shouted abuse at him, and the pair were lucky to escape without being beaten. The incident places the friends close to the political confrontation they had hoped to ignore, while also showing how their holiday was shaped by the choices and encounters of the people around them.

Legat remembers the trip as a departure from the intellectual world of Hauff and J. S. Mill. That contrast gives the setting its retrospective force: Bavaria had been proposed as a change of scenery, but the journey brought the friends face to face with a political reality that could not be kept outside their vacation.