King's Square

King's Square in Munich is presented as both a transformed urban space and a point where private memory collides with the public staging of the Third Reich. For Hartmann, the former park survives as the setting of a remembered picnic; on his return, its grass, trees, and open paths have given way to granite, flags, memorial structures, and the buildings of the regime.

From park to parade ground

Hartmann approaches King's Square on foot, having avoided this part of Munich for several years. The route passes the Old Botanical Gardens, a girls’ school, and academic buildings before opening onto the square. He has preserved an earlier image of the place: a red-and-grey checked blanket beneath the trees, Leyna in a white dress, and Hugh Legat reading nearby. That recollection belongs to a park of ordinary leisure and companionship.

The present landscape abruptly displaces it. The park has been cleared to create a vast parade ground for the spectacles of the Third Reich. Tens of thousands of granite slabs replace the grass, while metal flagpoles take the place of trees. Two swastikas, each more than 40 metres high, dominate the space. The square’s physical redesign is not incidental scenery: it turns an open public place into a monumental setting for political display.

Monuments and surrounding buildings

Two Temples of Honour stand on either side of the square. Their yellow-limestone pillars enclose eight bronze sarcophagi apiece, containing the dead identified as martyrs of the Beer Hall Putsch. Eternal flames burn at the temples, watched by guards in black uniforms. The surrounding buildings extend the same severe visual order. One is the administration building of the National Socialist German Workers' Party; its near-identical counterpart is the Führerbau. White, grey, and black surfaces, straight lines, sharp edges, and even square-profiled classical columns make the ensemble feel deliberately controlled.

The arrangement links memorial ritual with current political authority. The square’s dead are commemorated in structures beside the administrative buildings of the regime, while the Führerbau serves as the destination of the conference Hartmann is approaching. The public space is therefore at once a commemorative site, a parade ground, and a threshold to official power.

Hartmann's return

The contrast between the remembered picnic and the remade square stops Hartmann in his tracks. He sets down his suitcase, registering the scale of the change; the view is worse than he had expected, even after seeing it in newsreels. The remembered park has not simply acquired new buildings. Its basic character has been erased and replaced by an immense political stage.

Outside the Führerbau, cars arrive amid guards, flashbulbs, and crowds. Hartmann salutes the commemorated dead because the gesture is required by law and disobedience could be dangerous; he cannot know who may be watching. He then picks up his suitcase and walks toward the conference. His passage across the square thus combines private recognition with compelled public conduct: he carries his earlier image of the place into a landscape where even a gesture of respect is governed by political risk.

Legat's crossing and the square's narrative role

King's Square also marks a change in Hugh Legat's sense of the city. Walking along Max-Joseph-Strasse, he passes cherry trees, apartment blocks, an obelisk, and people going about ordinary routines. Only after several minutes, as he moves toward the square, does he realize that he has crossed an invisible frontier. What he had understood as a park is now a parade ground, and a guard stands before an eternal flame at one of the temples.

Legat identifies the Führerbau by the crowd gathered on the granite square. He passes the hanging flags and bronze eagles, explains his official status to a sentry, and has his name checked by an officer inside the lobby before asking for the British delegation. The route makes the square more than a backdrop: it is the spatial transition from a familiar city street into the regime's ceremonial and administrative world. Hartmann encounters that transition through the destruction of a remembered landscape; Legat encounters it as a boundary he crosses without at first noticing. Together, their approaches show how the square converts political power into an environment that shapes movement, memory, and conduct.