In Europe

mentioned earlier, invited him to all her receptions. She also bought him neat shoes and respectable evening dress. Elsa Bruckmann, a Romanian princess by birth, taught him not to put sugar in his wine and other useful rules of etiquette. Both of them helped to mould him and make him ready for the bigger world.
    Young Baldur von Schirach – later a prominent Nazi – saw how finally even his reserved, aristocratic father fell for Hitler's charms. Looking back on it, he could find only one explanation for this bewildering phenomenon: amid the prevailing mood of doom in the old German Empire, people from the upper reaches of society as well were desperately in search of a saviour. And Hitler, ‘like a sorcerer’, was able to forge together two concepts that had until then ‘been as irreconcilable as fire and water: nationalism and socialism’.
    The eternally nagging question about Munich remains: how in the world could this friendly southern city, this uncommonly pleasant town, this centre of the arts and good cheer, have been the birthplace of such a fanatical and destructive movement? Here, after all, was where the NSDAP was set up, it was here that Hitler discovered his own charismatic powers, here that the movement's first martyrs fell in 1923, and it was here that the 1938 peace conference was held.
    In the late nineteenth century, Munich, capital of the conservative kingdom of Bavaria, developed into a baroque city of refuge with broad boulevards and glorious palaces. It was a haven for the writers, artists and theatrical people who wanted to escape the confines of Berlin. The Schwabing district was a second Montmartre. There were more painters and sculptors working in Munich than in Vienna and Berlin: traditional artists, but also people like Franz Marc, Paul Klee and other avant-gardists involved in the almanac
Der Blaue Reiter
. It was no coincidence, therefore, that the twenty-four-year-old painter Adolf Hitler decided to move from Vienna to Schwabing in 1913. ‘Schwabing was a spiritual island in the great world, in Germany, mostly in Munich itself,’ wrote the Russian artist Vassily Kandinsky. From 1896 it served as the home base of the celebrated
Simplicissimus
, a satirical magazine with a red dog as its symbol, a publication full of jokes about emperor and church, as well as advertising pages with ‘power pills’ for men and detoxification cures ‘for alcohol, morphine, opium and cocaine’. After the magazine was banned, its circulation rose from 15,000 to 85,000 within a month.
    Less than twenty years later Munich had become the official seat of the Nazi party, the second capital of the Third Reich. But this same Munich was also the city of the White Rose, one of the rare resistance groups inNazi Germany. It was in this town, in the midst of the war, that female students of the university booed the gauleiter of Bavaria when he called on them to leave school and bear children for the Führer. And in autumn 1939 it was in the Bürgerbräukeller, of all places, that the first attempt was made to assassinate Hitler, with a time bomb hidden in a cleverly hollowed-out pillar, the singular resistance of a cabinetmaker, Johann Georg Elser.
    Schwabing today is a pretty posh neighbourhood of broad streets, almost Parisian-looking apartment buildings and countless restaurants, shops, bookstores and art galleries. Striking features are the massive office and school buildings from the early nineteenth century, of a size rarely seen in such surroundings. These are clarion calls from the past: here we are and here we shall remain, we kings of Bavaria.
    With the exception of Amsterdam, Munich is the only major European city where even the mayor travels by bicycle. Bicycle paths have been built everywhere in recent years, and along them today a minority of the population bikes zealously, on professional-looking two-wheelers, at breathtaking speed. These Germans have embraced cycling in their own, thoroughgoing fashion. When one bicycles, then one Bicycles. Cycling here is a Deed, a Credo.
    My own bike is simply tied to the back of my van. It is a straightforward Amsterdam nag, an implement full of dents and rust spots, a plain fellow amid the perfect racing machines of the believers. We feel a little out of place, both my bicycle and I.
    And so I thread my way carefully through Athens-on-the-Isar, as Munich was often called before the First World War, the cultural pleasure garden of Henrik Ibsen, Wagner and