I am in Munich again — Munchen, city of monks and Gothic courtyards, of a sky-piercing Olympic tower and its view of snowcapped Alps, of fountains both torrential and trickling, of high-fashion, of contrasts — somberly tolling cathedral bells and the oom-pah-pah burlesque of brass bands, stately royal palaces and nudist areas in public parks, steaming breweries and hushed museums, haute cuisine and pigs' knuckles, absurdly playful Rococo decorations and high-tech architecture.

How does a visitor organize such a city or comprehend it? Is this Munich the most cultured, most elegant burg in Germany — the nation's unacknowledged capital — or is it, deep in its genes, a capital of kitsch and corn? Is it, as the Prussians to the north used to say, a coarse, beer-belly town — or is it a city of books and laboratories and universities? Should it be honored as a royal seat, home of a seven-century Bavarian dynasty — or remembered as the spiritual womb of National Socialism, Hitler's "city for a thousand years?"

Or is it none-of-the-above?

Now that I am arrived, Munich dazzles me with rich images but confuses me with its contradictions. Can any outsider ever reach both arms around this kaleidoscope and say, "I've captured you, Munich, I understand you now!"

Spin the wheel, I am here to try.

I came to Munich once as a child, with my Mama, in those innocent days when German toys were more sought-after than any others, and I left with a wind-up Marklin train set that always emitted a faint scent of lubricating oil from its precision gears. I came to Munich again, many years later, to see a former concentration camp called Dachau — a place of deepest shame that Muncheners correctly, though perhaps irrelevantly, assert is 14 miles away in another town.

Then, one more time, I arrived in the city on a fast train, and German friends, carrying red roses, met me at the Hauptbahnhof and drove me directly out to the storied Bavarian countryside.

In other words, I have never really been in Munich before.

Where, then, to begin understanding this city? With a brief history? In the eighth century, monks settled here on the banks of the Isar River and established a village that was called Munichen — "by the monks' place." In 1158, a Bavarian Duke moved in on the monks, fortified the town and turned it into a commercial center. A century later, the city came under the rule of the Wittelsbach family, a ducal dynasty that would eventually become a royal line. After World War I, Munich experimented briefly with a radical socialist form of independence. Hitler arrived in 1923 and intended eventually to make the city the capital of Nazism. After that, the world remembers.

Which means, of course, that Munich — and Bavaria — are much older than the nation called Germany that was created in 1870 and of which they became a part. The language here differs from other spoken German — "very much dialect," as they say in these parts, heavy on the vowels, not like in Berlin or Frankfurt or Hamburg. And I see that Muncheners wear very-much folksy dress, too — Lederhosen, Dirndl dresses, velvet jackets, and funny felt hats. Bavarians dress this way not just on holidays or in parades, but on any day they feel like it.

Munich is Germany's stepchild, the local people will tell you with perverse pride; Munich is very much Bavaria. You are also required to understand that the Freistaat (freestate) of Bavaria — one of the 11 Lander (states) that make up the Federal Republic — cherishes its history and keeps its own ways and therefore is Bavarian before it is German.

"Gemutlichkeit, you mean?"

"Yes, that and more."

So I embark on discovering what makes Munich so singular — city of sorrow, city of elegance, city of history, city of self. "And what do you mean, "more?" How else are you different? "It's being in the south, partly," am told. "We are softer here, more sentimental. There is a whiff of Italy that blows in and a little of Austria . . . .

Arriving here at midmorning in autumn, you encounter a quiet airport — no lines, no anxiety — plenty of baggage carts, many porters, a quick, professional look at your passport, a swift exchange of dollars for Deutsch Mark, a clean, new Mercedes-Benz taxi purring to the hotel. Everything click, click. Very first-world.

"You came for Oktoberfest, perhaps?" (Was it my American-tourist face?)

"No."

"But you are here, you may as well see it."

"Yes, I want to."

An inescapable linkage. The annual 16-day international beer bust and county fair seems both Munich's pride and Munich's embarrassment: "Even when we are sordid, we are good at it," one citizen says. Statistics are recited with a wry, contained smile, a blend of apology and of boast: almost six and one half million Oktoberfest visitors last year (and more every year); Six million litres of beer drawn from barrels; 84 oxen roasted whole on the spit; 152.025 pairs of pork sausages; dozens of amusement park rides, old and new; 54 shooting galleries; 34 games of chance; one flea circus . . . .

"You will see all you want of it in an hour," a smug critic says. "Did you know they have special tents where all the drunks and lost children are allowed to sleep?"

I do not search out the Bierleichenzelt (beer-corpse tent) or the one for verlorene Kinder. I look instead for the big, noisy, happy gatherings where everybody goes to eat barbecued chicken and grilled sausages and salted, thin-sliced white radishes and to drink beer — or wine — and sing songs and merrily slap their shoes in the unashamedly-ridiculous dance called Shuhplattler.

And then I ride on a very old roundabout (merry-go-round), called Krinoline, now in its 60th consecutive season, and I share a seat with an elderly Munich lady wearing her finest Bavarian outfit. She smiles a bit self-consciously, as if two old timers such as we should perhaps not be taking such a silly ride on such a silly old machine. She says a few words and a friend translates. "We start out in life as children and then we are children again."

Oktoberfest is a misnomer; the great civic party is about over as October begins each year. It was pushed up to sunnier September because October often brings omens of winter from the Bavarian Alps, 35 miles south — gray skies, mist, rain, even snow. October also brings a widespread melancholy, it seems, for this is the almost-end of Munich's other great, ongoing love affair with the outdoors — the beer garden season. When I arrived on the cusp of fall, I didn't understand at first why the Muncheners I met seemed so preoccupied with each day's weather. Then someone explained, "The heart of every Bavarian lies in the beer garden. As the season draws to an end, we become anxious and sad."

What better place to begin to know Munich, then? I find one of the city's 36 major beer gardens (there are many others combined with restaurants) and sit at a sunny table under green and russet chestnut trees and spread out my maps and guidebooks. The Hirschgarten happens to be the largest of these leafy retreats, seating over 7000 on summer nights. Today there are no more than a hundred of us sitting among the thousands of jumbled-tumbled tables and folding chairs. Grandmothers from the nearby Nymphenburg district who have brought their lunches, some chess players in Lederhosen (the leather pants), some students with books, some lovers discovering each other. Gray squirrels play with fallen chestnuts; children roll hoops through dry, cinnamon-colored leaves on the gravel paths. It is a scene I will find recreated and preserved in the art museums; generations of Bavarian painters have tried to capture the elusive Gemutlichkeit (cordiality) of the beer gardens in all seasons, all lights and all ages.

My overflowing tankard of golden, foaming beer arrives in the grasp of an overflowing waitress and with the traditional benediction, "Gruss Gott" (God's greeting). This standard measure of beer called a "Mass," equals approximately half a U.S. six-pack, costs a little more than $4 these days and is served as seriously as communion. If you have an appreciation for good suds, nothing ever tasted better.

Guidebook Munich is daunting, I find. The best local edition lists merely 160 "places of interest" and doesn't seem to exaggerate. Tourist maps of the city are also densely annotated with important landmarks. How to simplify? How to organize?

"How long do visitors usually stay here?" I ask.

"Two days average, not more."

"What do they do, where do they go?"

The answer is a list: one million, four hundred thousand a year visit the Deutsches Museum of technology; a million-three go to the zoo; one million elevate to the top of the Olympic tower; one million visit the former concentration camp at Dachau; six hundred thousand take a movie-studio tour a la Hollywood. These are the Big Five.

Somehow the statistics don't tell me what I want to know or what I expected to find. Movie studios and revolving restaurants? Where are the works of the famed Munich artists, Lenbach and Kandinski? How do I find the creations of the Royal Dwarf, Cuvilles, who became the Royal Architect? Where are the music halls of Schubert and Mozart? The palaces of the Wittelsbachs? (Easy now, they're all here, you'll find them, they're just not on the hit parade.)

There are no statistics needed for the Marienplatz. It is simply the city's picturesque central square, a commercial and touristic crossroads, the place where, at 11 each morning (and at noon and 5 p.m. in summer), the famed 1904 Glockenspiel under the New City Hall clock revolves through its five-minute musical performance. Thousands of faces (and cameras) tilt upward as the 43 bells of the carillon begin; soon the life-size, enamel-on-copper figures of knights-in-armor execute their halting, herky-jerky joust. This is followed (on another carousel) by the twirling-turning folk dance of the barrel-makers.

I find the handsome little Cafe Glockenspiel on the fifth floor of a building facing the city hall. Just before eleven, a waitress opens large windows so we can better hear the Glockenspiel's music-box-like accompaniment from our eye-level perch. I order a coffee and a piece of Englischerkake. It is easy to fall in with this, one of Munich's traditions: if you have a few minutes on your hands, or if you meet a friend on the street, pop into the nearest café or delectable konditerei (pastry shop) and — touch of Austria — have a coffee and some small, sinful bite like a marzipan pig or a brandy torten. There are many tempting places for such dalliance, but perhaps the most extraordinary is Dallmayr's, "the millionaire's delicatessen," just a few steps from Marienplatz. There is a café-restaurant above street level — if you can pull yourself away from the Roman-orgy food displays and the aroma of fresh-roasted coffee on the ground floor.

The Marienplatz is only slightly less busy when the Glockenspiel isn't clanking around. Flowers tumble from the city hall balconies; heraldic flags add the white-and-blue or black-and-gold colors of Munich and of Bavaria; mimes, jugglers and musicians provide an almost perpetual street theatre (their occupation-time of any given public space limited by the police) and everyone crosswalks in all directions on the one million square feet of city pavements which were taken away from automobiles and converted to pedestrian zones beginning in 1966.

I have a somber thought over coffee: Almost all that I can see around this stage-set medieval square — and much of Munich beyond — was destroyed by the aerial bombings of World War II. Yet today, every red-tiled roof and painted facade is intact, every decorative carving and gargoyle in place, every clockface is gilded, every bronze or marble fountain repaired, every spire and stepped-gable restored. One wonders: How? And even, Why?

Somewhere in almost every church or public building a visitor finds framed photographs documenting what it looked like in 1945 after 75 Allied air raids, 60,000 blockbusting bombs and 50,000 incendiary fires. The caption words are always the same: "Nact der bombardierung . . .after the bombing." The aging, sepia-tone photos are all the same, too: they show a silent, graveyard city where a few surviving walls stood like headstones and twisted girders raged against empty sky as if they were tormented arms.

Twelve million metric tons of once-elegant Munich were eventually bulldozed together and trucked off to the suburbs, a tragic cargo of Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo fragments, the shards of centuries. (So much for the madman's thousand-year city.) This historic rubble was mounded up to form rolling hills, then disguised with grass and landscaping. In time, the mass graves healed; the hills became parks; children fly kites from the 200-foot summit of Olympic Hill today.

The last forty years for this proud, independent Munich have been devoted to an obsessive, passionate self-restoration. While other nations agonized with new wars, Munich struggled only with the ravages of an old one. The nineteen forties did not happen! Everything, everything would — must — be put back as it was: every Baroque tower, every Rococo cherub. Munich would not rise anew as a city of glass blocks, Munich would be the old Munich again. If there was anything left of a building, the building was restored; if there was nothing left, it was rebuilt in every detail — museums, opera houses, town halls, churches, the cathedral, even some of the dishonored buildings of the Nazi era. Result: Munich today is the Munich of the Thirties — the 1930's, or even the 1830's, 1730's, 1630's. Choose your century, it is all here, it is now almost intact again.

Twice, late in the evening, I passed a craftsman working entirely alone on the restoration of one of the cathedral's side doors. In many of the other churches, scaffolds still reach to the vaulted ceilings so artisans can reproduce murals that were conceived centuries ago and lost to Britain's RAF. Curiously, a single, unrestored ruin of the war still stands near the center of town with weeds growing from its roof. Controversy about what to do with the shell of the former Army Museum has delayed its restoration, but there is no question that it will be saved.

At the City Museum, a restored, Late Gothic building that dates to 1520, a collection of paintings, drawings and photographs reflect the growth of the city as seen by its artists over the last century or more. The exhibit is popular with older citizens who come to look nostalgically at scenes they may remember from childhood, neighborhoods that are no more and devastation that was so great that only seeing the photographs again can make the experience seem believable.

The city's art collections, royal crowns and relics, illuminated books, Greco-Roman statues, historic china and glass, secular carvings, armories of ancient arms and armor, and awesome technical exhibitions are evidence enough of the Bavarians' passion to collect, to restore and to preserve their past. Anticipating the possibility of a Gotterdammerung in World War II, Muncheners transported all movable treasures and even some architectural details to caves long before the first Allied bombers arrived. Now this trove is returned to the light. (All but a reportedly vast collection from the cult of Nazi art which remains too politically sensitive to exhume.)

I find myself wondering how to make all this, or some of it, mine. "There are 49 museums, galleries and collections," an official source tells me. But I count even more: museums of hunting and fishing, of theatre, of applied arts, of ethnology, of coins, of puppets, of photography, of carriages, of paleontology, of toys, of prehistory, of beer making, of fire-fighting, of mineralogy, of porcelains, of graphic arts, of Egyptian art, of folk music — and, yes, even a museum of chamber pots.

A museum-a-day plan would take almost two months if one did not sooner succumb to an overdose of culture. I decide to begin with the obvious, the #1 tourist attraction, the place I have been warned can take a week in itself.

The Deutsches Museum must surely be the world's greatest collection of technology, a man-boy's wonderland — 16,000 items displayed in 43,000 square feet of space and so many miles of walking through the endless (and endlessly fascinating) exhibits that only a Sherpa could survive without collapse. (There are coin-operated foot-massage machines for the weary.)

page 2