Kingdom of Bavaria

The Kingdom of Bavaria (Königreich Bayern), ordinarily Bavaria or Bayern, is a constituent kingdom of the German Empire, the second of its member states by population and area, and by common agreement the most constitutionally distinct of them. It occupies the south east of the Empire, from the Franconian scarplands in the north across the Bavarian plateau to the Bavarian Alps on the Austrian frontier, and holds approximately fifteen and a half million people in roughly seventy six thousand square kilometres, a figure that includes the detached Rhenish Palatinate west of the Rhine. Its capital is Munich.

It is a monarchy under the House of Wittelsbach, which has held the country in unbroken succession since the twelfth century and the royal title since 1806, and which reigns today in the person of Ludwig IV. Its government is parliamentary: a Landtag of 180 members elected for four years, a ministry commanding that chamber’s confidence, and a Crown whose ordinary powers are exercised on advice. It has kept its own constitution, of 1818, continuously amended and never replaced, and it is the only member state whose constitutional instrument is older than the Empire it belongs to.

What makes Bavaria distinct is not its size, its wealth or its Catholicism, though it has all three. It is that Bavaria entered the Empire in 1871 on terms, and that some of those terms are still in force. The kingdom retained its own army in peacetime, its own diplomatic representation abroad, its own railway and postal administrations, its own military justice, its own tax on beer, and a permanent seat on the imperial council’s committee for foreign affairs. Those arrangements, the reserved rights, were the price of Bavarian accession, and the century and a half since has been a long, quiet, mostly courteous argument about which of them a modern federal state can plausibly still exercise.

Several have gone, surrendered by Bavaria itself in exchange for something it wanted more. Several remain, exercised daily and defended fiercely. One of them, the beer law, is treated by the rest of Germany as a joke and by Bavaria as a constitutional principle, and both are right. The kingdom’s politics, its relationship with Berlin, its self-understanding and a good deal of its national temper are organised around the difference between the rights it has kept and the rights it has let go.

Name, style and forms

The name

Bayern is the modern German form; the English is Bavaria, from the Latin Bavaria, itself from the Baiuvarii, the people who settled the country in the sixth century and whose name nobody has satisfactorily explained. The state’s formal style is the Kingdom of Bavaria, Königreich Bayern, and it has used no other since 1806.

The spelling with a y rather than an i is a Wittelsbach affectation of the nineteenth century that stuck: Ludwig I ordered the change in 1825 out of enthusiasm for Greek, the y being felt to give the name a classical dignity that Baiern lacked. It is the sort of decision that explains a great deal about the dynasty, and the kingdom has never seen a reason to reverse it.

The King’s style

The sovereign’s full style is King of Bavaria, Count Palatine of the Rhine, Duke of Bavaria, of Franconia and in Swabia, a compound recording the territorial accumulations of the house and retained without any of them implying a separate government. In ordinary use he is the King, der König, and in Munich frequently unser König in a register that mixes affection with proprietorship.

He is not styled Emperor of anything, holds no imperial dignity, and takes precedence within the Empire as the second of its sovereigns after the King of Prussia in his Prussian capacity. The order has been the subject of protocol disputes of extraordinary pettiness across a century and a half, several of which are documented in the archives at Munich in more detail than the wars.

The citizen

Bavarian state citizenship precedes German nationality, as it does throughout the Empire, and in Bavaria the precedence is felt rather than merely recorded. A Bavarian is a Bavarian first in a way that a Hessian is generally not, and the imperial identity sits above the state one as a fact of law rather than of sentiment.

The formula heard in Munich, and meant more seriously than a visitor assumes, is that Bavaria is in the Empire but not of it. As constitutional description this is false and Bavarian lawyers will say so. As an account of what a great many Bavarians actually feel it is exact, and it has been exact since 1871.

The reserved rights

What they are

The reserved rights (Reservatrechte) are the powers Bavaria retained on entering the Empire, written into the accession treaties of November 1870 and carried into the imperial Constitution of 1871 as exceptions to the general federal scheme. They were not a courtesy. They were the price of getting Bavaria in at all, and everyone involved understood that a German Empire without Bavaria would have been an enlarged Prussia with a better name.

The principal reservations were these. Bavaria retained its own army in peacetime, under the King’s command, passing under imperial command only on the outbreak of war. It retained its own diplomatic representation, sending and receiving envoys in its own name. It retained its own postal and telegraph administration and its own railways. It retained its own military justice and its own military railways. It retained the taxation of beer and spirits within its own territory. And it received a permanent seat on the Bundesrat’s committee for foreign affairs, a body from which every other member state could be excluded, and the chairmanship of that committee in the King’s gift.

Why Prussia agreed

Bismarck’s calculation is on the record and has never needed much interpretation. A German Empire required Bavaria; Bavaria would not join a unitary state; a federal shell with reserved rights cost Prussia very little in practice and secured the thing that mattered. He also expected, and said in writing, that the reservations would wither: that a modern state generates common administration whether or not its constitution provides for it, and that within two generations the Bavarian post office and the Bavarian railways would be indistinguishable from anybody else’s.

He was substantially right about the post and the railways and substantially wrong about everything else. The rights he expected to wither by disuse have instead been kept alive by exactly the argument he was trying to avoid, because a right that Bavaria is conscious of holding is a right Bavaria will not surrender without being paid.

What has gone

The postal and telegraph administration was surrendered in stages across the twentieth century, the last of it in the 1920s, in exchange for an imperial investment programme and a settlement of accounts favourable to Munich. Nobody in Bavaria now regrets it and few remember it happened.

The railways followed. Bavarian State Railways operated as a distinct undertaking into the middle of the century and were folded into the imperial network by agreement, again for money, again with a negotiated set of guarantees about rural lines that the Empire has kept. The Bavarian rolling stock livery survived the merger by thirty years and is now a preservation society.

Military justice went with the general reform of the armed forces after the Second Great War, when a separate Bavarian court-martial system became impossible to defend in a professional volunteer army operating under a single imperial code.

What remains

Three reservations survive in working order.

The army in peacetime. Bavaria maintains its own contingent under its own War Ministry, recruits it in Bavaria, administers it in Bavaria, and commands it in peacetime through the King. In federal defence matters the Bavarian War Minister is subordinate to the Imperial Defence Minister, and on the outbreak of war the contingent passes wholly under imperial command. Between those two conditions lies an enormous amount of practical autonomy, and Bavaria uses all of it.

Diplomatic representation. Bavaria sends and receives envoys in its own name. The Empire conducts foreign policy and Bavaria does not, and the distinction is real and observed. What Bavaria has is a parallel channel of its own: legations in a handful of capitals, a permanent mission to the Holy See that is the oldest and most consequential of them, and a standing seat on the Bundesrat’s foreign affairs committee that gives Munich sight of imperial business no other state sees.

The beer law. Bavaria taxes beer and regulates its composition within its own territory under its own law, and the Reinheitsgebot, the purity requirement of 1516, is a Bavarian statute rather than an imperial one. This is the reservation the rest of Germany finds funny. Bavaria does not find it funny at all, for reasons set out at length below, and every attempt to harmonise it at imperial or European level for a hundred and fifty years has failed against the same wall.

The pattern

The reservations that survived are not the economically valuable ones. The post and the railways were worth real money and Bavaria sold them. What it kept were an army it will never independently use, a diplomatic service that does not make foreign policy, and a tax on beer.

The pattern is the article’s central observation and Bavarians make it themselves without embarrassment. What the kingdom retained was not power but standing: the visible apparatus of a state, the things that make a Bavarian minister a person other governments receive rather than a provincial official with a portfolio. It sold the reservations that were merely lucrative and kept the ones that were merely dignified, which is either a serious constitutional strategy or an expensive vanity, and has been argued to be both.

History

Before the Kingdom

The country is older than almost anything else in the Empire. The Bavarian tribal duchy was established in the sixth century, held by the Agilolfings until Charlemagne broke them in 788, and re-established as a stem duchy of the medieval Empire. It passed to the Wittelsbachs in 1180, when Frederick Barbarossa deprived Henry the Lion of it, and it has been Wittelsbach territory continuously from that day to this: a tenure of eight and a half centuries, longer than any other reigning house in Europe holds any other country.

That the duchy came to the Wittelsbachs at the expense of the Welfs is a fact both houses remember. Henry the Lion is the ancestral figure of the Welf line that now reigns in Hanover and Brunswick and, through the personal union, in the United Kingdom of America. The two dynasties have therefore been in the same imperial federation since 1871 with an unresolved twelfth-century grievance between them, which they observe with elaborate courtesy and mention only in jest.

Division and reunion

The medieval and early modern duchy repeatedly divided among heirs and repeatedly reassembled, and the details are of interest chiefly to specialists. The consequential facts are three. The Golden Bull of 1356 made the Wittelsbach Count Palatine of the Rhine an imperial elector, planting the Palatine title that still forms part of the royal style. The primogeniture ordinance of 1506 ended partition and made Bavaria a single indivisible inheritance, which is the reason it survived as a great territorial state when Saxony and the Thuringian lands fragmented. And the Reformation did not take, or rather was suppressed: Bavaria remained Catholic by ducal policy, enforced from above, in a period when much of Germany went over.

The Thirty Years’ War

Bavaria fought the Thirty Years’ War as the principal Catholic power of the Empire after the Habsburgs, and it fought it well and profitably. Maximilian I raised and financed the Catholic League’s army, defeated the Bohemian revolt, and was rewarded in 1623 with the electoral dignity taken from his Palatine cousin and with the Upper Palatinate.

The country was also devastated. Bavaria lost something between a third and a half of its population in a generation, its Swedish occupation was thorough and its recovery slow, and villages that were emptied in the 1630s were not resettled to their former numbers for a century. That the kingdom emerged from the war with a higher rank and a smaller people is the earliest instance of a pattern the Bavarian historical imagination returns to often: the state advancing while the country suffers.

The eighteenth century

The eighteenth century was Bavaria’s period of maximum dynastic ambition and minimum success. The house pursued the imperial crown itself, achieved it briefly in Charles VII, elected Holy Roman Emperor in 1742, and found that an emperor whose own country is occupied by his enemies is not an emperor at all. He died in 1745 having spent most of his reign unable to enter Munich, and the episode is remembered in Bavaria as the last time the country tried to be a great power in its own right.

What followed was a long, unglamorous and rather effective period of administrative consolidation, and then the extinction of the senior line in 1777 and the passage of Bavaria to the Palatine branch, which brought the two Wittelsbach inheritances together in one hand and produced the state that entered the modern era.

The making of the Kingdom, 1806

Bavaria became a kingdom by allying with Napoleon, and the kingdom has never entirely known what to do about it.

Maximilian IV Joseph, Elector, allied with France in 1805, contributed troops to the campaigns that destroyed the Holy Roman Empire, and was rewarded on 1 January 1806 with the royal title and with an enormous territorial expansion: the Franconian bishoprics and free cities, the Swabian lands, Tyrol for a period, and the secularised church estates. Bavaria roughly doubled and became, at a stroke, the largest German state after Prussia and Austria.

The price was a French alliance that lasted until it plainly could not, and in 1813 Bavaria changed sides at Ried a fortnight before Leipzig, on terms guaranteeing its royal title and its new territory. The manoeuvre was cynical, competently timed and entirely successful, and the Congress of Vienna confirmed the kingdom substantially as Napoleon had made it.

Modern Bavarian historiography handles this with more candour than it used to. The kingdom, the borders, the Franconian and Swabian provinces and the constitutional order that followed all descend from a bargain with a conqueror who was destroying the Empire Bavaria had belonged to for a thousand years. The Wittelsbachs got a crown out of the destruction of the old order, and the state they built on it is the state that exists now.

Montgelas and the modern state

The architect of that state was Maximilian von Montgelas, first minister from 1799 to 1817, and he is the most consequential Bavarian who never wore the crown. In eighteen years he abolished the estates, dissolved the monasteries, secularised church property, ended serfdom, imposed a uniform administration on territories that had never shared one, created a professional civil service, standardised the law, took education from the church, and welded a Catholic old-Bavarian core, a Protestant Franconian north and a Swabian west into a single working kingdom.

He did it with a ruthlessness that made him permanently unpopular and a competence nobody has ever disputed. The Bavaria of 2028, its provinces, its administrative habits, its civil service culture and a good deal of its legal architecture, is recognisably his. That the most Catholic state in Germany was made a modern country by a minister who dissolved its monasteries is a paradox the kingdom lives with and rarely examines.

The Constitution of 1818

Maximilian I Joseph granted a constitution on 26 May 1818, and it is the oldest instrument still in force anywhere in the Empire, older than the imperial Constitution by fifty-three years and never once replaced.

It was, by the standards of 1818, genuinely liberal: a two-chamber assembly, a budget right, guarantees of religious equality between Catholics and Protestants, equality before the law, and an independent judiciary. It was granted rather than negotiated, which the Landtag has spent two centuries quietly correcting through amendment, and it has been amended continuously and comprehensively, so that the document in force shares little text and much lineage with the one the King granted.

Bavaria’s attachment to it is difficult for outsiders to credit. The constitution’s age is cited in the Landtag with the frequency and the reverence that the cholera is cited in Hamburg, and the anniversary of the grant is a state holiday. When the Empire’s own constitutional lawyers point out that a document amended past recognition is not really the same document, Bavarian lawyers answer that a country amended past recognition is still the same country, and the exchange has been conducted in exactly those terms since about 1890.

Ludwig I

Ludwig I reigned from 1825 to 1848 and did more to determine what Munich looks like than any other individual. He built the Ludwigstrasse and the Königsplatz, founded or filled the great museums, moved the university to Munich, imported architects and archaeologists, and spent public money on classical architecture at a rate the Landtag repeatedly and unsuccessfully tried to restrain.

He was also a reactionary who dismantled much of the press freedom his father’s constitution implied, and he abdicated in 1848 over a scandal involving a dancer that the country found more entertaining than shocking. The mixture of aesthetic seriousness, fiscal recklessness and personal absurdity is the Wittelsbach signature, and Bavaria’s affection for the dynasty is inseparable from it.

Ludwig II

Ludwig II, king from 1864 to 1886, is the most famous Bavarian who has ever lived and remains the kingdom’s most difficult inheritance. He built the castles, patronised Wagner at a cost that alarmed his ministers into open rebellion, withdrew almost entirely from public business, accumulated debts that threatened the civil list, and died in the Starnberger See in 1886 in circumstances that a hundred and forty years of investigation have not settled.

He also, and this is the part the tourist literature omits, signed the letter that made the German Empire. The Kaiserbrief of November 1870, inviting the King of Prussia to assume the imperial title, was drafted in Berlin and signed by Ludwig in exchange for money from the Guelph Fund, and the Empire’s own foundation therefore rests on a document purchased from a Bavarian king who did not want to sign it.

Bavaria’s relationship with him is unresolved and enjoyably so. He is simultaneously the state’s greatest embarrassment, its most profitable asset, its most beloved sovereign and the man who sold the country’s independence for a building fund, and the Landtag has never once managed a debate about him that stayed on the subject.

The accession of 1871

Bavaria entered the German Empire on 1 January 1871, last of the southern states and on the hardest terms.

The negotiations at Versailles in November 1870 were conducted for Bavaria by Otto von Bray-Steinburg and were genuinely adversarial. The Bavarian delegation understood that it could not stay out, that the war had made unification inevitable and that a Bavaria alone between a German Empire and Austria-Hungary would be a client of one or the other. What it could do was charge for entry, and it did: the reserved rights described above, a separate treaty rather than simple accession, and a form of words throughout that treats Bavaria as contracting rather than acceding.

The Landtag ratified in January 1871 after a debate of real bitterness, by a margin that was comfortable in the lower chamber and uncomfortably narrow among the Patriot deputies who spoke for Catholic rural Bavaria. The kingdom has never held a vote on its imperial membership since, and the 1871 ratification debate is still quoted by both sides of every constitutional argument the state has.

The Kulturkampf

The first two decades inside the Empire were dominated by the Kulturkampf, Bismarck’s campaign against the political and institutional power of the Catholic Church, and Bavaria’s experience of it was formative and bitter.

The campaign was chiefly Prussian and its Bavarian application was patchy, but the principle was imperial and the offence was total. A Catholic kingdom that had entered the Empire on terms found the imperial government legislating against its church within three years of accession, and the political consequence was the permanent Catholic mobilisation of Bavarian politics under the Zentrum, which has been the country’s dominant party ever since with only brief interruptions.

The Kulturkampf is the reason Bavarian federalism is not a merely constitutional preference. It is the memory of the one occasion when the imperial centre came for something Bavaria could not compromise about, and it is why the kingdom’s instinct in any dispute with Berlin is to reach first for the treaty of 1870.

Prince Regent Luitpold

Ludwig II was deposed on grounds of incapacity in June 1886 and died three days later. His brother Otto was incurably ill and reigned in name for twenty-seven years while his uncle Luitpold governed as Prince Regent, and the arrangement, which ought to have been a constitutional crisis, produced instead the most settled and prosperous period in the kingdom’s history.

The Prinzregentenzeit is Bavaria’s belle époque: Munich’s expansion into a European cultural capital, the Secession and the artistic ferment around Schwabing, the founding of the technical institutions, the electrification of the country, the modernisation of the army, and a political settlement in which a Catholic-conservative Landtag and a liberal-leaning ministry got along by not examining their disagreements. Bavarians of a certain temperament regard it as the moment the country was most itself, and a great deal of what visitors take for immemorial Bavarian tradition was in fact codified, costumed and institutionalised between 1886 and 1912.

The First Great War

The war came to Bavaria as it came to the rest of the Empire, and the Bavarian army went to it as a Bavarian army: its own contingent, its own corps, its own staff, its own uniforms, under the reserved right, passing to imperial command on mobilisation exactly as the treaty specified.

Crown Prince Rupprecht commanded an army group on the western front for the greater part of the war and emerged from it with a reputation as one of the ablest German commanders and a private conviction, recorded in his diaries and published long afterwards, that the war was being prosecuted past the point of sense by men who would not admit it. He is the only royal army commander of the period whose military reputation has survived professional scrutiny intact.

Bavaria’s losses were proportionate and terrible. The kingdom’s particular grievance, aired continuously in the Landtag from 1916 onwards, was that Bavarian formations were being used as shock troops at a rate disproportionate to Bavarian numbers, and the imperial staff’s denials were not believed then and have not been vindicated since.

Victory, and what it prevented

Germany won. The consequence for Bavaria was the absence of everything a defeated monarchy ordinarily suffers: no collapse, no revolution, no Freistaat proclaimed by a socialist journalist in the Mathäser beer hall, no council republic, no white terror in the streets of Munich, no Wittelsbach flight, no abdication.

Ludwig III, who had succeeded on Otto’s death in 1913, remained King, and died in his bed at Munich in 1921 having reigned eight years and lost none of them. The dynasty that a defeat would have ended in a car driving out of Munich with a hastily written release of officers from their oath continued without interruption, and the kingdom entered the 1920s as a monarchy with its constitution, its army, its reserved rights and its self-respect intact.

The Register states the obvious consequence because it is the largest single fact about this Bavaria and it is easy to pass over. Munich did not become the city where the Nazi Party was founded, because there was no defeat for it to be founded on. The beer halls in which such a party would have been assembled remained beer halls.

Rupprecht I

Rupprecht I succeeded his father in 1921 and reigned until 1955, the longest Bavarian reign since the Middle Ages and the one that made the modern kingdom.

He came to the throne as a victorious army commander with a public standing no Bavarian king had held since Max Joseph, and he spent it on constitutional reform. The settlement of 1919 to 1923, negotiated before and completed after his accession, widened the franchise to universal adult suffrage, made the ministry answerable to the lower chamber alone, abolished the upper chamber’s veto, disestablished the Catholic Church while guaranteeing its schools and its concordat position, and converted the royal domains into a public trust with an audited civil list.

He did all of this from a position of strength, which is the point. Bavaria democratised as a winner, on the initiative of a popular king who had commanded its army, without a revolution and without losing its monarchy, and the resulting settlement has never been seriously challenged from either direction. It is the defining feature of the kingdom’s modern political history.

The interwar decades

The 1920s and 1930s were prosperous, stable and increasingly nervous. Bavaria industrialised its south and east, electrified its Alpine watersheds, built the road and rail links that turned the mountains from a barrier into an economy, and settled into the political shape it still has: a dominant Zentrum, a strong SPD in Munich, Nuremberg and Augsburg, a nationalist right that was noisy and never near government, and a permanent federalist consensus across all of them about Berlin.

The nervousness came from the west. The fascist turn in France under the Nationaux was watched from Munich with more alarm than from most German capitals, because Bavaria’s Catholic press and its clergy had contacts in the French church and were receiving accounts of what was happening there long before it was official. The Bavarian bishops’ pastoral letter of 1936 on the French regime is a document of some courage and is taught in Bavarian schools.

The Second Great War

Fascist France made war on the Empire, and Bavaria’s war was different in kind from Hamburg’s or the Rhineland’s. It was not a front-line state in the first phase and it was a front-line state in the second, when the fighting in the south west and the Alpine approaches brought the enemy within reach of Augsburg and the Lech.

Munich was bombed. The raids were sustained and destructive without ever approaching the annihilation that the bombing of the period was capable of, and the reconstruction that followed was faithful rather than modernising: the Bavarians rebuilt what had stood, and the Munich of 2028 is substantially the Munich of 1938 with better plumbing.

Two Bavarian facts of the war deserve statement. The kingdom’s Alpine formations fought the mountain war against the French southern armies and their record is the foundation of the modern contingent’s self-image. And Bavaria took in a very large number of refugees, from France, from the occupied Low Countries and from the Italian north, housed them in the monasteries and the requisitioned hotels of the Alpine valleys, and did so under a diocesan administration that was better organised than the state’s.

The postwar settlement

The Empire’s postwar reforms reached into Bavaria as they reached everywhere: land reform that broke the great estates, the reorganisation of the armed forces onto a professional volunteer basis with no conscription, the abolition of separate state military justice, the imperial social insurance settlement.

Bavaria’s response was characteristic. It accepted the reforms that were plainly right, traded hard over the compensation, surrendered the reserved rights that had become indefensible, and used the negotiation to entrench the ones it meant to keep. The Munich Protocol of 1951, which settled the postwar position of the Bavarian contingent, is the document that guarantees the kingdom’s army in its present form, and it was obtained in exchange for concessions on military justice that Bavaria had already lost in practice.

Since

The second half of the twentieth century made Bavaria rich. A state that had been agricultural, Catholic, poor and peripheral in 1900 became by 2000 one of the wealthiest regions in Europe, on the back of engineering, vehicles, optics, chemicals, aerospace, electronics and an unusually successful policy of putting technical institutes in small towns.

The transformation was managed by the Zentrum with a consistency that has kept it in office for most of eighty years, and it produced the modern Bavarian paradox: the most traditional-seeming state in the Empire is also one of its most technologically advanced, and the country that fills its tourist literature with costume and custom earns its living from precision manufacturing.

The present

Bavaria is governed by a Zentrum ministry under Dr Theresia Aigner, is the second economy of the Empire, holds the second delegation in the Bundesrat, maintains its army and its legations, and is in the middle of three arguments: over the Alpine water compact, over the imperial climate legislation and what it will cost Bavarian industry and Bavarian farming, and over the succession settlement that the Prussian crisis has forced onto every dynastic agenda in Germany.

None of the three is resolved. They are treated in their place below.

Geography

The shape of the country

Bavaria rises from north to south. Its northern third is the Franconian scarplands, a landscape of limestone ridges, wooded escarpments and river valleys running down to the Main, with the Franconian Jura at its centre and the Spessart, Rhön and Fichtelgebirge along its margins. Its middle is the Bavarian plateau, the rolling gravel and moraine country between the Danube and the Alps, and it is on this plateau that Munich sits. Its southern edge is the Bavarian Alps, where the Empire reaches its greatest elevations along the Austrian frontier.

The gradient is the country’s organising fact. Almost everything about Bavaria, its rivers, its farming, its confessional map, its industry, its dialects and a good deal of its politics, can be read off the rise from the Main valley to the Zugspitze.

That description covers seven of the eight provinces and not the eighth. The Rhenish Palatinate lies west of the Rhine, separated from the rest of the kingdom by Baden and Hesse, and shares no land border with Bavaria proper. It is a low country of the Rhine plain and the wooded hills behind it, rising from the vineyards along the western edge of the valley into the Palatinate Forest, which is among the largest continuous woodlands in Germany. Its climate is the mildest in the kingdom by a wide margin, which is why it grows wine, figs and almonds where Old Bavaria grows barley.

A Bavarian official posted from Munich to Speyer travels through two foreign states to reach his own province. The kingdom has organised its administration around this since 1816, and the arrangement works, and it remains the single most unusual fact about Bavarian geography.

The Alps

The Bavarian Alps are the northern edge of the great range, a limestone wall running east to west along the frontier, cut by transverse valleys and fronted by a belt of foothills and lakes. They are not the highest Alps and they are among the most abrupt: the mountains rise out of the plateau with very little transition, so that the wall is visible from Munich on a clear day at a distance of seventy kilometres and dominates the southern horizon of a city built on flat gravel.

The Zugspitze is the Empire’s highest point. The frontier runs along the crest for most of its length, which means that a great many Bavarian summits are shared with Austria and that the mountain rescue services of the two countries operate under a standing convention older than the Empire.

The plateau and the moraines

Between the Alps and the Danube lies the Alpine foreland, the plateau proper: gravel plains laid down by the glacial rivers, moraine ridges left by the ice, peat bogs in the hollows, and a scatter of lakes along the mountain front. It is not dramatic country and it is extremely good country, and the great monastic estates of the eighteenth century were built on it.

The soils are variable and the water is everywhere. The plateau’s characteristic landscape is a patchwork of pasture, arable, dark spruce woodland and standing water, with onion-domed church towers as the visible punctuation, and it is the Bavaria that the rest of the world pictures.

Franconia

North of the Danube the country changes completely, and Bavarians are perfectly clear that it does. Franconia is a limestone and sandstone landscape of terraced vineyards, dry uplands and market towns, the Main running west through it toward the Rhine, and it is culturally, confessionally, linguistically and historically distinct from old Bavaria in ways treated at length below.

Its centre is Nuremberg, its wine country runs along the Main around Würzburg, and its uplands, the Fichtelgebirge and the Frankenwald, are among the poorest and emptiest parts of the kingdom.

Swabia

The west, beyond the Lech, is Bavarian Swabia, acquired in 1806 and Swabian rather than Bavarian in speech and temperament. Its landscape is the continuation of the plateau and the Danube valley, its centre is Augsburg, and its relationship with Munich is the least troubled of the three provinces because it has never had a separate political grievance to hang on the cultural difference.

The rivers

Two systems drain the kingdom and the watershed between them is the country’s oldest internal boundary. South and east of it everything runs to the Danube, which enters Bavaria from Swabia, is joined by the Alpine rivers, the Lech, the Isar, the Inn and the Salzach, and leaves the kingdom eastward toward the Habsburg lands. North and west of it the Main runs to the Rhine and thence to the North Sea.

The Danube’s Bavarian tributaries are Alpine rivers: fast, cold, heavily laden with glacial rock flour, and subject to summer floods from mountain rain rather than spring floods from snowmelt. The Isar through Munich is the characteristic example, and its management, straightened in the nineteenth century and deliberately re-naturalised in the twenty-first, is the country’s standing lesson in hydraulic humility.

Lakes

The Alpine foreland carries a chain of substantial lakes along the mountain front, glacial in origin and deep, of which the Chiemsee is the largest and the Starnberger See the most freighted with history, being the water in which Ludwig II died. They are the kingdom’s summer landscape, its most expensive property, its sailing and swimming culture, and a large part of its tourist economy.

Forest

Bavaria is the most heavily wooded country in the Empire, with something over a third of its surface under trees. The great blocks are the Bavarian Forest along the Bohemian frontier, the Spessart and Rhön in the north west, and the Alpine forests of the south.

The Bavarian Forest is the largest continuous woodland in central Europe, shared across the frontier with the Bohemian side, and it carries the kingdom’s oldest national park. Its management is a live argument: the park’s policy of letting bark-beetle damage run its course without intervention is loathed by the surrounding foresters and defended by the ecologists, and it has been to the Bavarian courts twice.

Climate

The climate is continental and grows more so eastward, with cold winters, warm summers, and considerably more precipitation in the south than in the north. The Föhn, the warm dry downslope wind off the Alps, is a genuine meteorological feature and a genuine part of Munich’s self-mythology: it clears the air, brings the mountains improbably close, and is blamed locally for headaches, irritability, accidents and poor decisions in a manner that the medical literature does not entirely support and has never quite dismissed.

Snow is reliable in the Alps and increasingly unreliable below eight hundred metres, and the consequences of that change for the winter economy are among the sharpest of the kingdom’s climate arguments.

Environment and the water compact

Bavaria holds the Empire’s Alpine water, and the Alpine water compact now before the Landtag is the most consequential piece of environmental legislation the kingdom has considered in a generation. It concerns abstraction rights, hydroelectric licensing, the ecological flow required in the Alpine rivers, snowmaking allocations for the winter resorts, and the obligations Bavaria owes downstream neighbours on the Danube.

It has not passed. It is opposed in part by the farming interest, in part by the resorts, in part by the municipalities that own the hydro schemes, and in part by Franconian deputies who observe that the water is southern and the money would be spent everywhere. It is supported by the Zentrum leadership, by the SPD and by the churches. It remains unresolved, and it is one of the three arguments defining the present ministry.

The Crown

The house

The House of Wittelsbach has held Bavaria since 1180 and the royal title since 1806, and its tenure is the longest of any reigning house in Europe over any single country. It has produced two Holy Roman Emperors, a King of Sweden, a King of Greece, a King of the Romans, several Electors Palatine and an extraordinary quantity of eccentricity.

The house is Catholic, historically and presently, and its Catholicism is not decorative. The Wittelsbachs enforced the Counter-Reformation in Bavaria, financed the Catholic League, and maintained the confessional character of the state through the period when it was the state’s principal political asset. The disestablishment of 1919 to 1923 ended the church’s constitutional position and did not touch the dynasty’s, and the King is a practising Catholic whose religion is a matter of public knowledge and no constitutional consequence.

Ludwig IV

Ludwig IV has reigned since 2019, having succeeded his father Franz I. He is in his early seventies, was educated at Munich and abroad, served in the Bavarian contingent as a young man, and spent the long years of his father’s reign on the forestry and water administration of the royal trust, which has given him a technical grasp of the kingdom’s most contested resource that his ministers find useful and occasionally inconvenient.

He is a deliberately unglamorous monarch in a dynasty famous for the opposite. His public manner is dry, his speeches are short by Bavarian standards, and he has made a policy of appearing at agricultural shows, fire brigade anniversaries and technical school openings rather than at the events the Wittelsbach name would guarantee him. The Munich press finds him dull. The Franconian and Swabian press, which has spent two centuries complaining that Bavarian kings are Munich figures, does not.

The name

The choice of Ludwig on his accession was contested inside the household and settled by the King himself. Three Ludwigs preceded him: the builder of modern Munich, the builder of the castles, and the last king before the imperial accession-era reforms. The name carries the dynasty’s grandeur and its most conspicuous failure in the same syllables.

His stated reason for taking it, given once and not repeated, was that a house which will not use its own difficult names has decided to be a museum. The remark is quoted in Bavaria more often than anything else he has said.

The royal function

The King’s constitutional position is that of a parliamentary monarch with a small number of real reserve powers and one substantial personal one.

He appoints the Minister-President on the nomination of the Landtag and dismisses on its withdrawal of confidence. He gives assent to Bavarian legislation, which has not been refused since the nineteenth century and is not regarded as refusable. He opens the Landtag, receives ministers, holds the rights to be informed, to warn and to encourage, and represents the kingdom on state occasions.

His command of the Bavarian contingent in peacetime is the exception, and it is not nominal. The King is the source of the contingent’s commissions, its oath runs to him in the Bavarian capacity, and he exercises the peacetime command through the Bavarian War Ministry, which is answerable to him and to the Landtag jointly. In federal defence matters the War Minister is subordinate to the Imperial Defence Minister, and on the outbreak of war the whole contingent passes to imperial command. What lies between is the largest personal power any German sovereign holds below the Kaiser, and successive kings have been careful to exercise it through ministers.

Succession

The Bavarian succession runs by male-preference primogeniture within the house, under the family law of the dynasty as received into the constitution.

This is now the kingdom’s quietest constitutional problem and it is becoming louder. Prussia enacted absolute primogeniture in 2015 and enacted it prospectively, and the consequences of that drafting are on public display in the person of a fourteen-year-old emperor who privately believes his elder sister should be reigning. Every other German dynasty has watched that argument and drawn its own conclusions.

A Bavarian reform bill has been drafted, has not been introduced, and is understood to have the King’s private sympathy and no ministerial urgency. The heir apparent, Crown Prince Maximilian, has an elder sister. Nobody in Bavaria has yet been willing to say in public what that means, and the reform’s supporters are waiting for a moment that the Prussian crisis may or may not provide. It is unresolved.

The royal trust

The palaces, the forests, the lakes, the art collections and the archives were converted from royal domain into a public trust by the settlement of 1919 to 1923, independently audited, with a civil list voted by the Landtag. The house retains private property separately and modestly.

The trust is one of the largest landowners in the Empire and one of its largest cultural undertakings, running the castles that Ludwig II bankrupted the crown to build and that now, with an irony nobody in Bavaria has ever been able to leave alone, produce a substantial public revenue.

Government

The constitution

Bavaria is governed under the Constitution of 1818, continuously amended. Its modern operative provisions descend chiefly from the settlement of 1919 to 1923 and from the postwar amendments, and the document as it now stands provides for a constitutional monarchy, a unicameral legislature, a ministry responsible to it, an independent judiciary, an entrenched bill of rights and a constitutional court.

Amendment requires a two-thirds majority of the Landtag and, for provisions touching the Crown, the succession, the reserved rights or the position of the provinces, a referendum. The referendum requirement is the reason the succession reform has not been introduced: a government that opens the dynastic provisions must put them to the country, and no Bavarian ministry has wanted that argument in an election year.

The Landtag

The Landtag has 180 members, elected for four years by a proportional system with constituency and list components, in eight electoral regions corresponding to the historic provinces. It legislates, votes supply, elects and can dismiss the Minister-President, and scrutinises the ministry.

The upper chamber, the Reichsrat of the nineteenth-century constitution, was abolished in the 1919 to 1923 settlement. Bavaria has been unicameral since, and the periodic proposals to restore a chamber of provinces have never got beyond the pamphlet stage.

The ministry

The Minister-President heads the government and is elected by the Landtag and appointed by the King. The present holder is Dr Theresia Aigner of the Zentrum, in office since 2024, a lawyer from Lower Franconia who came up through the water and environment ministry and whose Franconian origin was itself a point of comment on her election, the Zentrum leadership having been an old-Bavarian preserve for most of a century.

Her Cabinet holds the ordinary portfolios and two that are not ordinary: a War Minister, because Bavaria has an army, and a Minister for Foreign Affairs, because Bavaria has legations. Neither has a counterpart in most member states, and the second is the smallest ministry in the Bavarian government and the one that most reliably annoys Berlin.

Parties

The Zentrum has dominated Bavarian politics since the Kulturkampf and has governed for most of the last eighty years. Its Bavarian organisation is the largest and most independent of any federal party’s state bodies, is more federalist and more agrarian than the party’s Rhenish wing, and exercises an influence in imperial politics out of proportion to its numbers.

The SPD is strong in Munich, Nuremberg, Augsburg and the industrial south east, and has led Bavarian governments in the past, though not recently. The FVP holds a professional and commercial vote in the cities. The NLP and the two conservative currents, the DKP and the FKP/DRP, hold a nationalist and agrarian right that is louder in Bavaria than its seat count suggests. The USPD is marginal here.

There is no German green party, and the environmental argument in Bavaria therefore runs where it runs everywhere in the Empire: inside the SPD, and through the churches. In Bavaria the second channel is unusually strong, because the Catholic Church here has institutional weight, a rural constituency directly affected by water and land policy, and a habit of pastoral intervention that goes back to the letter of 1936.

The provinces

Bavaria is divided into eight provinces (Regierungsbezirke): Upper Bavaria, Lower Bavaria, the Upper Palatinate, Upper Franconia, Middle Franconia, Lower Franconia, Swabia and the Rhenish Palatinate, the last of which is detached from the rest of the kingdom west of the Rhine. They are administrative rather than governmental, headed by appointed presidents, and they matter chiefly as the frame for the Landtag’s electoral regions and as the units in which Bavarians locate themselves.

Beneath them the counties and municipalities carry real local government with substantial fiscal autonomy, and Bavarian municipal independence is a genuine feature of the kingdom rather than a slogan. The smallest Bavarian communes are very small indeed, resisted amalgamation successfully for decades, and are one of the reasons the state’s administration costs more per head than Prussia’s.

Courts

Bavaria maintains its own court system to appellate level, with further appeal in federal questions to the imperial courts, and a Bavarian Constitutional Court sitting at Munich which rules on the Bavarian constitution and on the compatibility of Bavarian law with it.

The constitutional court is unusual in the Empire for its popular action procedure, which allows any Bavarian citizen to challenge a Bavarian statute as unconstitutional without needing to show personal injury. The procedure produces a good deal of litigation of no merit and a small number of judgments of great consequence, and it is defended in Bavaria as the clearest available demonstration that the constitution belongs to the country rather than to the state.

The Bavarian Army

What it is

The Royal Bavarian Army is the kingdom’s contingent within the German Army, and it is the most substantial of the surviving reserved rights. It is recruited in Bavaria, administered by a Bavarian War Ministry, commanded in peacetime by the King through that ministry, and it supplies something in the order of an eighth of the Empire’s active strength, the second contribution after Prussia’s fifty-five percent.

It is not a separate army and Bavaria does not claim that it is. It uses imperial equipment, imperial doctrine, imperial ranks and the imperial code of discipline; its officers pass through imperial staff education; its formations exercise within imperial corps; and it has no capacity, no intention and no lawful ability to act independently. Every serious Bavarian account of it says so plainly.

What it has is administrative separateness in peace, and the difference is real. Bavarian units recruit from Bavarian districts and keep their men there. Bavarian barracks are built and maintained by Bavaria. Bavarian officers are commissioned by the King. Bavarian regiments carry Bavarian numbers alongside their imperial ones and Bavarian colours alongside the imperial standard. The chaplaincy is Catholic in a way no other contingent’s is.

The Munich Protocol

The present arrangement rests on the Munich Protocol of 1951, which settled the contingent’s position after the postwar reorganisation. Bavaria surrendered separate military justice, accepted the common imperial code and the professional volunteer establishment, and abandoned its own military railway administration. In exchange it obtained the guarantee of territorial recruitment, the retention of the War Ministry, the King’s peacetime command in a form spelled out for the first time, and the Alpine specialisation described below.

The Protocol is a Bavarian document in a way the 1870 treaties are not: negotiated by a Bavarian ministry from a position of relative weakness and obtained anyway, and regarded in Munich as the more impressive of the two achievements for exactly that reason.

The mountain troops

Bavaria supplies the Empire’s mountain formations, and the specialisation is not decorative. The Alpine brigades are recruited from the mountain districts, trained in them year-round, and hold the imperial responsibility for high-altitude, cold-weather and difficult-terrain operations for the whole of the German Army.

The specialisation is the contingent’s identity and its practical justification. An imperial staff that might otherwise regard the Bavarian arrangement as a nineteenth-century survival instead has a concrete institutional reason to keep it, because the mountain capability is genuinely difficult to build and Bavaria has been building it for a century and a half. Bavarians know this, and the mountain brigades are protected in Munich with a care that has nothing to do with sentiment.

The oath, and what it means

The Bavarian soldier swears to the King in the King’s Bavarian capacity and to the imperial Constitution. The double oath is exactly what it appears to be and is the sharpest expression of the whole reserved-rights arrangement: a soldier of a federal army whose personal allegiance runs to a monarch who is not the Kaiser.

Its practical content is nil, because the Constitution governs, the contingent passes to imperial command on mobilisation, and the King has never given an order the Empire disapproved of. Its symbolic content is considerable, and every generation or so an imperial deputy proposes to tidy it away, and Bavaria explains at length why it will not be tidied.

Public standing

The army’s social position in Bavaria is high without being militarist. The mountain brigades in particular are locally rooted institutions of a kind the Empire’s professional forces are generally not: a mountain battalion is a district’s battalion, its rescue work is public and continuous, its cooperation with the civilian Alpine rescue services is close, and the number of Bavarians who have been pulled off a mountain by soldiers is not small.

The Alpine rescue role is the reason the contingent’s reputation survived the general postwar decline in military prestige better in Bavaria than elsewhere. An institution the public sees saving climbers is a different proposition from one the public sees on parade.

Bavaria abroad

The legations

Bavaria maintains diplomatic representation in its own name, the second of the surviving reserved rights, and the practice is smaller and older than it sounds.

The kingdom keeps a handful of legations: the Holy See, which is the oldest and by a distance the most important; Vienna, for reasons of proximity, Catholicism and four centuries of entanglement; and a small number of others maintained chiefly for commercial and cultural purposes. It receives accredited envoys in Munich in return. The mission to the Holy See has never been interrupted since its establishment and is one of the longest continuous diplomatic relationships in Europe.

What it is not

Bavaria does not conduct foreign policy. The Empire does, exclusively, and the boundary is understood on both sides and rarely tested. The Bavarian legations do not negotiate treaties, do not take positions on imperial foreign policy, and do not receive instructions that contradict Berlin’s.

What they do is real nonetheless. They handle the concordat relationship with Rome, which is a Bavarian matter under Bavarian law. They service Bavarian commercial and cultural interests. They provide Munich with a channel of independent information, which a ministry occasionally finds useful and a chancellery occasionally finds irritating. And they exist, which is the point: a member state with legations is a state that other states have to speak to as a state.

The Bundesrat committee

The most consequential of Bavaria’s external rights is the least visible. The kingdom holds a permanent seat on the Bundesrat’s committee for foreign affairs, together with the chairmanship in the King’s gift, and the committee is the body through which the constituent states see imperial foreign business.

Every other state’s presence on that committee is elective and rotational; Bavaria’s is guaranteed. In practice this means that no imperial foreign policy is developed without a Bavarian in the room from the beginning, and it is the single most valuable thing the kingdom obtained in 1870. It is also almost never discussed in public, and Bavarian ministers who talk about the legations at length will change the subject when asked about the committee.

Bavaria and the Concert

Bavaria is enthusiastic about the European Concert, founded at Straßburg in 2027, and its enthusiasm has a specific and self-interested shape.

A supranational union with a strong court and a regional dimension is, from Munich’s point of view, a second forum in which a member state’s distinctiveness can be asserted, and a counterweight to imperial centralisation that Bavaria has been seeking since 1871. Bavarian ministers appear in Straßburg and Brussels with a frequency that the imperial foreign ministry has more than once described as excessive.

The kingdom’s Catholic and Alpine connections also matter here. Bavaria’s natural partners in the Concert’s regional politics are Austria-Hungary, the Catholic south of the continent and the Alpine states, and Munich has been assembling that grouping quietly and effectively since before the union existed.

Religion

A Catholic country

Bavaria is the largest Catholic bloc in the Empire and one of the largest in Europe. Catholicism here is not a private preference but an institutional, architectural, calendrical and political fact: the churches are full by comparison with the north, the dioceses are wealthy and organised, the religious orders retain a real presence, and the parish remains the effective unit of rural life across most of old Bavaria.

The Catholicism is baroque rather than austere, and the distinction matters. It is a religion of pilgrimage, procession, patronal feast, roadside shrine, brass band and beer, and it coexists with a rate of ordinary religious observance that is falling as it is falling everywhere. Bavarians who attend nothing still expect the procession to pass.

Disestablishment

The Catholic Church was disestablished by the settlement of 1919 to 1923, and Bavaria’s disestablishment is unusual in having been managed almost entirely without rancour.

The church surrendered its constitutional position and retained, by concordat, its schools, its faculties, its property, its right to appoint and its position in religious instruction. The state surrendered its rights of nomination and retained the church tax collection and the peace. Nobody was expropriated, nothing was closed, and the arrangement has survived a century without either party seriously attempting to reopen it.

The comparison with the Prussian settlement is instructive and Bavarians draw it often. Prussia’s religious arrangements arise from general law and it has no concordat. Bavaria’s arise from a treaty with Rome negotiated by a Catholic monarchy that had just won a war, and the difference is visible in every Bavarian schoolroom.

The Zentrum and the parish

The political consequence is the Zentrum’s long dominance, and the mechanism is worth stating because it is often misdescribed. The party is not clerical, does not take instruction from bishops and has fought them publicly on more than one occasion. What it has is the parish as an organisational base, in a country where the parish covers everybody, and a hundred and fifty years of habit.

The habit is weakening. Zentrum majorities now depend on a coalition of rural Catholic loyalty, urban Catholic professionals and a substantial vote that has no religious content at all and simply regards the party as the one that governs Bavaria competently. The party’s internal argument about which of those it is really for is the most interesting thing in Bavarian politics and is not settled.

Protestant Franconia

Bavaria’s Protestant minority is large, is concentrated in Franconia, and is the kingdom’s oldest internal division.

The Franconian territories acquired in 1806 were substantially Lutheran, had been Lutheran since the sixteenth century, and were absorbed into a Catholic monarchy without any consultation whatever. Montgelas guaranteed confessional equality and the 1818 constitution entrenched it, and the guarantees were kept, but a Protestant north governed from a Catholic capital has spent two centuries watching the distribution of appointments with care.

The Protestant church in Bavaria is a substantial institution with its own hierarchy, its own theological faculty at Erlangen, its own concordat-equivalent settlement, and a public voice that is proportionately louder than its numbers because it speaks for a region as well as a confession. On the environmental questions it has generally been the more outspoken of the two churches.

The Jewish communities

Bavaria’s Jewish communities are old, continuous and unbroken. Munich, Nuremberg, Würzburg, Augsburg, Bamberg, Fürth and Regensburg all carry communities of long standing, and Fürth in particular was for centuries one of the principal centres of Jewish learning in southern Germany.

No Nazi era came, and the consequence in Bavaria is the same as in Hamburg and everywhere else in this Germany: the communities were not destroyed, the synagogues are the ones that were built, the cemeteries have been in continuous use, and the institutions have a documentary record running back unbroken.

The record is not clean and the article does not pretend it is. Bavaria expelled its Jews in the fifteenth century and again in the sixteenth, admitted them back under restrictive settlement laws, maintained the Matrikel system limiting the number of Jewish families permitted in a given community until 1861, and carried an antisemitism in its Catholic press and its student corporations that was real, sustained and sometimes violent. Emancipation came late and grudgingly. What did not come was annihilation, and the distinction is the whole of the difference.

The Alpine and rural religion

Away from the cities the older layer is visible and is not merely folkloric. The pilgrimage churches, the votive tablets, the field crosses, the Corpus Christi processions across the lakes with the boats decorated, the Palm Sunday bundles, the Leonhardi rides with the horses blessed: all of these are living practice in the Alpine and plateau districts rather than performance for visitors, and a foreigner who assumes otherwise will be corrected.

The relationship between this and the tourist economy is uncomfortable and acknowledged. A procession that people travel to watch changes, and Bavarian parishes have been negotiating with that fact for sixty years without arriving at a general answer.

Beer

Why it is constitutional

The rest of Germany treats Bavaria’s beer reservation as a joke. Bavaria does not, and understanding why is the single quickest route into the kingdom’s constitutional psychology.

The Reinheitsgebot, the purity requirement first promulgated in 1516, restricts brewing to barley, hops, water and, since yeast was understood, yeast. It is a Bavarian statute, enforced by Bavarian authority, under a taxation power reserved to Bavaria by the treaties of 1870 and never surrendered. Every attempt to harmonise it away, at imperial level in the nineteenth century, at imperial level again in the twentieth, and at European level since 2027, has failed.

It has failed because the reservation is not really about beer. It is the most legible surviving instance of Bavaria legislating for Bavaria in a field the Empire does not control, and its defence is a rehearsal of the whole federal argument in a form that every voter understands. A Bavarian minister who surrenders the beer law surrenders the principle, and the principle is what is being defended.

The trade

Beer is also a substantial industry. Bavaria has more breweries than any comparable territory in the world, most of them small, many of them monastic in origin, a good number still owned by the communities they serve. The Franconian brewing country around Bamberg has the densest concentration of small breweries anywhere, and the villages there with their own brewery number in the hundreds.

The trade is protected by more than the purity law. Municipal brewing rights, communal ownership, the Bierkeller culture and the tax structure together produce a market in which very small producers survive at a rate that economists find anomalous and Bavarians find obvious.

The beer gardens

The Munich beer garden exists by law and the law is characteristic. An eighteenth-century ordinance permitted brewers to cellar beer under chestnut trees and sell it on the spot, and a nineteenth-century compromise settled that customers might bring their own food but not their own drink. That compromise is still in force, and the right to bring a picnic into a commercial establishment is genuinely defended.

When a Munich ministry attempted in the 1990s to restrict beer-garden hours on noise grounds, the resulting demonstration was among the largest in the city’s postwar history and the regulation was withdrawn within days. Bavarians tell this story to visitors with great pleasure and it is entirely true.

The Oktoberfest

The Oktoberfest began in 1810 as the wedding celebration of the future Ludwig I and has been held, with interruptions for war and epidemic, every year since. It is the largest folk festival in the world, occupies a permanent site on the Theresienwiese, is run by the city rather than by the breweries, and admits only Munich beer brewed to the Bavarian standard.

Its relationship with Bavarian self-image is complicated. It is the single largest export of Bavarian identity, it is responsible for most of what the world believes about the country, and a considerable number of Bavarians regard it as an embarrassing caricature that has colonised the reputation of a serious place. Both views are held with force, and the festival is defended and deplored in the same households.

The reserved rights in detail

The instruments

The reservations are carried by three layers of instrument and the distinction between them governs how hard each is to remove.

The accession treaties of November 1870 are treaties between Bavaria and the North German Confederation and its allies, and they are the foundation. The imperial Constitution of 1871 incorporates their substance as exceptions to the general federal scheme, which makes them constitutional rather than merely contractual. And a long series of later agreements, of which the Munich Protocol of 1951 is the most important, adjusts the working detail without touching the constitutional basis.

The practical consequence is that a reservation cannot be abolished by imperial legislation. It requires constitutional amendment, which needs three-fifths of both imperial chambers and ratification by the states, and Bavaria is a state. The reservations are therefore not merely defended by Bavarian resistance; they are defended by the amendment procedure, and everyone involved has understood this since 1871.

The postal surrender

Bavaria ran its own posts and telegraphs until the 1920s, issued its own stamps, set its own tariffs and kept its own revenues, and the surrender is the clearest case of the kingdom trading a reservation for something it wanted more.

The negotiation ran for years and concluded with an imperial investment programme in Bavarian telecommunications, a settlement of accumulated accounts favourable to Munich, and guarantees about rural service that the Empire kept. Bavarian stamps ceased. The philatelic literature on them is large, the surrender is mentioned in the Landtag approximately never, and it is the standing evidence for the proposition that Bavaria’s federalism has a price.

The railway surrender

The Royal Bavarian State Railways were among the best-run in Europe and were surrendered in the mid-century consolidation for a comparable set of reasons: capital investment Bavaria could not raise alone, integration into a network whose economics were increasingly imperial, and money.

What Bavaria obtained in exchange was the branch-line guarantee described above, and it obtained it in a form specific enough to be enforceable. That guarantee is now the reason the Alpine valleys and the Franconian uplands retain rail service, and it is quietly the most valuable thing the kingdom got for any reservation it gave up.

Military justice

Separate Bavarian courts-martial survived until the postwar reorganisation and were then abolished, in the same settlement that produced the professional volunteer establishment and the common imperial code of discipline.

Bavaria’s own account is that it surrendered something it had already effectively lost, since a contingent operating under imperial doctrine and imperial equipment inside imperial corps cannot plausibly be disciplined under a different code. The surrender was nonetheless traded, and what it bought was the Munich Protocol’s guarantees on recruitment and command.

The tax reservation

The reservation on beer and spirits taxation is narrower than the popular account suggests. It concerns those duties within Bavarian territory and nothing else; Bavaria has no general tax autonomy, participates in the imperial shared-tax and equalisation system like every other state, and is a substantial net contributor to it.

The reservation’s value is therefore not fiscal. It is that the regulation of composition travels with the power to tax, which is what makes the purity law a Bavarian statute, and it is the purity law rather than the revenue that Bavaria has spent a century and a half defending.

What a reservation is worth

The kingdom’s own internal argument about the reservations is more sceptical than its public defence of them. A serious body of Bavarian constitutional opinion holds that the surviving reservations cost the state more in imperial goodwill than they return in practical autonomy, that the army arrangement in particular is an expensive way of maintaining a distinction with no operational content, and that the political capital spent defending the beer law would be better spent on the water compact.

That argument has never won and is made in every generation. The answer it receives is always the same: a right surrendered is not recovered, the Empire of 2028 is not the Empire of 1871 and will not be the Empire of 2100, and the value of an option is not measured by whether it is currently being exercised.

Economy

The shape of it

Bavaria is the second economy of the Empire and one of the wealthiest regions in Europe, and it became so recently. Within living memory it was a poor agricultural country on the imperial periphery, exporting people to the industrial north and importing everything else. The reversal is the largest social fact of the last century here and it is not yet complete: the wealth is real and its distribution across the kingdom is very uneven.

The modern economy rests on precision manufacturing above all: vehicles, machine tools, optics, electrical and electronic equipment, aerospace, chemicals and pharmaceuticals, instruments. Around it sits a large services economy in Munich, a substantial insurance and publishing sector, a forestry and timber industry, an agriculture that is small-farm and heavily protected, and a tourist economy in the Alps and the lakes that is larger than any other in the Empire.

How it happened

The transformation was policy as much as luck, and the policy is identifiable. Bavaria spent the postwar decades putting technical institutes and applied research stations in small towns rather than concentrating them in Munich, tied them to local firms, financed the arrangement through a state development bank, and kept it up for fifty years without interruption because the same party was in office throughout.

The result is an industrial geography unlike Prussia’s. Where the Ruhr concentrated, Bavaria dispersed: a network of medium-sized firms in medium-sized towns, family-held, technically specialised, exporting worldwide, often the global leader in a product nobody outside the trade has heard of. The pattern has a Bavarian name and a large literature, and it is the reason a Franconian town of nine thousand people can contain a firm supplying half the world’s demand for a particular bearing.

Vehicles and machines

Vehicle manufacture is the largest single industry and the most exposed. Bavaria builds cars, commercial vehicles, engines and the enormous supply chain beneath them, and the industry is concentrated in Munich, Ingolstadt, Regensburg and Nuremberg with component works scattered across the whole kingdom.

The transition away from combustion is therefore the central economic question of the decade here, more acutely than anywhere else in the Empire. Bavarian firms have invested heavily and Bavarian politics has been slower, and the gap between what the industry is doing and what the Landtag is willing to legislate is the second of the ministry’s three arguments.

Optics, instruments, electronics

The optical and instruments industry is old, concentrated in Middle Franconia and Munich, and technically formidable: lenses, microscopes, measurement systems, semiconductor tooling, medical imaging. It is less politically visible than vehicles and in some measures more valuable, and it is the sector the technical-institute policy was designed around.

Aerospace

Aerospace is substantial and is concentrated around Munich and Augsburg, with airframe, engine, avionics and space work. Bavaria’s aerospace sector is a participant in the European civil programmes, including the successor studies to Concorde that Boeing, Aérospatiale and Airbus are conducting jointly, and the Bavarian works are among the sites where that programme’s structural work is done.

Agriculture

Bavarian agriculture is small-farm, mixed, heavily protected and politically enormous. The average holding is a fraction of the Prussian average, dairy dominates in the south and the Alpine foreland, arable and specialty crops in Franconia, and hops in the Hallertau, which is the largest continuous hop-growing region in the world and supplies brewers across the Empire and beyond.

The wine country of Lower Franconia along the Main is small, distinctive and fiercely defended, producing dry white wine in the flat-sided Bocksbeutel bottle that is a protected form. Bavarian wine is not exported in quantity and Bavarians regard this as the fault of everyone else.

Farm politics are the Zentrum’s foundation and the reason the party has never been able to move as fast on environmental questions as its urban wing wishes. The Alpine water compact is being fought largely by farmers, and they are fighting it inside the governing party rather than against it.

Forestry

A third of the kingdom is forest and the forest is worked. Bavarian forestry is a serious industry, substantially in public and communal ownership, supplying timber, pulp and construction material and employing a considerable rural workforce.

It is also the front line of the climate argument in a very literal way. Bark beetle, drought stress and windthrow have killed spruce across the Empire’s uplands, and the conversion of monoculture spruce plantation to mixed broadleaf forest is a fifty-year public programme already under way. The Bavarian Forest national park’s non-intervention policy sits in the middle of that argument and is loathed by the working foresters around it.

Tourism

Tourism is the largest employer in the Alpine districts and the lake country and is the sector most exposed to climate change. The winter economy depends on snow below the high stations, the snow is retreating uphill, and the resorts have responded with snowmaking, which requires water and energy, which is precisely what the Alpine water compact proposes to ration.

The summer economy is growing and is not a straightforward substitute: it employs differently, pays differently and pressures different places. The management of Alpine visitor numbers, the traffic on the valley roads and the strain on villages of a few hundred people receiving a few hundred thousand visitors is a chronic Bavarian dispute with no settled answer.

The uneven country

Bavarian wealth is not evenly held. The Munich region is among the richest places in Europe; the Alpine districts are prosperous in season; the industrial belt from Ingolstadt through Nuremberg to Regensburg is solidly well off. Against that, the eastern border districts along the Bohemian frontier, the Upper Franconian uplands and parts of the Rhön are among the poorest and emptiest parts of the Empire, with falling populations, ageing communities and a long history of out-migration to the cities.

The kingdom has poured money into these regions for decades through a structural policy that is generous by any comparison. It has slowed the decline and not stopped it, and the resentment in the emptying districts is a real and growing element in Bavarian politics that no party has yet found a satisfactory answer to.

Housing and Munich

Munich has the most expensive housing in the Empire by a distance, and the Bavarian answer has been less effective than Hamburg’s. The city builds, the state subsidises, the cooperative sector is substantial, and demand has outrun all of it for thirty years.

The consequence is a commuter belt reaching most of the way to the Alps and to Augsburg, an emptying of the city’s centre of everyone but the wealthy, and a political problem that the Zentrum, whose base is not in Munich, has been slow to treat as urgent.

The cities

Munich

Munich is the capital, the royal seat, the largest city of the kingdom and the cultural capital of Catholic Germany. It holds something over a million and a half people, more than two million with its ring, and it is the second city of the Empire by most measures that are not population.

It is baroque, monumental, planned and rather serious. Ludwig I’s classical avenues, the residence and its theatres, the great museums, the university, the churches and the enormous English Garden give the centre a coherence that few German cities have kept, and the wartime raids, destructive as they were, did not destroy the plan. What was rebuilt was rebuilt as it had been.

Its character is Catholic, southern, prosperous, culturally confident and suspicious of Berlin as a matter of standing policy. It is a beer-garden city and a museum city at once, and it manages the combination without embarrassment. Its press is nationally influential and reliably federalist. Its wealth is visible in a way Hamburg’s deliberately is not, and the two cities’ mutual opinion of one another is a small comic fixture of German public life.

The city is also the least Bavarian place in Bavaria in one specific sense: it has drawn population from the whole Empire and beyond for a century and a half, and a substantial proportion of its residents were not born in the kingdom. Old Munich complains about this continuously and has done since about 1880.

Nuremberg

Nuremberg is the capital of Franconia in everything but law, the second city of the kingdom, and a place with a much older claim to greatness than Munich.

It was one of the great free cities of the medieval Empire, a centre of manufacture, invention, printing and art, the city of Dürer, and it was independent until 1806, when it was handed to Bavaria in the Napoleonic settlement and has resented it in a low-grade, permanent, mostly good-humoured way ever since. Its Protestantism, its trading past and its civic self-government sit awkwardly with a Catholic monarchy, and Nurembergers will explain this at length to anyone who asks.

Industrially it is a serious place: electrical engineering, machine tools, printing, toys, and the transport industries that grew from the Empire’s first railway, which ran from here to Fürth in 1835. Its old town survived the war less completely than Munich’s and was rebuilt on the medieval plan.

The city carries none of the international associations that a party of that kind would have fastened on it. There were no party rallies, because there was no party; there were no trials, because there was no regime to try. No parade grounds were ever laid out on the city’s southern edge, and Nuremberg is known for gingerbread, toys, the Christmas market and Dürer.

Augsburg

Augsburg is the capital of Bavarian Swabia, a Roman foundation, one of the oldest cities in Germany, and the seat of the Fugger banking house that financed emperors and effectively decided a papal election. Its Fuggerei, the almshouse settlement founded in 1521 and still let at the original rent, is the oldest social housing in the world and is still occupied on the original terms.

Modern Augsburg is an industrial and university city, water-rich, historically a textile centre and now a machinery and environmental-technology one. Its water management system, a network of canals and works running back to the fifteenth century, is a world heritage matter and the source of considerable civic pride.

Regensburg

Regensburg on the Danube is the best-preserved medieval city in Germany, having come through both wars substantially intact, and it carries a peculiar constitutional history: it was the permanent seat of the Imperial Diet of the Holy Roman Empire from 1663 to 1806, which makes it the place where the old Empire actually sat for its last century and a half.

It is now a university city and a vehicle manufacturing centre, and the combination of a twelfth-century stone bridge, a Gothic cathedral, a Roman gate and a modern engine plant is entirely ordinary here.

Würzburg and the Main

Würzburg is the seat of Lower Franconia, a prince-bishop’s city until 1803, and the site of the Residenz, the baroque palace whose staircase carries the largest ceiling fresco in the world. It is the centre of the Franconian wine country and holds a university of long standing.

Downstream, Aschaffenburg, Schweinfurt and the Main towns carry industry and vineyards in roughly equal measure, and the whole valley is culturally oriented toward Frankfurt and the Rhine rather than toward Munich, a fact of which Munich is aware and about which it can do very little.

Bamberg, Bayreuth, Erlangen, Fürth

Bamberg is a cathedral city on seven hills with an intact medieval and baroque centre, an archbishop, a smoked beer that visitors find alarming, and the densest brewery country in the world around it.

Bayreuth is the Wagner city: the Festspielhaus built to the composer’s specification with Ludwig II’s money, the annual festival, and a cultural apparatus of formidable seriousness attached to a town of seventy thousand people.

Erlangen carries the Protestant theological faculty and a large medical and electrical-engineering complex. Fürth, immediately beside Nuremberg and permanently annoyed by it, holds one of the oldest and most important Jewish communities in southern Germany, continuous and unbroken.

Ingolstadt, Landshut, Passau

Ingolstadt on the Danube is a fortress town turned vehicle manufacturing centre and one of the wealthiest municipalities in the Empire. Landshut is the old ducal seat of Lower Bavaria with an intact Gothic centre and the largest brick church tower in the world. Passau sits at the confluence of three rivers on the Austrian frontier, is a bishop’s city and a university town, and floods with a regularity that has shaped its architecture.

The Alpine towns

Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Berchtesgaden, Oberstdorf, Mittenwald and the lake towns are the visible face of the Alpine economy: resorts, spas, sports centres, and in Mittenwald’s case a violin-making tradition of three centuries that still supports working shops.

They are small places carrying very large visitor numbers, and the strain of that arithmetic on housing, water, traffic and the ordinary functioning of a village is the persistent local politics of the whole Alpine belt.

Speyer, Ludwigshafen and the Palatine towns

The Palatine towns are the kingdom’s outliers in every measure. Speyer carries the imperial cathedral and the Jewish quarter and is a provincial capital of twenty-odd thousand more people than its administrative weight suggests. Ludwigshafen is a nineteenth-century chemical town, the least picturesque place in Bavaria and among the most productive, and its relationship with Mannheim across the river, which is in Baden, is closer than its relationship with anywhere in its own kingdom. Kaiserslautern, Neustadt an der Weinstraße, Landau, Zweibrücken and Pirmasens complete the province.

The wine road running along the foot of the Palatinate Forest through the vineyard villages is the most visited stretch of country in the province and the least characteristic of Bavaria anywhere in the kingdom.

The four countries

One kingdom, four peoples

The most important thing an outsider can learn about Bavaria is that it is not one country but four, assembled between 1806 and 1816 out of a French emperor’s redistribution and a congress’s compensation, and held together since by administration, monarchy and habit.

Old Bavaria, the core, is the plateau and the Alps and the Danube country, Catholic, Bavarian-speaking, and the Bavaria of the world’s imagination. Franconia is the north, Protestant in large part, Franconian-speaking, oriented to the Main and the Rhine, and independent until Napoleon. Swabia is the west beyond the Lech, Alemannic in speech, culturally continuous with Württemberg and Switzerland. The Palatinate is not adjacent to any of them: it lies west of the Rhine, is reached from Munich only by crossing two other states, is confessionally mixed with a Protestant plurality, speaks a Rhine Franconian dialect, and looks to Mannheim and Mainz rather than to its own capital.

A Bavarian will tell you which of the four he is before he tells you he is Bavarian, and in Franconia the order is emphatic.

The Palatinate

The Rhenish Palatinate came to Bavaria in 1816, at the Congress of Vienna, as compensation for territories surrendered elsewhere in the settlement. It was a transaction between cabinets. Nobody in the Palatinate was consulted, the province had no historic connection with the Wittelsbach lands beyond a medieval dynastic one long since lapsed, and it has never been contiguous with them.

What Bavaria acquired was a country with a political temper unlike anything else in the kingdom. The Palatinate had spent twenty years under French administration and had kept what that administration brought: the French civil code, public and oral trial by jury, the abolition of noble privilege and of the guilds, and a population that regarded these as its property rather than as an occupation’s residue. Bavaria was obliged to leave the French legal order in place, and the province kept a separate body of private law for over eighty years, until the imperial Civil Code came into force in 1900.

The consequence is that the most liberal, most democratic and least monarchist province of the kingdom is the one furthest from Munich, and that the argument between them is nearly as old as the union.

Hambach, and what Bavaria did about it

In 1832 something over twenty thousand people assembled at the ruined castle above Hambach, in the Bavarian Palatinate, and spent two days demanding a free press, popular sovereignty, civil liberty and a united Germany, under black, red and gold flags that were themselves illegal. It was the largest political gathering in Germany before the revolutions, it was peaceful, and it is a founding event of German democracy.

The Bavarian government suppressed it. The follow-up meetings were banned, the press of the province was placed under prior censorship, the principal organisers were arrested and prosecuted, associations were dissolved, and troops were moved into the Palatinate and quartered there. The prosecutions largely failed in front of Palatine juries, which is the reason juries were subsequently the object of official anxiety, and the repression succeeded.

Bavaria commemorates Hambach now. The castle is a national monument of German democracy, the anniversary is marked, and Bavarian ministers speak at it. That this is the same state which banned the meetings, censored the newspapers and garrisoned the province is a point Palatine speakers make at the ceremony, in the presence of the ministers, with some regularity.

The Franconian question

Franconia’s grievance is two centuries old, entirely genuine and almost never separatist. Its content is that the kingdom’s capital, court, ministries, appointments, cultural spending and self-image are all southern, that the north pays in and is governed from elsewhere, and that “Bavarian” in the mouth of a foreigner means specifically the thing Franconia is not.

Its expressions are cultural and constant: the Franconian rake flag flown from private houses, the refusal of Bavarian costume, the insistence on Franconian wine against Bavarian beer, the naming of institutions, the argument over which dialect a broadcaster should use. A Franconian regionalist party has existed for decades, wins a handful of Landtag seats, and has never sought secession because there is nothing to secede to.

Munich’s handling of it has improved and remains a live subject. The present Minister-President is Franconian, which was widely noted; the Landtag’s electoral regions guarantee Franconian representation; and the structural money for the Upper Franconian uplands is generous. None of it has settled the argument, and the article does not settle it either.

Swabia

Bavarian Swabia’s position is easier because its grievance is milder. It speaks Alemannic, looks culturally toward Stuttgart and the south west, was acquired in the same settlement as Franconia, and has never developed a comparable political expression of difference.

The explanation generally offered in Augsburg is that Swabia lost less. Franconia lost bishoprics, free cities and a self-governing tradition of real antiquity; Swabia lost a scatter of small lordships nobody was much attached to.

Language

The dialects

Bavaria carries three of the great German dialect groups and the boundaries between them are old, sharp and audible.

Bavarian proper (Boarisch) is spoken across old Bavaria and into Austria, is one of the most distinct varieties of German, and is not readily intelligible to a northern German at speed. East Franconian is spoken across Franconia and belongs with the central German dialects, and its speakers do not consider it Bavarian in any sense. Swabian and Alemannic are spoken west of the Lech.

The boundaries run where the historic territories ran, which is why a linguistic map of the kingdom is also a map of the eighteenth-century political one.

Status and use

Dialect use in Bavaria is higher than in most of the Empire and is not confined to the countryside or to the old. It is normal in the Landtag, on Bavarian broadcasting, in schools as a spoken register alongside standard German, and among professionals in Munich.

The kingdom supports it deliberately: dialect is taught about rather than corrected out, broadcasting maintains dialect programming as policy, and the state funds dialect literature and lexicography. The Bavarian Academy’s dictionary of the Bavarian dialects has been in preparation since the nineteenth century and is not finished, which Bavarians report with a certain satisfaction.

The Wisconsin echo

Bavarian is one of the two confessional strands in Wisconsindeutsch, the vernacular of the Grand Duchy of Wisconsin in the United Kingdom of America, where a Swabian-Lutheran frame carries a Bavarian-Catholic overlay and the diminutive -erl rides on a Swabian body as a fossil of the mixing.

The connection is real and should not be overstated. Wisconsin German is a local American hybrid, not transplanted Bavarian culture, and Bavarians who visit expecting to find their own country are corrected quickly and kindly.

Society

Costume and custom

Bavarian traditional dress is genuinely worn, and understanding when and by whom is the difference between seeing the country and seeing the postcard.

Tracht is worn at weddings, church festivals, folk events, shooting and gymnastic society occasions, in the Landtag on certain days, and at the Oktoberfest by everybody including people with no claim to it. It is regionally specific to a degree outsiders never suspect: the cut, the colour, the trim and the hat identify a valley, and wearing the wrong valley’s dress in the right valley is noticed.

Most of the codification is nineteenth-century. The preservation societies that fixed the forms date from the Prinzregentenzeit, and a good deal of what is worn as immemorial custom was standardised within living memory of the great-grandparents of the people wearing it. Bavarians know this and it does not trouble them.

Associational life

The kingdom runs on associations to a degree that is unusual even in Germany. Shooting societies, gymnastic clubs, mountain societies, brass bands, volunteer fire brigades, choral societies, folk-costume associations, sports clubs and parish organisations cover the country densely, hold property, run finances, and constitute the real social infrastructure of small-town Bavaria.

The volunteer fire brigade is the load-bearing institution of the rural districts, and its function extends far past fires: it is the emergency service, the flood response, the mountain assistance and the principal social organisation of a great many villages. The Alpine rescue services and the mountain brigades of the army are woven into the same fabric.

Sport

Alpine and winter sport is a Bavarian speciality and is a serious institutional matter, with the state, the clubs and the army all involved in the development pipeline. Skiing, ski-jumping, bobsleigh, luge and biathlon carry the kingdom’s international sporting identity.

Football is followed intensely and Munich’s principal club is among the most successful in Europe, which gives the city an unusual double: the cultural capital of Catholic Germany also fields the country’s dominant football team, and Munich has never been shy about either.

Mountaineering is more than sport here. The Alpine association is a mass-membership institution owning huts, maintaining paths and running training, and its political voice on Alpine development questions is loud and generally listened to.

Food

Bavarian food is southern, Catholic, heavy and seasonal: pork in its many forms, dumplings, sausage in enormous regional variety, cabbage, freshwater fish from the lakes and rivers, dairy from the Alpine pastures, and an elaborate baking tradition.

The regional divisions again follow the four countries. Franconia has its own sausage, its own bread and its wine culture. Swabia has the flour-and-egg tradition of noodles and filled pasta it shares with Württemberg. The Palatinate eats on the Rhine pattern and drinks wine rather than beer. Old Bavaria has the veal sausage that may not be eaten after noon, a rule that is not a law and is observed as though it were.

The social settlement

Bavarian social provision is generous, conservative in design and heavily mediated through the churches and the associations. The Catholic and Protestant welfare organisations run a very large share of the kingdom’s hospitals, care homes, kindergartens and social services under public contract, and the arrangement is old, entrenched and defended by both churches and the state.

Its critics say it produces a welfare system that is patchy where the churches are weak and paternalistic where they are strong. Its defenders say it produces provision that is embedded in communities rather than administered at them. The argument has been running since the 1919 settlement created it.

The festival year

The pattern

The Bavarian year is a sequence of fixed occasions, most of them local, most of them older than the kingdom, and most of them organised by an association rather than by any authority. A visitor who attends the famous ones sees the least characteristic part of the system.

Carnival and Lent

Fasching, the pre-Lenten carnival, runs from Epiphany to Shrove Tuesday and is observed most intensely in the Catholic districts and in Munich, with balls, guild processions, the dancing of the market women on the last day, and a licensed suspension of ordinary decorum that the church has tolerated for centuries on the reasonable ground that it precedes forty days of the opposite.

Lent is still kept in a recognisable form in rural Bavaria, and it has a commercial expression: the strong beers brewed to sustain fasting monks are released in Lent and are among the strongest produced anywhere.

Spring and the maypole

The maypole is a genuinely functioning custom and not a display. A village raises a decorated pole carrying the emblems of its trades, the raising is done by hand with poles and ropes rather than machinery wherever the fire brigade can be persuaded, and the theft of a neighbouring village’s pole before it is raised is a recognised practice with a settled tariff of ransom, normally paid in beer.

The custom’s persistence is a reasonable index of the health of the associational life that carries it, and its decline in the emptying districts is noticed locally as a symptom rather than a loss.

Corpus Christi and the processions

Corpus Christi is the high point of the Catholic year in Bavaria and is a public holiday. Processions carry the sacrament through streets strewn with flowers, past altars built at the corners, accompanied by brass bands, guilds, fire brigades, riflemen and children in costume.

The lake processions of the Alpine foreland, in which the sacrament is carried across water in decorated boats with the congregation following, are the most striking of them and among the oldest.

Summer and the parish festivals

Every parish keeps its patronal day and most keep a summer festival, and the two together fill the calendar from Whitsun to September. The characteristic form is a marquee, a brass band, a beer tent run by the parish or a society, a dance and a service, and it is organised by volunteers to a standard that surprises people who assume voluntarism means amateurism.

Autumn: the drive and the fair

The Almabtrieb, the return of the cattle from the high pastures, is the Alpine autumn event: the herds brought down decorated when the summer has passed without loss, and undecorated when it has not, which is a custom with a meaning and not a performance.

The harvest festivals, the shooting societies’ autumn matches and the great fairs, of which the Oktoberfest is only the largest, run through the same weeks.

Winter

The Christmas markets are the winter institution, of which Nuremberg’s is the most famous and among the oldest, and the Advent customs of the Alpine districts, including the masked processions and the Perchten runs of the twelve nights, are older than Christianity in the region and have been absorbed rather than suppressed.

The Leonhardi rides, in which horses are blessed in procession, are the last major event of the working year and are among the customs that have grown rather than declined, partly because horse ownership in Bavaria has become a leisure matter and there are more horses than there were.

Culture

Music

Bavaria’s musical institutions are among the strongest in Europe. Munich supports an opera of the first rank in a house with a lineage running back to the premières of Mozart and Wagner, several major orchestras, and a broadcasting orchestra of international standing.

Wagner is the largest single presence and the most complicated. Ludwig II’s patronage rescued the composer’s career, financed the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, and cost the Bavarian crown a fortune and very nearly its ministers. The Bayreuth Festival runs annually in a house built to the composer’s specification, is administered by a foundation, and remains one of the most heavily oversubscribed cultural events in the world.

Underneath the institutions is a living popular musical culture: brass bands in every village, church music of real quality, the folk-music revival that has been continuous since the nineteenth century, and a contemporary scene in Munich and Nuremberg that has been quietly influential in European electronic and rock music for decades.

Art and architecture

The kingdom’s architecture is its most visible cultural asset: Romanesque in the Franconian cathedrals, Gothic in the brick churches of the south east, and above all baroque and rococo, of which Bavaria and Swabia between them hold the greatest concentration in Europe.

The Bavarian rococo church is the country’s characteristic building: the Wies pilgrimage church, the Asam brothers’ work in Munich, the abbey churches of the Danube and the plateau. The style’s local practitioners worked in a tradition of family workshops that produced plasterers, fresco painters and altar-builders across three generations, and the buildings they left are the reason the Bavarian countryside looks as it does.

The great collections are Wittelsbach in origin and public in ownership: the old and new picture galleries, the antiquities, the state collections of Egyptian, ethnographic and natural-historical material, and the enormous technical museum on its island in the Isar, which is among the largest museums of science and industry in the world.

Literature and theatre

Bavarian literature carries a strong tradition of rural realism, satire and dialect writing, and a metropolitan tradition centred on Munich’s periodical culture and the Schwabing ferment of the Prinzregentenzeit, when the district was among the two or three most important literary and artistic quarters in Europe.

The kingdom’s theatre is state-supported, extensive and traditional in taste by comparison with Berlin’s, which is a recurring subject of complaint from Munich’s own younger practitioners and a recurring source of satisfaction to its audiences.

The Munich cultural argument

Munich’s standing cultural anxiety is that it is a conservative city with a radical past, and the anxiety is justified. The Schwabing of 1900 was genuinely avant-garde and the Munich of 2028 is not, and the gap between the city’s cultural self-image and its cultural output is the subject of a permanent local argument conducted in the very newspapers that constitute the problem.

Sport

The mountains

Alpine sport is Bavaria’s international sporting identity and is institutionally organised to a degree that surprises visitors. The state, the clubs, the Alpine association and the army’s mountain brigades together run a development system that takes children from village ski clubs to international competition, and the kingdom supplies a disproportionate share of the Empire’s winter athletes.

The disciplines are the Alpine and Nordic ones: downhill and slalom, ski jumping with the great hills at Garmisch and Oberstdorf, cross-country, biathlon, and the sliding sports at Berchtesgaden. The New Year ski-jumping fixture is among the best-attended sporting events in the German year.

Climbing and the huts

Mountaineering is a mass participation activity rather than a specialist one. The Alpine association maintains a network of huts across the Bavarian and adjacent Austrian Alps, marks and maintains thousands of kilometres of path, runs training and rescue, and holds a membership numbering in the hundreds of thousands.

Its political weight follows from that scale. On Alpine development questions the association is the organised counterweight to the resort and cable-car interest, and Bavarian ministers treat it as a party to negotiations rather than as a lobby.

Football and the clubs

Football is followed intensely, and Munich’s principal club is among the most successful in Europe, which gives the city a combination few places manage: the cultural capital of Catholic Germany also fields the country’s dominant football team, and has never been modest about either.

Nuremberg’s club carries the older history and a considerable regional loyalty, and the Franconian relationship with Munich’s success is exactly what would be predicted from every other Franconian relationship with Munich.

The societies

Beneath the professional sport lies the club system, which is where most Bavarians actually participate: gymnastics, shooting, athletics, swimming, ice sports, and the traditional disciplines of stone-throwing, finger-wrestling and the like that survive in the Alpine districts as competitive sports rather than as folklore.

The shooting societies are the largest and the most political, being simultaneously sporting clubs, historical associations, ceremonial bodies that appear in procession, and a constituency with strong views on firearms law that Bavarian governments handle carefully.

Cuisine

The southern table

Bavarian cooking is southern German, Catholic in its calendar, and built on pork, dumplings, cabbage, freshwater fish, dairy and an elaborate baking tradition. It is a cuisine of the tavern and the household rather than of restaurants, and its best expression is generally the least expensive.

The characteristic dishes are the roast pork with dumpling, the boiled beef, the sausages in their bewildering regional variety, the pretzel and the bread, and the freshwater fish grilled on a stake by the lakes.

The veal sausage and its rules

The Munich veal sausage is governed by a set of conventions that carry the force of law without being law. It is eaten before noon, on the reasoning that a sausage made without preservative in a pre-refrigeration city could not safely be eaten later; the reasoning is obsolete and the rule is observed.

It is skinned rather than eaten in its casing, by one of two accepted methods over which Bavarians disagree amiably, and it is served with sweet mustard and a wheat beer. A visitor who orders one in the afternoon will receive it, together with information.

Regional divisions

The four countries eat differently. Franconia has its own smaller sausage grilled over beech, its own bread, its own carp tradition in the months with an R, and a wine culture where old Bavaria has a beer one. Swabia shares the flour, egg and noodle tradition of Württemberg, including the filled pasta and the scraped noodles. Old Bavaria holds the dumpling and the roast. The Palatinate eats differently again, on the Rhine pattern: saumagen, liver dumplings, potatoes, chestnuts and a great deal of wine, and it is the only province where the everyday drink is not beer.

Beer with food

The pairing of beer with food is treated seriously and regionally: wheat beer in the morning and with veal sausage, pale lager with the roast, dark beer with game, the strong Lenten beers alone, and the smoked beer of Bamberg with whatever a visitor can be persuaded to attempt.

Dairy and the Alps

The Alpine and Allgäu dairy produces a cheese tradition of real quality, protected by designation, made in mountain huts through the grazing season under systems that are economically marginal and culturally load-bearing. The subsidies that sustain Alpine grazing are defended in Bavaria on landscape and cultural grounds as much as agricultural ones, and the defence is honest about it.

Politics in practice

How Bavaria is governed

The kingdom’s political culture is consensual, slow, and dominated by a single party to a degree unusual in a democracy. The Zentrum’s long tenure has produced a governing style in which decisions are made through consultation with the associations, the churches, the chambers and the municipalities before they reach the Landtag, and in which the chamber ratifies more often than it originates.

Its defenders call this corporatism and mean it approvingly: a system that brings the affected parties in before legislating produces law that survives. Its critics call it the same thing and mean that a governing party which has absorbed every organised interest in the state has made opposition structurally impossible.

The opposition

The SPD’s position is the standing problem of Bavarian politics. It holds the cities, has governed in the past, is competent and is permanently short of the votes required, because the rural Catholic vote that decides Bavarian elections has been unavailable to it for a century.

Its response over recent decades has been to compete for the Zentrum’s own ground on federalism, agriculture and regional policy rather than against it, which has narrowed the ideological distance between the two parties considerably and has not yet altered the arithmetic.

The right

The nationalist and agrarian right is louder in Bavaria than its seat count implies, holds a genuine constituency in the emptying eastern and Franconian districts, and has been contained rather than defeated. The Zentrum’s method of containment has been to occupy as much of its ground as can be occupied without embarrassment, which works and has a cost that is discussed in the party more than outside it.

The Landtag at work

The chamber sits in the Maximilianeum in Munich, works through a substantial committee system, and conducts itself with a formality that Berlin finds antique. Its debates are long, its committee work is genuinely detailed, and its rate of amendment to government bills is higher than the Zentrum’s majority would suggest, because the party’s internal factions do their arguing in committee rather than in the chamber.

Referendums

Bavaria makes more use of direct democracy than most member states. Constitutional amendments touching the Crown, the succession, the reserved rights or the provinces require a referendum; ordinary popular initiatives can force a vote at state and municipal level; and the municipal referendum in particular is used constantly.

The record is mixed and instructive. Direct democracy in Bavaria has protected beer gardens, blocked an airport runway, entrenched schooling arrangements and defeated several ministries’ plans, and it has also made a number of decisions that the ministries of the day considered irresponsible and have had to live with. It is the reason the succession reform has not been introduced.

Education and science

Schools

Bavarian schooling is selective, tracked, academically demanding and conservative, and Bavarian pupils perform at or near the top of imperial comparisons. The Zentrum defends the structure as the guarantee of standards; the SPD attacks it as a machine for reproducing the class and confessional geography of the kingdom; and neither position has moved appreciably in fifty years.

Religious instruction is confessional and is provided under the concordat and its Protestant equivalent, with an opt-out and a secular alternative. The arrangement is one of the most conservative in the Empire and one of the least contested inside Bavaria.

The universities

Munich holds the kingdom’s principal university, founded in the fifteenth century and moved to the capital by Ludwig I, together with a large technical university of international standing. Würzburg, Erlangen, Regensburg, Bamberg, Bayreuth, Augsburg and Passau carry the others, and the Franconian institutions in particular are old and jealous of their independence.

The distinctive feature is the network of applied technical institutes in smaller towns, tied to local industry, which is the educational half of the dispersal policy that made the modern Bavarian economy.

Science

Bavarian science is strong in physics, optics, materials, aerospace, computing and the life sciences, organised through the universities, a substantial network of public research institutes, and industrial laboratories.

The Bavarian Academy of Sciences, founded 1759, remains the kingdom’s senior learned body and runs a set of very long-term projects, the dialect dictionary among them, of the kind that only an institution with a two-hundred-and-seventy-year horizon will undertake.

Broadcasting

Bavaria maintains its own public broadcaster, one of the largest of the imperial regional bodies, with a substantial dialect and religious output and a cultural remit taken seriously enough to sustain one of Europe’s better radio orchestras.

Its Franconian coverage is a permanent political question, its dialect policy is a permanent cultural one, and its relationship with the Zentrum, which has appointed to its supervisory bodies for most of eighty years, is a permanent journalistic one.

Bavaria in the Empire

The federal position

Bavaria is the Empire’s most consistent federalist and has been since 1871. Its position in any dispute between the imperial centre and the constituent states is predictable to the point of being a constant in German political arithmetic, and it is not ideological: it is the settled interest of a large, wealthy, distinct member state that entered the federation on terms and intends to keep them.

The kingdom’s federalism is therefore different in kind from Hamburg’s. The free city aligns with the small states because it fears being absorbed by a large one. Bavaria aligns with the small states because it is large enough to lead them, and the difference is visible in every Bundesrat session.

The Bundesrat

Bavaria holds the second delegation in the Bundesrat after Prussia’s capped thirty percent, votes it as a bloc on ministerial instruction, and chairs the foreign affairs committee by reserved right.

Its practical influence exceeds its votes because it is the natural leader of the non-Prussian majority. A Bavarian delegation that has decided on a position can generally assemble the smaller states behind it, and the Empire’s constitutional convention that Prussia does not win alone is enforced in practice largely by Munich.

The Zentrum in imperial politics

The Zentrum’s Bavarian wing is the largest and most autonomous state organisation of any imperial party, and it makes Bavarian opinion felt in Berlin more reliably than any other member state manages. Its deputies vote with the party on most things and against it on federalism, agriculture and church questions whenever Bavarian interest requires, and the party’s imperial leadership has learned to negotiate with its own Bavarians before negotiating with anyone else.

The present imperial coalition is FVP-Zentrum-SPD under Chancellor Brenner, which places the Bavarian Zentrum inside the imperial government, and the resulting position is uncomfortable and well managed: Bavarian ministers support an imperial climate programme in Berlin that Bavarian ministers are resisting in Munich, and both sets of ministers are from the same party.

The Prussian crisis, seen from Munich

The constitutional crisis in Prussia is watched from Bavaria with intense interest and studied neutrality.

The kingdom has no standing in it. The dismissal of a Prussian minister-president by a Prussian regency council under Prussian personal powers is a Prussian matter, and Bavaria has been meticulous about saying nothing that could be read as intervention. Ludwig IV has made no public comment of any kind, which is itself a comment.

Privately the crisis is instructive to Munich in two ways. It is a demonstration of what happens when a Crown’s personal powers are exercised by guardians rather than by a sovereign, which bears on Bavaria’s own regency provisions. And it has made the succession question urgent across every German dynasty, Bavaria’s included, by putting on public display a young emperor who believes his elder sister should be reigning in his place.

The other states

Bavaria’s relations with the other member states are cordial, and its closest working relationships are with Baden and Württemberg, the other southern states, with whom it coordinates on federal questions frequently enough for the grouping to have a name in German political journalism.

With Saxony the relationship is friendly and slightly competitive, two proud old kingdoms of comparable standing with a shared interest in not being administered from Berlin. With Hanover it is correct, careful and freighted with the Welf and Wittelsbach history described above and with the fact that Hanover’s sovereign is also a foreign head of state on a scale that dwarfs the German context.

With Prussia the relationship is what the whole article describes: professional, necessary, mutually respectful, and permanently guarded.

The Wittelsbachs and Wisconsin

A close family

A cadet line bearing the Wittelsbach name reigns as Grand Dukes of Wisconsin in the United Kingdom of America, confirmed in that position by the Grand Ducal Settlement. The branches are close, and they have stayed close irrespective of how far back the descent divides.

This is the ordinary condition of the house rather than a special arrangement. The Wittelsbachs have thrown off cadet lines for eight centuries, and the family’s habit has been to keep them: to visit, to correspond, to stand as godparents, to appear at each other’s weddings and funerals, and to treat degree of descent as a matter for the genealogists rather than for the relatives. A Wisconsin Wittelsbach in Munich is a cousin in a family that has a great many of them, and is received as one.

The traffic runs both ways and it is private. Family occasions in Bavaria draw the Wisconsin relatives and family occasions in Wisconsin draw the Bavarian ones, in each case as relatives and not as a court. There is no precedence, no state character, no accreditation and no protocol beyond the domestic. The two households’ archivists cooperate, which produces the only paperwork the relationship generates.

And a total constitutional separation

None of this touches the constitutional position, and both houses have been careful for a long time that it should not.

The Wisconsin house holds no governing claim to Bavaria, no right to act for any foreign crown, and no independent European state interest inside Wisconsin. It became Wisconsin by law, oath, residence, service and constitutional limitation, and its legitimacy in the Grand Duchy comes from settlement and conduct rather than from blood. The King of Bavaria exercises no authority of any kind outside his kingdom’s frontier and has never claimed any. Nothing in the family relationship qualifies a word of that.

The separation is maintained in practice as well as in law, and the practice is more demanding than the law. Nothing political passes between the houses: no messages, no representations, no positions, and no use of one household’s standing in the other’s country. A Grand Duke who behaved in Bavaria like a foreign prince would weaken the settlement that gives him his office, and the Wisconsin household understands that more sharply than the Bavarian one does.

The nearest analogue elsewhere in the Allied order is the friendship between George V and Alexander I, first cousins whose relationship is warm, private and less formal than the relations between their houses, and in which the cousin who is not the German sovereign makes no public intervention in German affairs whatever. Bavaria and Wisconsin work the same way and for the same reason.

What remains genuinely unsettled is the genealogy: the exact line by which the Wisconsin branch descends is not established here, and on the evidence of how the two families actually behave it does not appear to matter to either of them.

The eight provinces

The system

Bavaria’s seven provinces (Regierungsbezirke) are administrative districts rather than governments, headed by presidents appointed by the ministry, and they carry state administration outward from Munich rather than representing their populations back to it. They matter for three reasons nonetheless: they are the frame for the Landtag’s electoral regions, they correspond closely enough to the historic territories to carry real identity, and Bavarians locate themselves by them without hesitation.

Beneath them sit the counties and the municipalities, which hold the local government that actually touches people, and which in Bavaria are unusually numerous, unusually small and unusually resistant to amalgamation.

Upper Bavaria

Upper Bavaria is the largest, richest and most populous province, running from the Danube south to the Alpine frontier and containing Munich, the lake country, the Alpine resorts and the greater part of the kingdom’s wealth.

It is the Bavaria of the world’s imagination and the least representative part of the country: Catholic, prosperous, Bavarian-speaking, mountainous in the south and gravel plain in the middle, and containing within itself both the most expensive property in the Empire and Alpine villages losing population every year. Its politics are Zentrum in the countryside and mixed in Munich, and the tension between the two is the central fact of the province.

Lower Bavaria

Lower Bavaria lies along the Danube east of Upper Bavaria toward the Austrian and Bohemian frontiers, and it is the most agricultural, most Catholic and most conservative of the seven. Its centre is Landshut, its river towns are Passau, Deggendorf and Straubing, and its uplands run into the Bavarian Forest.

It is poorer than Upper Bavaria and has been catching up steadily for fifty years, chiefly through the technical-institute policy and the vehicle plants at Dingolfing and Regensburg’s edge. Its border districts along the Bohemian frontier are among the emptiest in the kingdom, and its politics are the Zentrum’s most reliable ground anywhere in Germany.

The Upper Palatinate

The Upper Palatinate is the province that does not fit. Its territory came to Bavaria as the prize of the Thirty Years’ War, taken from the Palatine cousins, and it has been part of the state ever since without ever quite becoming part of old Bavaria in the way the Danube country did.

Its landscape is upland, wooded and thinly settled along the Bohemian frontier, its centre is Regensburg, and its economy has been transformed by vehicle manufacture and electronics in a generation. Its dialect is transitional between Bavarian and Franconian, which is the linguistic expression of exactly its political position.

Upper Franconia

Upper Franconia is the north-eastern province, upland, Protestant in large part, and the poorest region in the kingdom. Its towns are Bayreuth, Bamberg, Coburg and Hof, its uplands are the Fichtelgebirge and the Frankenwald, and its economy was built on textiles, porcelain, glass and brewing, three of which have largely gone.

It has the densest concentration of breweries in the world and the sharpest demographic decline in Bavaria, and the two facts together produce a particular kind of politics: a province with an intense local identity, a strong tradition of self-organisation, and a steady loss of the young people who would sustain both. The structural money that Munich sends here is generous and has slowed rather than stopped the decline.

Middle Franconia

Middle Franconia is the industrial heart of the Bavarian north, containing Nuremberg, Fürth, Erlangen and Ansbach, and it is the province where the Franconian question is loudest because it is the one with the resources to be heard.

Its economy is electrical engineering, machine tools, optics, medical technology, printing and transport, and it is the second industrial concentration in the kingdom after the Munich-Ingolstadt corridor. It is substantially Protestant, its cities are old free cities or margravial capitals with self-governing traditions predating Bavaria, and its relationship with Munich is correct, competitive and permanently slightly aggrieved.

Lower Franconia

Lower Franconia is the north-west, the Main valley province, the wine country and the most outward-looking part of the kingdom. Its centre is Würzburg, its towns are Schweinfurt and Aschaffenburg, and its landscape is terraced vineyard, dry limestone upland and the wooded Spessart.

It is Catholic where Middle and Upper Franconia are substantially Protestant, having been prince-bishops’ territory until 1803, and it is oriented economically and culturally toward Frankfurt and the Rhine rather than toward Munich. Its Landtag deputies are consistently among the most federalist in the chamber, on the reasonable ground that a province three hours from its own capital and one hour from somebody else’s has an interest in decentralisation.

Swabia

Swabia, the western province beyond the Lech, is Alemannic in speech and Swabian in temperament, and its relationship with Munich is the easiest of the three acquired countries. Its centre is Augsburg, its landscape runs from the Danube valley south to the Allgäu Alps, and its economy combines machinery, environmental technology, aerospace and, in the Allgäu, the most intensive dairy farming in the Empire.

The Allgäu is the province’s distinctive region: high pasture, cheese-making of an organisation and quality that supports a protected-designation system of its own, and a tourist economy that has grown large enough to compete with farming for land and labour.

The Rhenish Palatinate

The kingdom’s eighth province and its only detached one, seated at Speyer, lying west of the Rhine with Baden and Hesse between it and the rest of Bavaria. It is the most densely populated province after Upper Bavaria, the warmest, the most industrial in proportion to its size, and the least Catholic.

Speyer is a small city with an enormous building: the Romanesque imperial cathedral, the burial church of the Salian emperors and the largest surviving Romanesque church in the world. Its Jewish community is one of the oldest north of the Alps, and the medieval Jewish quarter, with the ritual bath beneath it, is the best preserved in Germany. Ludwigshafen, opposite Mannheim on the Rhine, was founded by and named for Ludwig I and is the chemical capital of the Empire’s south, a works town of a scale nothing else in Bavaria approaches. Kaiserslautern anchors the interior, Neustadt the wine trade, and Landau, Zweibrücken and Pirmasens the south and west.

The province’s economy is the kingdom’s least typical. Where Bavaria dispersed its manufacturing among medium-sized firms in small towns, the Palatinate has one very large chemical concentration, a wine industry, and a good deal of ordinary poverty in the western districts along the frontier. The technical-institute policy was applied here as elsewhere and worked unevenly, for the reason it worked unevenly everywhere: the firms to tie the institutes to were fewer.

Politically it is the province Munich can least rely on. The Zentrum has never held it securely, the SPD is strong in Ludwigshafen and the industrial belt, the liberal parties poll better here than anywhere else in the kingdom, and a Palatine deputy who reminds the Landtag that his province was bought at a congress is doing something entirely conventional.

Transport and infrastructure

Rail

Bavaria is crossed by the imperial network’s principal southern corridors, running east to west along the Danube toward Austria and the Habsburg lands, and north to south from Franconia through Munich to the Alpine passes and Italy. Munich is the second rail hub of the Empire after Berlin.

The kingdom surrendered its own railway administration in the mid-century merger, and the guarantees it obtained in exchange concerned rural lines. Those guarantees have been kept, which is why Bavaria retains a branch network into the Alpine valleys and the Franconian uplands that pure commercial logic would have closed decades ago, and why closing any of it remains politically impossible.

The Alpine crossings

The routes through the Alps to Austria and Italy are the kingdom’s most consequential piece of transport geography and its most contested. The Brenner corridor, reached from Munich through the Inn valley, carries an enormous volume of road freight between northern Europe and Italy, and the valleys it passes through have been complaining about it for fifty years.

Bavaria’s position is genuinely conflicted. It benefits from the corridor commercially, its Alpine communities bear the noise, air pollution and road damage, and its own manufacturers depend on the route. Rail transfer schemes have been agreed repeatedly between Munich, Vienna and Rome, funded partially, and delivered slowly.

Roads and the motorway question

The kingdom is served by a dense motorway network, and Bavaria has been among the more resistant member states to imperial proposals for a general speed limit, on grounds that mix industrial interest, driver sentiment and federalism in proportions its critics regard as suspicious.

The argument has been running for decades and has been sharpened by the climate legislation, and it is one of those Bavarian disputes in which the kingdom’s federalism and its car industry point in the same direction, which makes the federalism harder to take at face value.

Air

Munich’s airport is the second of the Empire and a major intercontinental hub, built on a greenfield site north east of the city after a long and bitter dispute with the farming communities displaced by it. Nuremberg and Memmingen carry regional and low-cost traffic.

The airport’s third runway has been proposed, litigated, put to a Munich municipal referendum and rejected, and remains a live argument between the state government, which wants it, and the city, which does not.

Water and power

Bavaria generates a substantial share of its electricity from Alpine hydroelectric schemes, many of them municipally or communally owned, and the licensing of those schemes is at the centre of the water compact now before the Landtag.

The kingdom is also the Empire’s largest producer of solar electricity, a consequence of a long-running feed-in support scheme and a great deal of south-facing agricultural roof, and the resulting pattern of small distributed generation owned by farmers and cooperatives is one of the more successful pieces of Bavarian economic policy.

Digital

Rural connectivity has been a chronic Bavarian complaint and a chronic Bavarian failure. A dispersed settlement pattern of very small municipalities is expensive to serve, the kingdom’s own programme has run behind its targets for a decade, and the gap between the Munich region’s provision and the Upper Franconian uplands’ is one of the sharper practical inequalities in the state.

Law and justice

The courts

Bavaria maintains its own ordinary court system through the trial and appellate levels, with the Bavarian High Court at Munich at its head and further appeal in federal questions to the imperial courts. Administrative disputes run through specialised divisions, and the judiciary is appointed under a merit system with judicial-council involvement.

The Constitutional Court

The Bavarian Constitutional Court, sitting at Munich, rules on the Bavarian constitution. Its distinctive feature is the popular action, under which any Bavarian citizen may challenge a Bavarian statute as incompatible with the constitution without needing to demonstrate personal injury.

The procedure is genuinely unusual and its consequences are mixed. It generates a substantial volume of hopeless litigation brought by people with a grievance and a filing fee. It has also produced a small number of judgments of real constitutional importance, several of them brought by individuals with no institutional backing whatever, and it is defended in Bavaria as proof that the constitution belongs to the country rather than to the state that administers it.

Police

Policing is a Bavarian competence, organised on a state basis, and the Bavarian police are among the largest and best-resourced forces in the Empire. Bavaria’s law-and-order politics are more conservative than most member states’, its public order provisions are stricter, and its crime rates are among the lowest in Germany.

The relationship between those last two facts is contested in exactly the way it is contested everywhere, and the Bavarian answer, that the policy produces the outcome, is asserted more often than it is demonstrated.

The concordat in law

The Catholic Church’s position rests on a concordat, a treaty between the Bavarian state and the Holy See, and the Protestant church’s on a parallel state treaty. These are the instruments that carry the school arrangements, the theological faculties, the church tax collection and the appointment procedures.

Their legal character is the point. A concordat is a treaty, not a statute, and cannot be amended by ordinary legislation, which gives the Bavarian church settlement an entrenchment that the Prussian arrangements, arising from general law, do not have. This is the single sharpest legal difference between the two kingdoms’ religious orders.

Health, welfare and daily life

The welfare settlement

Cash welfare and social insurance are imperial competences, so a Bavarian’s pension and unemployment insurance come from the Empire. What Bavaria administers is the physical provision: hospitals, care homes, kindergartens, social services, housing and the schools.

The distinctive Bavarian feature is how much of that provision is delivered by the churches under public contract. The Catholic and Protestant welfare organisations run a very large share of the kingdom’s hospitals, homes and childcare, funded publicly and staffed professionally, and the arrangement dates from the settlement of 1919 to 1923 that traded the church’s constitutional position for its institutional one.

The argument about it

The system’s defenders say it produces provision embedded in communities rather than administered at them, with lower costs, deeper local roots and a workforce with a vocation. Its critics say it produces a service that is patchy where the churches are weak, paternalistic where they are strong, and that it gives confessional bodies employment practices and admission policies that a public service would not be allowed.

Both are right in particular places and the argument has never been settled. It has become sharper as observance has fallen, because an institution delivering public services on behalf of a shrinking church is a harder thing to justify than one delivering them on behalf of a majority.

Health

Bavarian health outcomes are among the best in the Empire and its hospital provision is dense, including a network of small rural hospitals that the ministry has repeatedly proposed to consolidate and repeatedly failed to. The Alpine districts carry an unusual burden of mountain trauma and an unusually developed emergency medical and air rescue system in consequence.

The working year

Bavarian life is organised around a calendar that is still substantially the church’s. The great feasts are public holidays, the kingdom keeps more of them than any other member state, and the pattern of parish festival, patronal day, harvest and pilgrimage remains legible in the working year even for people with no religious practice at all.

The summer closure, the Alpine grazing cycle with its spring drive and autumn return, the shooting and gymnastic society calendars, the fire brigade anniversaries and the brass band circuit together constitute a social year that a visitor experiences as folklore and a resident experiences as the schedule.

Housing and how people live

Bavarians own their homes at a lower rate than the imperial average and rent at a higher one, which surprises people who assume a conservative rural society implies widespread ownership; the explanation is Munich, where prices have made purchase impossible for a generation and where a quarter of the kingdom’s population lives.

Outside the Munich region ownership is high, the housing stock is newer than in the industrial north, and the characteristic form is the detached or semi-detached family house in a village that has grown outward from a medieval core. The consequence is a settlement pattern of very low density that is expensive to service and comfortable to inhabit, and the tension between those two facts is the substance of Bavarian planning politics.

Media

The press

Bavaria supports a dense regional press, in which a large number of small local papers survive at a rate that has not been matched in most of the Empire, and two Munich dailies of national influence.

The kingdom’s press is more federalist than the imperial average and more sympathetic to the Zentrum, and Munich’s papers carry an authority in imperial debate that gives Bavarian opinions a reach no other state’s press achieves. This is the mechanism by which, as observers of German politics regularly note, Bavarian views are felt in Berlin more reliably than any other member state manages.

Broadcasting

The Bavarian public broadcaster is among the largest of the imperial regional bodies, with television, radio, an orchestra and a substantial cultural and religious output.

Its distinctive features are a dialect policy maintained as deliberate cultural provision rather than tolerated as a regional accident, a religious broadcasting commitment that reflects the kingdom’s confessional character, and a supervisory board on which the Zentrum has had a majority or near-majority for most of eighty years. The last of these is a permanent subject of complaint from every other party and has never produced a change.

Publishing and film

Munich is one of the Empire’s principal publishing centres, particularly in books, and holds a substantial film and television production industry with studios of long standing. Bavarian film production has a strong tradition in popular and regional work and a more intermittent one in the internationally ambitious, and Munich’s relationship with Berlin in this field is the usual mixture of resentment and dependence.

Bavaria and Austria

The oldest relationship

Bavaria’s relationship with Austria-Hungary is its longest, closest and most complicated external connection, and it operates almost entirely below the level of foreign policy, which belongs to the Empire.

The two are contiguous along a frontier of great length, share a language boundary that does not correspond to the political one, share the Alps and their rescue services, share the Danube, share Catholicism, share dynastic history running back a thousand years, and share a dialect continuum in which the speech of Upper Bavaria and that of the Austrian Tyrol are closer to one another than either is to standard German.

In practice

The practical relationship is a dense mesh of arrangements: cross-frontier commuting, the mountain rescue convention, water and river management on the Inn and the Salzach, transport agreements on the Alpine corridors, university and hospital cooperation, and a tourist economy that treats the frontier as a formality.

Bavaria’s legation in Vienna is the second of its diplomatic establishments after the mission to the Holy See, and its function is chiefly to manage this mesh rather than to conduct anything resembling diplomacy.

The historical shadow

Behind it lies the older question. Bavaria and Austria are the two great Catholic German states, they were rivals for the leadership of Catholic Germany for centuries, they fought one another repeatedly, and in 1866 they lost to Prussia together.

That defeat is the hinge. Bavaria entered a Prussian-led Empire in 1871 and Austria did not, and the Bavarian and Austrian answers to the same nineteenth-century question therefore diverged permanently. The relationship since has been warm, close and marked by a mutual awareness that the two countries came to opposite conclusions about the same problem, and that the other one might have been right.

The three arguments

Water

The Alpine water compact is before the Landtag, is opposed inside the governing party by the farming interest and the resort municipalities, is supported by the ministry’s leadership, the SPD and both churches, and has not passed. It concerns abstraction, hydroelectric licensing, ecological flow, snowmaking and Bavaria’s downstream obligations, and it is the most consequential environmental legislation the kingdom has considered in a generation. Unresolved.

Climate and the vehicle industry

The imperial climate programme and the transition away from combustion bear on Bavaria harder than on any other member state, because vehicles are its largest industry and its supply chain reaches into every province.

The kingdom’s position is genuinely divided rather than merely obstructive. Its manufacturers have invested heavily and want regulatory certainty; its component towns fear what the transition does to them; its farmers oppose the land and fuel provisions; its urban voters support the programme; and its ministers sit in an imperial coalition that is enacting it. Unresolved.

The succession

The reform bill exists in draft, has not been introduced, requires a referendum under the constitution’s entrenchment of the dynastic provisions, and is understood to have the King’s private sympathy and no ministerial urgency. The Crown Prince has an elder sister. The Prussian crisis has made the subject impossible to ignore and no more comfortable to raise. Unresolved.

The court and the monarchy in practice

The household

The royal household is small by the standards of the dynasty’s past and large by the standards of a modern constituent monarchy. It is funded by a civil list voted by the Landtag, audited publicly, and separate from the public trust that holds the palaces, forests and collections.

Its functions are the ordinary ones: the King’s private office, the ceremonial and household departments, the Bavarian orders of chivalry, the royal archives, and the liaison offices that manage the King’s relationship with the ministry, with the Landtag, with the church and with the contingent. The last of these is the only one with a counterpart in no other member state’s household, because no other member state’s sovereign commands an army.

The royal year

The King’s public year is heavily provincial by design. Ludwig IV spends more time outside Munich than any of his three predecessors, and the distribution is deliberate: a monarch of a kingdom with a Franconian question and a Swabian one cannot be a Munich figure without confirming exactly the complaint the north makes.

The fixed points are the opening of the Landtag, Kingdom Day, the great church feasts, the harvest and Alpine grazing occasions, the fire brigade and rescue service anniversaries, the technical school and institute openings that have become his particular association, and an annual round of the eight provinces. The Oktoberfest opening is a municipal function of the city of Munich and the King attends as a guest, which is a distinction Bavarians make with care.

The King and the ministry

The relationship between Crown and ministry is regulated by convention and is generally uneventful. The King is informed, receives the Minister-President regularly, may warn and encourage, and does not obstruct. Assent has not been refused since the nineteenth century and is not regarded as refusable.

Where the King has genuine independent standing is on the water question, because his long service in the royal trust’s forestry and water administration gave him a technical command of the subject that predates his reign and outlasts any ministry. Officials report that his questions on the Alpine compact are the sharpest he asks about anything. He has expressed no public view and is not expected to.

Reserve powers

The Bavarian Crown’s reserve powers are narrow and real: to refuse a dissolution in defined circumstances, to appoint a Minister-President where the Landtag produces no clear nomination, and to act in the emergency provisions on ministerial advice with legislative ratification.

They have not been exercised within living memory. The Prussian crisis has nonetheless made them a subject of study in Munich, since Prussia has demonstrated what happens when comparable powers are exercised by a regency council rather than by an adult sovereign, and the Bavarian regency provisions have not been revisited in eighty years.

The dynasty in public life

The wider royal family carries an ordinary programme of patronages, charitable presidencies and institutional associations, and its members are minor public figures rather than celebrities. Bavarian press treatment of them is respectful, incurious and occasionally sharp on questions of money.

The house’s own historical apparatus is substantial: the family archives are among the richest private collections in Europe, are administered with the public archives under a joint arrangement, and are open to scholarship. The willingness to be researched is comparatively recent and is generally credited to Franz I.

Bavaria and the wider world

The Empire’s foreign policy, and Bavaria’s place in it

Foreign policy belongs to the Empire and Bavaria does not conduct it. What the kingdom has is a channel, a committee seat and a set of interests that it presses through imperial machinery like any other member state, with more success than most because of the Zentrum’s imperial weight and the Munich press.

Bavarian interests abroad are identifiable and consistent: the Alpine and Danubian neighbourhood, the Catholic connection, the export markets its manufacturers depend on, and a long-standing preference for institutional multilateralism that its critics attribute to a small state’s instinct surviving in a large one.

The United Kingdom of America

Bavaria’s relationship with the UKA runs almost entirely through the economy and the family. Bavarian manufacturers export heavily to the Realm and hold substantial American operations; American firms hold Bavarian ones; the technical universities maintain long research relationships.

The dynastic connection to the Grand Duchy of Wisconsin is described above and is a family matter without political content. What it produces in practice is a modest cultural traffic, a certain warmth in Bavarian coverage of a polity most Germans could not place on a map, and an annual quantity of Wisconsin visitors to Bavaria who are received with more patience than the equivalent traffic from anywhere else.

The Holy See

The mission to the Holy See is the oldest of Bavaria’s legations and the only one whose work is genuinely consequential, because the concordat is a live instrument requiring continuous management: appointments, faculties, school arrangements, property questions and the ordinary friction of a treaty between a secular state and a church.

The relationship is close and is not uncritical. Bavarian governments have disagreed with Rome publicly on more than one occasion, most recently over appointments, and the Zentrum’s habit of distinguishing itself from the hierarchy is at its most visible here.

The Concert and the regions

Bavaria’s activity in the European Concert is disproportionate to its formal standing, because the union’s regional and subsidiarity dimension is exactly the terrain the kingdom has spent a century and a half cultivating.

Munich has been assembling a grouping of strong European regions and small states, Catholic and Alpine in its centre of gravity, since before the Concert was founded, and Bavarian ministers appear at Straßburg and Brussels at a rate the imperial foreign ministry finds excessive and has no power to restrict.

Demographics

Population and change

Bavaria holds approximately fifteen and a half million people, of whom about 1.4 million live in the detached Rhenish Palatinate, is growing slowly, and is growing entirely through migration and internal movement rather than through natural increase, the birth rate having been below replacement for decades.

The growth is very unevenly distributed. The Munich region, the Ingolstadt-Nuremberg corridor and the Alpine resorts gain; the eastern border districts, the Franconian uplands and the Rhön lose, in some counties at rates that are emptying schools and closing services. The kingdom’s structural policy has slowed this and not reversed it, and the political consequences in the losing districts are the least examined problem in Bavarian politics.

Migration

Bavaria has received substantial migration for seventy years: from the rest of the Empire, from the European south, from Austria and the Habsburg lands, from the wider world. The Munich region is among the most internationally mixed places in Germany, the industrial corridor is close behind, and the rural districts are markedly less so.

Integration policy is a Bavarian competence in schooling and housing and an imperial one in nationality. The kingdom’s approach has been more conservative than Prussia’s, more insistent on language and civic instruction, and its own assessment of the results is more positive than its critics’. The argument is a live one and the article does not settle it.

The confessional map

The confessional map is old and legible: Catholic in old Bavaria, the Upper Palatinate, Lower Franconia and Swabia; Protestant in Middle and Upper Franconia and pockets elsewhere; and mixed, with a Protestant plurality, in the Rhenish Palatinate, whose Lutheran and Reformed congregations united in 1818 and which is the one province where neither confession commands the ground. It corresponds to the territorial settlement of the sixteenth century almost exactly, which is a fact about the durability of the cuius regio principle rather than about anybody’s present belief.

Observance is falling across both confessions at rates comparable to the rest of the Empire, from a considerably higher base. The institutions remain strong while their congregations thin, which is the condition that makes the welfare settlement described above increasingly hard to defend.

Language communities

Beyond the three dialect areas, Bavaria carries the ordinary language communities of a modern European economy, and Munich’s schools operate in a linguistic environment its curriculum was not designed for.

The kingdom’s dialect support policy sits awkwardly beside this and the awkwardness is acknowledged. A state that funds Bavarian dialect broadcasting while requiring German instruction of migrant children is making a defensible distinction between heritage and integration and is regularly accused of making a less defensible one.

Environment and conservation

The protected landscape

Bavaria carries a dense network of protected areas: two national parks, a large number of nature parks, biosphere reserves along the Rhön, and protection regimes over most of the Alpine zone. The proportion of the kingdom under some form of protection is among the highest in the Empire.

The Bavarian Forest national park, the first in Germany, is the most contested. Its non-intervention policy, under which bark-beetle damage is allowed to run its course, has produced a landscape of standing dead spruce and vigorous natural regeneration that ecologists regard as a triumph and the surrounding forestry communities regard as a scandal. It has been to the Bavarian courts twice and survived.

The Alps under pressure

The Alpine environment carries the kingdom’s sharpest conflicts: ski development, snowmaking, cable-car construction, road traffic, visitor numbers, hut capacity and the retreat of the snowline. The Alpine association, with mass membership and considerable moral authority, is the principal organised opponent of further development, and it wins as often as it loses.

The retreat of the glaciers is the most visible single change. Bavaria’s remaining glaciers are small, are being monitored continuously by the state’s own scientists, and are projected to disappear within decades. Their loss has no great hydrological consequence and an enormous symbolic one, and the annual measurement has become a fixture of the Bavarian news year.

Rivers and the water question

The re-naturalisation of the Isar through Munich, reversing a nineteenth-century channelisation, is the most successful piece of environmental engineering the kingdom has undertaken and is cited internationally. It is also the exception, and most Bavarian rivers remain heavily engineered for hydroelectricity, navigation and flood control.

The Alpine water compact would change the licensing basis of a great deal of that infrastructure, which is why the municipalities that own the hydro schemes are among its opponents. That the opposition includes publicly owned utilities and farming cooperatives rather than distant corporations is what makes the argument genuinely difficult.

Agriculture and the land

Bavarian agriculture’s environmental record is mixed and improving from a poor base. Nitrate in groundwater, the loss of meadow diversity, the intensification of dairy in the Allgäu and the spread of maize for biogas are the recurring problems; organic conversion rates well above the imperial average, the Alpine grazing systems and the small-farm structure are the mitigations.

The kingdom’s agricultural politics make rapid change impossible and gradual change reliable, which is the standing Bavarian pattern and is defended as such.

Symbols

The arms and flag

Bavaria’s arms are lozengy bendwise argent and azure, the white and blue lozenges, one of the oldest and most immediately recognisable devices in Europe. They came to the Wittelsbachs from the counts of Bogen in the thirteenth century and have been the country’s mark ever since.

The flag exists in two forms, both official: the lozenge flag carrying the diamond pattern across the whole field, and the white-over-blue bicolour. Both are in constant use, the lozenges more festively and the bicolour more officially, and Bavarians use whichever is to hand.

The white and blue are so thoroughly identified with the country that they function as a national colour scheme in a way few regional palettes do, appearing on everything from maypoles to sports kit to the livery of institutions with no connection to the state.

The motto

The kingdom’s motto is In Treue fest, steadfast in loyalty, and its object has been deliberately unspecified since it was adopted. Loyalty to what is not stated: to the King, to the Empire, to the faith, to the country. The ambiguity was convenient in 1871 and has been convenient ever since.

The anthem

The Bayernhymne is sung at state occasions, at sporting fixtures and in schools, and its performance alongside the imperial anthem rather than beneath it is a matter on which Bavaria has been particular for a century and a half.

Kingdom Day

The kingdom’s national day marks the grant of the Constitution of 1818 rather than the assumption of the royal title in 1806, a choice made deliberately in the nineteenth century and never revisited. Bavaria celebrates the day it acquired a constitution rather than the day it acquired a crown, which is either an admirable piece of civic priority or a tactful way of not commemorating an alliance with Napoleon, and the honest answer is both.

Public finance

The budget

Bavaria budgets in two-year cycles, a practice inherited from the nineteenth century and retained when most of the Empire moved to annual estimates. The double budget is defended on the ground that it forces ministries to plan beyond the immediate year and criticised on the ground that it makes the Landtag’s control weaker in the second year than the first, and both claims are true.

The budget is introduced by the Finance Minister, referred to the Landtag’s budget committee, and returned to the chamber with amendments that are usually accepted. The committee is the most powerful body in the Landtag and its chairmanship is by long convention given to the opposition, a rule that is not written in the constitution and has never been broken. It is the one place in Bavarian public life where a minister can be questioned for hours without an audience, and ministers who have appeared before it describe the experience in similar terms regardless of party.

Supplementary estimates are common, and the practice of funding new commitments through them rather than through the main budget is a standing complaint of the Court of Audit.

What the kingdom raises

The great majority of Bavarian revenue comes from taxes the kingdom does not set. Income tax, corporation tax and turnover tax are imperial taxes whose rates are fixed at Berlin and whose yield is divided between the Empire, the states and the municipalities by a formula in imperial law. Bavaria’s fiscal position is therefore determined less by what it decides than by what its economy produces, which is why Bavarian finance ministers spend more effort on the division formula than on the Bavarian tax code.

The kingdom’s own taxes are a short list. The beer and spirits duties fall under the reservation and are collected by Bavarian officials into the Bavarian budget. Property transfer duty, the tax on gaming, a small number of licensing charges and the returns of the state forests and the state lottery make up most of the remainder. The beer duty, so prominent in the popular account of Bavarian distinctiveness, produces well under two per cent of revenue in an ordinary year, and the figure has been quoted in the Landtag by successive opposition finance spokesmen for at least sixty years without dislodging the reservation in the slightest.

The equalisation, and the change in Bavaria’s position

Bavaria participates fully in the imperial fiscal equalisation, the system by which revenue is redistributed between richer and poorer states. For most of its existence within the Empire it was a receiving state. The agricultural south was poorer than the industrial north and west, the Franconian uplands and the eastern border districts were among the poorest regions in Germany, and Bavarian ministers argued the case for redistribution with the vigour of people who needed it.

Bavaria became a net contributor in the second half of the twentieth century and has been one of the largest ever since. The reversal took about two decades and its political consequences are still working through. Bavarian governments now make the arguments that were made against them within living memory, and are reminded of it by the states that receive the money. Ministers from the poorer German states have a settled repertoire of quotations from Bavarian ministers of the 1950s, and Bavarian ministers have a settled answer, which is that a state that has paid for its own development is entitled to say how long it should pay for everyone else’s.

The kingdom has brought two challenges before the imperial constitutional court over the formula, one of which succeeded in part. Neither was framed as an attack on equalisation itself, and Bavarian governments have been careful, in a way that is generally read as deliberate, never to argue that redistribution between the German states is wrong in principle. The reason usually given in Munich is that the kingdom has too long a memory of being on the other side of it.

Borrowing and the debt rule

Bavaria carries the lowest public debt of any German state relative to its economy, and has for a generation. The position is the result of a constitutional amendment carried in the 1990s which requires the ordinary budget to balance over the cycle and permits borrowing only for investment or in a declared emergency, and of the fact that the amendment was introduced when the kingdom’s revenues were rising fast enough to make compliance painless.

Whether the rule caused the low debt or merely recorded a discipline that already existed is argued about in the Landtag. What is not argued about is the effect on capital spending in the poorer provinces, where the districts that most need investment are the ones least able to service the local share of it, and where the rule has been criticised by every party including the one that introduced it.

The royal trust and the civil list

The palaces, forests, collections and estates transferred to public trust in the settlement of 1919 to 1923 are administered separately from the budget and are audited by the Court of Audit like any other public body. The trust’s accounts are published. It runs at a surplus in most years, principally from forestry and from admissions to the palaces, and the surplus is applied to the maintenance of the properties rather than returned to the state.

The civil list is voted by the Landtag, is a charge on the ordinary budget, and is not large by the standards of European monarchies. It is reviewed at intervals and has twice been reduced in real terms at the request of the Crown, once under Rupprecht I and once in the first year of the present reign. The arrangement is generally regarded as settled. The one recurring dispute concerns the boundary between the trust’s properties and the private property of the house, which was drawn in the 1920s and has been redrawn twice since, on each occasion by agreement and on each occasion after several years of quiet negotiation that became public only when it concluded.

The development bank

The kingdom maintains a state development bank, established in the postwar decades and owned by Bavaria, which does not take retail deposits and does not compete with the savings banks or the cooperative banks. It lends long, at rates below the commercial market, for purposes fixed by statute: industrial investment in the weaker districts, the technical institutes and their associated firms, municipal infrastructure, housing, and agricultural modernisation on holdings too small to interest a commercial lender.

It is the instrument through which the institute policy was actually financed, and its existence is the reason a fifty-year programme of placing research capacity in small towns did not have to be voted through the budget in fifty separate annual instalments. Its lending decisions are taken by the bank, its statutory purposes are set by the Landtag, and the distinction between the two has been tested and largely held.

The bank has been criticised on two grounds, both of which have substance. Lending below market rates to firms in particular districts is a subsidy whatever it is called, and it has on occasion been directed to firms whose principal qualification was the constituency they were in. And a state bank that lends long into a narrow regional economy concentrates risk, which was demonstrated in the 1990s when a group of loans to a single sector had to be written down and the loss fell on the Bavarian budget without ever appearing in it as an item anybody had voted for. Both criticisms are made by the Court of Audit at intervals. The bank’s mandate has been narrowed twice in response and has never been withdrawn.

Where the money goes

The largest single item is education, which in Bavaria includes the teachers’ salaries, the universities and the technical institutes, and which has been protected in every budget round since the institutes became the instrument of regional policy. Policing, the courts and the prisons follow. Transfers to the districts and municipalities are the third block and the most politically sensitive, because they are the mechanism by which the poorer provinces are kept functioning and because the formula is revised only after negotiations that no minister enjoys.

The Bavarian budget carries two lines that no other German state’s budget carries, the War Ministry and the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. Neither is large. The army’s equipment, pay scales and pensions are imperial charges, so the Bavarian military line covers administration, barracks, the mountain training establishments and the contingent’s own recruitment; the foreign ministry maintains a small number of legations and a department at Munich that is smaller than several municipal administrations. The two lines together are less than the annual budget of the Munich police, a comparison drawn in the Landtag whenever the reserved rights are debated and drawn by both sides, because it can be used to show either that the rights cost nothing or that they are worth nothing.

Local government

The tiers

Below the kingdom there are two levels of self government and one level of state administration. The municipalities and the districts are self governing bodies with elected councils and their own budgets. The eight provinces are administrative and have no assembly, as the constitution has provided since 1818 and as every attempt to change has failed to alter.

The distinction matters more in Bavaria than the bare description suggests. Communal self government is entrenched in the constitution, is protected by the Constitutional Court, and has been successfully defended by municipalities against Bavarian governments on several occasions through the popular action procedure. A Bavarian municipality is not an administrative convenience of the state and does not regard itself as one.

The municipalities

There are rather more than two thousand municipalities in Bavaria, a number that is high for the population and is the result of the kingdom having abandoned amalgamation earlier and less completely than its neighbours. They fall into three legal categories which are also social ones. A Stadt is a town or city; a Markt is a market town, a status granted historically by the Crown and carrying the right to hold markets, which has no practical content in modern law and which no municipality entitled to it has ever surrendered; a Gemeinde is everything else. The signs at the village boundary state which of the three the place is, and the distinction is used in ordinary speech.

The twenty five largest towns are district free, administering their own affairs without a district above them. The rest belong to a district.

Municipal councils are elected for six years on a system that allows voters to distribute their votes among candidates across party lists, which produces councils where personal standing matters more than party and where independent local associations, many of them older than the parties, hold a large share of seats. In the smaller municipalities party labels are frequently absent altogether.

Mayors

Mayors are directly elected, separately from the council, for six years. In municipalities above a threshold the office is full time and salaried; below it the mayor keeps another occupation and is paid an allowance, and something over half of Bavarian mayors are part time. The part time mayor of a village of nine hundred people, who is also a farmer or a schoolteacher or runs the building firm, is a real and common figure and is the level at which most Bavarians have actually met someone holding public office.

The direct mandate makes Bavarian mayors unusually independent of their councils and of their parties. Mayors have won re election after leaving the party that first nominated them often enough that the pattern is not remarkable. Ministers negotiating with municipal associations negotiate with people who cannot be disciplined by the party whips, which is one of the reasons municipal finance rounds are difficult.

The districts

The seventy one districts are self governing bodies with an elected assembly and a directly elected chief executive, and carry the functions too large for a village and too local for the kingdom: the secondary schools, the hospitals in most of the country, refuse, the roads below the state network, social assistance and the licensing of vehicles. They also carry the fire and rescue coordination that in the Alpine districts is a serious operational responsibility.

District finance depends on a levy raised from the municipalities within the district, which produces a permanent and structural argument between the two tiers, since the district must set a rate that the poorest municipality in it can pay. In the eastern border districts and the Upper Franconian uplands this argument is not academic, and the levy has been the proximate cause of more municipal litigation than any other subject.

Municipal referendums

Any municipal question within the competence of the municipality may be put to a binding local referendum on the petition of a proportion of the electorate, a procedure introduced by popular initiative in the 1990s against the wishes of the government of the day and now used several hundred times a year across the kingdom. The subjects are overwhelmingly local: a bypass, a supermarket at the edge of a village, the closure of a school, the siting of a wind installation, the sale of a municipal woodland.

The procedure is popular, is defended across the parties that opposed its introduction, and has two settled criticisms. It favours the organised and the retired, who turn out; and it has made some municipalities effectively unable to site anything that anybody objects to, with the result that the facilities still get built, in whichever neighbouring municipality has the weaker organisation. Neither criticism has produced a serious proposal to repeal it.

The amalgamations, and what they left

The territorial reform of the 1970s reduced the number of districts by more than half and merged several thousand of the smallest municipalities. It was carried out on administrative advice, was largely rational, and is still resented in a way that surprises officials who assume that fifty years is long enough for such a thing to settle.

Villages that lost their independence in 1972 continue to field their own fire brigade, their own shooting club and their own festival, maintain the boundary signs of the former municipality below the new one, and in a number of cases have secured the restoration of the old name to the merged entity. The pattern is consistent enough across Old Bavaria, Franconia, Swabia and the Palatinate that it is not usefully explained by regional character. What it demonstrates is that the municipality in Bavaria was a community before it was an administrative unit, and that abolishing the unit did not abolish the community.

The administration

Montgelas’s inheritance

The Bavarian civil service is the direct creation of the reforms carried out under Montgelas between 1799 and 1817, and the continuity is not merely rhetorical. The structure of ministries, the uniform administration of a territory assembled from very different pieces, the professional and examined official, the numbered files and the requirement that decisions be recorded in writing all date from that period and all survive in recognisable form.

The service that resulted has a settled reputation within the Empire for being competent, slow, legalistic and extremely difficult to move, and Bavarian officials do not generally dispute the description. It is also the institution that made the kingdom governable. Bavaria in 1806 was a collection of duchies, bishoprics, free cities, imperial knights’ estates and Protestant margraviates with nothing in common but a new sovereign, and the administration is what turned it into one state within a generation.

Recruitment and training

Entry to the higher service requires a legal education, two state examinations and a period of practical training in the courts and the offices, a route that has been essentially unchanged for a century and a half and that produces an administration dominated by lawyers. The technical services, the forestry administration, the water and building administrations and the teaching service have their own parallel routes.

The result is an official corps with a strong internal culture, a well developed sense of its own standards, and a marked tendency to regard ministers as temporary. Successive Minister-Presidents have complained about this in retirement and rather fewer have complained about it in office, since the same quality that frustrates a minister with a new idea also protects him from his predecessor’s.

Recruitment is heavily Bavarian. The kingdom trains its own officials in its own universities under its own examination boards, and while there is no legal bar to appointing a north German, the proportion is small and has not changed appreciably in fifty years. Whether this is the natural result of a local training route or a preference that nobody writes down is one of those questions that is raised in the Landtag every few years and answered with statistics that satisfy no one.

The government presidents

Each of the eight provinces is administered by a government at its historic seat, at Munich for Upper Bavaria, Landshut for Lower Bavaria, Regensburg for the Upper Palatinate, Bayreuth for Upper Franconia, Ansbach for Middle Franconia, Würzburg for Lower Franconia, Augsburg for Swabia and Speyer for the Rhenish Palatinate. The government president is appointed by the ministry, is a career official rather than a politician, and is responsible for the state administration within the province and for supervising the districts and municipalities.

The office carries no democratic mandate and considerable practical weight. A government president who is trusted by the municipalities in his province can settle disputes that would otherwise reach Munich, and the appointments are made with that in mind. The convention that the government president of a Franconian province should be a Franconian is not written anywhere and has not been departed from in a very long time.

The ministries at Munich

The ministries occupy a scattering of buildings in the government quarter of Munich, several of them former royal or ecclesiastical properties, a circumstance that Bavarian officials mention to visitors and that visiting officials from Berlin are said to find pointed. Two of them exist nowhere else in the Empire.

The War Ministry administers the Bavarian contingent in peacetime, maintains its records and its recruitment, and is subordinate to the Imperial Defence Ministry in all federal defence matters. Its permanent staff is small and its senior posts are held alternately by officers and civil officials.

The Ministry for Foreign Affairs maintains the legations, conducts the ceremonial correspondence of the Crown with other courts, and administers the Bundesrat foreign affairs committee seat. It makes no foreign policy, has no negotiating authority, and says so in its own published description of its functions, which is a document that repays reading for the care with which it defines what the ministry does not do.

Executing the Empire’s law

The practical core of German federalism is that imperial law is in most fields executed by the states through their own officials, and this is worth more to Bavaria than any of the reserved rights. Imperial taxation is collected by Bavarian revenue offices. Imperial social insurance is administered by Bavarian institutions. Imperial regulation of trade, food, building and the environment is enforced by Bavarian inspectors reporting through Bavarian district offices to Bavarian ministries.

A statute passed at Berlin therefore reaches a Bavarian citizen through Bavarian hands, and the margin of judgement available in the execution is real, if bounded. It is the reason the Empire cannot govern Bavaria over the head of the Bavarian administration, and it is entirely unromantic, is never mentioned in a speech on Kingdom Day, and does not appear on any list of the reserved rights.

Emigration and the Bavarians abroad

The century of departure

Between the 1820s and the 1890s Bavaria lost several hundred thousand people to emigration, overwhelmingly to America. The scale is difficult to convey from the modern kingdom, which is prosperous and receives migrants, and it is not much commemorated in Bavaria itself. It is commemorated abroad, and the asymmetry is itself part of the subject: the places the emigrants went have museums, societies and dialect programmes devoted to the fact, and the places they left mostly have a line in the parish register.

The departures were not evenly spread. They came disproportionately from Lower Franconia, the Upper Palatinate, the Rhön and the Upper Franconian uplands, which is to say from the same districts that are the poorest and emptiest parts of the kingdom. Old Bavaria south of the Danube sent proportionally fewer. The Alpine districts sent fewer still, and what they sent went seasonally to Munich and Vienna rather than permanently across an ocean.

Why they left

The immediate causes were agricultural. The failures of 1816 and 1817, the blight and the harvest failures of the middle 1840s, and the long agricultural depression of the 1870s and 1880s each produced a surge in departures within two years. The underlying causes were structural and are better documented in Bavaria than in most of Germany, because the Bavarian administration collected the figures.

In Franconia land was divided among all the children, with the result that within three generations holdings had been subdivided below the size that would support a household, and the surplus children of a viable farm inherited fragments of an unviable one. In Old Bavaria land passed undivided to a single heir, which kept the farms intact and left the other children with no land at all. The two systems produced opposite landscapes and the same emigrants.

To these were added the marriage and settlement laws. For much of the nineteenth century a Bavarian could not marry without the consent of his municipality, which was entitled to refuse on the ground that the couple could not support themselves, and did refuse. The law was intended to prevent pauperism and it worked by preventing families. It produced one of the highest rates of illegitimacy in Europe, a large population of unmarried farm servants, and a steady flow of people for whom emigration was the only route to a household of their own. It was relaxed in 1868, and the emigration figures do not fall afterwards, because by then the chains of correspondence and prepaid passages were established and ran on their own.

The Matrikel and the Jewish emigration

The Matrikel system, which limited the number of Jewish families permitted to reside in any Bavarian community and passed the entitlement to only one child, had a direct and intended demographic effect. A Jewish family in a Bavarian town could place one child; the others could not marry in Bavaria, could not establish households, and in very large numbers left.

The consequence is that Bavarian Jewish emigration to America in the second quarter of the nineteenth century was proportionally far heavier than Bavarian emigration generally, and that a substantial part of the Jewish communal life established in the American polities in that period was Bavarian in origin, in liturgy, in dialect and in family connection. The synagogue registers on both sides record the same names.

The system was abolished in 1861. It is not disputed that it was discriminatory in purpose as well as in effect, that the Bavarian state maintained it for nearly half a century after it had become indefensible by its own stated principles, and that the departures it caused were not a side effect but the mechanism by which it kept the numbers it existed to keep. The communities that remained are old and continuous and were never destroyed; that is a real distinction from the history of Jewish Germany elsewhere, and it does not convert the Matrikel into anything other than what it was.

The state and the poor emigrant

Bavarian municipalities and, at intervals, the Bavarian government assisted the emigration of the poor by paying passages. The practice was open, was debated in the chamber, and was defended on the ground that a passage cost less than a lifetime of poor relief.

It was applied to paupers, to the chronically unemployed, to unmarried mothers and to people discharged from institutions. In some districts it amounted to a policy of exporting a welfare liability, and contemporaries said so in those terms. The receiving authorities in America complained, and the complaints are in the diplomatic record. The practice declined as the kingdom’s finances and its labour market improved, and it has no modern equivalent, but it belongs in any honest account of how some Bavarians came to leave.

Where they went, and the Wisconsin question

The Bavarian emigration went where the German emigration generally went, to the middle polities of the American realm and to the ports through which it passed. The heaviest concentrations formed in Wisconsin, Ohio, Missouri and the German districts of the great cities.

The Bavarian contribution to Wisconsin was large but was not distinct from the wider German settlement there, and the honest account is that Bavarians were a substantial minority within a German-speaking population drawn from every German state. The vernacular that developed, Wisconsindeutsch, carries recognisably Bavarian and Franconian features in its vocabulary and in some of its verb forms, alongside features from the north and the Rhineland, and the specialists who work on it caution against reading it as transplanted Bavarian.

The relationship between this popular emigration and the presence of a Wittelsbach house in the Grand Duchy of Wisconsin is one that Bavarians assume and Wisconsin historians deny. The settlement and the dynastic arrangement have separate causes and separate dates, the Bavarian element in the settlement was not decisive, and no serious account connects them. The assumption survives anyway, is repeated in Bavarian newspapers whenever a Wisconsin visit occurs, and is corrected each time by somebody from a university.

What emigration did to the villages

The districts that lost the most people show the effects into the present. Villages in the Rhön and the eastern Upper Palatinate have fewer inhabitants than they had in 1840. Church buildings sized for a population that left are maintained by parishes a fraction of the size. Field patterns record holdings that were consolidated when their owners went, and the local histories that village societies have published in large numbers since the 1970s are in substantial part emigration histories, because for many of these places the departures are the largest thing that ever happened.

The kingdom’s regional policy of putting technical institutes in small towns was directed at exactly these districts and was explicitly justified, in the debates of the 1950s and 1960s, by reference to the emigration. The argument made then was that Bavaria had already exported one generation for want of work and should not export another. The policy is generally judged to have worked in the Franconian and Swabian towns and to have worked much less well along the eastern border, where the population has continued to fall.

Return, correspondence and memory

Return migration was smaller than from most European countries and was concentrated among those who had left latest. What persisted instead was correspondence, and it persisted for a remarkably long time: letters between Bavarian and American branches of the same family running to the third and fourth generation are common enough in the archives to be a documentary source in their own right, and the district archives have collected them systematically since the 1980s.

Village twinning arrangements with American municipalities, many of them founded in the 1950s and 1960s on emigrant connections, are numerous and are taken seriously at the municipal level. The visits are reciprocal, are organised by the associations rather than the state, and are one of the few forms of contact with the American realm that ordinary Bavarians have.

Bavaria as a country of immigration

The kingdom has received migrants for longer than it now generally remembers. The refugee movements of the Second Great War brought very large numbers into Bavaria under a diocesan administration that functioned better than the state’s, and a substantial minority of those people stayed, changing the confessional balance of several Old Bavarian districts and founding parishes that had not existed. Industrial recruitment from southern Europe from the 1950s brought a second population, concentrated in Munich, Nuremberg, Ingolstadt and Augsburg. Movement within the Empire and, since 2027, within the European Concert has brought a third.

Munich’s population is in consequence the least Bavarian in Bavaria by descent, a fact that the rest of the kingdom mentions frequently and that the city does not dispute. The political argument about immigration in Bavaria is conducted in much the same terms as elsewhere in the Empire, with the difference that the party which dominates the kingdom is a confessional party whose clergy have taken a consistent and public position in favour of reception, and which therefore conducts a substantial part of the argument with itself.

The monasteries and the secularisation

What was dissolved

The secularisation of 1803 dissolved the Bavarian monasteries, abbeys, convents and collegiate foundations, transferred their lands, buildings, libraries and treasuries to the state, and sold a large part of what it took. It was carried out under Montgelas as an instrument of state building and of finance, at a moment when the territory was expanding and the treasury was empty, and it was thorough.

Something over three hundred houses were suppressed. Some were centuries old, several were among the oldest institutions of any kind in the country, and a number had functioned continuously since before the Wittelsbachs came to Bavaria in 1180.

What it destroyed

The account given in Bavaria has changed considerably over two centuries and the modern one is not favourable. The dissolution removed, in the space of a few years, most of the schools, most of the hospitals and almshouses, and effectively all of the institutional relief of the poor in rural Bavaria, and put nothing in their place for a generation. The state’s own school system was not built until the 1820s and 1830s. In the interval the villages that had been served by an abbey were served by nothing.

The dispersal of the libraries and collections was worse than the policy intended and worse than its authors admitted. Manuscripts were saved in bulk and became the foundation of the state library at Munich, which is one of the great collections of Europe and would not exist otherwise. Much else was sold by weight, used as packing material, or bought by dealers and scattered. Church buildings were quarried for stone. Baroque interiors were stripped and sold, and a proportion of the Bavarian church furnishings now in foreign museums left the country in those years.

The Bavarian state has not disputed this record for a long time. The state archives published the inventories, the losses are quantified in the scholarly literature, and the standard Bavarian school treatment presents the secularisation as an act of the state which was fiscally motivated, culturally destructive and socially harmful in the short term, and which also made the modern administration and the state library possible. The two halves of that sentence are taught together.

The refoundations

Ludwig I began the restoration of monastic life in the 1830s, refounding a number of houses and permitting others, in a policy that was part piety, part antiquarianism and part a judgement that the state had gone too far. The refoundations were selective and did not restore the endowments, so the houses that returned did so as communities dependent on their own work rather than as landowners.

That dependence shaped what they became. The surviving abbeys support themselves by schools, by publishing, by guest houses, by forestry and by brewing, and the brewing is not incidental: several of the best known Bavarian breweries are monastic, operate under the purity law like any other, and are among the few institutions in the kingdom that connect the constitutional argument about the beer reservation to something visibly older than the constitution.

The abbeys at present

The houses are small. Vocations have fallen for sixty years, the average age of the communities is high, and several abbeys are maintained by a handful of monks with lay staff carrying the schools and the businesses. Two have closed since 2000 and their buildings have passed to diocesan or municipal use.

Their public standing does not track their numbers. The abbey churches are pilgrimage sites, the abbey schools are over-subscribed, and the guest houses are used by people with no religious connection at all. When the kingdom needed accommodation at scale during the Second Great War it was the monasteries and the requisitioned Alpine hotels that took the refugees, and the diocesan administration that organised it, which is within living memory in the districts concerned and is the single strongest reason for the standing the houses retain.

The Landtag has voted maintenance grants for the buildings, as historic monuments rather than as religious foundations, since the disestablishment settlement. The grants are debated periodically. They have never been refused.

The palaces

The Munich houses

The Residenz at Munich is the city palace of the Wittelsbachs and the largest such building in Germany, grown by accretion from the fourteenth century to the nineteenth and containing within one structure a Renaissance hall, a rococo theatre, a neoclassical royal apartment and a treasury of the first rank. It was heavily damaged in the bombing of Munich during the Second Great War and was rebuilt across four decades, faithfully rather than approximately, on the basis of the measured drawings and photographic surveys that had been made before the war.

The rebuilding is treated in Bavaria as an ordinary duty rather than an achievement, which is a Munich attitude to the whole reconstruction of the city, and specialists from outside the kingdom write about it more than Bavarians do. The workmanship is not uniform. Interiors restored in the first years after the war are recognisably poorer than those restored in the 1970s and later, and the trust has published this assessment of its own work.

Nymphenburg, the summer palace on the western edge of the city, survived with less damage and retains its park, its canal system and the group of small garden pavilions that are the best of Bavarian rococo. Schleissheim to the north holds the trust’s principal picture galleries of the baroque period.

The Franconian palaces

The Residenz at Würzburg is the finest building in the kingdom and is not a Wittelsbach one. It was built for the prince-bishops in the eighteenth century, passed to Bavaria with Würzburg in 1806, and carries above its staircase a ceiling fresco that is the largest in the world. It was burnt out in the Second Great War when the city was bombed, the vault over the staircase held, the fresco survived, and the reconstruction of the rest occupied the following forty years.

The Margravial Opera House at Bayreuth, built for the margravine in the 1740s, is the most complete surviving baroque court theatre in Europe and is a separate building and a separate tradition from Ludwig II’s Festspielhaus on the hill above the town, with which visitors regularly confuse it. The former royal residences at Ansbach and Bamberg are also in the trust, are less visited and are in the view of most Bavarian architectural historians undervalued.

The distribution matters politically. The trust’s holdings are not concentrated in Old Bavaria, and Franconian complaints about Munich have never been able to include the palaces, which is one reason the trust has been careful to keep it that way.

The Ludwig II palaces

Neuschwanstein above Hohenschwangau, Linderhof in the Graswang valley and Herrenchiemsee on its island in the Chiemsee are the three palaces begun by Ludwig II and none was finished. Linderhof is the only one substantially complete. Herrenchiemsee consists of a central block, built as an homage to Versailles, standing without the wings it was designed to have. Neuschwanstein has finished state rooms on two floors and unbuilt shells elsewhere, and the building is a nineteenth century romantic reconstruction of a medieval castle that never existed, executed with modern engineering and central heating.

They were opened to the public within weeks of the King’s death in 1886, by a government that needed the money, and they have been open continuously since. Neuschwanstein is the most visited building in the German Empire.

That fact is now the trust’s largest single problem. The building was designed as a private retreat for one man and receives visitors in numbers its stairs and floors were never intended to carry. Entry has been by timed ticket for decades, the interior route is fixed and unaccompanied movement is not permitted, and the trust has reduced the daily maximum twice since 2010 against the objections of the district, whose economy depends on the visitors, and with the support of its own conservators, who have measured the wear.

The proposals that recur are a cap at a level that would materially reduce local income, a replica route, and a pricing structure that would ration by cost. The trust has adopted none of them. The Landtag has debated the question four times since 2015 and has each time declined to instruct the trust, which is generally read as the chamber preferring that the decision be taken by somebody else.

Conservation

The trust maintains something over forty properties and the maintenance rather than the acquisition is its work. The Alpine buildings suffer from a freeze and thaw cycle that has become less regular over three decades, which affects stucco, roof timbers and external render, and the trust’s conservation reports have described the change in plain terms and have been cited in the Landtag by both sides of the climate argument.

The trust’s forestry, which covers a very large area and is administered on a long rotation, funds a substantial part of this work. The present King spent his working life in that administration before his accession, a biographical fact that is mentioned whenever the trust appears in the budget debate.

The collections, and the contested provenance

The trust holds the paintings, manuscripts, plate, furniture and armouries of the former royal collections. A part of that material entered the collections through the secularisation of 1803, when the property of the dissolved houses passed to the state, and the trust has since the 1990s conducted and published provenance research on it.

The research has produced claims. Dioceses, parishes and two refounded abbeys have asked for the return of specific objects, principally liturgical plate, reliquaries and choir books with a documented origin in a named suppressed house. A small number of returns have been made by agreement. Others have been refused on the ground that the objects were acquired lawfully under the legislation of the day, which is accurate and which the claimants do not dispute and do not regard as an answer. The matter is not settled, is pursued without acrimony on either side, and is one of the very few subjects on which the trust and the Bavarian church are in open disagreement.

Pilgrimage and the shrines

Altötting

Altötting in Upper Bavaria is the principal Marian shrine of the German-speaking lands and has been a place of pilgrimage since the fifteenth century. The object of the pilgrimage is a small black wooden figure of the Virgin in the Chapel of Grace, an octagonal building in the middle of the town square, whose exterior walls are covered inside and out with votive tablets recording answered prayers, the oldest of them medieval and the most recent from the present year.

The town receives very large numbers of pilgrims annually, most of them arriving on foot in parish groups over one or more days, walking routes that are marked, maintained and in continuous use. The practice is not a revival. It has been carried on without interruption, and the parish pilgrimage remains one of the few religious observances in Bavaria whose participation has not fallen with the general decline in practice, a fact that the dioceses note and do not fully explain.

The hearts of the Bavarian sovereigns are kept at Altötting in silver urns in a side chapel, a custom followed from the seventeenth century and observed at the death of every Wittelsbach ruler since, including the most recent. The bodies are buried at Munich. The arrangement joins the dynasty to the shrine in a way that no Bavarian government has ever proposed to alter, including the governments that disestablished the church.

The other shrines

Andechs, on its ridge above the Ammersee, is a Benedictine abbey, a pilgrimage church and a brewery on one site, and receives pilgrims and day visitors who are not always distinguishable. Vierzehnheiligen in Upper Franconia is the masterpiece of German baroque church architecture and stands, characteristically for that province, within sight of a Protestant town. The Wieskirche in the Alpine foothills is a pilgrimage church built around a wooden figure that was reported to have wept, in open meadow, reached by a minor road, and left deliberately without a town around it.

Smaller shrines are dense across the Catholic districts. Most are local, most are attached to a spring, a wayside image or an event recorded only in the parish, and most receive a single parish on a single day each year.

What pilgrimage does in practice

The walking pilgrimage is organised by the parish rather than the diocese, is led by lay members, and mixes the devout with people who come for the walk and say so. The distinction between the two is not policed and the clergy who lead the routes are on the record as regarding the question as unhelpful.

Sociologists of religion in the Bavarian universities have made the point that the pilgrimage survives because it is a communal activity that does not require assent to anything in particular, which is a fair description of a great deal of Bavarian religious practice and is offered by the people who make it as an observation rather than a criticism.

Chronology

Training and the technical institutes

The apprenticeship

Rather more than half of Bavarian school leavers enter an apprenticeship rather than a university. The apprenticeship runs for three years or three and a half, is served in a firm under a contract of training rather than of employment, is combined with attendance at a vocational school for one or two days a week, and ends in an examination set by the chamber of trades or the chamber of industry and commerce rather than by the state.

The qualification is a licence as much as a certificate. A range of trades may not be practised independently without it, and the master craftsman’s qualification above it carries the right to train others, which is the mechanism by which the system reproduces itself. The arrangement is not Bavarian in origin and exists across the Empire, but Bavaria has retained a higher proportion of its school leavers within it than the imperial average and has resisted the pressure, recurrent since the 1970s, to move them into academic tracks.

The defence made in Bavaria is that a country of dispersed medium-sized manufacturers needs trained hands in the places where the manufacturers are, and that a system which sends the ablest of them to a university in Munich and does not send them back is a system for emptying the provinces. The criticism is that the tracking happens at ten or eleven years old, that it correlates strongly with the occupation of the parents, and that a country which selects that early is not doing what it says it is doing. Both arguments have been made in the Landtag for fifty years by the same parties.

The institutes

The technical institutes are the second half of the arrangement and the part that was deliberate policy. From the 1950s, applied research institutes and technical colleges were placed in small and medium towns across all eight provinces rather than concentrated at Munich, and were tied by their founding statutes to the industries of their districts.

An institute in a Franconian town of nine thousand people is not a miniature university. It is a specialist establishment in a narrow field, frequently the field of the largest local employer, staffed by people who move between the institute and the firms, and funded jointly by the state, the district and the firms themselves. Its work is applied, its publications are unglamorous, and its graduates overwhelmingly stay in the district.

The system was built and maintained by a single party over half a century, and its continuity is inseparable from that fact. It was also expensive, was criticised at every stage as a subsidy to particular firms in particular constituencies, and in a number of documented cases was exactly that. The institutes placed where the political need was greater than the industrial one have mostly closed or been merged. Enough of the others succeeded that the policy is regarded as vindicated, and the failures are not much discussed.

Where it does not reach

The eastern border districts are the standing exception. The institutes were placed there as they were elsewhere, the firms to tie them to were fewer and smaller, graduates left anyway because the wages were higher three hours to the west, and the population has continued to fall. The kingdom has spent six decades on the problem without solving it, and Bavarian ministers who describe the institute policy as a success add the qualification themselves, because the districts concerned send members to the Landtag who would supply it otherwise.

Hops, and the Hallertau

The region

The Hallertau, between the Danube and the Isar in Lower and Upper Bavaria, is the largest continuous hop-growing region in the world. It is not a spectacular landscape. It is a low, rolling country of small fields, and for most of the year the wirework that carries the bines is the only sign of what it grows.

Hops have been grown there since the Middle Ages and the region has supplied brewers well beyond Bavaria for centuries. The holdings are small and overwhelmingly family-held, several hundred hectares constitutes a very large operation, and the average farm is a fraction of that. Hop growing is unusually capital-intensive for a smallholding: the wirework, the picking machinery and the drying kilns represent an investment that must be renewed on a long cycle, and the crop is a perennial that takes several years to come into full bearing, so a grower cannot readily change what he grows in response to a bad year.

The trade

Bavarian hops are sold overwhelmingly on forward contract, often several years ahead, through a trade concentrated in a small number of merchant houses at Mainburg and Wolnzach. The contract system protects growers against the violent price swings the crop is prone to and transfers that risk to the merchants, who manage it across regions and years.

Growers complain that the contracts are drawn by the merchants and that the price is set by people who do not grow anything. Merchants reply that the growers are protected against exactly the collapses that ruined their grandfathers. The argument is at least a century old, is conducted through the growers’ association and the trade association, and has produced periodic proposals for a cooperative marketing structure, some of which exist and none of which has displaced the merchant houses.

The aroma varieties on which the region’s reputation rests command a premium and are grown under registered designations. The bittering varieties compete directly with production in other countries and are the part of the trade most exposed to price.

The harvest

Picking runs from late August into September and is the largest seasonal labour movement in Bavarian agriculture. It was for generations done by hand by families from the Bohemian border districts and by townspeople who took their annual leave for it, and the social history of the hop harvest, with its camps, its wage disputes and its own vocabulary, has a substantial literature in the region.

Machine picking replaced hand picking over about two decades from the 1960s. The labour requirement fell sharply and did not disappear: the machines are fed, the kilns are watched and the pressing is supervised, and the seasonal workforce now comes largely from within the European Concert. Its accommodation and its conditions have been the subject of two investigations by the Landtag’s agriculture committee since 2010, the second of which was critical of both the growers’ association and the district authorities, and whose recommendations have been partly implemented.

Water, weather and the compact

Hops are drought-sensitive at a specific point in the growing season and the Hallertau has been irrigated increasingly since the 1990s. Abstraction from the groundwater and from the smaller rivers has risen, wells have been deepened, and the region has become one of the more significant agricultural water users in the kingdom.

This places the hop growers directly inside the Alpine water compact argument, on the side of the farming interest and against the leadership of the party most of them vote for. Their case is that the crop is a permanent planting which cannot be abandoned for a season, that the region’s yields have already been affected by three of the last ten summers, and that a licensing regime drawn for Alpine hydro schemes will be applied to them by officials who have not distinguished the two. The ministry’s case is that abstraction in the Hallertau has risen faster than anywhere else in Bavaria and that a compact which exempts the fastest-growing use is not a compact.

Neither side disputes the underlying measurements, which is a feature of the whole water argument in Bavaria and one reason it has proved so difficult to settle. The compact has not passed.

Beer, and the connection that is always made

The Hallertau is invoked in every Bavarian debate on the purity law, on agricultural policy and on water, because it joins the kingdom’s most famous product to its most ordinary landscape and because the connection is genuine rather than decorative. A statute of 1516 regulating what may go into beer is also, read from the Hallertau, a statute about what a few thousand family holdings between the Danube and the Isar are for.

Growers make this argument themselves and make it well. It is also true that the great majority of Bavarian hops are sold to brewers outside Bavaria and outside the Empire, who are under no obligation to the purity law whatsoever, and the growers’ association does not dwell on this in its submissions.

Mountain rescue

The service

Alpine rescue in Bavaria is carried out by a volunteer service organised in local watches attached to the Alpine districts, supported by the state, and staffed almost entirely by people with other occupations. Its members are mountaineers first. Recruitment is by invitation within the climbing community, training runs for years before a member is operational, and the service has never had difficulty finding people, which is not true of every volunteer emergency organisation in the kingdom.

The work is unglamorous in bulk. The great majority of call-outs are to walkers with ankle injuries on marked paths in good weather, and the service says so publicly and repeatedly, partly out of accuracy and partly because it would rather the public understood the ordinary case than the dramatic one. The dramatic cases exist: winter recoveries above the tree line, avalanche searches, and the technical rescues from the north faces that account for a disproportionate share of the fatalities and of the newspaper coverage.

Its relation to the army

The Bavarian contingent’s mountain formations and the rescue service overlap in membership, in training and in equipment, and the overlap is deliberate and long-standing. Soldiers of the mountain units train with the watches, army helicopters and crews are made available for rescue work under a standing arrangement, and a substantial number of rescue volunteers have served in the formations or serve in the reserve.

This is the practical foundation of the contingent’s public standing, and it is worth being exact about why. A Bavarian in the Alpine districts is unlikely to have any view about the constitutional position of a separate army in peacetime, and quite likely to know somebody who was carried off a mountain by it. The arrangement is not presented by the kingdom as a justification for the reserved right, and the ministry is careful not to make the argument in those terms, because doing so would invite the reply that an imperial formation could perform the same service. That reply is correct. It has not made much impression in the valleys.

Cost, and who pays

Rescue is charged for. The costs of a helicopter recovery are substantial, are recovered from the person rescued or from insurance, and the Alpine associations sell rescue cover as a membership benefit, which the great majority of regular walkers and climbers hold.

The charging has been criticised on the ground that it deters people from calling early, which is when a rescue is cheapest and safest, and the service’s own operational reviews have supported that criticism. The Landtag has considered abolishing the charge three times and has not done so, on the ground that the cost would fall on the general revenue and that the numbers are rising. The service continues to say publicly that anybody in difficulty should call and that the question of payment can be settled afterwards, which is an accurate statement of its own position and does not appear to have changed behaviour much.

The pressure on the mountains

Call-out numbers have risen for two decades. The reasons given by the service are more visitors, better access by road and cable, and a greater proportion of walkers attempting routes on the basis of information found online without local knowledge or an assessment of conditions.

To these has been added a change in the mountains themselves. Permafrost at the higher levels has become less reliable, rockfall on established routes has increased, and several classic lines have been closed or rerouted. The service’s incident data on this is among the longest continuous records of Alpine conditions in Germany, is published, and is used by researchers well outside Bavaria. The service does not campaign on the subject and has declined invitations to appear on either side of the water compact debate, restricting itself to publishing the figures, which both sides then quote.

Assessment

Bavaria is the Empire’s great exception and has organised its entire public life around being one. It entered the federation last and on terms, kept an army it will never use alone, ambassadors who make no foreign policy and a law about beer, and sold the post office and the railways that were actually worth money. It has a constitution older than the Empire, a dynasty older than the constitution by six centuries, and a national day commemorating a document rather than a crown.

The temptation is to read this as sentiment, and it is not. The reserved rights are the visible portion of a settled and rather hard-headed strategy: a member state that is seen to be a state gets treated as one, and Bavaria has spent a hundred and fifty years ensuring that no imperial government forgets what it is dealing with. The kingdom’s federalism is not nostalgia for 1806 but the working method of the second largest economy in a federation dominated by the largest.

What it has not resolved is what it is for now. The rights were won against a Prussia that wanted a unitary Germany, and no such Prussia exists. The Empire that Bavaria guards itself against is a constitutional federal state with a capped Prussian vote, an elected Reichstag, an entrenched amendment procedure and a supranational union above it, and the question of what the kingdom’s distinctiveness is defending against is asked in the Landtag more often each decade.

The country’s own answer, when it gives one, is that a right surrendered is not recovered, and that the argument for keeping the apparatus is the argument for keeping the option. Whether that is prudence or a very long habit, Bavaria has not decided, and the three arguments now before it, over its water, its industry and its succession, will each be settled in part by which of the two it turns out to be.

Trivia

See also

• The German Empire, the federation Bavaria entered on terms in 1871
• The Kingdom of Prussia, the state the reserved rights were negotiated against
• The Kingdom of Saxony, the third kingdom, which had nothing to negotiate with
• The Kingdom of Württemberg, the south-western kingdom whose ministries Bavaria’s work with routinely
• The Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, the Empire’s other conspicuous exception, and a federalist for opposite reasons
• The Kingdom of Hanover, the Welf kingdom whose dynasty lost Bavaria in 1180
• The Grand Duchy of Wisconsin, where a cadet line bearing the Wittelsbach name reigns
• Wisconsindeutsch, whose Bavarian-Catholic overlay rides on a Swabian-Lutheran frame
• The European Concert, which Bavaria supports as a second forum for its distinctiveness

Categories

Nations of the World · German Empire · Monarchies · Constitutional History · Catholicism · Alps