Olympics '72: Munich: Where the Good Times Are

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This month an estimated 500,000 tourists and sport lovers will descend upon Munich for the 20th Olympic Games. What they will find, reports TIME Correspondent Jesse Birnbaum, is an overgrown village that likes to think of itself as Germany's secret capital, a city of museums (25) and music (three symphony orchestras, a 48-week opera season), with memories of Richard Strauss and Wagner, Bavaria's mad King Ludwig II—and Adolf Hitler. Vignettes from Birnbaum's recent visit there:

STRADDLING the historic trade routes of Southern Europe, drinking in the influence of other cultures, Munich has always been chiefly absorbed with the manufacture and enjoyment of Bavarian Gemütlichkeit (some of which is identified by its sudsy head). It's all very apparent today, this spirit of "leben und leben lassen"—a cheery apathy and beery tolerance combined with a benign condescension toward anything German that is not also old Bavarian. The ambience of the cities to the north—those pompous Prussians—can be described in straight lines and right angles. Munich gives you embroidered corners and fanciful curlicues.

Munich of the '70s has sometimes been compared with Berlin of the '20s. In fact, Munich lacks the intellectual electricity of those brilliant Berlin days. It is also much too innocent. Still, it is the place where most Germans prefer to live, and candid Münchner concede that it is the "other" Germans who »JJJ lend the city much of its style. Only one out of three Münchner is Bavarian-born, while about 15% of the city's population is non-German. It is this cultural blend that finally gives the city its lustig if somewhat spurious cosmopolitanism, an odd chemistry of the provincial and the sophisticated.

A sky of uncommon blue—Italian blue, insist the proud Münchner—canopies the 890-acre expanse of wood, trail, meadow and stream known as the Englischer Garten. From their benches, the forgotten aged stare across the little lake into the sun or watch in silence the absurd parade of ducks and drakes or the wheeling Frisbees in the sky. Lazing in a field are clusters of young longhairs, some of them students, some wanderers from other nations. They all speak the same language: guitar and hash. Elector Karl Theodor designed this park in 1789. It was not Karl Theodor who inscribed the familiar four-letter Anglo-Saxon words on the sober columns of the Greek temple in the garden.

The city's postwar population was 480,000; today it is 1,350,000 and is growing at the rate of 30,000 to 40,000 a year. The economy, once bound to beer and tourism, is now worth about $17 billion a year. Biggest contributors: electronics (notably Siemens) and automobiles (notably BMW, with new headquarters that resemble a cluster of three engine cylinders). No business is hard-pressed, whether it be publishing (every seventh German book title is printed in Munich) or the clothing and fashion industries, where earnings have outstripped the beer business threefold.