On good days, the Isar is a harmless rippling river that invites you to swim, provided you are not afraid of cold water. But the “great pouring stream from the mountains”, as Thomas Mann called the Isar, also has a dark, dangerous side, and then the “free mighty wazzer” (such a document from 1381) is a monster, everything and everyone with it tears, which gets into its wake.
The Isar flaneur is made aware of this violent, sometimes fatal nature when he reaches the point on the right bank of the river where the Auer Mühlbach branches off with a great roar. There is a wooden plaque with the inscription: “In memory of the water supervisor Johann Anzer, drowned on March 22, 1906.”
If the strollers take a few steps up the slope, they come to an almost jungle-like overgrown way of the cross and, after having passed a stone altar, stands in front of a wooden chapel. No, this little church is not an insider tip, it is world famous in Munich: the Marienklause. The lock keeper Martin Achleitner built it in 1866 as a thank you to the Blessed Mother, who saved him several times from the floods.
Yes, whoever looked after the weir at the Auer Mühlbach at that time needed divine support. A plaque on the chapel commemorates Achleitner’s colleague who drowned in 1906.
When the market and the city of Munich were built on the Isar bridge by Duke Heinrich the Lion around 1158, the residents kept a safe distance from the unpredictable river. The Isar was anything but a nice flowing body of water, it was an anarchic river that had countless tributaries and looked different after each tidal wave. In 1802, the electoral water engineering department complained that “the Isar itself only has to wash around under desolate stretches in front of the gates of the capital and, when the water swells, it spreads ravages and ravages throughout the area”.
Extreme snowmelt and storms caused the river from the Karwendel Mountains to grow into a flood. In the Middle Ages, the construction of bank fortifications and dams was the city’s most important building task, only defensive structures were of equal importance. Above all, the only bridge over the Isar, today’s Ludwigsbrücke, had to be permanently repaired, and sometimes it fell completely victim to one of the devastating floods.
In 1924 onlookers marvel at the raging Isar from the Ludwigsbrücke.
(Photo: SZ Photo)
On the other hand, the Isar was a blessing for the young city, without which its upswing would not have been possible. If the salt and other goods, which brought high profits to the ducal treasury, the commune and the merchants, came to Munich by land, it was the river on which the raw materials were transported that were needed to build houses, Churches or city walls.
The Isar rafting industry was already flourishing around 1300. The raftsmen carried countless logs from the richly stocked coniferous forests of the Isarwinkel to the medieval town. For the roof of the Frauenkirche alone, which was built between 1468 and 1488, master carpenter Heinrich von Straubing had 147 heavy timber rafts driven to the city’s raft site. The brickworks and lime kilns in the vicinity of Munich also needed a lot of firewood.
As early as 1286, the Munich Council had enacted laws for the Isar rafting, in which the city claimed the right to stack. Accordingly, no raft was allowed to pass Munich without landing. For three days, the vehicle and its goods had to be offered to the citizens of Munich for sale. In addition to wood, it was wine, oil, the popular Tölzer beer, the equally coveted Tölzer furniture and other merchant goods that came to Munich by water. There were also passenger trips, including those that went as far as Vienna. Around 1860, when the Isar rafting was at its peak, up to 10,000 rafts reached the town’s landing sites, the Untere Lände north of the Ludwigsbrücke, the Obere Lände on Westermühlbach and the Lände near Thalkirchen.
The ride on the raft through the rapids of the wild Isar was risky, especially at the bottlenecks at Fall, at the “Isarburg” at Arzbach or at the Georgenstein before Grünwald. One time not paying attention – and the raftsman went overboard. Few of them could swim at the time. In April 1660, for example, the raft master Joseph Pichlmayr had an accident on the Isar between Freising and Landshut. On board were 17 pilgrims from Munich, all of whom drowned. Pichlmayr survived but was expelled from the country on charges of being drunk. In March 1594, according to the city chronicle, “a raft failed on a rake on the Isar, and many people, especially children, drowned”. The city paid a total of 17 guilders to the bereaved.
The Isar was omnipresent even within the city walls. Contemporary paintings show that many streams flowed through the city, which were natural or artificial tributaries of the Isar and made Munich a miniature Venice. On both sides of the fortifications, the streams drove many mills, saws and blacksmiths’ hammers; they provided the energy for Munich’s craft businesses.
And what was particularly practical: the floods were used for garbage collection. Up until the 19th century, people from Munich simply threw their waste and faeces into the nearest city stream. The brutally stinking tannins from the medieval leather workshops ended up in the city streams, as did the dye residues and lye from the dyer’s factories and the meat waste from the butchers’ shops. Historian Michael Schattenhofer reports that on the Katzenbach, “the” Abschütt “was located, where the” night kings “or night workers, who were occasionally organized as” gold-brooders “in a cooperative, would hide the rubbish and faeces from the private and public” prifets “or” secretly ” Chambers ’emptied’.
Dumping the rubbish into a flowing body of water was considered a particularly clever way of disposing of it, as Christine Rädlinger writes in her book “Geschichte der Münchner Stadtbach”: “Standing water harbors dangers, as the dangerous vapors, the miasms, are released here , On the other hand, flowing water carries purifying powers, which on the one hand help to improve the air and on the other hand also help to avoid contamination of the earth’s surface, as they not only visibly transport the waste away, but also immediately ‘convert’ it, i.e. clean it. “
The fact that this transformation did not always work is shown by a complaint letter from a citizen around 1780: “The city administration lets so little water into the dye pit that the rubbish remains. Dead dogs and cats are free and rot.” Until the last quarter of the 19th century, Munich was considered one of the dirtiest cities in Europe.
Even experienced raftsmen drowned again and again in the “huge wazzer”.
(Photo: Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo)
It goes without saying that the streams turned into sewers favored the spread of infectious diseases of all kinds. The bacteria and virus spreaders were right on the doorstep, which is why the city was repeatedly ravaged by cholera and typhoid epidemics. After all, they were smart enough not to use the streams as a source of drinking water. Instead, they used the groundwater that was drawn from the depths by means of private and public scoop or draw wells.
At the beginning of the 16th century, the city built the first well at the foot of the Rosenheimer Berg. Large quantities of spring or ground water were collected there and pumped into a tower so that a gradient was created that allowed it to be passed on via wooden pipes. But the quality of the groundwater also deteriorated noticeably over the centuries. Whoever drank it risked his life.
In the autumn of 1854, cholera broke out again in the city, around 3,000 people in Munich died as a result. Then the professor of medicinal chemistry Max von Pettenkofer was commissioned to research the causes. Although Pettenkofer suspected that the breeding ground for the epidemic was the dirty ground, he drew the right conclusions. He designed a program for hygienic urban renewal in which water played a central role: Since then, the city has disposed of its wastewater via a modern sewer system, while it draws its drinking water from the Mangfall Valley.
The Isar can still swell dangerously today, but the Sylvenstein reservoir, completed in 1959, has a moderating effect. Before that, the river was a source of constant calamity. The city chronicle is full of relevant reports. Again and again the “free mighty wazzer” damaged or destroyed the wooden Isar bridge, also in 1367, which cost the city 12 pounds, 3 shillings and 22 pfennigs plus the expenses for the ferry services of the fishermen, “that is the ringing over the Yser “. The river regularly flooded the areas near the banks outside the city walls, where mainly poor people lived.
In August 1598, according to the city chronicle, the Au was “a noisy lake”. Handicraft businesses were damaged, the herb and orchards were flooded and “vil wood, heuser and other things were fed away and otherwise vich and leuth were killed”.
Probably the worst flood disaster is recorded in the city chronicle on September 13th, 1813: “There has been a flood for days that has washed away houses in the Au and caused them to collapse. Many people stand all day and towards evening on the outer Isar bridge and watch the disaster Others were on their way home to Haidhausen when at 6 1/3 o’clock some arches of the brick bridge fell into the water. Apart from a Chevauleger who could swim well, no one was rescued. More than 100 people died. “