Showing Lola Montez the university fountain by night

A field chapel near Landau an der Isar, the sole building of a former village to have survived the Thirty Years’ War; the Wallenstein Festival in Memmingen, which commemorates the historic siege; or the view from Schellingstraße down to Ludwigstraße, one of King Ludwig I’s grand boulevards – Professor Marita Krauss often begins her research at physical sites like these, before seeking out their traces in the archives. “You have to make the connection,” the historian explains, “between what you encounter in books and sources and what has left its mark on the urban landscape.”

Born in Zurich and raised near Lake Starnberg, the LMU alumna initially studied German and Romance philology. “But those subjects didn’t really inspire me,” she recalls. The history classes she attended at the same time had a very different effect: “Christoph Stölzl was a teaching assistant in Bavarian regional history at LMU at the time. I guess he noticed my enthusiasm, and he asked me straight up: ‘Would you like to join the advanced seminar?’” Krauss recounts with a laugh. “That sort of thing was still possible back then – presumably because I had already completed several semesters of German and Romance studies.”

That advanced seminar resulted in an exhibition on Munich in the 1920s. Further exhibitions followed on the post-war “Rubble Years,” the “Prince Regent Era,” and “Life in Munich from the Turn of the Century to 1933.” In these projects, Krauss worked directly with primary sources, contributed to exhibition catalogues, and coordinated teams of students. “Faculty and students collaborated closely – on the exhibition itself, on research, but also on everything involved in presenting the results to the public,” she explains. “This created a remarkably productive scholarly atmosphere.”

Research into councilors of commerce and kings

After completing her studies, Krauss earned her doctorate at LMU and subsequently completed her habilitation here as well. Then she taught as a lecturer and later as a privatdozent in modern and contemporary history. Further appointments followed: as a lecturer in nineteenth- and twentieth-century social and economic history in Bremen, as a visiting professor at the Department of Contemporary History in Vienna, and as an interim professor in early modern history in Bremen again. She was also a member of the working group responsible for conceptualizing the NS Documentation Centre. In 2008, she was appointed Professor of Regional European History with a focus on Bavarian and Swabian history at the University of Augsburg.

“Municipal and regional history are so compelling because they intersect with so many other disciplines – geography, literature, cultural studies,” observes Krauss. Major historical developments, she argues, can only be properly understood “if one examines how they play out in specific localities.” Accordingly, she encouraged her students to conduct archival research in their own home towns – ­for instance, on economic elites such as the Bavarian Councilors of Commerce (Kommerzienräte), on the National Socialist period, or on the integration of expelled ethnic Germans in the post-war period. “When your home place suddenly becomes a research topic, motivation increases enormously.”

Her own scholarly work has taken her to villages such as Feldafing on Lake Starnberg, whose history – from a colony of exclusive villas to an elite school of the Nazi Party and later a displaced persons camp – she related in a book co-authored with her husband. The book would subsequently serve as a source for a theater production at the Munich Kammerspiele. Krauss also travels regularly to Filetto di Camarda in the Abruzzi, as part of a collaborative project with the Italian village and the Bavarian municipality of Pöcking about the war crime committed there by Matthias Defregger. While stationed in Italy as a Wehrmacht officer in 1944, the future auxiliary bishop of Munich was involved in a massacre of civilians.

She is also repeatedly drawn back to Munich in her research. Since 2022, she has been carrying out research in the project “Munich After the 1972 Olympics: the Kronawitter and Kiesl Era” in cooperation with the Munich City Archives and the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History. The city is also closely linked to another major focus of her work: King Ludwig I, who transplanted the university from Landshut to Munich in 1826, making a lasting imprint on the development of the city and the history of the university.

Feeling the presence of the monarch at the main building

Krauss has just published a new biography of Ludwig I of Bavaria, based on an extensive range of sources. “It was his vision to situate the university, the state library, and the museums in close spatial proximity,” she explains. “This facilitated cooperation, made museums more accessible, and fostered areas of strength such as collection-based art history, archaeology, and a strong tradition of regional and urban historical research.”

In the book, titled Ludwig I: Dreams and Power, she portrays the monarch not just as an art collector and university founder, but as a complex figure shaped by experiences of war and death during the Napoleonic era, endowed with far-reaching cultural ambitions, and driven by powerful emotions. Particularly striking is the way private diary entries intersect with grand politics. “When I stand in front of LMU’s main building today,” says Krauss, “I often think of Ludwig’s diary entry describing how he wanted to show Lola Montez the new university fountain by night.”

Marita Krauss is equally adept at narrating history on the radio. She has worked for Bayerischer Rundfunk since the 1980s. “At heart, I’m a radio woman,” she says. She has produced more than seventy radio programs, primarily for the series Land und Leute, Bayerisches Feuilleton, and Radiowissen on Bayern 2. Broadcasting also provided financial stability, particularly in the early stages of her career: “In my early years before I secured a permanent position, I often supported myself entirely through radio work.”

Gallery owner on Lake Starnberg

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Even after her retirement in 2023, Krauss remains highly active. She continues to work on research projects, write radio programs, and produce short films on Jewish business figures for the Swabian Chamber of Industry and Commerce. Together with her husband, she also oversees the estate of her stepfather, the artist Helmut Ammann, which has given rise to a gallery in Pöcking. “For me, this is a world beyond academia,” she says. “At readings, concerts, and exhibitions, you meet very different people than at the university.”

She still travels regularly to Munich and Augsburg for her research. Today’s students, she observes, are “socialized differently – and are strongly focused on accumulating credits.” Commitment has changed as well: “In the past, you would drag yourself to a seminar even when you were sick as a dog,” she says with a laugh. “Today, students blithely cancel a presentation on the very morning it’s due.” Large-scale projects are still possible, she notes, but they have to be embedded within module plans.

As she walks through Munich, she is constantly aware of the city’s history: “When you pass through Alter Hof, you think of Louis IV. When you walk by the Bavarian State Library, you immediately see its post-war reconstruction.”

She also urges students to move through the city with open eyes – and to explore as many scholarly practices beyond the lecture hall as possible: exhibitions, conferences, archives. “You have to remain curious,” Krauss concludes. “History lives through places and original sources – not through mere compilation of other people’s texts.”