The Fischbrunnen is a favorite meeting place at a corner of busy Marienplatz in Munich, a bit of sculptural whimsy, and a placeholder for 800 years of history.
You wouldn’t think so at first glance—it’s not very big and it doesn’t seem very old, and it’s not. The previous fountain was destroyed in a 1944 bomb raid, and the fountain you see today was created in 1954 by Josef Henselmann, using three statues that survived the raid and a large fish created by his student Otto Kallenbach.
Even the ‘old’ fountain wasn’t that old; it was built by Konrad Knoll in the 1860s. In that version, four butchers’ apprentices poured water into the basin, while four musicians played above them, and an old man with a beer stein stood on top.
The first fountain on the site was built in 1343 with a pump to draw water from a stream under the surface. In 1471, when Munich built its first aqueduct to bring clean water from outside the city, that fountain, then called the Citizens’ Fountain, was the first and for a while only place to get that water.
About 400 years later, when the neo-Gothic New Town Hall was being built behind it, the city apparently decided to upgrade its utilitarian fountain with Knoll’s work, which recognized a long connection between the city’s fish butchers and the site. For several hundred years, apprentices finishing their terms jumped into the fountain and then out, tossing apples, nuts, coins and water at the spectators. In the last few years there have been a few revivals.
The fountain has another ancient tradition, one that originally was practiced by the city’s poor: Washing a wallet in the fountain’s water in hopes of assuring a full wallet in the coming year. In the 19th century, messengers and assistants acted out the ritual to remind employers they needed a raise, and in the 1950s, during a fiscal crisis, Mayor Thomas Wimmer began a tradition of washing the city’s ’empty wallet’ in the fountain.
The three surviving musicians from the Knoll fountain adorn a wall a few blocks away at Karlstor, where they serve as a memorial for Herbert Jensen, the architect who first convinced the city to create its first pedestrian zones back in the 1960s.
