Walhalla, Donaustauf — monument
SimonWaldherr · CC BY-SA 4.0

Walhalla, Donaustauf

Walhalla

  • Elevation408 m
  • 2 min read
  • 49.031° N 12.224° E

Interesting facts

  • Martin Luther was left out at the 1842 opening because the devoutly Catholic king hesitated; Ludwig only added his bust himself in 1848.
  • Klenze built a Hall of Expectations into the foundations for busts of living candidates, to be carried upstairs after their deaths; the plan was abandoned.
  • Because the test was the German tongue, early honorees include Dutch admirals, Flemish painters like Rubens and van Dyck, Swiss heroes and a Swedish king.
  • The first bust, Copernicus by Johann Gottfried Schadow, was finished in 1807, and by 1825 some 60 busts existed before any building had begun.
  • At the opening on 18 October 1842 there were 96 busts plus 64 plaques for people of whom no reliable likeness survived.
  • The original busts run in order of death, from Henry the Fowler, who died in 936, to Goethe; Luther's late arrival broke the sequence.
  • Unlike the Norse Valhalla of fallen warriors, Ludwig's hall was meant from the start for scientists, writers and clerics, women as well as men.
  • Beneath the marble, the roof is carried by an iron framework that was strikingly modern engineering for the 1830s.
  • The southern pediment celebrates the liberation of 1814, with the German states paying homage to Germania and the border rivers Rhine and Moselle personified.
  • New busts are proposed and paid for by private sponsors, vetted by the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and approved by the Bavarian cabinet.

Why it is worth it

Walhalla is a Greek temple on the Danube, raised by a Bavarian king to honour German-speaking greatness. Ludwig I conceived the idea in 1807, at the age of twenty, while still crown prince; once he came to the throne in 1825 he had it built, and the architect Leo von Klenze supervised the work from 1830 to 1842. Klenze modelled the building on the Parthenon in Athens, a Doric temple surrounded by columns, about 67 m long and 20 m high, and set it on a hill above the river near Donaustauf; with its terraces and stairways the whole complex stretches about 125 m and rises 55 m. Seen from the Danube, it looks as if a piece of ancient Greece had been carried north.

The name comes from Norse myth, where Valhalla is the hall of fallen heroes, and the interior carries the idea through. The hall, clad in marble inside and out, holds about 130 busts and 65 plaques commemorating figures spanning two thousand years, beginning with Arminius, victor over the Roman legions in the Teutoburg Forest. The northern pediment shows that battle, sculpted by Ludwig von Schwanthaler after designs by Christian Daniel Rauch, and a frieze by Johann Martin von Wagner tells an idealised history of the early Germanic peoples. Ludwig began with 96 busts; the collection has kept growing, and since 1945 nineteen more have been added, among them Albert Einstein in 1990, Sophie Scholl in 2003 and Max Planck in 2022.

Walhalla is at once a work of Romantic nationalism and one of the finest neoclassical buildings in Europe, and it is worth seeing as both: as a nineteenth-century statement about who belonged to the nation, and as a pure piece of architecture placed with great skill in a landscape. The view from the colonnade over the Danube plain towards Regensburg is part of the design.

Getting there

Walhalla stands above the Danube in the municipality of Donaustauf, about 9 km east of Regensburg; Munich Airport (MUC) is about 82 km away. Riverboats run from Regensburg to the foot of the hill, and buses from Regensburg stop at Walhallastraße, from where a walk of around 20 minutes climbs 358 steps. There is paid parking for cars.

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Bavaria 22The Most Beautiful Places in Germany 87The Most Remarkable Monuments in Germany 5The Most Beautiful Squares, Streets and Monuments in Germany 7The Most Remarkable Monuments 56The Most Beautiful Squares, Streets and Monuments 173

From the encyclopaedia

Walhalla is a hall of fame monument in Bavaria that honours laudable and distinguished people in German history – "politicians, sovereigns, scientists and artists of the German tongue"; While all new inductees since 1890 have been Germans or German-speakers, several earlier honorees came from outside modern Germany, which had not yet been established when the monument was built. Their inclusion reflects a 19th-century, still evolving, more loosely defined concept of "Germanness", one that would today be seen as conflating the term "German" with the much broader notion of having spoken a Germanic language or being of partial or supposed German ancestry.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

49.03149, 12.22409per Wikidata