The Munich Residence

When Allied bombs devastated Munich in 1944, only 50 square meters of the Residence’s 23,500-square-meter roof remained intact. Yet before the first bomb fell, palace staff had already dismantled the carved wooden Cuvilliés Theatre piece by piece and spirited away slashed portraits from their frames. A reconstruction office opened in May 1945, before the war even ended. The Golden Hall’s elaborate gilt ceiling, part of apartments remodeled in ornate Turin Baroque style for Electress Henriette Adelaide in 1666, survived to tell its Italian tale in Bavaria.

The Cuvilliés dismantling happened in 1943, a full year ahead of the raid that leveled the building around the empty space where the theater’s interior used to be. By the time the bombs actually fell in March 1944, the removal crews had already guessed correctly. What they couldn’t save, the reconstruction office spent the next four decades rebuilding room by room, some pieces recovered from rubble, others recreated from photographs and memory. The Golden Hall’s survival looks almost accidental next to that effort, an Italian princess’s 17th-century vanity project that simply happened to be standing when everything around it wasn’t.