On 30 March 1920, a group of students in Munich founded a self-help organisation.
They called it the Verein Studentenhaus München, and its purpose was simple – to enable students to study “möglichst sorgenfrei” – as free from worry as possible.
In the chaos of post-war Germany, that meant running a goods distribution point in the university, a sewing and mending workshop, a shoe repair service, healthcare provision, and, by 1924, their own chamber orchestra.
A century later, the organisation that grew from that moment now serves 143,000 students across 15 universities in Munich and Upper Bavaria.
Studierendenwerk München Oberbayern operates 29 halls of residence with around 15,000 beds, serves over 4 million meals a year, runs 17 childcare centres with 500 places, processes 13,000 BAföG (student maintenance) applications annually and operates a comprehensive network of free counselling services covering everything from psychotherapy to legal advice to disability support.
The Studierendenwerk is, by any measure, one of the most impressive pieces of student welfare infrastructure we’ve seen in Europe.
It’s Day -1 of the Wonkhe SUs study tour to the Rhineland countries of Germany, Switzerland, France, Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands – tomorrow student leaders and SU staff will meet in St Gallen in Switzerland to begin a five day tour of over 30 students’ unions, guilds, associations, and even the odd university official too.
Before we board the bus, a little group of us have snuck in a visit to Munich, where we’ve been trying to understand a model that the UK never built – what happens when you separate student welfare from universities entirely, and hand it to a dedicated public body operating at regional scale?
Self-help to state infrastructure
The chronicle published for the Studierendenwerk’s centenary in 2020 is admirably honest about the trajectory:
History would have it that from the initially student self-help organisations, large state-supported institutions developed that take care of student welfare.
That origin story should sound familiar. UK students’ unions emerged from the same impulse – mutual aid, self-help, students looking after each other when no one else would. The difference is what happened next.
In Munich, the early years look remarkably like a UK SU origin story. Fritz Beck’s Verein Studentenhaus München opened residence halls in repurposed palaces – the Wittelsbacher Palais on Brienner Straße, the Duchess’s Palace on Karl-Theodor-Straße.
It ran a goods distribution point in the university, a sewing and mending workshop, a shoe repair service in the Technische Hochschule. It founded a healthcare department and organised medical examinations for students. By 1922, there was a loan fund, a printing press, a tailoring workshop. By 1924, a chamber orchestra. In 1926, Beck opened the “International Student Club” in Türkenstraße – realising, as the chronicle puts it, his dream of “a meeting point for students of all faculties and nations.”
In 1929, James Loeb and his wife Marie-Antonie donated the first women’s hall – the Marie-Antonie-Haus in Kaulbachstraße, still operating today. The organisation was growing, professionalising, building assets. Then 1933 happened.
The Verein Studentenhaus München was renamed Studentenwerk München as part of the Gleichschaltung – the Nazi coordination of civil society. Ernst Röhm, the SA leader, became its first president. In June 1934, during the Röhm Putsch, both Röhm and Fritz Beck – the organisation’s founder and managing director since 1920 – were murdered by the SS. Beck was 45 years old.
His successor was Dr Eduard Friedel, the long-standing secretary of the AStA – the student representative body – at Ludwig Maximilian University. By 1935, the Reich Education Ministry had issued “guidelines for health selection for university study” – eugenic screening as a condition of admission. In 1938, the Reichsstudentenwerk law dissolved all local student self-help organisations and centralised them under Berlin. In 1945, the Americans dismissed Friedel.
The post-war reconstruction rebuilt the Studierendenwerk as an Anstalt des öffentlichen Rechts – a public law institution – in 1948. The same year, students founded the Studentenhilfe München e.V. as a rapid-response hardship fund, still operating today. Confiscated property was returned from the Freistaat Bayern in 1949. In 1952, a new building was named the Fritz-Beck-Haus, commemorating the murdered founder. In 1955, psychotherapeutic counselling was established – nearly 70 years ago now. In 1957, the Honnefer Modell introduced state funding for student maintenance, the predecessor to today’s BAföG.
The core functions remained what Beck had built – affordable housing, good cheap food, financial support, student counselling, international exchange. But the governance had fundamentally changed. Students would have representation on oversight bodies, but not control. The self-help tradition had become state infrastructure.
What €85 a semester buys you
Today, every student at the 15 member universities pays a Grundbeitrag of €85 per semester to the Studierendenwerk. That’s roughly £70 – and you get quite a bit for the money:
- Housing: Around 15,000 places across Munich, Garching, Freising, Rosenheim and Oberschleißheim. Average rent is €360 per month warm – meaning all utilities included. The private market in Munich charges €700+ for a 20 square metre room. The Studierendenwerk housed 6,266 international students in 2022 alone.
- Catering: A network of Mensen (canteens), StuBistros, StuCafés and StuLounges across all campuses. Students pay €0.90 per 100g at the self-service counters – roughly half what staff pay and a third of guest prices. Over 4 million meals served annually. All kitchens are bio-certified. There’s a free children’s meal for students with kids. Every dish now carries CO2 and water footprint labelling.
- Financial support: The Amt für Ausbildungsförderung processes BAföG for all member institutions. Over 9,000 students received support in 2024. The Studierendenwerk also runs the Studentenhilfe München e.V., a rapid-response hardship fund founded in 1948 and reactivated in 2008 as inequality grew.
- Counselling: Free, confidential services including general advice, psychotherapeutic counselling (established 1955), legal advice (since 1963), scholarship guidance, student coaching (since 2017), and specialist support for disabled students and student parents.
- Childcare: 17 centres with around 500 places for children of matriculated students. That’s not a typo.
Cultureclubbing and cooking classes
There’s also the cultural programme – designed to help students access Germany’s most expensive student city’s cultural life affordably. The winter semester 2025/26 brochure lists dozens of events across themed strands.
“Live (and experience) diversity” includes a queer city rally and bar tour run with LMU’s Queerreferat, a post-colonial traces workshop and city walk, and civil courage training.
“Living (more) sustainably” offers clothes swaps, bike repair workshops, DIY beeswax products sessions, and vegan cooking classes with names like Umami Vegan and Colour Cooking. There’s even a Freshers’ Cleanup at the Olympic Village – picking up litter as community building.
The “Diverse Munich” strand takes students into corners of the city they might never otherwise find – scavenger hunts via app covering the Old Town, street art trails, and Nymphenburg; a tour of Munich’s underground sewer system run in cooperation with the Münchner Stadtentwässerung; architectural tours; even a wastewater treatment plant visit.
“Getting out of town” offers day trips to Staffelsee, Regensburg and Salzburg, Christmas market excursions to Nuremberg and Bad Tölz, and a winter hike with sledging.
The signature format is cultureclubbing – “Kultur und Party in einer Nacht” – combining cultural access with socialising. A typical cultureclubbing event might involve documentary screenings at DOK.fest (109 films from 51 countries), followed by a director Q&A, followed by a party at Unter Deck with 100 free drinks for the first 100 students through the door. Or a guided visit to the Lenbachhaus followed by a club night, or theatre at the Münchner Kammerspiele followed by drinks at TAM TAM Treppenbar. The format launched in 2006 and has become a fixture.
There’s also a “Finances & studies” strand focussed on building students’ confidence – scholarship orientation sessions, “How to finance your studies as an international student” workshops, “Graduation in sight” planning events, and straightforward financial literacy sessions called “Let’s talk about money.” Mental health programming then runs through a separate strand – resilience workshops, thesis writing motivation sessions, exam nerves support, substance awareness events, relaxation classes.
The village that became a symbol
We talked about it yesterday, but we can’t not cover the Olympic village in more detail.
In 1969, the Studierendenwerk secured 7 hectares at Oberwiesenfeld for student housing. The architect Werner Wirsing – later described by the Süddeutsche Zeitung as “the most important experimenter in the field of student housing” – had originally planned two or three-storey buildings. Then he had an inspiration –”Everyone needs their own little house!”
By May 1971, 800 cube-shaped bungalows were ready for students. They moved out briefly for the 1972 Olympics – the site housed female athletes – then moved back in. By 1974, the former Olympic catering centre had been converted into a community hub with a Mensa, cafeteria, reading room and common spaces – the heart of village life.
That same year, students founded the Verein “Studenten im Olympiazentrum” – a residents’ association for self-governance. Unlike SUs in Bavaria, this is a registered Verein, an e.V., with legal personality. It can hold money, employ people, enter contracts, and run businesses.
And run businesses it does. The Bierstube has operated as a student pub since the 1970s. There’s also the OlyLounge bar and OlyDisco nightclub. Profits from the venues fund the association’s programming – 12 committees and hundreds of volunteers cover everything from sports (Olynited Sportsclub fields a football team in the university league) to pottery (the Töpferausschuss runs workshops and offers studio access) to theatre (Theater im Olydorf produces and stages plays) to beekeeping (the “Bienen im Olymp” project started producing honey in 2018).
The FSK committee runs a photo lab, manages social media, and produces the Dorfbladl newspaper. The International Committee hosts culturally themed events and a regular jam session in the Bierstube. And so on.
The association’s self-description is “Germany’s Last Soviet Republic” – a tongue-in-cheek reference to the 1919 Bavarian Soviet Republic, playing on the council-based governance structure. It’s a joke, but it’s also a genuine claim to collective self-determination that Bavaria’s university student bodies can’t make.
The Werkstattausschuss (workshop committee) doesn’t just run wood and metal workshops – it sells custom furniture adapted for the bungalow’s quirky dimensions – bed extensions, under-stair storage drawers, solutions to the “where do I put my stuff in 18.8 square metres” problem. One handmade shelf at a time.
Two flagship festivals anchor the year. OlyLust in winter semester is described as Munich’s largest student carnival event, and Copa Connolly in summer sees the association trucking in sand to build a beach in the city centre, with cocktails and multiple stands, deliberately designed as an on-your-doorstep festival.
Both are organised by huge student volunteers teams and recruit volunteers through shift-based systems, with perks like vouchers and team shirts.
Two up two down
The bungalows themselves were demolished and rebuilt between 2007 and 2012 – they’d become structurally unsound after 35 years. The site has Ensembleschutz (protected status as an architectural ensemble), so the rebuilders had to preserve the character while fixing the problems.
The new bungalows are slightly narrower – 3.15 metres instead of around 4 – which allowed them to squeeze in 1,052 units instead of the original 800. Each one is 18.8 square metres across two floors: kitchen and living space downstairs, bed and desk upstairs, connected by a spiral staircase.
The painting tradition survived the rebuild. The Studierendenwerk provides free paint to residents – facade-safe formulations – and the GRAS committee (Grünflächen- und Umweltausschuss, green spaces and environment) manages the lending from a kiosk in the centre of the village, open 8pm to 8:30pm Monday to Friday. The only rules are no painting on doors, no political messages, no advertising, nothing sexist or racist. One attempted mobile phone sponsorship deal was blocked before execution.
The official position, as per former spokesperson Anke van Kempen – “Je bunter, desto besser” – the more colourful, the better.
Walk through the village and you’ll find Van Gogh’s Starry Night, Homer Simpson, Pettersson and Findus, Hogwarts references, Bavarian diamonds, pop art tributes, fake brickwork, a North Sea lighthouse with sheep grazing on a dyke, a tulip bed flowing into a beach scene with palm trees, and at least one satirical sign reading “Oly-Zoo – Exposed Concrete Enclosure: Homo Sapiens.” One contrarian has painted “A Heart for Exposed Concrete” above their door.
The tenancy system builds in renewal. Bachelors students can stay a maximum of 7 semesters, Master students 4 semesters. But you can extend by earning Honorarsemester – honorary semesters – through volunteer engagement with the residents’ association. Work a shift in the Bierstube, help run a committee, organise events, and you can stay up to three years longer.
The thick concrete walls create poor mobile reception – which means residents have to go outside to make calls, inadvertently bumping into neighbours. The large balconies do the same job more deliberately. One long-term resident reflected:
Where will you ever get to know all the residents of your street personally again?
“Germany’s largest tiny house settlement” sends a signal that would terrify a British estates director – this place belongs to students – and the complex draws in tourists from across Europe. It’s also the most popular student accommodation in Munich.
The road not taken
So what does this mean for the UK? The fundamental difference isn’t really about student control versus state control. It’s about who is responsible for what – and at what scale.
The Bavarian Higher Education Innovation Act is explicit about the division of labour. Universities are responsible for research and teaching. Studierendenwerke are responsible for “the economic support and social welfare of students” – specifically childcare facilities, student dormitories, catering facilities, counselling services, and “facilities in the cultural and social sphere.” Two different jobs, two different institutions.
And crucially, one Studierendenwerk serves multiple universities. The Studierendenwerk München Oberbayern, with over 500 employees, serves 143,000 students across 15 institutions – from LMU and TUM to the Hochschule für Musik und Theater to the Catholic University in Benediktbeuern. One housing stock, one catering operation, one counselling network, one set of childcare centres – regional infrastructure at genuine scale.
Back home, every university runs its own accommodation office, its own counselling service, its own catering operation, its own hardship fund – siloed, fragmented, and often unforgivably different . A Russell Group university in the same city as a post-92 and a small and specialist will each run their own version of everything, duplicating overheads, unable to pool capacity or share expertise beyond meetings in seminar rooms where student services managers share how bad things are.
The Studierendenwerk model asks a different question – why should a university run student housing? What’s the connection between research excellence and managing 10,000 tenancies? Why are academic institutions in the (outsourced) catering business?
The answer in Germany is – they shouldn’t. Let universities focus on being universities. Build separate public infrastructure for student welfare and let it operate at regional scale, serving everyone.
We’ve somehow let the income and capacity from student number expansion leak out of the sector in the UK – into private halls charging a fortune, outsourced “treat only” catering contractors, and overstretched university services that students have no meaningful stake in.
Meanwhile, the Studierendenwerk serves 4 million meals a year at prices students can actually afford, houses 10,000 students at rents that don’t consume their entire maintenance loan, runs 17 childcare centres, employs professional counsellors who aren’t burning out from impossible caseloads, runs vegan cooking classes and sewer tours and documentary festivals with free drinks, and causes social networking between students who attend different universities.
The stakes are not abstract. The MLP Studentenwohnreport 2025 puts Munich’s average rent for a 30 square metre student flat at €837 – nearly three times Chemnitz at €296. The BAföG housing allowance of €380 per month covers about 15 square metres in Munich. Students here spend 53 per cent of their income on housing, versus 25 per cent for the general population.
In 2001, the housing crisis got so bad that the Studierendenwerk introduced the €1 meal – “um Studierenden, die sparen müssen, jeden Tag eine warme Mahlzeit zu ermöglichen” – to give students who need to save a hot meal every day. That’s not ancient history – it’s the context in which regional-scale infrastructure can deliver, because students are its priority.
A UK university that tried to build the buildings we’ve seen from scratch would take decades. But a regional body serving multiple institutions could start tomorrow – if anyone had the ambition to create it.
A founding betrayed and redeemed
There’s one more thing worth thinking about. Fritz Beck founded the Verein Studentenhaus München on 30 March 1920 with a vision of student self-help. Fourteen years later, the Nazis killed him. The organisation he built was absorbed into the Reich, stripped of its autonomy, and used to implement eugenic health screening for university admission.
After the war, it was rebuilt as a public institution. The self-help origins were commemorated – the Fritz-Beck-Haus, the bronze bust in the foyer unveiled on the 80th anniversary of his death – but not restored in their original form.
And yet in the gaps, students keep creating their own structures anyway. The Studenten im Olympiazentrum, founded in 1974. The StuStaCulum festival in the Studentenstadt, running since 1989. The painted bungalows, renewed generation after generation. The Bierstube, still pouring drinks after 50 years.
The Studierendenwerk provides the infrastructure. Students make it theirs.
We’re off to the city centre now to watch the official installation of the Carnival Prince and Princess, marking the beginning of the main Fasching season in Munich. Je bunter, desto besser.
