There’s a particular feeling you get standing in Geschwister-Scholl-Platz on a cold January morning, looking up at the main building of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.
The square is named for Hans and Sophie Scholl, the siblings executed by the Nazis in 1943 for distributing leaflets calling for the end of the Hitler regime.
The White Rose resistance movement was born in this building – students risking everything to speak truth to power.
The irony of what happened here thirty years later is almost too much. In 1973, Bavaria’s Kultusminister Hans Maier – a professor brought into government as a non-partisan minister, though he’d later join the CSU – abolished the Verfasste Studierendenschaft, the constituted student bodies (SUs) that had existed at Bavarian universities since 1919.
Maier was a co-founder of the Bund Freiheit der Wissenschaft (Federation for Academic Freedom), which despite its name existed primarily to combat left-wing influence in universities.
His explicitly stated aim?
Drain the left-wing swamp at universities.
Some 20 years before the Tories tried the same trick in the UK, students in Bavaria had become too political. They were engaged in Marxist agitation, rent strikes, general political mandates. The cure was to strip their SUs of legal personality and independent funding.
Bavaria remains, to this day, the only German state without constituted student bodies. The university that memorialises student resistance has spent fifty years without legally autonomous student self-government.
We came across the memorial on Day -2 of this year’s Wonkhe SUs January study tour, which this year is whizzing (snow permitting) around the central European countries of Germany, Switzerland, France, Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands.
On Sunday around 35 students’ union officers and staff from across the UK will make their way to St Gallen in Switzerland to begin a coach trip aimed at fostering links with and learning from others representing and serving students – and while the trip doesn’t officially start until Monday morning, a small group of us decided to kick the trip off in a German city home to over 120,000 students – Munich.
The absence
To understand what Bavarian students don’t have, we need to understand what students elsewhere in Germany do have. In the other fifteen Länder, student bodies are corporations under public law – Körperschaften des öffentlichen Rechts.
They have legal personality, can own property, enter contracts, sue and be sued. They collect mandatory fees from all students, typically €10-15 per semester, and have a general political mandate.
In Bavaria, none of this exists. The Studierendenvertretung (StuVe) at LMU comprises over 350 volunteer students doing impressive work, but they are a committee of the university rather than an independent corporation.
2023 saw reform that created the Bayerischer Landesstudierendenrat (BayStuRa) and trumpeted as progress – but read the legislation, and you find a body with the right to be consulted and precisely no decision-making power.
In practice, when the state government decides something students oppose, there is no institutional mechanism for escalation beyond moral suasion. When the other side simply ignores you, you have no cards left to play.
A new form of social selection
The bus to Studentenstadt Freimann takes about twenty minutes from the city centre, depositing you at the edge of the Englischer Garten. Germany’s largest student housing is ominous on the landscape – 2,478 residential units, the streets named for White Rose martyrs.
The Gesamtheimrat governs the community, with public sessions every other Monday. Students run pubs, a bread shop, workshops, even a kindergarten established in 1975 – before the Studierendenwerke (student services organisation) provided childcare anywhere.
Every May, the Studentenstadt hosts StuStaCulum – Germany’s largest student-run festival. The name is a portmanteau of Studentenstadt and Spectaculum, and the thing itself is exactly as ambitious as that sounds.
Four days, four stages, 30,000 visitors, over 100 events spanning indie, ska, reggae, hip hop, metal, comedy, improv theatre, cabaret, even rugby and football tournaments.
The whole thing is organised entirely by volunteers who live in the complex – over 900 volunteer shifts filled for the 2025 edition. Performers aren’t paid, and admission is €12 for all four days.
It started in 1989 as a modest affair with two bands and twelve theatre groups for the Studentenstadt’s 25th anniversary – it’s run annually ever since, cancelled only for the pandemic. Since 2003 it’s collaborated with GARNIX and TUNIX, festivals run by TUM students, and since 2010 with LMU’s Uni-Sommerfest.
This is “school play syndrome” operating at industrial scale – students organising something for each other, ropey around the edges perhaps, but with an emotional investment and community ownership that no professionally-produced event could match.
The organising committee, Kulturleben in der Studentenstadt e.V., is a registered association run by residents. They book the acts, manage the logistics, run the food and drink tents, handle safety, clean up afterwards.
It’s an extraordinary demonstration of what student self-organisation can achieve when given space, continuity, and a bounded community to work within – which makes the contrast with the emaciated formal representation structures all the sharper.
Bavaria stripped students of legal personality and independent funding at university level – but here in the residential complex, where the state’s writ runs less directly, something like the old vision of student self-government persists.
The fire
From the twenty-first floor of one of the buildings at Studentenstadt Freimann, the Manhattan bar offers what residents claim is Munich’s highest beer garden. The Alps are visible on clear days.
And therein lies the problem.
Munich’s student housing crisis is among the worst in Germany. Average rent for a shared room now exceeds €800 per month, while the BAföG housing allowance is €380. The Studierendenwerk provides over 9,000 rooms at an average of €360.80 – genuinely affordable – but waiting list times can run to seven semesters.
One student leader described this as “a new form of social selection.” Which university you can attend increasingly depends not on academic merit – but on whether your family can subsidise Munich rents until a Studierendenwerk room becomes available. Sound familiar?
On 16 February 2021, a fire broke out in the basement sauna of Haus 13 – the Rotes Haus. A 23-year-old student was found unconscious on the fourth floor. She died on 1 March from severe smoke inhalation. “She was one of our friends,” one former resident wrote later.
Süddeutsche Zeitung subsequently reported that an expert had warned the Studentenwerk about “serious deficiencies” in fire protection months before. Deficiencies had been “remedied in makeshift manner to continue using the building without necessary investments,” the paper reported, “regardless of continuing danger to residents’ lives.”
The cascade of evacuations that followed left approximately 1,500 apartments standing empty. At nearly half its normal occupancy, Studentenstadt feels like a ghost town now – the large empty buildings once vibrant with life towering gloomily over a quiet atrium. Renovation won’t be complete until 2027-2028. Six to seven years of empty apartments in a city where students pay €800 a month for a room exacerbates the problem.
On the last evening of September 2021, as final residents moved their belongings out of the Grünes Haus, some hatched a plan. They turned on the lights of certain rooms to create the pattern of a heart, visible from the atrium below – a farewell to the building and the community it had housed. Even the groundskeepers secretly admired their work.
Without Verfasste Studierendenschaft, Bavarian students have no independent body with legal standing to hold the Studentenwerk accountable, commission independent reviews, or pursue legal action. The heart in the windows was beautiful – but it changed nothing.
Painted doors
The Olympic Village offers up another variation on the model. The former women’s accommodation from the 1972 Games has been student housing since 1973 – about 2,000 units now, a mix of bungalows and tower blocks.
The bungalows are the thing. Each resident is allowed – encouraged, even – to paint their façade however they like, and the Studentenwerk provides paint and tools. Walking through is like wandering an open-air gallery – Santorini sunsets, comic book heroes, political slogans, homesick landscapes, cryptic in-jokes.
The Verein der Studenten im Olympiazentrum e.V., established in 1974, runs the Bierstube pub, the Olywood cinema, the OlyDisco. Residents call themselves “Olympianer” and move their breakfast tables into the laneways on sunny mornings. The roads are underground, so nothing disturbs the peace.
There’s a paradox here. The Studentenstadt and Olydorf represent exactly the kind of student self-organisation Bavaria systematically denied at university level. But because they operate as residential communities rather than formal student bodies, they escaped political attack. Student agency found a different institutional form when the obvious one was closed off.
Munich’s universities are scattered across the metropolitan region. LMU’s main buildings cluster around that historically freighted square, but faculties have dispersed – Chemistry to Großhadern, Biology to Martinsried. TUM’s Garching campus, ten kilometres north, has grown to become the university’s largest site.
For years, transport to Garching was miserable. Students nicknamed it “Garchosibirsk” and “Novogarchinsk” – references to remote Siberian outposts. Since 2006 the U-Bahn has connected it to the city, but it’s still thirty minutes to the centre. Students don’t live “on campus” in any UK sense. They live in one part of the city and commute to another. The Deutschlandticket isn’t a nice-to-have – it’s essential infrastructure.
Populist gender bans
Which brings us to the populist present, and a familiar ironic brass neck.
In December 2023, Markus Blume – Bavaria’s State Minister for Science and Arts, and former Secretary General of the CSU – announced a ban on gender-inclusive language at Bavarian universities.
The CSU is Bavaria’s dominant conservative party, sister party to the CDU but further right, and has governed the state almost continuously since 1946 – think of it as what the Tories might be if they’d held one region uninterrupted for eighty years.
From April 2024, the Genderstern, the colon, the underscore – all have been impermissible in official communications. Blume justified this by claiming his ministry:
…repeatedly receives complaints that there are disadvantages when someone doesn’t follow some gender guideline.
Seven Bavarian student representative bodies issued a joint response:
We have never received a single complaint about ‘gender compulsion.’ Nor is any case of worse grades for ‘not gendering’ known at any of the universities involved in this letter.
They found it “surprising” that such complaints had supposedly reached the ministry while universities themselves were unaware of any incidents. They quoted the CSU’s own manifesto, which rejects “the idea of governing with prohibitions and ideologies.” They listed the actual problems facing students – €720 average rent, inadequate funding, overcrowded lectures, ceilings falling down.
Blume’s response was to double down. The ban would be codified in law.
In 1973, the justification for abolishing student self-government was that student bodies had become too political. They were pursuing ideological agendas instead of focusing on practical student welfare.
Over 50 years on the Science Minister used his office to pursue an ideological culture-war objective with no demonstrated connection to actual student welfare. The student representatives – structurally neutered – have been the ones pleading for attention to housing costs and crumbling buildings.
The 1973 settlement created the asymmetry that makes this possible. The student representatives can cite the CSU’s own manifesto, build coalitions of 53 organisations, document the absence of any complaints – and it doesn’t matter. They can issue press releases. He can amend the law.
We’re heading to the Augustiner for dinner now, which feels appropriately clichéd. More tomorrow – servus from Munich.
