"The whole landscape becomes darker, the air becomes strangely weightless and unnaturally bright in the reflection of the snow-covered heights, and the darkness hangs close over the earth... Anyone who wanders through the Bavarian highlands and foothills soon senses that this is the other world of a strange religion. It is a strange landscape, remote, unto itself. Perhaps it is still that of the forgotten imperial armies." This is how the British writer D.H. Lawrence raved on his trip to Italy in 1912. Together with his future wife Frieda von Richthofen, he hiked from Icking near Wolfratshausen over the Alps to Lake Garda. "The old imperial road to Italy leads from Munich through the mountains of Tyrol via Innsbruck and Bozen to Verona. The emperors traveled south on this road with large entourages or from sunny Italy home to their own German lands. [...] In our day, no imperial army trains travel through the mountains to the south. That has been forgotten; hardly anyone still knows the old road. But it is still there, and its landmarks remain. The crucifixes still line it, and they are not just an arbitrary addition, they are still part of it.” The writer is just as impressed by the “unique, luminous beauty” of the inhabitants of the Oberland as he is by their piety. He finds their processions and religious festivals “solemn and breathtaking.” A few decades earlier, the Munich lawyer and writer Ludwig Steub described the Bavarian highlands in a much more sober manner, namely as a peripheral area of historical events: “Between the castle at Schwangau and the fortress at Hohensalzburg, much less happened in the past than on the German Rhine between imperial Speyer and holy Cologne. Nothing great or earth-shattering ever happened in Tölz, Miesbach, Traunstein or Garmisch. We know of no decisive battle or peace treaty that took place here. […] These regions on the edge of the Rhaetian Alps always march in step with the fortunes of the Duchy of Bavaria, but only in the second rank, in a certain still life and without making much noise about themselves, because the Wittelsbach history has always sought its theater more downwards, from Munich to Landshut towards Ingolstadt and Straubing. […] I believe, by the way, that the clever people of the mountains never wanted to be bothered more often by the often very noticeable footsteps of the serious Clio, just to play a role worth seeing in Bavarian history... “ While in the 19th century the important events took place away from the Oberland, this was soon to change. Curtain up for Murnau's role in German history in the first half of the 20th century!