Because Murnau is easy to reach by train, city dwellers also moved here at the beginning of the 20th century and built villas and country houses. This included the Jewish Rosenthal family, who had to emigrate in 1933. His son Joseph, born in 1918 and known as Rovan as one of the most important German-French historians, remembers the place of his childhood with longing: “My parents valued the peace and quiet of the Upper Bavarian Alpine foothills as much as the warmth of the people. Together with Aunt Lise, they bought a large plot of land on the tongue of the moraine hills that separate the lake basin from a wide swampy plain that stretches to the first Alpine ridge, whose peaks reach no higher than 1800 to 1900 meters. To the south, this increasingly narrow plain stretches to the next, higher mountain range, the highest peak of which is the Zugspitze, located just above the famous winter sports resort of Garmisch-Partenkirchen. The view from our property was exceptionally beautiful and wide. When my parents had their house built in 1923, from our bathroom on the first floor you could see the entire central part of the Bavarian Alps and the wide plain of the Murnau Moor in front of it with a single glance. There were no roads and it was only crossed by a few footpaths that the farmers used to cut the lush grass of the moor - and to hunt if they had a hunting license, which was rarely issued in Germany. [...] Murnau is the first place from my childhood that I remember: the long main street lined with brightly painted houses, the baroque church built several meters above the town and the many viewpoints over the countryside and the mountains."