Munich Trivia
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50 free Munich trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Munich's name means 'at the monks', and its birthday is the day in 1158 when a duke's salt-toll bridge won a legal fight with a bishop. This quiz follows the city from Henry the Lion through 700 years of Wittelsbach rule, the royal wedding party of 1810 that became Oktoberfest, Ludwig I's 'Athens on the Isar', the Bavarian Soviet Republic, the Beer Hall Putsch and Munich Agreement, the White Rose students, 71 air raids, and the postwar boom that brought the 1972 Olympics and their tragedy. The modern city gets equal attention: the Frauenkirche's devil's footprint and 99-metre height cap, the Glockenspiel's coopers' dance, the Hofbrauhaus and the Reinheitsgebot, the English Garden built by an American loyalist, the Eisbach surfers, Nymphenburg, the Deutsches Museum, the tent roof of the Olympiapark, the Allianz Arena's colour-changing skin, Bayern's record titles, BMW's aircraft-engine origins, Weisswurst before noon and the strange fact that Munich is bigger than any German city that isn't its own state. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Munich and its landmarks, clubs and events, and each question shows the sentence that supports it. Our Germany quiz covers the rest of the country.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Munich's name comes from an old German word for which people, one of whom appears on its coat of arms?
Monks
Monks. A hooded monk has been on the city seal since 1239, but artists drew him younger and younger until he became the 'Münchner Kindl', the Munich child.
Q 02Munich sits on which river?
The Isar
The Isar. It rises in the Austrian Alps and joins the Danube downstream of Munich, so the meltwater rushing through the city ends up in the Black Sea.
Q 03Which duke founded Munich around 1158 to draw the salt trade away from a bishop's toll bridge to his own?
Henry the Lion
Henry the Lion. Legend has him burning the Bishop of Freising's bridge by night; what is certain is that in 1158 the emperor let his new market stand but made him hand the bishop a third of its tolls.
Q 04Which dynasty ruled Bavaria from Munich until the revolution of 1918?
The Wittelsbachs
The Wittelsbachs ruled Bavaria for 738 years. The end came overnight: on 7 November 1918 King Ludwig III slipped out of Munich with his family as Kurt Eisner declared a republic.
Q 05Whose 1806 reward to Bavaria made Munich a royal capital?
Napoleon
Napoleon Bonaparte. The alliance also brought Bavaria lands in Franconia and Swabia, which gave the state roughly the shape it still has today.
Q 06Munich's first Oktoberfest, in October 1810, was held to celebrate what?
Crown Prince Ludwig's wedding
Crown Prince Ludwig's wedding. The whole city was invited to celebrate on a meadow outside the gates, and Munich has thrown its party on that same field ever since.
Q 07What was the main event of Munich's very first Oktoberfest in 1810?
A horse race
A horse race, proposed by a National Guard major, closed the celebrations; beer stalls came only later. Repeating the race a year on began the annual festival, though the race itself was dropped long ago.
Q 08Since 1950 the Mayor of Munich has opened Oktoberfest by tapping the first keg and shouting what?
O'zapft is!
O'zapft is! is Bavarian for 'It's tapped!'. The city counts how many mallet blows the mayor needs, so mayors practise; the best have done it in two.
Q 09What do Munich locals call Oktoberfest, after its meadow?
The Wiesn
The Wiesn, Bavarian for 'the meadow'. In 2023 a public holiday stretched the festival to 18 days instead of 16, and a record 7.2 million visitors came.
Q 10Which essential beer ingredient is missing from the purity law Munich adopted in 1487 and all Bavaria in 1516?
Yeast
Yeast. The law allowed only barley, hops and water: brewers seeded each batch with dregs from the last without understanding what did the work, so it was written into the rules only centuries later.
Q 11Which Munich beer hall began in 1589 as Duke William V's own brewery, set up to replace imported beer?
The Hofbräuhaus
The Hofbräuhaus began as the duke's private brewery. In the 1890s the brewing moved out to the edge of town and the old site was rebuilt as a beer hall, where no beer has been brewed since.
Q 12By tradition, when is Munich's white sausage, the Weisswurst, supposed to be eaten?
Before noon
Before noon: the saying goes that a Weisswurst must never hear the midday church bells. The usual explanation is that the unsmoked sausages, made fresh each morning, spoiled quickly before refrigeration.
Q 13Munich's Marienplatz is named after a column raised in thanks when Swedish occupiers spared the city in which war?
Q 21Nymphenburg Palace, begun in 1664, was the birthplace in 1845 of which 'fairy-tale king'?
Ludwig II
Ludwig II was born at Nymphenburg in 1845. His castle-building, Neuschwanstein included, ran up such debts that in 1886 his ministers had him declared insane, and days later he was found dead in Lake Starnberg.
Q 22Which Munich museum of science and technology opened on an island in the river in 1925?
The Deutsches Museum
The Deutsches Museum. Its founder, Oskar von Miller, was the engineer who in 1882 sent electric current some 60 km from Miesbach to an exhibition in Munich, the first long-distance transmission of power.
Q 23The Lenbachhaus displays which Munich-based modernist movement?
Der Blaue Reiter
The Thirty Years' War
The Thirty Years' War. Elector Maximilian had vowed a monument if his cities were spared, yet the square stayed 'Schrannenplatz', after its grain market, until 1854, when it took the column's name.
Q 14What does the Munich Glockenspiel's upper scene re-enact?
A jousting tournament
A jousting tournament, held on Marienplatz in 1568 for a ducal celebration. The result never changes: every day the Bavarian knight beats his rival from Lorraine.
Q 15In legend, Munich's coopers first danced to lure people back outdoors after what?
The plague
The plague, in the legend. The barrel-makers still dance it only every seven years and their figures turn daily on the town hall clock, but the first record dates from 1702, and historians think it was simply a guild custom.
Q 16According to legend, who left the black footprint in the entrance hall of Munich's cathedral?
The devil
The devil, in the tale. From that one spot the pillars once hid every window, a trick the builder used to fool him; his stamp left the mark, and his rage is said to blow still as the wind around the towers.
Q 17A 2004 referendum barred new Munich buildings from rising above which landmark?
The Frauenkirche
The Frauenkirche, whose twin towers stand just under 99 metres. The vote passed with barely half the ballots and stopped two skyscrapers Siemens had planned, though it was legally binding for only a year.
Q 18Which sprawling Munich park was begun in 1789 on the advice of an American-born scientist?
The English Garden
The English Garden. Benjamin Thompson, a Massachusetts-born physicist who had sided with the British, was reforming Bavaria's army and wanted gardens for its soldiers; the plan grew into a park for everyone, and he became Count Rumford.
Q 19Which sport made a standing wave on Munich's Eisbach stream famous around the world?
River surfing
River surfing. Surfers rode the wave year-round until it vanished after routine riverbed cleaning in autumn 2025; when activists installed a beam at Christmas to bring it back, the city had it removed.
Q 20King Ludwig I's grand neoclassical buildings earned Munich a nickname likening it to which city?
Athens
Athens. The Greece-mad Ludwig I filled Munich with temple-fronted museums and gates, but he gave up his throne in the revolution of 1848, which his scandalous affair with the dancer Lola Montez helped to set off.
Der Blaue Reiter, the Blue Rider. Painter Gabriele Münter hid the group's pictures in her cellar through the Nazi years, then gave them to the Lenbachhaus on her 80th birthday in 1957.
Q 24Which Munich company began life during the First World War building aircraft engines?
BMW
BMW. When peace ended its warplane orders the company turned to motorcycles in the 1920s, and it did not enter the car business until 1928.
Q 25Hitler's failed 1923 coup attempt in Munich is known by what name?
The Beer Hall Putsch
The Beer Hall Putsch. Hitler fired a pistol into the ceiling to hijack a rally, but police stopped his march the next day; convicted of treason, he served only months and used them to dictate Mein Kampf.
Q 26Georg Elser's bomb in a Munich beer hall on 8 November 1939 missed Hitler by how much?
Minutes
Minutes: Hitler left unexpectedly early, about 13 minutes before the blast. Georg Elser, a carpenter working alone, had spent weeks hollowing out a pillar beside the podium, and was caught that night trying to cross into Switzerland.
Q 27The 1938 Munich Agreement let Germany annex which region of Czechoslovakia?
The Sudetenland
The Sudetenland, handed over in exchange for Hitler's pledge of peace. Less than six months later he broke the pact and occupied the Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia as well.
Q 28Which concentration camp opened in March 1933 just outside Munich?
Dachau
Dachau. Set up in a disused munitions factory weeks after Hitler took power, it became the model for every later camp and the school where the SS trained its guards.
Q 29The White Rose resistance group, led by Hans and Sophie Scholl, was based at which Munich university?
Ludwig Maximilian University
Ludwig Maximilian University. A janitor saw the Scholls scatter leaflets into its atrium on 18 February 1943 and turned them in; they were executed four days later, and the square outside now bears their name.
Q 30Whose troops captured Munich in April 1945, after bombing wrecked about half the city?
The US Army
The US Army. Its troops marched in on 30 April 1945, the very day Hitler killed himself in Berlin, and took the city the Nazis had styled the 'Capital of the Movement'.