"Herr Meyer" comes to Munich...


In the late summer of 1900, a gentleman who called himself "Meyer" rented a room from an innkeeper at Kaiserstraße 46 at Munich Schwabing. The innkeper is an old socialist and runs an inn on the ground floor of the house, it's called "Zum Onkel".







Herr Meyer also occasionally turns up in the restaurant - no wonder it gets too boring for him in his dark back room - and always orders the cheapest meal, a pastry, that's all he can buy.

And in the following spring his wife also arrives. Well, she's not exactly a beauty, the neighbors agree...:



And they're amazed, because they make a wild scene to greet "Mr. Meyer".

Because "Mr. Meyer" missed picking her up at the train station. And he hasn't written to her where he lives either.

Or, he wrote to her and the letters were intercepted. At least that's what he's trying to talk his way out of!

The furnished room is also not good enough for "Mrs. Meyer", and so something better is rented at Siegfriedstrasse 21...:



One day the mother-in-law of "Mr. Meyer" appears there...:



So the three of them live in the small apartment, the mother-in-law helps in the household, "Herr Meyer" and his wife occasionally go to a concert or the opera - a great admirer of Richard Wagner, that's him, "Herr Meyer"!

And now he's enjoying the beer in the Hofbräuhaus. Apparently he made money.

"Herr Meyer" likes Munich very much, at least that's what he often lets on in fluent German (albeit with a shear Slavic accent).

Yes, and what else does he do, Herr Meyer? When he's not at the opera and not at the Hofbräuhaus?

Then, yes, then he works. at the revolution.

Because the mysterious "Mr. Meyer" is none other than Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov...



... better known by his underground combat name "Lenin", which means nothing other than "the one from the Lena River", which is again a camouflage, because Lenin was born in Simbirsk and that is on a different river called Volga.. .:



Of course, they preserved the house where he was born...:



Lenin fled from Russia on July 29, 1900, where the ground was getting too hot for him - and fled to safe exile via Geneva to Munich.

His "wife" is really his wife - and her name is Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya. She has no code name, but is commonly referred to in the underground Communist Revolutionary Party as "the fish" because of her bulging eyes.

By the way, her first name - Nadezhda - means "hope" in Russian...

The "mother-in-law" is actually Krupskaya's mother, Jelizaveta Vasilyevna Tistrova, wife of the noble Russian (actually of Polish origin) infantry officer Konstantin Ignatievich Krupskij...



...who died in 1897.

The "Meyers" will live in Munich for five long years before moving on to Switzerland...