Show me your fingertips!” was the motto a hundred and twenty years ago in the Müllersches Volksbad.

Because your fingers get shriveled after prolonged bathing or swimming, you could tell who had been enjoying the water for a long time and had to make room for waiting bathers.

"There was no other way of recording time back then," says Erich Kühberger.

The 57-year-old branch manager knows many curious stories about the house, including the so-called Zamperlbad, which was in the basement until 1978.

Here masters and mistresses could leave their dogs for bathing and blow-drying while they relaxedly did their lengths through the water.

"What an enchanting spectacle it must have been when little rainbows were still floating over the swimming pool," enthuses Kühberger.

Kühberger sometimes works as a museum guide in the venerable halls, when guests suddenly stop in amazement and have questions about the architecture, which is often still in its original state.

The Müllersche Volksbad is listed as one of the most beautiful art nouveau baths in Europe and is considered a veritable Munich attraction.

Two swimming pools spanned by mighty barrel vaults, flanked by gargoyles and bronze statues, wooden changing rooms, lots of stucco, decorated iron railings, artistic wall clocks and murals make bathing and sauna a highly stylish experience.

Its builder Carl Hocheder unmistakably found models for the exquisite public baths in oriental hammams, Roman thermal baths and baroque sacred buildings.

In such an opulent setting and far away from the noise of the water park, there is nowhere else in the city where you can immerse yourself.

This is why it is mainly bathers like Hansjörg Jodl who are drawn here.

"In the pool, it was customary to give other regulars a quick nod and then exchange a few sentences with each other.

Unfortunately, the pandemic wiped that out because older people in particular have become cautious in closed rooms," says the 78-year-old professor of physics.

For twenty years, however, he has not been dissuaded from his weekly sauna session in the Müllersches Volksbad, after all he has not been ill since then.

Perhaps he also owes that to the iron maiden, who provides cooling and hardening here.

The semi-circular shower, named after a medieval instrument of torture, does not require any frills or wellness gimmicks.

The bathers still make the music to the device themselves - whether with high-pitched screams or a casual whistling concert, that depends on the physical robustness.

At the push of a button, ice-cold water sprays from ten metal tubes from head to toe onto the naked body in a very puristic way.

An idyllic open-air courtyard and a shapely circular plunge pool in the sophisticated Roman-Irish sweat bath ensure comfortable regeneration.

“What is special here are the warm air rooms at different temperatures, in which the body can gradually warm up to forty, sixty and eighty degrees Celsius”,

says sauna regular Jodl enthusiastically.

Only the historic steam bath has yet to remain closed during the pandemic.