MAD KING LUDWIG - PART ONE

​In 1806, Maxmilian I was the King of Bavaria. When he died in 1825, he was succeeded by his son, Ludwig I, who abdicated to his son, Maxmilian II, in 1848. After Max II died in 1864, his eldest son, Ludwig, became Ludwig II. When that Ludwig supposedly committed suicide in 1886, he passed the throne onto his brother, Otto. However, Otto had already been declared insane, so his Uncle Luitpold took over as the Regent of Bavaria until he died in 1912, leaving the regency to his eldest son, also named Ludwig. That Ludwig took only a few months to have Otto (who was still alive and still insane) officially deposed and himself declared King Ludwig III. That lasted until after WWI, in 1918, when monarchies in Germany were dissolved.
 
As uninteresting and opaque as all that is, you might be surprised to know that Ludwig II is quite well-known: one of the castles he built for himself served as the model for the centerpiece castles at Disneyland and DisneyWorld.
 
Ludwig II was not like the other Bavarian rulers. He was raised with constant reminders that he would someday be king, so his parents indulged him to the extreme, while also severely controlling him, subjecting him to a strict regimen of study and exercise. In spite of it, or perhaps because of it, Ludwig displayed rather odd behaviors as an adult. His father, the King, was frequently ignored, while he would later refer to his mother as “my predecessor’s consort”. He preferred fantasy worlds, heroic German sagas, and images of German knights, and was athletic in riding horses, swimming, and climbing mountains near his childhood home. He loved to read poetry, and enjoyed staging scenes from the Romantic operas of Richard Wagner in and around the castle. He would later decorate castle interiors with large scenes from Wagner’s The Ring.
 
Ludwig’s father died after a three-day illness in 1864, and Ludwig Otto Friedrich Wilhelm, who was only nineteen at the time, became Ludwig II, King of Bavaria. In spite of a war between Bavaria and Prussia, and then a war where they were allies against France, both happening before he was twenty-five, the King had no interest in the military might of Bavaria and became recognized as a complete pacifist. After Bavaria was pressured into joining Bismarck’s unification movement of Germany in 1870, Ludwig II largely withdrew from politics, devoting himself to his personal creative projects in art, music, and architecture. He built Munich’s famed opera house, encouraged foreign composers and performers to tour Bavaria, and made himself the patron of Richard Wagner, who might have been unknown, otherwise. But his delight was designing and building castles, where he personally approved every detail of the architecture, decorations, and furnishings.
 
That did not free him from his greatest royal stress, however, for he had no heir, owing to the fact that he was not much interested in women. He was engaged to a cousin in 1867, but the only thing they had in common was a deep interest in the works of Wagner. Over the next few months, he repeatedly postponed the wedding date, and finally canceled the engagement. He later confessed that he could not envision sharing his house with a woman.
 
This might have only been the exaggerated behaviors of an introvert, but his preference for being by himself was pathological. In Castle Linderhof, which was the only castle of his that was finished before he died, the castle’s dining table had only enough space for one person. In fact, the King designed his dining room to be directly over the kitchen. Refusing to allow the servants to witness him eating, the dining table was lowered down through the floor by pulleys into the kitchen, loaded with the meal, and raised back up, where Ludwig would then eat alone. He sent it down when he was finished.
 
For having several castles, he was often the only inhabitant, other than the servants. Even if there were guests in the castle, he designed his private quarters to be accessible only by a single passageway, which they were forbidden to use.
 
Between 1872 and 1885, the King attended 209 performances at various royal theaters. They were all mostly performed for only one audience member – himself. He watched and listened, by himself, to 44 operas, 11 ballets, and 154 plays. It wasn’t that he didn’t like people, he said, but that he did not want people staring at him and following his every expression through their opera-glasses.
 
At Castle Linderhof, he had a personal grotto built in the upper expanse of the park – a manmade cave with its own lake, where he would be rowed alone in a shell-like boat through the cavern as it was lit by different colors of electric lights (he built one of the first power plants in Bavaria to provide the electricity).
 
As for leading the government as King, he was basically absent. In his last ten years of governing, he only visited the Royal Palace in Munich once, while attending only one military review. He did, however, like roaming the countryside in his carriage, alone except for the driver, where he would stop and visit at different homes and farms, visiting with the common people. For this, he was immensely popular with the people of Bavaria, even if he wasn’t with the government and military officials.
 
As for his castles, there are three on regular tourist routes: Castle Linderhof, which is smallish for a castle, but had several acres of park around it; the iconic Castle Neuschwanstein, which is recognized world-wide; and Herrenchiemsee, a partial replica of the French palace of Versailles (which was not on my particular tour) and in which he stayed a total of ten days. The other castle of note was not his, but was his childhood home - Castle Hohenschwangau, built by his father.
 
At the time of his death, Ludwig was about to start building another fairy-tale castle that was styled much like Neuschwanstein, but higher up the same mountain.
 
The photos include Castle Linderhof, which is more ornate on the inside as it is on the outside. I did not see a square inch of floor, wall, or ceiling that wasn’t extravagantly decorated, usually being gilded in gold. He also had been impressed by the mirrors at Versailles, so he covered the walls of his residence with mirrors to make the rooms look bigger, as well as giving himself more reflections; he was quite vain about being a very handsome man. The surrounding many-acre park is also elaborate with several buildings, fountains, ponds, and statuary, many of them fashioned after the backdrops and sets in Wagner’s operas.
 
Castle Neuschwanstein is easy to recognize – there is a small bridge across from it that provides the money shot. A guard manages the crowd at the bridge to prevent overcrowding. Exiting the castle, an impressive model is shown inside a glass case. By the way, as fairy-like as the towers are, they hold staircases that provide access to the different floors of the castle. There are no public elevators and visitors are sometimes challenged to make all the steps.
 
In the photo that includes a lake, the yellowish/orange castle at the bottom right is Castle Hohenschwangau. I took the photo while standing on an outside deck of Neuschwanstein.

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