LegendThe mad king
Ludwig was mad, and the castles prove it.
Source: The view of his ministers in 1886; psychiatrists who reviewed the papers in 2014 found no evidence of the illness named in the report
The story
Ludwig II became king of Bavaria in 1864 at eighteen. Two years later his army lost a war to Prussia, and after that the real decisions were made in Berlin. He turned away from government and towards building. He built three palaces at once and had plans for more.
This one stands above the castle where he grew up. He wrote to the composer Richard Wagner in 1868 that he would rebuild the old ruin on the rock "in the true style of the old German knights' castles". In China this is the reign of Tongzhi of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912).
Close by, with a page of its own: Himeji Castle, Schönbrunn Palace.
What is here
The ticket is for the half-hour tour of the finished rooms. The courtyard, the paths and the bridge are free.
| Part | Ticket |
|---|---|
| The road up and the outside of the castle | Free |
| The throne hall | Tour ticket |
| The king's rooms and the cave | Tour ticket |
| The singers' hall | Tour ticket |
| The kitchen | Tour ticket |
| The bridge over the gorge | Free; closed in snow and ice |
If you have one minute
On the bridge, looking at the castle
From here it looks as if it grew out of the rock. Count the towers and gables: no two are alike. It was not drawn by an architect. The first drawings were made by a man who painted scenery for the opera in Munich, and it is a stage set, built of real stone.
The white is limestone. Under it the walls are brick, and the big hall is held up by a steel frame. The king wanted the Middle Ages, but warm: there are hot-air ducts under the floors, a lift for his food and a bell system worked by electricity.
Look to the left end. The building stops short. A tall keep and a chapel were to stand in the courtyard. They were never begun. Of some two hundred rooms planned, about fifteen were finished.
Things people often get wrong
"It is a medieval castle." It was begun in 1869, the year the Suez Canal opened. It was never a fortress and never had a garrison.
"Wagner lived here." Wagner never saw it. He died in 1883, before the king moved in.
"The king ruined Bavaria to pay for it." He paid from his own income and by borrowing in his own name. The debts were his family's, not the state's, and the ticket money had cleared them by 1899. Today his palaces earn Bavaria far more than they cost.
"You can walk round inside on your own." You go in only with a tour, at the minute printed on your ticket, and it lasts half an hour.
People who stood here
- Ludwig II (king of Bavaria, 1845–1886)He came by night, by sleigh or carriage, and watched the building through a telescope from his father's castle below. He moved into the gatehouse in 1873 and into his rooms in 1884. He once wrote that he wished to remain an eternal riddle to himself and to others.
- Richard Wagner (German composer, 1813–1883)The king heard his opera Lohengrin at fifteen and was never the same. As soon as he was king he sent for Wagner, paid his debts and paid for his theatre. The walls here are painted with the stories Wagner used. He never came.
- Elisabeth of Austria (empress, 1837–1898; known everywhere as Sisi)She was his cousin and the one person he trusted. They wrote to each other as the eagle and the seagull. She did not see the castle in his lifetime. When he died she laid jasmine on his body.
- Christian Jank (stage painter, 1833–1888)He painted the sets for Wagner's operas in Munich. The king had him draw the castle first, as a picture, and then told the architects to build the picture.
- Bernhard von Gudden (psychiatrist, 1824–1886)He signed the report that declared the king insane without having examined him. On the night of 11 June 1886 he came up to the castle with a commission to take the king away. Two days later both men were found dead in a lake near Munich, in water shallow enough to stand in.
- James Rorimer (American museum curator and army officer, 1905–1966)In May 1945 he climbed to the castle and found what he was looking for. The Nazis had used it as the main store for art stolen from Jewish families in France: thousands of items, with the card index recording whose they had been.
- Walt Disney (American film maker, 1901–1966)He and his wife toured Europe before he built his first park. The castle at its centre, opened in California in 1955, takes its towers and its hillside from this one.
- Luchino Visconti (Italian film director, 1906–1976)He filmed his four-hour Ludwig here in 1972, in the king's own rooms. The actress who had made Sisi famous as a girl in the 1950s played her again, older and sharper.
Go deeper: eight stops, from the village to the bridge
Stops 1, 2 and 8 are free. Stops 3 to 7 are on the tour.
1. The village and the yellow castle
The village below, Hohenschwangau, is where you collect your ticket. Above it stands a yellow castle. The king's father rebuilt it in the 1830s, and painted its rooms with knights and swans. The boy grew up among them. The swan was the badge of the lords who once held this valley.
2. The road up
The road climbs for a kilometre and a half through the forest. In 1880 two hundred craftsmen worked up here every day. A steam crane lifted the stone. The top of the crag had been blasted off, eight metres of it, to make a flat site.
3. The throne hall with no throne
The hall rises through two floors, gold and blue, in the style of a church in Constantinople. At the top of the marble steps, where the altar would be, is an empty platform. The throne of gold and ivory was ordered and cancelled when the king died.
Look up at the chandelier. It is shaped like a crown, holds ninety-six candles and weighs nine hundred kilograms. Look down: the floor is a mosaic of two million pieces, with the animals and plants of the earth.
4. The bedroom
Fourteen carvers worked for four and a half years on the oak of this one room. The canopy over the bed is a forest of Gothic spires. The washstand is a silver swan, and water ran from its beak.
This is the room where he was arrested.
5. The cave
Between the living room and the study a door opens into a small cave, with stalactites of plaster, a waterfall and coloured lights. It is on the third floor of a building.
6. The singers' hall
The whole top floor is one hall, copied from a castle in central Germany where, the legend says, poets held a singing contest in the year 1207. The paintings tell the story of a knight who seeks the Holy Grail.
No note was sung here while the king lived. The first concert was in 1933.
Nie sollst du mich befragen, noch Wissens Sorge tragen, woher ich kam der Fahrt, noch wie mein Nam' und Art!
Never shall you ask me, nor trouble yourself to know, from where I journeyed here, nor what my name and kind!
Richard Wagner, Lohengrin, Act 1, 1850: the swan knight's one condition. The castle is named for him; our translation
7. The kitchen
The tour ends in the kitchen, which was the most modern in Germany: hot and cold water from a spring above the castle, an automatic spit turned by the heat of the fire, and a warming cupboard heated by the flue.
8. The bridge
A path of fifteen minutes leads up behind the castle to an iron footbridge ninety metres above a waterfall. His father had put a wooden bridge here and named it for the queen. The king replaced it in iron in 1866, before the castle was begun. He used to stand on it at night and look at his lit windows.
The same shot: every poster of the castle is taken from the middle of this bridge. Go to the far end, where it is less crowded, and then ten metres up the path beyond: the view is the same and you can hold the camera still. In the film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) the flying car circles the castle from this side.
In snow and ice the bridge is shut. The castle still opens.