Castles in the air

Writing on the train back to Munich from Fussen, after a day out visiting the fairy-tale castles of King Ludwig II, who was exceptionally eccentric – or should that just be artistically sensitive – even for a monarch. Uncomfortable with his regal responsibilities, although he was king from the age of 18, he retreated into a kind of fantasy world made reality through his wealth and position, until he was eventually declared insane and removed from office in 1886, dying soon afterwards in circumstances which are still unclear.

My brief and rather stiffly translated booklet on ‘King Ludwig II: His Life – His End’ quotes the unfortunate monarch as once commenting: ‘It seems to me that in the household of life there is only room for a single type of person. He who wants to be someone must be rough, coarse, or phlegmatic. Whoever is different, is called eccentric by friend and foe.’ One has a certain amount of sympathy with this.

His great loves were architecture and the music of Wagner, glorifying the medieval legends such as Parsifal and Tristan and Isolde, not to mention Lohengrin – the swan motif prominent in both his childhood castle home of Hohenschwangau and at the fantastic Neuschwanstein which was still incomplete at the time of his death. The ‘swan corner’, a sort of armchair reading corner next to his bedroom, was one of his favourite retreats.

The castle visits, despite being so regimented in terms of ticket-buying and us tourists being shepherded quickly from one room to the next by a rapidly-speaking guide, were really rather poignant, most especially the ‘unfinished’ quality of Neuschwanstein. That magnificent throne-room, for example, constructed as a glorious Byzantine chapel, but missing the focal point, the throne itself, because Ludwig was dead, age 41, before it could be constructed. They are not the gothic castles in the literary genre of gloomy, ghost-filled or secret-guarding passages, but there is something of an enigmatic quality to them which is heightened by this air of incompletion. One can almost imaging Ludwig's ghost, sadly waiting for the throne to be installed.

Other little details spoke to me also. The glorious bedchamber with magnificently carved gothic turrets above the lonely king’s bed (he never married, was quite probably gay); above its bedstead a simple Madonna and child painting. And in earlier years, back in Hohenschwangau, when he assumed the King’s bedchamber, Ludwig had the stars and moon painted on a ceiling the colour of the night sky, and had them as translucent so that lit gas lamps on the floor above could glow through and add to the illusion of sleeping directly out under the heavens. ‘Now that’s not what I’d call mad,’ said Wolfgang, our Hohenschwangau guide. ‘That’s what I’d call cool.’ We tourists murmured our agreement.

A curious tradition of replication with these castles also. Built on traces of authentic medieval constructions the castles took on a sort of romantic pastiche in the attempt to reproduce the golden age that had never existed in the sense it was envisaged, a kind of pastoral nostalgia for knights and courtly fights and beautiful maidens in their fluttering dresses and tresses. Distinct parallels with the Pre Raphaelite brotherhood in England too, who were painting with predominantly medieval themes at exactly the same time, the mid-nineteenth century, although this wasn’t mentioned by guide or guidebook. Something in that age yearned for the fantasy chivalric past.

And how interesting to learn in this context that in the twentieth century Disneyland, with its distinctively similar white towers and turrets, was to an extent modelled on Ludwig’s castles. Perhaps a more honest investment in fantasy – or simply the more commercial. Critics such as Baudrillard would have it that we all live in a kind of Disneyland anyway: at least the trademarked simulacra is clearly conscious of its inauthenticity - or hyperreality as Umberto Eco would say.

But we all love castles. I’d have one built myself if I had the time and money. Alas, I couldn’t take any photos inside the two we visited, as the images of the interiors are all copyright apparently – no unauthorised visual replication of the details there. It adds to their mystique, those dreamt-up castles in the Alpine air.