Ludwig II of Bavaria

• 1. The Swan King

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  Late on the night of the 13th of June 1886, searchers on the shore of Lake Starnberg found Ludwig II of Bavaria lying in shallow water. His doctor lay dead beside him. The king's watch had stopped at 6:54.

  Across Germany, Ludwig was known as the Swan King and the Fairy Tale King. Abroad, people called him the Mad King. In Bavaria, many still use a gentler name, Unser Kini, which means Our Cherished King in the local dialect.

  How does one man collect so many names? Why did a king who poured his private fortune into castles lose his throne to his own ministers? Who decided he was insane, and on what evidence? And did he take his own life, or did something else happen on that shore?

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• 2. A Cold Childhood

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  Nymphenburg Palace, now part of central Munich, is where Ludwig was born on the 25th of August 1845. His parents were Maximilian, then crown prince, and Marie of Prussia. They had planned to call the boy Otto. His grandfather, King Ludwig I, objected, because the two shared a birthday. The 25th of August is the feast day of Saint Louis IX of France, patron saint of Bavaria, and Ludwig is the German form of Louis. The grandfather won. In 1848, during the German revolution, Ludwig I abdicated, and the boy's parents became king and queen.

  King Maximilian II wanted both of his sons to learn the burdens of royal duty early. Tutors indulged Ludwig in some ways and policed him in others, with a strict routine of study and exercise. Punishment was part of the plan. When advisers suggested that the king take his heir along on his daily walks, Maximilian replied, "But what am I to say to him? After all, my son takes no interest in what other people tell him." Years later, writing at the age of 30 to Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria-Hungary, Ludwig recalled that his father "always treated me de haut en bas from above, at most deigning to offer some gracious cold words en passant."

  Queen Marie, a Prussian princess by birth, was no warmer an ally. She disliked Richard Wagner, which put distance between her and her son. She also thought his friendship with the actress Lilla von Bulyovsky improper. Her lively chatter grated on him, and once he was king he avoided her and referred to her as "my predecessor's consort." He was far closer to his grandfather Ludwig I, the notorious deposed king.

  Hohenschwangau Castle, beside the Alpsee, gave the family its happier days. Maximilian had turned the medieval building into a fantasy castle in the Gothic Revival style, with frescoes of heroic German sagas. The most prominent showed Lohengrin, the Knight of the Swans. Marie and her sons hiked in the mountains while the king went hunting, a sport Ludwig never cared for. The family also owned Berg Palace on Lake Starnberg, then called Lake Würm. This small Renaissance hunting lodge became one of his favorite summer homes. At 16 he attended the Fairytale Maskenfest of 1862, a costume ball themed on German fairy tales.

  One companion from these years would stay loyal to the end. His eccentric cousin Duchess Elisabeth in Bavaria, later empress of Austria and queen of Hungary, became a lifelong friend.

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• 3. A Reluctant Sovereign

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  On the 14th of March 1864, Bavarians saw their new king in public for the first time, at the funeral of his father. Maximilian II had died after an illness of just three days. Ludwig, in his nineteenth year, inherited a throne he was not prepared for. He stood just under six feet four inches, remarkable for the era. His youth and brooding good looks made him popular. He kept his father's ministers and policies, because his real passions lay in art, music, and architecture.

  The last military parade Ludwig inspected took place on the 22nd of August 1875. His last court banquet followed on the 10th of February 1876. He disliked large public functions, and as the years passed he retreated to country castles to pursue creative projects. Seclusion did not damage his popularity. He enjoyed travelling the Bavarian countryside, chatting with farmers and labourers, and rewarding anyone who had been hospitable to him with lavish gifts.

  In August 1866, Ludwig's government went to war on the side of Austria against Prussia. The king had wanted neutrality, but Austria insisted that Bavaria honour its alliance duties within the German Confederation. Both lost, and Bavaria had to sign a mutual defence treaty with Prussia. Ludwig had never cared for military matters. He left the war to his ministers and withdrew with his aide Paul von Thurn und Taxis to Berg Palace and Rose Island in Lake Starnberg.

  In 1870, the Franco-Prussian War forced Bavaria to fight beside Prussia. After the victory over France, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck moved to complete German unification. In November 1870, Bavaria joined the North German Confederation and lost its independence. The Bavarian delegation, led by Minister President Count Otto von Bray-Steinburg, still won special rights known as the Reservatrechte. Bavaria kept its own diplomats and its own army, which passed to Prussian command only in wartime. Bavarian soldiers continued to swear their oath to the Bavarian king, and many kept their light-blue infantry uniforms.

  In December 1870, Bismarck used financial concessions to persuade Ludwig to write the Kaiserbrief. This letter endorsed King Wilhelm I of Prussia as German emperor, and the king's equerry, Maximilian Count von Holnstein, supported the effort. Ludwig still regretted the loss of independence. He refused to attend Wilhelm's proclamation at Versailles on the 18th of January and sent his brother Otto and his uncle Luitpold instead. When Wilhelm later passed through Munich on a private trip, Ludwig forbade his mother to receive her cousin at Nymphenburg, since it was not a state visit.

  Contrary to popular belief, Ludwig did his official work almost to the end of his life. At King's House on Schachen, one of his remote mountain cabins, telegraph lines to the nearest post office kept him in touch with his cabinet secretary. He often added his own remarks to documents, intervened in appointments and petitions for clemency, and picked up some knowledge of economic policy and church-state relations. Yet his ministers saw him less and less often at Linderhof Palace, his near-permanent home after the wars.

  After 1866, the Catholic-conservative, anti-Prussian Patriotic Party won an absolute majority in parliament. Ludwig appointed national-liberal, pro-Prussian ministers anyway, although his own sympathies lay closer to the Patriots. Showing his sovereignty mattered more to him than matching the vote. In a July 2010 interview with ZDF, the historian Bernhard Löffler argued that Ludwig never showed much political assertiveness and did not understand how a constitutional system worked. Increasingly he escaped into a dream of divine right and absolute monarchy. His idol and namesake was Louis XIV of France, whose life, and especially whose buildings, Ludwig studied intensively.

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• 4. Wagner's Patron

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  At 15, Ludwig saw Lohengrin, and ten months later he saw Tannhäuser. Wagner's operas fed his fantasy-filled imagination. The composer himself had a notorious reputation as a political radical and womanizer who was always on the run from creditors. Within months of taking the throne, Ludwig summoned him to court. On the 4th of May 1864, the 51-year-old Wagner received an unprecedented audience of one and three-quarter hours in the Munich Residenz. Afterward he wrote, "Alas, he is so handsome and wise, soulful and lovely, that I fear that his life must melt away in this vulgar world like a fleeting dream of the gods."

  A year after meeting the king, Wagner presented Tristan und Isolde in Munich to great acclaim. His extravagant and scandalous behavior unsettled conservative Bavarians, and in December 1865 Ludwig had to ask him to leave the city. The king even considered abdicating to follow him, but Wagner talked him out of it. Ludwig then provided the Tribschen residence in Switzerland, which he visited incognito on the 22nd of May 1866. There Wagner completed Die Meistersinger, which premiered in Munich in 1868.

  Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, the first two operas of the Ring Cycle, received special previews in Munich in 1869 and 1870 at Ludwig's demand. The reclusive king preferred to watch from the royal box in an empty opera house. Wagner next dreamed of his own opera house at Bayreuth, the Festspielhaus. Ludwig at first refused to back the grandiose scheme. When Wagner had exhausted every other source, the king lent him 100,000 thalers. He also paid for the Wahnfried villa, built in 1872-74. In 1876 Ludwig attended the dress rehearsal and the third public performance of the complete Ring Cycle. He skipped the premieres, which drew Kaiser Wilhelm I and many other German monarchs.

  Ludwig's love of the stage went well beyond Wagner. In 1864 he laid the foundation stone of a new theatre, now the Staatstheater am Gärtnerplatz. In 1867 he appointed Karl von Perfall to direct his court theatre. Under the king's supervision, Perfall introduced Munich audiences to Shakespeare, Calderón, Mozart, Gluck, Ibsen, and Weber, and raised the standard of productions of Schiller, Molière, and Corneille.

  Between 1872 and 1885, the king ordered 209 private performances in the two court theatres, for himself alone or with a single guest. They comprised 44 operas, 11 ballets, and 154 plays, many with Bourbon France as their theme, and cost 97,300 marks. He explained his solitude to the theatre manager Ernst Possart: "I can get no sense of illusion in the theatre so long as people keep staring at me, and follow my every expression through their opera-glasses. I want to look myself, not to be a spectacle for the masses."

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• 5. Private Life

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  Prince Paul of Thurn and Taxis, Ludwig's aide-de-camp, was the first great attachment of his adolescence. The two young men rode together, read poetry aloud, and acted out scenes from Wagner's romantic operas. Ludwig abruptly ended the relationship in November 1866. Paul later became engaged to a commoner.

  The 22nd of January 1867 brought the announcement of Ludwig's engagement to his cousin Duchess Sophie Charlotte in Bavaria. She was 19, the youngest sister of Empress Elisabeth. The pressure to produce an heir had been the great strain of his early reign. In a letter written days earlier, Ludwig told Sophie, "The main substance of our relationship has always been... Richard Wagner's remarkable and deeply moving destiny."

  At the formal engagement ball on the 22nd of February 1867, the shy king stayed barely an hour before vanishing without a word. In the carriage to Berg Palace he kept repeating, "I'd rather jump into the Alpsee... I'd rather jump into the Alpsee." He soon regretted the match and told his mother he would have a platonic "angelic marriage" with Sophie. He kept postponing the wedding. Sophie wrote offering to release him. In October, her father, Duke Maximilian Joseph in Bavaria, demanded that Ludwig either keep the new date or free his daughter. Ludwig cancelled the engagement that month.

  His farewell to his former fiancée read, "My beloved Elsa! Your cruel father has torn us apart. Eternally yours, Heinrich." The names came from characters in Wagner's Lohengrin. Sophie's disappointment seems to have been slight. During the sittings for the bridal portraits she had fallen in love with the court photographer Edgar Hanfstaengl, and she wrote that the engagement had put her "freedom in chains." She later married Prince Ferdinand, Duke of Alençon, at Possenhofen Castle. Ludwig unexpectedly attended the reception.

  In May 1867, Ludwig met Richard Hornig in the royal stables. Hornig was a riding master and an artillery reserve officer, and a secret, intimate love affair began almost at once. Ludwig made him master of the horse and later his private secretary, and took him along to Paris in July. When Hornig married in 1870, the king did not forgive him. Even so, Ludwig later gave him a villa on Lake Starnberg, where he often invited himself for tea. Other close male friends included the Hungarian actor Josef Kainz and the courtier Alfons Weber.

  Ludwig never married and had no known mistresses. His diary and private letters reveal strong homosexual desires, which he struggled to suppress in order to stay faithful to Catholic teaching. Bavaria had not punished homosexuality since 1813. The unification of Germany under Prussian leadership in 1871 changed that, because Paragraph 175 made sexual acts between men a crime.

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• 6. Castles and Debt

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  Ludwig's travels in 1867 set the course of his building career. He saw Eugène Viollet-le-Duc's work at the Château de Pierrefonds, the Palace of Versailles, and the Wartburg near Eisenach. In his letters he marvelled at how magnificently the French had glorified their culture, and how poor Bavaria looked beside it. He resolved to do the same for his own country. In 1868 he commissioned the first drawings, starting with Neuschwanstein and Herrenchiemsee.

  In 1869, Ludwig oversaw the laying of the cornerstone for Neuschwanstein on a mountaintop crag above Hohenschwangau, where he reputedly first pictured the castle as a boy. The fortress is Romanesque, with soaring fairy-tale towers. Its walls carry frescoes of the legends behind Wagner's operas. Christian glory and chaste love dominate the imagery, but the bedroom shows the illicit love of Tristan and Isolde. Ludwig first occupied his residence quarters in May 1884. The throne room is monumental, yet the throne itself was never finished, and the watch-tower and chapel never rose beyond their foundations. The castle opened to the public on the 1st of August 1886. It has since drawn more than 50 million visitors, including 1.3 million in 2008 alone, and Walt Disney took it as inspiration for the Sleeping Beauty castles at Disney parks.

  Linderhof Palace was finished in 1878, an ornate building in neo-French Rococo style with formal gardens. The grounds hold a Venus Grotto lit by electricity, where Ludwig was rowed in a shell-shaped boat. A large share of the Linderhof budget went into it. After seeing the Bayreuth performances, he built Hunding's Hut in the nearby forest. It copies the stage set for the first act of Die Walküre, with an artificial tree and a sword stuck in it.

  Inside Linderhof, the imagery reflects Ludwig's fascination with the absolutist France of the Ancien Régime. He cast himself as the Moon King, a Romantic shadow of Louis XIV, the Sun King, because he had fallen into the habit of turning night into day. He took moonlit sleigh rides in an eighteenth-century sleigh, with footmen in period livery. Only the king wore modern clothes. The lamp in the sleigh's crown was electric, powered by a battery. Touches like these make the Fairy Tale King seem far more modern than his backward-looking image.

  Herrenchiemsee, begun in 1878 on the island of Herreninsel in the Chiemsee, was a tribute to Louis XIV in the form of a partial copy of Versailles. Only the central section was built. Its Hall of Mirrors and the adjoining Halls of War and Peace stretch 98 meters, slightly longer than the original. Ludwig lived there for just 10 days in October 1885, and all work stopped when he died.

  On the roof of the royal apartment in the Munich Residenz, he also built a winter garden measuring 69.5 by 17.2 by 9.5 meters. It held an ornamental lake with a skiff, a painted panorama of the Himalayas, an Indian fisher-hut of bamboo, and a Moorish kiosk. Water leaking from the lake into the rooms below led to its demolition in 1897.

  Total costs between 1869 and 1886, published in 1968, came to 6,180,047 marks for Neuschwanstein, 8,460,937 marks for Linderhof, and 16,579,674 marks for Herrenchiemsee. The building sites gave work to many hundreds of local labourers and artisans and brought money to poor regions. The king paid from his personal fortune and from an annual state grant of 4.2 million Bavarian guilders, the Zivilliste, though court upkeep swallowed much of that.

  From 1873, Bismarck added an annual subsidy of 270,000 marks. It came from the Guelph Fund, made up of the seized assets of King George V of Hanover, whom Prussia had dethroned in 1866. The payments passed through Swiss banks in strict secrecy and bought Bavarian loyalty. Ludwig never appointed a government led by the anti-Prussian Patriotic Party. The two men had met only once, at a banquet at Nymphenburg when Ludwig was still crown prince. Bismarck had flattered him by calling himself a "vassal of the Wittelsbachs," and they corresponded for the rest of Ludwig's life.

  By 1885, Ludwig owed 14 million marks, much of it borrowed from his family. His financial ministers urged economy, but he kept planning. He wanted a castle on Falkenstein near Pfronten in the Allgäu, a Byzantine palace in the Graswangtal, and a Chinese summer palace by the Plansee in Tyrol. None got beyond plans. Artists who knew their designs would never be built produced ever more extravagant sketches, and many now hang in the King Ludwig II Museum at Herrenchiemsee. He demanded loans from the royal houses of Europe and thought of dismissing his entire cabinet. The ministers moved first.

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• 7. Conspiracy and Deposition

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  Prince Luitpold, the king's uncle, was the ministers' choice to take over. He agreed on one condition: reliable proof that Ludwig was helplessly insane. Between January and March 1886, the conspirators assembled a Medical Report, the Ärztliches Gutachten. Count Maximilian von Holnstein, by then disillusioned with the king and keen to see him fall, gathered most of the material. He used bribery and his high rank to extract complaints, anecdotes, and gossip from the king's servants.

  The list ran from pathological shyness and neglect of state business to dining outdoors in cold weather and wearing heavy overcoats in summer. It also cited sloppy, childish table manners, expensive expeditions by servants abroad to research architectural details, and violent threats toward servants. How accurate these accusations were may never be known.

  Bismarck was shown the report and doubted it. He called it "rakings from the King's wastepaper-basket and cupboards." He remarked that the ministers wished to sacrifice the king, because otherwise they had no chance of saving themselves. He suggested taking the matter to the Bavarian Diet, but he did not stop the plan.

  In early June the report was finished and signed by four psychiatrists. They were Bernhard von Gudden, chief of the Munich Asylum, his son-in-law Hubert von Grashey, and their colleagues Friedrich Wilhelm Hagen and Max Hubrich. They diagnosed paranoia and concluded, "Suffering from such a disorder, freedom of action can no longer be allowed and Your Majesty is declared incapable of ruling, which incapacity will be not only for a year's duration, but for the length of Your Majesty's life." None of them had examined the king. Gudden had met him only once, 12 years earlier. Ludwig's younger brother Otto was considered insane, which handed the ministers a convenient claim of hereditary madness.

  Today the paranoia diagnosis is not considered correct. Ludwig's behavior is instead read as a schizotypal personality disorder, and he may have suffered from Pick's disease in his last years. The autopsy report mentions a frontotemporal lobar degeneration, which supports that idea. The German brain researcher Heinz Häfner disagrees that clear evidence of insanity ever existed. Others suggest that chloroform, used to control a chronic toothache, may explain his state.

  At 4 am on the 10th of June 1886, a government commission that included Holnstein and Gudden arrived at Neuschwanstein with the deposition papers. A faithful coachman, Fritz Osterholzer, had tipped the king off an hour or two earlier. Ludwig ordered the local police to protect him, and the commissioners were turned back from the castle gate at gunpoint. The 47-year-old Baroness Spera von Truchseß, loyal to the king, attacked the men with her umbrella. She then rushed to the king's apartments to name the conspirators. Ludwig had the commissioners arrested, held them for several hours, and released them.

  That same day, the government under Minister-President Johann von Lutz proclaimed Luitpold Prince Regent. Ludwig telegraphed his cousin Prince Ludwig Ferdinand, the one relative besides Elisabeth who stayed on friendly terms. Luitpold prevented him from leaving Nymphenburg to answer the call. Friends urged the king to flee or to show himself in Munich and win back the people. Ludwig hesitated. A Bamberg newspaper published a statement on the 11th of June, allegedly drafted by his aide-de-camp Count Alfred Dürckheim, which called on "every loyal Bavarian to rally around my loyal supporters to thwart the planned treason against the King and the fatherland." The government seized most copies. The proclamation's authenticity is doubted, because it is dated the 9th of June, before the commission arrived, uses "I" instead of the royal "We," and contains spelling errors.

  As Ludwig dithered, his support melted away. Peasants who rallied to him were dispersed. The police guarding his castle were replaced by a detachment of 36 men who sealed every entrance. He finally decided to escape, but he was too late. A second commission arrived in the early hours of the 12th of June, and Ludwig was seized just after midnight. At 4 am he was led to a waiting carriage. He asked Gudden, "How can you declare me insane? After all, you have never seen or examined me before." Gudden answered that it was unnecessary, because the servants' reports were copious, fully substantiated, and overwhelming. The carriage took the king to Berg Castle on the shore of Lake Starnberg, south of Munich.

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• 8. Death and Legacy

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  On the afternoon of the 13th of June 1886, Gudden strolled with Ludwig through the grounds of Berg Castle, escorted by two attendants. Afterward he told other doctors he was optimistic about treating his royal patient. After dinner, around 6 pm, Ludwig asked him to accompany him on another walk along the lakeshore. Gudden agreed, and may even have suggested it, and told the aides not to come. His words, "Es darf kein Pfleger mitgehen," meant "No attendant may walk with us." Whether the attendants were meant to follow at a distance is unclear. The two men were last seen about 6:30 pm and were due back at 8.

  The whole castle staff searched for more than two hours in a gale with heavy rain. At 10:30 pm they found both bodies near the shore, with heads and shoulders above the shallow water. Gendarmes patrolling the park had seen and heard nothing unusual.

  The death was officially ruled a suicide by drowning. The autopsy found no water in Ludwig's lungs, although a laryngospasm may explain that. Doubts remain. Ludwig had been a very strong swimmer in his youth, the water was roughly waist deep, and he had expressed no suicidal feelings during the crisis. Gudden's body showed blows to the head and neck and signs of strangulation, which raised the suspicion that he was strangled, though no further evidence supports it. Another theory holds that Ludwig died of natural causes, such as a heart attack or stroke, brought on by lake water at 12 degrees Celsius during an escape attempt.

  Jakob Lidl, the king's personal fisherman, lived from 1864 to 1933. He said that three years after the king's death he was made to swear an oath of silence, and that the state promised to look after his family. Notes found after his death describe him waiting behind bushes with his boat, to row the king out to loyalists. He wrote that as Ludwig stepped up to the boat, "a shot rang out from the bank." The autopsy found no scars or wounds on the king's body. Years later, Countess Josephine von Wrbna-Kaunitz showed afternoon tea guests a grey Loden coat with two bullet holes in the back, asserting that Ludwig had worn it.

  Ludwig lay in state in the royal chapel of the Munich Residenz, dressed in the regalia of the Order of Saint Hubert. In his right hand he held a posy of white jasmine picked for him by Empress Elisabeth. An elaborate funeral took place on the 19th of June 1886, with a procession through Munich, and his body was placed in the crypt of St. Michael's Church.

  Otto succeeded his brother, but he had been under medical supervision since 1883 and was considered incapacitated by mental illness, on Gudden's diagnosis. Luitpold therefore remained regent until his own death in 1912 at the age of 91. His eldest son, also named Ludwig, took over as regent. After 13 more months, in November 1913, he deposed Otto, who was still alive and still institutionalized, and declared himself King Ludwig III of Bavaria. That reign lasted until the end of World War I, when monarchy ended throughout Germany.

  Empress Elisabeth had her own verdict: "The King was not mad; he was just an eccentric living in a world of dreams. They might have treated him more gently, and thus perhaps spared him so terrible an end." Ludwig once said, "I wish to remain an eternal enigma to myself and to others." Wagner's late career is also part of his legacy. Without the king's support, the composer almost certainly could not have finished the Ring Cycle or written Parsifal. The castles that ruined Ludwig financially passed to the Bavarian state in 1923, a gift from Crown Prince Rupprecht. They have since paid for themselves many times over and attract millions of tourists each year.

  The Swan King is said to have inspired the story of Tchaikovsky's ballet Swan Lake, because he grew up near a lake called the Schwansee, or Swan Lake. Films about him include Helmut Käutner's Ludwig II in 1955, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's Ludwig: Requiem for a Virgin King in 1972, and Luchino Visconti's Ludwig in 1973. Ted Alspach designed the board game Castles of Mad King Ludwig, released in 2014. On the 15th of March 2023, Ludwig II joined the strategy game Civilization VI as downloadable content, rewarding players who build great architectural and cultural feats.

  Three years after his death, a small memorial chapel was built overlooking the place where he died, and a cross was set in the lake. Bavarian tradition sent the king's heart in a silver urn to the Shrine of Our Lady of Altötting, where it rests beside those of his father and grandfather. A remembrance ceremony is held there every year on the 13th of June.

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