June 8, 2019 • 24 mins
In this 2010 episode, previous hosts Katie and Sarah look at Ludwig II of Bavaria. From his opulent, solitary dinners to the amazing Neuschwanstein Castle, it's no surprise that King Ludwig II was known as an eccentric. In fact, people thought he was mad. But why?
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday everyone. Today we are going back to a
frequent listener request that is lit Big, the second of Bavaria,
the eccentric monarch who was sometimes nicknamed the Mad King.
This episode is from July, featuring previous hosts Katie and Sarah,
and they talk about how that nickname is really a misnomer.
(00:23):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy.
Today we're going to start our episode with a housekeeping
tip from King Ludvig, the second builder of Neuche bon
(00:46):
Stein and patron of Wagner. Sarah take it from here,
all right. So, if you enjoy really opulent multi course
dinners with your imaginary friends, but you don't want a
bunch of servants and footman, oh I don't interrupting them.
A changing of the course is interrupting the service, you
should install a trapped door dinner table. So that way,
when you're done with your plate, or when Louis fourt
(01:09):
is done with his plate, you simply press a button
and then wait in your settings will descend into the floor,
and soon enough the whole table will reappear, freshly laid out,
new food, new plates, and you can get back to
entertaining your guests. That is a true story, and it's
no wonder that Ludwig is part of a popularly requested
(01:30):
trio of topics, the king himself, his castles, and his composer.
And there's a lot of lovable weirdness here in this story,
and some eccentric cities, plus some enormous building projects and
bizarre royal families, which you know how much we love those,
and you know, who knows, We might even mention our
most favorite theme of all, which are most loyal listeners
(01:54):
will know what that is right away. But to start off,
we're going to go for another common theme, which is
sad royal childhood's Soldvig the Second, who is also known
as Louis the second, was born in Munich at Nimfenburg
Palace on August forty five, which interestingly was the same
day and same hour that his grandfather and namesake was born,
(02:17):
and he is a vital Spock, a member of Europe's
longest ruling dynasty. They ruled Bavaria continuously from eleven eighty
to nineteen eighteen, which is when the last of their
line was forced to abdicate at the end of World
War One. And initially this family ruled as dukes and
duke electors. Some were Holy Roman Emperors, but by eighteen
(02:38):
o six their duchy is raised to a kingdom by
Napoleon and they become kings. Max the First, Ludvig the
seconds great grandfather is the first vital Spot king, but
Lidvig's grandfather, King Ludvig the First, is more famous for
his womanizing than anything else, and he's even decorated the
Nippenburg Palace with or trips of all these gorgeous society women.
(03:02):
It's called the Gallery of Beauties. You can still see
it today. I liked author Michael White described it as
a room of high class pin ups. But um, this
is a pretty conservative state, so people would like their
king to at least keep this discreet. And he loses
it completely when he meets Lola Montez, who's a beautiful
(03:22):
Irish woman who's pretending to be a Spanish aristocrat. She
is a trip. We have to cover her in a
later podcast, Yeah, we we might. And they have this
very open relationship. People really don't like it, and the
king is forced to abdicate in favor of his son,
Maximilian the Second, and this is of course Ludwig the
seconds father. So Maximilian is not a big fan of
(03:43):
being a king, though he would really rather be a
professor study read books. And he's also not interested in
his son. So this gives you a little background on
what Ludvig's childhood is going to be like. And his mother,
Marie of Prussia, is exactly the opposite of her husband
in every way except one. But she's also completely uninterested
(04:04):
in her children and spends maybe an hour a day
with them at the very most. She's athletic and pretty
and is proud to say that she's never read a book.
So I don't think she can hang with us now,
not at all. We should also say that Lidvig's parents
are cousins and that his family, aside from his parents
being cousins, is severely inbred. Another thing to keep in
(04:25):
mind as we go on. So Little Ludvig becomes heir
to the throne at two and a half, and life
is pretty sad for a crown prince. He's lonely, he's neglected.
He's also pampered, though, because every wish must be catered to,
and he's very undisciplined, and the birth of his brother
Otto only further splits this very limited and especially this
(04:52):
is bad when Otto starts to suffer from hallucinations and
requires a lot more care and attention than Lidvic can self.
And his childhood, as Sarah points out, is actually a
lot like the palace he was born in. It's very formal,
it's grand, but it's also isolated, and so perhaps it's
no wonder that he turns to elaborate reimaginings of medieval
(05:15):
architecture as an adult. But since architecture is such an
important part of Ludvig's later life, we should go into
a little more detail about his childhood architecture. He grows
up around the Victuals Box. Official home is in Munich.
They don't spend or at least Ludwig doesn't spend a
terribly large amount of time there, because being in Munich
(05:37):
means work in business, and we don't do a lot
of this family and Livig instead grows up at Hoenshvana,
which is about forty miles away from Munich. And it
was a palace built by his father, and the walls
there are covered in murals of German legends and you
can actually see these today, they're still there. And uh,
(05:58):
these legends a lot with biblical stories really fuel this
poor lonely young boy's imagination. So you're bored at home,
you read some Bible stories. Maybe you dress up like
a nun. This is what he does and are shy.
Imaginative boy is also really obsessed with his own power.
(06:20):
It's not all these sweet imaginative games. At one point,
he tries to strangle his younger brother and instead of apologizing,
he says that Otto is his vassal and had disobeyed him.
And he steals from a shop and tells a governess
it doesn't matter because everything will belong to him someday.
So very healthy mindset. Yeah, So, becoming Crown Princess Ataler
(06:43):
was obviously the first major event in Livig's life, really
shaping who he became in his future. But the second
major event in his life is his discovery of Richard
Wagner at age thirteen. And I'm really tempted to talk
more about the composer and a later episode because he's
really interesting and really controversial. But for now we're just
(07:05):
going to say that Ludwig loved Wagner in caps on
my outline. Yeah, he wants to be Wagner's swan Knight.
He loves the music, he loves the big, elaborate theatrical sets,
and most of all, he loves the stories because, after all,
a lot of Wagner's music is based on those same
Teutonic legends that Lidvig has literally grown up seeing around
(07:30):
his bedroom walls. Yes, his imagination comes to life in
a moody teenager. And our moody teenager became a moody
king when his father died in eighteen sixty four, possibly
of syphilis. This might be our other new theme. And
eighteen year old Ludwig inherits the throne, and he looks
like a king. He's very tall, he's six four, he's slender,
(07:53):
he has a thick, curly black hair. He's extremely handsome.
He looks like what Prince Charming should be. People go
crazy when they see him during the funeral procession. And
he's a romantic hero as well as the king. Yeah,
it almost only helps that he's so moody and so
bookish it It adds to this the handsome brooding men
(08:16):
exactly like we said earlier, though, he's really obsessed with Wagner,
and one of the first matters of business when he's
king is to send for the composer, and the very
indebted Wagner moves to Munich makes all these immediate financial
(08:40):
demands like I need a new theater King Ludwig, and
Ludvig is happy to oblige. The politicians, however, um freak out.
To put it in nice historical terms, they're also getting
really worried, not only because Ldvig is spending so much
money on this composer, but because Ludvig really loves Wagner
(09:00):
like I loves loves Yes. He writes him passionate letters,
and Wagner, who's smart enough to work his job, returns
in kind. Wagner at the time, is of course, hooking
up with his mistress and future wife, Cosima, who's the
daughter of Franz List and the woman largely responsible for
(09:22):
later creating the cult of Wagner, and once the team
King told Wagner that he would give up his kingship
and come live with him, Wagner realized perhaps things had
gone a little too far, had to talk him down,
hides the woman in his bed, and eventually the Bavarian
cabinet says that enough is enough, and Wagner is kicked
(09:43):
out after a year. Yeah, we don't want another Lola Montez, everybody,
So moving on from this early infatuation, Ludwig seeks consolation
in his best friend, who is his cousin Sissy, also
the Empress of Austria. And she's a little out there too,
like a lot of the victuals box. She suffers from interaxia,
(10:07):
she suffers from manic depression, but she really understands Ludvig,
and she understands the problems he's facing and is able
to talk to him. You know. They write letters to
each other, and suddenly he's engaged to her little sister, Sophie.
And you might wonder how this extremely awkward young man
(10:27):
comes together with this beautiful young woman and there apparent interests.
Shared interests was Wagner, of course, And I feel like
today they would meet on some sort of internet message board.
If we're both attractive and we both love Wagner, we
should probably get married. So they get their official photos
made up, they plan the wedding and then he starts
(10:48):
to get cold feet and he pushes back the wedding date.
He asks his doctor to certify him as unfit to marry,
and finally he tells Sophie that there is not the
love which is necessar very for a matrimonial union, so
burn Sophie, and that, of course, is because he was
probably gay. And in addition to his obsession with Wagner,
(11:11):
his secret diaries disclose liaisons with lots of actors and
maybe some military officers, and they were destroyed in World
War Two. But a lot of his inner turmoil seems
to have come from guilt about his sexuality, because he
was a devout Catholic. Yeah, but this isn't all to
say that Ludwig is totally isolated from matters of state
(11:33):
at this point of what we've described so far might
sound like somebody who isn't going to work every day, um,
But that isolation really comes later. In eighteen sixty six,
he actually enters the Seven Weeks War on the side
of Austria against Prussia. UM. But at the defeat of Austria,
he signs an alliance with Prussia and works to reconcile
these two big powers in Germany. So this alliance with
(11:57):
Prussia comes into play in eighteen seventy when they're the
war against France and he sticks with Prussia, avoiding a
potential Franco Austrian Bavarian alliance, and Prussia wins, and then
at the urging of Bismarck, Ludwig actually helps put out
the call to all the other princes of Germany to
unite into this German Empire under the rule of the
(12:19):
Prussian King, who is from there on out known as
the Kaiser. But Ludvig is kind of disappointed with aspects
of this new arrangement. It's not exactly what he had
hoped it would be. His territory isn't expanded, and you know,
as as one of the kings who's not the Kaiser,
he doesn't have as much power as he liked. And
he thought there would maybe be some sort of sharing
(12:41):
of the crown between his state and Prussia, and that's
not how it worked out. So he's still King of Bavaria,
but now it's just a state and not a kingdom.
And again he's a bit of a figurehead, so you
know why bother he retreats into increased solitude. And what
do you do when you don't really have a kingdom
(13:03):
to run, you don't have your composer to live with,
and you really don't want to get married. You build
your own kublican right, or three of them. So Littvig
builds three castles and designs three more, and they occupy
him during his increasingly isolated life that starts in the
eighteen seventies, and from this point on he's mostly alone.
(13:25):
He dines alone, he goes to his theatrical performances alone.
He switches to this vampire like nocturnal schedule where he
gets up at five pm um. But his first major
building project, he doesn't. He doesn't start off right away
with a huge castle. He starts off with a remodeling project,
and that's redecorating his father's castle and his childhood home
(13:48):
at Hohenschwangau. And he must have caught a nice view
from there, because he starts to plan a bigger project,
which of course is Nisch von Stein across the lake.
And this is seriously the Disney Castle. And while it's
not the most elaborate of his creations, it's definitely the
most recognizable. It's a reimagining of what a medieval castle
(14:11):
looks like, with plenty of French Rococo and Bavarian Baroque
thrown in. And it's planned by a theatrical designer, not
an architect, and it's basically Wagner themed, with Swan shaped
taps and an indoor grotto from Venusberg the opening apparition
in Wagner's opera Townhauser. And it takes seventeen years to construct,
(14:34):
its actually never finished, and Ludvig only spends about six
months their total all added up together. So the next
place he builds is Linderhof, which is of home year
sort of residents, and it's about twelve miles from Nu Schwenstein,
and he builds it between eighteen sixty nine and seventy eight,
and it's actually modeled on trin On, though so not
(14:58):
terribly homy to so the still an elaborate palace. He
really liked the Bourbons. His coaches and his sleighs were
staffed by coachman dressed in reproduction Louis the fourteenth Livery.
He would spend about two weeks of every month at
this house and had a harmonium set up for Wagner,
along with that disappearing table we mentioned in the intro.
(15:21):
But it's here that he starts all the weird stuff,
waking up at five pm, dining with his imaginary friends,
then going out for midnight carriage rides as he again
just retreats more and more from society, but he sticks
with the Wagner theme for this place to Linderhoff has
the Venus Grotto another Venus grotto imagined again from ton Hauser,
(15:45):
and he would row around in the man made lake
on this gilded seashell. You can look up pictures of this.
It's a pretty cool. Sarah sent me one today and
we decided that might be a better use of our time.
And the lake is actually illuminated by one of Bavaria's
first power ants, because who wants a dark, creepy cave
made out of plaster needs to have all these cool
(16:05):
blue and red lights. It also had a moorish pavilion
with a peacock theme perfect for opium smoking if you're
so inclined, and a hunting cabin with plenty of faux
wood stumps and fake trees, again Disney Alert. But his
(16:30):
final big project was haren Hens, which was constructed between
eighteen seventy eight and eighteen eighty five, and this time
he really honors the Bourbons and even tries to upstage
them because the castle is a copy of their Sailles,
only bigger and better. Yeah, it has an even grander
hall of mirrors where he would read under the light
(16:51):
of seventy nine candelabras with one thousand, eight hundred forty
eight candles. It seems like you need a lot of
servants for that. Or he would take a bath in
this marble tub that took eight hours to heat and fill,
and we didn't mention this yet either. The castle was
built on an island in the middle of an alpine lake,
(17:11):
a very exclusive island. I would imagine, a very exclusive island.
It's going to make it harder to build too, if
you have to row everything out to the island well,
and this castle is his downfall. Only twenty of the
seventy rooms are finished. It cost more to build than
nischvon Stein and Linderhof together, and he only spends nine
(17:33):
nights there, so multiply those candles by nine nights exactly.
So this makes us come to the question, how did
Ludwig pay for all this, and initially he financed these
castles himself. He saw himself as a modern son king,
and accordingly he thought he needed to celebrate this through
the construction of castles through the patronage of artists such
(17:55):
as Wagner and others. But it's not that long before
he runs out money. Obviously, he starts to borrow in
his own pay way way ahead. He tries to get
loans from the Shawl of Iran, from the Turkish Sultan,
from the Duke of Westminster. He even orders his cabinet
to find loans and is very threatening and forceful when
(18:16):
they're coming up short. And so by eighteen eighty six
he's being sued for debt, which is terribly embarrassing, and
he has this hair brand plan to rob a London
bank doesn't work out, so the government is starting to
get seriously worried, like is our king crazy or is
he just spending way too much money? Either way, this
(18:38):
has got to stop. He was certainly lonely, he told
an aide to camp. Sometimes I call one of the
domestic servants or postilions and asked him to tell me
about his home and his family, otherwise I would completely
forget the art of speech, and in his private journals
he appeals to dead rulers for help. Louis the fourteenth,
Charles the First of England. These are his friends, and
(19:02):
it's interesting a lot of the stuff I read about
these castles and about Ludvig. Apparently the tour guides refrain
from calling him the mad King anymore, which has long
been his nickname. It makes sense. It's not a very
nice thing to call someone. Sorry for using it in
our title. Little Wig Eccentric is more often used today.
But his family definitely has some mental health issues. His
(19:26):
brother Otto, who we mentioned at the beginning, is schizophrenic
and he's put into an asylum. His aunt Alexandra is
put into a convent because she's positive she's swallowed a
glass grand piano. But if Ludvig is crazy, he's very
lucid at times too. He writes these eloquent letters, he
(19:46):
studies French history and literature, and he's even politically astute
when he actually tries, you know, when he's not worrying
about his castle castles or his opera and actually gets
to work well. His best friend, I think, says it
best Sissy, and she said he is not mad enough
to be locked up, but to abnormal to manage comfortably
(20:08):
in the world with reasonable people. So that's the assessment
from the person who knew him better than anyone. Yeah.
So finally the viddles Box, worried that Lidvig would bankrupt
their family, go to the Prime Minister and say that, well,
you know, we'd be okay if you deposed the king.
And so a panel of doctors declare living insane without
(20:31):
seeing him. It's kind of like the tablet um and
the noted psychiatrist doctor Bernhard von Gutten is one of these.
And so on June tenth, Prince Leopold, who is Ludwig's uncle,
declares himself Prince Regent and Otto will be king officially
(20:52):
Otto the First and Lidvig is at nisch fon Stein
when the delegation finally comes to arrest him, and the
soldiers and peasants try to stop them, try to save Ludwig,
but he's led away. He's taken to the Vittles Box
castle Berg, which is on Lake Starnberg, and he's attended
there by the doctor and that's when things start to
(21:14):
get kind of weird. On June thirteen, he asks to
attend mass but is refused, and later in the day,
after a huge meal lots of wine, he gets Dr
Gooden to walk along the lake with him, but they
don't come back, and a search party finds that the
king has drowned face up, which is strange because he
(21:35):
was a very good swimmer and he was only in
four ft of water. Dr Gouden is also dead, So
what happened there? Obviously a lot of theories about this,
and the main assumption for many years is that the
king committed suicide because he had no future. He was
essentially a prisoner, and Dr Guten drowned trying to say
(22:00):
of him. Others have suggested that he was perhaps trying
to cross the lake to meet people sent by Sissy
and escape to Austria and escape to her, and then
others say he was murdered, maybe even that he was
shot and not drowned at all. And we would probably
no more, I feel if we opened his crypt in
(22:21):
Munich at St. Michael's. All of the victuals box are
interred there and they have identical cripts, but his stands
out because it's always covered with flowers, and he's still
very popular, despite the fact that he nearly bankrupted his family.
His castles are today among Bavaria's main attractions. Who doesn't
want to go see the Sleeping Beauty Castle? Well, and interestingly,
(22:43):
they started to become these major attractions. I think within
weeks after his death, people were paying to go to them.
So in the long run, it's been a pretty good
investment for Bavaria. I'd say Ludwig's own memorial is far
simpler than any of these castles. It's across in the
lake at the spot where he drowned. But Sarah and
I were talking about it's always so strange for us
(23:06):
to talk about these subjects who are supposedly so well loved.
We keep reading, you know, the well loved so and so,
but we have no idea how these people are actually
viewed in their own country. Yeah, if you're in the area,
let us know what you think about Ludwig. It always
has a little funny thing. Supposedly you people love this guy,
but you know, maybe not. It's easy enough to see though,
(23:30):
why he would be so well loved. He's a gentle
pacifist king. He's extremely eccentric, but that only makes him
more interesting. It's also always interesting, like we talked about
in our Emperor Norton podcast, to try to diagnose people
posthumously and figure out what sort of mental illness Ludwig
(23:51):
was grappling with, and it was in fact anything at all.
And that's one of the reasons I think people are
so interested him that end to his gorgeous castle and
this mysterious fate that we simply do not have the
answer to. Ye, thank you so much for joining us
on this Saturday. If you have heard an email address
(24:14):
or a Facebook you are l or something similar over
the course of today's episode, since it is from the
archive that might be out of date now, you can
email us at History podcast at how stuff Works dot com,
and you can find us all over social media at
missed in History, and you can subscribe to our show
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and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff You Missed
(24:40):
in Hisstory Class is a production of I Heart Radios
How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio,
visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Happy Saturday everyone. Today we are going back to a
frequent listener request that is lit Big, the second of Bavaria,
the eccentric monarch who was sometimes nicknamed the Mad King.
This episode is from July, featuring previous hosts Katie and Sarah,
and they talk about how that nickname is really a misnomer.
(00:23):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy.
Today we're going to start our episode with a housekeeping
tip from King Ludvig, the second builder of Neuche bon
(00:46):
Stein and patron of Wagner. Sarah take it from here,
all right. So, if you enjoy really opulent multi course
dinners with your imaginary friends, but you don't want a
bunch of servants and footman, oh I don't interrupting them.
A changing of the course is interrupting the service, you
should install a trapped door dinner table. So that way,
when you're done with your plate, or when Louis fourt
(01:09):
is done with his plate, you simply press a button
and then wait in your settings will descend into the floor,
and soon enough the whole table will reappear, freshly laid out,
new food, new plates, and you can get back to
entertaining your guests. That is a true story, and it's
no wonder that Ludwig is part of a popularly requested
(01:30):
trio of topics, the king himself, his castles, and his composer.
And there's a lot of lovable weirdness here in this story,
and some eccentric cities, plus some enormous building projects and
bizarre royal families, which you know how much we love those,
and you know, who knows, We might even mention our
most favorite theme of all, which are most loyal listeners
(01:54):
will know what that is right away. But to start off,
we're going to go for another common theme, which is
sad royal childhood's Soldvig the Second, who is also known
as Louis the second, was born in Munich at Nimfenburg
Palace on August forty five, which interestingly was the same
day and same hour that his grandfather and namesake was born,
(02:17):
and he is a vital Spock, a member of Europe's
longest ruling dynasty. They ruled Bavaria continuously from eleven eighty
to nineteen eighteen, which is when the last of their
line was forced to abdicate at the end of World
War One. And initially this family ruled as dukes and
duke electors. Some were Holy Roman Emperors, but by eighteen
(02:38):
o six their duchy is raised to a kingdom by
Napoleon and they become kings. Max the First, Ludvig the
seconds great grandfather is the first vital Spot king, but
Lidvig's grandfather, King Ludvig the First, is more famous for
his womanizing than anything else, and he's even decorated the
Nippenburg Palace with or trips of all these gorgeous society women.
(03:02):
It's called the Gallery of Beauties. You can still see
it today. I liked author Michael White described it as
a room of high class pin ups. But um, this
is a pretty conservative state, so people would like their
king to at least keep this discreet. And he loses
it completely when he meets Lola Montez, who's a beautiful
(03:22):
Irish woman who's pretending to be a Spanish aristocrat. She
is a trip. We have to cover her in a
later podcast, Yeah, we we might. And they have this
very open relationship. People really don't like it, and the
king is forced to abdicate in favor of his son,
Maximilian the Second, and this is of course Ludwig the
seconds father. So Maximilian is not a big fan of
(03:43):
being a king, though he would really rather be a
professor study read books. And he's also not interested in
his son. So this gives you a little background on
what Ludvig's childhood is going to be like. And his mother,
Marie of Prussia, is exactly the opposite of her husband
in every way except one. But she's also completely uninterested
(04:04):
in her children and spends maybe an hour a day
with them at the very most. She's athletic and pretty
and is proud to say that she's never read a book.
So I don't think she can hang with us now,
not at all. We should also say that Lidvig's parents
are cousins and that his family, aside from his parents
being cousins, is severely inbred. Another thing to keep in
(04:25):
mind as we go on. So Little Ludvig becomes heir
to the throne at two and a half, and life
is pretty sad for a crown prince. He's lonely, he's neglected.
He's also pampered, though, because every wish must be catered to,
and he's very undisciplined, and the birth of his brother
Otto only further splits this very limited and especially this
(04:52):
is bad when Otto starts to suffer from hallucinations and
requires a lot more care and attention than Lidvic can self.
And his childhood, as Sarah points out, is actually a
lot like the palace he was born in. It's very formal,
it's grand, but it's also isolated, and so perhaps it's
no wonder that he turns to elaborate reimaginings of medieval
(05:15):
architecture as an adult. But since architecture is such an
important part of Ludvig's later life, we should go into
a little more detail about his childhood architecture. He grows
up around the Victuals Box. Official home is in Munich.
They don't spend or at least Ludwig doesn't spend a
terribly large amount of time there, because being in Munich
(05:37):
means work in business, and we don't do a lot
of this family and Livig instead grows up at Hoenshvana,
which is about forty miles away from Munich. And it
was a palace built by his father, and the walls
there are covered in murals of German legends and you
can actually see these today, they're still there. And uh,
(05:58):
these legends a lot with biblical stories really fuel this
poor lonely young boy's imagination. So you're bored at home,
you read some Bible stories. Maybe you dress up like
a nun. This is what he does and are shy.
Imaginative boy is also really obsessed with his own power.
(06:20):
It's not all these sweet imaginative games. At one point,
he tries to strangle his younger brother and instead of apologizing,
he says that Otto is his vassal and had disobeyed him.
And he steals from a shop and tells a governess
it doesn't matter because everything will belong to him someday.
So very healthy mindset. Yeah, So, becoming Crown Princess Ataler
(06:43):
was obviously the first major event in Livig's life, really
shaping who he became in his future. But the second
major event in his life is his discovery of Richard
Wagner at age thirteen. And I'm really tempted to talk
more about the composer and a later episode because he's
really interesting and really controversial. But for now we're just
(07:05):
going to say that Ludwig loved Wagner in caps on
my outline. Yeah, he wants to be Wagner's swan Knight.
He loves the music, he loves the big, elaborate theatrical sets,
and most of all, he loves the stories because, after all,
a lot of Wagner's music is based on those same
Teutonic legends that Lidvig has literally grown up seeing around
(07:30):
his bedroom walls. Yes, his imagination comes to life in
a moody teenager. And our moody teenager became a moody
king when his father died in eighteen sixty four, possibly
of syphilis. This might be our other new theme. And
eighteen year old Ludwig inherits the throne, and he looks
like a king. He's very tall, he's six four, he's slender,
(07:53):
he has a thick, curly black hair. He's extremely handsome.
He looks like what Prince Charming should be. People go
crazy when they see him during the funeral procession. And
he's a romantic hero as well as the king. Yeah,
it almost only helps that he's so moody and so
bookish it It adds to this the handsome brooding men
(08:16):
exactly like we said earlier, though, he's really obsessed with Wagner,
and one of the first matters of business when he's
king is to send for the composer, and the very
indebted Wagner moves to Munich makes all these immediate financial
(08:40):
demands like I need a new theater King Ludwig, and
Ludvig is happy to oblige. The politicians, however, um freak out.
To put it in nice historical terms, they're also getting
really worried, not only because Ldvig is spending so much
money on this composer, but because Ludvig really loves Wagner
(09:00):
like I loves loves Yes. He writes him passionate letters,
and Wagner, who's smart enough to work his job, returns
in kind. Wagner at the time, is of course, hooking
up with his mistress and future wife, Cosima, who's the
daughter of Franz List and the woman largely responsible for
(09:22):
later creating the cult of Wagner, and once the team
King told Wagner that he would give up his kingship
and come live with him, Wagner realized perhaps things had
gone a little too far, had to talk him down,
hides the woman in his bed, and eventually the Bavarian
cabinet says that enough is enough, and Wagner is kicked
(09:43):
out after a year. Yeah, we don't want another Lola Montez, everybody,
So moving on from this early infatuation, Ludwig seeks consolation
in his best friend, who is his cousin Sissy, also
the Empress of Austria. And she's a little out there too,
like a lot of the victuals box. She suffers from interaxia,
(10:07):
she suffers from manic depression, but she really understands Ludvig,
and she understands the problems he's facing and is able
to talk to him. You know. They write letters to
each other, and suddenly he's engaged to her little sister, Sophie.
And you might wonder how this extremely awkward young man
(10:27):
comes together with this beautiful young woman and there apparent interests.
Shared interests was Wagner, of course, And I feel like
today they would meet on some sort of internet message board.
If we're both attractive and we both love Wagner, we
should probably get married. So they get their official photos
made up, they plan the wedding and then he starts
(10:48):
to get cold feet and he pushes back the wedding date.
He asks his doctor to certify him as unfit to marry,
and finally he tells Sophie that there is not the
love which is necessar very for a matrimonial union, so
burn Sophie, and that, of course, is because he was
probably gay. And in addition to his obsession with Wagner,
(11:11):
his secret diaries disclose liaisons with lots of actors and
maybe some military officers, and they were destroyed in World
War Two. But a lot of his inner turmoil seems
to have come from guilt about his sexuality, because he
was a devout Catholic. Yeah, but this isn't all to
say that Ludwig is totally isolated from matters of state
(11:33):
at this point of what we've described so far might
sound like somebody who isn't going to work every day, um,
But that isolation really comes later. In eighteen sixty six,
he actually enters the Seven Weeks War on the side
of Austria against Prussia. UM. But at the defeat of Austria,
he signs an alliance with Prussia and works to reconcile
these two big powers in Germany. So this alliance with
(11:57):
Prussia comes into play in eighteen seventy when they're the
war against France and he sticks with Prussia, avoiding a
potential Franco Austrian Bavarian alliance, and Prussia wins, and then
at the urging of Bismarck, Ludwig actually helps put out
the call to all the other princes of Germany to
unite into this German Empire under the rule of the
(12:19):
Prussian King, who is from there on out known as
the Kaiser. But Ludvig is kind of disappointed with aspects
of this new arrangement. It's not exactly what he had
hoped it would be. His territory isn't expanded, and you know,
as as one of the kings who's not the Kaiser,
he doesn't have as much power as he liked. And
he thought there would maybe be some sort of sharing
(12:41):
of the crown between his state and Prussia, and that's
not how it worked out. So he's still King of Bavaria,
but now it's just a state and not a kingdom.
And again he's a bit of a figurehead, so you
know why bother he retreats into increased solitude. And what
do you do when you don't really have a kingdom
(13:03):
to run, you don't have your composer to live with,
and you really don't want to get married. You build
your own kublican right, or three of them. So Littvig
builds three castles and designs three more, and they occupy
him during his increasingly isolated life that starts in the
eighteen seventies, and from this point on he's mostly alone.
(13:25):
He dines alone, he goes to his theatrical performances alone.
He switches to this vampire like nocturnal schedule where he
gets up at five pm um. But his first major
building project, he doesn't. He doesn't start off right away
with a huge castle. He starts off with a remodeling project,
and that's redecorating his father's castle and his childhood home
(13:48):
at Hohenschwangau. And he must have caught a nice view
from there, because he starts to plan a bigger project,
which of course is Nisch von Stein across the lake.
And this is seriously the Disney Castle. And while it's
not the most elaborate of his creations, it's definitely the
most recognizable. It's a reimagining of what a medieval castle
(14:11):
looks like, with plenty of French Rococo and Bavarian Baroque
thrown in. And it's planned by a theatrical designer, not
an architect, and it's basically Wagner themed, with Swan shaped
taps and an indoor grotto from Venusberg the opening apparition
in Wagner's opera Townhauser. And it takes seventeen years to construct,
(14:34):
its actually never finished, and Ludvig only spends about six
months their total all added up together. So the next
place he builds is Linderhof, which is of home year
sort of residents, and it's about twelve miles from Nu Schwenstein,
and he builds it between eighteen sixty nine and seventy eight,
and it's actually modeled on trin On, though so not
(14:58):
terribly homy to so the still an elaborate palace. He
really liked the Bourbons. His coaches and his sleighs were
staffed by coachman dressed in reproduction Louis the fourteenth Livery.
He would spend about two weeks of every month at
this house and had a harmonium set up for Wagner,
along with that disappearing table we mentioned in the intro.
(15:21):
But it's here that he starts all the weird stuff,
waking up at five pm, dining with his imaginary friends,
then going out for midnight carriage rides as he again
just retreats more and more from society, but he sticks
with the Wagner theme for this place to Linderhoff has
the Venus Grotto another Venus grotto imagined again from ton Hauser,
(15:45):
and he would row around in the man made lake
on this gilded seashell. You can look up pictures of this.
It's a pretty cool. Sarah sent me one today and
we decided that might be a better use of our time.
And the lake is actually illuminated by one of Bavaria's
first power ants, because who wants a dark, creepy cave
made out of plaster needs to have all these cool
(16:05):
blue and red lights. It also had a moorish pavilion
with a peacock theme perfect for opium smoking if you're
so inclined, and a hunting cabin with plenty of faux
wood stumps and fake trees, again Disney Alert. But his
(16:30):
final big project was haren Hens, which was constructed between
eighteen seventy eight and eighteen eighty five, and this time
he really honors the Bourbons and even tries to upstage
them because the castle is a copy of their Sailles,
only bigger and better. Yeah, it has an even grander
hall of mirrors where he would read under the light
(16:51):
of seventy nine candelabras with one thousand, eight hundred forty
eight candles. It seems like you need a lot of
servants for that. Or he would take a bath in
this marble tub that took eight hours to heat and fill,
and we didn't mention this yet either. The castle was
built on an island in the middle of an alpine lake,
(17:11):
a very exclusive island. I would imagine, a very exclusive island.
It's going to make it harder to build too, if
you have to row everything out to the island well,
and this castle is his downfall. Only twenty of the
seventy rooms are finished. It cost more to build than
nischvon Stein and Linderhof together, and he only spends nine
(17:33):
nights there, so multiply those candles by nine nights exactly.
So this makes us come to the question, how did
Ludwig pay for all this, and initially he financed these
castles himself. He saw himself as a modern son king,
and accordingly he thought he needed to celebrate this through
the construction of castles through the patronage of artists such
(17:55):
as Wagner and others. But it's not that long before
he runs out money. Obviously, he starts to borrow in
his own pay way way ahead. He tries to get
loans from the Shawl of Iran, from the Turkish Sultan,
from the Duke of Westminster. He even orders his cabinet
to find loans and is very threatening and forceful when
(18:16):
they're coming up short. And so by eighteen eighty six
he's being sued for debt, which is terribly embarrassing, and
he has this hair brand plan to rob a London
bank doesn't work out, so the government is starting to
get seriously worried, like is our king crazy or is
he just spending way too much money? Either way, this
(18:38):
has got to stop. He was certainly lonely, he told
an aide to camp. Sometimes I call one of the
domestic servants or postilions and asked him to tell me
about his home and his family, otherwise I would completely
forget the art of speech, and in his private journals
he appeals to dead rulers for help. Louis the fourteenth,
Charles the First of England. These are his friends, and
(19:02):
it's interesting a lot of the stuff I read about
these castles and about Ludvig. Apparently the tour guides refrain
from calling him the mad King anymore, which has long
been his nickname. It makes sense. It's not a very
nice thing to call someone. Sorry for using it in
our title. Little Wig Eccentric is more often used today.
But his family definitely has some mental health issues. His
(19:26):
brother Otto, who we mentioned at the beginning, is schizophrenic
and he's put into an asylum. His aunt Alexandra is
put into a convent because she's positive she's swallowed a
glass grand piano. But if Ludvig is crazy, he's very
lucid at times too. He writes these eloquent letters, he
(19:46):
studies French history and literature, and he's even politically astute
when he actually tries, you know, when he's not worrying
about his castle castles or his opera and actually gets
to work well. His best friend, I think, says it
best Sissy, and she said he is not mad enough
to be locked up, but to abnormal to manage comfortably
(20:08):
in the world with reasonable people. So that's the assessment
from the person who knew him better than anyone. Yeah.
So finally the viddles Box, worried that Lidvig would bankrupt
their family, go to the Prime Minister and say that, well,
you know, we'd be okay if you deposed the king.
And so a panel of doctors declare living insane without
(20:31):
seeing him. It's kind of like the tablet um and
the noted psychiatrist doctor Bernhard von Gutten is one of these.
And so on June tenth, Prince Leopold, who is Ludwig's uncle,
declares himself Prince Regent and Otto will be king officially
(20:52):
Otto the First and Lidvig is at nisch fon Stein
when the delegation finally comes to arrest him, and the
soldiers and peasants try to stop them, try to save Ludwig,
but he's led away. He's taken to the Vittles Box
castle Berg, which is on Lake Starnberg, and he's attended
there by the doctor and that's when things start to
(21:14):
get kind of weird. On June thirteen, he asks to
attend mass but is refused, and later in the day,
after a huge meal lots of wine, he gets Dr
Gooden to walk along the lake with him, but they
don't come back, and a search party finds that the
king has drowned face up, which is strange because he
(21:35):
was a very good swimmer and he was only in
four ft of water. Dr Gouden is also dead, So
what happened there? Obviously a lot of theories about this,
and the main assumption for many years is that the
king committed suicide because he had no future. He was
essentially a prisoner, and Dr Guten drowned trying to say
(22:00):
of him. Others have suggested that he was perhaps trying
to cross the lake to meet people sent by Sissy
and escape to Austria and escape to her, and then
others say he was murdered, maybe even that he was
shot and not drowned at all. And we would probably
no more, I feel if we opened his crypt in
(22:21):
Munich at St. Michael's. All of the victuals box are
interred there and they have identical cripts, but his stands
out because it's always covered with flowers, and he's still
very popular, despite the fact that he nearly bankrupted his family.
His castles are today among Bavaria's main attractions. Who doesn't
want to go see the Sleeping Beauty Castle? Well, and interestingly,
(22:43):
they started to become these major attractions. I think within
weeks after his death, people were paying to go to them.
So in the long run, it's been a pretty good
investment for Bavaria. I'd say Ludwig's own memorial is far
simpler than any of these castles. It's across in the
lake at the spot where he drowned. But Sarah and
I were talking about it's always so strange for us
(23:06):
to talk about these subjects who are supposedly so well loved.
We keep reading, you know, the well loved so and so,
but we have no idea how these people are actually
viewed in their own country. Yeah, if you're in the area,
let us know what you think about Ludwig. It always
has a little funny thing. Supposedly you people love this guy,
but you know, maybe not. It's easy enough to see though,
(23:30):
why he would be so well loved. He's a gentle
pacifist king. He's extremely eccentric, but that only makes him
more interesting. It's also always interesting, like we talked about
in our Emperor Norton podcast, to try to diagnose people
posthumously and figure out what sort of mental illness Ludwig
(23:51):
was grappling with, and it was in fact anything at all.
And that's one of the reasons I think people are
so interested him that end to his gorgeous castle and
this mysterious fate that we simply do not have the
answer to. Ye, thank you so much for joining us
on this Saturday. If you have heard an email address
(24:14):
or a Facebook you are l or something similar over
the course of today's episode, since it is from the
archive that might be out of date now, you can
email us at History podcast at how stuff Works dot com,
and you can find us all over social media at
missed in History, and you can subscribe to our show
on Apple podcasts, Google podcast, the I Heart Radio app,
and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff You Missed
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