Visiting a Fairytale Castle

Traveling through Germany with David, I bypassed to castle after castle – there seemed to be one on every hilltop. We stopped at “The most famous castle in the World.” The one pictured on posters and advertisements promoting all things German. The one that Disney replicated as his one symbol of Disneyland. Its German name is Neushwanstein.

Most German castles were built in the 13th Century, or earlier, when every village was the enemy of every other village. Most are now in ruins, except for a few which have been “restored” as hotels, where rich Americans stay. They come home to brag about “sleeping in a castle.” As if these hotels, with all the modern amenities, were anything like original drafty, cold, dark castles.

Unlike 13th Century ruins, Neushwanstein is not ancient. It was begun in 1869 by Ludwig II, King of Bavaria, when Germany was still a patchwork of small, independent kingdoms. He had two palaces in his capital city, Munich, one in the center of the city and a nearby “summer palace”, the delightful Baroque “Nymphenberg”, where he was born to parents who hated each other. Ludwig fled the city to be alone in the Bavarian Alps.

Ludwig II is known as “the Mad King.” He certainly was a strange bird, fascinated by swans and Wagner’s music, particularly the opera “Lohengrin” whose hero comes on stage in a swan boat.

As soon as he ascended the throne, at age 22, Ludwig started to build castles, four of them, all at a distance from Munich. When I returned to Germany in 1983 without David, I visited Ludwig’s Linderhof, a miniature neo-classic Versailles, where I entered a fake cave and saw where the king sat in solitude gazing at a swan boat while his private orchestra played Wagner.

To build Neushwanstein, Ludwig hired a set designer to draw up designs for a fairytale castle to be built on top of a mountain with a great hall where operas could be performed. He then hired and fired three engineer-architects to transform this fantasy into stone.

The castle was incomplete in 1884 when Ludwig drowned, probably a suicide, in Schwansee, or Swan Lake. Shortly before his death, the king spent 12 nights in Neushwanstein, the only time he stayed there. Today thousands of strangers climb the mountain every day to gawk at Ludwig’s dream castle.

David and I were among the mob that made that climb. The castle is truly amazing, decorated with swan statues and murals of imaginary knights, as impressive as any Hollywood movie set. Ludwig must have been crazy to build such a place, but I thoroughly enjoyed its brightly-lit, colorful rooms.

As we left this dream world, I looked across the valley. On the opposite side of the gorge was a 13th Century castle, also part of Ludwig’s inheritance. It was a gray stone fortress, as forbidding and gloomy as all old castles. Tourists do not visit that one. Neither did David and I.

All of us prefer to believe in a bright, fantasy world, rather than confront the truth of a dark, tragic past.