Neuschwanstein--was Ludwig II mad or merely irritated? We report, you decide.

Late Saturday night Clair, Morgan, Alana, Kyle, Jamie, and Jennifer (yes, I’m naming names) talked me into accompanying them to Neuschwanstein, “Mad” Ludwig’s castle at Fussen. I must have been crazy too because I said yes, despite having webcourse assignments to grade and my own Ger 201 homework to do. We left at 6:45 am Sunday and got back on the Escargot Express from Munich past midnight. I'll let them tell you about that.


As all the world knows Neuschwanstein was the model for Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty Castle. It was planned by a set designer, not an architect and, like a stage set, its camp artificiality is apparent when seen close up. In fact if Ludwig were alive today he’d probably one of the so-called “developers” of criminally bad taste who erect the 300-thousand dollar McMansions (excuse me, “starter homes”) that now despoil the American landscape.

One wonders if the plotters' real reason for overthrowing Ludwig was to prevent a plague of “starter castles” built for the addled Romantic Wagner-loving German nobles exemplified Ludwig’s close friend and aspiring actor Paul Maximilian Lamoral von Thurn und Taxis (whose family palace is in Regensburg and whose brewery produces German's worst beer).

Ludwig built his many palaces in part as a way to make work for unemployed Bavarians. He was immensely popular with the peasants who nearly foiled the aristocratic plot to remove him by surrounding him intending to escort him to safety in nearby Austria. But he refused to leave his kindom. Subsequently he was seized and imprisoned at Berg on the Starnbergersee near Munich. Afterward Ludwig and Professor Bernhard von Gudden, the doctor who had declared him insane, were found dead on the shore of the lake after they failed to return from an evening walk, probably murdered by the coup leaders for whom a live imprisioned monarch was an inconvienence.

Was Ludwig mad? Probably not, beyond having insanely bad taste.