The Madness of King Ludwig II

[Music] let's be honest most americans vision of a medieval castle is based on the ones that we see in disney parks but to be fair those were based on real castles particularly neuschwanstein or the new swan stone castle built on a rugged hill in bavaria but neuschwanstein is anything but medieval it was commissioned in 1869 by the bavarian king ludwig ii who was obsessed with fairy tales today he's sometimes called the swan king or the fairy tale king but he's mostly known as the mad king ludwig ii led a troubled life he died in mysterious circumstances and yet he left behind a legacy in music and in stone that has become almost synonymous with bavaria it is history that deserves to be remembered on august 25th 1845 the future king was born to maximilian crown prince of bavaria and marie of prussia his parents intended to name him otto but his grandfather keen ludwig the first insisted the name be changed otto was born on the king's own birthday or probably the day before with the date changed purely for appearances which was also the feast day of the patron saint of bavaria king louis ix so he was renamed ludwig the german version of louis and his younger brother would become otto ludwig had an odd childhood and was described by some as an odd boy when he was three his grandfather abdicated the throne in the face of forces of the german revolutions of 1848 in a personal scandal over an indiscrete relationship with an irish dancer called lola montez maximilian became king of bavaria and restored stability to the regime but paid little personal attention to his son when maximilian's advisers suggested the king take ludwig with him on walks the king answered but what am i to say to him of his mother one cabinet member said that marie scarcely even knew how to treat her children as children ought to be treated as an adult ludwig referred to his own mother as my predecessor's consort and his youth as a series of humiliating tournaments ludwig spent most of his childhood at his father's castle whose walls were decorated with myths and fairy tales like the arthurian parsible in lowengren the knight of the swan which sparked his obsession with all things fairy tale from a young age ludwig did not enjoy playing soldier or hunting activities his parents thought appropriate for a crown prince but was an imaginative boy preferred stories in solitude when asked if he was bored the young prince replied i imagine various things and keep myself quite amused his father scolded him while his brother was more spoiled and it affected his psyche otto is a good boy and i will be good also he wrote to his mother his behavior was sometimes abhorrent he stole a purse and argued that all that belongs to my subjects belongs to me and nearly strangled his brother with a rope for daring to resist his will he learned young about the divine right of kings in the superiority of his house he also showed some early tendencies towards hallucinations perhaps a byproduct of inbreeding in the royal family when he was 12 he heard about richard wagner's opera lowengren about a mythical german hero and begged to see it his parents refused while famous wagner was a controversial figure for his scorn of religion and politics ludwig finally saw the play two years later and it changed his life he was enthralled by the music and by watching his childhood fantasies come to life a year later he saw another of wagner's operas tan hauser the secretary who attended with the prince said that luvig was thrown in such convulsions that i was afraid he might have an epileptic seizure ludwig's childhood came to a halt when his father died suddenly on march 10 1864. harold's rolled through munich in a snowstorm trumpeting the news the eighteen-year-old prince was now king ludwig ii to bavaria at maximilian's funeral a bavarian writer wrote glowingly of the dark-haired handsome prince he was the most beautiful youth i had ever seen the king was less enthusiastic writing it has been my fate to be called too young to face heavy responsibilities too heavy for young shoulders too difficult for a young brain ludwig was a very solitary person but he did have a close friend and his cousin elizabeth who was empress of austria by marriage they became close after his coronation i think those that are taken to be insane are the only really intelligent people she wrote to ludwig after becoming king he contacted his greatest obsession richard wagner wagner struggled his whole life to pick creditors and when ludwig wrote him the artist was on the run some friend must arise to help me wagner wrote only a miracle could help me now and that right soon or i am done for ludwig's letter must have been a miracle too it included a ruby ring in the note as the stone burns so do i burn with ardor to behold the creator of the words and music of low and grin when they met ludwig was completely enthralled i have no other disciple who is so utterly my own it is scarcely believable wagner wrote the king rendered a house for the composer and pressed him to do nothing but right ludwig peppered him with letters writing my love for you and your art grows even greater and this flame of love shall bring you happiness and salvation his love for wagner was not shared by the bavarian public and he thought the king was lavishing too much attention on his friend when the prime minister threatened to resign if wagner didn't leave lupe was forced to exile the composer hoping he would be able to return someday in 1866 outside political events intruded at the time germany did not exist as a country but was made up of dozens of small states the most powerful was prussia which hoped to unite germany under its leadership precious competitor for germany hegemony was austria and southern german states like bavaria otto von bismarck the prussian minister president forced the issue by declaring war in the summer of 66. ludwig who wanted the title of king but not the duties tried to give up his throne rather than take a position until wagner for purely selfish reasons convinced him to keep his crown he chose to support austria ludwig did his best to forget about the war refusing to lead the army or even to receive news from parliament the austrian ambassador wrote one begins to think that the king is demented when finally forced to visit the army he was traumatized by the wounded the seven weeks war was brief but a resounding defeat for austria and bavaria austria was kicked out of the german union and bavaria was forced to acknowledge prussian supremacy among the kingly duties in which ludwig had no interest was marriage the state was pushing him to find a wife and even bogner tried to convince him of it i haven't timed to get married he said he was eventually worn down however and began to pay attention to empress elizabeth's younger sister sophia she shared an appreciation for wagner they were engaged but ludwig acted oddly with sophia and his obsession with wagner shone through in letters he used the names of characters from wagner's operas instead of their own he left an official engagement ball without warning to go to the theater when together he made her play and sing music from the operas he soured on the wedding quickly he told an advisor that he'd rather drown than mary he postponed the wedding several times and when sophia's father demanded that he set a firm date or cancel the wedding ludwig happily took the offered way out sophia got rid of the gloomy picture fades along for freedom to awaken this terrible nightmare he wrote in his journal sofia's reputation suffered from rumors after the broken engagement though she was at the time in love with another man in fact from ludwig's personal writings it seems that he was much more attracted to men although he struggled with the urges and his religion ludwig's myriad disappointments drove him to find an escape how necessary it is to create for oneself such poetic places of refuge where one can forget for a while the dreadful times in which i live he decorated his room with stars and a fountain and created a winter garden indoors in munich complete with a waterfall and an artificial moon when his grandfather died the former king's pension came to him giving him funds to be more ambitious he chose a beautiful location within sight of his childhood palace to build himself a castle it experienced ruins there as a child and resolved to build neuschwanstein atop the rugged peaks he hired a stage designer to lead the construction and decorated the walls with murals of his favorite stories ludwig oversaw every detail of the building spared no expense the throne room which never received an actual throne had two million painstakingly arranged tiles he built the castle in honor of wagner and based much of it on his stage productions war broke out again in 1870 this time between prussia and france ludwig was bound to support prussia but again found himself terribly stressed by the possibility of a war prussia's victory cemented prussian power and allowed bismarck to bring the last german states into his german confederation an emperor was to be named and ludwig hoped it could be him a futile hope since bismarck never meant to empower bavaria wilhelm ludwig's uncle the king of prasha was the chosen leader ludwig was so upset he refused to attend the negotiations bavaria did gain privileged status within the german empire and ludwig reluctantly supported unification with wilhelm as emperor the second reich was born he dove further into personal projects he loved the palace of versailles and the opulence of king louis xiv the sun king he built linderhoff palace the only construction he lived to see completed he demanded absolute control of construction reflecting his desire to be an autocrat his room in the palace was decorated with gold and had a thousand pound crystal chandelier also at linderhoff was his table that sets itself the king liked to dine alone and the table could be lowered into the kitchen filled with food and then raised so that he didn't have to deal with servants one of his most ambitious constructs was the venus grotto again inspired by wagner it was an enormous man-made cave made to look natural with a waterfall and a large lake including one of bavaria's first electrical generator-powered lights and a wave machine the king seemed to be growing more eccentric as he aged he gained weight and his love of sweets rotted out most of his teeth causing constant pain he cultivated a peculiar walk meant to imitate louis xiv which one observer called a total mockery of nature he began sleeping during the day and riding his horses at night he surprised peasants in their homes after midnight and lavished them with gifts he staged hundreds of plays in operas mostly by wagner for himself alone he began two more palaces and planned an even greater castle he played for a large theater at bay right called the festival theater for wagner where the composer first showed his four opera ring cycle in 1876. when wagner died ludwig ordered all of his pianos be draped with black he regularly set his table for three or four though he dined alone so he could imagine and converse with people such as louis xiv and marie antoinette he was difficult to his servants whom he would berate forbid from looking at him and forced to bow to him as they backed out of the room he usually communicated in notes as he wished not to speak ludwig's projects were financed entirely from his own money but by 1884 he'd put everything he had and borrowed some 8 million marks he made plans for even more palaces despite his financial troubles but his workers halted construction because they weren't being paid his cabinet officials were furious he sent servants as far as persian asked for loans and tried to get them to rob a bank as criticism grew he turned inward even more finally refusing to go to the capitol and only communicating via letter johann lutz prime minister decided to take the king down he met with the king's uncle lutopold who agreed to become regent if ludwig could be proven insane lutz turned to dr bernard von guden who listened to reports from servants many of whom were paid for their wild reports and declared that the king suffered from paranoia guten said the king was incurably insane and had to be removed from power he never examined the king directly the cabinet appointed a commission to arrest the king at neuschwanstein on june 7th 1886. they planned to confine him at berg castle on the shores of like starnberg the king caught wind of the plan before the commission could arrive and barricaded himself inside the castle with help from local peasants and soldiers utropold was declared regent and ludwig remained paralyzed with indecision talking of suicide when the commissioners came again the king had been abandoned by his servants and was captured without a fight how can you certify me in seeing without seeing me he demanded of guten who insisted that the servant's testimony was enough the king appeared calm the next day and collected his cousin elizabeth was across the lake and the water was covered in boats some of which carried peasants who supported him that afternoon he insisted on going for a walk during a rainstorm and guden accompanied him alone the doctor had a train to catch at 8 pm but when the hour arrived neither of the men had returned the rain had grown heavier by 10 pm searchers discovered hats and coats soaked and abandoned by the lake they took a boat out and found both men dead guten showed signs of a fight his face was scratched a fingernail had been torn off and he had a gash in his forehead the king was simply still face down in the water so ended the reign of the fairy tale king the exact circumstances of what happened that night have never become clear a letter that he wrote to his cousin elizabeth across the lake that night has been lost the official government explanation was that ludwig had attacked guten and then killed himself there were armed peasants on the lake in boats so perhaps it was an attempted escape that failed years later rumors started to arrive that ludwig had been assassinated there were rumors that the cloak they found on the shore had bullet holes in it and that the doctor that had examined lubig's body had been forced to lie about bullet wounds even though it's not really clear what anyone had to gain from assassinating ludwig at that point and in any case we'll never know the cloak was burned in a fire and the king's body has never been exhumed it's not even clear that ludwig was actually mad doctors today looking at his behavior disagree some say that his behavior really showed that he was merely an eccentric although others say there was evidence of frontal lobe injury and that he showed some signs of personality disorder just seven weeks after his death his buildings were made open to tourists and of course the scents have earned bavaria many millions more than they ever cost to build his legacy in those buildings and in the later works of wagner which never would have been composed were not for luvig's patronage far outlast him and have come to be seen as synonymous with bavaria itself in an irony the german magazine focus noted in 2014 that he won the love of his subjects only posthumously but what to make of the fairy tale king well perhaps from that we should take his own word he once wrote i intend to remain an enigma to myself and others and so he has i hope you enjoyed this episode of the history guy short snippets have forgotten history between 10 and 15 minutes long and if you did enjoy please go ahead and click that thumbs up button if you have any questions or comments or suggestions for future episodes please write those in the comment section i will be happy to personally respond be sure to follow the history guy on facebook instagram twitter and check out our 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Channel: The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered

Views: 254,812

Keywords: history, history guy, the history guy, ludwig II, bavaria, Neuschwanstein castle, Richard wagner

Id: TWCWQq-YNdI

Length: 15min 20sec (920 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 28 2020