King Ludwig

After Maximilian’s premature death in 1864 and Ludwig’s ascension to the throne, at age 18, things changed. Ludwig was a young and exceptionally attractive man – tall, athletic and with a hair and complexion that matched his cousin, Elizabeth of Austria. At the time, they were regarded as the two most beautiful people in the world. But even though Ludwig was aware of his incredible beauty, he had no desire to wed. The one love of his life were the romantic and nationalistic operas of Richard Wagner. It is not difficult to imagine that Ludwig – still a very young man – was easily influenced by Wagner’s sentimental messages, which helped him to escape what he hated: the Germany of the nineteenth century, the grim and forbidding court of his parents, the unfriendly faces in the streets of Munich, and the smoke stacks of the new factories belching smoke into the air. Instead, he tried to escape to an earlier, purer age of chivalrous knights rescuing damsels in distress.

Things were not as simple as Ludwig liked to pretend, though, as Geoffrey Regan writes: “However, during the 1860s, Germany was becoming more and more industrialised and nationalised. The Zollverein (customs union) now bound the separate German states together in its economic web and Otto von Bismarck was striving for political unification. But Ludwig was comically out of touch with the militant German nationalism.” (Regan, 54) Two years after his ascension to the throne, in 1866, the Seven Week War would break out between Prussia and Austria; five years later, in 1871, the Franco-Prussian War would be set off by an undiplomatic telegram from Bismarck and the rabidly anti-German French press. Throughout it all, Ludwig dressed in silver armour and paddled round a lake in a swan-shaped boat. In order to finance these wars and Ludwig’s increasingly phantasmagorical castles, the Bavarian state treasury would be ransacked in a raid to end all raids; but Ludwig would sit on a peacock throne and plan the construction of his theme-park castles. Having experienced nothing but separation from the outside world throughout his childhood and early adolescence, and having been crowned king with no experience of dealing with court officials and politicians, he felt himself separated from the outside world and saw no need to have to deal with it. His destiny, as he saw it, was to rescue German national art; nothing else mattered.