The Bavarian Kings - keeping up with the Joneses

I was pretty tired by yesterday afternoon so came back to the camp site and spent a peaceful couple of hours overhauling my gear and getting everything in order – three nights of camping on the road = complete chaos. What a joy it was to crawl into my own familiar little tent in the twilight and feel instantly at home! I slept like a queen and the waterproofing work which I did seems to have held, so far at least, but I’m not confident enough with it yet to leave my sleeping bag in the tent during a day when more rain is expected.

I had had some thoughts of doing a tour of Dachau concentration camp which is near here today, but given that one of the big goals of this trip is seeing Auschwitz, decided to give this a miss – I think whichever one I visit is going to be emotionally gruelling so instead I decided to spend today pottering about the city, visiting gardens while the rain holds off and museums when it doesn’t, and finishing with an organ music recital at one of the vast old churches in the heart of the city.

Munich is a rather nice city – it sprang up in the Middle Ages at the cross roads of two main trade routes, one between Salzberg and Augsberg, and another between northern Germany and Italy. It went through a number of phases, beginning as a small fortified town before expanding to a large fortified town and then the capital of Bavaria and the city it is today.

I’m quite fascinated by the Bavarian kings – they seem to have had a real itch to keep up with the Joneses, with many of their castles and palaces built to imitate the styles of existing places – Versailles was an inspiration for at least two palaces. King Ludwig II, who built Neuschwanstein, particularly intrigues me. He built a large number of exceptionally large and ornate buildings (one of the Versailles imitations was his), but they don’t seem to have been an act of self-glorification – he was much more interested in building monuments to ideals. His Versailles-imitation-palace, Herrenchiemsee Palace, was a monument to idealism, and is said to be far more magnificently furnished than Versailles itself. This tendency to overembellishment, in addition to his desire to build places to reflect ideals, seems to be a common theme for Ludwig II – Neuschwanstein, which was built as a monument to the ideals of the knights of the medieval period, the music of Wagner, and his own idea of kingship, began in concept as a medieval castle and then was designed by a set designer for operas, taking it well into the world of dreams rather than the realities of the past.

Ludgwig II also had a magnificent collection of coaches and sleighs, all with their origins in the Baroque style, but which, true to form, were finally far more elaborate than the style which inspired them. The royal crown on the State Sleigh was lit with an electric light – this back in the 1860s or so – and when he took one of his many midnight rides through the mountains, the ornate design and artificial illumination of the sleigh would make a tremendous impression on the few who saw him.

Ludwig II of Bavaria

Ludwig II really seems to have been quite the eccentric – in addition to his night owl-ish habits (at Neuschwanstein Castle, the chef’s office in the kitchen was furnished with a divan so he could rest between preparing meals for the king, who primarily seems to have been up at night), and spending a fortune building shrines to ideals, he would do other odd things, such as having a whole Wagner opera put on at the opera house in Berlin, which seats 2300 people – with only himself in the audience. I’m really looking forward to getting home and having some time to research him more thoroughly than I can while on the road.