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rushthatspeaksI did not sleep on the transatlantic flight from Boston-- I almost never do. My lover and traveling companion B. fortunately slept basically the entire way. I say fortunately because our plans called for him to do a lot of driving on arrival. We'd had a two-hour delay before getting off the ground and so exited the plane in Munich not into early morning cool, but into steaming nearly-noon-and-getting-hotter, which did at least do us the courtesy of being accurate about the next several hours of weather. The Munich airport is way out of town, thirty klicks from anywhere, no hurry, one of those giant major airports which is not terribly public-transport accessible and which will cost you a fortune by taxi, so we had prearranged a car. The German word for 'rental car' turns out to be 'mietwagen', which I personally am never going to manage to forget if only because it makes me feel I ought to be renting an ambulance.
The rental car people gave us a random upgrade, so on trekking our baggage down to the garage we were met by a BMW Series 5, a car which has reached such a ludicrous perfection of engineering that if I knew the right German I could probably get it to make me an omelette. It was black, and sleek, and aerodynamic, and full of random little convenient and confusing details. The included GPS came in seven languages and did nothing so crass as speak to us, preferring to project upcoming turns holographically on the interior of the drivers'-side windshield. The keys did not need to be put in the ignition-- there was no ignition to put them in-- merely left casually somewhere in the interior of the car. The thing politely turned off its own engine at short stops such as traffic lights and had more than twice the legroom of a transatlantic coach seat. The whole experience was rather like expecting a car and being met by a vaguely disdainful, although in its own way friendly, sort of panther. I was moderately worried about breathing on the paint wrong somehow.
B. has driven in many countries and did not find the concept of driving in Germany at all intimidating, so we got on the road as soon as we had spent about twenty minutes figuring out how to work the GPS, and another ten minutes and a consult with the rental people figuring out how to put the thing in drive (as opposed to turning it on-- it turned on automatically, but the question was what to do after that). I had worn my usual plane clothes, jeans and T-shirt, but it became obvious I was going to die of heat exhaustion, so I managed the classic change-in-public shimmy and got into a long skirt. This proved to be a mixed blessing later.
My first impression of the German countryside was of fields and fields of solar panels, acres of them, black and sleek and shiny as the car; and also all the other cars on the road were polished and powerful and gleaming in the sunlight. The Germans evidently prefer their highways to be neither seen nor heard, when possible, a position I understand entirely, and so despite being, for the first chunk of the drive, on the road between a major European city and its airport it took a very long time for us to pass by even one visible building. The side views were mostly solar panels, and soundproof fences, and ludicrously green fields bordered in ludicrously green trees.
Eventually we finished bypassing the Munich metropolitan area and got onto smaller roads, and then there started being small villages, all alike filled with a combination of antique whitewashed houses with red tile roofs and gleaming modern chrome topped with yet more solar panels. The local church style (more than one per village) looks, to my untrained eye, more what I would have expected of Greek Orthodox than Lutheran, and is usually on the outskirts, an extremely whitewashed tiny rectangle with one proud redtiled domed tower. Rose trellises, woodpiles several stories high in sheds attached to houses, signs for beer gardens. The farther we got into the country, the smaller the roads got, and twistier. There started to be farm equipment sharing road space, and the way dwindled down to what in the U.S. we would consider one lane, while continuing to support traffic in two directions. We passed chunks of woodland, incredibly dense in a way I've never seen a forest manage-- when we passed an exit, we might be able to see that the tree-belt between the exit and the main road was not even ten feet thick, but it would be so lush, so full of undergrowth and verdancy, that even then you could not see light through it. This gives me some idea of why the Bavarian woods are so legendary, and why it is so very easy to lose one's way in them. You could get wildly turned around in that ten-foot belt, if you could force your way through it at all.
It was so hot it was hazy, and the initially flat ground started to ripple in gentle waves. To the sides were fields full of haying, bound round bales of new hay drying and sunburned men shepherding haymows in their gentle circles. (I thought hay was an August crop, but evidently not.) The cows looked whitewashed, Disney-eyed and sleepy in the few shadows. Eventually, in the distance, blue mountains stuck against the sky like cutouts of cloud-banks. They came nearer, and the snow on top of them became more and more wildly improbable to the summer country underneath it. A bike path started up beside the road at about the time the hills got really serious, so that it had clearly been designed by and for cyclists devoted to the point of lunacy, and the villages became full of bed-and-breakfasts, restaurants as well as beer gardens, and public tourist-filled parking lots. "Der Romantische Straße", B. said, "the Romantic Highway." Romantic, yes, but highway only in the sense that it is a road and it is paved and you can put cars on it and they can putter along behind the combine tractors. Finally, another belt of flatness, green and waving like an ocean, not even trees in it, stretching for several miles into a great horseshoe bay in those mountains, which lifted straight from the flatland with no preliminaries, just the green breaking against the lowering cliff-wall. In the most dramatic possible position in the center of the flatland, one of those proud and tiny domed-tower churches, surrounded by wind in skirling wheat, a splash of lake, a few defiant little trees and nothing else; in the most dramatic possible position on the lowest spire of the back of the bay in the mountains, the flashing towers of the overlooking castle.
Neuschwanstein was built by King Ludwig II of Bavaria (1845-1886), a man fighting for predominancy with Rudolf II of Prague at the top of the list of historical figures most likely to have been secretly werewolves. There's a video game based on that supposition, and my reaction when told about this video game was that it didn't need Rosicrucian conspiracies or secret Templar orders, it just needed Ludwig. The mangaka You Higuri has done a lovely two-volume (gay porn) biography of him, because in order to make his life into a manga you need to change precisely nothing. This is the Swan King we are talking about here, the man who hired Wagner as his household composer, the man who put in one of his ornamental grottoes an actual boulder with an actual sword actually sticking out of it so that he could pull it out on special occasions.
This is the man whose reaction, one presumes, to the knowledge that his namesake Ludwig I had damn near managed to bankrupt the country by throwing money at Lola Montez was GO BIG OR GO HOME; his hobby was building extravagant castles. He had Versailles duplicated in miniature on a lake island, just because he could.
Actually he loved his people and they loved him (and still do), and he tried his hardest to be the best king he could be. He was devoted to the ideals of chivalry and knighthood and Romance in the classical sense and courtly love and the worship of beauty, and it really wasn't his fault that nobody taught him the value of money. Castles were not only his passion and a way for him to build idealized dreamworlds, but his idea of a solution to the problem of unemployment. Oddly enough, nowadays the ones which survive bring in massive revenue by means of tourism dollars, which is one reason he is still looked on with a great deal of reverence. He would have done fairly well as a figurehead monarch, kept out of politics and given a budget, but he was theoretically a ruling king, and so they found him facedown and strangled in a lake at the age of forty.
I have wanted to see Neuschwanstein ever since I first heard about it, because it is his Grail Knight castle. It's the one where he concentrated all of his Arthurian interests, and it is also the inspiration for Disney's Cinderella castle. (In fact the entire Bavarian landscape around Neuschwanstein turns out to explain a fair bit about early Disney. Those hills, those forests, those turrets and towers, those disturbingly giant-eyed cows... the entire place reads to an American raised on repertory Disney films as an agricultural fantasy of a theme park, which is a reading imposed on it by the fact that the communalized id-fantasy is emulating it and not the other way around. This lends a certain vertiginous quality to the landscape, a fear that somebody is trying to propagandize with it-- or rather that they already have, years ago, and it was impossible to tell until this moment. I spent a fair amount of energy working on blinking this imposed view away as much as I could, because it is exactly this sort of thing which prevents one from seeing an actual country.)
Neuschwanstein (New-Swan-Stone) was never finished entirely, in that the outside fabric was, but many of the interior rooms were not decorated. But you can walk up to it, and tour what there is of the inside. It was almost certainly Ludwig's favorite castle, as evidenced by the fact that he put it right up the road from the castle he grew up in, Schloss Hohenschwangau.
This was just not dramatic enough, okay? I mean it has what, five or six turrets? It's made of stucco and tile? Not sufficiently pseudo-medieval. Ironically enough, there was an actual medieval castle on the site where Ludwig put Neuschwanstein, but it was, you know, old stonework and had nothing that nice-looking so he tore it down and started over. *quiet facepalm*
The car park is down at the base of the mountain spur, and there's a street full of restaurants and tourist shops, and a ticket office where you can buy tickets for both Neuschwanstein and Hohenschwangau. Following Ludwig's taste, we were not terribly interested in the latter (both of us are more along the lines of 'interested in mad royal architects' than 'Bavarian monarchy geeks', precisely), so we bought tickets for the tour of Neuschwanstein only. You have to take a guided tour, they won't just let you in to wander around because there are a lot of rather narrow spaces. I think the ticket was about twelve Euros? There are tours in a lot of languages, including English, and they tell you what time you are supposed to turn up in the castle courtyard. We had more than an hour before our tour.
This meant we went and grabbed some food at one of the tourist cafes, which may have been a mistake, as although I was very hungry it was rather heavy and salty fare. Sausages and sauerkraut and mashed potatoes, and I think B. had schnitzel. We played 'how many portraits of King Ludwig II can you spot without getting up?' inside the restaurant and got as high as nine.
Since, as I mentioned, the car park is at the base of the mountain spur, there's a road of about a mile and a half leading up from there to the actual castle. They've got a bus, although it does not run very frequently, and there are horse-pulled carriages which go up and down it. But B. and I decided to walk, as although it was switchbacked it did not seem to be that steep a grade really. This turned out not to be the case.
It is possible that, in my life, I have done something more stupid than getting off a transatlantic plane flight on which I did not sleep and which had its usual dehydrating effect, eating a fairly heavy lunch, and then climbing a mountain in the mid-afternoon of a high summer heat wave and in a skirt. But you'd have to go back a ways, I mean you are probably talking teenagerhood, because this is a level of stupidity which I really sincerely have tried to avoid since I got out of high school. I plead jet lag. Serious jet lag. Not a rational thought in my body. Jet lag would also be why I forgot to take my daily medications, because the time change with the plane caused confusion there, and why I managed to leave them in the car at the bottom of the hill, even though by the time we started climbing I already had a significant headache, which I was attributing entirely to lack of sleep. Jet lag: it makes people stupid. B. was fine, because B., as I mentioned, had slept on the plane.
I did not throw up or pass out. You are all very proud of me. I am proud of me, really. I was genuinely concerned that I might faint and wake up in a hospital. It was up there among the most physically uncomfortable experiences of my life, by which I mean I am actively comparing this climb to having had meningitis. There just kept being more grade and more road and more switchbacks, and it was a fairly nice road through a fairly nice forest, but I was incredibly annoyed with it for existing. It did not help that, as it is still a carriage road, it was covered in flies and in horse manure. It also did not help that for the vast majority of the climb, you cannot see the castle, which is concealed by trees and by its own innate sense of drama. So there's no way to know how far away it is. After a while, I started wondering, where the hell is it? Did it decide to go on vacation? Just, how does something that large lurk like that?
Lurk is the correct word. We made a last switchback and it suddenly sprang up from the forest above and behind us.
This was one hundred and eighty degrees behind us. I can only assume Ludwig wanted his guests to be craning out the carriage windows.
The amusing thing here is that a lot of these details are entirely for the benefit of the arriving guests. There is literally nowhere in the entire castle or area just outside it where you can see either that horse relief between the windows on the tower or that statue on the roof peak.
Just below the castle, the road widens and the bus and carriages stop and there are benches and a store which sells the usual tourist kitsch but also water and lemon tea (electrolytes!). We still had a while until our tour, which was great, because I had to sit down very badly. I looked as though I'd been dragged through a bush backwards and then had a bucket of salt water poured over my head, and I felt like the confluence of death and a migraine. I am used to being in a fair amount of pain when I travel, and usually I just push through it, because I know that what I will remember in later years is the things I saw and the things I did, not the way I felt. I certainly remember what I saw and did at Neuschwanstein, but man, do I also remember the rest. Anyway, we sat down until I was feeling less shaky, and then went up to the actual castle entrance.
The entrance is just to the left of this picture. Note the square glass bit-- that's original, that's Ludwig's own conservatory. Gas heating was a thing by the time this was built, so he could have plants all winter even in the mountains.
You go in through a fake gatehouse with a large pseudo-portcullis (it does not actually go down) and then there's a courtyard, which has been turned into the tour meeting point. There's also a set of stairs up from each side of the courtyard, which rises to a roof garden. I was done with climbing things for the time being, but B. went up. From there you can see Ludwig's favorite place from which to gaze at Neuschwanstein, the Marienbrücke, Marie's Bridge. This bridge spans a gorge behind the castle and was also erected by Ludwig (it's named after his mother). It's about another mile and a half walk, which means we didn't trek out to it.
I am pretty sure that somewhere beyond Marienbrücke lay the origin point of the several hang gliders we saw hovering over the valley in the late afternoon sunlight, and a better place for hang gliding I honestly cannot imagine: mountains which go straight up and straight down, the castles, the gorges, the canyons, the little streams, the lazy green fields. If we'd been in the area longer I'd have wanted to find a way to do it myself. As it was, we simply went inside.
Pictures are not allowed in the interior of Neuschwanstein, since all the paint is original and none of it has ever been restored. This is a pity, but completely comprehensible from a conservationist point of view. The guide told us about the picture policy in the tiny entrance hall, which is full of Corinthian columns with carved and painted acanthus tops and is bemuraled with jewel-bright florals surrounded by arabesques in gold and lapis. "As bright as the day they were painted," the guide said, and the gentleman standing in front of us surreptitiously removed his elbow from the side of the column and tried to pretend he had never touched anything. Then there's a long, relatively bare hallway, with windows on one side out to a sheer drop and windows on the other into the servants' quarters. Hardwood floors, hardwood furniture, cupboards and cubbies built into the walls. The inspiration was clearly monk's cells, everything whitewashed to a fault, but for servants' quarters I thought they were fairly nice, assuming that not too many people were crowded into them.
"And now we will go up sixty-three steps," the guide said cheerfully, and indeed, we did, up a long stone spiral staircase inside a round turret. No, they have never put in elevators; if you cannot climb steps that well, I do not suggest taking the Neuschwanstein tour. This let us out in Ludwig's private quarters.
The thing which amazed me, and which still amazes me, is that I found the whole thing very tasteful. I had been expecting, well, Arthurian bling. Ludwig has a very... Elton John sort of feel, historically speaking, and there is a room which has more than a hundred pictures of swans, and the throne room is a duplicate of the nave of a medieval cathedral, and I was expecting it to be so blazingly over-the-top that we could not see the top below us. I was expecting the top to have been left down in the valley somewhere.
Well. I had two thoughts upon looking at most of the rooms. The first was that William Morris would have given his eyeteeth to see what Ludwig was doing here, and that I have no idea whatsoever why Neuschwanstein is not mentioned as the triumph of the influence of the pre-Raphaelite and Arts and Crafts movements it so obviously is. Seriously. Morris & Co. made its first huge splash with textiles, wallpapers, decorative motifs etc. at the 1862 International Exhibition, and the foundation stones of Neuschwanstein were laid in 1869. The aesthetic is so similar: the return to handwork and handicrafts as a proposed method of solving unemployment and fostering pride in workmanship; the attempt to create an idealized Middle-Ages-as-it-should-have-been through study of myths and legends-- also, if necessary, revised to what they should have been; the concealment of modern comforts via decorative flourishes; even the color palette and the attenuated delicacy of the linework in the murals are the same. The Arthurian heroes, the water nymphs and goddesses of Ludwig's walls are the same who were painted by Rossetti and Burne-Jones, and Ludwig's highest hall has a minstrel's gallery in it very similar to the one Morris put in at the Red House... except of course Ludwig's is about a hundred feet long instead of ten.
The second thought will mostly be intelligible to people who also went to Bryn Mawr, I'm afraid. At Bryn Mawr, there's an Old Philadelphia Main Line mansion the school has inherited, which has grad student housing and a very few undergrads, and which has been as well-preserved as the school can keep it. I lived in it for a year. It has a banquet hall and a whole lot of carved woodwork, and many, many murals, all representing scenes from Ivanhoe. In short, I walked into Neuschwanstein and said to myself 'holy fuck, this is what they were trying to do with Glenmede back when they built it, only they didn't have this much money'. And Glenmede is explicitly an American Arts and Crafts building.
So Ludwig did not just throw gold at this, is what I am saying, though he did do that. All of the rooms have plans, all of the wall designs have sight lines built in, all of the furniture is meant to be usable as well as expensive, and it may not be to everybody's taste but there is a unifying mind at work expressing itself through the castle. And a curious and fascinating mind it is.
The room with the hundred-plus pictures of swans is Ludwig's sitting room. There is an extremely large rock-crystal swan covering the heating vent outlet, and a full-length portrait of Lohengrin, and apart from that you actually have to work to see any of the swans at all. The doorknob is a swan's neck, if you look closely at it. The wallpaper border up near the ceiling has a lot of interlocking swans, if you squint. The tables are supported on swans' wings, if you happen to look under the table. Except for the giant-ass rock crystal one, it's basically a lovely little sitting room, and when the guide told us about the swans you could see people start going 'wait, where?'
Then there's the throne room.
The throne room made me deeply emotional about Ludwig II of Bavaria. I already knew I liked him, but I liked him in the being-very-entertained way, and the throne room made me begin to respect him. It is the most peculiar statement about the metaphysical position of a king in a divine-right monarchy I have ever seen, which is saying something. It is a duplicate not just of the interior of a medieval cathedral, but of an Eastern Orthodox medieval cathedral, and the entire floor is covered with mosaic of the quality, skill, and pictorial brilliance you would expect from that. They have glass laid down, but even so it felt criminal walking on the glass, what if it rubbed, gah. Flowers and fruit and peacocks and just amazing work. Three of the walls have murals of the setting out of Arthur and his knights to seek the Holy Grail, and the ceiling is a lapis lazuli and gold celestial dome mosaic. The dais for Ludwig's throne is the apse of the cathedral, and since the throne itself was never built, the wall mosaics are entirely visible. They are full-body portraits of the kings of Europe who have been canonized as saints: Saint Louis, Saint Olaf, Saint Edward the Confessor, Saint Wenceslaus, Saint Stephen of Hungary, and that one Holy Roman Emperor. Then above them are portraits of the twelve apostles, and above that Christ enthroned, looking like a cross between the Western portraits of God the Father and the Eastern ones of the son as Pantokrator. None of these people are smiling. Their sightlines cross at a point in midair on the wall, and you know what they would be staring at-- the occupant of the throne. Even Christ is looking down. When a king sits here, he is surrounded by the gazes of Good Examples, staring out at the story of the Grail Quest.
Then there's the chandelier. The chandelier packs all the bling I had thought would be in the rest of the castle into one place. It is literally plated in gold and studded with hundreds and hundreds of emeralds. It is multi-layered, there are several rounds of it, with the largest circle on the outside, and narrowing circles rising up to a confection of gold and rubies and lapis and other gems which looks like a cross between a crown and an explosion of fireworks. It is in fact a duplication, with embellishments, of the crown of a Byzantine Emperor.
It is hovering at a central position in the room, quite low down, maybe ten feet from the floor, and the ceiling is like seventy feet tall at least. When you are standing front and center looking at the dais, in the position in which you would speak to someone sitting on the throne, it is hovering directly over your head. The king on his throne would literally see his supplicants crowned with all the riches of his own kingdom, more richly than he himself could possibly be arrayed. I suspect that Ludwig was not thinking what I was thinking while I stood under it, which is that I hope those chains are solid because the thing looks incredibly heavy, and would not so much squash you if it fell as enclose you in an expensive and extremely difficult to move cage of filigree. But maybe he was thinking that. Do you see what I mean about the iconography of this room? Complex, multi-layered, intelligent and erudite but so personal it's impossible to tell whether it's confused or not and how deep the symbolism is meant to run, lovely almost despite itself, crafted at the peak skill of everyone involved with it, irreducibly unique. Self-abnegating to the point where it circles around to become self-absorption again, or possibly the other way round.
I take that throne room as a portrait of Ludwig himself, a far more revealing one than the infinite iterations of his face which are plastered on all surfaces in the surrounding tourist area, and it is a portrait I appreciate. It is the portrait of a very real person.
You have to go up yet another thirty-two steps to get to the music hall at the very top, which as I mentioned has a minstrel's gallery and a stage and they do do concerts in it every so often, which is good because it would be a shame to waste the carefully planned acoustics. There's the conservatory, which is tiny and crowded, and there's an interior grotto-- on the second floor yet-- with craggy rocks sprouting out of the hallway walls suddenly and artfully dripping water and, the one major miscalculation in the place, new-at-the-time purple and blue bulbs over the gas jets to give the whole thing a (really kitschy) faerie glow. There's the unfinished bathing room, two stories high, with sketches on the walls showing that it was going to be set up as the bath of a knight's vigil, except that I think you were supposed to be able to dive from the second story into the bath, which is not so much a vigil thing. The kitchens, with their ovens larger than my entire apartment and a plethora of giant copper dishware. Ludwig's bed frame, which is also carved to look like a cathedral, but the outside of a Gothic cathedral, this time. The gift shop, which is wasting its opportunities because if I ran that place you would be able to get replica chandelier hats and T-shirts with concealed swan patterns, but they don't even sell plushies of Ludwig which is, come on people, a gimme. They sell postcards. Not even good ones. Buy postcards down the street, much larger selection. Sheesh.
But for me the heart of Neuschwanstein is the throne room, and not only because it was pretty much the last thing I was physically able to parse fully (those last thirty-two steps were the cherry on the sundae of inadvisable climbing). It is one of the world's great interesting rooms.
I mostly remember the climb down as being made in a sort of haze, broken by arriving back at our car, drinking a great deal of tea, and taking my meds and all sorts of painkillers. Then lapsing into a state of vague somnolence in which I was concerned primarily with fully appreciating the fact that I no longer had a headache.
But one thing I do remember from the drive back, in the long slow summer country only just starting to fade into twilight, out the window in a snatch gone too soon to even gesture 'look' to the driver: a hayfield, just-mown, mowed in a spiral, with the long crisp stalks of still-green hay lying in a high-mounded line, and the spiral stretching up a hillside just steep enough to display that shape to advantage. Nothing special at the center, except that it was where all the hay radiated from. But jumping over the bottommost hay-line, caught in mid-leap with all four feet off the ground, about to crash into both the harvest and her own quick shadow was a stretched line of long-haired calico cat.
I didn't even see her land. Pounce! and gone, and on to Munich.
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The rental car people gave us a random upgrade, so on trekking our baggage down to the garage we were met by a BMW Series 5, a car which has reached such a ludicrous perfection of engineering that if I knew the right German I could probably get it to make me an omelette. It was black, and sleek, and aerodynamic, and full of random little convenient and confusing details. The included GPS came in seven languages and did nothing so crass as speak to us, preferring to project upcoming turns holographically on the interior of the drivers'-side windshield. The keys did not need to be put in the ignition-- there was no ignition to put them in-- merely left casually somewhere in the interior of the car. The thing politely turned off its own engine at short stops such as traffic lights and had more than twice the legroom of a transatlantic coach seat. The whole experience was rather like expecting a car and being met by a vaguely disdainful, although in its own way friendly, sort of panther. I was moderately worried about breathing on the paint wrong somehow.
B. has driven in many countries and did not find the concept of driving in Germany at all intimidating, so we got on the road as soon as we had spent about twenty minutes figuring out how to work the GPS, and another ten minutes and a consult with the rental people figuring out how to put the thing in drive (as opposed to turning it on-- it turned on automatically, but the question was what to do after that). I had worn my usual plane clothes, jeans and T-shirt, but it became obvious I was going to die of heat exhaustion, so I managed the classic change-in-public shimmy and got into a long skirt. This proved to be a mixed blessing later.
My first impression of the German countryside was of fields and fields of solar panels, acres of them, black and sleek and shiny as the car; and also all the other cars on the road were polished and powerful and gleaming in the sunlight. The Germans evidently prefer their highways to be neither seen nor heard, when possible, a position I understand entirely, and so despite being, for the first chunk of the drive, on the road between a major European city and its airport it took a very long time for us to pass by even one visible building. The side views were mostly solar panels, and soundproof fences, and ludicrously green fields bordered in ludicrously green trees.
Eventually we finished bypassing the Munich metropolitan area and got onto smaller roads, and then there started being small villages, all alike filled with a combination of antique whitewashed houses with red tile roofs and gleaming modern chrome topped with yet more solar panels. The local church style (more than one per village) looks, to my untrained eye, more what I would have expected of Greek Orthodox than Lutheran, and is usually on the outskirts, an extremely whitewashed tiny rectangle with one proud redtiled domed tower. Rose trellises, woodpiles several stories high in sheds attached to houses, signs for beer gardens. The farther we got into the country, the smaller the roads got, and twistier. There started to be farm equipment sharing road space, and the way dwindled down to what in the U.S. we would consider one lane, while continuing to support traffic in two directions. We passed chunks of woodland, incredibly dense in a way I've never seen a forest manage-- when we passed an exit, we might be able to see that the tree-belt between the exit and the main road was not even ten feet thick, but it would be so lush, so full of undergrowth and verdancy, that even then you could not see light through it. This gives me some idea of why the Bavarian woods are so legendary, and why it is so very easy to lose one's way in them. You could get wildly turned around in that ten-foot belt, if you could force your way through it at all.
It was so hot it was hazy, and the initially flat ground started to ripple in gentle waves. To the sides were fields full of haying, bound round bales of new hay drying and sunburned men shepherding haymows in their gentle circles. (I thought hay was an August crop, but evidently not.) The cows looked whitewashed, Disney-eyed and sleepy in the few shadows. Eventually, in the distance, blue mountains stuck against the sky like cutouts of cloud-banks. They came nearer, and the snow on top of them became more and more wildly improbable to the summer country underneath it. A bike path started up beside the road at about the time the hills got really serious, so that it had clearly been designed by and for cyclists devoted to the point of lunacy, and the villages became full of bed-and-breakfasts, restaurants as well as beer gardens, and public tourist-filled parking lots. "Der Romantische Straße", B. said, "the Romantic Highway." Romantic, yes, but highway only in the sense that it is a road and it is paved and you can put cars on it and they can putter along behind the combine tractors. Finally, another belt of flatness, green and waving like an ocean, not even trees in it, stretching for several miles into a great horseshoe bay in those mountains, which lifted straight from the flatland with no preliminaries, just the green breaking against the lowering cliff-wall. In the most dramatic possible position in the center of the flatland, one of those proud and tiny domed-tower churches, surrounded by wind in skirling wheat, a splash of lake, a few defiant little trees and nothing else; in the most dramatic possible position on the lowest spire of the back of the bay in the mountains, the flashing towers of the overlooking castle.
Neuschwanstein was built by King Ludwig II of Bavaria (1845-1886), a man fighting for predominancy with Rudolf II of Prague at the top of the list of historical figures most likely to have been secretly werewolves. There's a video game based on that supposition, and my reaction when told about this video game was that it didn't need Rosicrucian conspiracies or secret Templar orders, it just needed Ludwig. The mangaka You Higuri has done a lovely two-volume (gay porn) biography of him, because in order to make his life into a manga you need to change precisely nothing. This is the Swan King we are talking about here, the man who hired Wagner as his household composer, the man who put in one of his ornamental grottoes an actual boulder with an actual sword actually sticking out of it so that he could pull it out on special occasions.
This is the man whose reaction, one presumes, to the knowledge that his namesake Ludwig I had damn near managed to bankrupt the country by throwing money at Lola Montez was GO BIG OR GO HOME; his hobby was building extravagant castles. He had Versailles duplicated in miniature on a lake island, just because he could.
Actually he loved his people and they loved him (and still do), and he tried his hardest to be the best king he could be. He was devoted to the ideals of chivalry and knighthood and Romance in the classical sense and courtly love and the worship of beauty, and it really wasn't his fault that nobody taught him the value of money. Castles were not only his passion and a way for him to build idealized dreamworlds, but his idea of a solution to the problem of unemployment. Oddly enough, nowadays the ones which survive bring in massive revenue by means of tourism dollars, which is one reason he is still looked on with a great deal of reverence. He would have done fairly well as a figurehead monarch, kept out of politics and given a budget, but he was theoretically a ruling king, and so they found him facedown and strangled in a lake at the age of forty.
I have wanted to see Neuschwanstein ever since I first heard about it, because it is his Grail Knight castle. It's the one where he concentrated all of his Arthurian interests, and it is also the inspiration for Disney's Cinderella castle. (In fact the entire Bavarian landscape around Neuschwanstein turns out to explain a fair bit about early Disney. Those hills, those forests, those turrets and towers, those disturbingly giant-eyed cows... the entire place reads to an American raised on repertory Disney films as an agricultural fantasy of a theme park, which is a reading imposed on it by the fact that the communalized id-fantasy is emulating it and not the other way around. This lends a certain vertiginous quality to the landscape, a fear that somebody is trying to propagandize with it-- or rather that they already have, years ago, and it was impossible to tell until this moment. I spent a fair amount of energy working on blinking this imposed view away as much as I could, because it is exactly this sort of thing which prevents one from seeing an actual country.)
Neuschwanstein (New-Swan-Stone) was never finished entirely, in that the outside fabric was, but many of the interior rooms were not decorated. But you can walk up to it, and tour what there is of the inside. It was almost certainly Ludwig's favorite castle, as evidenced by the fact that he put it right up the road from the castle he grew up in, Schloss Hohenschwangau.
This was just not dramatic enough, okay? I mean it has what, five or six turrets? It's made of stucco and tile? Not sufficiently pseudo-medieval. Ironically enough, there was an actual medieval castle on the site where Ludwig put Neuschwanstein, but it was, you know, old stonework and had nothing that nice-looking so he tore it down and started over. *quiet facepalm*
The car park is down at the base of the mountain spur, and there's a street full of restaurants and tourist shops, and a ticket office where you can buy tickets for both Neuschwanstein and Hohenschwangau. Following Ludwig's taste, we were not terribly interested in the latter (both of us are more along the lines of 'interested in mad royal architects' than 'Bavarian monarchy geeks', precisely), so we bought tickets for the tour of Neuschwanstein only. You have to take a guided tour, they won't just let you in to wander around because there are a lot of rather narrow spaces. I think the ticket was about twelve Euros? There are tours in a lot of languages, including English, and they tell you what time you are supposed to turn up in the castle courtyard. We had more than an hour before our tour.
This meant we went and grabbed some food at one of the tourist cafes, which may have been a mistake, as although I was very hungry it was rather heavy and salty fare. Sausages and sauerkraut and mashed potatoes, and I think B. had schnitzel. We played 'how many portraits of King Ludwig II can you spot without getting up?' inside the restaurant and got as high as nine.
Since, as I mentioned, the car park is at the base of the mountain spur, there's a road of about a mile and a half leading up from there to the actual castle. They've got a bus, although it does not run very frequently, and there are horse-pulled carriages which go up and down it. But B. and I decided to walk, as although it was switchbacked it did not seem to be that steep a grade really. This turned out not to be the case.
It is possible that, in my life, I have done something more stupid than getting off a transatlantic plane flight on which I did not sleep and which had its usual dehydrating effect, eating a fairly heavy lunch, and then climbing a mountain in the mid-afternoon of a high summer heat wave and in a skirt. But you'd have to go back a ways, I mean you are probably talking teenagerhood, because this is a level of stupidity which I really sincerely have tried to avoid since I got out of high school. I plead jet lag. Serious jet lag. Not a rational thought in my body. Jet lag would also be why I forgot to take my daily medications, because the time change with the plane caused confusion there, and why I managed to leave them in the car at the bottom of the hill, even though by the time we started climbing I already had a significant headache, which I was attributing entirely to lack of sleep. Jet lag: it makes people stupid. B. was fine, because B., as I mentioned, had slept on the plane.
I did not throw up or pass out. You are all very proud of me. I am proud of me, really. I was genuinely concerned that I might faint and wake up in a hospital. It was up there among the most physically uncomfortable experiences of my life, by which I mean I am actively comparing this climb to having had meningitis. There just kept being more grade and more road and more switchbacks, and it was a fairly nice road through a fairly nice forest, but I was incredibly annoyed with it for existing. It did not help that, as it is still a carriage road, it was covered in flies and in horse manure. It also did not help that for the vast majority of the climb, you cannot see the castle, which is concealed by trees and by its own innate sense of drama. So there's no way to know how far away it is. After a while, I started wondering, where the hell is it? Did it decide to go on vacation? Just, how does something that large lurk like that?
Lurk is the correct word. We made a last switchback and it suddenly sprang up from the forest above and behind us.
This was one hundred and eighty degrees behind us. I can only assume Ludwig wanted his guests to be craning out the carriage windows.
The amusing thing here is that a lot of these details are entirely for the benefit of the arriving guests. There is literally nowhere in the entire castle or area just outside it where you can see either that horse relief between the windows on the tower or that statue on the roof peak.
Just below the castle, the road widens and the bus and carriages stop and there are benches and a store which sells the usual tourist kitsch but also water and lemon tea (electrolytes!). We still had a while until our tour, which was great, because I had to sit down very badly. I looked as though I'd been dragged through a bush backwards and then had a bucket of salt water poured over my head, and I felt like the confluence of death and a migraine. I am used to being in a fair amount of pain when I travel, and usually I just push through it, because I know that what I will remember in later years is the things I saw and the things I did, not the way I felt. I certainly remember what I saw and did at Neuschwanstein, but man, do I also remember the rest. Anyway, we sat down until I was feeling less shaky, and then went up to the actual castle entrance.
The entrance is just to the left of this picture. Note the square glass bit-- that's original, that's Ludwig's own conservatory. Gas heating was a thing by the time this was built, so he could have plants all winter even in the mountains.
You go in through a fake gatehouse with a large pseudo-portcullis (it does not actually go down) and then there's a courtyard, which has been turned into the tour meeting point. There's also a set of stairs up from each side of the courtyard, which rises to a roof garden. I was done with climbing things for the time being, but B. went up. From there you can see Ludwig's favorite place from which to gaze at Neuschwanstein, the Marienbrücke, Marie's Bridge. This bridge spans a gorge behind the castle and was also erected by Ludwig (it's named after his mother). It's about another mile and a half walk, which means we didn't trek out to it.
I am pretty sure that somewhere beyond Marienbrücke lay the origin point of the several hang gliders we saw hovering over the valley in the late afternoon sunlight, and a better place for hang gliding I honestly cannot imagine: mountains which go straight up and straight down, the castles, the gorges, the canyons, the little streams, the lazy green fields. If we'd been in the area longer I'd have wanted to find a way to do it myself. As it was, we simply went inside.
Pictures are not allowed in the interior of Neuschwanstein, since all the paint is original and none of it has ever been restored. This is a pity, but completely comprehensible from a conservationist point of view. The guide told us about the picture policy in the tiny entrance hall, which is full of Corinthian columns with carved and painted acanthus tops and is bemuraled with jewel-bright florals surrounded by arabesques in gold and lapis. "As bright as the day they were painted," the guide said, and the gentleman standing in front of us surreptitiously removed his elbow from the side of the column and tried to pretend he had never touched anything. Then there's a long, relatively bare hallway, with windows on one side out to a sheer drop and windows on the other into the servants' quarters. Hardwood floors, hardwood furniture, cupboards and cubbies built into the walls. The inspiration was clearly monk's cells, everything whitewashed to a fault, but for servants' quarters I thought they were fairly nice, assuming that not too many people were crowded into them.
"And now we will go up sixty-three steps," the guide said cheerfully, and indeed, we did, up a long stone spiral staircase inside a round turret. No, they have never put in elevators; if you cannot climb steps that well, I do not suggest taking the Neuschwanstein tour. This let us out in Ludwig's private quarters.
The thing which amazed me, and which still amazes me, is that I found the whole thing very tasteful. I had been expecting, well, Arthurian bling. Ludwig has a very... Elton John sort of feel, historically speaking, and there is a room which has more than a hundred pictures of swans, and the throne room is a duplicate of the nave of a medieval cathedral, and I was expecting it to be so blazingly over-the-top that we could not see the top below us. I was expecting the top to have been left down in the valley somewhere.
Well. I had two thoughts upon looking at most of the rooms. The first was that William Morris would have given his eyeteeth to see what Ludwig was doing here, and that I have no idea whatsoever why Neuschwanstein is not mentioned as the triumph of the influence of the pre-Raphaelite and Arts and Crafts movements it so obviously is. Seriously. Morris & Co. made its first huge splash with textiles, wallpapers, decorative motifs etc. at the 1862 International Exhibition, and the foundation stones of Neuschwanstein were laid in 1869. The aesthetic is so similar: the return to handwork and handicrafts as a proposed method of solving unemployment and fostering pride in workmanship; the attempt to create an idealized Middle-Ages-as-it-should-have-been through study of myths and legends-- also, if necessary, revised to what they should have been; the concealment of modern comforts via decorative flourishes; even the color palette and the attenuated delicacy of the linework in the murals are the same. The Arthurian heroes, the water nymphs and goddesses of Ludwig's walls are the same who were painted by Rossetti and Burne-Jones, and Ludwig's highest hall has a minstrel's gallery in it very similar to the one Morris put in at the Red House... except of course Ludwig's is about a hundred feet long instead of ten.
The second thought will mostly be intelligible to people who also went to Bryn Mawr, I'm afraid. At Bryn Mawr, there's an Old Philadelphia Main Line mansion the school has inherited, which has grad student housing and a very few undergrads, and which has been as well-preserved as the school can keep it. I lived in it for a year. It has a banquet hall and a whole lot of carved woodwork, and many, many murals, all representing scenes from Ivanhoe. In short, I walked into Neuschwanstein and said to myself 'holy fuck, this is what they were trying to do with Glenmede back when they built it, only they didn't have this much money'. And Glenmede is explicitly an American Arts and Crafts building.
So Ludwig did not just throw gold at this, is what I am saying, though he did do that. All of the rooms have plans, all of the wall designs have sight lines built in, all of the furniture is meant to be usable as well as expensive, and it may not be to everybody's taste but there is a unifying mind at work expressing itself through the castle. And a curious and fascinating mind it is.
The room with the hundred-plus pictures of swans is Ludwig's sitting room. There is an extremely large rock-crystal swan covering the heating vent outlet, and a full-length portrait of Lohengrin, and apart from that you actually have to work to see any of the swans at all. The doorknob is a swan's neck, if you look closely at it. The wallpaper border up near the ceiling has a lot of interlocking swans, if you squint. The tables are supported on swans' wings, if you happen to look under the table. Except for the giant-ass rock crystal one, it's basically a lovely little sitting room, and when the guide told us about the swans you could see people start going 'wait, where?'
Then there's the throne room.
The throne room made me deeply emotional about Ludwig II of Bavaria. I already knew I liked him, but I liked him in the being-very-entertained way, and the throne room made me begin to respect him. It is the most peculiar statement about the metaphysical position of a king in a divine-right monarchy I have ever seen, which is saying something. It is a duplicate not just of the interior of a medieval cathedral, but of an Eastern Orthodox medieval cathedral, and the entire floor is covered with mosaic of the quality, skill, and pictorial brilliance you would expect from that. They have glass laid down, but even so it felt criminal walking on the glass, what if it rubbed, gah. Flowers and fruit and peacocks and just amazing work. Three of the walls have murals of the setting out of Arthur and his knights to seek the Holy Grail, and the ceiling is a lapis lazuli and gold celestial dome mosaic. The dais for Ludwig's throne is the apse of the cathedral, and since the throne itself was never built, the wall mosaics are entirely visible. They are full-body portraits of the kings of Europe who have been canonized as saints: Saint Louis, Saint Olaf, Saint Edward the Confessor, Saint Wenceslaus, Saint Stephen of Hungary, and that one Holy Roman Emperor. Then above them are portraits of the twelve apostles, and above that Christ enthroned, looking like a cross between the Western portraits of God the Father and the Eastern ones of the son as Pantokrator. None of these people are smiling. Their sightlines cross at a point in midair on the wall, and you know what they would be staring at-- the occupant of the throne. Even Christ is looking down. When a king sits here, he is surrounded by the gazes of Good Examples, staring out at the story of the Grail Quest.
Then there's the chandelier. The chandelier packs all the bling I had thought would be in the rest of the castle into one place. It is literally plated in gold and studded with hundreds and hundreds of emeralds. It is multi-layered, there are several rounds of it, with the largest circle on the outside, and narrowing circles rising up to a confection of gold and rubies and lapis and other gems which looks like a cross between a crown and an explosion of fireworks. It is in fact a duplication, with embellishments, of the crown of a Byzantine Emperor.
It is hovering at a central position in the room, quite low down, maybe ten feet from the floor, and the ceiling is like seventy feet tall at least. When you are standing front and center looking at the dais, in the position in which you would speak to someone sitting on the throne, it is hovering directly over your head. The king on his throne would literally see his supplicants crowned with all the riches of his own kingdom, more richly than he himself could possibly be arrayed. I suspect that Ludwig was not thinking what I was thinking while I stood under it, which is that I hope those chains are solid because the thing looks incredibly heavy, and would not so much squash you if it fell as enclose you in an expensive and extremely difficult to move cage of filigree. But maybe he was thinking that. Do you see what I mean about the iconography of this room? Complex, multi-layered, intelligent and erudite but so personal it's impossible to tell whether it's confused or not and how deep the symbolism is meant to run, lovely almost despite itself, crafted at the peak skill of everyone involved with it, irreducibly unique. Self-abnegating to the point where it circles around to become self-absorption again, or possibly the other way round.
I take that throne room as a portrait of Ludwig himself, a far more revealing one than the infinite iterations of his face which are plastered on all surfaces in the surrounding tourist area, and it is a portrait I appreciate. It is the portrait of a very real person.
You have to go up yet another thirty-two steps to get to the music hall at the very top, which as I mentioned has a minstrel's gallery and a stage and they do do concerts in it every so often, which is good because it would be a shame to waste the carefully planned acoustics. There's the conservatory, which is tiny and crowded, and there's an interior grotto-- on the second floor yet-- with craggy rocks sprouting out of the hallway walls suddenly and artfully dripping water and, the one major miscalculation in the place, new-at-the-time purple and blue bulbs over the gas jets to give the whole thing a (really kitschy) faerie glow. There's the unfinished bathing room, two stories high, with sketches on the walls showing that it was going to be set up as the bath of a knight's vigil, except that I think you were supposed to be able to dive from the second story into the bath, which is not so much a vigil thing. The kitchens, with their ovens larger than my entire apartment and a plethora of giant copper dishware. Ludwig's bed frame, which is also carved to look like a cathedral, but the outside of a Gothic cathedral, this time. The gift shop, which is wasting its opportunities because if I ran that place you would be able to get replica chandelier hats and T-shirts with concealed swan patterns, but they don't even sell plushies of Ludwig which is, come on people, a gimme. They sell postcards. Not even good ones. Buy postcards down the street, much larger selection. Sheesh.
But for me the heart of Neuschwanstein is the throne room, and not only because it was pretty much the last thing I was physically able to parse fully (those last thirty-two steps were the cherry on the sundae of inadvisable climbing). It is one of the world's great interesting rooms.
I mostly remember the climb down as being made in a sort of haze, broken by arriving back at our car, drinking a great deal of tea, and taking my meds and all sorts of painkillers. Then lapsing into a state of vague somnolence in which I was concerned primarily with fully appreciating the fact that I no longer had a headache.
But one thing I do remember from the drive back, in the long slow summer country only just starting to fade into twilight, out the window in a snatch gone too soon to even gesture 'look' to the driver: a hayfield, just-mown, mowed in a spiral, with the long crisp stalks of still-green hay lying in a high-mounded line, and the spiral stretching up a hillside just steep enough to display that shape to advantage. Nothing special at the center, except that it was where all the hay radiated from. But jumping over the bottommost hay-line, caught in mid-leap with all four feet off the ground, about to crash into both the harvest and her own quick shadow was a stretched line of long-haired calico cat.
I didn't even see her land. Pounce! and gone, and on to Munich.
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