The Last Castle

The castle from the valley.

If there's anything most people think they know about Schloss Neuschwanstein in Bavaria, it's that it was the inspiration for the Magic Castle of Walt Disney. If they know anything else, it's that Neuschwanstein ("new swan stone") is the brainchild of King Ludwig II, the so-called "Mad King" who was completely disinterested in statecraft, but spent huge sums on realizing his romantic fantasies. This castle is his crowning achievement: a mammoth tribute to his friend and inspiration, Richard Wagner, embodying in stone the great Ur-legends that became the glorious past of a newly unified Germany. Or at least Wagner's versions of them.

That's all I knew when I arrived there yesterday, at what is still the #1 or 2 top tourist destination in the country (1.3 million visitors a year). I picked up some notion somewhere that Neuschwanstein was little more than a garden folly on a grand scale--great for viewing at a distance, but with not much to see within. Tastemakers deplore it as kitsch. The masses of unwashed surging in the town below, Hohenschwangau, did nothing to dispel these impressions.

But I was pleasantly surprised by Neuschwanstein. It goes without saying that it is spectacular from afar: situated on a high perch above the valley, its profile in white stone beckons in any season. On the day we visited, it was shrouded by tendrils of cloud, as if emerging from--or spinning--the mists of prehistory. 

Actually, though the interior was never finished, there's plenty to see inside. The interior is replete in the way we never see anymore, with every square inch painted, gilded, or carved. The style is 19th century Romantic, like a Pre-Raphaelite painting come to life. Photo-taking is verboten, but pictures are easy to find on the web, and worth looking at. It is certainly the only palace I know with a grotto--an actual cavern, with stalactites-- located directly off the master bedroom. 

How Ludwig II tops a staircase.

Of course it's kitsch. And yet, the Disneyfication of its profile has the paradoxical effect of making Ludwig's pastiche "original" seem more authentic than it would otherwise. Instead of the prehistory of Germany, Neuschwanstein has become the ur-source of a far larger empire: the Wonderful World of Disney. 

Despite its transgressions against conventional good taste, there's something else that's real about the place. It stems directly from Ludwig himself, who did not play at nostalgia or the faux antique, but actually lived for and in the world he created. For him, modernity was nothing much to celebrate, and the past was not an attitude to strike, but a kind of utopia. Knowing the human costs of that modernity, who's to say he was wrong? 

© 2015 Nicholas Nicastro