Note sull'episodio
Ludwig II of Bavaria grew up at Hohenschwangau, sketching the ruins of twin medieval castles on the crag above, and took the throne at 18 as a constitutional monarch with little real power. When his grandfather died in 1868, the freed appanage funded a castle inspired by the Wartburg and Pierrefonds and conceived as a temple to Richard Wagner's Tannhäuser and Lohengrin. He hired stage designer Christian Jank to draw it and architect Eduard Riedel to make it stand. Up to 300 men blasted away the old ruins and built for two decades with steam cranes, and the medieval shell hid central heating, running hot water, flush toilets, telephone lines, and a self-turning Rumford roasting spit.
Costs climbed past six million marks while Ludwig also built Linderhof and Herrenchiemsee, and from 1871 Otto von Bismarck paid him secretly after he signed the Kaiserbrief backing a Prussian emperor. With private debts reaching 14 million marks, ministers deposed him in 1886 on a psychiatric report by Dr. Bernhard von Gudden, who never examined him. Ludwig had the first commission arrested with help from local fire brigades, but a second one took him from his bedroom. Two days later he and von Gudden were found dead in Lake Starnberg, and six weeks after that the castle opened to paying visitors.
- Ludwig ordering a Lohengrin mural changed, down to a golden chain in place of roses
- Why the debts were private and did not come from the Bavarian state treasury
- The bed whose canopy took 14 wood carvers more than four years
- Only 172 days spent living in the castle he bankrupted himself to build
- Nazi storage of art looted from France, and Walt Disney's Sleeping Beauty Castle