Königsschlößer (Royal Castles) Overview

Perhaps it was to his credit that Maximilian II neglected to educate his sons in the mundane affairs of government, allowing them to cultivate a taste for literature and the arts instead. With Max’s untimely death, the royal line was left in the hands of his naïve 18-year-old son Ludwig II, an existentially tragic figure often dismissed as a whimsical, but insane, boy-child. In truth, Ludwig was incurably isolated from those around him, burying his despair of modernity in castle plans and reading Schiller until the day before his death. A frenzied visionary and fervent Wagner fan, Ludwig created fantastic castles soaring into the alpine skies, a veritable fantasia inspired by scenes from the opera Lohengrin. Whether the king was actually crazy has never been determined—some claim that his detractors fabricated medical evidence—but in 1886 a band of upstart nobles and bureaucrats deposed Ludwig in a coup d’etat, had him declared insane, and imprisoned him in Schloß Berg on the Starnberger See, outside of Munich. Three days later, the king and his psychiatrist were discovered dead in the lake under mysterious circumstances—murder, suicide or a failed escape attempt, perhaps. The young King remains an adored Bavarian icon, his portrait still hanging proudly in the foyers of more traditional family homes. Thousands of tourists flock to his castles daily to explore the captivating enigma of Ludwig’s life, death, and self-fashioned dream-world. As over-touristed and over-priced as they may seem, the castles are worth the trip.