Stuff You Should Know - Ludwig II: The Only Real King of the 19th Century

Episode Date: September 5, 2024

Outside of Germany, King Ludwig II is relatively unknown. And, yet, he is one of history’s most tragic and romantic kings. He was a gay icon and a ruler who eschewed public appearances for turn inward into a fantasy realm of his own making.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and this is Stuff You Should Know. Welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and this is stuff you should know the Fairy-tale King edition, I guess Yeah, that's the one and only I could come up with I love I love stories of allegedly Mad Kings Mm-hmm. I've spoken before about the madness of King George the great film

Sure, and I'm surprised no one's done a movie about this character I am too as a matter of fact because Even if he's not that well known and he's pretty well known. Yeah his his castle is certainly extraordinarily well known sure which one Well, yeah, he made three castles as we'll see but the one that really takes the cake is Neuschwanstein, which means new swan stone. Do you want to know the German pronunciation? I just gave it.

Neuschwanstein. That's what I said. Oh, OK, great. Is it really? Yeah, for EI it's always the second letter in German. Neusch. And then Neu is, it's not Neu, it's Neu. Gotcha.

So, yeah, I'll just call it New Swanstone Castle then from now on. Yeah, that's what it means, right? Alright, let me try my hand at this. Ludwig the second, and we're saying the W like a V, correct? Yeah, yeah, let's what it means, right? All right, let me try my hand at this. Ludwig II, and we're saying the W like a V, correct? Yeah, yeah, let's do it. Okay, Ludwig II, known as the Fairytale King. In German, Fairytale King is der Markenkönig. Yeah, you just gotta work on your umlauts.

I thought I nailed it. So, okay, what is that one then? I think that would be Merchenkinnig. Okay, well at any rate, I love these words. I just can't pronounce them at all. Hey, I'm going on German I learned in 1988 and 89. Well, you still got it. A little bit 91 and 92. I don't know if I do or not.

So as we'll see, even if you haven't heard of Ludwig, he is a really appealing character in history. He was a real life character. But he was, I think he kind of taps into this universal desire that everybody has every once in a while, or some people have more than others, but we all like face times and circumstances and consequences that make us just want to turn away from the world, turn inward into like a fantasy world of our own making, where we can be happy. And most of us don't go actually do that.

Ludwig II did just that because he had the opportunity and he had the means to do it. And I think in that sense, he's appealing in a lot of ways. Plus he's a deeply tragic romantic figure as well. Yeah, as they say, it's good to be the king, right? Sure, sure. In his case, for a little while at least. Well, actually for a long while, he had a nice run.

He did, 20 something years. But let's set up the stage of kind of what was going on when he came about in Southeastern Germany, what was known as Bavaria, and they still call that area Bavaria. You like that? I did. But back then it was just Bavaria.

It had its own, you know, it was independent. It had its own taxes and it had its own constitution. But it was surrounded by just a lot of upheaval in Europe at the time. And when he was born to Crown Prince Ludwig II, he was born in 1845, I'm sorry, that was his name. He was born to King Maximilian the second, and Marie of Prussia had a brother named Otto who suffered from mental illness,

looked like probably schizophrenia, and his aunt, Princess Alexandra, also suffered from some sort of mental illness because she believed, one of the things she believed, that she had swallowed a piano made of glass when she was a kid and she was protecting it and if she moved the wrong way it could shatter. And the reason we bring those two cases up is because Ludwig's own mental capabilities would be questioned later in life and so you obviously look to the family a lot of times and say hey, he also had this in his bloodline. Yeah.

I had an uncle who thought he was St. Jerome. Right. So Ludovic was born into like, like you said, this really strange time or time of turmoil geopolitically, and like you said, Bavaria was an independent state. It was a kingdom and it was one of the last kingdoms in the area. Things were moving more toward more of a nation state, more of less monarchy, more constitution kind of thing, right? And Germany was very much on the brink of basically being brought together into the modern Germany that we think of it now.

This happened when Ludwig was I think 18 or 19 or 20 years old basically. I think he rose to the throne at 18. One thing we should set up though just you know as far as his palace that he would later go on to build that he's famous for. He grew up in these kinds of palaces obviously his royalty in Bavaria at the time. The place where he was mainly raised was called Hoenn-Schrongau Castle, even though he was born in Nymphenburg Palace. But both of these places, if you're looking at, you know, quality castles, they were both pretty amazing. Growing up in these places, little Ludwig was like, you know, this established his

aesthetic of what he thought was amazing and beautiful. Yeah, and there's a quote from his mom that said that as a child he enjoyed dressing up, took pleasure in play acting, loved pictures, and liked making presence of his property, money, and other possessions. Does that mean like giving it away? Yeah, exactly. Like here, I want you to have this. That's nice.

That's a good kid, right? Not exactly like king type behavior, and as we'll see, he basically set the stage for himself, or set the tempo for himself from a very early age, it turns out. So I think like you said, he was 18 when his father died, and he ascended to the throne. He became king of Bavaria in 1864,

and he felt totally unprepared for it. Yeah, he was not excited about it like a lot of kind of boy kings were. He wasn't very well-schooled, seems very sheltered, didn't travel abroad really, never wanted anything to do with kinging or anything like that, kind of throughout his life, it seems like.

And he was a total pacifist at a time where there was a lot of warring going on. He said it corrupts people's morals, makes them unable to entertain grand noble ideals, dulls them for spiritual enjoyment. So he was a pacifist. Yeah, he was also very much opposed to hunting and he loved nature, right?

I love this guy. So he was apprehensive. Um, he did have a really good education. He just felt like he didn't have enough of it to qualify as a ruler of a kingdom. But that's, that's the way the cookie crumbles sometimes, sorry, King. Um, but when he came to power within just a couple

of years, despite his pacifist leanings, um, Bavaria was forced into two different wars. And as a result of that, the geopolitical map changed dramatically. Yeah, for sure. They were allied with Australia because of royal bloodlines. You said Australia.

Did I? Really? Yeah. All right. So remove the L. And there's a couple of, I think, another vowel or so that needs to be... I think another A. Clearly meant Austria. They were allied with Austria.

Who knows what he thought about Australia? No one ever asked, as far as I know. And so when Prussia came knocking on the door for the Seven Weeks War, he was sort of forced to fight with Austria. And then they got there, buttswept pretty good. And then Bavaria was part of, or at least under the thumb of Prussia to the north. And then when the Franco-Prussian war started,

then they had to fight with Prussia. Yeah, and then after the Franco-Prussian war, the Prussians came out on top. And at that point they're like, all right, you know what, we're just going to take over all of Germany. And they established the first right, the German empire that collected all these separate little

kingdoms, including Bavaria and put them under the rule of Prussia. But rather than being Prussia, the whole group, the whole collection that was now combined was Germany as we, as we recognize it today, although a little more because there's a bunch of Poland that was also part of Prussia that would be included in that map of Germany but that was an enormous huge change and for Ludwig the second personally it meant that he was he had no power any longer. He was a ceremonial figurehead,

and geopolitically speaking, he really was not very significant at all. Yeah, so I imagine, I mean, from everything I know about poor little Ludwig, this probably wasn't the worst thing in the world, because all of a sudden, he was forced into a figurehead sort of role. And I get the idea that that was probably ideal for him.

Like he didn't want to govern. It seems like he didn't mind doing the day-to-day bureaucracy of the job and like, you know, signing the things he needed to sign and allocating the things he needed to allocate. But he was not interested in being king. And so all of a sudden, sort of under this new, I mean, sort of protection in a way

as being part of the German Empire and only having figurehead duties, he was free to be a fanciful boy king. Yeah, and to add a little nuance, he was totally fine with being king, but he wanted to be like an absolute monarch, like God's divine representative on earth, like the kings of the centuries before were considered, but that wasn't happening even if Prussia wasn't running the show, because by that time Bavaria

had become a constitutional monarchy. So even before the German Empire was founded, he wasn't nearly as powerful a king as he would have liked to have been. So yeah, that combined with his pacifism, combined with his proneness to fantasy, he was like, yes, this is my chance. I'll see y'all later. I'm going to go over here into this little fantasy world, and it's going to be awesome. Yeah, he got to basically pretend

that he was the king that he wasn't. Yes. Yeah, well put. And he was a romanticist. He was very much into romanticism. It was that something that had already come and gone. But just like so many teenagers are obsessed with the generations before them,

he loved the literature and the art of the movement. Obviously, romanticism was all about emotion and art and vast imagination and history. And so, all of this sort of wrapped up in this idea that he was like, all right, well, I'm going to pretend that I'm Louis XIV and basically sit around all day and fantasize. Right. And then also really importantly, one part of romanticism, the architectural part of it is called historicism. Yeah. And it's basically a nostalgic return to past architectural styles, but rather than going for historical accuracy, you go for idealization or improvement.

So it ends up being like this fantasy version of what used to be. historical accuracy, you go for idealization or improvement. So it ends up being like this fantasy version of what used to be. Yeah. More gilded things. Exactly. That totally jibed with how Ludwig like to live and think. Should we take a break? Yeah, let's. Well, this one's been densely packed so far.

Yeah. There's a lot of geopolitics, a lot of architecture, historic movements, what else? Well, that's about it. Oh, okay. Pronunciation. Yeah, don't forget that. All right, we'll be right back. Hi, I'm David Eagleman from the podcast, Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America.

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If you're in your señora era or know someone who is, then this is the show for you. We're your hosts, Dioza and Mala, and you might recognize us from our flagship podcast, Locatora Radio. We're so excited I'm so excited about my new podcast, Rebel Spirit, where I head back to my hometown in Kentucky and try to convince my high school to change their racist mascot, the Rebels, into something everyone in the South loves, the Biscuits. I was a lady rebel.

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Segregation academies, when the civil rights said that we need to integrate public schools, these charter schools were exempt from that. All right. So welcome to Act Two. This is where we talk about the private life of Ludwig, and I love how Livia put it in this section title. No, that was me. Oh, that was you? Yeah. Oh, that sounded a little bit like Livia, but now I see Josh all over it. Okay.

Was Ludwig gay? Yes, yes he was. And that's the deal, Ludwig was a gay man, a gay king. He was sort of arranged to be married to his 22 year old cousin, Elsa, which was a Duchess in, not Australia, but in Austria. And not surprisingly, he did not go through with that wedding. He blamed it on the father-in-law.

And that was just a deal. He bestied up with Elsa's sister, Empress Elizabeth, and they were peas in a pod. Yeah, they both had a disdain for war and violence. They both loved classical literature. They both liked their solitude. And so much so that Ludwig, when he had his birthday parties, most of the people who were ever invited were the people who already worked for him,

like his attendants and servants. They would dress up and come to the parties as guests. That's how much of a loner he was, and he liked it that way. And he was also not exactly quiet about his sexual orientation, which is really something at the time. I mean, we're talking about the late 19th century in Bavaria. This is the king. And he's just, he's not exactly making it a huge secret. And in fact, while he was alive, it was like a very open secret

that Ludwig enjoyed the company of men as they were to put it back then. Yeah, when you were listing out the shared loves that he and Empress Elizabeth had, you left one out though. They both love Sean Cassidy. Sean Cassidy, what was his one hit? He just had the one, right?

Don't know., don't know. I don't know. I remember, though. We were all in love with him. Yeah, he had that great feathered hair. Me, Ludwig, the whole, all of us. Sure. So, like you said, his relationships were no, it was sort of like one of those open secrets.

When, um, he had fixers, you know, he was the king. So when something happened, people would, you know, would clean up after him. I think there were men in the stables that he was very fond of and perhaps had, you know, physical relationships with, one man named Richard Hornig, who would eventually be his private secretary. And there was also a groom named Karl Hessel Schwert, who was sort of his traveling valet, and apparently wingman, because would help him find sexual partners. But anytime something like this would happen,

and it got to, you know, sort of the rumors became widespread, like people would just, and I was about to say people would disappear they wouldn't like have them snuffed out or anything but people be relocated with other jobs and stuff like that. Yeah we know all this because he wrote a lot about this in his diary entries and from what I gleaned from it he would basically pull out all the stops for his

dates like there'd be champagne and candles and gifts and stuff like that. Bottle service? Yeah, basically. You gotta do it. Yeah. But also in his diary, very sadly, he was a devout, very pious Catholic. Yeah.

So he had a lot of inner turmoil, but that he was conflicted between his religious beliefs and his sexual orientation. And so in that sense, that's like just one leg of He was conflicted between his religious beliefs and his sexual orientation. And so in that sense, that's like just one leg of the stool that makes him a tragic figure. Yeah, absolutely. One thing that we aren't as clear about as far as relationship goes is his relationship to composer Richard Wagner.

He was a big, big fan of Wagner since he was a little kid. And once he became king and had means, he found Wagner sort of on hard times financially, and was able to basically say like, hey, I love your music. You're not doing too well, so why don't you let me financially support you. Yeah.

And you'll kind of just be like my private entertainer. I mean, you can still go on and make your great compositions, but you can also do these private operas and private concerts here in the court. And it was a mutually beneficial relationship for both of them. Yeah, he was considered, Ludwig was considered one of the great patrons of the arts of the 19th century.

And he actually made Munich, which was the capital of the great patrons of the arts of the 19th century. And he actually made Munich, which was the capital of Bavaria, essentially the music capital of Europe during the time. And to give you an idea of what people who were into romanticism, what they talked like in their letters back then, there's a really great quote about Wagner that he wrote to, I think his mistress who would eventually become his wife, Cosima, he said, he is unfortunately so beautiful and wise, soulful and lordly, that I fear his life must fade away like a divine dream in this base world.

That's great. Yeah. So this is what he's writing to his wife about this new patron he has. And Wagner was into women. He, he had a long standing affair with the woman. Like I said, who had become his wife. But if you read some of their letters and even taking into account that people expressed friendship much differently than they do today.

Yeah. Between men especially. Even taking that into account, like the flowery language they would use and just the desperation they would have at being apart, it's still not 100% clear what all went down between Wagner and Ludwig when it was just the two of them hanging out in a castle. Yeah, for sure. There was one quote that Wagner wrote, I think to Ludwig, right?

After they had been in each other's company, he wrote this, how can I find words to describe you the magic of this hour? I am in your angelic arms. We are near to one another. So that reads as possibly something happening there, and I'm certainly no expert, but Was it this you or Livia that found the LGTBQ history writer? Livia found that guy. Yeah, it's a guy named Richard Norton

Wrote that their relationship was almost certainly physical though. Not necessarily genital. Mm-hmm so I mean it seems like if that's correct or if that you know, he's he's you know, it's a supposition but if that's correct, or if that, you know, he's, you know, it's a supposition, but if that's correct, then it may be the case of a young, wealthy patron who is around his idol, and the idol may be, you know, giving the patron just some extra time and affection to stay in the good graces and to stay funded. Maybe like who knows what happened behind closed doors, but that's at least Richter Norton's take. Yeah. Ultimately, it doesn't matter what happened.

I think the point is that Ludwig was a gay icon before there were such things as gay icons and he still is today. It's just palace intrigue basically. Yeah, exactly. So from the moment Wagner showed up or was invited to court through Ludwig's death, he was supported by Ludwig financially and there's, it's pretty widely agreed that had Ludwig not supported Wagner, he probably would not have been able to create a lot of the compositions that he came up with. Yeah, for sure.

So in that sense Ludwig II gave the world a lot of Wagner's later work. And if you're familiar with Wagner and his Germanic nationalism, he was also an anti-Semite. And one of the cool things about Ludwig is he objected to his friend's anti-Semitism. He didn't just turn a blind eye to it Oh nice. Yeah, he was like he was a great guy the more I find out about him more. I just love him totally So the other thing that he was really into like we kind of mentioned early was architecture, especially romanticist stuff sort of Byzantine influences and Roman kind of stuff right Byzantine is Roman I guess. But he loved to build things, he loved to take on these big projects even though he did not hunt and was against it. He built a

lavish hunting retreat, he built these three palaces that you mentioned earlier and the UNESCO World Heritage Sites had this to say of the palaces, the monarch created artificial alternative worlds in which he could immerse himself in far distant places in past eras. Their main function was to simulate literary and ideal fantasy worlds as realistically as possible using architecture, art, and technology

in order to produce an all-encompassing experience, a perfect illusion. That says it all. I left it out of this quote, but it also goes on to say, he was also a really big fan of Australia. Right. So they said something,

UNESCO said something, they used the word technology, and that was part of that historicism, that you took something that you loved about the past, but you improved it, you made it better. And part of that was using modern technology. And Ludwig was an eager, enthusiastic early adopter of new technology, in particular electricity. And he was using this stuff in the 1870s. It's worth pointing out, Edison did not invent the light bulb, but he did produce the first best incandescent light bulb.

That wasn't until 1880. Ludwig was already using light bulbs and electricity in the decade before that. Yeah, and using them as every lovely outdoor cafe does with like string lights. He had an artificial cave, and this is at Linderhorf Castle. He had an artificial cave and a lake which had these colored lights everywhere. He eventually would build a recreation of Versailles

on a lake island. I believe it's called, oh geez, this is a tough one, Heron Shemesee Palace, but that wasn't. That can't be it. What do you think it is? I don't know, but that sounds like a town along the Mississippi. It didn't sound German at all.

Well, it doesn't look German. I don't think it's, I don't think it is German. I think it is. Heron, Heron, Him, Him, Himsi? How would you say it? I think, I liked what you just said. I'm just gonna stick with that. I'm not attempting it, I'm just making fun, that's all.

Okay, nice work. Thanks. That was never finished, but they did finish some sections. But his most famous, the one that we're gonna kind of focus on, is, you wanna try it again, tough guy? New Swanstone.

Neuschwanstein Castle, which, I mean, you gotta look this thing up, it's unbelievable. I say we take a break and then come back and talk about Neuschwanstein. Stein. Stein, no, it is Stein, you're right. Oh, you know, you're just confusing me. We'll be right back. This podcast is an intergenerational conversation between Latinas from GenX to Gen Z.

We're covering everything from body image to representation in film and television. We even interview iconic Latinas like Puerto Rican actress, Ana Ortiz. I felt in control of my own physical body and my own self. I was on birth control. I had sort of had my first sexual experience. If you're in your señora era or know someone who is,

then this is the show for you. We're your host, Dioza and Mala, and you might recognize us from our flagship podcast, Locatora Radio. We're so excited for you to hear our brand new podcast, Señora Sex Ed. Listen to Senora Sex Ed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

Hi, I'm David Eagleman from the podcast, Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America. I'm a neuroscientist at Stanford, and I've spent my career exploring the three pound universe in our heads. We're looking at a whole new series of episodes this season to understand why and how our lives look the way they do. Why does your memory drift so much?

Why is it so hard to keep a secret? When should you not trust your intuition? Why do brains so easily fall for magic tricks? And why do they love conspiracy theories? I'm hitting these questions and hundreds more because the more we know about what's running under the hood, the better we can steer our lives. Join me weekly to explore the relationship between your brain and your life by digging into unexpected questions. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. How do you feel about Biscuits? Hi, I'm Akilah Hughes, and I'm so excited about my new podcast, Rebel Spirit, where I head back to my hometown in Kentucky and try to convince my high school to change their racist mascot, the Rebels, into something everyone in the South loves. The Biscuits.

I was a lady rebel. Like, what does that even mean? The Boone County Rebels will stay the Boone County Rebels with the image of the Biscuits. It's right here in black and white in Prince. A lion. An individual that came to the school saying that God sent him to talk to me about the mascot switch. As a leader, you choose hills that you want to die on. Why would we want to be the losing team? I just take all the other stuff out of home. Segregation academies, when civil rights said that we need to integrate public schools, these charter schools were exempt from that.

Bigger than a flag or mascot. You have to be ready for serious backlash. Listen to Rebel Spirit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. OK, everybody, so we talked about a couple of other castles, but Neuschwanstein is the one that is most associated with Ludwig II. The first one, Linderhof, is considered this technological amusement park. The other one that you said was like a recreation of Versailles. Nuschvenstein was the most magical looking recreation of what's called Romanesque architecture

that you would just think of essentially as like, it's just like Sleeping Beauty's castle at Disney World and Disneyland. So much so that he must have been inspired by that. Are we putting a pin in that or talking about that? We can talk about it. Yeah, I mean supposedly Walt Disney visited that castle with his wife in the 1950s and if you look at the main castle there in Disney World and I guess Disneyland has one too right,

I've never been there. It looks a heck of a lot like Neuschwanstein. Yeah. And I think it is 100% certain that he modeled it after that. And if you see it, like even if it wasn't 100% certain, you'd be like, yeah, he totally modeled it after that. It looks like a fairy tale castle. If you are not driving right now and you're just sitting around, you have your phone or your computer, a full set of encyclopedias, or at least the ends.

Look up a picture of Neuschwanstein. It is amazing. Breathtaking. It's the definition of the word breathtaking. Yeah, it is gorgeous. It sits on a top of a mountain, and like these are the mountains that have those, you know, it looks like the castle in Frozen. like it sits on the tiny little peak not for defense but he loved the view there if you if you look out from the castle you

have the beautiful mountain ranges you have the it's a very small lake but the Schwansee is right there you can actually see the two castles from the video I saw online was a guy standing on the deck, or not the decking, but whatever you would call the outdoor areas. The dance floor? Hey, come out to the deck. Or a patio. The hardscape?

It's got to be something more grand than those words for what those were. But anyway, what we would call like the outdoor patio of Hohenschwangau. And right there in the background, you can see Neuschwanstein. They're only about a mile from each other. I'm guessing it's the crow flies, but it's just a gorgeous scene. Yeah, it really is.

I mean, whether it's summer, fall, winter, in particular, with snow on it. Ooh, magical. It's gorgeous. And like we said, Ludwig was an early adopter of technology. One of the things that he used or his construction people had to use was steam powered cranes because this was not an easy place to build. And it was a pretty massive castle made of very heavy brick and stone.

And in addition to that, he had things like an elevator. Yeah. In fact, he had an elevator table. So remember, uh, we said that he, he enjoyed his solitude. Yes. In particular, he appreciated dining alone.

He didn't even want servants around serving him. So what he would do is sit at the table in his dining room and the table would lower down, I think three stories to the kitchen. The table would be set, all the food would be put on it and then it would be raised back up for him to dine. That's how remote he wanted to be from people when

he didn't want to be around people. So, I don't quite follow that actually. Imagine it's like a dumb waiter, but the whole table is the dumb waiter. Yeah, but he would be sitting at it when it was doing this? Well, no. So he would stay seated up in the dining room, and the table would go down to the kitchen. Oh, OK, I gotcha. And then the table would come back up all set and resplendent with a feast.

And then he'd be like. That makes sense. I thought he wrote it down, they set the table with the food and then he wrote it back up. I was like, that doesn't, I mean, that's a lot of fun, but that doesn't prevent him from seeing anybody. No, exactly.

Okay, I got you. Wee, dinner time. So the throne room is pretty impressive. You can see pictures and videos of all this stuff, like full tours online. That was where the Byzantine influence really came in. It has a 13 foot tall chandelier, never had a throne in it. But this stuff is as over the top as it gets

when you look at pictures and videos. It's really, I mean, it's not my style, obviously, and I've never, like castles are kind of fun. I've toured a couple. None of it aesthetically is like, ooh, that's beautiful to me. But the ornate qualities of it, I can appreciate. Yeah, for sure.

And I think photos don't do it justice either, especially like interior photos of these rooms. They all just seem garish and gaudy. And they are basically by definition, but I'm sure it's much more impressive in person than it is looking at a photo, you know? We should go. All right, I would totally love to go.

I've been wanting to go to Germany for a while. Yeah, you know, I mean, we're talking about maybe trying to do some like real European tour dates. Oh, yeah. We should do a 10person show in Germany. Yeah I bet we could I bet we get 500 people in a room in Germany. You're crazy All right. Well, let's talk about some other stuff. We talked about that artificial cave That was pretty amazing. He also had a singer's hall, which was supposedly recreated from

Part of the Varchberg, which was a castle where they had American Idol, essentially. It was called the Singer's Creek, a singer's contest in 1207. Yeah, which is right in the wheelhouse of when this fantasy era would have taken place, the high Middle Ages, from about 1000 CE to 1300 CE, right? Yeah, totally. There's also a winter garden, which essentially is an enclosed balcony

that looks out, has an amazing view. But the thing that's really notable about that is that their window panes with glass measuring nine feet tall, about three meters, the largest, tallest window panes made in the history of humanity up to that point. Yeah. Pretty impressive.

Now it's no big deal, but yeah, at the time it was. And then some of the other technology that he employed, he had hot and cold running water, that was not very common back then. What else? He had central heat, he had forced air, he had a little electric bell system for his servants. Ring-a-ding.

And he had telephone lines, even though there was not much, you know, there was no one he could really call. There were very few people he could call, but he did have telephone lines. Apparently it would connect to Ho-hin-shwang-uan Gao, his childhood castle a mile away. Oh really? Okay, well that makes sense. Yeah. He also had flush toilets too. The thing is, is it took forever for this to be constructed.

When they broke ground, I think in 1869, he estimated it'd be about three years. And it took them longer than that just to build the gate house, which is like the first building of this massive castle complex. And that's where he lived while they were building the rest, the palace itself. But he only lived in the palace for about six months before he died. So I think actually as we'll see the whole thing went unfinished as a matter of fact,

but as he was doing this, he grew deeper and deeper and deeper in debt. And you might be like, boo, hiss, he used the king's money to build himself a fantasy castle. That's not correct. No, he did not use public monies. He just went into debt and traded on his family name, securing loans against that royal family name. He also got a loan from Otto von Bismarck of Prussia, who helped him out when he could, including vouching for him, as we'll see later. But he was obsessed with these projects. He kept building these projects. He started another one about a year after

Neuschwanstein Which like you said wasn't even close to being done and they were like, alright, this is enough We need to get this guy out of here and this was all like kind of the quiet talk, you know around the court Right and you know, it seemed like by all appearances. He was still doing the the bureaucratic work of the king like I mentioned earlier he was he was not so interested in the the public sort of Warring type of stuff and being a big public face He liked to hide away

But he wasn't like just laying around in a dream world like he would he would keep up with the paperwork and stuff like that That he had to do. But that wasn't enough. They wanted him out, so in March of 1886, Prime Minister Johann von Lutz hired Bernard von Guten, a very prominent psychiatrist who had already been treating his mentally ill brother, Ludwig's mentally ill brother.

And instead of, and this guy seemed like a good guy. Like he was against restraints and violence, and he wanted to treat patients with dignity and respect and allow them freedoms and stuff like that. Yeah, very progressive for the time. Super progressive, but he did not actually examine the king himself. He talked to people around him, sexual partners that he had and stuff like that,

took into account the family diagnoses here and there, and came up with his own diagnosis, right? He did. And to be fair, von Gudden wasn't the only psychiatrist or psychologist who was tasked with preparing this report, but he was the most prominent. And in fact, he became Ludwig's personal doctor. I guess personal psychiatrist essentially is what it came to.

So three months after he was tasked with this, they released this report and they diagnosed Ludwig with paranoia, parentheses madness, essentially saying he probably had something like schizophrenia. And then one of the other things about that report is it touched on, um, but apparently didn't mention explicitly. I hadn't read it, so I'm not quite sure how they put it, but it was definitely in there in not direct terms, the fact that he was gay, a gay king, right? Right.

And so I'm sure that by itself, like basically a report from a psychiatrist saying this would have been enough. But the impression I have is it was really the public funds and being indebted to families from other nations on Bismarck. Like that's a big deal, right? And then if the creditors came after him, he's like, I don't have any money. Ultimately, they're gonna turn on Bavaria.

And I get the impression that that was what really got them the most, right? And what they were trying to protect against. So three days after that report comes out, they showed up at his doorstep and said, you're under arrest, freeze sucker. Yeah, they brought, was it Pam Grier? Yeah. No, they didn't say sugar.

Oh, okay. Yeah, I guess that would have been sugar. They had chloroform, they had a straight jacket. Apparently, they didn't have to use the straight jacket. I'm not sure about the chloroform. But they placed him under arrest and sent him to the Castle of Berg. Guden was to care for him basically kind of full time there. And here's where we get to the question of like whether or not he was genuinely mentally ill or just sort of forced out by being an eccentric gay young king.

Well, he wasn't super young by this point, I guess. But in 2013 there was a paper in Germany from some mental health researchers who basically said it was an unreliable report That was politically motivated and they were just trying to get him out of there He was still governing. He was still sort of doing the paperwork and doing the things he needed to do He had written in fact von Bismarck even vouches for this guy saying that they had exchanged letters Right up until the very end where he seemed lucid and was in touch with reality Seven years after that in 2020 just a few years ago. There was another report from another set of german psychiatric researchers that said

Actually, it's probably pretty well founded The fact that he was gay may have played a big part for sure, but there's a lot of pretty good evidence here that he had a mental disorder. Yeah, you can make a pretty good case based on the contemporaneous reports, right? Like, apparently, at least once, he ordered a dinner for 12 people to be set,

and then when he arrived in the dining room, it was just him, and yet he still greeted all of the empty seats before sitting down. He would also talk to a bust of Marie Antoinette, quite in depth. It wasn't like a passing like, love you or anything like that. Like he would have conversations with her in French.

He also, and this is something, he would speak at a fast pace with different ideas mixing together hallucinations and delusions. That's a big one, right? What else? To pay off his debts at one point he proposed a bank robbery. Pretty good idea. It says odd dancing and jumping movements. Who knows? File that under whatever. Maybe just fun guy. He, when they threatened his His, to shut down his construction projects basically. At one point he threatened suicide. And he was, he was nocturnal. He would, he would be up all night, he would sleep all day.

None of these things by themselves like, all night, he would sleep all day. None of these things by themselves says, aha, schizophrenia. But taken all together, it definitely paints a picture with his family history of someone who may have had something legitimate going on. I don't know, I think the hallucinations and delusions by themselves could account for it.

Well, he could have also been taking drugs. Sure, I guess so. Royal 19th century drugs, who knows what that is. That's the good stuff. But the 2020 paper, essentially, they said he probably could have been diagnosed with schizotypal personality disorder, which is characterized by odd, eccentric behavior and few, if any, close friends.

And that definitely describes him. So it's possible, but it's certainly, I mean, we're diagnosing this guy in the same way that Dr. Gooden did, which was based on reports and stuff like that, that the people writing these papers never examined him. So it's not clear and we'll probably never know. Yeah, I think the autopsy report was sort of a big factor. There was findings on autopsy that showed he had scars on his frontal lobes from meningitis when he was a baby.

So that could have been something. Sure, I mean, that will have some sort of effect. And like you said, they performed an autopsy, which strongly suggests that he died. So spoiler alert, he did die. He eventually died. I mean, he was living in the 19th century. So yeah, he was going to die by now anyway, but he

died relatively young at age 41, another leg of the stool that makes him a tragic figure. Um, and he was, remember they came and got him Dr. Gooden and some, some,uden and some, I guess, hired men by the parliament, came and took him away to Kastleburg, one of his father's castles, where he was essentially under house arrest. And then the next day, he turned up dead.

He and Dr. Guden went on a walk around the castle grounds, their second of the day. This one was in the evening and they never came back. So people went out to look for them and when they did, they discovered them dead, floating face down in Lake Sternberg on the castle grounds. Yeah, the story was Ludwig wanted to drown himself, made a break for the water. Dr. Gudden went after him.

They tussled in the water and Dr. Gudden was drowned and then the king drowned himself after. There's a lot of hinky stuff. The way this went down, first, like there really no need to be one hinky thing in this case really, is the fact that they found them floating. Yeah. Because when you drown, you sink.

Your lungs take on water and in 10 seconds, you can be at the bottom of that lake. Maybe a few days or a week later, you might eventually float back up once like gases are released and stuff like that. But drowning victims don't float. And there was also no water in his lungs at the autopsy or no foam at his mouth or nose or anything like that. Like he didn't drown. It just seems pretty clear. Certainly doesn't seem that way.

So other people say, well, no, he didn't drown. He died from being assassinated. He was shot as was Dr. Guden, who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And whoever assassinated Ludwig didn't want to leave any witnesses. And there's a whole fringe belief that this was a, that, that Ludwig was assassinated and this

was covered up. Um, and there's supposedly like the diary of a fisherman who was there at the scene who that he left this confession or description of what really happened after he died. Supposedly somebody in the same Royal family as Ludwig or the Royal house had his coat that he wore that night and it had two bullet holes in it.

And supposedly she showed it to some other people. All of this stuff, the big problem is it's all second and third hand accounts. And all of the evidence that's referenced, the physical evidence, it's gone, vanished, burned up in a house fire. No one knows where it went, whatever. So there's, it's just going to always essentially remain a fringe theory, unless we find like a writing from Audubon Bismarck talking about how he had Ludwig assassinated.

We're just probably never going to know what happened to him. And there's actually a group called the Google Monarch. Did I say that right? Hmm. It's really more like MENA. And they're essentially like a Bavarian

independent society who say not only was Ludwig assassinated, that makes everything that came after that illegitimate. Yeah. They said it. You hate Umlauts. Why do you hate Umlauts? Their reasoning. So that's the thing.

One of the, there weren't very many people who had good reason to have Ludwig assassinated. He was deposed. His uncle was put into power, and Ludwig had been taken care of, so why kill him? And the Google Monarch says that von Bismarck had found out that Ludwig was negotiating with France to help liberate Bavaria from this new German empire so that he could,

you know, take his rightful place on the throne again. And Bismarck was like, we can't have that and assassinated him. So who knows? We'll never know. He died at 41. That's one thing we do know. And he very much like you've been saying, was a tragic figure. His bestie there, Empress Elizabeth, put some jasmine in his hands, in his casket, which is a very sweet thing to do. French poet Verlaine called him the only true king of this century. And the irony of all this is that Neuschwanstein, which had basically not bankrupted him, but put him in dire financial straits and may have led to his ouster,

kind of right after he died, they opened it to tourists and it has made a ton of money since then and continues to. Yeah, they estimate 130 million people have visited it since they opened it a few weeks after his death. Isn't that nuts? It's pretty great.

Also, if you go to Kesselberg in Lake Sternberg, there's a cross coming out of the water to mark the spot where his body was found. And he's even more beloved in death than he was in life. Every August 24th and 25th, Fusen, the town nearest the castle, celebrates his birthday. So he's kind of a big deal around there, you know? Yeah, totally.

Great, great story. I love Ludwig II. I don't know if I got the point across or not, but he was a tragic figure. Tragic figure. You got anything else? I'm gonna guess no. I got nothing else.

Okay, that means everybody, it's time for Listener Man. ["The Last Supper"] All right, I'm gonna say this is from Parker and it's about Cher. I'm kind of going to bat for Cher with some of her song themes and album titles. Hey guys, hope people aren't too hard on Cher these days for the title Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves and for the song Halfbreed. I was a young child living an apple pie life when those songs were released and they were my first introduction to how unfair life can be. I felt a lot of empathy for the character singing the songs and

swore to myself never to make people feel like that. Share is awesome. So thanks for that great episode. And you know, that's something that I don't even think we mentioned. There are certain singers who at times have sung sort of as character, in character. My own beloved Billy Joel wrote songs about, you know, seemingly from the perspective of a Vietnam vet or from a longboat, you know, longshoreman and a fisherman. And Bruce Springsteen and you know, there's long been a rich history of sort of writing in character and as a character and singing as a character.

So that is how Parker took it and it seems like it imparted a good lesson. Yeah, for sure. That's a great, great point, Parker. Thanks for writing in to point that out. If you want to be like Parker and write in to point something out that's very insightful, we love that kind of thing, you can send it off to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

I'm Renee Stubbs and I'm obsessed with sports, especially tennis. Tune into my podcast each week to hear me and my friends in the community break down the latest matches, including the US Open. Plus hear from some of the biggest names in the sport about what the future holds. It's about belief. And once you break through that, then you know, you can win a grand slam. Listen to the Renee Stubbs tennis podcast every Monday on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports. Ever wonder what it takes to be a professional athlete?

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