In the halls of the mad king

There’s a castle in the Bavarian Alps that looks like it was sketched by a feverish Disney intern on acid. A love letter to medieval myth carved in stone and conceived by a king who had more visions than friends.

There are lots of castles in southern Germany. They all look like they could take a punch from the Hulk and laugh at it. Neuschwanstein is something completely different. Instead of any kind of defense function, it was build as a whimsy feeling. An escape from the real world.

The postcard perfection of Neuschwanstein.

A fairy tale of turrets, towers and bridges forms the castle grounds of the world’s most photogenic mental breakdown. Ludwig II of Bavaria is sometimes called the mad king. Not in a “off with their heads” kind of mad, but the dreamy recluse who preferred fantasy towers instead of war councils. Like a girl with a doll’s house, he tried to create a parallel universe in the forests above Füssen.

Once I get out of the woods, the castle appears like the gods sneezed out a Gothic hallucination dangling on a cliff. It’s a postcard-perfect view, appearing on jigsaw puzzles and lunch boxes around the world. It looks medieval, but it’s actually a 19th-century illusion. It was built for one man’s melancholy fantasy of what medieval Europe should have been in his mind. On the inside, it’s all about murals of swans, golden halls with baby blue drapings and even a faux grotto. Romanticism turned up to eleven.

Adequate view from the castle balcony.

Before the castle was even finished, the king himself was found drowned in a lake under mysterious circumstances. Was it the final act of a reclusive mind, or the burning rage of concerned citizens? Regardless of the motives, Neuschwanstein still stands. A world where a king could dream, build and vanish into his own myth.