I wonder whether it is possible to kill oneself, successfully negotiate a suicide, by drowning oneself in the bath, ie in two feet of water. Is it possible to do so when one is fully alert; not blind drunk or unconscious? It has always seemed to me that suicide is a decision which may take a long time to come to but, having made the decision, the actual process is really quite quick, whether it's a gun, poison, handfuls of pills or even the slow transition to unconsciousness when gassed with your head in the oven. However to purposefully drown yourself seems to me to take more than an effort of will, more then a mere decision to end it all. To drown oneself means having to fight every instinct we have as human beings not to breathe water; only when you can hold your breath no longer, perhaps after 2 or 3 minutes, would you be forced, having no choice, to breathe liquid . To purposely drown yourself seems to me to be an impossibility. The relevance of this point will become apparent at the end of this post.
Ludwig II of Bavaria, der Märchenkönig, the fairy-tale king, ascended to the throne of Bavaria soon after his eighteenth birthday in March 1864 following the death of his father, Maximilian.
What is now modern-day Germany did not exist, in any form, before 1871; it was merely a collection of states some small, some large, of which the largest and most powerful was Prussia with Bavaria bringing it home in second place. Following the victory in the Franco-Prussian war in 1870, in which Bavaria actually sided with Austria against the Prussians*, Otto von Bismark, the Prussian President, attempted to 'kick-start' the second empire (Das Zweite Reich**) using Wilhelm I of Prussia, the Hohenzollern King of Prussia, as de facto emperor, or Kaiser, essentially browbeating the lesser states into acceptance, although Bavaria still managed to retain a semblance of its previous Kingdom status, only coming under the Emperor's hegemony in times of war.
Whilst not in any way an absolute monarch in the manner of Louis XIV of France or Elizabeth I of England, the King and his court had some degree of influence. However, after the 'shackles' imposed on the the Kings and Princes of the various Germanic states following the unification and the establishment of the Empire, Ludwig increasingly withdrew into his 'personal projects' and abandoned any pretence at politics unless they furthered such projects. One can perhaps sum up his many personal projects in two words; Richard Wagner.
Ludwig had first seen Wagner's early operas (first Lohengrin and then Tannhäuser) when still an adolescent and before he came to the throne. He was completely smitten, as any adolescent with 'Romantic' leanings might be, by Wagner's highly charged and emotional music and myths of chivalry and the heroic. Within two months of ascending to the throne, Ludwig invited Wagner for a private audience which lasted an unprecedented one hour and three quarters. If Ludwig had been smitten before the meeting, he was in 'Cloud-Cuckoo Land' at its end; Ludwig effectively opened his wallet and said to Wagner: "help yourself!"
In fact, it is unlikely that Wagner would have been able to compose the later operas, the 'Ring' cycle (Das Rheingold, Die Valküre, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung), Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg or Parsifal, without Ludwig's patronage. Wagner had spent the preceding years fleeing creditors, angry husbands*** and all kinds of social scandal as befits a social and operatic iconoclast. Ludwig gave him money, social standing, performances at the Munich Opera and even made significant contributions to Wagner's very own 'Festspielhaus', the (Wagner) Festival Opera House, being built in Bayreuth.**** In return, Wagner gave to Ludwig free rein to indulge his own and Wagner's imagination with his undeniably remarkable legacy; his castle building!.
From early in his reign until the very end, Ludwig embarked on a furious round of castle building; major alterations at Schloss Linderhof, including the building of 'Hunding's Hut' and grotto, inspired by Act 1 of Die Valküre; modifications to Hohenschwangau; the building of Neuschwanstein and the laying of the foundations, groundwork and electricity cables for the unbuilt, 'robber-baron castle', Schloss Falkenstein and finally, his homage to Louis XIV of France and the Palace at Versailles, Herrenchiemsee; only partially completed at his death. Lying almost in a straight line across the Alpenvorland, parallel to the high Alps, the mountains serve as a fitting backdrop to Ludwig's (and Christian Jank's) imagination, his almost paranoid reclusiveness and his eccentricity. It was as if he were building sturdy fortresses in which he might keep the rest of the world at bay and from which he might only venture forth to travel from one to another; therein lay the roots of his sad downfall.
Ludwig was most keen not to use state funds to finance his many projects but the royal coffers were scarcely adequate. As a result, he amassed debts throughout the royal houses of Europe at a colossal rate and to levels which were surely unsustainable from his own resources without heavy state subsidy and, moreover, half of his proposed projects, already underway, were still a long way from completion. The state ministers and politicians were not at all happy with this state of affairs and even less so when Ludwig threatened to dissolve the cabinet of ministers and bring in a set of new brooms unless the Cabinet supported a fresh round of the 'royal houses begging bowl' to help build his castles.
Faced with existing royal debts of 14,000,000 marks***** and the prospect of more to come, the Cabinet decided at act. In the first three months of 1886, the Cabinet amassed a mountain of 'eye-witness' testimony as to Ludwig's alleged 'madness' and 'unfitness' to rule. We will never know how much was real, how much servants, for example, were pressured to exaggerate and how much evidence was simply fabricated but Ludwig's disinclination to have anything to do with a personal involvement in state affairs too easily lent itself to accusations of this nature. Four psychiatrists signed the final report in June 1886 attesting the King as paranoid and unfit to rule for the remainder of his life; not one of the four even gave so much as a cursory examination to Ludwig himself. On 12 June 1886, Ludwig was arrested and led away, accompanied by Dr Gudden, one of the four psychiatrists, to Schloss Berg on the Würmsee, now Starnbergersee (a lake).******
The following day, on 13 June, Ludwig, a strong swimmer, went for an evening stroll with Dr Gudden by the lakeside; neither of them ever returned. The bodies were found about 11:30pm that evening, after a furious and protracted search in a torrential rainstorm; they were floating in the lake by the shore in three feet of water. Gudden, so the official autopsy ran, showed marks of physical trauma to the head and shoulders and signs of strangulation; Ludwig was deemed to have committed suicide by drowning although no water was found in his lungs during the autopsy. The official line was that Ludwig had murdered the Doctor, perhaps in an escape attempt, and then, guilt-ridden, committed suicide; a somewhat convenient reinforcement of the official report's diagnosis of paranoia. Perhaps he killed the Doctor and attempted to escape by swimming away and then had a heart attack or a fatal stroke. Perhaps he was murdered and no witnesses were to be left. Who knows?
His cousin and friend, the Empress Elisabeth*******
of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was reputed to have said after his death that, "The King was not mad; he was just an eccentric living in a
world of dreams. They might have treated him more gently, and thus
perhaps spared him so terrible an end." Is this not the fate of dreamers everywhere; to be crucified on the cross of practicality and reason?
All one can say with any degree of certainty about Ludwig is that the Bavarian State Government has probably recouped whatever the cost of Ludwig's debts were, many times over, by the millions of fee paying tourists who flock to the castles, given to the state in 1923, every year.
I have fond memories of Neuschwanstein with its frescoes of Siegfried, Tannhäuser, Parsifal and, strangely, Die Meistersinger, then overnight at a Füssen hostel, back out to Hohenschwangau the next day and then east to Linderhof and finally, following a three day hike, after three nights of sleeping in the Bavarian forests under the stars, Herrenchiemsee; the bejewelled island under the summer sunshine.
* European politics before 1918 was always very complicated!
** The first empire has been the 'Holy Roman Empire', (neither holy, nor Roman nor an empire) in which 'Germans' were effectively Emperors from the sixteenth century until 1806 when it was dissolved during the Napoleonic Wars.
*** One such angry husband was Hans von Bülow, who conducted the premiere of Wagner's 'Tristan and Isolde' at Munich in 1865, and whose wife, Cosima, had recently given birth to Wagner's child! Cosima was the illegitimate daughter of Countess Marie d'Agoult and Franz Liszt; you have to hand it to those composers!
**** After Wagner had been soundly turned down in his initial proposal for similar in Munich by the controllers of the state purse strings.
***** It is difficult to assess exactly how much Ludwig's debts might be valued in today's currency because there is no real way to match 'exchange' rates and Germany's migration from the 'Bavarian' Mark to the pre-war 'Reichsmark' and then to the Deutschmark and finally to the Euro, but a figure of DM600,000,000 would be perhaps not nonadjacent to the size of Ludwig's debts today. (€300,000,000, £255,000,000 or $390,000,000)
****** Otto, Ludwig's brother and successor as King, WAS genuinely and medically deranged, which merely lent fuel to the fire of the accusations against Ludwig; it was 'common knowledge' at the time that madness ran in families.
******* Assassinated by an 'anarchist' in 1898. (There was a lot of it about; assassination, that is, at the 'fin de siècle'.)
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