Neuschwanstein Castle: Origins

The inspiration for the building came to Ludwig II in the summer of 1867 when he visited two rebuilt castles, which were to be both a monument and a residence. To get to know the original setting of Richard Wagner’s (1813-1883) "Tannhäuser", he first of all visited Wartburg Castle (Wartburg), which Hugo von Ritgen (1811-1889) had restored from 1853 for Grand Duke Carl Alexander von Weimar (1818-1901) as a habitable monument to the Landgraves of Thuringia, as the site where St. Elisabeth made an impact and as a "battlefield of the greatest German poets of the Middle Ages". Then Napoleon III (1808-1873) showed him Pierrefonds, where Eugène Viollet-le-Duc (1814-1879) restored one of the most imposing Gothic castle ruins in France as a museum and residence for the emperor.

In April 1868 Ludwig II had the idea of "rebuilding" the ruins of Vorder-Hohenschwangau. These ruins in a highly romantic location had already been included by his father in the system of walks around the Hohenschwangau summer residence. "In my opinion, the future castle should have much more of the genuine medieval character of an old German knight’s castle than the lower Hohenschwangau," he wrote to his cousin Wilhelm von Hessen (1845-1900).

In 1879 the king ordered that the murals in the castle should not depict Wagner’s musical dramas but the medieval epics on which they were based. With the increasing loneliness of Ludwig II, the focus of interest for the imagery at Neuschwanstein also shifted. His "old German knight’s castle" became more and more like a Castle of the Holy Grail to him.

Uwe Gerd Schatz