The perils of the romantic

It is often asserted that the word 'Tuesday' has a Norse derivation, referring to the deity 'Thor'. My experience of the last two Tuesdays has led me to propose a different etymology. My theory is that it is an adaptation of the old French word for 'tail' - queue. There is no doubt the last two for us have been Quesdays. Thinking about Disneyland last Quesday, of the eleven hours trapped in the park, we spent at least a third of the time either queueing ourselves or waiting for Laura to return from a queue. By my reckoning that comes to a Q cost of £18 pounds per person per day.. Do the arithmetic for this Quesday's outing to Schloss Neuschwanstein and the Q cost is astronomic. 

The guided tour of King Ludwig's fairytale folly takes less than 30 minutes. When Gill asked the receptionist at the Fussen stelplatz if there was any delay in getting tickets for the castle, 'No,' she assured us, 'it's fine for the morning.'

Maybe if you got there by 5am! When we arrived at ten, fully breakfasted, the queue to the ticket office already stretched 400 yds. down the road. An odd mix of Germans , Americans, Pan-Asian and Italian tourists shuffled from one shady spot to another in 35 degree heat. We reached the ticket office just past noon to be informed by a very friendly fräulein that the earliest tour in English available to us was at 5.10pm. So the time it took to arrange a 30 minute tour was seven hours.

The big Q

It has always been assumed that Walt designed the Sleeping Beauty castle at the centre of every Disneyland based on Neuschwanstein because of its storybook look; I believe he must have visited here and it was the queue that really impressed him. So much so that he managed to build a theme park empire based on the observation that if you get the marketing package right people will pay good money to stand in line.

All this being said, Hohenschwangau and its lake, Alpensee, is as nice a place as you can imagine to get unexpectedly stuck in. Even by 'Ronseal standards' of German literalness the name Alpensee excels, being equally evocative in both Deutsch and English.

Ludwig 1st castle overlooks Hohenschwangau

Many a posh hotel by the lakeside

It actually was as hot as it looked

Neuschwanstein from the lake, it was further and steeper to get to than the photo suggests

The swan was the royal house of Bavaria's heraldic device, Ludwig was obsessed by them.

Clear water....

magnificent forests

calm lakes...its a bit like Windsor meets Grasmere!

The woods around the lake have lovely walks and you get a great view of both royal castles. Eventually it was time to climb through the trees to take the 40 minute walk from the town to Neuschwanstein. We arrived early giving us enough time for a drink, for Gill to leave and retrieve her camera in the shop, take plenty of outside shots and video of the castle before queueing yet again at the 'eingang' turnstiles in the inner courtyard.

A hot day for a steep walk

Once you reach the castle, more sitting about until your tour is called

Time to get your breath back...

.....take outside shots of the castle - cameras and video can't be used inside

From the lawn you get a good view North towards Fussen

It is a spectacular, theatrical setting

The tour was swift but informative. Only a few staterooms and the royal apartments were finished before Ludwig's early and mysterious death. The rooms are themed around the Germanic myths contained in Wagner's operas. The place is gloomy and obsessive; the murals dull and uninspired. Throughout the building there is a high level of craftsmanship, but overall little zest or inspiration. Maybe the most impressive thing about Neuschwanstein is the wood carving, on the royal furniture, the doorways, and the beautifully crafted metalwork on the door furniture. The tessalated floor in the throne room, a curious mixture of the pretentious with the vernacular is interesting and memorable too.

In the end the whole edifice is a monument to a decadent obsession with remoulding nature as if it was art. Ludwig was far from being alone in this; from Marie Antionette's 'rustic village' in the grounds of Versailles to the Pompeian inspired Getty Villa in Los Angeles, all are testaments to the capacity of the rich and powerful to descend into ruinous self delusion.

As we walked down the steep footpath from the castle I thought about the perils of Romanticism. There is no doubt that our modern sense of individuality and need to seek personal freedom has its roots in the ideas developed in the late Eighteenth Century by philosophers such as Rousseau and Paine. The way we regard the natural world, environmentalism and the green movement owes a debt to writers like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Goethe and Schiller. The crowds of people on the paths around Alpsee or heading, nordic walking poles in hand, onto the lower slopes of Zugspitz shows that the Romantics sense of the sublime remains strong in our common consciousness.

However the assertion of the importance of the individual, particularly the cult of genius, developed later in the Nineteenth Century around Nietzchean notions of the übermensch was purloined by Fascism and had terrible consequences for the whole of Europe and beyond last century. It is difficult to look upon Neuschwanstein in a simple, fairytale way, partly because it reflects the obsessions of its disturbed, tragic creator, but equally it is a monument to the Wagnerian vision which for all its soaring rich orchestration does have strong elements of proto-fascism within it.

What is undeniable, however, is Ludwig picked his spot. The tour comes to an end near the partly completed South terrace which overlooks the lake and the mountains beyond it. At the time we were there storm clouds were simmering above the mountains, shot through with shafts of sunlight. The forests looked dark and menacing; the lake glinted silver. If Ludwig wished to create in tangible form the mood and appearance of the sublime seen in German painters such as Caspar David Freidrich, then today the scene lived up to his ambition. It was an unforgettable sight.