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00:00Palaces, the most spectacular and lavish homes on earth.
00:12Luxuriously designed for the royals who wanted the biggest and the best.
00:18Behind the golden gates of these royal megastructures are incredible stories waiting to be discovered.
00:24Infamous monarchs from history, and the artists, designers, and engineers who turned their grand visions into a reality.
00:36These are the most opulent, flamboyant, and innovative royal residences around the world.
00:43This time, a breathtaking fairytale palace in the snow-capped mountains of Bavaria in southern Germany that influenced Walt Disney.
00:54Created for the eccentric king, Ludwig II, Neuschwanstein Castle is both a visual and engineering marvel, making it one of the world's greatest palaces.
01:06The village of Schwangau, 117 kilometers southwest of Munich, is the gateway to the fantastical Neuschwanstein Castle.
01:30Sitting in the Alps, the 19th century structure was the home of King Ludwig II of Bavaria.
01:39Inspired by the operas of German composer Richard Wagner, King Ludwig created Neuschwanstein to look medieval.
01:47But it was kitted out with all the latest innovations.
02:04Max Schraner has been guiding tourists through Neuschwanstein for 17 years.
02:09The whole castle was built from 1869 until 1886.
02:18After 17 years, they had to stop because of the king's quite mysterious and unexpected death.
02:24And although they built 17 years in all this, Neuschwanstein Castle wasn't and still isn't finished at all.
02:30We only have about 20 completed rooms, which are all situated in the main building of the castle.
02:38But there were more than 120 rooms planned.
02:43Despite dedicating almost two decades of his life to perfecting Neuschwanstein,
02:49King Ludwig II never got to fully complete his fairy tale palace.
02:53You must never forget, King Ludwig II moved into the castle, so the king kind of lived on a construction site.
03:02His apartment was completed, of course, but on the other part of the castle, construction work was still going on.
03:08And only six weeks after the king's death, the royal family opened it to the public as a museum.
03:15So after King Ludwig II, no one else has ever lived in here.
03:19Although it may look like a medieval structure, Ludwig had all the modern gadgets the 19th century had to offer, added to Neuschwanstein.
03:33Was ich wirklich interessant in diesen Schlössern finde, ist die Kombination aus modernster Technik
03:41und dem, was er sich aus der Vergangenheit an Kulisse geholt hat.
03:47Es ist ja nicht so, dass Ludwig so gebaut hat, wie man im Mittelalter oder im 18. Jahrhundert gebaut hat.
03:55Er hat ja die technischen Möglichkeiten des 19. Jahrhunderts verwendet, um seine Kulissen, seine Fantasiewelten, um seine Illusionen dort entstehen zu lassen.
04:05Und diese Kombination aus moderner, damals moderner Technik und dann dem Rückgriff auf die Vergangenheit,
04:13das ist sicherlich eine beeindruckende Angelegenheit.
04:17Eine von Ludwig's innovativen Angelegenheiten war ein Elektrical Servant Spell.
04:25Wir sind jetzt in der King's Apartment.
04:27Wenn der King war in diesem Kastell, dann war ein Servant present in der Room, in case der King needed etwas.
04:33Der King hatte eine Botanische Room, und er hat ihn geöffnet.
04:35Der Bellen hier rang.
04:37Der Name of the Room appeared in hier.
04:40Und dann der Servant always knew where he had to go.
04:44Und das System war driven by these very first batteries.
04:49The Servant summoning device was state of the art in the late 19th century.
04:54It was an early use for an electric bell system.
04:58Bell systems have existed a couple of hundred years ago in all these great manners, for example.
05:04But an electric bell system was quite new, quite modern, yeah.
05:08In 1864, five years before the foundations were laid at Neuschwanstein,
05:17the German state of Bavaria welcomed a new king.
05:22Ludwig II ascended to the throne quite early and quite unprepared.
05:27He was only 18 years old when his father, King Maximilian II, died quite unexpectedly,
05:33at the age of about only 53.
05:36And so he took up his office, and over the first couple of years,
05:41he started to realize that the way that he was brought up was quite different from the reality then.
05:49Within two years of becoming king, Ludwig's Bavaria joined forces with Austria
05:55in a war with their neighbors to the north, Prussia, but were defeated.
06:00In 1870, Bavaria joined their former adversaries in the Franco-Prussian War with France.
06:08The German state won, and Prussia became all-powerful.
06:13The German Empire was proclaimed, and the king of Prussia became emperor of Germany,
06:19which meant that not only had Bavaria lost its independence,
06:23but Ludwig had lost his role in life.
06:27A king without a kingdom, Ludwig had already decided to build his own.
06:33Bavaria had been left with little power after the war,
06:37and the disillusioned monarch chose to shun the political life in Munich.
06:41Instead, in 1869, Ludwig headed into the Bavarian mountains to build himself a palatial home,
06:49Neuschwanstein Castle.
06:52Well, the foundation stone was laid on September the 5th, 1869, by the king himself.
06:59And then they used quite modern technologies for building up this castle.
07:04Although it looks like an old medieval castle from the 10th to 12th centuries,
07:10is actually quite a modern castle, with steel inside and all the new technologies
07:15in the late 19th century old that he had to offer.
07:19There was a great revival of interest in the Middle Ages,
07:22and one of the greatest ways of seeing the Middle Ages
07:26was really by making their castles into this beautiful 19th century glossy version.
07:31So Ludwig was something of a romantic, and certainly thought that if you rebuild a castle,
07:36you can go back to that actual time.
07:39The whole castle was actually designed not by an architect, but by a painter from the Royal
07:46Theater in Munich. His name was Christian Young. He made several designs. The last one was actually
07:52approved by the king, and then these designs were given to the real architects, and they had to do all
07:58the mathematics and the statistics and stuff like this.
08:02The building of Neuschwanstein became a community project.
08:06The construction of the castle was actually the biggest employer of local people for a number
08:12of years in the area. Ludwig II apparently was imposing some quite unrealistic deadlines on these
08:18workers because he wanted to get it built as soon as possible. So there were up to 300 workers that
08:24were on site every day, which is quite incredible considering it's quite tight, it's quite precarious,
08:30there's not a lot of space to work in. So it must have been a really, really buzzing and busy site.
08:38They brought all the material up the hill. They first built a road up here, and then they used
08:43horse and ox carriages, and the train stop was about 15 miles away from here. So all the material,
08:51which was transported to this place from Farah Bay, they could use the train for that as well.
08:57But the construction workers soon found out that building a castle on top of a mountain
09:03was really as difficult as it sounds.
09:07There are huge problems with building on the side of a ravine, and it's very dependent on the type of
09:12rock. But in a place that is prone to poor weather, where there is freezing, so that water gets in small
09:19fissures or cracks in stonework and in the rock of the foundations, and then freezes and expands,
09:25cracks and fractures the rock. Then you continuously have a problem with bits of the facade falling off,
09:32or the very foundations on which the whole building is built crumbling away. And this is the problem the
09:38castle has. It looks like it's been there for centuries. It is only just over a hundred years old,
09:45and yet right from the beginning it has suffered from these problems that it needs continual maintenance,
09:51and it started falling apart before they even finished constructing it.
09:55It is actually an enormous building in terms of height, and it is a very stable building.
10:03And we ask ourselves, well how does he do this? It's actually, for the most part, a steel-framed building.
10:09And he sets up a steel frame that can carry then an enormous amount of weight. Then between the steel
10:17frames is actually brick. Brick isn't too terribly heavy. And what he then does, and this is all very
10:23modern, I mean it's almost breaking edge, pushing the envelope of construction engineering is what he's
10:29doing. He then clads it, I should say he gives a veneer in the beautiful limestone that we see on the
10:36building itself. And that wonderful monochromatic is quarried in those mountains. So it creates an
10:42indivisibility between the architecture, the build, and then the landscape behind in which it is found.
10:49The king played an integral role in the structural engineering of Neuschwanstein.
10:55The input of Ludwig in the construction site was enormous. So he wanted to see every plan for every
11:01detail. And the more detailed things got, the more detailed his choosing became.
11:06Er hat auf jedes noch so kleine Detail geachtet. Die Architekten durften Vorschläge machen und nach
11:14seinen Maßgaben dann die Pläne zeichnen. Aber derjenige, der auch noch die letzten kleinen Dinge
11:21bestimmt hat, war nur allein der König, ansonsten niemand.
11:26After living in temporary accommodation on the construction site, Ludwig was finally able to
11:34move into his still incomplete new home in 1884, 15 years after he'd laid the first stone.
11:43This is a castle, but it was also a palace. It was planned by Ludwig as his home. He wants to live
11:51there and spend his life there. And every room that's finished, every part of the castle bears
11:57the imprint of Ludwig's personality. It's all very well being inspired by fantasy, but fantasy is
12:03fantasy because it is unachievable. To try and produce the ultimate fantasy castle, that is something
12:09else. And this created huge challenges for his architects. They would come up with dreams of what the
12:17castle could be, which were far grander than Ludwig could ever afford.
12:21This castle costs about 6.1 million gold mark. It's a bit difficult to say nowadays money because you
12:29can't really compare. If I would be forced to tell you an equivalent, it could be about 95 million euros.
12:39The interior design of Neuschwanstein castle was inspired by King Ludwig II's boyhood hero,
12:49German composer Richard Wagner.
12:51Ludwig II watched his first performance of a Wagnerian opera at the age of about 15,
12:57which was the Lohengrin opera. And the king loved the story and wanted to meet the composer.
13:05One of his first actions when he became king said, okay, I want Wagner here.
13:10I want to invite Wagner and make him work. So he invited Wagner to come to Munich to court.
13:18Ingratiating Wagner to the king's court was a highly controversial decision.
13:24The composer Richard Wagner back then was, let's say, a bit on the run because he was wanted for
13:31bankruptcy and was very relieved that he found a new financial supporter and the king willingly spent
13:39quite a lot of money on Wagner in order to ensure that he could continue composing operas and using
13:46all these stories that the king loved in creating operas out of them.
13:51For many people, they really saw the music as incredibly transcendent and Ludwig himself was so
13:57keen to strengthen his position that allying himself with Wagner in this mythical greatness was
14:03something that he saw was making him more powerful.
14:07Ludwig had Neuschwanstein decorated with characters from Wagner's operas.
14:13The murals of Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Parsifal, they're there. You almost walk off the walls.
14:21Actually, it looks like the stage set for a Wagnerian opera. It's wonderful.
14:26This is the secret legend, the first part of the Nibelungen. I can see on these paintings,
14:33this one here is particularly interesting. You can see Siegfried, the main character of that story,
14:38standing on the right hand side. And there his magic sword is made, the one with which he later kills the
14:44dragon.
14:44When you walk up to Neuschwanstein, you are participating in that theater.
14:52You are part of that theatrical moment. You are one with Neuschwanstein. And you are one with Parsifal.
15:04This is amazing. And it's almost postmodern. One could say, it's as if Ludwig says,
15:11I'm going to push that envelope and my society, my kingdom is going to come with.
15:14A recurring design theme in the palatial castle is the swan. The numerous references to the water
15:22bird are inspired by the love story in Wagner's opera, Lohengrin.
15:27Lohengrin comes in to Flanders, a hero, a savior, who will fight for the purity and the honesty and the honor
15:39of Elsa. He comes in on a swan. So all of a sudden, we begin to see a linguistic
15:46referencing or complexity developing. Neuschwanstein. New swan mountain, a new swan cliff, we could suggest.
15:55Ludwig even included the swan in another of his technical innovations.
16:03This is the king's washstand. The water came from a natural source, which was situated approximately
16:10150 meters above us in the mountains and had enough natural pressure to allow cold water to come out of
16:18the silver swan's beak. The pipes down from the spring into the castle and then up again on each
16:24floors and say the king only had to pull this small silver button down here and the water came out of
16:30the silver swan's beak. There was running water on all the floors. They were actually able to bring the
16:36water up, you know, not just to the ground floor, but actually throughout the building.
16:40The kitchen had hot and cold running water and the toilets even had rinses.
16:47The water also provided the castle with central heating,
16:51which was much needed during the cold Bavarian winters.
16:54Ludwig II wanted a medieval castle. He didn't want a drafty cold space. He wanted all the comforts
17:05that modern technology could provide. So he installed a hot air heating system, a central heating system,
17:12to keep him warm. He had warm water piped through the building so that he could turn on the tap and
17:18have baths. None of these would have been of course available in the middle ages.
17:24Central heating was a British idea that was really first investigated in the 1830s. We're talking here
17:29in the very early 1870s. So the building received a wonderful central heating that was energized via
17:37steam and steam boilers that were also a very new concept.
17:43Heat was also provided by the grand fireplaces located throughout the building.
17:52This fireplace here is a bit special because it's not only the biggest one we have in the castle,
17:57but it's also the only one where the entrance, the opening, where we put the wood in, is not in the
18:03room itself. It's on the back side. So it was operated from the dining room of course, because when the
18:09king was asleep in here, no one else would dare to walk into the room to put a new layer of wood in
18:15there. And so they could do this from the other room. So we have the actual opening to this fireplace
18:23over here. You see this is wood. It isn't. That's metal. And you can open it like this. And here it is.
18:31Despite being a monarch with little power, Ludwig still wanted to have the palatial home of a king.
18:43One of the grandest rooms at Neuschwanstein is Ludwig's beautifully decorated throne hall.
18:49We will now go into the throne room. As you've probably noticed, the most important object in the
18:57throne room is missing. The throne itself was supposed to be up there, but it was never made
19:03because the king died before they could manufacture it. The throne hall is built in the style of a
19:10Byzantine church. Byzantine art refers to art of the Eastern Roman Empire as headquartered in Constantinople,
19:19today's ensemble. It has a sort of a Greek feel. And as I look at that room, I notice that the gold
19:26ground has eight saints who were kings. Then I notice Michael the Archangel in a mosaic. I notice an
19:38enormous candelabra, which is modeled after the crown of St. Stephen of Hungary.
19:45It's made of gilded grass, so it's quite heavy. It weighs about a thousand kilograms or two thousand
19:52pounds. It has 96 candles and it can be lowered down to the floor by means of a winch, which is situated
20:02above the throne hall in the attic. The colored stains you can see on the chandelier
20:08and it's just colored glass. So no real gemstones, I'm afraid.
20:17Measuring 20 meters long, 12 meters wide and 13 meters high, the throne hall occupies both the
20:24third and fourth floors in the west wing of the castle. The throne room has quite a unique feature in
20:32it. So it's huge. It's 65,000 square feet in size and they use steel. So steel was actually as a material
20:42just starting to really gain popularity as a construction material in the mid to late 1800s,
20:48which is the time that this castle was being built. Nowhere is the strange hybrid nature of this castle more
20:54obvious than when you get to the throne room. Here one can see the medieval meeting, the technology that
21:01was necessary to construct the building. It's sort of on display, but it's also sort of concealed.
21:07So at this point, the strange artifice of the building comes apparent.
21:12Some parts of the throne hall may look classical in design, but are really just a facade for the 19th
21:18century technology beneath. All the columns, for example, there are no real marble columns. They
21:25have steel inside. It's covered with plaster and they just paint it. Because during the building process,
21:32the king always changed his mind. So they had to put steel inside, which goes up through these columns
21:38up here, through the blue ones up there, and also on top, the cupola as well, in order to support the
21:45whole construction. And you also have these steel T-bars underneath the floor as well.
21:52If you think about trying to span a really long distance, you generally use a big beam. And with
21:58the gravity, the beams get pulled down a little bit and that causes the beams to flex. So you get a
22:04little bit of a pulling action at the bottom of the beam and a little bit of a squashing action at the
22:09top of the beam. But the larger the span is, the bigger those actions are. And at some point,
22:14timber is just not strong enough to resist those forces. But steel, on the other hand,
22:20it's orders of magnitude stronger. And so using this new modern material that they had just figured out
22:27how to manufacture on a big scale meant that they could create this really large, impressive throne room
22:35for the king. Despite the illusion of grandeur, King Ludwig II never appeared to be comfortable
22:43as a monarch. Hidden away in Neuschwanstein Castle, his fantastical home in the Bavarian Mountains,
22:50he shunned his political and public duties. He didn't like court life. He stopped reviewing
22:59military parades. He stopped holding court banquets. He only had a few friends. He didn't seem to like
23:07their Bavarian ability. Ludwig II, as king, was actually responsible for that it would be
23:16that it would be a king again after him. And that was, in the normal case,
23:20to marry and get children. Ludwig II, as you know now, was quite sure, but he was
23:27certainly homosexual. So it was for him a very, very difficult opportunity to face a marriage in the eye.
23:35But in January 1867, Ludwig did get engaged to Duchess Sophie Charlotte,
23:44the sister of Empress Elizabeth of Austria. Ludwig was engaged to Sophie Charlotte in Bavaria.
23:52She was a very distant cousin. And they basically grew up together, not in the same residence, but
23:58her family was part of the royal family. And so they saw each other regularly. And she liked Wagner too.
24:05They liked music and literature. So they were in close contact, like brother and sister, something like that.
24:10Ludwig II, of course, had a very interesting connection with Sophie in Bavaria.
24:15Ludwig II, of course, also had a very interesting connection with Sophie in Bavaria.
24:19Because he had, in a short time, this young woman not even spoken to her own name,
24:26but called her Elsa, as if she was one of Wagner's operatives and called herself as Pasifal.
24:34The nine-month engagement to Sophie was called off in October 1867, and Ludwig never produced an heir.
24:43He remained a very private king who enjoyed a life of solitude.
24:48He also didn't want to watch performances within a crowded theater. The king hated being stared at,
24:58and people always looking at him. As the king was getting older and older, more and more retreated from
25:04the public. And so he ordered extra performances just for himself. So he was the sole audience member.
25:13The entire opera had to be performed just for himself.
25:17This has often been held against Ludwig, saying only a madman would do that.
25:23But Ludwig said, if I am in the theater with all the others,
25:31then they will not be watching Tristan and Isolde. They will be looking at me. And I do not wish this.
25:39And that's actually quite rational when you think about it.
25:43As if to reinforce his life of misanthropy, Ludwig had a grotto added to his private suites at Neuschwanstein.
25:50Well, the next room we're about to go through, we definitely will inspect that one up on the third
25:56floor behind the living room, because we're going now through an artificially constructed cave.
26:04This cave here is supposed to represent the Venus Grotto from the Tannhäuser Opera.
26:12The king loved the special scene of the story so much that he said, well, I'd like to have a cave
26:19just like that one inside my castle. And as he was the king, I had to build one. So once again,
26:25he created his own kind of fantasy world stage set within the castle, actually.
26:31You will go into it and think, oh, this has to be some outside external rock cave. The door itself,
26:37one side was just a normal door. But if you then went in, the other side of the door was made from
26:42this fake rock, a paper machete style material. And you could essentially kind of shut yourself
26:48into this little cave in the middle of your palace. It's astonishing, really. But I suppose we might
26:57compare it to people who might be terribly rich now and build themselves a meditation room or something.
27:02It's just that Ludwig wanted it to look like a cave.
27:07The grotto is in stark contrast to the room where the king would have slept.
27:17We are in the king's bedroom. The bedroom was built in neo-Gothic style. You can see quite a lot
27:24of wood carvings in here. The finest work in here is the bed, of course. The canopy above it shows all the
27:33different Gothic church towers. And if you ever look into the bed, you can see the king has also golden
27:42stars in it. So I love these kind of motors with the blue skies and golden stars.
27:48I always suggest take a minute or two in the bedroom and simply engage in that beautiful woodworking
27:59of the bed, his kingly bed that he probably never slept in.
28:04We don't really know how long they actually had to work on all this. But it is said that 14
28:12woodcarvers had to work for about four and a half years on this room alone.
28:20Although he lived a life away from the hustle and bustle of Munich, Ludwig remained in contact with his
28:27parliament. The main myth about Ludwig is that he didn't act as a king. But that was not true at all.
28:33He just wasn't residing in Munich. He just didn't fit into the clockwork of the government. So when they
28:40wanted to have something signed, they had to go to him. And he was on a very regular basis on his
28:46classes. But in Munich, it could look like as he was a bit erratic, wandering around the countryside.
28:53That wasn't basically not true. And Ludwig was always contactable, thanks to another
28:59state-of-the-art device he had installed at Neuschwanstein. Over here on the right-hand corner,
29:07you find another very interesting technical detail of the castle, the king's very own telephone.
29:13This telephone is actually from 1884. It was one of the first telephones in Bavaria,
29:20produced by the Siemens company. As it was one of the first telephones, it just had one single
29:25connection. It was from the castle down to the post and telegraph office in the village.
29:31He's one of the first monarchs to have a telephone. He loved telephoning, especially to his mother.
29:37When you visit Neuschwanstein, you can see the telephone. It's absolutely magnificent.
29:40But technology can not only afford communication, it can afford a removal from society.
29:51So again, he knows exactly where to place these modern innovations to further his goals.
29:59But one of Ludwig's technological advancements didn't get off the ground.
30:07What he also wanted to do was create, just outside of Neuschwanstein,
30:13a wonderful cable car situation that was not funicular, but rather on a, literally a cable.
30:20And this cable car situation would have presented, shall we say, a dock in the lake that is just
30:29underneath Neuschwanstein. And then via a wheel mechanism that was steam power, the steam power
30:36would have energized the cables that in turn would have been pulling a cable car that was a swan.
30:46And in this, he could then ride from Neuschwanstein down to the lake and then over to his mother's castle
30:54as well. And everybody thought he was out of his mind. But when we think of today's cable cars that
31:00bring us up to the top of a mountain to go skiing, he's an innovator.
31:09After 17 years of building his fantasy palace,
31:12King Ludwig II was continually trying to improve upon Neuschwanstein.
31:18But in 1886, his dream turned into a nightmare.
31:23Ludwig had private money and he had a royal income. And that was basically where the money came from.
31:30The problem was that he was overspending, terribly overspending in the later times. And then he ran into debt.
31:37And the debt was piling up. And in the early 80s, there was the first person who said,
31:43okay, I'll go to court if you don't pay my bills. Then it became difficult because he could,
31:48in theory, have been judged and just to pay by his own courts. So that became a real problem.
31:55He had so much money for him, so that he could not pay the debt. And as the government, the minister,
32:05saw that he wanted to continue to pay more money, which nobody could pay more,
32:12than if they were to pay more money. And they had to pay more money and they had to pay more money.
32:30In June 1886, the Bavarian parliament made the decision to officially depose Ludwig.
32:36deposed Ludwig. A psychiatric report claimed he was paranoid and stated,
32:43suffering from such a disorder, freedom of action can no longer be allowed and
32:48your majesty is declared incapable of ruling. He's no longer king. They attempt
32:57to arrest him. This is unsuccessful. They return with a greater militia-like
33:06formation on the 11th of June 1886 to Neuschwanstein where he is residing. He is
33:16able to revoke them once again. They go down into the little village, have a
33:20luxurious breakfast and go back up the mountain and with the help of a devious
33:26or I should say compliant house personnel. Ludwig is arrested. King Ludwig II would
33:38never step foot inside Neuschwanstein again. He is taken in a carriage that
33:45cannot be opened from the interior to a palace on Starnberg Lake, which is south
33:50of Munich. A palace that he had loved as a young man in which he spent many, many
33:56happy hours. In the meanwhile, they have converted it into an asylum.
34:02If the king really was mentally ill, nobody really knows. You see, the only way to get
34:09rid of a king back then legally was to say that he was mentally ill. They collected
34:14evidence, things the king wrote in his diary, for example. They interviewed servants and other staff from the
34:25royal courts. And the doctors who wrote that medical report actually never even saw the king. They didn't have a proper
34:32examination or anything like this. They just wrote what people were told to tell them.
34:38He could be obsessed and he has an enormous energy. But the organization of his building projects, the organization of his innovative moments in construction, engineering, architectural ideas, though they were conceived as mad, he cannot be a mad person.
34:55They are too perfect and too coherent in their organization to be done by a mad person, by somebody who was sociopathic or psychopathic.
35:06And they themselves, I believe, are enough evidence to prove that he was not insane.
35:15And that's something we should also consider in terms of Ludwig II.
35:22After spending just two nights in the asylum under the watchful eye of his psychiatrist, Dr. Bernhard von Gooden, despair turned to tragedy for Ludwig.
35:33On June the 13th, 1886, the king and his psychiatrist went for a walk to the lake.
35:40As they didn't come back in the evening, they sent out the search party. It found both of them, the king and the psychiatrist, dead in the lake.
35:48What really happened there? Nobody knows. It's still a mystery.
35:52You see, the king died in kind of knee-deep water, although he was an excellent swimmer. So that's a bit fishy.
36:01We know for certain that two of the caretakers were to follow behind. And we know for certain, because both of these caretakers swear to this, that Gooden waved them away.
36:15How those two bodies arrived there, we do not know. There are all sorts of theories. They were shot. They both drowned. They fight in the water.
36:24We also know that Ludwig was wearing a large, heavy coat. It must have been a cooler day, and it was raining.
36:31That we know. What happened between Gooden waving the caretakers away and the bodies being found in the water will remain a mystery.
36:42Despite an autopsy report that stated that Ludwig had no water in his lungs, his death was officially ruled as suicide by drowning.
36:54Also, when man sich für den Tod Ludwigs II interessiert, dann muss man wahrscheinlich viele Geheimnisse wegstreichen.
37:02Es war kein ganz großes Geheimnis und ist kein Geheimnis um diesen Tod.
37:07Man weiß im Grunde, dass er mit seinem Arzt Dr. Gutten spazieren ging an diesem 13. Juni und dass er wohl versucht hat zu fliehen.
37:17Und dass sein Arzt versucht hat, das zu verhindern.
37:20Und wir gehen heutzutage davon aus, dass Ludwig, der wesentlich größer und stärker war als sein Arzt,
37:27im See mit ihm gekämpft hat, ihn unter Wasser drückte und als er sah, dass er einen Menschen umgebracht hatte, dann Selbstmord begangen hat.
37:36Also so geheimnisvoll ist der Tod Ludwigs II. gar nicht.
37:42There are many other theories.
37:44There is an almost Arthurian myth in some quarters in Bavaria.
37:50They will almost believe he might come back one day, his ghost haunts everywhere.
37:56And quite a lot of people think that he was murdered.
38:00But I would be inclined to believe the official version is true.
38:06Ludwig's deposition, incarceration and subsequent death meant that his beloved Neuschwanstein Castle was left unfinished.
38:16The building was never completed.
38:18And we know as well that what Ludwig was going to do was add more to it.
38:25So it became very conceptual.
38:28He was going to have a purification bath.
38:31This was to be heated by those same boilers that we're doing in the central heating.
38:37And then creating a series of beautiful ovens and stoves for the heating process.
38:43And so again, bringing us back to these very modern ideas and innovative ideas.
38:49Riddled with financial problems at the time of his death, there was only one way to clear Ludwigs debt.
38:58As Ludwig died, the family very quickly opened the Camp Neuschwanstein for the population and for the public.
39:09And that was a very pragmatic reason.
39:12Because the family had to pay the immense debts that Ludwig II had given up to them.
39:19And every visitor in this camp was welcome.
39:23Not even two decades later, so the entrance fees had paid for the debt already in 1899.
39:30And all the king's debt were paid in 1901.
39:33So not even 15 years after his death, the debt was paid off by the entrance fees.
39:38But almost 60 years after the death of Ludwig, his castle fell into the hands of the Nazis during the Second World War.
39:48So in World War II, Neuschwanstein became a depot for looted art.
39:53Hitler wanted to build an immense museum for art in Linz, then Austria.
40:00So he looted basically all Europe.
40:03He could get his hands on and took the best pieces of art in order to put them up all in Linz.
40:09And Neuschwanstein served as a depot for the looted art from France and Belgium.
40:15Towards the end of the war, the SS were planning on blowing up Neuschwanstein to destroy all the looted art.
40:22But fortunately, the castle was surrendered to the Allies before the plan materialized.
40:28The American army reached Neuschwanstein on the 28th of April of 1945.
40:34And there was no resistance. The gate was open and said, okay, here's your art.
40:39Luckily, a very great French art curator had the forethought to write down what had been taken and somehow found out where they were going.
40:48So everything was recovered intact. And also, thankfully, the castle is intact.
40:54Today, Neuschwanstein is a major tourist attraction with over one million annual visitors to the fantastical home of Ludwig II.
41:09What's very unique about the castle is that the majority of our castles and palaces bear the imprint of a variety of personalities.
41:18They're rebuilt, they're changed. Each time a new king arrives, he changes it or a queen changes it.
41:23And it's altered and new bits are put on. But that's not the same here.
41:27It almost pretty much is preserved in the pristine state that it was for Ludwig. It's all about him, exactly what he wanted.
41:36When you think about it, that the king has no one in his tents, that he wanted to be alone, that only his Lakae and his servants would live there with him.
41:51The king would probably turn around the grave, if he would see how these people-mases were driven through Neuschwanstein today.
42:01As well as wowing visitors from around the globe, the glorious castle also had a huge impact on one of Hollywood's most famous men.
42:12Well, Disney definitely used this castle as an inspiration for his own ones.
42:17Yeah, it's a white castle, a bit fairytale-like, with all these small towers and turrets and stuff like this.
42:23And he loved this castle, he used it as an inspiration.
42:31Because of its perilous position in the Bavarian Alps, Neuschwanstein needs constant maintenance to keep it from subsiding.
42:39But the castle still stands proud as one of the most visually stunning and technically advanced royal residences in the world.
42:47Neuschwanstein's success is in producing a building that doesn't look like it's been designed, that looks like it's grown up, but it's also everybody's idea of the perfect castle.
43:01If you want to know who Ludwig was, just go to the castle. It's all there. You see his romanticism, his idealism, his slight naivety, and the fact was that the castle became a complete obsession with him, blowing everything out of the water.
43:18And we might argue to a degree, the government said it, it did send him slightly mad.
43:25Why do we go to Neuschwanstein? Why do 1.5 million people track all the way down south of Munich into the Alps, up that mountain? How are they getting there?
43:39And I think the answer to that is a search for beauty.
44:09To be continued...