My first day in Munich: Hot & Sunny

My day in Landsberg: Hot & Sunny

My day in Lindau: Hot & Sunny

My second day in Munich: Hot & Sunny

My third day in Munich: Hot & Sunny

My fourth day in Munich: FREEZING COLD AND MISERABLE

Crazy weather! Every day so far was hot & sunny, and then I looked out the window this morning – heavy dark clouds, and rain.

Anyways, I took a trip, a little ways outside of Munich, to Lake Starnberg, a rather scenic location, though it was not quite so beautiful today with the clouds. The lake while not terribly special on its own, once was the location of a shocking murder. That of King Ludwig II. Some of his other titles: Count Palatine of the Rhine, Duke of Bavaria, Duke of Franconia, and Duke in Swabia, but you probably already knew those.

A brief backstory: King Ludwig was building fancy palaces, that he had dreams of building for a long time, such as Neuschwanstein, a very short distance from his childhood home. The king was a lavish spender, using his own money, but also demanding loans, shying away from managing the kingdom of Bavaria, and generally let matters worsen, and ignored the advice of his counselors and ministers. The irritation of his ministers caused Ludwig to consider firing them all.

The ministers got together, and came up with a plan to depose the king. They gathered all kinds of embarrassing, or damaging information on the king, some of the information could have been fake, or at least unknown or unverifiable. Eventually a psychiatrist was sent to examine King Ludwig’s mental state – Dr. Bernhard von Gudden. He studied, and spent time with King Ludwig, and found nothing wrong. The allegations in the report likely being false. Then the night came…!

Here’s a big copy and paste from Wikipedia:

“On the afternoon of the next day, 13 June 1886, Dr. Gudden accompanied Ludwig on a stroll in the grounds of Berg Castle. They were escorted by two attendants. On their return, Gudden expressed optimism to other doctors concerning the treatment of his royal patient. Following dinner, at around 6 PM, Ludwig asked Gudden to accompany him on a further walk, this time through the Schloß Berg parkland along the shore of Lake Starnberg. Gudden agreed; the walk may even have been his suggestion, and he told the aides not to join them. His words were ambiguous (Es darf kein Pfleger mitgehen, “No attendant may come along”) and whether they were meant to follow at a discreet distance is not clear. The two men were last seen at about 6:30 PM; they were due back at 8 PM but never returned. After searches were made for more than two hours by the entire castle staff in a gale with heavy rain, at 10:30 PM that night, the bodies of both the King and von Gudden were found, head and shoulders above the shallow water near the shore. The King’s watch had stopped at 6:54. Gendarmes patrolling the park had heard and seen nothing.

Ludwig’s death was officially ruled a suicide by drowning, but the official autopsy report indicated that no water was found in his lungs. Ludwig was a very strong swimmer in his youth, the water was approximately waist-deep where his body was found, and he had not expressed suicidal feelings during the crisis. Gudden’s body showed blows to the head and neck and signs of strangulation, leading to the suspicion that he was strangled, although there is no more evidence to prove this

Many hold that Ludwig was murdered by his enemies while attempting to escape from Berg. One account suggests that the king was shot. The King’s personal fisherman, Jakob Lidl (1864–1933), stated, “Three years after the king’s death I was made to swear an oath that I would never say certain things — not to my wife, not on my deathbed, and not to any priest … The state has undertaken to look after my family if anything should happen to me in either peacetime or war.” Lidl kept his oath, at least orally, but left behind notes which were found after his death. According to Lidl, he had hidden behind bushes with his boat, waiting to meet the king, in order to row him out into the lake, where loyalists were waiting to help him escape. “As the king stepped up to his boat and put one foot in it, a shot rang out from the bank, apparently killing him on the spot, for the king fell across the bow of the boat.” However, the autopsy report indicates no scars or wounds found on the body of the dead king; on the other hand, many years later, Countess Josephine von Wrba-Kaunitz would show her afternoon tea guests a grey Loden coat with two bullet holes in the back, asserting it was the one Ludwig was wearing. Another theory suggests that Ludwig died of natural causes (such as a heart attack or stroke) brought on by the cool water (12 °C) of the lake during an escape attempt.

Ludwig’s remains were dressed in the regalia of the Order of Saint Hubert, and lay in state in the royal chapel at the Munich Residence Palace. In his right hand he held a posy of white jasmine picked for him by his cousin the Empress Elisabeth of Austria. After an elaborate funeral on 19 June 1886, Ludwig’s remains were interred in the crypt of the Michaelskirche in Munich. His heart, however, does not lie with the rest of his body. Bavarian tradition called for the heart of the king to be placed in a silver urn and sent to the Gnadenkapelle (Chapel of Mercy) in Altötting, where it was placed beside those of his father and grandfather.

Three years after his death, a small memorial chapel was built overlooking the site and a cross was erected in the lake. A remembrance ceremony is held there each year on 13 June.

The King was succeeded by his brother Otto, but since Otto was considered incapacitated by mental illness due to a “diagnosis” by Dr. Gudden, the king’s uncle Luitpold remained regent. Luitpold maintained the regency until his own death in 1912 at the age of 91. He was succeeded as regent by his eldest son, also named Ludwig. The regency lasted for 13 more months until November 1913, when Regent Ludwig deposed the still-living but still-institutionalized King Otto, and declared himself King Ludwig III of Bavaria. His reign lasted until the end of the World War I, when monarchy in all of Germany came to an end.”

Today, nobody knows who or what was responsible and why. And it will likely never be known. Anyways, that’s that, so basically I went to the town of Berg, to the location of the chapel and the shore where the bodies of the 2 men were found. It was a short trip with nothing grand planned, but I did also just want to see Lake Starnberg. I also wanted to visit Schloß Berg, (the castle from where the Dr. and the King went for a walk but never returned) but all the roads to it were closed.

I then came back and spent some more time walking around the Marienplantz, the main central square in Munich.

Images Here!