Ludwig II of Bavaria: IEI

 

"It is essential to create such paradises, such poetical sanctuaries where one can forget for a while the dreadful age in which we live."

"At 12.30 I was born, and at 12.30 I shall die."

For Ludwig II of Bavaria (1845–1886) the typing essentially writes itself in a high linguistic register. Definitely one of the most "classic" IEI's when it comes to European royalty, there's no Talanov trait from the list he doesn't fit. The lifelong absorption in inner imaginative worlds (reflecting Ni with a touch of Ne, often quite strongvalued for the type), the aestheticized melancholy, the fantasy empathy with mythic-heroic figures, the attraction to dominant artistic and physical personalities, the building of fairy-tale architectural refuges from reality, the inversion of day and night, the self-presentation as the doomed Romantic king, and the early death in mysterious circumstances at forty — all of this is very characteristic. 

The childhood is already diagnostic. His mother's report is unsentimentally accurate: "Ludwig enjoyed dressing up, took pleasure in play acting, loved pictures and the like, and liked making presents of his property, money and other possessions." His "vivid imagination, his tendency to isolate himself, and his pronounced sense of sovereignty were also already evident when Ludwig was a child," notes the website of the famed Neuschwanstein Castle. 

Ludwig saw Wagner's Lohengrin at fifteen (strongly identifying with the titular Swan Knight) and Tannhäuser ten months later. When he became king at eighteen, his first significant act was to summon Wagner to Munich and rescue him from bankrupcy. Wagner's letter after their first meeting captures the IEI emotional register quite well: "He is unfortunately so beautiful and wise, soulful and lordly, that I fear his life must fade away like a divine dream in this base world. You cannot imagine the magic of his regard: if he remains alive it will be a great miracle!" Ludwig's patronage made the Ring and Parsifal possible. Wagner's late career exists because Ludwig made it exist. The IEI's characteristic attraction to dominant figures found, in Wagner, an unusually pure object, even if Wagner himself was an EIE (and not SLE). 

The castles he built were not built for state use; they were "barred to strangers" and meant for his own habitation as the imagined version of himself the building enabled. They are, as the official Bavarian site puts it, "records in stone of the ideal fantasy world which the king built as a refuge from reality." Most IEIs cannot afford to build their inner worlds outside their heads, but Ludwig had his private royal revenues (he had the decency not to use actual state funds, contrary to what his enemies alleged).

A major IEI marker is the inability to inhabit the practical role the circumstances demand. Lugwig was never particularly involved in state affairs, and after Bavaria's defeat by Prussia in 1866 he increasingly withdrew even further. After 1871, when Bavaria was absorbed into the new German Empire, the withdrawal became near-total. He confided in Wagner that he wanted to abdicate; Wagner had to talk him out of it. He was, as one biographer puts it, "a king in name but not in the original sense". The IEI temperament does not function well in administrative-practical roles, while even an EIE is far better in this regard, and would be unlikely to use a high position only for escapism.

The poet Verlaine (possibly another EIE, a strong accent in any case) called Ludwig "the only true king of this century." By every conventional measure, Ludwig indeed was a failure — he lost wars, lost state sovereignty, ran his personal finances into ruin, was deposed for unfitness — but in the dimension that mattered to him, the mystical projection of an ideal kingship into the world, he succeeded as no other monarch of the nineteenth century did. The 130 million people who have visited his castles since his death are the continuing testimony. Disney's castles, modeled directly on Neuschwanstein, are downstream of his fantasy.

From 1885, foreign banks threatened to seize his property over his accumulated debts. The Bavarian government declared him insane and deposed him on June 10, 1886, through a procedure not actually provided for in the constitution. He was interned at Berg Castle on Lake Starnberg. The next evening he went for a walk along the lake with his physician, Dr. Bernhard von Gudden. Both bodies were found a few hours later in shallow water. The death was, rather dubiously, ruled a suicide. Even this romantic-tragic ending — the persecuted dreamer king, dying in moonlit water under suspicious circumstances — fits the type script. "I want to remain an eternal mystery to myself and others", Ludwig once told his governess, and it is this mysterious element, correlated with Ni as a function, that still fascinates people today.