LUDWIG: REQUIEM FOR A VIRGIN KING

Ludwig: Requiem for a Virgin King (Requiem für einen Jungraulichen Koenig, 1972), dir Hans Jurgen Syberberg
This film definitely bears the imprint of the Fassbinder group more surely than Syberberg’s laterwork. Three of Fassbinder’s most compelling ‘stars’, Ingrid Caven, Peter Kern and Gunther Kaufmann, are part of the cast. The film offers a very schematic account of Ludwig’s life, a bio-pic but framed in an unusual German stylistic, akin to theatre or caberet. It is also filmed on set with back projections, allowing Syberberg to concentrate on a Brechtian and Wagnerian depiction of Ludwig, patron of Richard Wagner, builder of Schlossneuschwanstein, found dead in the Starnbergersee with his psychiatrist, Professor Gudden, in apparently suspicious circumstances. (Today it’s conjectured that he was squandering the Bavarian purse on his romantic, but apparently insane, projects, and therefore was murdered. Of course, Wagner and ‘mad Ludwig’s’ castles are some of the reasons that make Bavaria a major tourist attraction. Indeed Munich would hardly survive without it: that’s enough of an irony to build a film around.)

Ludwig II is born and dies in Bavaria. He appeared at a time of great ferment. Austria and the south German states are defeated, absorbed into a greater Germany by Prussia, the most aggressive of the German principalities. Chancellor Bismarck unifies Germany. Bismarck then defeats France in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. Ludwig hoped that Munich might one day rival Berlin as a cultural centre, deliberately setting out on a policy of liberalism, democracy and openness (even though he was a despot, he realised that the forces of the European Enlightenment had to be contended with and adopted), in order to attract artists and intellectuals. As a consequence Richard Wagner comes to Munich to live, writing some of his greatest operas. Munich’s Schwabing district becomes a major cultural centre as a consequence, rather like Greenwich Village in 20th century America.  Ludwig is torn between adherence to the Catholic Church and by his homosexuality, which he strives to repress, despite numerous affairs.

The film depicts these facts in a Brechtian or agitprop style, mixing styles and personages, as when Ernst Roehm, Ludwig and other personages from German history inhabit the film’s frames, dancing an intoxicating rumba. The film is an adumbration of the level of sophistication found in later Syberberg films, such as his Parsifal. Wagner is ever-present, as a score and as an influence on Ludwig.

Finally, Ludwig is the subject of a mock-execution. Some of the stranger usages of Brecht surface, but generally the film is always on course. Never a shocker, it depicts Ludwig in a delicate, tasteful, surprising and appropriate fashion. It seems like a definite homage in an off-kilter style, but (in this film) Syberberg is still very much a director living in the shadow of Fassbinder.

Paul Murphy, National Film Theatre, London

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