Two and a half poems around Neuschwanstein, and a tale of how tales are born

Going up a winding trail past St. Mary’s Bridge

to view New Swans Stone and High Swan

District Castles from above

Straight past the bridge, a trail goes up - you start

and leave the crowd, the thousands, down below

you climb along dense growth, pines grow apart -

at each west end, it opens: dazzling show:

Down on a ridge, two castles keeping guard -

two worlds: two lakes, a town, fields, roofs aglow -

two other lakes, in world’s wild, untamed heart

the mountains, rocks, deep forest, distant snow

A landscape is a mirror of the soul

here - order, law, enthroned on the bright right -

dark needs, unknown, lurk left on our brown scroll

The castles, silver, gold, ’s where we reside

proud centers rule both state and woodland’s call

connecting day to dark and dangerous night

Gudrun Böse

Dein Fall, Gudrun, wie ist’s passiert?

Frage schwer zu lösen

was bleibt - ein Name, kondensiert

dir, der das Schicksal böse …

27/8/1966

what happened, Gudrun, darling this is an elaborated translation of the German

that tragic summer date?

up here - all joy, smiles, charming

down there - cracked stare - unmade

gone - thought so vast, alarming

so past me - can’t translate

what’s left, a name, a warning

of someone scorned by fate

Commentary:

When one passes over the Maria Bridge, a pedestrian bridge next to Neuschwanstein castle, a footpath starts going up the mountain. That trail leads to one of the most stunning landscape views I have ever seen. The trail meanders in switchbacks alternating away from and toward the castle, which reappears each time in a higher octave, with a second, older castle gradually appearing in the distance, drawn out of gold yellow brick, vs. Neuschwanstein’s silver. At the first switchback, however, there is a small metal cross with a name and a date: Gudrun Böse, 27/8/1966. The following little commentary I found on the internet, from a North-American traveler:

“In 1997 I was told that she was a beautiful young woman from the nearby town of Kaufbeuren. She and her boyfriend had walked up the mountain, when she fell about 60 metres (200 ft.) to her death at the bottom of the Pollät Gorge. Her body was recovered from the pool at the base of the waterfall below the bridge, the Marienbrücke. Her boyfriend told the police that he was going to take a photo of her, when her shoe caught on the root of a tree and she fell. The police believed him. However, seven years later he went to the police and told them he could no longer sleep. Her death wasn’t an accident. He had pushed her because she was pregnant with his baby. He was then arrested and jailed for a long time.”

I love these stories. They show the origin of myth. This has as all the right ingredients for an orally transmitted and gradually altered folk tale: a young woman in the prime of her beauty; unwanted pregnancy; private, passionate murder in remote, pristine locations, remorse, a monument, and the number 7. Usually, the real events, however tragic - we know a woman fell to her death - tend to be far more prosaic. Not until we make the poor victim young and beautiful, with a devastated lover who 7 years later ‘confesses’ to have pushed her because she was bearing his child, does the story resonate with us. That’s how legends happen.

Kaufbeuren, incidentally, is “nearby” only by Great Plains or Trans-Siberian standards: the drive is over an hour, I’ve driven it in different types of cars, so you cannot blame the vehicle. The real nearby town is Füssen, where I had delicious pizza in an Italian restaurant - excellent, as usual in that part of Germany - built inside the town’s medieval city wall, with a gorgeous patio ¾ enclosed with red plastered walls covered with vines. But then, Neuschwanstein is a number-one tourist attraction in all of the German speaking world, and I’m sure everyone in Kaufbeuren past kindergarten has been there.

I never found anything on line in terms of police or court records, newspaper articles etc. The idea, however, of the boyfriend going to jail for a long time seems an Americanism. From what I know about Dutch and German jurisdiction at the time, I don’t believe a young man who comes forward on his own account confessing, after 7 years, a murder out of despair, would have be jailed for a long time in a country that, a mere 15 years after the concentration camps, did its very best not to err in the direction of harshness and cruelty. Also, why kill her in the first place? The world is swamped with young pregnant girls with the impregnators simply having gone AWOL. Perhaps a reason for suicide, but hardly for murder. The story got legend written all over it.

It is interesting to me that the few web postings I found on my mini google search were mostly from foreign vacationers, travelers who either inferred from the sign that a female fell to her death (probably tacitly assuming she was young and beautiful, as I confess I did), or, in this case, shared the fascinating legendary stories they heard from locals. Locals, who told the account I heard in Budapest in the 1980s how in the 1954 World Cup final in Switzerland, Hungary sold the victory to Germany in an arranged game for 20 tractors (twenty, really?!!!!). Or how Peru was bribed to lose with 6 goals, so Argentina, not Brazil, would make it to the World Cup final in their own Buenos Aires in 1978. Or how the moon landing never happened, OR, as I heard in the late 1970s, several landings had already happened before Neil Armstrong took his famous small step for a man = a big leap for mankind. Or how, after that immortal line, the same Armstrong allegedly said Go for it, Mr. Gorsky!, referring to a tidbit of conversation the astronaut had overheard as a little boy playing under the neighbors’ bedroom window, when Mrs. Gorsky cried out: THAT?! THAT I’ll do to you when the boy next door lands on the moon!

Part of the story narrated above cannot possibly be true. Whoever falls down from the spot marked by the cross has as many chances to end up down in the Pollät Gorge as on the top of Humphrey’s Peak (12,633 ft.) in Arizona, or in the Sea of Imbrium (which is on the moon). As the crow flies, the cross is about half a mile away from that ravine. But, of course, everyone who has seen the spellbindingly abrupt precipice down that pedestrian bridge below at the castle’s elevation, which looks like a hair-raising, neck-breaking trip to the basalt entrails of the earth, almost automatically sees poor Gudrun fall down to her demise in that spot, where you almost feel the Nibelungen Saga or Wagner’s Lohengrin (‘New Swan Stone’) come to life. Most people don’t look at maps when they hear fascinating stories. And tales told by locals automatically get an aura of authenticity around them. They live there, they should know. I don’t know who invented the fall into the schlucht, tourist or local, but invented it was.

(If this were the Bible, and the above printed text were in some Gospel, I can see biblical apologists make her a hang glider and thus account for the forbidding geographical discrepancy. On my visits to Neuschwanstein, I saw para-gliders - followers of the unfortunate Otto Lilienthal (the aviator, not the violinist in my mom’s orchestra) who plummeted to his death in 1896 - float in the air around the mountain top of 1,730 meters (5766 ft.) where the path I took leads to, and which is accessible from below by means of a cable car. But which para-glider would start off at Gudrun’s spot, a mere 100 yards above the castle? Also, the story does not say there was a hang glider, it says she tripped and fell to her death. - - - Or else, perhaps she fell into the river and her body ended up under the bridge where she was found, even though that particular precipice does not lead to the river, and if it did, the current would have carried her body north, away from the bridge. That’s my current problem with Christian apologetics: they find the most unlikely scenarios just to fit the words of what they think of, completely randomly, as God’s inerrant word; and ‘faith’ does the rest…)

What’s left: a name, a memory, of someone scorned by fate (der das Schicksal war böse …). And a warning to every traveler in the mountains,, to please, please mind your step, for the love of God. When you get off the trail to have a picture taken, that is.

P.S. If you keep to the trail, you’re fine. In spite of some of the travelers’ allegations, the path is not hazardous, just a little strenuous going up. The cross is posted on a rock formation at the end of the first winding back toward the castle - the initial trail goes away from it - and about 20 ft. from the path, where you want to go to enjoy a spectacular view of Neuschwanstein. Or have your picture taken. That’s when you need to be careful. I am stressing this because this path gave me one of the most incredible landscape view experiences in my life. The view is divided into - well, you can read it again in the poem above. Just mind your step and you’ll be fine, Traffic in Cleveland Heights, known for its ridiculously low speed limits and super-lethargic drivers, is more dangerous.

The few walkers I met on the mountain, on each occasion, were all descending, so they probably took the cable to the top and made the walk down to Neuschwanstein that way. I am stunned at how few of the hundreds of tourists visiting Neuschwanstein and the many dozens gathered on both sides of the Mariabrücke at any given moment actually seem to continue walking the path as I did. It may well be the number of male spectators at the one Browns game I saw wash their hands after facing the urinal, which was me out of about 80 or 100 guys (20 urinals with 4 or 5 guys in front of each, 20 sinks with no one there). Or the 15 individuals, out of thousands, I counted during the half hour I loitered at the end of the mile-long climb at at the part of the Great Wall open for tourists closest to Beijing, who were not a member of our 35-man orchestra.

P.P.S.  The Tegelberg seems to be a rather well known starting place for para-gliders. Not only did I see them every time I visited the castle, circling like bald eagles high up around the top, but Wikipedia’s article in English about paragliding, when I visited it on 10/17/2015, had a picture of someone taking off from the very spot.

P.P.P.S.  I do not mean to  imply that it is more of a tragedy when a young and beautiful female falls to her death rather than someone else; but I do claim with conviction that the former case is much more captivating to the imagination of the vast majority of males and probably a good number of females also, and that there is nothing wrong with that - as that is, as stated, the stuff that myths and legends consist of. It is how we are made, what makes us tick, which we express in images such as the ones carried by this tale.”

P.P.P.P.S. Now that I’m on the subject, please forgive me for mentioning how on one of my several solo trips to this site I ran into the good late Herr Schmidt-Gaden, who singlehandedly created the Tölzer Knabenchor out of a bunch of farmers’ sons, and with whom I often worked together when playing in Toronto’s Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra at the yearly overseas start of its season in Irrsee, which is really nearby Kaufbeuren. It was our free Sunday and he and his wife decided to come to the castle sightseeing. He was the one who told me that the architect who designed Neuschwanstein under orders of King Ludwig was not an architect but a theatrical set designer. The old couple had one choir boy with them, for some reason. At some point, Schmidt-Gaden asked the boy his name: Christoph. I didn’t think much of it, the boy could have been new, and the boy’s name might have slipped the old man mind. No. A Bavarian organ builder, that night, who also taught me how to drink a Hefe Weizen “Bavarian style” - slightly bent over the table, fist around  the beer glass sitting on the wood, defiantly glaring into the world - explained what had happened. In Bavaria, and especially in this choir, the boys were known by their last name. That gives a sense of pride and responsibility to the boys, the idea that on stage and in the rehearsals, they were men, not boys. The gift to work … I was glad my command over the German language allowed me to get some real inside information from the locals, the best antidote to shallow prejudice. Except when the locals themselves tell tales, of course. Though those, as the story above shows, are never shallow.

(The first time I played with this choir was in 1993, when we recorded Haydn’s Creation under Bruno Weil. Ten or fifteen years later, when I got to do a production with the choir again, I joked: “See that blonde boy there? He was already there fifteen years ago!” In fact, we did do Schubert’s Gesang der Geister über den Wassern with a male choir consisting of men who had sung in that choir as little boys. Unbelievable piece …)

Gudrun Böse’s memorial, and Neuschwanstein Castle. The Maria Bridge would be about an inch (= 300 ft.) into the white to the left of the picture, down where the castle is ….