Uitgelezen 83

‘There must be barbarians for us to convince ourselves we are the civilised. Baudrillard went further, claiming that Disneyland existed to suggest the rest of America was real. Disneyland was partly based on the fantasies of Prince Ludwig which in turn were based on a legendary medieval Bavarian past. Ludwig’s dreams came largely from the operas of Wagner. The music was sublime and perhaps deserved to be frozen into architecture in terms of beauty alone, but they were also nationalistic fictions posing as facts, anthems for the coalescing German nation inventing itself from fragments and stories. The sensitive recluse Ludwig fell prey to phantasms. Wagner had suggested in sound a better world and the prince resolved to build it, commissioning Christian Jank who’d built sets for Wagner’s Lohengrin to begin work on turning ruins at Burg Falkenstein (‘Castle Falcon Stone’) into a Wagnerian palace in a mish-mash of architectural styles. He was an outsider artist trapped on the inside, walling himself into his exquisite delusions.’
[Darran Anderson, Imaginary cities, p.502.]