‘National Education’ in a Royal Pantheon in Regensburg

Abstract

The impressions of Chancellor Metternich upon first seeing the future Walhalla pantheon combined two emotions that appeared in nearly every account by nineteenth-century visitors. On the one hand, spectators were overwhelmed by the building’s Neoclassical aesthetics, its size, and Arcadian location. William Turner dedicated a painting to it while author Karl Gutzkow poetically described how, standing on the Bräuberg, he breathed ‘gasps from the ether empire’.2 But the Walhalla also evoked emotions of a very different kind, notably in relation to contemporary political culture and the selection of exemplary men. For Metternich, again, the construction of a pantheon in the secluded village of Donaustauf was ‘madness’; Heinrich Heine disparagingly described the Walhalla as ‘a sanctuary of marble skulls’.3 No public pantheon in Revolutionary Europe evoked so many contrary emotions and had such an uneven reception as the Walhalla of Ludwig I of Bavaria. And yet the idea for a pantheon to exemplary Germans, a monument that combined Hirschfeld’s plea for a German Westminster-Abtey with thecommemoration of the Wars of Liberation (1813–4), was received with general enthusiasm.4