A wooden pavilion from the Bavarian state exhibition in 2018 is still standing in the Ettal monastery garden. It should have been set up somewhere else a long time ago – but no one knows where, how and why.
With the Moorish kiosk and the Moroccan house it was possible back then. His Majesty, Kini, discovered the kiosk at the Paris World Exhibition in 1867 and had it set up in the palace gardens in Linderhof a few years later. Ludwig II then sent the court building director Dollmann to Paris for the Expo 1878, and he brought the Moroccan house with him. Ludwig had this built at the foot of the Kreuzspitze. After his death it was sold to Oberammergau and in 1980 it was bought back in a desolate state by the palace administration and also transferred to Linderhof. So why shouldn’t something like this also work with the wooden snow globe into which the House of Bavarian History had Ludwig’s other visions for Linderhof projected for the 2018 state exhibition? But the thing still stands as a black building in the Ettal monastery garden, and the monks don’t know what to do with it either.
At that time, the abbey was the builder of the building, which the Free State paid for with almost 600,000 euros and was only approved by the district office in Garmisch until 2019 due to the monastic monument protection. The state position in Ettal was originally intended to revolve around the “forest myth”. But then, surprisingly, 100 years of Free State had to be celebrated in 2018. For that anniversary of Bavarian kinglessness, the impresarios prepared their show for “Forest, Mountains and King’s Dream – Myth Bavaria”. And Ludwig’s royal dreams of a Byzantine palace and a Chinese castle in the nearby Graswangtal then floated in front of the 120,000 visitors in this pavilion, with which the state foresters actually wanted to show how easy and sustainable such a wooden structure can be erected and dismantled and with a completely new use can be rebuilt elsewhere.
Unfortunately, no one has yet thought of this completely new use, and the pavilion turned out to be much more massive and much more difficult to dismantle than everyone had imagined. This has now even called the Supreme Court of Auditors into action, which is concerned about the profitability. Maybe the monks should just put the pavilion at a world exhibition, someone will like it. Or set it up right away in a king’s dream, possibly next to the Byzantine palace and the Chinese castle. You don’t need a building permit there, and the Court of Auditors isn’t allowed in either.