DARMSTADT FRANKENSTEIN CASTLE RUINS
Where Literature, Legend and Halloween Meet
The
legend of a monster and mystery of creation. The town of Darmstadt
is about half an hour from Frankfurt
in the Hesse region of Germany.
Fifteen minutes south of the city and the airport just off the A5 autobahn,
a winding road takes you up a mountain to the ruins of a castle called
Frankenstein. An original fortress was first built in the
10th Century. The current castle was constructed beginning in
the
13th
Century
with
additions
in
the next two hundred years. Abandoned as a residence in the late 1600's,
serving for awhile as a prison and then completely forgotten and a ruin
ever since with some walls, an intact though damaged distinctive tower
and a small chapel, said to be haunted.
The
Darmstadt Castle Frankenstein was resurrected in romantic age of the
1800s as a part of the era’s fascination with gothic
and romantic literature and the publishing of Mary Shelley’s famous
novel of “Frankenstein” in 1818. The inspiration for Mary
Wollstonecraft Shelley’s brilliant, haunting work has been the
subject of speculation ever since its first printing. Connections
of the name of the novel with
an actual place have been
tantalizing, though never proven.
The novel of Frankenstein has very little to do
with a castle, which was more an invention of James Whale’s
iconic version of the story in the Universal film with Boris Karloff,
indelibly etched as the monster and castle as a romantic setting for
a film.
Mary Shelley’s inspiration is more complex. In the novel, Victor von Frankenstein is not German at all but Swiss from Geneva. Her story was most famously begun at Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816 (see Byron and Villa Diodati). The science student's undetailed creation of an unnamed “creature” were carried out at Ingolstadt University and most of the story takes place in Switzerland, the Alps, a stopover in London, and on a ship. There is a suggestion that Mary Shelley visited the Darmstadt Castle Frankenstein ruin on a boat trip down the Rhine River in 1814. There is no record of a visit to Darmstadt, or mention of it in her published journals. A visit to the castle by Mary Shelley is depicted in the novel "Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley" along with other tantalizing mostly unknown events that inspired her book.
Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley Audiobook Coming Soon
She may have encountered its legend of physician, crackpot theologian and alchemist, Johann Dippel, rumored to have tried to raise the dead by experimenting with human corpses in the castle its days as a prison. Dippel was trying to discover the alchemist's "Elixer Vitae" potion of eternal life from blood and body fluids. He supposedly got the Landgrave of Hesse (see Castle Hotel Ludwigseck) to grant him the castle in exchange for the formula, but instead he created a foul-smelling explosive concoction known as "Dippel's Oil" made from animal bones, better suited to cloth dies and sheep dip than eternal life. A tenuous connection to Dippel's doings might be found in an offhand joke made to a pregnant Mary Shelley while she was working on the book, taking a remedy of mixed Aniseed Spirit and a whale fat called Spemaceti, to which Percy Shelley quipped might be added "9 drops of human blood, 7 grains of gunpowder, 1/2 ounce of putrified brain and 13 mashed grave worms", perhaps a reference to local villager jokes about what Dippel was up to. Or the name may not be from the Darmstadt castle at all, but rather from the other Frankenstein Castle ruin in Rhineland-Palatine (see Frankenstein Castle Palatine).
A
suggestion for the Frankenstein name has been assigned
to Mary's
step-mother Mary Clairmont, who may have had contact with Jacob
Grimm (see Grimm's
Fairy Tale Trail) for William Godwin's children's book
publishing venture in London.
Or to Samuel Taylor Coleridge who traveled in Germany and had an association with Johann Goethe and the Darmstadt Literay Circle. Darmstadt is not far from Hanau, the birthplace of the fairy tale writing
brothers and the start of the Fairy Tale Road from Hanau to Bremen (see Fairy
Tale Museum). Though that's even less likely as Mary
Shelley's relationship with her step-mother was not good and they did
not speak.
The early 1800s
was a time when the mysteries of science and medicine were meeting
the
mysteries
of life. A panic of
being buried alive had caused coffins of the time to be made with bells
on a rope that could be rung if the mistakenly buried came back to life.
Mary (Godwin) Shelley had also heard from her father’s friends,
Charles Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, stories of experiments at
Newgate prison of electricity
being passed through dead prisoners, and the experiments of
Luigi Galvani making frogs legs twitch with electric jolts. The idea
of corpses surging to life was called "Galvanism" all the rage
of excitement in the early 1800s.
The invention of her story "in
a dream" had
come after the reading of a German collection of horror stories called
the "Fantasmagoriana" that
famous summer night on the shores of Lake Geneva. The
novel of Frankenstein and what inspired it is as much a collection of
inspirations
as her monster
is of collected bits of dead bodies (see Mary
Shelley St Pancras).
Goth Halloween
The
Castle Ruins of Burg Frankenstein in Darmstadt have been popularized
by its name over the years and by its proximity
to a military base as the end of a run to the top of the hill
from Cambrai-Fritsch Kaserne army base in Darmstadt. It was mostly
American
soldiers who brought
the idea of Halloween as a holiday party to Germany and the castle with
the scary name seemed the perfect place. The Darmstadt Frankenstein Castle
has become the location for one of the largest Halloween scare-show celebrations
in the country, with spook effects and music, food and drink partying
over three weekends at the end of October and November.
The
Ruins of Burg Frankenstein can be reached by car off route B426 to
a parking lot down the hill
or by
public transportation on the "Frankenstein
Bus" from Darmstadt during the Halloween weekends and to the bus
stop the rest of the year, but the walk from the bus stop is indeed a
hike. The road and slope up the hill to the castle
is
a popular destination for bike riders and runners. There is a restaurant
at the castle which hosts weddings and other events with beautiful views
of the valley. The ruins
have become
quite popular in the "goth" world with photographers taking
pictures of glam girls in black dresses freely haunting its stone walls. © Bargain
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Burg Frankenstein
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See Also:
EUROPEAN
CASTLES INSTITUTE - PHILIPPSBURG
HOTEL JAGDSCHLOSS KRANICHSTEIN
RAIL MUSEUM DARMSTADT-KRANICHSTEIN
JOHANNISBURG
PALACE & PARK - ASCHAFFENBURG
BAVARIAN ARMY MUSEUM INGOLSTADT
