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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 on the spot in the 10th Century. Frankenstein in German essentially means “free stone” and the name was attached to the castle and the family line. 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 distinctive tower and a small chapel.

The Darmstadt Castle Frankenstein was resurrected in romantic age of the 1800’s 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 Shelley’s brilliant, haunting work has been the subject of speculation ever since it’s first printing. Connections of the name of the novel and it's protagonist with an actual place have been indeed tantalizing. Most of these connections are “suggested” “reported” “hinted” and entirely conjecture. The novel of Frankenstein has very little to do with a castle, which was more an invention of the writers of James Whale’s iconic version of the story in the Universal film with Boris Karloff, indelibly etched as the monster and a castle as a romantic setting for a film.

Mary Shelly’s inspiration is more complicated. In the novel, Victor von Frankenstein is not German at all but Swiss from Geneva. Her story was most famously begun on holiday at Lake Geneva. His mostly undetailed creation of an unnamed “monster” were carried out at Ingolstadt University and most of the story takes place in Switzerland, in the Alps, on a ship and the arctic. There is a suggestion that Mary Shelly visited the Darmstadt castle Frankenstein Ruin on a boat trip down the Rhine River in 1814 with a stop on the German "Burgenstrasse" Castle Road (see Burg Hornberg). There is no record of a visit to Darmstadt, though she may have heard of the castle on the journey. On a Rhein River tour trip from Basel, she might also have visited instead the Frankenstein Castle in Rhineland-Palatine near Speyer (see Grab Your Pitchfork).

A suggestion for the inspiration of the name has been assigned to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly’s step-mother Mary Clairmont, who had been a translator of the "Swiss Family Robinson" story from German and the Brothers Grimm stories (see Grimm's Fairy Tale Trail). Mary Shelly may have heard the legend of physician, crackpot theologian and alchemist, Johann Dippel, born at the Darmstadt castle who apparently tried to raise the dead by boiling dead animals and human flesh in the dungeons of the Darmstadt castle in its days as a prison, perhaps an early version of Joseph Mengele. 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). The early 1800’s 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 Shelly had also heard from her father’s friends Charles Lamb and S.T. Coleridge stories of experiments at Newgate prison of electricity being passed through dead prisoners, and the published experiments of Luigi Galvani making frogs legs twitch with electric jolts. 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 Shelly St Pancras).

The Castle Ruins of Burg Frankenstein in Darmstadt however have been popularized by the growing romanticism of 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 Travel Europe

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See Also:

BIG GUNS AND FAT UNIFORMS
Bavarian Army Museum Ingolstadt

EUROPEAN CASTLES INSTITUTE
Philippsburg Castle

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