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Bargain Travel Europe guide to Europe on a budget for unusual destinations, holiday travel tips
and secret spots missed by travel tours.



FRANKENSTEIN CASTLE RUIN - RHINELAND
Grab Your Pitchfork

Frankenstein Castle Ruin Rhineland photoAlong a winding road in the Rhineland-Palatine region between Kaiserslautern (near where Ramstein and Landstuhl military bases are located) and Mannheim, near the wine road town of Bad Duerkheim, the red limestone castle ruin stands ominously above a tiny little village named Frankenstein. The Frankenstein Castle of Rheinland-Pfalz was first built in 1100 and expanded in the 14th and 15th Centuries. It was controlled by the Bishops of Speyer and for a time the Monastery at Limburg. From the former tower one can see the value of the position over the valley with a 190 degree view of the road and now railroad track far below. The main rail line to Valley View Burg Frankenstein photoKaiserslautern runs through a tunnel right under the ruins. This Burg Frankenstein castle has a fairly sketchy history and is not even marked on some maps, suggestive of hidden secrets? There is no admission or visitor center. One can park at the rail crossing and hike up a steep path which rises behind the village cemetery up to the ruins and a nature trail. A few remaining walls where the former main hall stood. Suffering the ravages of time and struggles for control of the region, the castle at Frankenstein was occupied by the Spanish and the French (see Hardenburg Castle) in various wars and suffered much of its distruction in the Thirty Years War of European Succession.

Frankenstein Village Rhineland  Road photoOne of literature’s and the movies’ most enduring monsters was created by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley after one stormy night in Geneva, Switzerland when she and future hubby, Percy Bysshe Shelley, along with England’s romantic poet-hedonist Lord Byron and his doctor John Polidori, while sitting around the fireplace in 1816, bet they could write scary stories better that the purveyors of cheap scary literature of the day known as “Penny Dreadfuls” (see Villa Diodoti Gothic Summer). Byron started a vampire story, naming his villain after the fellow who cut down trees at his ancestral Nottinghamshire home Newstead Abbey (see Byron's Newstead Abbey), but grew quickly bored. Polidori later finished and published the story as “The Vampyre”. Percy Shelley scribbled some middling haunting verse. But 19 year old Mary, who had never had a novel published before, invented Victor Frankenstein - a man of science so infected by his power of knowledge and ego, made a creature from the parts of the dead, only to have the result of his over-reaching ego destroy him and those he loved. Inspired by the social arguments between Byron and Shelly, a nightmare "dream" influenced by the experiments of Luigi Galvani who had recently stimulated dead muscle tissue with electricity, and her young romantic trysts with the married Percy Shelly in the graveyard of St. Pancras Paris Chuch in London (see Mary Shelley's London "Birth" of Frankenstein), Mary Shelley created one of the enduring works of gothic literature.

Rhineland Frankenstein Ruins photoThe novel of Frankenstein sets the hero coming from Switzerland to study at the University at Ingolstadt, (see Ingolstadt - Bavarain Army Museum) one of the first centers of learning in old Germany, in the walled city 30 minutes north of Munich in Bavaria. The monster actually had no name, but became synonymous with the name Frankenstein. Speculation has resulted in a search for a connection between the name and a real place. Mary and Percy Shelly traveled down the Rhine River on a return back to England from Switzerland (see Rhine Falls Schaffhausen) and may have visited one of two castles along the journey.

Ruins of Frankenstein Castle Rhineland photoStrikingly, the Castle Frankenstein ruins clinging to a rock over-looking the small town with the infamous name, one can picture the angry villagers with pitchforks storming the castle while Boris Karloff rages from the burning battlements. And if peering close, one can almost see the face of the monster in the rocky crag to which the castle ruins cling, which might have inspired a young woman author surrounded by men of notoriously monstrous talent and egos.

TRain to Kaiserlautern Frankenstein Tunnel photoAs for other Castle Frankensteins, there is a beautiful castle overlooking the Rhine River - Burg Gutenfels that some tour operators refer to as Frankenstein (it fits better on the boat tour) but was actually built by the von Falkensteins (see Rhine Castles Ehrenfels and Sooneck). The most familiar Frankenstein Castle is the ruin in Darmstadt near Frankfurt with legends of a murderous doctor which has also claimed the literary Frankenstein inspiration mantle (see Frankenstein Castle Darmstadt ) and is easier to reach than the castle ruin in Rhineland-Pfalz. In the end, the 19 year old authoress of the world's most famous monster may not have set foot in any castle named Frankenstein, but legends grow in mysterious ways. © Bargain Travel Europe

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See also:

FOOTSTEPS OF THE BROTHERS GRIMM

GERMAN KING'S FANTASY CASTLE - NEUSCHWANSTEIN

AIR BERLIN AIRLINES TO DUSSELDORF


LUFTWAFFE MEMORIES - DEUTSCHES MUSEUM