Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: How German is it?

Speaker:
Prof. Christoph Bode
Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich

Abstract:
The lecture examines how much Germany there is in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It discusses the significance of Ingolstadt, Victor Frankenstein’s university and the place where his Creature is actually created; the possible importance of the leading German physiological scientist at the time, Johann Wilhelm Ritter; the unfounded theory that the novel has something to do with Burg Frankenstein near Darmstadt; and it dismisses the idea that the German ghost stories collected in Fantasmagoriana were a kind of source for Mary Shelley. Towards the end, it suggests that Frankenstein is a philosophical novel (much more than Gothic fiction) that systematically sets man and his creation in sceneries that are supreme examples of the Kantian sublime. Frankenstein is read as a novel about a double failure of judgement, viz. in aesthetic and in ethical terms. The dichotomy of ‘terror of the soul’ vs. ‘terror of Germany’ is exposed as a specious one.