Goethe and Frankenstein: Or, The Devil and the Dream
Here’s an exchange from The Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley when Mary, Percy and Claire are unexpectedly entertained in Switzerland from a local academic who has read Percy Shelley’s St. Irvyne, addressing him under the mistaken name from his pseudonymous “A Gentleman from Oxford” author identity.
“Monsieur Oxford, in your book—an outcast from society wanders in the Alps Mountains hoping for death. This is Wolfstein,” he began, giving the abstract and the main character’s name to the author as if he might have forgotten it. “He encounters an alchemist, the Rosicrucian, who promises him the elixir of life if his magic can raise the corpse of his dead lover, Magalena, from her tomb. But to do this, he must denounce his faith and deny his creator. They are struck by lightning and they are destroyed.”
The familiar story of the creation of the Frankenstein novel is a fireside reading of a book of Gothic tales and a nightmare dream on the lakeside of Geneva one summer. But the formation of the ideas of Mary Godwin’s book arose from her exposure to many influences, of Shelley, a collection of literary minds in the circle of her father’s acquaintances, and her readings, assembling the themes and events of her story from as many parts as her fictional creature.
But what role did Johann Goethe play in the writing of Frankenstein? And his friend, Friedrich Schiller?
When Victor Frankenstein encounters his creature who has been wandering and hiding in the Alps above Geneva, his unwanted creation tells of his education, how he read “The Sorrows of Werter”, “Plutarchs Lives” and “Paradise Lost”, books he found in a dropped leather satchel. It is from Werter, he learns the human need for love and connection, which so angers him with Victor for denying him, it drives him to murder and revenge.
Today, Goethe is more familiarly known for his play of “Faust”, the doctor who trades his soul for a deal with the devil, but Johann Goethe’s early masterwork “The Sorrows of Young Werther”, the semi-autobiographical tale of a young student so obsessed with a love he cannot have that he commits suicide, was the “Catcher in the Rye” or “Hunger Games” of its day in the late 18th Century, a popular story that reached out to the young, so melancholy that it was blamed for a wave of suicides. The creature in Frankenstein expresses the profound effect the story had on him, which is the author’s expression of the effect it had on her, so much that in it can be found her own inspirations.
“I thought Werter himself a more divine being than I had ever beheld or imagined; his character contained no pretension, but it sank deep. The disquisitions upon death and suicide were calculated to fill me with wonder…”
But the reading of his book was not Mary Godwin’s only connection to Goethe. At the time of her formations of ideas that would permeate her novel, the German classicism was infusing the English literature world, inspiring the romantics of her world. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a regular of the literary society of her father, William Godwin, and a familiar acquaintance of Mary and Shelley, had been one of the founding sources of this.
Coleridge had learned German on a trip to Germany in his younger days, along with his friend William Wordsworth. Coleridge had encamped for a few months at Gottingen University, where he learned the language and listened to lectures and made side trips. He utilized this on his return to England to launch his literary career by translating to English his version of Friedrich Schiller’s “Wallenstein”.
And though he did not translate Schiller’s play of “Wilhelm Tell” he translated a poem “Tell’s Birthplace”. Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin had been so influenced by the story of Wilhelm Tell it had inspired their elopement trip to Switzerland in 1814, to the beauty of the Lake Uri locations of Schiller’s story, where they had hoped to live away from the clucking tongues of English society, until they ran out of money. Shelley had even expected his wife and son might come and live with them in an egalitarian communal paradise.
Schiller was not Coleridge’s only influence on Mary and Percy. About the time of their elopement escape, Coleridge had been approached by publisher John Murray II to produce a translation of Goethe’s Faust. Coleridge was struggling with his own particular demons at the time, his long addiction to Laudanum, and his doubts about his own work with a tendency to begin brilliant works and never quite finish them, like Kubla Kahn, even going so far as to add: Or, a Vision in a Dream, A Fragment to the title, after Byron and friends convinced him publish it.
Coleridge would surely have been well acquainted with the literary circle of Darmstadt, the German Romantic movement “Circle of the Senses”, much like the literary circles of the English publishing world of John Murray, and of Madame DeStael at her Chateau Coppet in Geneva, visited by Bryon and Shelley in their travels around the lake.
The Darmstadt Circle was organized around the literary lights of Johann Merck, Gottfried Herder, and Christoph Wieland. The German authors had been translating works of Shakespeare and Cervantes into their language, as Coleridge had been the German works to English. Goethe, born in Frankfurt had served briefly as a magazine editor in nearby Darmstadt with Merck, before trying to revitalize his legal career in Wetzler, where he was inspired by the suicide of a friend and his own passionate attraction to an unattainable girl to write Young Werther.
Had Coleridge heard of the story of the strange activities of the one-time inhabitant of the Frankenstein Castle at Darmstadt, the college lecturer-alchemist and occult dabbler, Johann Conrad Dippel, from his travels in Germany? Coleridge may have readily been introduced to Dippel’s Oil, a malodorous concoction made from distilled animal parts, claimed as a universal medicine (meant to be rubbed on and not swallowed.) But by Coleridge’s time in Gottingen, the medicinal qualities of the Dippel’s Animal Oil had been largely dismissed and perhaps turned into somewhat of a joke after his chemical formulas had found a use in cloth dies. Mostly now only known for his tangential relation to the Frankenstein Castle, Dippel had written almost seventy works about his chemistry in German by the time of Coleridge’s studies at Gottingen.
Coleridge never published his English version of Faust in his lifetime and only later has what is believed may be his unfinished work been discovered. Mary Godwin also began a book before Frankenstein that she never finished, she called Hate, and what secrets of her sixteen year old heart it held may never be known. But why would she chose a German name for her French speaking Genevan characters of: Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus? Not only were they French Swiss, but Victor Frankenstein’s father was Italian. Confusing?
Wallenstein, Wolfstein, Frankenstein, and some smelly creepy medicine for a pregnant young woman author, expressing her exposure to the lofty thoughts and influences of the circle of contemplative minds surrounding her. Constantly pressed for an explanation of where she got the idea for her story, if a vision in a dream worked for Coleridge to explain Kubla Khan, why not for Frankenstein?
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The most famous assassination of a Habsburg was the shooting of the Archduke Ferdinand by Yugoslav separatist Gavrilo Princip, while riding in a car in Sarajevo in 1914, which is deemed to be the catalyst which led to the beginning of the First World War. This was not the first murder of an Austro-Hungarian royal while traveling. Mary Shelley set the tragic events of her novel Frankenstein on the shores of Lake Geneva with the murder of Victor Frankenstein’s son on the Plainpalais by the creature he had created. This was the terrible retribution for his hubris of creating a living being and then abandoning him. A similar case might be made for the turning of the anarchists on the imperials in class warfare. The French Revolution, of which Mary’s mother Mary Wollstonecraft had been a witness and had written about, and the resulting end of the Emperor Napoleon, had been one of the draws which had brought Mary and Percy to Paris on their elopement tour in 1814 as told in the 
As Geneva celebrates the 200th anniversary of the origination of Frankenstein, for history buff sight-seeking visitors to Geneva who might be drawn by the story of Frankenstein, and looking for more to explore, here is an account of the curious murder of one of the most sympathetic of the Imperial family of Habsburgs who ruled and dominated the life of Central Europe.
On Saturday, the 10th of September, at 1:35 in the afternoon, Sisi and her lady-in-waiting and traveling companion, the Countess Irma Sztáray, 35, left the hotel to walk the short distance to the harbor dock to catch the steamship Genève for a scenic cruise journey to Montreux where she was residing. The empress like many others had followed the “Grand Tour” which began with the writings of Byron and the other romantics. The Empress Sisi didn’t like “processions,” and she had ordered that her servants take the train ahead to Territet on the lake shore at Montreux where they would meet the boat after she had taking the scenic 
The two women were strolling on the promenade when a 25-year-old Italian man approached them. In an account by Countess Sztáray, the young man tried to peek under her mistress’s parasol, then, just as the ship’s bell rang to signal the departure, the man stumbled against her and made a movement with his hand as if he was trying to catch his balance. She was unaware at the moment it happened that he was actually holding a small weapon made of a sharpened four inch long needle file embedded into a wooden handle. The attacker was an Italian anarchist named Luigi Lucheni. The tool was used to file the eyes of industrial needles, intended by the assassin as a symbol of the rise of the industrial worker against the oppressor, and he later pronounced this as part of the anarchist creed, the “propaganda of the deed”, promoting the change of society by a violent action. His original plan was to assassinate the Duke of Orleans, a pretender to the throne of France, but the duke had departed on a tour of the Swiss Valais before he could make his move. Then, a Geneva newspaper had reported from the hotel source that a guest staying under the name of the “Countess of Hohenembs” was in fact the Empress Sisi of Austria, and he changed his target.
After Lucheni had made his sly attack and moved swiftly on, neither woman realized the seriousness of what had happened, that she had been stabbed. The empress weakened on her feet and a nearby coach driver rushed to assist her. He signaled to the concierge of the Beau Rivage, an Austrian named Planner, who was watching. Rather than return to the hotel, the coachman helped the two women to the boat dock, about a 100 yards, and up the gangway to board the Genève steamer. Countess Sztáray relaxed her hold on the empress’s arm and at that moment she collapsed unconscious on the boat deck. The companion called urgently for a doctor, but there was none on board and only a fellow passenger, a former nurse, came to aid. The captain of the Genève, a Captain Roux, was unaware of the true identity of the ill passenger and since it was a very hot day, advised that her companion should take her back to the hotel. This was impossible as the boat was already departing from the dock, and sailing out of harbor onto the lake. Three men carried the empress to the top deck and laid her on a bench. Countess Sztáray then opened her gown and cut the laces of her corset so she could take air. The empress came around briefly and her lady-in-waiting asked if she was in pain. “No”, Elizabeth answered, and then asked, “What has happened?” They were her last words as she lost consciousness.
The wife of the hotel chief was a nurse and when she and Sztáray began to undress the empress’s layers, they finally noticed the small stain of blood and the tiny puncture wound. The empress was still. She had breathed her last breaths as they had carried her into the room, but when they lifted her to a bed, she was certainly dead. Two doctors arrived and a priest. Dr. Mayer made a small incision in her arm, but there was no blood flow, and the Empress Elizabeth was pronounced dead at 2:20 pm and that Saturday afternoon. An autopsy was performed by Dr. Golay, who determined that the thin tool, just three and third inches, had pierced the lung and penetrated the heart. The pressure from the tight corsets the empress wore to control her slim figure, had kept the blood flow from the surface and had kept the empress from being aware of the wound. When the corseting was removed, the blood hemorrhage had filled the pericardial sac, stopping the heart.
She had been placed in placed in a triple coffin, with two inner lead linings and a bronze exterior case with lion claw feet. On Tuesday, before the coffins were sealed, Franz Joseph’s official representatives arrived to identify the body. The coffin had two glass panels with doors which could be slid back to view her face. Eighty-three sovereigns and the nobility of the Austro-Hungarian Empire followed the funeral cortege of the hearse to her burial in the Habsburg crypt at the Church of the Capuchins in Vienna. The tomb inscription first denoted “Elisabeth, Empress of Austria”, but the words “and Queen of Hungary” were added after the protests of Hungarians.
The assassin had made his escape from the harbor down the Rue des Alpes and tossed the weapon into the doorway of No. 3 Rue des Alpes, which is now a storefront abutting the 
Luigi Lucheni was actually born Paris and left as an orphan and spent most of his life in Switzerland, so he was only really Italian by the parentage of his mother. But the news that the assassin of the adored Sisi was “Italian” caused a wave of anti-Italian reprisals through Switzerland. There was concern that a wave of political attacks was coming from cells of anarchists, but Lucheni claimed he was acting alone. But a few months later, the International Conference for the Social Defense Against Anarchists was held in Rome, but it failed to curb the movement, until another anarchist would fire the shot which sent the world into war and ended empires.
Ever since the publishing of the 1831 edition of Mary Shelley’s masterwork “Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus”, Geneva, Switzerland has been the touchstone of lore surround the creation of the most famous work of Gothic literature, with the story of the competition between the romantics gathered on a dark and stormy night when Mary Shelley had a nightmare, waking dream, where she got the idea for a creature brought to life by a student of science.
In the lower exhibit floor of foundation library, a row of glass cases hold 15 hand-written note pages of the first from draft version of the classic story beginning “I beheld the wretch—the miserable monster whom I had created; he held up the curtain, and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me.”