Frankenstein Castle

Conrad II Reiz of Breuberg raised the castle on a spur of the Langenberg around 1240 and took his name from it, von und zu Frankenstein. A charter of 1252 concerning Conrad and his wife Elisabeth of Weiterstadt records business done super castro in frangenstein — on the castle at the Frankenstein — so the place was already standing and in use; most historians date the building to around 1240. What Conrad founded was a free imperial barony answering to no one but the emperor, holding the lordship of Nieder-Beerbach, Eberstadt and other villages. An older castle probably stood on the same hill from the eleventh century, abandoned once the new one went up nearby.

In 1292 Friedrich von Frankenstein made his family Burgmannen of the counts of Katzenelnbogen, granting them unrestricted access to the castle and support in the event of war. The case never arose; the castle was never besieged. The trouble came from inside the family, which split into two lines during the fourteenth century and divided the castle under a Burgfrieden of 1363 drawn up in punctilious detail, which for all that left them in continuous litigation. Around 1400 the castle had grown too small and was extended with an outer bailey, and in 1402 it became an imperial fief along with Nieder-Beerbach, free of Katzenelnbogen.

By the middle of the sixteenth century the castle had reached the extent it kept, and the conflict with Hesse-Darmstadt had grown with it. The Frankensteins held to the Catholic faith and the right of patronage that came with it, while their lands stayed a patchwork of villages and the landgraves consolidated around them — the more so after the partition of 1567, when Georg I made Darmstadt his residence. Holding high-court jurisdiction over the Frankenstein possessions in Eberstadt, the landgraves extended it on doubtful legal ground to imperial-immediate Nieder-Beerbach; the barons answered with a stream of suits at the Imperial Chamber Court and lost to political weight anyway.

The same quarrel explains the family's oddest right. Until the late sixteenth century the Frankenstein knights lent a donkey and a squire to neighbouring places, chiefly Darmstadt, as a pillory for women who had beaten their husbands. The loan lapsed, ostensibly over unpaid fees, more probably because sending the donkey to every local court district would have conceded the landgrave's jurisdiction over every Frankenstein holding. Instructed by will never to sell to Hesse, the family sold anyway in 1662, castle and lordship together, to Landgrave Ludwig VI for 109,000 gulden, and retired to a new lordship at Ullstadt in Franconia.

Ludwig VI had bought the territory rather than the building, and the castle — sound enough at the sale — was left to rot. It served as an invalids' house and a refuge during the wars of Louis XIV, and then rumours of buried treasure did what no siege had: walls and cellar vaults were pulled down by people digging for them. By the middle of the eighteenth century the outer bailey was largely gone, the castle administrator's wife had sold off everything saleable down to the lead from the roofs, and the villagers below were quarrying the rest.

A chaotic dig in 1763, prompted by the old legend and by the readings of crystal-gazers, ran clean out of control: when the Nieder-Beerbach priest tried to stop it the diggers demanded his dismissal, and it ended only when Johann Heinrich Drott was buried alive in a collapsing shaft and given a suicide's burial. Later attempts in 1770 and 1787–88, the second of them fatal as well, brought an official ban on digging. From the middle of the nineteenth century Grand Duke Ludwig III had the ruin partly rebuilt in the romantic taste of the day, clumsily enough that the work destroyed more than it recovered: the gate tower was given a storey too many, and the inner tower a cap it had probably never had.

The castle's fame rests on a book that never mentions it. Johann Konrad Dippel, alchemist and physician, was born here in 1673, and local folklore, repeated by the castle's own keepers, has him experimenting on exhumed corpses and with nitroglycerin. Historians doubt it: nothing shows Dippel returning after he finished his studies at Giessen in 1693, and nitroglycerin had not been discovered in his lifetime. Mary Shelley's journals from the period name no castle either. She did travel the Rhine in 1814, spending a few hours at Gernsheim some sixteen kilometres away, and several biographers have offered Dippel as a possible influence; others doubt any connection at all, and Frankenstein — the Franks plus stein, rock — is an unremarkable castle name in a region full of them.

The older story is the dragon. As August Nodnagel set it down in the nineteenth century, a knight called George rode up from Nieder-Beerbach, fought the beast by the well until both were spent, killed it, and died of the poison in its tail. A Georg von Frankenstein who died in 1531 does lie in the church below, his tomb carved with a lindworm — but the tale is later than the tomb, and the carving most likely honours his name-saint, conventionally shown fighting a dragon. The newest layer is American: a live radio broadcast from the castle on Halloween 1952, rigged with a toppling statue, which swamped the station with frightened callers, and from 1978 an annual Halloween festival begun by airmen from Rhein-Main Air Base.