Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved home and the war's desolation!
As the 18th century neared its end, an independent observer might have supposed that Bremen had attained a real measure of security. Her chief military foe - France - was reeling in the aftermath of bloody civil war, as was her ally but chief commercial rival, England. Spain had been humbled and her colonial empire destroyed, Austria was immersed in Italy and the Balkans, Poland was wholly impotent. Bremen's domestic economy was the largest in Europe, her trade spanned the globe and her armed forces were technically advanced and strong in numbers.
And yet, Bremen made no move to relax her vigilance. The army and navy budgets remained at painfully-high levels, with almost half a million men under arms in the European provinces alone. Intelligence activity remained high, even on the territory of states that were allies and friends. Immense sums were poured into fantastical projects of dubious military value.
Where, then, did this feeling of insecurity originate, and how did it persist in the face of all the evidence to the contrary?
Men may be termed geniuses for the originality and perception of their thoughts. But perhaps we may be permitted to advance the argument that no thinker of original thoughts can be considered truly great unless he - or someone else - is able to clearly communicate those thoughts to others. The real practical value of the work of genius is the degree to which more ordinary men may put it to use.
That said, we may also state the less-obvious corollary: all work of genius is subject to corruption, perversion, misuse and abuse, particularly so among those who have imperfectly grasped the intent of that genius. So Darwin was misused to excuse rapacity and Machiavelli to excuse faithlessness and treason, so even the Holy Bible would be quoted as justifying every kind of crime. Given the vagueness and generality of most of Doktor Gropius' work - it is less a philosophical work than a collection of maxims and anecdotes - we may see that the margin there for misunderstanding his concepts would be uncommonly large.
We know from careful examination of the work of Doktor Gropius that he held the Roman armies in high esteem (and we count the Eastern Roman armies as Roman, as those men did name themselves). We know that he believed that the success of Roman armies was chiefly due to the Roman virtues of devotion to duty, love of country and disciplined behavior. And we can assume that, while a man of genius might fully comprehend the Doktor's thoughts and a man of mediocre intelligence gain some understanding of the art of war, a man of more limited reason or greater ideological fervor might miss the spirit entirely and turn the words to unintended use. Might make the fatal assumption that such a perfectly obedient army could be used only for good ends; might assume that the end - assumed to be good - would excuse the means employed.
Bremen's government had long rested on three legs - a rich mercantile class, a landed aristocracy that dominated the military and a powerful church establishment. Seemingly unstable, this three-pronged structure had proven dynamically stable: pressure on one leg was resisted by the others, and the system tended to return itself to a stable state. Forever teetering and flexing - forever cursed for its seeming inability to accomplish anything - the 'self-correcting' nature of this dynamic stability had given Bremen centuries of domestic peace.
But from a certain perspective - one more accustomed to the solid certainty of centralized government on the French, Austrian or Spanish model - Bremen's government would have seemed a fragile thing, not to be trusted in the revolt-ridden days of the late 18th century. Just as a ship seems endangered by the waves that twist and flex it, yet that ship may ride on waves that batter down cliffs of solid stone. Few men, however, would rather be on that tossing ship than on the seemingly solid but crumbling shore. And the storms - those massive upheavals of civil war that convulsed England and France - would have seemed a threat that Bremen's ship of state could not weather without a stout anchor. An anchor best provided by an army of utter dependability, of perfect devotion to duty and absolute loyalty to... well, to those who felt they deserved that loyalty and the power that would come with it, of course. They would not have seen that their effort to rigidly fix the republic in an unchanging form would inevitably cause it to crumble. They were only men, foolish and fallible, who had watched two powerful nations collapse in civil war - and they were afraid.
Another of the converging lines of force that would intersect with such terrible result was the temper of the times. It was an age when reason was thought supreme, when human nature was thought to be perfectable; it was an age in which rational philosophy was thought capable of defining what a perfected human nature might actually be. It was an age that believed - absolutely - in absolutes. The ultima thule of an engineer was a truly stable work platform; the ideal of an architect that of a truly precise measurement. The holy grail, if you will, of religion was an unshakeable faith, and the unrealized goal of every ruler was a perfect fidelity, an absolute loyalty from his subjects.
Enormous advances in the mechanical arts were everywhere: steam engines were pumping mines and powering boats, electrical experiments seemed to promise god-like powers to the men who could unlock their secrets, chemistry and metallurgy progressed in leaps and bounds. It must have seemed that, for the first time in human history, rational methods might be applied to developing the perfect obedience that the nation seemed to need in order to survive. And, most horribly, it must have seemed perfectly rational to try.
The armies of Europe in that age were made up of long-service soldiers. Men were recruited for terms of up to thirty years, and recruited from gutters, gaols and asylums. The officers (and a fair percentage of the cavalry) were younger sons of nobles or men who were wealthy enough to purchase commissions in a regiment for themselves or their sons. The artillery officers were mostly bourgeoisie, literate and specially educated in engineering, siege and fortification techniques and the minutae of logistics and supply. Units drilled endlessly: manuevers were perfect, uniforms meticulous, discipline was savage. It was not unusual for a man who attempted to desert to be flogged to death - slowly, so that the lesson would bite home. The rich, gaudy uniforms were as distinctive as our modern-day prisoners' day-glo orange, and for the same puropose, so that men who attempted to run would be spotted and stopped or killed.
Battlefield power was thought to lay in siege lines of geometrical exactness, of infantry lines as straight as a ruled line, of cavalry charges in exact order and volleys delivered with clockwork precision. And all of this required robotic obedience, when the shot and ball were flying about and men were dying all around. An army that could achieve perfection of manuever, perfection of discipline and obedience, perfect unflinching acceptance of casualties... that army would, they reasoned, be invincible.
But despite the mind-numbing repetitions of drill and the ferocious discipline, units still broke. Men disobeyed, units mutinied. Ambitious army officers might even lead their troops in rebellion against their government, as officers had done so lately in France and England. The ideal of perfect dependability - perfect obedience - was only attainable by clockwork mechanisms. Could men be turned into clockwork?
Therin lies our tale.
In defense of Bremen - if any defense is even possible - no evidence has ever surfaced that would show that her government conducted, condoned or even knew of the terrible events that unfolded in that gloomy forest along the Rhine. Undoubtedly, some generals and officials may have provided monies, or suspected the truth and looked the other way - after all, dozens of soldiers must have been involved - but no active conspiracy can be proven. And nothing at all might be known today had not a dissolute young English aristocrat not passed through in search of poetry.
In the latter half of the 17th century and the early days of the 18th there lived a famous, learned man by the name of Johann Konrad Dippel. Born in a castle on the German side of the Rhine, his parents were refugees from France and Dippel adopted Germany as his new home. University-educated, renowned as a theologian, chemist and alchemist (he invented Dippel's Oil, and prussian blue pigment), he was also thought to be possessed by Satan. He eventually bought that birthplace castle by the Rhine, but after his death the madwoman Euler let it all go to wrack and ruin.
Located atop a hill halfway between Mainz and Mannheim, the castle was within convenient traveling distance to the army defending Pfalz and yet isolated, the surrounding area thickly forested and thinly populated. The castle towers were not yet topped with the modern peaked roofs when the castle and Darmstadt town played host to the glittering literati of the 1790's. Nobility and intelligentsia gathered on the hillside lawns for romantic outings, and in the Gothic fashion of the day we can be sure they told each other tales of Gothic horror. Goethe was certainly there, as was a dissolute young English aristocrat with delusions of poesy - Percy Shelley. Luigi Galvani was not there, but his experiments with electrical stimulation of nerves would have been avidly discussed. One man who was certainly in attendance was young Heinrich Sieger, whose own operation was quietly underway past the old Franconian stone quarry that gave the name to Castle Frankenstein.
The achievements and scandals of Dippel must have merged with garbled local reports of Sieger's activities, become seasoned by Shelley's own experiments with electrical galvanism and emerged as his young wife's tormented masterpiece in 1816. With no other written records and only uncertain local rumors, what can we deduce of Sieger's experiment?
The man himself was young, probably in the middle half of his twentieth decade. He was a recent graduate of the University of Ingolstadt, with good but undistinguished marks. The comments of his tutors all have a single theme: great promise but no application to his courses. His mind, it would seem, was even then turned to other subjects than rhetoric, Latin and theology.
His father was a retired army officer of fearsome reputation, noted for his rabidly conservative politics. Whatever its source, we know that the experiment was well funded and provided with an ample labor force - survivnig traces of the buildings by the old quarry show that they were large and had immensely thick foundations and walls. They would have been, in fact, nearly or even perfectly soundproof. Local reports reveal an ugly pattern of stolen bodies, graves robbed and missing people along with missing dogs and livestock.
But from what we know of the finale of this tale we must assume that at least some of the victims were soldiers, seconded - or, horrors, even volunteered - from the great Army of the Rhine in Pfalz. Mustering records of that army do show a few more desertions than usual, enough that we may infer the loss of a dozen or a score of soldiers. Perhaps they went to Darmstadt as guards and laborers, but in the end the temptation to test Sieger's techniques on them must have been irresistible.
Far from Mary Shelly's fancies of reanimated corpses, Sieger must have been using electrical shock treatments to instill perfect obedience in those soldiers. Experiments with animals and human corpses would have shown where the electrodes might be placed; batteries, or electrical storms and accumulators could have provided the current. This we may deduce from the tidy rows of unmarked graves behind the tumbled building ruins, the bodies therein whose bones are splintered from muscular contraction, and whose mummified flesh is charred from the awful power Sieger used.
The experiment, of course, failed. The men certainly died, and probably died in agony - though we may hope not, the condition of the corpses in those lonely unmarked graves admits no other interpretation.
And Sieger? We do know how Sieger died, if only from local legend. One dark, quiet, moonlit night, one of Sieger's tormented victims escaped his tormentor. Animated by superhuman fear and rage, he smashed the euipment, spattering himself and Sieger with battery acids. He pursued Sieger through the night, pursued him into the ruins of the old castle, and hurled him from the great tower to the accompaniment of unearthly shrieks and howls. Villagers, drawn by the horrendous racket, drove the poor creature with torches to an old windmill and burned it there, alive.
One assumes it died.
One hopes.
There is no evidence that this tragedy was anything but a conspiracy of a few, an experiment whose horrific results we must believe they could not have foreseen when they began. It is a testament to the fear of chaos, a parable of sacrifice by small, fearful men for no good reason. It is the kind of death that comes to soldiers all too often.
The buildings are gone. The castle wears its ridiculous witches hats on its turret tops and preens for tourists who have never really read Mary Shelley's book. The sixteen graves are long since emptied, their contents reburied in consecrated ground with reverence and pity.
Every October 31st the Seventeenth Regiment of the Line, wherever thay may be, forms on parade. No names are read, no ceremonial speeches are allowed. Only a long, long moment of silence and regret, followed by sixteen single rifle shots.
They died, as soldiers often die, in pain and loneliness and regret, with lives unfinished and fates unknown. They died, as all of us must die, before their time. But one of them, in his loneliness and agony, took the bastard down who caused it, made sure the torment would go no further, gave up his own life to protect the innocent. Like Mary Shelley's monster, he will forever remain nameless.
He died, obedient to his duty. He died a soldier. I have no greater praise.
