Frankenstein

To pass the time while stuck in a house on Lake Geneva during the rainy summer of 1816, the 19-year-old Mary Shelley wrote the story of the scientist Viktor Frankenstein and the nameless monster he creates. At the heart of this novel that reached world fame stands the creator and his distressed creature. The moment Frankenstein succeeds in animating his monster and they see each other for the first time, euphoria turns to sheer terror and utopia to horror. The ‘father’ casts out his ‘child’, leaving it alone in a world where it is a stranger, without language, place or memory. The developmental stages of the monster, its attempts to get closer to people and its exclusion from the social sphere impressively reveal that 'monstrosity', as Annina Klappert puts it in her essay Monster Machen, 'consists not only of exhibiting something that should not exist, but that also might exist'.
Mary Shelley's work not only reflects on her position as a female writer but also takes the dazzling, transgressive and cultural idea that the monstrous represents to a new level. Her patchwork monster, stitched together from hybrid body parts, is the ultimate monster. The questions raised by its creation resonate in every era: Should humanity be allowed to do everything it can? What is the origin of evil? How do we become who we are? And: Who are the monsters of our time?