Johann Konrad Dippel

1 Comment November 7, 2020 Steve Wiggins

So, I’m doing some research into a seventeenth-eighteenth century alchemist named Johann Konrad Dippel. He lived in what would become Germany, and had a bit of a reputation. The first stop for information these days is Wikipedia. Now, as any academic knows, you can’t rely on what you find on the site. I use Wikipedia to help start my bibliography. The references here are rather slim. I see there’s an Encyclopedia Britannica article (1911 edition) available for free. I check their references. They wouldn’t have passed my 100-level courses. They contain the initials of the authors, no titles for their books, years and cities of publication but not the publishers. Okay, so I’ll google/ecosia the authors with just their initials. And the years. And the cities. Nothing comes up.

The next step is WorldCat. It’s never let me down before. Indeed, my first search brings up the bibliographic information on one of the mysterious, initialed authors. (The WorldCat entry doesn’t even have a last name.) The book is in German and the nearest copy is at Yale. Looks like I’d better keep looking. The next book doesn’t show up on WorldCat at all. No combination of author (with only initials and surname), place, and date appears. What was Encyclopedia Britannica 1911 thinking? It’s at times like this that I miss paper research. Although the privilege is no longer mine, roaming an academic library stack to stack, checking the card catalogue, breathing in the perfume of old books, acquiring new knowledge, these come back to me with the force of meeting an old friend after many years’ separation.

Less about the subject and more about the journey, seeking knowledge used to be an embodied thing. I suspect somewhere in a bio-mechanical future with the internet coursing through our veins, it will seem quaint to think of oldsters like me tapping away at a keyboard and peering at a screen to find information about a nearly forgotten dead white man. But even with all the knowledge of the web in intravenous electronic supply, will our future selves be able to put it all together? Will they solve the problems of sexism, racism, capitalism, and dare we go any further than that? Of will they elect leaders who care only for themselves and call on Christians to join them in deep corruption and fraud? Or will, after some collapse, future Leibowitz stumble across a mysterious piece of melted plastic and wonder if there really was anything here before?

1 Comment March 18, 2020 Steve Wiggins

The story of Frankenstein has many unexpected twists and turns. I’m currently reading a book about the writing of the novel—something I’ve done a number of times before. There was an aspect of this story that hadn’t really caught my attention too much, but then, circumstances changed. Suddenly old information became new. It all started with a missed opportunity from childhood.

It was a real puzzle. Although my grandmother lived with us her last years, I never knew the name of her mother. There had been hints. My grandfather’s book with birthdays in it listed the first name, so I had a Christian moniker and birthdate only. She’d died young, I knew, somewhere in the Washington, DC area. This had been the state of my knowledge for many years. My grandmother died before I was a teen, and before I took any interest in the family story. I knew her heritage was Germanic, her father having been a first-generation American.

So young Mary Shelley (technically Godwin) was on a tour of Europe with her lover Percy. Although they both came from distinguished backgrounds, they were cash poor. Running out of money they made their way back to England as cheaply as they could. They passed near Castle Frankenstein along the way, although there is no record that they actually visited it. The name seems to have stuck, as does the story that they potentially learned about a mad scientist who’d lived in that castle. This scientist was a theologian who dabbled in alchemy and experiments with dead bodies. I know what you’re thinking—it’s like a puzzle piece we desperately want to go in this place but its fit’s ambiguous. We’re not sure how much of this Mary Shelley knew. The alchemist’s name was Johann Konrad Dippel. I’d read about him before.

I’d spent nearly an entire summer some years back working on my grandmother’s family, finding little. Just two years ago I did a casual search on “Find a Grave,” and to my surprise, I found my great-grandfather. I knew it was him because his second wife’s name matched information from all the family records. The cemetery record, in Maryland rather than DC, had his first wife’s name. It was that easy. After decades of searching, a few keystrokes revealed the mystery. When it also listed her parents, the significance of her mother’s maiden name—Dippel—escaped me. Now I have no way of knowing if this is the same Dippel family of Castle Frankenstein, but it put flesh on the bones of my long-standing interest in monsters. Seeking them out may be the same as learning family secrets. Perhaps it always is.