The Hollywood creation of "Castle Frankenstein" as the place where Victor creates the Creature is really a shame, as it prevents the wider public from knowing the hilarity of the fact that Victor made his fucked up homunculus in his student housing at the college in Ingolstadt. Imagine you're trying to get your bachelor's degree and the chem major down the hall has created a crime against god in his fucking dorm room AND THEN HE LEAVES IT THERE. The creature has to make his own damn way off campus somehow!!!
Victor Frankenstein is BAVARIAN?? now that explains everything.
Victor Frankenstein is not Bavarian, he studied there but he's from Geneva.
And he didn't make the creature in a dorm on a college campus or anything like that, it was a workshop that was part of the apartment he rented in Ingolstadt, from descriptions it was probably a building kinda like this with a small courtyard and stairs outside leading to the workshop
(The 1994 movie Mary Shelley's Frankenstein for example went in the right direction)
Also Castle Frankenstein is a real castle in Germany (with lots of spooky legends of its own surrounding it) and it's a popular theory that Mary Shelley got the inspiration for the name from it and possible that its existence factored into the Hollywood myth.
While we're on the topic of historical correctness: It should also be noted that medieval unis in the German countries don't have a campus in the American sense, instead the uni buildings were (and in those unis that still exist, are) distributed around town (or town/city centre these days). Also, as @rovermcfly has alluded to, by the time Frankenstein was written there was no such thing as uni halls/college dorms in what today is Germany (in the middle ages there was something similar to the type of on-campus accommodation you still find in Oxford and Cambridge today). Instead students rented rooms - the stereotype is the room rented from an uptight old lady that had opinions on everything in the student's life and who made sure that there would be no female visitors ever. In Germany the earliest form of uni halls back to the 1920s, and the idea didn't really take off until after WWII.
Years ago @dduane and I were guests at an SF con in Basel, Switzerland.
Victor Frankenstein cropped up in a panel, and among other things was dismissed as "Veektor Frahnkenshtein?" Not from Geneva, not with a name like that!" (Geneva is French-speaking) but also "typical Geneva behaviour, leaving others to clean up their mess."
Followed by, "Mary Shelley was English so we should cut her some slack for not knowing the details" versus "You mean nobody told her the details about Geneva…?"
It was all very tongue-in-cheek, but those are examples of Swiss attitudes to other Swiss in a nutshell.
Switzerland is a country; it's also an amalgamation of 26 cantons (states) - the national code is CH, Confœderatio Helvetica - which, while they'll always band together against a common enemy, have VIEWS about each other.
Those views are best summed up as "Those? They're From There, Don't Trust Them." A Swiss boy from one canton marrying a Swiss girl from another canton was a Mixed Marriage and provoked comments to the parents like "if none of our local boys / girls were good enough you can't have raised him / her right…"
As one chatty Swiss guy told us in a hotel bar:
"The Zurichers are too fond of money, the Thurgauers are too German, the Genevois are too French, nobody knows what the Baslers are and have you heard one speak? Ticiners are more Italian than is good for them, Appenzellers are hairy mountain-men and that includes their women, the folk from Uri like animal husbandry the wrong way and the Bernese are slow, never tell a Bernese a joke on Friday because he'll get it on Sunday and laugh in church…"
Our informant had something to say about every single canton and was grinning like a fox the whole time. The hotel BTW was in Bern, he was from Bern, and if that was an example of Bernese slow, then fast must be like lightning. (Which in Bern apparently goes "bzzt (pause) bzzzt (pause) bzzzzt (pause) boom.")
In the 16th century, when the principal Swiss export was lethal mercenary soldiers, one of the main reasons why they didn't roll up Europe like a cheap carpet and take it home as a souvenir was that not enough Swiss (from Bern, Zurich, Uri etc.) would leave Switzerland to do it because that would have meant leaving Other Swiss (from Zug, Appenzell, Luzern etc.) to take care of the place.
"No wise Fox will leave another Fox to mind the hen-house while he's away on Business…"
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