POETRY AND TRUTH

The Heirs of the Night is not only a fantastic novel series about vampires, it is also a journey through nineteenth-century Europe with its people and its history, inviting my readers to immerse themselves in the world of that time. It is important for me to provide brief insights into politics, art, and the state of sciences with their new inventions at the time, whether in the field of medicine, architecture, or technology. Many real-life figures appear, including men and women of politics, as well as artists whose works in music, painting, or literature still influence us today. I also describe the places as they looked at the end of the nineteenth century: Hamburg with its poor quarters, where today the Speicherstadt can be seen in the free port, and Rome with its ancient ruins, which at that time were still largely buried and overgrown with weeds. Although much has changed in both places to this day, one can rediscover many things when traveling to Hamburg and Rome. It's worth it! I have walked the paths myself and have seen every described building that still stands today, every ruin, every cemetery - and of course, I have also been in the catacombs outside the gates of Rome! If one engages with it, the atmosphere captivates and leads one into long-gone epochs.

Guest Stars

Lord Byron and the Birth of Frankenstein

The English poet Lord Byron (1788-1824) was a colorful personality in his time, about whom the gossip press would have regularly reported if it had existed in its current form, because he was not only a gifted poet, he was the dream of young women with his dark beauty, was a dandy, and his private life was surrounded by scandalous gossip. Did he really have a love affair with his half-sister Augusta? The prudish society of puritanical England drove him to Europe. In 1816, Lord Byron settled in a villa on Lake Geneva with three friends. They were the doctor and writer John Polidori, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, later Wollstonecraft Shelley. In the nights, they sat together with wine and opium and talked about scientists' attempts to infuse dead matter with life through electricity. And they read ghost stories. Finally, Lord Byron suggested that each should write a creepy story themselves. While the stories by Lord Byron and Shelley remained mere fragments, Mary created her Frankenstein. By the way, Mary was only sixteen years old when she eloped with Shelley to Switzerland. Polidori wrote The Vampyre, which was published anonymously in 1819 and became the basis for many plays and operas. The four authors were not blessed with luck: Polidori committed suicide at the age of only twenty-six, Shelley, who had a lifelong fear of drowning, died at the age of twenty-nine in a shipwreck, Lord Byron died at the age of thirty-six from a fever. Only Mary Shelley lived to be fifty-four years old. Tom Holland turned Lord Byron into a vampire in his novel The Vampire and let him haunt the world as an undead. For those who want to learn more about Lord Byron and his friends, I recommend Tanja Kinkel's biographical novel: Madness that Devours the Heart.

The Greatest Opera Composer - Giuseppe Verdi

Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) came from humble origins. His talent was noticed early on, and he attended gymnasium with the support of a patron. He became an organist and music director, studied the basics of opera composition, literature, and politics. At the age of 26, he composed his first opera, Oberto - Conte Di San Bonifacio, which was successfully performed at La Scala in Milan. However, his next opera, King for a Day, was booed. His young wife and children died. Verdi was deeply depressed and decided to stop composing. It was only a year later that the director of La Scala persuaded him to create another opera. Nabucco became a sensation, and Verdi was hailed as the hero of Italian opera. The Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves quickly became the political anthem of the Lombard cities occupied by Austria. For the people, the opera was a manifesto of the Italian struggle for freedom against all foreign rule. The "Abigaille" of the premiere became Verdi's life companion. From then on, he wrote several operas in quick succession, "like a galley slave," as he himself said, wanting to earn enough to retire like a gentleman to his estate. Nevertheless, he remained faithful to Italy's political unification movement and, after the revolutionary year of 1848, wrote The Battle of Legnano. With his story of the victory of the Lombard cities over Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, Verdi was celebrated as the "singer of the Risorgimento." The Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves from Nabucco became the unofficial national anthem. The highlights of his musical work are considered to be the operas Rigoletto (1851), Il Trovatore (1853), and La Traviata (1853). He drew on literary works by Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Schiller, Voltaire, and Lord Byron. After the unification of Italy, Verdi was persuaded by Count Cavour to run for the Chamber of Deputies, but he soon withdrew and went to Paris to work for the opera there. He composed his famous opera Aida at the request of the Egyptian viceroy Ismail Pasha. However, it was not performed in Cairo until 1871, not for the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. For this event, Rigoletto was performed. Disappointed by the politics of the Kingdom of Italy, Verdi retired to his estate and composed only a few more works.

Bram Stoker - the Father of Count Dracula

Bram Stoker (1847-1912) grew up in Dublin. He was constantly sick as a child and could not stand and walk until he was eight years old. After that, he developed normally, went to university in Dublin, and was even an athlete and played football. Later he became a journalist and theater critic. Through this, he met Henry Irving, the most famous Shakespearean actor of the time. Until Irving's death, Stoker was his manager and private secretary. Irving introduced him to London high society, where he met, among others, Oscar Wilde, who also came from Dublin. Both men courted Florence Balcombe, but she chose Bram Stoker. Already in the seventies, Stoker wrote fantastic stories, but his big breakthrough came only with the publication of Dracula in 1897. Stoker had always been interested in the occult and was a member of the secret lodge "Golden Dawn in the Outer." Crucial for the creation of

 Dracula was his acquaintance with the Hungarian Orientalist Arminius Vanbéry, who told him the story of Prince Vlad Tepes of Wallachia, whom Stoker then made into his vampire Dracula. Dracul means "devil" and "dragon" in Romanian. Dracula's father was admitted to the Order of the Dragon by Emperor Sigismund in 1431 and received the nickname Dracul. His son was therefore "the little dragon" Dracula. Due to his cruelty, the meaning of "son of the dragon" changed to "son of the devil." Bram Stoker's Dracula became the epitome of all vampires, although some of his ideas did not hold up. His vampire can indeed appear during the day and does not burn in sunlight. However, he is weakened by daylight and only regains his full strength after dark.

Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis - A Breakthrough in Medicine

The Hungarian-Austrian physician Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis (1818-1865) is rightly called the "Savior of Mothers." Until the mid-nineteenth century, childbirth was life-threatening for mother and child - especially if one entrusted oneself to the doctors of a clinic. Semmelweis calculated a mortality rate from puerperal fever in the Vienna clinic where he was an assistant doctor between 12 and 17 percent! Women had a much greater chance of survival if they were attended by a midwife. Semmelweis wanted to find out the reason and examined his patients even more thoroughly. The result was that more mothers died in his department than ever before. The women began to refuse to be transferred to his department. When one of his colleagues died of blood poisoning in a disease course similar to puerperal fever during a post-mortem examination after cutting himself with the scalpel, Semmelweis was put on the right track: In his department, students dissected the deceased in childbirth and then examined the women who came to deliver with unwashed hands. The midwife trainees, on the other hand, had no contact with the corpses and did not perform vaginal examinations. The actual cause of the disease, infection by transmission of bacteria, was not yet known, but the doctor had recognized the connection. Semmelweis instructed his students to disinfect their hands with chloride of lime. The mortality rate dropped to 2-3 percent. His discovery showed the complicity of doctors in the deaths of many mothers. Many did not want to admit this, and Semmelweis was opposed by colleagues. The students considered the hygiene regulations unnecessary, and the doctors did not want to admit that they often caused the diseases they wanted to cure. Through an intrigue of his boss, Semmelweis was even forced to leave the clinic in Vienna and go to Hungary. Semmelweis became a professor of obstetrics at the University of Pest in 1855 and summarized his findings on puerperal fever in a book, but he still found no recognition among colleagues. Hygiene seemed to doctors to be a waste of time. Semmelweis became mentally ill, but he was not insane. Nevertheless, three colleagues admitted him to the Döbling asylum near Vienna without a diagnosis after he threatened in a letter to the medical profession to denounce the obstetric doctors as murderers. Only two weeks after his admission, Semmelweis died - of blood poisoning he had contracted through a small wound in a dispute with the clinic staff!

Pope Pius IX

The son of a count, Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti (1792-1878), was Pope Pius IX. He sat on the Chair of Peter for thirty-one years and eight months, thus having the longest historically documented pontificate - and all without magic! In 1846, he was unexpectedly elected pope by the conclave. He was the last Papa Re, Pope-King, who exercised both the ecclesiastical office of Peter and the secular rule over the Papal States - at least for a few years, until Rome and the Papal States were conquered and the Kingdom of Italy was founded. After his election, Pius IX carried out some reforms but opposed republicanism and, after initial sympathy, also opposed the unification movement. When revolution broke out in the Papal States in 1848, as in many places in Europe, he fled with his cardinals to the coast of Naples-Sicily. For a few months, a republic was proclaimed in Rome with the participation of the radical-democratic revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini, but in mid-1849, French and Spanish troops entered Rome and ended the republican interlude. Pius IX returned to Rome. When the Prussian-French protection force withdrew from Rome in 1870, the troops of the new Italy took the city and dissolved the Papal States. The pope withdrew to the Vatican Palace. Only in the Vatican complex around St. Peter's Basilica and the palace, the Lateran, and the summer residence Castel Gandolfo did the pope's sovereignty continue to be tolerated. It was not until 1929 that the Italian state officially returned its sovereignty to the pope in these areas. The pope rejected the Italian state with its monarch and parliament throughout his life and referred to himself as a "prisoner in the Vatican." His protest is expressed in the encyclical Ubi nos (1871), in which he condemns religious freedom and speaks out against the separation of church and state. He thus opposed the increasing secularization in Europe. Important steps were the First Vatican Council with the proclamation of "papal infallibility in the proclamation of a dogma" and the dogma of the "immaculate conception." The proclamation of the pope's infallibility led to the secession of the so-called Old Catholics in Germany. Bismarck used the pope's words as justification for his Kulturkampf against the Catholics,

 in which they were not only discriminated against; many Catholic dignitaries were arrested or expelled from Germany. In February 1878, Pius IX died, only a few days after the first king of united Italy, Victor Emmanuel II. Pius IX was beatified in 2000 by John Paul II.