Audioguides Ingolstadt

Mary Shelley set Frankenstein in Ingolstadt for a reason. The University of Ingolstadt, founded in 1472, was where Copernicus studied and where Johann Adam Weishaupt founded the Illuminati in 1776. It had a reputation as a place of dangerous ideas. The building where Victor Frankenstein animated his creature, the Alte Anatomie on Anatomiestrasse, still stands and is now a medical history museum. Shelley never visited the city but the atmosphere she gave it, rationalist, a little dangerous, brilliant and morally ambiguous, turns out to have been accurate.

The fortress that made Ingolstadt famous in military history was never taken.

During the Thirty Years War in 1632, the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus besieged it and failed. Field Marshal Tilly, the Catholic League's commander, died here from a cannonball wound. The Kreuztor gate, built in 1385, and the Gothic Church of Our Lady begun in 1425 are the best surviving markers of the medieval city. The New Castle, which dates from 1418, now houses the Bavarian Army Museum.