Franz Bonaparta: The children’s author who wanted to manufacture perfect people

In episode 73 of Monster, the anime Madhouse adapted (2004-2005) from Naoki Urasawa’s manga (1994-2001), the German town of Ruhenheim has turned into a shooting gallery: neighbors kill one another, and among them moves Roberto, Johan Liebert’s hitman. Mortally wounded by Inspector Lunge, Roberto still has one shot left, and it brings down the old man who runs the Hotel Versteck under the name Klaus Poppe just as he is about to fire at Johan, in front of Dr Kenzo Tenma. Behind that name is Franz Bonaparta, the author of illustrated children’s books who, decades earlier, had worked on a secret Czechoslovak state project to create superior human beings through the selection of couples and the conditioning of children. His stories, among them The Nameless Monster, were part of that conditioning. The project was centered on the Red Rose Mansion, in Prague, where it all ended in a massacre. The series suggests that Bonaparta chose the mother of Johan and his twin sister for the experiment and that he is the father of both. Tenma, who saved Johan’s life when he was a child and has spent years pursuing him across Germany and the Czech Republic, has followed the trail of those books to reach his origins. The man who died in Ruhenheim had spent his old age in hiding, horrified at what he had made, and in the end had tried to undo it with a bullet. His story is the story of eugenics: the promise of improving the species that ended up manufacturing what it wanted to prevent.

// The theoryImproving the species

The British scientist Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin, coined the term eugenics in 1883 to designate the study of means of improving the hereditary qualities of the species. In the early twentieth century, the idea spread across Europe and the United States, and criminology adopted it: if crime was partly hereditary, as Lombroso and family studies such as that of the Jukes claimed, it could be reduced by preventing offenders from reproducing. More than thirty US states passed forced sterilisation laws, and the Supreme Court upheld them in 1927. Nazi Germany took eugenics to extermination. After 1945, the discipline was discredited.

// The subjectThe repentant creator

Bonaparta is a character of shadows. For much of the series he is known only through his books, through the testimony of those who knew him and through the fear he inspires. When he finally appears, he is an old man trying to repair what he did, consumed by guilt. Urasawa builds him as a modern Doctor Frankenstein, who plays god with human lives and ends up horrified by his creature. His literary work, beautiful and disturbing at once, is the image of his ambiguity.

The Red Rose Mansion is the moment his project turned into a crime. Late in the series, Johan tells his sister Nina the story of a gathering in that Prague house at which many people died poisoned, and Nina realizes that the girl who saw those deaths was herself; the shock almost drives her to suicide, and Tenma saves her. When Bonaparta finally speaks, he admits that he fell in love with the twins’ mother and that he planned what happened at the mansion to kill everyone who knew about her, the twins and the experiment. The eugenicist who wanted to perfect people ends up erasing witnesses, like any criminal covering his tracks.

His death closes the circle. Bonaparta repents after watching Wolfgang Grimmer, another former inmate of the orphanages, die in Ruhenheim, and decides to kill Johan himself. Roberto, the man who stops him, grew up in Kinderheim 511, the East Berlin orphanage where children were also stripped of their names and their memory to remake them. Bonaparta does not die at the hands of his own creature, but at the hands of a child shaped by the same logic his stories served: the conviction that a human being can be designed from outside.

// The crackEugenics did not fail only because it was cruel

Criminological eugenics did not fail only because of its moral consequences, but because its scientific basis was false. Studies of criminal families were riddled with errors, and the idea that crime is inherited as a single trait ignored the role of environment. Modern genetics has shown that genes’ effects on behavior are small, multiple and inseparable from the environment.

Monster, moreover, does not blame heredity for what Johan is, but psychological manipulation and abandonment. The series is, at bottom, a critique of the eugenic idea: what makes the monster is not blood but what is done to a child.