Alraune

In medieval German legend the humanoid-shaped mandrake was said to be produced beneath the gallows by the bodily emissions (in some versions semen, in some tellings blood) of hanged men; alchemical and popular commentators sometimes claimed hanged men ejaculated or released vital matter at execution, which the earth absorbed and could take the form of a mandrake root. This gallows-origin myth links execution, a liminal death-space, with the creation of a plant that embodies transgressive generative power. Hanns Heinz Ewers's 1911 novel Alraune reinterprets this folklore: a scientist deliberately inseminates a woman with the semen of a hanged murderer, producing a girl named Alraune whose unnatural origins drive the novel's moral and psychological plot.

Folkloric descriptions emphasize a humanoid-shaped mandrake root—a root that resembles a human figure. Literary treatments differentiate the plant-figure from the human character: in Ewers's novel Alraune is depicted as a female child and later woman (the sources summarize her role and behavior but do not supply a detailed physical description). Film adaptations later presented the character visually, but those portrayals are adaptations of the literary figure rather than elements of the medieval plant legend.

Folklore attributes to the mandrake a role in love and fertility magic: the root was believed to be used in love philtres and potions and its fruit alleged to facilitate pregnancy. Folk belief held that intercourse with or use of the mandrake could result in offspring lacking 'real' love or a soul; sources present these claims as cultural beliefs rather than empirical fact. In Ewers's novel the human Alraune is narratively characterized by obsessive sexuality, an apparent incapacity for normal love, and ultimately vengeance when she discovers her origins—literary themes that echo and dramatize the folkloric moral about artificially generated offspring.