The Gene of Magic and Its Importance in the Fascist World of Harry Potter (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2018 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Regensburg, language: English, abstract: Reading Harry Potter as a child leads to a vast number of questions. The young readership may ask themselves how somebody could become a wizard or a witch and whether someday they would receive a letter from Hogwarts and become wizards or witches, too. The books taught us that not only children of other witches and wizards can obtain the ability to use magic, but "regular" human offspring, too, so the question about how magic finds its way into the human body is arises. Since the novels show that there is a high importance of who the ancestors of somebody are, it can be concluded that genetics might be behind the appearance of magic. In fact, the family tree of the respective characters is highlighted enormously; not as much by the narrator as by the other characters through dialogue. Although the novels are highly imprecise about the genetics of wizards, the importance of ancestral history shows that the genetic background of a wizard is still of utmost importance in the wizarding society and that, consequently, the relationship between the different types of wizards can definitely be compared to the harsh and tensed interrelations between people in the Third Reich.

In order to find out how magic is passed on and to what extent the relationships between the different wizards are analogue to those of the interrelation of people in the Nazi regime, two aspects will be analysed. The first and more detailed aspect will be the analysis of the information about inheritance of magical gene using the information that is given in the novels, newspaper articles and textbooks on human genetics. The basis of this analysis will be the ground-breaking work of Gregor Mendel, who decoded the inheritance of certain features from one generation to the other by (cross-) breeding differently looking plants. The second aspect will be the interrelation between the different kinds of wizarding humans and their analogy to the Nazi regime. Due to the limited length of this term paper, the object of analysis will primarily be the first novel of the "Harry Potter"-series, the book "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone", however the other six books will also be considered in the argumentation and partly cited in order to demonstrate developments that were not mentioned in the first book, but are too important to ignore.