CHRISTIAN HEINRICH

See also:

• CHRISTIAN HEINRICH SPIESS (1755-1799)

SPIESS (1755-1799)  , German writer of romances, was born at Freiberg in Saxony on the 4th of April 1755 . For a time an actor, he was appointed in 1788 controller on the estate of a certain Count Kiinigl at.Betzdikau in Bohemia, where he died, almost insane, the result of his weird fancies, on the 17th of August 1799 . Spiess, in his Ritter-, Rduber- and Geister-Romane, as they are called—stories of knights, robbers and ghosts of the " dark " ages—the idea of which he borrowed from Goethe's GOaz' von Berlichingen and Schiller's Rduber and Geisterseher, was the founder of the German Schauerroman (shocker), a style of writing continued, though in a finer vein, by Karl Gottlob Cramer (1758-1817) and by Goethe's brother-in-law, Christian August Vulpius . These stories, though appealing largely to the vulgar taste, made Spiess one of the most widely read authors of his day . The most popular was a ghost story of the 13th centtiry, Das Petermdnnchen (1793) among others were Der alte Uberall and Nirgends (1792); Die Lowenritter (1794), and Hans Heiling, vierter and letzter Regent der Erd- Luft- Feuer- and Wasser-Geister (1798) . Beside numerous comedies, Spiess wrote, anticipating Schiller, a tragedy Maria Stuart (1784), which was in the same year performed at the court theatre in Vienna . See Karl Goedeke, Grundriss, v . 506 sqq . ; Muller-Fraureuth, Die Ritter- and Rduberromane (Halle, 1894) .