2 - “The echo of the question, as if it had merely resounded in a tomb”: The Dark Anthropology of the Schauerroman in Schiller's Der Geisterseher

Summary

Schiller'sGeisterseher (The Ghost-seer) has long been regarded as a prototype of the Schauerroman. Such was the view taken of the work by Adalbert von Hanstein in a positivistic study written in 1903, and Jürgen Viering concurs exactly a century later in his entry in the Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft. At the same time researchers never fail to emphasize that Schiller's text was not merely a sensational success at the time of its appearance between 1787 and 1789, and indeed his greatest literary triumph measured in terms of sheer popularity and number of editions, but that in the complexity of its ideas and narrative techniques it excels the mass of ghost, robber, and secret-society fictions that make up the bulk of the genre. In short, Der Geisterseher is seen as both the prototype and a masterpiece of the Schauerroman.

Schiller's novel certainly was the product of the contemporary controversies around Geisterseherei (necromancy). We know that he followed the debates on the subject in the Berlinische Monatsschrift, especially those about the arch-swindler and occultist Cagliostro, and among those in particular a contribution from the Duke of Württemberg, Eugen Friedrich Heinrich, who, by advocating tolerance of speculative philosophy and of the belief in apparitions, triggered fears about the Protestant duke's possible conversion to Catholicism. Cagliostro and Duke Eugen subsequently found their way into Schiller's novel in the figures of the Armenian and the Prince whom he manipulates to the point of psychological destruction.