Gespensterbuch

According to Friedrich Laun's memoirs, Laun had stayed a week at Apel's family estate at Ermlitz, near Schkopau. A few stories were told about ghosts that appeared there at and after dusk, from the times when a high court was located nearby. These stories made such an impression on Apel and Laun, that when they returned to Leipzig they recounted them to their friends over tea. This proved very popular, and they started to hold () evenings from time to time, where ghost stories were told, and which led Apel and Laun to write the . Apel and Laun included stories both with and without ghosts, but also those where the question is left open – an innovation that was later expanded on by other authors. They tried to add variety to the first volume by adding two comic fairy tales: "" (Apel's retelling of Madame d'Aulnoy's "") and "" (an original tale by Laun), but the response to these stories was negative, and they did not include fairy tales in later volumes. Some characters in the stories may have been based on personal acquaintances, such Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Wagner (1770–1813), a police actuary, who may have inspired "Aktuarius Wermuth" in "". Both Apel and Laun knew Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose play (1776) may have influenced Laun's "". Scholar Robert Stockhammer notes that "" contains characters inspired by Cagliostro, who Goethe had written on, and who may have been discussed when Laun visited Goethe in 1804. Goethe's "" (1782) also inspired Apel's poem "". For the fifth volume, they decided to expand the scope from ghosts to anything that could not be explained by the laws of nature, and gave the series a second title: (). In another attempt to add variety, they decided to invite other authors to contribute, which led to Apel's friends Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué and Carl Borromäus von Miltitz writing stories for the final volume of the . ==Publication==

, depicting "" The first volume of was published in 1810 by G. J. Göschen in Leipzig, with a coloured frontispiece illustration of the story "" (). Very few copies of this edition have survived, leading many sources to assume the series was published from 1811, when the first volume was reprinted (this time without the frontispiece), simultaneously with the second and third volumes. Volume four was published later in the same year. The fifth volume was published in 1815 with two title pages: one giving the title as volume five, and another with the title () volume one. This reflected Apel and Laun's decision to expand the scope of the books to include other supernatural stories. The final volume was published in 1817 only under the title volume three, but the signature marks in page footers of some editions say (). The book has been reprinted several times since then. The Macklots published the last four volumes in Stuttgart from 1816–1818. Following the premiere of Weber's (1821), Apel's was reprinted in its own volume by Fleischer in 1823. was reprinted by Philipp Reclam junior in Leipzig (1885), Belser in Stuttgart (1987–1990), and Aufbau-Taschenbuch in Berlin (1991). ==Translations==

Jean-Baptiste Benoît Eyriès translated five of the stories into French for his anthology (1812). Three of these were translated from French to English by Sarah Elizabeth Utterson in Tales of the Dead (1813), and again by Marjorie Bowen (1933–1935). The two remaining stories were translated by both A. J. Day (2005), and Anna Ziegelhof (2023). Some of these stories were also translated directly from the German, including Thomas De Quincey's "The Black Chamber" (1823), "The Fatal Prophecy" in La Belle Assemblée (1824), and Robert Pearse Gillies's "The Sisters" and "The Spectre Bride" (1826). Following the success of Carl Maria von Weber's opera ' (1821), the ' story that it was based on – also called "" – was translated into English several times. The first translation was by Thomas De Quincey (1823), followed by Walter Sholto Douglas (1825), George Godfrey Cunningham (1829), an anonymous translation (1833), and Jacob Wrey Mould (1849). The 1820s saw a growing interest in German Romanticist literature in Britain, and several more stories began to be translated individually, mostly in magazines and annuals: "The Raven: A Greek Tale" (1823), "The Lamia: Greek Tradition" (1824), "The Spectre Unmasked" (1824), "The Dance of the Dead" (1824), "Maredata" (1824), "New Year's Eve: The Omens" (1824), "Death Tokens" (1825), "The Veiled Bride" (1825), "Head Master Rhenfried and His Family" (1826), "The Bridal Ornaments" (1826), "The Piper of Neisse" (1829), "The Spirit's Summons" (1835), "The Silver Lady" (1837), "The Two New Year's Nights" (1839), "Fatal Curiosity" (1845), and "The Night-Mare" (1845). In addition to these translations, some authors adapted stories for an English-speaking audience, such as Walter Sholto Douglas's "The Three Damsels" (1826), based on part of "", "The Black Chamber" in Dublin University Magazine (1858), which expands on "", Charles John Tibbits's "A Strange Bride" (1890), an abridged version of Gillies's "The Spectre Bride", and J. E. Preston Muddock's "The Dance of the Dead" (1899), a retelling of "". Some translations were never published, such as Walter Sholto Douglas's translation of "", and a translation of "" started by De Quincey in autumn 1824. ==Influence==

Freischütz The first tale in the first volume is "", a retelling by Apel of the Freischütz folktale. It formed the inspiration for Weber's opera Der Freischütz (1821). However, unlike Apel's version, in Weber's opera the final bullet does not kill the protagonist's fiancée, but is deflected, and kills the huntsman who convinced him to cast the bullets instead. Frankenstein, The Vampyre, and Manfred In June 1816, Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John William Polidori and Claire Clairmont read (1812), a collection of German ghost stories translated into French, five of which were from the . Inspired by the book, the group decided to write their own ghost stories, with Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein, and Polidori writing The Vampyre, based on Byron's "Fragment of a Novel". while "" () is similar to Mary Shelley's account of the dream that inspired Frankenstein, of a haunting figure standing at the bedside. Another of the stories in , "" (, translated as "", ), may have been an inspiration for the Astarte scene in Byron's Manfred, which he began in late 1816. Other plays and operas Joseph von Auffenberg's 1824 play, () was based on Apel's "" from volume 2 of . '''', an opera based on Carl Borromäus von Miltitz's story of the same name from the final volume, was composed by Joseph Maria Wolfram, with a libretto by Miltitz. It premiered on 14 March 1830 in Dresden. ==Notes==