The New International Encyclopædia/Spielhagen, Friedrich

SPIELHAGEN, spēl'hä-gen, (1829&mdash;). A German novelist, born at Magdeburg, and educated at Berlin, Bonn, and Greifswald. He taught for a while at Leipzig, and in 1859 became editor of the Zeitung für Norddeutschland, in Hanover. Thence he moved in 1862 to Berlin, and edited (1878-84) Westermann's Illustrirte Monatschefte. Spielhagen began novel-writing with Problematische Naturen (1860), and then for a while dealt with social problems, arising from the irrepressible conflict between the stolid landed nobility and the intelligence of the nation. In several books (Durch Nacht zum Licht, 1861; Die von Hohenstein, 1803; In Reih und Glied, 1866; Hammer und Amboss, 1869) he treated the subject with an aggressive optimism that won him a popularity which he afterwards maintained by sensational novels of a lower type. Of these Sturmflut (1877), Der neue Pharao (1899), and Freigeboren (1900) are sufficient exemplars. Excellent are his critical Beiträge zur Theorie und Technik des Romans (1883). His own ideal for the novel is to present an artistically composed picture of the times, and for this he makes constant hardly veiled allusions to persons of contemporary prominence, so that his novels lose with time something of their significance and actuality. As a translator Spielhagen rendered into German Curtis's Howadji, Emerson's English Traits, a selection of American poems (1859; 2d ed. 1865), and Roscoe's Lorenzo de' Medici. He also translated from the French minor works of Michelet, L'amour, La femme, La mer. His collected novels appeared in 22 vols, in 1895. Consult his autobiographical Finder und Erfinder (1890), and Karpeles, Friedrich Spielhagen (Leipzig, 1889).