German writer of romances, 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 Künigl 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-, Räuber- und 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 Götz von Berlichingen and Schiller’s Räuber 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 century, Das Petermännchen (1793); among others were Der alte Überall und Nirgends (1792); Die Löwenritter (1794), and Hans Heiling, vierter und letzter Regent der Erd- Luft- Feuer- und 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.; Müller-Fraureuth, Die Ritter- und Räuberromane (Halle, 1894).
