Spielhagen, FRIEDRICH, German novelist, was born at Magdeburg on 24th February 1829, but passed all his youth at Stralsund. From the gymnasium there he proceeded in 1847 to the universities successively of Bonn, Berlin, and Greifswald, afterwards settling at Leipzig in 1854 as a docent, at Hanover in 1859, and at Berlin in 1862, in the last two places till 1884 as a newspaper editor. His works, of which eight have been translated into English, are some thirty in number, in upwards of fifty vols., and include (besides poems, books of travel, translations, and novellettes) Problematische Naturen (1860), Durch Nacht zum Licht (1861), Die von Hohenstein (1863), In Reich und Glied (1866), Hammer und Amboss (1868), Sturmflut (1876), Uhlenhuns (1884), Was will das werden? (1886), &c. Mostly 'novels with a purpose,' dealing with burning questions of the day, these have a vigour and interest, in spite of their sometimes portentous length, that too often are missing in modern German fiction. A complete edition of his works has been published since 1875.
See his autobiographical Erinnerungen (1889 et seq.), and Karpeles' Friedrich Spielhagen (Leip. 1889).