Concept, State of Research, Problem

“Where there are no gods, ghosts reign,” NovalisNovalis (properly Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg) (1772-1801) explained in his 1799 fragment Europe, “and the actual time of the European ghosts, which also explains their shape quite completely, is the period of the transition from Greek mythology to Christianity.” Superstition of the fantastic, particularly the fear of ghosts and goblins, appears to be the flip side of Christian monotheism and is considered a consequence of the loss of a powerful, poet-created mythology that was able to make sense for scholars and laymen alike. Emanuel GeibelGeibel, Emanuel (1815-1884), whose poems were set to music, among others, by RobertSchumann, Robert (1810-1856) and Clara SchumannSchumann, Clara (1819-1896), formulated a similar thought to Novalis in the mid-19th-century.