In Germany, too, spiritualism has found an entrance, although, on the whole, it has not gained much ground. In the large towns there may be some small spiritualist bodies. The English expression _trance_ has become so familiar to some deranged persons that they have adopted it in German as _trans_, imagining apparently, with the popular etymology, that it means ‘beyond’ instead of ‘ecstasy,’ or, in other words, the state in which, according to the spiritualist hypothesis, the medium ought to find himself who enters into communication with the world of spirits. Nevertheless, spiritualism has as yet exerted little influence on our literature. Excluding the later romanticists who have fallen into childishness, notably the authors of tragedies based on the idea of ‘fatality’ (_Schicksalstragödien_), few writers have dared to introduce the supernatural into their creations otherwise than allegorically. At most in Kleist and Kerner it attains a certain importance, and healthy readers do not consider that as a merit in the dramas of the unfortunate author of the _Hermannsschlacht_, and in the _Seer of Prevorst_ of the Swabian poet. On the other hand, it must certainly be noted that it is the ghost element precisely which has brought to these two writers, in recent times, a renewal of youth and popularity among degenerate and hysterical Germans. Maximilian Perty, who was evidently born too soon, met with but rare and even rather derisive notice from the less soft-headed generation which preceded ours, for his bulky books on apparitions. And, among contemporaries, none but Freiherr Karl du Prel has chosen the spirit world as the special subject of his theoretic writings and novels. After all, our plays, our tales, are very little haunted, scarcely enough to make a schoolgirl shiver; and even among the eminent foreign authors best known in Germany, such, for example, as Tourgenieff, it is not the world of apparitions which attracts German readers.