and "study human nature's difficulties." Artists sought to show how evil, rather than virtue, consumes people, and how individual acts lead to self-destruction. 18th-19th Century Movements in National Literatures Elements of Dark Romanticism were a perennial possibility within the broader international movement of Romanticism, in both literature and art. Germany Dark Romanticism arguably began in Germany, with writers such as E. T. A. Hoffmann, Christian Heinrich Spiess, and Ludwig Tieck – though their emphasis on existential alienation, the demonic in sex, and the uncanny, was offset at the same time by the more homely cult of Biedermeier. Like the Gothic novel, Schwarze Romantik is a genre based on the terrifying side of the Middle Ages, and frequently feature the same elements (castles, ghost, monster, etc.). However, Schauerroman's key elements are necromancy and secret societies, and it is remarkably more pessimistic than the English Gothic novel. All those elements are the basis for Friedrich Schiller's unfinished novel The Ghost-Seer (1786–1789). The motive of secret societies is also present in Karl Grosse's Horrid Mysteries (1791–1794) and Christian August Vulpius's Rinaldo Rinaldini, the Robber Captain (1797). Benedikte Naubert's novel Hermann of Unna (1788) is seen as being very close to the Schauerroman genre. Other early authors and works included Christian Heinrich Spiess, with his works Das Petermännchen (1793), Der alte Überall und Nirgends (1792), Die Löwenritter (1794), and Hans Heiling, vierter und letzter Regent der Erd- Luft- Feuer- und Wasser-Geister (1798); Heinrich von Kleist's short story "Das Bettelweib von Locarno" (1797); and Ludwig Tieck's Der blonde Eckbert (1797) and Der Runenberg (1804). Jüngere Romantik For two decades, the most famous author of Gothic literature in Germany was the polymath E. T. A. Hoffmann. His novel The Devil's Elixirs (1815) was influenced by Lewis's The Monk and even mentions it. The novel also explores the motive of Doppelgänger, the term coined by another German author and supporter of Hoffmann, Jean Paul, in his humorous novel Siebenkäs (1796–1797). Aside from Hoffmann and de la Motte Fouqué, three other important authors from the era were Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff (The Marble Statue, 1818), Ludwig Achim von Arnim (Die Majoratsherren, 1819), and Adelbert von Chamisso (Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte, 1814). After them, Wilhelm Meinhold wrote The Amber Witch (1838) and Sidonia von Bork (1847). The last work from the German writer Theodor Storm, The Rider on the White Horse (1888), uses Gothic motives and themes. Britain British