Carl Gottlieb Samuel Heun (20 March 1771 – 2 August 1854), better known by his pen name Heinrich Clauren, was a German author.
Biography
Born on 20 March 1771 in Doberlug,
Lower Lusatia. Heun went into the
civil service, and wrote in his spare time. He published under the pseudonym H. Clauren (an
anagram of Carl Heun), and became one of the most popular authors of fiction for the middle class in the first half of the nineteenth century.
In 1825, Wilhelm Hauff published a parody of Heun's novels, Der Mann im Monde ('The Man in the Moon'), imitating his style, and published under his pen name H. Clauren. Heun brought a lawsuit against Hauff, and won, leading Hauff to write another book, Kontroverspredigt über H. Clauren und den Mann im Mond (1826), successfully destroying the reputation of Heun's works. The following year Carl Herloßsohn also parodied Clauren by publishing a novel in Clauren's name, Emmy oder der Mensch denkt, Gott lenkt (1827) and mocked Clauren's plays in his Der Luftballon oder die Hundstage in Schilda (1827).
Heun's collected works were published in 25 volumes as Gesammelte Schriften in 1851. He died on 2 August 1854 in Berlin.
Influence
One of Heun's short stories, "italics=no", was translated for the French ghost story anthology
Fantasmagoriana (1812). Fantasmagoriana was read by
Lord Byron,
Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John William Polidori and
Claire Clairmont at the
Villa Diodati in
Cologny,
Switzerland during 1816, the Year Without a Summer, and inspired them to write their own ghost stories, including "
The Vampyre" (1819), and
Frankenstein (1818), both of which went on to shape the
Gothic fiction genre.
A. J. Day describes how many themes and ideas in
Frankenstein are a reflection of Fantasmagoriana, and uses passages from Heun's "italics=no" to compare to both the novel and Shelley's recollection of her inspiration in the preface to the novel.
Another of his short stories, "italics=no", may have been one of the sources of inspiration for Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839), as translated by Joseph Hardman as "The Robber's Tower" in Blackwood's Magazine.
In Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks (1901), the young Miss Antonie Buddenbrook is found reading Clauren's novel Mimili.
Translations
A number of Clauren's works have been translated into English:
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"italics=no" and "italics=no" were translated by John Kortz as "Northern Love" and "The Humours of Love" in Interesting Memoirs of Four German Gentlemen (1819)
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"italics=no" was translated anonymously as "The Apparition" in The Repository of Arts (1821)
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"italics=no" was translated anonymously as "The Green Mantle of Venice: A True Story" in The Repository of Arts (1821–1822)
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"italics=no" was translated by Frederic Shoberl as "The Church-Yard of Schwytz" in Forget Me Not for 1823, and again by James David Haas as Liesli: A Swiss Tale (1826)
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"italics=no" was translated anonymously in Forget Me Not for 1824
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"italics=no" was translated anonymously as "The Paper-Maker's Coffin" in The Edinburgh Literary Journal (1828)
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"italics=no" was freely translated by Joseph Hardman as "The Robber's Tower" in Blackwood's Magazine (1828), and more accurately by Dan Latimer as "The Robber's Castle" in Southern Humanities Review 24 (1990)
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"italics=no" was translated by George Godfrey Cunningham as "My Grandmother" in Foreign Tales and Traditions (1829)
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The first part of "italics=no" was translated by Marjorie Bowen as "The Grey Chamber" in Great Tales of Horror (1933), and again by Leonard Wolf as "The Gray Room: A True Story" in The Essential Frankenstein (1993);
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"italics=no" was translated by Pamela Selwyn as "Song of the Prussians" in Revisiting Prussia's Wars against Napoleon (2015)
See also
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Christian Köhler, an artist, originally Heun's stableboy
