page_title: The Ghost-Seer
section_title: Content
hierarchical_section_title: The Ghost-Seer / Content
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Der Prinz aus Friedrich Schillers Der Geisterseher, als Stahlstich gestochen von Conrad Geyer um 1859 nach einer Zeichnung von Arthur von Ramberg; das untertitelte Blatt hat die Maße 8 cm x 11,6 cm und hat auf der Rückseite keine weiteren Angaben. Es gehört zu einer Serie, möglicherweise als frühes Sammelbild, die als Schiller-Galerie von Friedrich Pecht und von Arthur von Ramberg bekannt geworden ist.
context_page_description: The Ghost-Seer or The Apparitionist is a novel by Friedrich Schiller. It first appeared in several instalments from 1787 to 1789 in the journal Thalia, later appearing as a three-volume book in its own right.
context_section_description: The work is narrated in the first person by the 'Graf von O**' (Count of O**). It describes the story of a German prince visiting Venice at carnival time. Right at the start of the work, the Count stresses that this story might sound incredible, but that he had witnessed it with own eyes. Furthermore, he talks of his disinterest in deceiving the public as "at the time these pages will tread into the world, I will not be and will neither win nor lose by the account given."
  Structurally and stylistically it is not a single story, but tells of a Jesuit secret society trying to convert a Protestant German prince to Catholicism and bring him to the throne back home in order to bolster its own power base. Writing of the Prince's fate, Schiller shows him as the key to the conflict between passion and morality, passion and duty.
  The work's passages on religious and historical philosophy show Schiller's Enlightenment ideals, with his critique of religion and society to the fore, though a deeper exploration of Immanuel Kant was to follow later. Due to the novel's slow formation and the author's antipathy to it, it was not planned from start to finish and its style and structure is not uniform throughout, ranging from rhetorical prose, to theatrical prose, to dialogues reminiscent of Don Carlos, to the popular  elements of Gothic fiction.
caption: An 1859 engraving of the novel's protagonist
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "600", "Image YResolution": "600", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0", "Image DateTime": "2011:12:12 16:21:27", "Image ExifOffset": "164", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "302", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "3693", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1992", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "2841"}