At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the English poet John Stagg (1770–1823) set the stage for a Romantic ballad with the following historical reminder:

Decades later, Charlotte Brontë had not forgotten, either. In Jane Eyre (1847), when the heroine discovers Bertha Mason — the famous “madwoman in the attic” — she struggles in vain to describe the “fearful and ghastly” apparition. Finally, as if she has been trying to avoid speaking the unspeakable, Jane breaks down: “Shall I tell you of what it reminded me? […] Of the foul German spectre — the Vampyre.” At the end of the century, Bram Stoker's Dracula associated vampires with “Germany” both geographically and linguistically. Tellingly, Jonathan Harker's travel companion takes leave of him as the undead Count arrives by whispering words from Gottfried August Bürger's eighteenth-century ballad “Lenore”: “die Todten reiten schnell” (the dead travel fast).

The preceding chapters have returned again and again to an imaginary Germany, for the most part coextensive with the Austrian Empire in decline, teeming with the restless undead.