WHEN WE THINK OF THE VAMPIRE, we imagine a bite. But what if vampires were subtler in their approach? Over the centuries, transforming from folk monster to literary companion to suave cinematic lead, vampires have entranced their victims in many different ways. Around 1800, when Karoline von Günderrode wrote her elegy “Die Bande der Liebe” (The Bonds of Love), the vampire was known as a folk monster similar in some ways to a ghost and in others to an animated corpse. Yet what all vampires of this era had in common was a connection with the pathological, whether corporeal or mental in nature.

Günderrode's poem does not thematize the vampire as explicitly as Gottfried August Bürger's ballad “Lenore” (1774) or Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's “Die Braut von Korinth” (1797), both of which deal with a dead lover who lures his living love to join him in death. Yet, there are lexical and thematic similarities that call to mind a kind of vampirism. Goethe's vampire drinks wine that resembles blood, an act he describes with the words “gierig” (greedily) and “schlürfte” (slurped), echoed in Günderrode's description of spirits of the dead sucking greedily (“schlürfen sie gierig mir aus”). The similar vocabulary suggests that Günderrode was taking part in a contemporary discourse surrounding the (folkloric) vampire, which her readers would recognize as such. Günderrode's poem is interesting for the subtle directional change of vampiric action: the initial “bite,” so to say, is not that of greedy spirits but a gentle breath of air passed from one lover to another. Surprisingly, this gentle breath (we might say inspiration) attracts a violent reaction of underworld shades, like a cold rush of air into a warm space.

But what does a vampire have to do with writing? In the following I argue that Günderrode's reverse vampirism—breath rather than bite, healing rather than infecting—is a response to eighteenth-century discourses that pathologize female writing. In Germany at the end of the eighteenth century, reading was rapidly increasing in popularity. At the same time, more and more women began to publish original works, whether under their own names or under pseudonyms.