EN
Bestselling author Richard Voss was one of the literary pioneers of naturalism in the German Empire. Until the 1880s he wrote numerous naturalistic works. Among those works there is the now forgotten tale Der Mönch von Berchtesgaden which had been translated into English by Ambrose Bierce. Bierce’s version The Monk and the Hangman’s Daughter became successful. The new punch line of the translation indicates that Bierce was familiar with Voss’s most important literary source: Matthew Gregory Lewis’s famous novel The Monk. The essay examines the so far unnoticed connection between those three texts and Lewis’s impact on the naturalistic period.