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Wilhelm Meinhold
1797–1851
Best remembered for the eerie historical novel The Amber Witch, this German pastor and writer delighted readers with a story so convincing it was first taken for a genuine seventeenth-century chronicle. His work blends folklore, suspense, and a sly sense of literary mischief.
3 Audiobooks
Mary Schweidler, the amber witch
by Wilhelm Meinhold
About the author
Born in 1797 in what is now northeastern Germany, Wilhelm Meinhold studied theology and spent much of his life working as a Lutheran pastor. Alongside his church career, he wrote fiction and is most widely remembered as the author of The Amber Witch (Maria Schweidler, die Bernsteinhexe), published in 1838.
That novel made him famous because he presented it as if it were a real old manuscript from the time of the Thirty Years' War. Readers were drawn in by its atmosphere of superstition, fear, and village life, and the book became a notable literary hoax before Meinhold acknowledged that he had written it himself.
Meinhold died in 1851, but The Amber Witch kept his name alive long after his lifetime. Today he is remembered for the unusual mix of historical storytelling, Gothic mood, and playful deception that made his best-known book so memorable.