Already discussed has been the report of Giure Grando (recorded as occurring in 1672), from Baron Jan Vajkart Valvasor’s Die Ehre des Herzogthums Krain, Vols. I-IV, published in 1689. An uproar had been created two centuries earlier with the reports from fleeing German Catholic monks of the atrocities committed against Catholics by Vlad Tepes (Dracula) – burning entire cities, impaling merchants or boiling them in oil, and so on. These were retold in poetic form by poets such as Michael Beheim, whose poem Story of a Bloodthirsty madman Called Dracula of Wallachia was published in 1463. Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press meant wide distribution of these reports, stories and poems, often illustrated with woodcuts – and Dracula became front-page news. Whether the tales are exaggerated or not, two things are clear: the German people saw him as a satanic monster, and Dracula was not a man filled with the milk of human kindness. He was reported as having dipped his bread into the blood of butchered victims and eating it.47
However, Dracula was never during his lifetime considered a vampire. If the reports of his bread-dipping are true, he may have been a blood-fetishist, and no doubt a man to whom cruelty was no stranger. It is only fair to mention that to the Romanians, Dracula is a national hero, and his measures against the foe merely the necessary actions of a strong leader. But certainly no one suggested he was an animated corpse. He was often depicted in various German tales of the sixteenth century as the embodiment of evil, but still… merely a human.
But the time was ripe in the wake of Germany’s troubles for vampire reports to hit Germany in the 1600s, prompting discussion and debate among the intellectuals of the day. (There does not seem to have been any connection in the literary tradition between those earlier horror stories concerning the barbaric Dracula and the tales of vampires – they are two separate streams, and were never connected until Bram Stoker decided to use Dracula as the name and inspiration of his literary vampire.)
It did not take long for the vampire to move from intellectual circles to literary circles in Germany, where poets found the vampire a wonderfully macabre subject. German poets have always found rich inspiration in concepts of the supernatural and the romantic, and almost as a matter of course, the German literary vampire became romanticised. The first modern vampire poem is Heinrich August Ossenfelder’s Der Vampir (1748).