He attended the gymnasium (roughly equivalent to an American high school) in Stralsund, studied law, and subsequently literature and philosophy at the universities of Berlin, Bonn and Greifswald.

In his Reminiscences, Schurz recalls Spielhagen as a person "in whom, in spite of his somewhat distant and reserved character, we all recognized a man of rare intellectuality and moral elevation, and who later became a star of the first magnitude among the novelists of the century.

"[2] After leaving university, he tried his hand at being a private tutor, an actor, a soldier and a teacher in a school in Leipzig, but upon his father's death in 1854 he devoted himself entirely to writing.

[3] As a translator, Spielhagen rendered into German George William Curtis's Howadji, Ralph Waldo Emerson's English Traits, a selection of American poems (1859; 2d ed.

[1] His novel In Reih' und Glied, translated into Russian as Один в поле не воин [literally Odin v pole ne voin, a proverb meaning "One man in the field is not a warrior" or "One man alone can't win a war"] (1867–1868), with its revolutionary protagonist Leo (based on Ferdinand Lassalle), was extraordinarily popular in Russia, and virtually all his novels were subsequently translated there at least once, collected editions being brought out in 1895 (8 vols.)