August von Kotzebue
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August Friedrich Ferdinand von Kotzebue
(born May 3, 1761, Weimar, Saxonydied March 23, 1819, Mannheim, Baden) German playwright. He helped popularize poetic drama, which he infused with melodramatic sensationalism and sentimental philosophizing. Prolific (he wrote more than 200 plays) and facile, he is known for works such as the dramas The Stranger (1789) and The Indian Exiles (1790) and the comedies Der Wildfang (1798; The Trapping of Game) and Die deutschen Kleinstdter (1803; Small-Town Germans). He was denounced by political radicals as a spy and stabbed to death.
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August von Kotzebue
Oxford Companion to American Theatre:
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August Friedrich Ferdinand Von Kotzebue
Kotzebue, August Friedrich Ferdinand Von (1761–1819), playwright. Hailed briefly by some of his contemporaries as the German Shakespeare, he burst upon the American scene in Dunlap's translation of his Menschenhass und Reue, here called The Stranger. The play's tremendous success not only saved Dunlap's faltering fortunes at the new Park Theatre but also initiated the vogue of theatrical romanticism. The play retained its popularity for decades, as did his Pizarro. Before Dunlap's retirement in 1805, more than a dozen of Kotzebue's plays were premiered in New York and elsewhere, their increasing sensationalism precipitating the deluge of melodrama, much as The Stranger helped open the gates to romanticism. The American titles were Lover's Vows, False Shame, The Wild Goose Chase, The Force of Calumny and The Virgin of the Sun.
Oxford Companion to German Literature:
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August von Kotzebue
Kotzebue, August von (Weimar, 1761-1819, Mannheim), the son of a Weimar civil servant, studied law, and soon after qualifying went to Russia as secretary to the head of the General-Gouvernement St Petersburg. The preposition of nobility (von) was conferred upon him in 1785, and he rose to high office in the province of Esthonia. In 1797 he became a theatre director in Vienna, and in 1799 was for a time in Weimar. He returned to Russia in 1800, fell from grace, and spent a few months as a convict in Siberia. He was then restored to favour as director of the St Petersburg theatre. When his patron the Tsar Paul was assassinated, he tried his hand in Weimar, but soon turned against Goethe, Schiller, and the Romantics, and then settled in Berlin. On the French occupation in 1806 (see Napoleonic Wars), he fled to Russia and carried on a journalistic campaign against Napoleon in the periodicals Die Biene and Die Grille. From 1813 he was again in Russian service; in 1817 he was appointed to the Russian foreign service and sent to Germany as political informant to the Tsar Alexander I. His political activities were suspect to Liberal Germans, and in 1819 he was stabbed to death by the German student Karl Ludwig Sand.
Kotzebue was a gifted but conscienceless writer, who was more than once convicted of shameless plagiarism. His first play, the Schauspiel Menschenhaß und Reue (1789), written for private theatricals in Reval, was for a time his most famous, though the comedies Die beiden Klingsberg (1801) and
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August von Kotzebue
Kotzebue, August von (ou'gʊst fən kôt'səbū), 1761-1819, German dramatist and politician. He wrote some 200 plays, including Menschenhass und Reue (1789, tr. The Stranger, 1798), Die Spanier in Peru; oder, Rollas Tod (1795, tr. Rolla, 1797), and Die beiden Klingsberg (1801, tr. Father and Son, 1914). His comedies and operatic librettos remained popular throughout the 19th cent. Among those who set his librettos to music were Beethoven, Schubert, and C. M. von Weber. After a stay in Russia, Kotzebue returned to Germany as an agent of Czar Alexander I. He was detested for his reactionary propaganda; his assassination at Mannheim by a student led to the suppression of German student organizations through the Carlsbad Decrees.
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August von Kotzebue
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| August von Kotzebue | |
|---|---|
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| Born | 3 May 1761 Weimar |
| Died | 23 March 1819 (aged 57) Mannheim |
| Resting place | Mannheim |
| Occupation | Author |
| Language | German |
| Alma mater | University of Duisburg |
August Friedrich Ferdinand von Kotzebue (German pronunciation: [ˈaʊɡʊst fɔn ˈkɔtsəbu]; 3 May 1761 – 23 March 1819) was a German dramatist and author who also worked as a Generalkonsul in Russia.
One of Kotzebue's books was burned during the Wartburg festival in 1817. He was murdered in 1819 by Karl Ludwig Sand, a militant member of the Burschenschaften. The murder of Kotzebue gave Metternich the pretext to issue the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819, which dissolved the Burschenschaften, cracked down on the liberal press, and seriously restricted academic freedom in the states of the German Confederation.
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Life
Kotzebue was born in Weimar, to a respected merchant family, and was educated at Wilhelm-Ernst-Gymnasium in Weimar, where his uncle, the writer and critic Johann Karl August Musäus was among his teachers. In 1776, the young Kotzebue acted alongside Goethe in the latter’s play Die Geschwister, which premiered in Weimar.[1] In 1777, aged sixteen, he enrolled in the University of Jena to study legal science. He continued his studies at Duisburg, graduating in 1780, and initially practiced as a lawyer in Weimar.
Through his association with Graf Goertz, Prussian ambassador at the Russian court, Kotzebue became secretary to the Governor General of Saint Petersburg. In 1783 he was appointed assessor to the high court of appeals in Reval, where he married the daughter of a Russian lieutenant general. He was ennobled in 1785, and became president of the Magistrat of the Governorate of Estonia, a province of the Russian Empire.
In Reval, his first literary works where favourably received. His novels Die Leiden der Ortenbergischen Familie (The Sorrows of the Ortenberg Family) (1785) and Geschichte meines Vaters (History of my Father) (1788) met with appreciation and even more so his plays Adelheid von Wulfingen (1789), Menschenhass und Reue (Misanthropy and Repentance) (1790) and Die Indianer in England (The Indians in England) (1790).
The good reputation due to these works was, however, almost destroyed by a controversial dramatic satire, Doktor Bahrdt mit der eisernen Stirn (Doctor Bahrdt with the Iron Brow), which appeared in 1790 with the name of Knigge on the title page. Written in response to a polemical feud between J.G. Zimmermann and leaders of Berlin's party of the Enlightenment, it linked each of Zimmermann's opponents to a particular sexual perversion. Kotzebue denied authorship, even when the police began to investigate the matter. This alienated both Zimmermann and Knigge (his former allies), and also gained Kotzebue a reputation for dishonesty and lasciviousness that he would never shake off.
After the death of his first wife[when?], Kotzebue retired from the Russian service, and lived for a time in Paris and Mainz; in 1795, he settled on an estate which he had acquired near Reval and devoted himself to writing. In the space of only a few years, Kotzebue published six volumes of miscellaneous sketches and stories (Die jüngsten Kinder meiner Laune, 1793–1796) and more than twenty plays, many of which were translated into several European languages.
In 1798 he accepted the office of dramatist to the court theatre in Vienna, but owing to differences with the actors he was soon obliged to resign. He then returned to his native town, but as he was not on good terms with the powerful Goethe, and had openly attacked the romantic style for which Goethe was known, his position in Weimar was not comfortable.
In April 1800, he decided to return to Saint Petersburg, but on his journey there he was arrested at the border under suspicion of being a Jacobin and transported to Siberia. Fortunately he had written a comedy which flattered the vanity of Emperor Paul I of Russia; he was quickly brought back, presented with an estate from the crown lands of Livonia, and appointed director of the German theatre in Saint Petersburg. Kotzebue wrote about this period in his life in the autobiographical Das merkwürdigste Jahr meines Lebens (The strangest Year of my Life).
After the assassination of Tsar Paul I, Kotzebue returned to Germany in 1801. After failing to establish himself in Weimar's literary circles, he moved to Berlin where he edited Der Freimutige in collaboration with Garlieb Merkel from 1803 to 1807, and began his Almanach dramatischer Spiele (Almanac of the Dramatic Arts) in 1803, which was published posthumously in 1820.
In 1806, after Napoleon's victory in the Battle of Jena-Auerstedt, Kotzebue fled to Russia, and in the safety of his estate in Estonia wrote many satirical articles against Napoleon Bonaparte, published in his journals Die Biene (The Bee) and Die Grille (The Cricket).
He started working for the department of foreign affairs in Saint Petersburg in 1816, and a year later was sent to Germany as consul general for Russia. Some suspected him of being a spy, and this view persisted for a long time, but in modern times this has been shown to have been unfounded: he reported only on matters that were already public knowledge. Nevertheless it is fair to say he was Russia's advocate in Germany.[2]
Assassination
In a weekly journal (Literarisches Wochenblatt) which he published in Weimar he scoffed at the pretensions of those Germans who demanded free institutions, and soon became detested by nationalist liberals.
One of them, Karl Ludwig Sand, a theology student, plotted to kill him, carrying out the act soon after Kotzebue had moved with his family to Mannheim.
Sand attacked Kotzebue at his house on 18 March 1819. According to Alexandre Dumas, père, Sand became overwrought when one of Kotzebue's children appeared and started to cry, and then stabbed himself.
Sand was arrested and carefully nursed back to health. At his trial, he protested that Kotzebue was an enemy of the German people.[3] Nevertheless, he was convicted of Kotzebue's murder and was executed later that year.
The assassination of Kotzebue provided Prince Metternich with arguments to convince the Confederation to enact greater restrictions on universities and the press, called the Carlsbad Decrees.
Work
Though he was unfavourably reviewed by critics - many of whom saw his work as immoral - he was one of the most popular writers of his time. In an essay called 'Why Do I Have So Many Enemies?', Kotzebue cited jealousy of his fame as a factor. He was politically conservative and cosmopolitan in his outlook, and spoke out against the antisemitism of student nationalists.
He was approached in 1812 by Beethoven, who suggested Kotzebue write the libretto for an opera about Attila (which was never written). Beethoven did however produce incidental music for two of Kotzebue's plays, The Ruins of Athens (Beethoven's opus 113) and King Stephen (opus 117).
Besides his plays, Kotzebue wrote several historical works: his 'History of the German Empires' was burned by nationalist students at the 1817 Wartburg Festival (which Sand attended).
Of continuing interest are his autobiographical writings, Meine Flucht nach Paris im Winter 1790 (1791), Über meinen Aufenthalt in Wien (1799), Das merkwürdigste Jahr meines Lebens (1801), Erinnerungen aus Paris (1804), and Erinnerungen von meiner Reise aus Liefland nach Rom und Neapel (1805).
As a dramatist he was extraordinarily prolific, his plays numbering over 200; his popularity, not merely on the German, but on the European stage, was unprecedented.
His success, however, was seen as due less to any conspicuous literary or poetic ability than to an extraordinary facility in the invention of effective situations. He possessed, as few German playwrights before or since, the unerring instinct for the theatre; and his influence on the technique of the modern drama from Scribe to Sardou and from Bauernfeld to Sudermann is unmistakable.
Kotzebue is to be seen to best advantage in his comedies, such as Der Wildfang, Die beiden Klingsberg and Die deutschen Kleinstädter, which contain admirable genre pictures of German life.
These plays held the stage in Germany long after the once famous Menschenhass und Reue (which translates as Misanthropy and Repentance, but was known in England as The Stranger), Graf Benjowsky, or ambitious exotic tragedies like Die Sonnenjungfrau and Die Spanier in Peru (which Sheridan adapted as Pizarro) were forgotten.
Theatre historians usually consider the runaway success of The Stranger, the English version of Menschenhass und Reue, in both England (where it opened in 1798) and the United States as one of the harbingers of the emerging popularity of theatrical melodrama, which dominated European and American stages for the first seventy-five years of the nineteenth century.
Two collections of Kotzebue's dramas were published during his lifetime: Schauspiele (5 vols., 1797); Neue Schauspiele (23 vols., 1798–1820). His Sämtliche dramatische Werke appeared in 44 vols., in 1827-1829, and again, under the title Theater, in 40 vols., in 1840-1841. A selection of his plays in 10 vols. appeared in Leipzig in 1867-1868. See Heinrich Doring, A. von Kotzebues Leben (1830); W. von Kotzebue, A. von Kotzebue (1881); Ch. Rabany, Kotzebue, sa vie et son temps (1893); W. Sellier, Kotzebue in England (1901).
Legacy
A street in Põhja-Tallinn administrative district of Tallinn, Estonia is named after him.
Kotzebue was the father of 18 children, among them Otto von Kotzebue, Moritz von Kotzebue, Paul Demetrius Kotzebue and Alexander Kotzebue.
References
- ^ Gerhard Schulz, Die deutsche Literatur zwischen Französischer Revolution und Restauration/ Teil 1 Geschichte der deutschen Literatur von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart / begr. von Helmut de Boor .... Bd. 7, Teil 1, Das Zeitalter der Französischen Revolution : 1789 - 1806, 2., neubearb. Aufl., München, Beck, 2000, S. 472
- ^ Williamson, G.S. (2000). "What Killed August von Kotzebue? The Temptations of Virtue and the Political Theology German Nationalism, 1789-1819.". The Journal of Modern History 72 (4): 890–943. doi:10.1086/318549 (Dec., 2000).
- ^ Dumas père, Alexandre. "Karl Ludwig Sand". Celebrated Crimes. Volume IV. Wildside Classics. pp. 13–76.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
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Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article Kotzebue, August Friedrich Ferdinand von. |
- Works by August von Kotzebue at Project Gutenberg
- Works of August von Kotzebue in German by EPOCHE NAPOLEON
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Mentioned in
Carlsbad Decrees
(history, Germany)
Sand
(1971 Drama Film)
Otto von Kotzebue
(person)
melodrama
(style – in theater)
Fantasie über Motiven aus Beethovens Ruinen von Athen, for piano & orchestra, S. 122 (LW H9)
(Classical Work)
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