Baron Karl Friedrich Hieronymus von Münchhausen

Münchhausen, Karl Friedrich Hieronymus, Freiherr von (Bodenwerder, 1720-97, Bodenwerder), a member of an ancient North German noble family, served as an officer, taking part in two campaigns against the Turks, and travelled much in his early years. Settling on his ancestral estate, he became a mighty hunter and a great raconteur of extraordinary, improbable, or impossible stories, with which he regaled his guests. So well known did he become for his rodomontades that, as with Till Eulenspiegel, he has developed into a figure of popular myth, and is sometimes referred to as ‘der Lügenbaron’. He certainly told many tall stories, but some of those which are attributed to him were current long before his time. Seventeen of his (alleged) stories were published in the Vademecum für lustige Leute between 1781 and 1783, and in 1785 an expanded English version appeared, published at Oxford as Baron Münchhausen's Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia. The compiler was R. E. Raspe. This version, in its second edition, was translated and expanded by G. A. Bürger as Wunderbare Reisen zu Wasser und zu Lande, Feldzüge und lustige Abenteuer des Freyherrn von Münchhausen and first published (in London) in 1786. Bürger's version is the popular one and has contributed most to Münchhausen's fame as the inventor of absurdly impossible adventures.

Münchhausen's principal later reappearances in literature are with K. Immermann and W. Hasenclever. The poet Börries Münchhausen was a descendant of the family.