Background
Kotzebue was born on May 3, 1761 in Weimar, Germany to a respected merchant family.
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consul dramatist writer author
Kotzebue was born on May 3, 1761 in Weimar, Germany to a respected merchant family.
Kotzebue was educated at Wilhelm-Ernst-Gymnasium in Weimar and then studied law at Jena and Duisburg.
Kotzebue settled in his native city in 1780 as an advocate. In 1781 he moved to St. Petersburg, becoming secretary to the governor general. He retired from the Russian state service in 1790. From 1798 to 1800 he was director of the court theater in Vienna, becoming director of the German theater in St. Petersburg in 1801. In later years he was employed in various artistic and political projects in Germany and Russia. He published in Weimar and Mannheim a weekly journal, Literarisches Wochenblatt, which was thoroughly antidemocratic, and his reactionism aroused the enmity of believers in democracy, by one of whom he was assassinated on March 23, 1819. The most popular stage writer in Germany at the end of the 18th century, Kotzebue first attained European fame with Menschenhaas und Reue, first performed in 1787 and published in 1789. This play about an erring wife who atones for her sins by repentance was translated into many languages and was long performed in England as The Stranger. Kotzebue turned comparatively late to comedy, a field in which he is best represented by Kleinstädter (1802). Dealing, as the title indicates, with small-town Germans, it is the ancestor of a large family of German comedies. Kotzebue was also the first creator of the modern German farce. Because of the superficiality of his works and their lack of ethical import, Kotzebue's reputation was short-lived. The reasons for his initial success are many. In an age of sentimentality and humanitarianism he placed the heart above reason, often leaving himself open to the charge of condoning immorality. He aimed at the average audience and tried only to give entertainment, while his contemporaries F. L. Schroder and A. W. Iffland wished to convert and improve their audiences. He used extreme measures to create vivid roles, and he resorted to dramatic types in all fields, although frequently attempting effects beyond his powers. His theatrical skill was immense, but he produced nothing new in dramatic form or technique. Kotzebue wrote several historical works, but these are almost wholly without objective merit. Among his autobiographical writings are Meine Flucht nach Paris im Winter 1790 (1791) and Über meinen Aufenthalt in Wien (1799). His play Die Spanier in Peru was adapted by Richard Brinsley Sheridan as Pizarro. He was murdered in 1819 by Karl Ludwig Sand, a militant member of the Burschenschaften. This murder 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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(The Stranger: A Drama, in Five Acts by August von Kotzebue)
Kotzebue published in Weimar and Mannheim a weekly journal, Literarisches Wochenblatt, which was thoroughly antidemocratic, and his reactionism aroused the enmity of believers in democracy, by one of whom he was assassinated on March 23, 1819.
President of the Magistrat of the Governorate of Estonia (1785)
In 1783 Kotzebue married the daughter of a Russian lieutenant general. He was the father of 18 children, among them Moritz von Kotzebue, Paul Demetrius Kotzebue, Alexander Kotzebue and the explorer Otto von Kotzebue.