Edward Frederick Moldenke was born on 10 August 1836, at Insterburg, East Prussia. He was the son of Franz August and Justine (Kessler) Moldencke. His father, an excise official and amateur inventor, was descended from an officer in the army of Gustavus Adolphus, his mother from one of the exiled Protestants of Salzburg. Her death when he was nine years old made his boyhood and youth dismal and cheerless.
Moldehnke attended the Gymnasium at Lyck, 1845-53, matriculated at the age of seventeen at the University of Konigsberg as a student of philosophy and theology, and followed Prof. Justus L. Jacobi in 1855 to the University of Halle, where he remained till 1857. The University of Rostock made him an honorary doctor.
While in Halle, Moldehnke acted as secretary to Friedrich Tholuck, in whose household he lived. He was one of the founders of the anti-dueling students' society, Tuisconia. Having passed his examinations with distinction, he was made head, for a few months, of the parochial school at Eckersberg, East Prussia, and was called in 1859 to a professorship in the Lyck Gymnasium. Though eminently happy at Lyck, he was eager for the work of the ministry, and in 1861 agreed to come to the United States for five years of missionary work in the West. He was ordained at Konigsberg July 23, 1861, and reached Wisconsin, with his wife and child, in August. For four years, he led the hard and at times dangerous life of a traveling missionary among the remote settlements of Germans in Wisconsin and Minnesota. In 1865, he was elected president of the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Watertown, Wisconsin, and became editor of the Wisconsin Synod's Gemeindeblatt. He returned to Germany in August 1866 to become pastor at Johannisburg, East Prussia. This parish numbered 11, 000 German and Polish members, and Moldehnke's post included the oversight of thirty-three schools and several prisons, poorhouses, and hospitals. During his incumbency the district was ravaged by epidemics of cholera and typhus; at one time Moldehnke himself was stricken and pronounced dead by his physician. Illness and overwork, aggravated by dissatisfaction with the Prussian State Church, led him to resign in 1869. Starting his career anew, he came to New York and organized a Lutheran congregation, Zion's, which worshiped temporarily in the Medical College at Twenty-third Street and Fourth Avenue. In 1871, this congregation was merged with St. Peter's, of which he served as pastor until his death thirty-three years later.
He was a member of the committee that edited the General Council's Kirchenbuch (1877) and was president of the Council from 1895 to 1898. He was the author of Darstellung der Modernen Deutschen Theologie; a life of Luther in verse, Lutherbüchlein; Das Heilige Vaterunser (Allentown, 1878); and Durch Kampf zum Sieg, the last being a series of lectures delivered in Cooper Institute. His "Fünf Jahre in Amerika" was published in Hengstenberg's Evangelische Kirchenzeitung. He wrote prolifically for various church periodicals in Germany and the United States was the first editor of the Lutherisches Kirchenblatt of Reading, Pennsylvania. (1884), and edited Siloah, a paper founded in the interest of German home missions, 1882-88. He died at his summer home in Watchung, New Jersey, while preparing a sermon for the following Sunday.
Moldehnke was a man of commanding presence and great personal charm, conversed fluently in German, English, Latin, Polish, French, and Italian, and had few equals as an orator in German.
In 1859, Moldehnke married Elise Harder, a descendant of the baronial house of Mannteufel. Of his four sons, Charles Edward became a well-known Egyptologist and Richard George Gottlob Moldenke, a metallurgist.
