Background
He was born on the 9th of December 1830 at Hamburg, of which city his father was senator.
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Friedrich Heinrich Geffcken
Edit ProfileEducation
After studying law at Bonn, Göttingen and Berlin, he was attached In 1854 to the Prussian legation at Paris.
Career
For ten years (1856–1866) he served as Hanseatic diplomat to the Prussian court Berlin, first as chargé d'affaires, and afterwards as minister-resident, being afterwards transferred in a like capacity to London.
Appointed in 1872 professor of constitutional history and public law in the reorganized University of Strassburg, Geffcken became in 1880 a member of the council of state of Alsace-Lorraine. Of too nervous a temperament to withstand the strain of the responsibilities of his position, he retired from public service in 1882, and lived henceforth mostly at Munich, where he died, suffocated by an accidental escape of gas into his bedchamber, in 1896.
He was a dear writer and made his mark as an essayist. He was one of the most trusted advisers of the Prussian crown prince, Frederick William (afterwards the emperor Frederick), It was also Geffcken who assisted in framing the famous document which the emperor Frederick, on his accession to the throne in 1888, addressed to the chancellor. This memorandum gave umbrage, and on the publication by Geffcken in the Deutsche Rundschau (Oct. 1888) of extracts from the emperor Frederick's private diary during the Franco-Prussian war, he was, at Bismarck's insistence, prosecuted for high treason. The Reichsgericht (supreme court), however, quashed the indictment, and Geffcken was liberated after being under arrest for three months.
Achievements
Personality
Geffcken was a man of great erudition and wide knowledge and of remarkable legal acumen, and from these qualities proceeded the personal influence he possessed.
