the death of william hendershot by Edward Mullany
Levon Helm, drummer and singer of The Band, passed away from throat cancer last week. The outpouring of love directed his way over the last week, from every corner of the world, was remarkable. His family did an interesting thing too; they told the world before he died that he was in his final…
Kotzebue, August Ferdinand von (1761-1819), German dramatist and miscellaneous writer, was born at Weimar and became a lawyer there. A man of personality and ambition, he entered the Russian legal service, in which he soon rose in rank, and by 1785 had obtained an important government post at Reval and was granted a patent of Russian nobility. He next became chief magistrate of Estonia, but retired from his post in 1795, having in the meantime made a far-reaching reputation with his fast-moving romantic plays, shallow no doubt, but with an unerring knowledge of stage-craft, the envy of Goethe and many another lesser figure who from then on could never forgive him his good fortune. His first success, launched (as were most of his other plays) in Vienna and Berlin, was Adelheid von Wulfingen, followed immediately by his greatest success of all, Menschenhass und Reue. He turned to exotic themes, exploiting South America, and produced ‘noble savage’ plots in Die Indianer in England, Die Sonnenjungfrau, about Mexico, and Die Spanier in Peru. On leaving Russian government service in 1795 he was made director of the German theatre at Petersburg where he remained, with one break of a few months in 1800 when he was in detention in Siberia, until the death of Czar Paul the following year. Thereafter he lived in Germany and became a central figure of literary activities in Berlin. Among his miscellaneous prose works my be named Das merkwurdigste Jahr meines Lebens and Erinnerungen aus Paris. His connection with Russia was to be his undoing and still more perhaps his reactionary opinions which he was never afraid of announcing, and in spite of his anti-Napoleonic pamphlets he was disliked by the rising generation of the War of Prussian Independence. He was often in Weimar, where the literary world showed its hostility, and in Mannheim, where he quarreled with theatre managers. In 1816 he became director of the Russian foreign service in Germany, and was murdered in Mannheim by a student called Sand who hated him for his mockery of the German student movement and believed him to be a spy in Russian pay. The murder had great political consequences, leading to the suppression of liberal movements in Germany and Austria, and in fact was grist to Metternich’s mill. Kotzebue’s dramatic works were published in 1840-1.
