August von Kotzebue

• Born: May 3, 1761
• Birthplace: Weimar, Saxony (now in Germany)
• Died: March 23, 1819
• Place of death: Mannheim, Baden (now in Germany)

Other Literary Forms

August von Kotzebue also wrote poems, novels, reviews, historical treatises, travel descriptions, autobiographical works, essays, opera librettos, anecdotes, and apologies and retractions. He edited several journals, such as Der Freimüthige (1803-1807), Die Biene (1808-1810), and Die Grille (1811-1812). Editions of his letters to his mother and to his publisher also exist, as well as letters and papers published from his estate. The most important collections of these works are Ausgewählte prosaische Schriften (1842-1843), Kleine gesammelte Schriften (1787-1791), Vom Adel (1792), and Unparteiische Untersuchung über die Folgen der französischen Revolution auf das übrige Europa (1795). Among the English collections and translations is Historical, Literary, and Political Anecdotes and Miscellanies (1807).

Achievements

It is no exaggeration to say that few German writers influenced European literature as much as did August von Kotzebue. His tremendous success with the theatergoing public in Germany, England, France, Russia, and other European nations engendered a multitude of translations, adaptations, and emulations of his dramatic style; his popularity also caused literary feuds in the artistic community and generated suspicion about Kotzebue’s political loyalties in his dealings with foreign powers and governments. The perceived inconsistencies in his views, for example, the depiction of a degenerate nobility in his plays and the apology for hereditary nobility in his treatise Vom Adel, or his apparent support of the French Revolution, his polemics against Napoleon, and his lifelong fascination with Russia and its czars, led to misunderstandings and finally to his assassination. Literary historians, far from celebrating the king of dramatists in his time, viewed with disdain his admitted goal to please the public and did not forgive him his quarrels with (and frequently his verbal victory over) the giants of German literature such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and the brothers August William von Schlegel and Friedrich von Schlegel. The playwright, whose productivity was so immense that he himself lost count of the number of tragedies, comedies, librettos, and farces that he had written (he thought them to number 211, but he actually wrote at least 230), was accused of lacking morality and of encouraging frivolity in his works. Kotzebue refused to see an educational function in the theater and perceived it instead as an entertaining institution; this attitude was unforgivable in the judgment of later literary historians. Critical works either ignore Kotzebue’s contribution to the theater entirely or are generally hostile. From the nineteenth century onward, literary historians have set the evaluative trends by calling Kotzebue a “procurer” for the brothel he made of literature (Wolfgang Menzel, Die deutsche Literatur, 1827, 1836); by claiming that he was guided by the “pernicious principle” (Julian Schmidt, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur im 19. Jahrhundert, 1886-1896); by announcing that although he is not dispensable, “we can despise him” (Georg Gottfried Gervinus, Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung, 1871-1874); by calling him a “characterless destroyer of our culture” (Max Martersteig, Das deutsche Theater im 19. Jahrhundert, 1904); or by scolding him as a “thorough scamp” (Adolph Bartels, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur, 1901-1902) while acknowledging his theatrical talents. Although Kotzebue’s work tends to be light in spirit and very frequently also in thought or content, it has highly entertaining qualities and is far from “immoral,” though negating dogmatism of all types. Above all, it possesses a sure sense of dramatic structure, scenic possibilities, dialogue, and satiric and comic elements. His literary influence in Germany and abroad offers evidence that he scarcely merits the treatment that he has received from critics and historians in his own country.

Biography

August Friedrich Ferdinand von Kotzebue was born on May 3, 1761, in Weimar, Saxony, the son of a well-to-do, middle-class bureaucrat who died while Kotzebue was still young. Under the doting care of his mother, he spent his childhood and youth in Weimar, going to school at the local gymnasium until he was sixteen and acting with his sister Amalie in one of Goethe’s plays. After spending a year at Jena, he matriculated at the University of Duisburg in 1778, returned to Jena in 1779, and finished his studies of law there in 1780. In Weimar he opened a law practice but showed little enthusiasm for his chosen profession and became involved in legal difficulties as a result of his sharp tongue. He left for St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1781.

There his career took a decidedly favorable turn. Originally the private secretary of a well-to-do German, he later became assistant director of the German theater at St. Petersburg. Before his employer died in 1783, he recommended Kotzebue to Catherine the Great, who made him assessor to the high court of appeal in Reval (now Tallinn). There he founded a private theater in 1784, wrote several stories and plays, and edited a journal. In the same year, he fell passionately in love with Friederike von Essen, to whom he was married despite the objections of her parents. In 1787, he was promoted to president of the magistracy in the province of Estonia and was ennobled by Catherine the Great. For reasons of health, he went to Pyrmont on the advice of Dr. Johann Georg Zimmermann, who soon became his friend. Shortly thereafter, two of his plays, The Stranger and The Indians in England, made him world-famous—the former competing favorably with Goethe’s novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774; The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1779) for public success. Other plays followed in quick succession, including The Virgin of the Sun, and Kotzebue boasted that he could write a play in three days. His biting wit and a satiric pen, along with his success, brought forth the envious as well as the admiring. Two occurrences of 1790 hurt his reputation for some time to come: His wife died in childbirth, and Kotzebue, not awaiting her final moments, left for Paris to console himself, writing an autobiographical account, Meine Flucht nact Paris im Winter 1790 (1791; flight to Paris), which was received as the epitome of tastelessness. In 1790, he also wrote a defense of his friend Dr. Zimmermann in a play entitled Doctor Bahrdt mit der eiserner Stirn, which contains numerous highly objectionable portrayals of well-known personages. Kotzebue publicly apologized for this piece of slander in 1792. In the same year, he returned to Russia and married Christel von Krusentjern.

Apparently to satisfy the doubts of his benefactress Catherine the Great concerning his political loyalties, he wrote a very conservative historical work on nobility (Vom Adel) but then left the Russian civil service in 1795 to write and live on his estate, Friedenthal. In 1798, he briefly went to Vienna, accepting the directorship at the Viennese royal theater, but he disliked the intrigues there and did not stay. In 1799, he was in Weimar for a short time. Early in 1800, Kotzebue returned to Russia with his family but was taken prisoner at the border and sent to Siberia on suspicion of political infidelities. He wrote a piece that excessively praised a charitable action of the emperor, delighting Czar Paul I so greatly that he immediately pardoned Kotzebue, presented him with an estate, and made him director of the St. Petersburg theater. Between 1798 and 1801, Kotzebue wrote some of his most successful plays, among them The Count of Burgundy and Johanna of Montfaucon. About his Siberian adventure he wrote the novel-length report Das merkwürdigste Jahr meines Lebens (1801; The Most Remarkable Year in the Life of August von Kotzebue, 1802).

In 1801, he returned to Germany, living in Weimar, Jena, and from 1803 on in Berlin. His residency in Weimar was marked by conflicts with Goethe, who viewed Kotzebue with scorn and disdain yet envied his successes with the public. Kotzebue’s second wife died in 1803, prompting another trip of refuge to Paris, where he was presented to Napoleon. The following year he married for the third time, choosing a cousin of his second wife. Beginning in 1803, Kotzebue edited the journal Der Freimüthige, which gave him ample opportunity to carry on his feud with the Romantic school of Goethe and the Schlegel brothers, and which appeared under his direction until 1807. Between 1807 and 1813, he wrote numerous plays on his estate in Estonia, where he had fled with his family from the French. In his journals Die Biene and Die Grille, he fought Napoleon with political articles. After Napoleon’s defeat, Emperor Alexander named Kotzebue General Consul of Prussia; Kotzebue also took over the directorship of the theater in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad).

In the aftermath of the wars of liberation, many German students became politically active, and their activities met with stringent government control and persecution. Meanwhile Kotzebue had undertaken the task of writing reviews about German and French literature and science and forwarding them to Russia. On July 17, 1817, he sent off the first of these surveys, discussing more than one hundred works. He thereby came under suspicion by the student groups of being a spy for reactionary Russia. Among the books burned at the Wartburg Festival of 1817, which brought the student groups into public political focus, was Kotzebue’s historical work Geschichte des deutschen Reichs, von dessen Ursprunge bis zu dessen Untergange (1814-1832). Critical of the German democratic movement, Kotzebue reacted with mockery and thereby encouraged suspicion and rage among the various student organizations. One of the more fanatic of their number, a theology student named Karl Ludwig Sand, from Jena, assassinated Kotzebue on March 23, 1819, in Mannheim, Kotzebue’s place of residence since 1818. As a consequence of this killing, the government further suppressed university student groups with stricter surveillance and supervision.

Analysis

August von Kotzebue’s position in literary history is unique. Although his 230 plays were immensely popular in Germany during his lifetime and scarcely a theater director could afford to ignore the public’s favorite playwright, he was ostracized not only by his contemporaries of the literary schools (classicism, Romanticism and its major representatives) but also by later generations of critics. Kotzebue’s cosmopolitanism and his recalcitrant spirit, combined with his enormous success as a dramatist, created for him at once a favorable climate outside Germany and an envious and hostile atmosphere within. His major influence as a writer therefore was exerted chiefly outside his homeland, notwithstanding his box-office success within Germany.

In England, German authors were fashionable and popular at the turn of the eighteenth century; more than fifty German writers in all genres had their works translated between 1790 and 1810. Of these, Kotzebue, with 170 editions (plays, novels, and biographies) of his works appearing in the English language, by far outnumbered all others in popularity. Between 1796 and 1842, thirty-six of his plays were translated into English—many of them several times—and twenty-two were produced onstage. In many instances, the plays were severely altered in the process of making them palatable to English audiences. Characters were added or deleted, plots were changed and various other adulterations were committed in order to present in Kotzebue’s name plays that would be congenial to English tastes.

Kotzebue wrote his first successful play, The Stranger, between October and November of 1788, while he was very ill. By 1860, it had been translated eighty times. After it was given in London for the first time on March 24, 1798, it was staged more frequently than were the plays of William Shakespeare. Undoubtedly Kotzebue’s popularity resulted in large part from the liberties that the translators took in adapting his plays for English audiences, which ensured their lasting success, for the critical reviews praise exactly that element that the German critics perceived as lacking: the morality. Although one of the main critical objections to Kotzebue in Germany was that he so freely depicted vice and immorality, thus undermining public virtue, the London Times of March 25, 1798, declared: “The heart is improved, and the fancy entertained, while a confirmed detestation of conjugal infidelity, which forms the chief moral of the play is irresistibly impressed.” While the Times critic noted that the characterization lacked originality, he also pointed out that “there is novelty of sentiment, passion, diction, and above all, there is that which we but rarely meet with in our modern dramas, novelty of virtuous principle and edifying morality.” English audiences, like their German counterparts, wanted to be entertained and not confronted with conflicts that required profound intellectual involvement. They wanted to be moved to tears, to see repentance and forgiveness, misunderstandings and happy endings. They perceived the complicated plots with separated lovers and families, fantastic familial interrelationships, and the all-pervasive, all-powerful manipulative factor of chance as a pleasant escalation of dramatic tension. In Kotzebue’s work, they saw their own social views vindicated and their expectations met while being pleasantly entertained.

Kotzebue’s box-office success in England prompted imitation by native playwrights. L. F. Thompson, in Kotzebue (1928), lists a substantial number of English plays that borrowed from Kotzebue’s plots, characters, and scenes. For example, Richard Cumberland’s The Wheel of Fortune (pr., pb. 1795) borrows the character Penruddock from Kotzebue’s The Stranger; a play by George Colman, the younger, contains the attempted seduction of a poor officer’s daughter—a parallel to Kotzebue’s play The Writing Desk. In addition to serving as a model for similar native productions, Kotzebue added some new perspectives to English theater, including scenes from lowlife alternating between the farcical and the tragic. He liberated English dramatists from an excessively moralistic perspective and thereby furthered a more realistic depiction of life onstage, and while he did not initiate it, he certainly contributed greatly to the development of the melodrama.

France and the Playwright

In France, the situation was somewhat different. Rather than being imitated, Kotzebue was to a great extent an imitator. He was, for example, greatly indebted to Molière, but many of the characters and situations that Kotzebue adopted can be found in prerevolutionary French plays in general. Although he probably also borrowed from Louis-Sébastien Mercier and Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, he apparently also exchanged ideas with contemporary writers such as Louis-Benoît and Alexandre Duval. As in England, The Stranger initiated Kotzebue’s success in France. It was first staged on December 28, 1798, at the Odéon, and was performed sixty times in its initial season. Its immediate impact was felt in the parodies that it engendered. Among them are Hyacinthe Dorvo’s La veille de Noces: Ou, L’Après-souper de Misanthropie et Repentir (1799), which was performed at the Théâtre Molière; Marc Antoine Desaugiers’s Cadet Rousselle misanthrope et Manon repentante (1800); and Paul Aimé Chapelle Laurencin’s Édouard et Clémentine, une comédie en trois actes mêlée de couplets (1842). For the French stage, the novelty of this play consisted chiefly of the weight and color that Kotzebue gave to supporting characters. More than forty of Kotzebue’s stage works were translated into French between 1790 and 1840, of which The Reconciliation rivaled The Stranger with some three hundred performances at the Comédie-Française between 1797 and 1845. Even between 1840 and 1902, Kotzebue’s The Good Citizens of Piffelheim saw more than twenty editions in print.

To a much greater extent than in England, Kotzebue shared the faults and merits of contemporary dramatists in France, although he was more versatile and considerably more successful than many of his French colleagues. French critical opinion, too, was divided. In his Erinnerungen aus Paris im Jahre 1804 (1804; Travels from Berlin Through Switzerland to Paris in the Year 1804, 1804), Kotzebue recalls the conflicting statements about his work and concludes that his plays endured despite their faults because of their true depiction of feeling and sentiment. Part of his success can probably be attributed to the fact that his work was not considered particularly innovative in France but was indebted to cross-fertilization: More than thirty of his plays can be considered adaptations of (mostly contemporary) French originals. Kotzebue revitalized these plays by providing a greater realism in characterization, departing from existing rules governing the French theater. What Kotzebue called realism in characterization, the French often called grotesqueness, yet they adapted enthusiastically to the liberation of theatrical customs and tastes both in the depiction of individuals onstage and in the new situations that Kotzebue provided. Often tapping existing resources, he expanded the possibilities for the theatrical treatment of the borrowed material and in turn opened vistas for native French writers concerning plot and figuration. Such a cultural interchange is the basis for Kotzebue’s influence on French theater.

Russia and Kotzebue

In Russia, the theater lacked any strong identification with nationalistic concerns and was influenced to a very large degree by French classicism. For some time before Kotzebue entered the scene, German literature had begun to assume a position of importance; yet Kotzebue is the first German dramatist whose work influenced Russian literature extensively and consistently by the number of his translations and the persistence of his popularity. By 1800, more than forty of his dramatic works had been printed in German, and approximately 80 percent of these appeared in translation—very frequently in more than one version, with different titles, and by various translators. Kotzebue’s reception in Russia varies in relation to locality. The Stranger, in translation by A. F. Malinovsky, was a staple on the repertoire of Moscow’s Medoks theater from 1791 on and was staged at least eighteen times between 1791 and 1800. The reason for this open reception can be traced in part to the cultural enlightenment of Moscow’s audiences, in part to the support of N. M. Karamzin, who had seen the play in Berlin and praised it highly in his journal, and also to the encouragement of the theater’s owner, M. Maddox. The situation was entirely different in St. Petersburg, where the German theater group, which had staged the play six times between October 30, 1790, and February 13, 1791, was disbanded on May 1, 1791. The conservative attitude of the court toward theatrical productions resulted in an almost exclusive continuance of French classical plays, and this in turn greatly influenced the repertoire of the two public theaters in St. Petersburg. Toward the end of the decade, however, the situation changed. Kotzebue’s mounting influence can be measured by three occurrences: the adoption of his plays in the repertoire of the French theater in St. Petersburg; the publication of plays under Kotzebue’s name that were not of his pen; and the first adaptations of his work by other writers. Kotzebue’s plays Johanna of Montfaucon and The Stranger were staged at the end of 1800 and in January, 1801, respectively, by the St. Petersburg ensemble in the French translation—an event that marks a high point in esteem accorded to him in that city. In Moscow, meanwhile, the plays of other German playwrights were staged under the fictitious authorship of Kotzebue. In the early years of the nineteenth century, Russian writers imitated Kotzebue by incorporating scenes, plots, and characters reminiscent of his plays and style into their own works. Frequently some reference to a Kotzebue drama was included in the title.

For the most part, Russian actors and playwrights perceived Kotzebue’s style as a liberation from the stringent limitations that French classical theater had placed on their initiative. The artificial language and the adherence to the unifying factors of time, place, and action within the classical tragedy were discarded in favor of a more freely developed plot and a greater display of feeling. In addition, plays such as The Stranger were based on social and personal conflicts with which the Russians could identify. Indeed, the very acceptability of and identification with the situations Kotzebue depicted in the European cultural community regardless of nationality were largely responsible for his international acceptance and success. Further, with his universal appeal, Kotzebue united actors, theoreticians, playwrights, translators, and the public in their effort to establish an independent national theater in Russia; in the interim between excessive dependence on foreign literary models and the development of a strictly Russian style, Kotzebue fused the German and French traditions already extant in the Russian repertoire with the emergence of a national literary spirit in that country.

Shortly after Kotzebue resigned as director of the St. Petersburg German theater in 1801, some criticism of his sentimental Rührstücke began to be heard. By 1803, Russian criticism of Kotzebue was colored by the realization that a Russian national theater could be achieved only be severing emotional ties to the German playwright. Literary discussions portrayed him negatively by associating his work with the achievements of other European literatures and finding his contribution lacking in substance: Kotzebue was inferior to Voltaire’s brilliant wit, to the tender spirit of Laurence Sterne, and to Jean-François Marmontel’s exquisite style. Despite vocal criticism, however, Kotzebue remained a considerable influence in the Russian theater until his death: Not until the second decade of the nineteenth century was there a decline in the popularity of the Rührstücke.

The discrepancy between public taste and critical opinion was as apparent in Russia as it was in Germany. A wealth of translations and the immense popularity that Kotzebue enjoyed with the theatergoing public necessitated in Russia as well as in Germany an intensive dialogue between playwrights and critics that continued far into the nineteenth century. Imitations of his style and plots flourished even as a distinctly Russian literature began to emerge. The extent of the division in Russia between detractors of Kotzebue and those who favored his approach may perhaps be discerned by the fact that Kotzebue’s influence is apparent in the work of a writer of the stature of Nikolai Gogol, whose comedy Revizor (1836; The Inspector General, 1890) shows many similarities to Kotzebue’s The Good Citizens of Piffelheim. Kotzebue was a European phenomenon and could not and cannot be disposed of as a marginal literary figure.

Most of Kotzebue’s plays can be divided among four categories: sentimental or family-centered plays (Rührstücke); farces or carnival sketches; comedies; and historical plays. Similar to the modern situation comedy, many of Kotzebue’s farces and comedies depended less on a coherent plot for their effect than on their witticisms, wordplay, and humorous set pieces. A plot summary for each category may suffice to illustrate the variables.

The Stranger

The Stranger was an early and immensely successful Rührstücke. The plot evolves around the Baroness von Meinau, who after two years of marriage has permitted herself to be seduced by her husband’s “friend.” Full of remorse, she has fled her home and now earns a meager living as a humble housekeeper at the castle of a countess. Her husband, deeply wounded but still in love with her, has also left his home and is eventually revealed to be the stranger living in the countess’s cottage. Although they do not know of each other’s close proximity, the estranged husband and wife each earn a reputation as an honorable and humanitarian individual through numerous noble deeds. When at last they are confronted with each other, they renounce each other in self-abnegation to spare each other’s feelings, hoping for a reunion in the hereafter. It is only when, through the intervention of the countess, their children are brought before them, that the Baron and Baroness von Meinau fall into each other’s arms. Kotzebue retains the spectator’s interest by keeping the identity of the two strangers a secret. Little by little, the reason for the housekeeper’s depression is revealed. When the couple are finally identified, the tension remains until the end, because their reunion in marriage is delayed.

Pagenstreiche

The farce Pagenstreiche (pageboy tricks) depends on stereotyped comedy characters for the delivery of witticisms. The plot is of the utmost simplicity: The three daughters of Baron Stuhlbein, entirely undifferentiated in their womanhood, fall in love with their cousin and refuse to marry the three young lieutenants who are wooing them (the young men are equally stereotyped). Only when the baron threatens to give his daughters in marriage to three elderly country squires do the young women agree to return to their erstwhile lovers. The various escapades of the irresistible pageboy (the cousin) are the foil to the quick-witted dialogue and to the antics of the elderly characters.

Father and Son

Comedy on a somewhat less undifferentiated and stereotypical plane is the substance of Father and Son. The erotic escapades of the Klingsbergs, father and son, who court the same women and are foiled by the clever sister of the elder Klingsberg, shape a plot of intrigue, love, estrangement, tempted virtue, and impoverished nobility. Young Klingsberg finds his true love, and the husband of Baroness von Stein is offered employment (reuniting this estranged couple), whereas the old Klingsberg is punished for his lecherous behavior (he must stay with his sister).

The Spaniards in Peru

If the line between farce and comedy is fluid in Kotzebue’s plays, the same can be said of his Rührstücke and historical dramas. The latter employ comic characters sparingly or not at all, but the historical figures are little more than homely philistines beneath the disguise of their exotic names. The tragedy The Spaniards in Peru takes its historical background from the invasion of Mexico by Francisco Pizarro’s troops. It is the sequel to The Virgin of the Sun and casts Pizarro as the cruel invader from whose grasp Rolla, the hero, snatches the child of Cora (the Virgin of the Sun). While saving the boy, Rolla is mortally wounded, and the tragedy concludes with his death. Kotzebue again exploits the emotions, this time to the accompaniment of scenes of war and atrocities. Pizarro is depicted entirely negatively, Cora as the insanely desperate mother, Rolla as the brave and righteous hero. Although the setting is exotic, the spectators can easily identify with the depicted emotions, which do not deviate from those customarily encountered at the hearth and in the home.

Bibliography

Mandel, Oscar. August von Kotzebue: The Comedy, the Man. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990. A basic biography of Kotzebue that covers his life and works. Bibliography and index.

Taylor, Harley U., Jr. “The Dramas of August von Kotzebue on the New York and Philadelphia Stages from 1798 to 1805.” West Virginia University Philological Papers 23 (1977) 47-58. A look at Kotzebue’s plays as they were presented on the early American stage.

Williamson, George S. “What Killed August von Kotzebue? The Temptations of Virtue and the Political Theology of German Nationalism, 1789-1819.” The Journal of Modern History 72, no. 4 (December, 2000): 890-943. An examination of how Kotzebue’s reputation as a “seducer of virtue” helped lead to his assassination by a German nationalist. He also describes the state of nationalism in Germany at the time of the killing.