Staat Friedrichs des Grossen: With an Appendix of Poems on Frederick the Great

by Gustav Freytag, Wilhelm Wägner (Editor), Karl Breul (Editor)

This 1924 second edition of Gustav Freytag's Aus Dem Staat Friedrichs des Grossen was edited by Karl Breul of Cambridge University. The original edition, published in 1877, was compiled by Wilhelm Wagner. Breul, whilst preserving the majority of Wagner's work, has edited and updated the text's notes, as well as appending a number of poems on Frederick the Great to Freytag's text. Gustav Freytag was a scholar of German antiquity, early German literature and the origins of German drama. He was also a journalist, biographer and historian with a fervent political mind. His Aus Dem Staat Friedrichs des Grossen is a 'Picture of the German Past', a text where an individual's thoughts and motivations are imagined and presented within a historical framework. Freytag's text thus acts as an invaluable introduction to the life and characteristics of Frederick the Great and will appeal to students of German history and literature alike.

140 pages, Paperback

Published August 11, 2011

About the author

Gustav Freytag (13 July 1816 – 30 April 1895) was a German novelist and playwright.

Freytag was born in Kreuzburg (Kluczbork) in Silesia. After attending the gymnasium at Oels (Oleśnica), he studied philology at the universities of Breslau (Wrocław) and Berlin, and in 1838 received his degree with a dissertation titled De initiis poeseos scenicae apud Germanos (Über die Anfänge der dramatischen Poesie bei den Germanen, English: On the Beginnings of Dramatic Poetry among the Germans). He became member of the student corps Borussia zu Breslau.

In 1839, he settled in Breslau, as Privatdozent in German language and literature, but devoted his principal attention to writing for the stage, achieving considerable success with the comedy Die Brautfahrt, oder Kunz von der Rosen (1844). This was followed by a volume of unimportant poems, In Breslau (1845), and the dramas Die Valentine (1846) and Graf Waldemar (1847). He at last attained a prominent position by his comedy, Die Journalisten (1853), one of the best German comedies of the 19th century.

In 1847, he migrated to Berlin, and in the following year took over, in conjunction with Julian Schmidt, the editorship of Die Grenzboten, a weekly journal which, founded in 1841, now became the leading organ of German and Austrian liberalism. Freytag helped to conduct it until 1861, and again from 1867 till 1870, when for a short time he edited a new periodical, Im neuen Reich. In 1863 he developed what is known as Freytag's pyramid.

He died in Wiesbaden.