Gustav Freytag

Gustav Freytag was a German novelist and playwright. Freytag was born in Kreuzburg (Kluczbork), Silesia. He joined the student corps Borussia zu Breslau. In 1839, he settled in Breslau as Privatdozent of German language and literature, but he devoted his primary attention to theatrical composition, finding significant success with the comic play Die Brautfahrt, or Kunz von der Rosen (1844). This was followed by a collection of insignificant poetry, In Breslau (1845), and the tragedies Die...See more

Gustav Freytag was a German novelist and playwright. Freytag was born in Kreuzburg (Kluczbork), Silesia. He joined the student corps Borussia zu Breslau. In 1839, he settled in Breslau as Privatdozent of German language and literature, but he devoted his primary attention to theatrical composition, finding significant success with the comic play Die Brautfahrt, or Kunz von der Rosen (1844). This was followed by a collection of insignificant poetry, In Breslau (1845), and the tragedies Die Valentine (1846) and Graf Waldemar (1847). He finally rose to prominence with his farce The Journalists (1852), which was one of the best German comedies of the nineteenth century. In 1847, he relocated to Berlin and, with Julian Schmidt, took over as editor of Die Grenzboten, a weekly publication founded in 1841 that had since become the principal instrument of German and Austrian liberalism. Freytag helped to run it until 1861, then again from 1867 until 1870, when he briefly published a new magazine, Im neuen Reich. In 1863, he developed Freytag's Pyramid. See less