Heinrich Laube

Heinrich Laube (September 18, 1806 – August 1, 1884), German dramatist, novelist and theatre-director, was born at Sprottau in Prussian Silesia.

He studied theology at Halle and Breslau (1826–1829), and settled in Leipzig in 1832. Here he at once came into prominence with his political essays, collected under the title Das neue Jahrhundert, in two parts — Polen (1833) and Politische Briefe (1833) — and with the novel Das junge Europa, in three parts — Die Poeten, Die Krieger, Die Bürger — (1833–1837).

These writings, in which, after the fashion of Heinrich Heine and Ludwig Börne, he severely criticized the political regime in Germany, together with the part he played in the literary movement known as “Das junge Deutschland,” led to his being subjected to police surveillance and his works confiscated. On his return, in 1834, from a journey to Italy, undertaken in the company of Karl Gutzkow, Laube was expelled from Saxony and imprisoned for nine months in Berlin. In 1836 he married the widow of Professor Hanel of Leipzig; almost immediately afterwards he suffered a year's imprisonment for his revolutionary sympathies.

In 1839 he again settled in Leipzig and began a literary activity as a playwright. Chief among his earlier productions are the tragedies Monaldeschi (1845) and Struensee (1847); the comedies Rokoko, oder die alten Herren (1846); Gottsched und Gellert (1847); and Die Karlsschüler (1847), of which the youthful Friedrich Schiller is the hero.

In 1848 Laube was elected to the Frankfurt Parliament for the district of Elbogen, but resigned in the spring of 1849, when he was appointed artistic director of the Hofburg theatre in Vienna. This office he held until 1867, and in this period fall his finest dramatic productions, notably the tragedies Graf Essex (1856) and Montrose (1859), and his historical romance Der deutsche Krieg (1865–1866, 9 vols), which graphically pictures a period in the Thirty Years' War.

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