Friedrich Maximilian Klinger

Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger (17 February 1752 – 9 March 1831) was a German dramatist and novelist. His play Sturm und Drang (1776) gave its name to the Sturm und Drang artistic epoch. He was a childhood friend of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and is often closely associated with Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz. Klinger worked as a playwright for the Seylersche Schauspiel-Gesellschaft for two years, but eventually left the Kingdom of Prussia to become a General in the Imperial Russian Army. Biography One of the few eighteenth-century authors from the lower social class, Klinger was born in Frankfurt am Main. His father, Johannes Klinger (1719–1760), was a town constable in Frankfurt who came from Pfaffen-Beerfurth in the Odenwald where he was born as the son of the mill owner, blacksmith and schoolmaster Johannes Klinger (1671–1743), who was married to Anna Barabra Boßler (1674–1747) since January 17, 1695. His father died when Klinger was eight years old, forcing his mother Cornelia Fuchs Klinger, a sergeant's daughter, to support her son and two daughters by washing laundry from the Frankfurt eliteincluding, perhaps, Klinger's future friends and patrons, the Goethes of Hirschgrabenallee. In spite of this misfortune, Klinger excelled in his studies and won a scholarship to study at the gymnasium, where he also worked as a tutor to earn money for his family. Klinger was the cousin of Heinrich Philipp Boßler, who is known as the authorized original publisher of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Though there is little documentation of Klinger's earliest interactions with Goethe during their Frankfurt years, they appear to have made acquaintance by 1773, as Klinger had begun work on his first dramas, Otto and Das leidende Weib (The Suffering Wife) which, according to his Leipzig publisher, owe a great debt to Goethe's then-unpublished Götz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand. Weygand released the collection at its Easter book fair of 1775, calling them "plays in the Goethean/Lenzian Manner." Additionally, it was only with Goethe's financial assistance that Klinger was able to enroll at the University of Gießen in 1774 where he briefly studied to be a legal clerk.