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OTTO LUDWIG (1813-1865)

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Originally appearing in Volume V17, Page 114 of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.
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OTTO LUDWIG (1813-1865)  , German dramatist, novelist and critic, was born at Eisfeld in Thuringia, on the 11th of
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February 1813 . His
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father, who was syndic of Eisfeld, died when the boy was twelve years old, and he was brought up amidst uncongenial conditions . He had devoted his leisure to
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poetry and
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music, which unfitted him for the mercantile career planned for him . The attention of the duke of
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Meiningen was directed to one of his musical compositions, an opera, Die Kohlerin, and Ludwig was enabled in 1839 to continue his musical studies under Mendelssohn in
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Leipzig . But
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ill-
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health and constitutional shyness caused him to give up a musical career, and he turned exclusively to
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literary studies, and wrote several stories and dramas . Of the latter, Der Erbforster (185o) attracted immediate attention as a masterly psychological study . It was followed by Die Makkabaer (1852), in which the realistic method of Der Erbforster was transferred to an
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historical milieu, which allowed more brilliant colouring and a freer
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play of the
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imagination . With these tragedies, to which may be added Die Rechte
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des Herzens and DasFraulein von Scuderi, the
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comedy Hans Frey, and an unfinished tragedy on the subject of
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Agnes Bernauer, Ludwig ranks immediately after Hebbel as Germany's most notable dramatic poet at the
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middle of the 19th century . Meanwhile he had married and settled permanently in
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Dresden, where he turned his attention to fiction . He published a series of admirable stories of Thuringian
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life, characterized by the same attention to minute detail and careful psychological analysis as his dramas . The best of these are Die Heiteretei and ihr Widerspiel (1851), and Ludwig's masterpiece, the powerful novel, Zwischen Himmel and Erde (1855) . In his Shakespeare-Studien (not published until 1891) Ludwig showed himself a discriminating critic, with a
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fine insight into the hidden springs of the creative imagination .

So

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great, however, was his
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enthusiasm for Shakespeare, that he was led to depreciate Schiller in a way which found little favour among his countrymen . He died at Dresden on the 25th of February 1865 . Ludwig's Gesammelte Schriften were published by A . Stern and E . Schmidt in 6 vols . (1891–1892) ; also by A . Bartels (6 vols., 1900) . See A . Stern,
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Otto Ludwig, ern Dicttterleben (1891; and ed., 1906), and A . Sauer, Otto Ludwig (1893) .

End of Article: OTTO LUDWIG (1813-1865)
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