Otto Ludwig (February 11, 1813 – February 25, 1865) was a German dramatist, novelist and critic born in Eisfeld in Thuringia.
His father, who was syndic of Eisfeld, died when he was twelve years old, and he was brought up amidst uncongenial conditions. He had devoted his leisure time to poetry and music, which unfitted him for the mercantile career planned for him. The attention of the Duke of Meiningen was directed to one of his musical composit...
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Otto Ludwig (February 11, 1813 – February 25, 1865) was a German dramatist, novelist and critic born in Eisfeld in Thuringia.
His father, who was syndic of Eisfeld, died when he was twelve years old, and he was brought up amidst uncongenial conditions. He had devoted his leisure time to poetry and music, which unfitted him for the mercantile career planned for him. The attention of the Duke of Meiningen was directed to one of his musical compositions, an opera, Die Köhlerin (The Charcoal Burner), and Ludwig was enabled in 1839 to continue his musical studies under Felix Mendelssohn in Leipzig.
But ill health and constitutional shyness caused him to give up a musical career and he turned exclusively to literary studies, and wrote several stories and dramas. Of the latter, Der Erbförster (The Hereditary Forester) (1850) attracted immediate attention as a masterly psychological study. It was followed by Die Makkabäer (The Maccabees) (1852), in which the realistic method of Der Erbförster...
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