Friedrich Leopold Graf zu Stolberg

He studied in Göttingen and was a prominent member of the famous Hain or Dichterbund. After leaving the university he made a journey to Switzerland with his brother Christian, in company with Goethe. In 1777 he was appointed envoy of the prince bishop of Lübeck at the court of Copenhagen, but often stayed at Eutin, where he was the intimate associate of his college friend and member of the Dichterbund, Johann Heinrich Voss.

In 1782 he married Agnes von Witzleben, whom he celebrated in his poems. After her early death in 1788, he became Danish envoy at the court of Berlin, and contracted a second marriage with the countess Sophie von Redern in 1789. In 1791 he was appointed president of the Lübeck episcopal court at Eutin; he resigned this office in 1800, and retiring to Munster in Westphalia, there joined, with his whole family, the eldest daughter only excepted, the Roman Catholic Church.

For this step he was severely attacked by his former friend Voss (Wie ward Fritz Stolberg zum Unfreien? 1819). After living for a while (from 1812) in the neighbourhood of Bielefeld, he removed to his estate of Son dermuhlen near Osnabrück, where he remained till his death.

He wrote many odes, ballads, satires and dramas--among the last the tragedy Timoleon (1784), translations of the Iliad (1778), of Plato (1796-1797), Aeschylus (1802), and Ossian (1806); he published in 1815 a Leben Alfreds des Grossen, and a voluminous Geschichte der Religion Jesu Christi (17 vols., 1806-1818).

This entry was originally from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.