August Friedrich Ferdinand von Kotzebue (German: [ˈaʊɡʊst fɔn ˈkɔtsəbuː], Russian: Евстафий Леонтьевич Коцебу, romanized: Yevstafiy Leontyevich Kotsebu; 3 May [O.S.

This murder gave Metternich the pretext to issue the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819, which dissolved the Burschenschaften, cracked down on the liberal press, and seriously restricted academic freedom in the states of the German Confederation.

Through his association with Graf Goertz, Prussian ambassador at the Russian court, Kotzebue became secretary to the Governor General of Saint Petersburg.

In the space of only a few years, he published six volumes of miscellaneous sketches and stories (Die jüngsten Kinder meiner Laune, 1793–1796) and more than twenty plays, many of which were translated into several European languages.

[4] In April 1800 he decided to return to Saint Petersburg, but on his journey there he was arrested at the border on suspicion of being a Jacobin and was escorted to Tobolsk in Siberia.

However, he had written a comedy which flattered the vanity of Emperor Paul I of Russia; he was soon brought back, presented with an estate in Vooru from the crown lands of Livonia, have received rank of court councillor, and appointed director of the German theatre in Saint Petersburg.

Failing to establish himself in Weimar's literary circles, he moved to Berlin, where he edited Der Freimutige in collaboration with Garlieb Merkel from 1803 to 1807.

[6] In a weekly journal (Literarisches Wochenblatt) which he published in Weimar, he scoffed at the pretensions of those Germans who demanded free institutions, and soon became detested by nationalist liberals.

The assassination of Kotzebue provided Prince Metternich with arguments to convince the Confederation to enact the Carlsbad Decrees, imposing greater restrictions on universities and the press.

Besides his plays, Kotzebue wrote several historical works: his History of the German Empires was burned by nationalist students at the 1817 Wartburg Festival (which Sand attended).

Still read are his autobiographical writings, Meine Flucht nach Paris im Winter 1790 (1791), Über meinen Aufenthalt in Wien (1799), Das merkwürdigste Jahr meines Lebens (1801), Erinnerungen aus Paris (1804), and Erinnerungen von meiner Reise aus Liefland nach Rom und Neapel (1805).

[5] Theatre historians usually consider the runaway success of The Stranger, the English version of Menschenhass und Reue, in both England (where it opened in 1798) and the United States as one of the harbingers of the emerging popularity of theatrical melodrama, which dominated European and American stages for the first seventy-five years of the nineteenth century.

Beethoven's "Turkish March", originally written as part of the incidental music to von Kotzebue's The Ruins of Athens, became one of this composer's most well-known pieces.

In her novel Mansfield Park she used a version of another of his plays, Das Kind der Liebe, adapted by Elizabeth Inchbald as Lover's Vows (1798).