[1][2] Friedrich Ludwig Lindner was born in Mitau, a prosperous midsized town in Courland (modern day Latvia) which at that time was an increasingly semi-detached territory in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.
[3] Working with Joseph Schreyvogel, during this period he co-edited a weekly newspaper in Vienna called "Das Sonntagsblatt" ("The Sunday News sheet").
[1] In 1809 Lindner abandoned his medical work, which he found insufficiently fulfilling[1] and moved again, traveling via Munich, Regensburg, Nuremberg and Bayreuth.
[1] He ended up relocating to Weimar, close to Jena where he had studied as a student, and where he now took a writing job with the polymath publisher Friedrich Justin Bertuch.
[1] Here he fell seriously ill, which caused him to stay with his uncle for longer than originally planned: he was nursed by a widow whose husband had been a French government official.
[1] In 1813, by now living in Jena, with a fresh outbreak of fighting, Lindner was officially entrusted with the billeting of francophone troops, partly because he had mastered the French language.
[1][4] Although little is known of his attitude to the respective belligerents in the 25-year "world war" that provided the backdrop for much of his life, it does appear that the successive reverses suffered by the French as their armies were rolled back after October 1813 left him unmoved.
[3] The efficiency of the censor saw to it that the edition of "Nemesis" containing the report was not widely seen,[3] but another editor, Ludwig Wieland [de] got hold of the document and published it in another (low circulation) newspaper called "Der Volksfreunde" (The Friend of the People) in January 1818.
[2] (Von Kotzebue became so detested that he, too, had to leave the area, moving to Mannheim where in 1819 he was assassinated by the theology student, Karl Ludwig Sand.
[3] As a journalist, Lindner showed himself to be a supporter of the new king, William I of Württemberg, even where this sometimes ran counter to the views of his newspaper's proprietor, Johann Friedrich Cotta.
[9] The appearance in 1824 of a second incendiary publication entitled "Geheime Papiere" ("Secret Papers") proved more damaging since the work was quickly attributed to him despite initial expressions of uncertainty.