At the University of Königsberg he got acquainted with the teachings and thinking of Immanuel Kant, his intellect was sharpened and his zeal for learning quickened by the great thinker's influence.

Nevertheless Kant′s categorical imperative and his ideas on the commandment of reason, from which all duties and obligations derive, did not prevent von Gentz from yielding to the taste for wine, women and gambling.

[1] When in 1785 he returned to Berlin, he received the appointment of secretary to the royal Generaldirectorium, his brilliant talents soon gaining him promotion to the rank of councillor for war (Kriegsrath).

As a quick-witted young man, he greeted it with enthusiasm, but its subsequent developments cooled his ardour and he was converted to more conservative views by Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, the translation of which into German (1794) was his first literary venture.

In 1797, at the instance of English statesmen, he published a translation of a history of French finance by François Divernois (1757–1842), an eminent Genevese exile naturalized and knighted in England, extracts from which he had previously given in his journal.

For a Prussian official to venture to give uncalled-for advice to his sovereign was a breach of propriety not calculated to increase his chances of favour, but it gave von Gentz a conspicuous position in the public eye, which his brilliant talents and literary style enabled him to maintain.

[1] Opposition to France was the inspiring principle of the Historisches Journal founded by him in 1799 and 1800, which once more held up English institutions as the model, and he became in Germany the mouthpiece of British policy towards the revolutionary aggressions of the French Republic.

Before returning to Berlin to make arrangements for transferring himself finally to Vienna, von Gentz paid a visit to London, where he made the acquaintance of Pitt and Grenville, who were so impressed with his talents that in addition to large money presents, he was guaranteed an annual pension by the British government in recognition of the value of the services of his pen against Napoleon Bonaparte.

Von Gentz had no official mandate from the Austrian government, and whatever hopes he may have cherished of privately influencing the situation in the direction of an alliance between the two German powers were speedily dashed by the Battle of Jena.

Von Gentz, who from the winter of 1806 onwards divided his time between Prague and the Bohemian watering places, seemed to devote himself wholly to the pleasures of society, his fascinating personality gaining him a ready reception in those exalted circles that were to prove of use to him later on in Vienna.

He was secretary to the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815) a series of meetings to design a longterm peace plan for Europe, which meant he was state of affairs manager and head of protocol.

[3] However, the liberalism of his early years was gone, and he had become reconciled to von Metternich's view that in an age of decay, the sole function of a statesman was to prop up mouldering institutions.

It was he who inspired the policy of repressing the freedom of the universities, and he noted in his diary as a day more important than that of Leipzig the session of the Vienna conference of 1819, which decided to make the convocation of representative assemblies in the German states impossible, by enforcing the letter of Article XIII of the Act of Confederation.

However, passion tormented him to the end, and his infatuation for Fanny Elssler, the celebrated danseuse, forms the subject of some remarkable letters to his friend Rahel, the wife of Varnhagen von Ense (1830–1831).

Though by birth he belonged to the middle class in a country of hide-bound aristocracy, he lived to move on equal terms in the society of princes and statesmen, which would never have been the case had he been notoriously bought and sold.

Apart from their value as historical documents, von Gentz′s writings are literary monuments, classic examples of nervous and luminous German language prose and of French as a model for diplomatic style.