Karl Ludwig von Pöllnitz

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Karl Ludwig Wilhelm Freiherr von Pöllnitz (born February 25, 1692 in Issum , near Kleve , † June 23, 1775 in Berlin ) was a Prussian writer and adventurer who spent the last decades of his life at the court of Friedrich II .

Pollnitz

origin

Memoires du baron de Pollnitz , 1741

He came from the Thuringian noble family von Pölnitz and was born in Issum on the Dutch border, then part of Kurköln . The family came to Brandenburg-Prussia with his grandfather Gerhard Bernhard von Pölnitz - who was married to a daughter of Moritz von Oranien and a close friend of the first wife of the Great Elector. This was raised there in 1670 to the hereditary baron status.

His parents were Wilhelm Ludwig Freiherr von Pöllnitz († 1693) and his wife Freiin Louise Catharina zu Eulenburg (1663-1711). His father was a Brandenburg colonel and died just a year after the birth of his son. As a widow, his mother married the Minister Franz von Meinders (1630–1695) and when he died, the Court Marshal Christian Ludwig von der Wense . His brother Friedrich Moritz became a royal British major and a major general in Brunswick-Lüneburg.

Life

Pöllnitz spent a large part of his youth (until 1710) in Berlin, where he grew up as a playmate of the future Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm . He and his brother inherited the Buch , Karow and Birkholz estates in 1700 when their grandmother, Eleonore Freifrau von Pölnitz, who had outlived her own children, died. Since his father did not leave him much, he first chose military service and fought in Flanders.

According to his not very reliable memoirs (which only go up to 1723), he then traveled widely, to the smaller courts in Germany, but also to Madrid (where he was supposedly a colonel), London, Warsaw, Rome and Sicily. He also went to the court of Hanover, where he lost all his money at the gaming table and, on the recommendation of Electress Sophie, moved on to Paris in 1713, where he was introduced to court by Liselotte von der Pfalz , the Dowager Duchess of Orléans. The Peace of Utrecht put an end to military career plans. He traveled on through Prussia, Poland and Saxony, where, as later still more often, he was imprisoned for gambling debts, and in 1716 tried his luck again in Paris in dire financial straits. He wanted to marry a wealthy widow who died before that, borrowed money from the Duchess of Orleans and converted to Catholicism in 1717 in order to further his career prospects. Later he seems to have changed denominations several times. But when this got to the ears of the Prussian Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, his old friend from childhood, he withdrew his offer to a junior chamberlain in Berlin in 1718. After participating in the Cellamare conspiracy against the regent in 1718, he also messed with the Duchess of Orleans, the regent's mother, who moreover said of him: "He can talk and does not speak a little" (had the same opinion Pöllnitz reversed from her). Forced further to travel through Europe, he allegedly threw himself at the feet of the Pope in Rome in the hope of making a career as a priest, but then found a better source of income as the author of entertaining gossip stories. From 1730 he monetized his (very unreliable) memoirs in Amsterdam (printed in Liège in 1734), which are basically travelogues from the cities of Europe and at that time had a similar success as the Baedeker . This was followed in 1732 by a book about the court in Hanover or more precisely about the Princess von Ahlden , in which he warmed up the Königsmarck affair, based on such dubious sources as the novels of Anton Ulrich von Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel . Nevertheless, the book was a great success in England, where people like to learn more about George I's “corpses in the cellar” . His greatest overall success was La Saxe Galante from 1734 on the love affairs of Augustus the Strong . He also wrote travel reports from fashionable seaside resorts (and centers of gambling) such as Spa and Aix ( Aachen ). His memoirs were continued in 1737, this time with a description of the Berlin court from 1688 to 1710.

In 1735 he returned to Berlin via Vienna and, after becoming Protestant again, found a job with the soldier king, but spied for Vienna and Dresden at the same time. He became a member of the tobacco college and chamberlain. In this position he was also taken over by Friedrich II, who valued him as an amusing chat bag. As Crown Prince, his opinion of Pöllnitz was still brief: “Divertissant while eating, lock up afterwards”. Friedrich increased his meager income under the soldier king of 250 thalers a year by six times, repaid his 6000 thalers debts and appointed him chief ceremonial master in 1740. In 1741 Pöllnitz followed the young king in the First Silesian War to the soldiers' quarters and hurried ahead of him in August 1742 for a spa stay in Aachen. In May 1746 he stayed with the king for a spa stay in Bad Pyrmont. In the circle of Frederick the Great he was often the object of rough jokes, so that he temporarily took his leave in 1744. When Pöllnitz died impoverished in 1775, he was, as Friedrich wrote to Voltaire , mourned by no one but his creditors.

Works

  • Histoire secrète de la duchesse de Hanovre , London 1732 (anonymous), German and Dutch 1734, 1735 Secret story of the Duchess of Hannovre (approx. 80 pages), greatly expanded with inserts that have nothing to do with the matter, in Berlin 1825 as Fredegunde or memorabilia to the secret history of the Hanoverian court .
  • Mémoires contenants les observations qu'il a faites dans ses voyages et le caractère des personnages qui composent les principales cours de l'Europe , 3 vols., Liege (Liège) 1734, 4 vols. London 1735 (English edition 1738/9)
  • News from Baron Carl Ludwig von Pöllnitz; Containing, which he particularly noted on his travels, no less the characteristics of those persons, of which the most distinguished courts in Europe consist. Newly improved from the French and translated into German by a considerably larger second edition. First to fourth parts, Frankfurt am Main, 1735
  • Lettres et mémoires , 2 vol. 1740
  • Nouveaux mémoires du Baron Pöllnitz contenant l'histoire de sa vie et la relations de ses premiers voyages , 2 vol., Amsterdam 1737 and Frankfurt 1738.
  • La Saxe galante , Amsterdam 1734 (416 pages), anonymous, German “Das galante Sachsen”, Frankfurt 1735, 1739, reissued: Munich, German 1995, ISBN 3-423-02362-7 .
  • Liaisons King August d. Strong , Berlin 1784.
  • État abrégé de la cour de Saxe sous la regne d'August III. , Frankfurt 1734, German Breslau 1736
  • Amusements des eaux de Spa, à ceux qui vont boire ces eaux minérales sur les lieux , Amsterdam 1734, anonymous (also in German 1735)
  • Amusements des eaux d'Aix la Chapelle (meaning Aachen), 3 volumes, Amsterdam 1736
  • Mémoires pour servir a l'histoire de quatre dernier souverains de la maison de Brandenbourg , Berlin 1791 (F.Brunn as editor from the estate, also as a German edition in the same year; the fourth monarch, Frederick II, is not dealt with Draft from the first years of government is also in the estate, French and German edition in the same year)
  • Lettres saxonnes , 2 vols. 1738

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ This is how Theodor Fontane reports : Walks through the Mark Brandenburg , Volume 4 ( Spreeland ) “Right of the Spree” - Book: The Roebels.
personal data
SURNAME Pöllnitz, Karl Ludwig von
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Prussian writer and adventurer
DATE OF BIRTH February 25, 1692
PLACE OF BIRTH Issum
DATE OF DEATH June 23, 1775
Place of death Berlin