Augustus Friedrich Ferdinand Von Kotzebue, a prolific German dramatist and miscellaneous writer, was born on the 3rd of May 1761, at Weimar, where his father was a counsellor of legation. He early evinced a propensity to poetry, and, whilst yet a boy, the representation of a play which he witnessed inspired in him such a love of the drama as determined his future destiny. He received the rudiments of his education at his native place, and when he was about sixteen years of age he entered the University of Jena. Here he remained for one year; but certain family circumstances occurred which induced him to remove to Duisburg, where he studied for a short time at the university, and returned to Jena in the year 1779. He was destined for the profession of the law, but the master-passion predominated; and in gratifying his love of the drama, as well as of literature in general, he consumed no inconsiderable portion of his time. If at this period he did not display great talent, he at least evinced wonderful versatility. Tragedy, comedy, ballads, essays, and other species of literary composition, flowed rapidly from his prolific pen. Their merits, however, he himself confesses in his autobiography, were exceedingly equivocal, although some of his plays were acted with applause. In his nineteenth year, he closed his studies at Jena by taking the character of an opponent at a doctor's degree. Soon afterwards he returned to his native place, where he diligently applied himself to the Pandects, and was admitted as advocate. But his addresses to the muses were still as assiduously paid as ever; and in the ardour of his desire for distinction he tried his skill in almost every species of composition, imitating, as caprice or admiration predominated, all the great writers of Germany, Schiller, Goethe, Wieland, Hermes, and others.

In 1781, on the invitation, it is said, of the Prussian ambassador, Kotzebue went to St Petersburg, where he obtained a situation under Von Bawr, general of engineers. The latter became his warm friend, and recommended him to the empress, who, on the death of Bawr, which occurred about two years afterwards, nominated him a counsellor. His imperial patronage first placed him in a judicial situation at Revel, and finally appointed him president of Estonia, on which occasion he was ennobled. His literary ambition kept pace with his growing fortunes, and drama succeeded drama from his pen, with great, if not increasing, rapidity. In 1790, on a journey to Pyrmont, he published his Doctor Baldrit with the Iron Forehead, under the name of Knigge; a work which created a considerable sensation at the time of its appearance, but by which he lowered himself not a little in public estimation. Dismissed from the imperial service, he retired for a time to an estate which he possessed at some distance from Narva; but, in 1797, he returned to Weimar, with a pension of 1000 guilders. Three years afterwards, he was induced to pay a short visit to Russia; but he had scarcely crossed the frontiers of the empire when he was arrested by order of Paul I. and sent to Siberia. This treatment of Kotzebue is said to have originated in a suspicion of the autocrat that he was the author of some political pamphlets, in which the emperor was personally attacked; but the exile was kept entirely ignorant of the cause of his banishment. He was, however, shortly afterwards recalled, and, as he informs us himself, well received by the emperor, who confided to his direction the theatre of St Petersburg.

After the death of Paul I. Kotzebue returned to Weimar, and in 1802 was admitted a member of the Academy of Sciences at Berlin. Some disputes which he had with Goethe and the Schlegels induced him to remove to Paris, where the French literati flattered his love of adulation by the attentions which they paid him. It is not much to his credit that he repaid their kindness by the publication of a calumnious work entitled My Recollections of Paris. The Italians were treated in the same spirit of illiberality in his Recollections of Rome and Naples. About the end of 1803 he commenced, in conjunction with Merakel, a journal entitled Der Freymuthige, "The Free-hearted," in which Napoleon was virulently attacked. In 1806 he went again to Russia, and lived from 1807 on his estate in Esthonia, never ceasing to write against the imperial usurper of France. Literature and politics continued to engage the pen of Kotzebue until 1813, when, as counsellor of state, he followed the Russian head-quarters during the campaign of that year; and, in order more effectually to excite the nations against Napoleon, he published in Berlin the Russian-German National Gazette (Volksblatt). After the affairs of Europe were decided by the victory of Waterloo, he went to St Petersburg; but was, in 1817, commissioned by the Emperor Alexander to return to his own country, and to report upon the state of literature and public opinion, for which he was to receive a salary of 15,000 roubles. He who had exerted himself so much in favour of Russia, sometimes, it is affirmed, at the expense of his native country, was not likely to be warmly welcomed on his return home. From the first he was looked upon as a spy; and the zeal which he displayed in his new employment soon confirmed this opinion, and prepared the way for his destruction. He established a literary weekly paper, in which judgment was passed on the publications of the day, and political opinions advanced at once dishonourable and obnoxious to Germany, then awakening from its torpor, and heated with the expectation of concessions on the part of its rulers, and by delusive anticipations of representative systems. In his journal Kotzebue steadily ridiculed every attempt to form liberal institutions; and not only was every species of political amelioration opposed, but a marked enmity to the liberty of the press was exhibited. A private communication of his to the Emperor of Russia, which had been obtained it matters not how, was published in a German paper, and republished throughout the country; and its appearance excited a strong feeling of hostility and indignation against the author. Shielded as he was by the power of the autocrat, he found it necessary to quit Weimar for Mannheim, where his literary and diplomatic labours were resumed with increased activity. Unfortunately for him, he began to point his pen more directly against the wild dreams of liberty which were seething in the minds of the great mass of the students at the German universities. A spark of dangerous enthusiasm caught the heated brain of a young fanatic named Sand, who thought that he had done a deed of heroic virtue when, on the 23rd March 1819, he deliberately murdered the advocate of tyranny and despotism. The murderer immediately gave himself up to justice, and suffered on the scaffold. Kotzebue, though the contemporary of Goethe and Schiller, was the most popular German author of his day. His fame was gained by his dramas, amounting to about a hundred in number. The best of them are "Die Indianer in England" (The Indians in England); "Menschenhass und Reue" (Misanthropy and Repentance), which, under the name of "The Stranger," still keeps the stage in this country; "Die beiden Klingsbergs" (The two Klingsbergs), which has not yet been translated into English, but which Goethe pronounced the best of all Kotzebue's plays; "Der Strassenkriuger ans Kindersliebe," else known as Lovers' Vows; "Die Spanier in Peru," adapted by Sheridan into English, under the title of Pizarro, and still a stock-piece in the theatres; "Benyowski;" and the "Virgin of the Sun." These plays are of very different degrees of merit; but it may be said that, except perhaps "The two Klingsbergs," not one of them has any permanent value. Kotzebue was in truth not so much a dramatist as a playwright. His great object was to startle his audience. The machinery he employed was pathos worked up to a harrowing pitch of tenderness, sentiment carried to the extreme of maudlin and bursts of passion, which even the votaries of the "litterature extravagante" of France would disclaim as overdone. The freshness, or at least the strangeness of his plays, raised him at once to the height of popularity. He dazzled there like a meteor, and for as short a time; and then vanished into the darkness. Kotzebue attempted history, and wrote an extremely bad History of the German Empire, and an equally bad Early History of Prussia. At the time of his assassination he was in his fifty-ninth year. He had been three times married, and left behind him thirteen children. One of these children, Otto Von Kotzebue, became a captain in the Russian navy, and published an account of a voyage which he made round the world in 1824-26.