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BARON FREDERICK VON DER
TRENCK &
PRINCESS
ANNA AMALIE OF PRUSSIA
To
my knowledge, my research
has uncovered virtually all the English and German literature published
between 1712
and the early 1990s which mentions either Princess Amalie of Prussia or
Baron
Frederick von der Trenck. This research, combined with my original
research on
them in the State Archive in Berlin, makes this the most comprehensive
work ever published on both Princess Amalie of Prussia and Baron
Frederick von der
Trenck.FREDERICK
VON DER TRENCK, BEST SELLING AUTHOR
Though Frederick von der
Trenck's
autobiography was first published in
the late 1780s, in his lifetime alone it sold around 40 000 copies in
German, a huge seller for the time. It was also translated
into
French,
Dutch, English, Hungarian and Italian. In 1912 Gustav Gugitz and Max
von Portheim published a bibliography listing some 195 published titles
of or to do with Trenck's memoirs. Since then some twenty editions or
adaptions have also been published. Even now, more than two hundred
years after his death on the guillotine in Paris, the light shill
shines on the legend of Frederick the Great's most (in)famous prisoner.
When Casanova, the famous Italian stallion, first came to public notice in Europe he was called a "Trenck", just as now we would call someone a "Casanova". Trenck became a famous man throughout Europe at the end of the 1700s |