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Heinrich Laube (18 September 1806 – 1 August 1884), German dramatist, novelist and theatre-director, was born at Szprotawa in Prussian Silesia.
These writings, in which, after the fashion of Heinrich Heine and Ludwig Börne, he severely criticized the political regime in Germany, together with the part he played in the literary movement known as "Young Germany," led to his being subjected to police surveillance and his works confiscated. On his return, in 1834, from a journey to Italy, undertaken in the company of Karl Gutzkow, Laube was expelled from Saxony and imprisoned for nine months in Berlin. In 1836 he married the widow of Professor Hänel of Leipzig; almost immediately afterwards he suffered a year's imprisonment for his revolutionary sympathies. He was the stepfather of Albert Hänel.
In 1839, he again settled in Leipzig and began a literary activity as a playwright. Chief among his earlier productions are the tragedies Monaldeschi (1845) and Struensee (1847); the comedies Rokoko, oder die alten Herren (1846); Gottsched und Gellert (1847); and Die Karlsschüler (1847), of which the youthful Friedrich Schiller is the hero.
In 1848, Laube was elected to the Frankfurt Parliament for the district of Elbogen, but resigned in the spring of 1849, when he was appointed artistic director of the Burgtheater in Vienna. This office he held until 1867, and in this period fall his finest dramatic productions, notably the tragedies Graf Essex (1856) and Montrose (1859), and his historical romance Der deutsche Krieg (1865–1866, 9 vols), which graphically pictures a period in the Thirty Years' War.
In 1869, he became director of the Leipzig Stadttheater, but returned to Vienna in 1870, where in 1872 he was placed at the head of the new Wiener Stadttheater; with the exception of a short interval he managed this theatre with brilliant success until his retirement from public life in 1880. He has left a valuable record of his work in Vienna and Leipzig in the three volumes Burgtheater (1868), Das norddeutsche Theater (1872) and Das Wiener Stadttheater (1875).
He was still active after his retirement, and in the five years preceding his death in Vienna on 1 August 1884, he wrote the romances and novels Die Böhminger (1880), Louison (1881), Der Schatten-Wilhelm (1883), and published an interesting volume of reminiscences, Erinnerungen, 1841–1881 (1882).
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