turned to Leipzig to edit with Julian Schmidt
the weekly journal Die Grenzboten, which he conducted until 1861, and
again from 1869 to 1870. In 1867 he became Liberal member for Erfurt
in the North German Reichstag. In 1870, on the breaking out of the
Franco-Prussian war, he was attached to the staff of the Crown Prince,
later the German Emperor Frederick III., and remained in service until
after the battle of Sedan. Subsequently to 1870 his journalistic work
was chiefly for the newly established weekly periodical Im Neuen
Reich. In 1879 he retired from public life and afterward lived in
Wiesbaden, except for the summer months, which he spent on his estate
Siebleben near Gotha. He died at Wiesbaden, April 30th, 1895.

All of Freytag's earliest work, with the single exception of a volume
of poems published in 1845 under the title 'In Breslau,' is dramatic.
His first production was a comedy, 'Die Brautfahrt' (The Wedding
Journey), published in 1844, which although it was awarded a prize
offered by the Royal Theatre in Berlin, found but indifferent popular
favor, as did its successor, the one-act tragedy 'Die Gelehrte' (The
Scholar). With his next play, 'Die Valentine' (1846), Freytag however
was signally successful. This was followed the year after by 'Graf
Waldemar.' He attained his highest dramatic success with the comedy
'Die Journalisten' (The Journalists), which appeared in 1853, and
since its first production in 1854 has maintained its place as one of
the most popular plays on the German stage. But one other play
followed, the tragedy 'Die Fabier' (The Fabii), which appeared in
1859.

He had begun in the mean time his career as a novelist with his most
famous novel, 'Soll und Haben' (Debit and Credit), which was
published in 1855 and met with an immediate and unbounded success.
The appearance of this first novel, furthermore, was most significant,
for it marked at the same time an era both in German literature and in
its author's own career, in that it introduced into the one in its
most recent phase one of the profoundest problems of modern life in
Germany, and unmistakably pointed out, in the other, the direction
which he was subsequently to follow. This latter statement has a
twofold bearing. It is not only that as a writer of novels Freytag did
his most important and lasting work, but that the whole of this work
was in a manner the development of a similar tendency. Although as
different as need be in environm