In most of his writings Zacharias Werner comes across as an eccentric propagandist; yet he was the most gifted dramatist of German Romanticism, and his stage successes in the first decade of the nineteenth century led many contemporaries to believe that he was the natural successor to Friedrich Schiller. He has been remembered in the twentieth century largely as the progenitor of the genre of fate tragedy, a reputation which many critics have come to dispute.

Born in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, U.S.S.R.) on 18 November 1768, Friedrich Ludwig Zacharias Werner was the third and only surviving child of Jakob Friedrich Werner, professor of history and rhetoric at Königsberg University, and Luise Henriette Werner, née Pietsch. Since his father was also the theater censor in Königsberg, the boy gained an insight into staging techniques and the irregularities of theatrical life...