Fritz Reuter - Early Career and Imprisonment

Early Career and Imprisonment

In 1831, Reuter began to attend lectures on jurisprudence at the University of Rostock, and in the following year went to the University of Jena. Here he was a member of the political students' club, or German Burschenschaft, and in 1833 was arrested in Berlin by the Prussian government and interned at Fort Silberberg in Silesia. Although the only charge which could be proved against him was that he had been seen wearing the club's colours, he was condemned to death for high treason. This sentence was commuted by King Frederick William III of Prussia to imprisonment for thirty years in a Prussian fortress. In 1838, through the personal intervention of the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg, he was delivered over to the authorities of his native state, and he spent the next two years in the fortress of Dömitz, but was set free in 1840, when an amnesty was proclaimed after the accession of Frederick William IV to the Prussian throne.

Although Reuter was now thirty years of age, he went to Heidelberg to resume his legal studies, but was forced by his father to give them up when it was found that he paid little attention to his studies. After returning to Mecklenburg, he spent some time with his uncle, a minister at Jabel, and then began working on an estate, in 1842, as Strom (trainee). Finding out, upon his father's death in 1845, that he had been disinherited, he realized that acquiring an estate of his own was out of the question, and he began to write, first in High German, later, with more success, in Low German. In 1850 he settled as a private tutor in the little town of Treptow an der Tollense in Pomerania (today Altentreptow, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern), and was now able to marry Luise Kuntze, the daughter of a Mecklenburg pastor.