THE FOLLOWING TEXT is a transcription of a manuscript in the Nachlass August von Kotzebue (Slg Adam [K 90]) located in the Handschriftenabteilung of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin—Preußischer Kulturbesitz zu Berlin. It is published here with the kind permission of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin.

In transcribing the text and preparing it for publication, the chief goal was to make this document available to scholars and others who might be interested in Kotzebue's life and works. The text presented here does not follow every principle that one might associate with a critical edition. In general, however, an attempt has been made to reproduce Kotzebue's text as it appears on the pages of the manuscript. Thus, Kotzebue's spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and grammar are preserved as faithfully as possible, with dubious cases (i.e., where the handwriting is unclear) rendered using grammar and spelling consistent with the rest of the manuscript.

The following additional principles have been adopted for the purposes of this transcription:

• Certain word combinations, which in contemporary German would appear as a single compound word, appear in the manuscript as two separate words. These have been left unaltered.

• The manuscript contains a number of insertions, sometimes located between the lines and at other times in the margins. Where insertions do not disrupt the fl ow of a sentence, they have been integrated into the main text. Where insertions cannot be integrated easily into the main text, they are reproduced in the endnotes.

• Where it has not been possible to decipher a word or, in some cases, a part of a word, it is rendered in the text as a lined space: _____.

• Where there is considerable uncertainty regarding the transcription of an individual word, a note has been included to that effect. However, there has been no systematic attempt to list all possible transcriptions of individual words (Lesarten).

• Words that are underlined in the original manuscript appear here in italics.

• At some point before or during the cataloging of this manuscript, its pages were collated and then numbered out of their intended sequence. The present transcription restores the original page sequence while retaining the numbering now found on the manuscript.