Writer of the celebrated autobiography, born on the 16th of February 1726 at Königsberg, his father being a Prussian general. After distinguishing himself for his quickness and imagination at the university of Königsberg, he entered the Prussian army in 1742, and soon became an orderly officer on Frederick’s own staff. But within a year he fell into disgrace because of a love affair—whether real or imaginary—with the king’s sister Princess Amalie, and when in 1743 his Austrian cousin presented him with a horse and opened a correspondence, Frederick had him arrested, a few days after the battle of Soor, and confined in the fortress of Glatz, whence in 1746 he escaped. Making his way home and thence to Vienna, in the vain hope of finding employment under his now disgraced cousin, he finally met a Russian general, who took him into the Russian service. But, receiving news that owing to his cousin’s death he had become the owner of the family estates, he returned to Germany almost immediately. He was made a captain of Austrian cavalry, but never served, as his time was fully taken up with litigation connected with the inherited estates. In 1754 he visited Prussia, but was there arrested and confined in Magdeburg for ten years, making frequent attempts, of incredible audacity, to escape from the harshness of his gaolers. But after the close of the Seven Years’ War, Maria Theresa requested that he should, as being a captain in her service, be at once released. Trenck then spent some years in Aix-la-Chapelle, managing an agency for Hungarian wines and publishing a newspaper, and on the failure of these enterprises he returned to his Hungarian estates. Here he composed his celebrated autobiography and many other writings. He visited England and France in 1774–1777, and was afterwards employed by the government in diplomatic or secret service missions. After the death of Frederick the Great he was allowed to enter Prussia, and stayed in Berlin for two years. In 1788 he visited Paris, where he was the hero of society for a moment; next year he returned to Hungary in order to collect his writings in a uniform edition, but in 1791 he returned to Paris to be a spectator of the Revolution, and after living in safety throughout the Terror he was at last denounced as an Austrian spy and guillotined on the 25th of July 1794.
His autobiography, which has been translated into several languages, first appeared in German at Berlin and Vienna (13 vols.) in 1787. Shortly afterwards a French version, by his own hand, was published at Strassburg. His other published works are in eight volumes and appeared shortly after the autobiography at Leipzig. A reprint of the autobiography appeared in 1910 in “Reclam’s Universal Series.”
See Wahrmann, Leben und Thaten des Franz, Freiherr von der Trenck and Friedrich Freiherrn von der Trencks Leben, Kerker und Tod (both published at Leipzig in 1837).
