author
Freiherr von der Friedrich Trenck
1726–1794
A Prussian officer, restless adventurer, and memoirist, he lived the kind of life that reads like a novel. Imprisonment, daring escapes, court intrigue, and a dramatic death during the French Revolution all helped turn his story into legend.
2 Audiobooks
The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck, Volume 1
by Freiherr von der Friedrich Trenck
The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck, Volume 2
by Freiherr von der Friedrich Trenck
About the author
Born in 1726, Friedrich Freiherr von der Trenck became known as a Prussian officer, adventurer, and author whose life was shaped by conflict and controversy. Sources including Wikipedia and Deutsche Biographie describe him as a cousin of the Austrian military commander Franz von der Trenck, and as a figure whose early promise in the Prussian military gave way to suspicion, arrest, and long imprisonment.
His fame rests largely on the extraordinary turns of his life. He spent years confined in the fortress of Magdeburg, later wrote vivid memoirs about his sufferings and escapes, and built a reputation across Europe as both a self-dramatizing storyteller and a survivor of political intrigue. That mixture of personal adventure and self-portraiture helped make his life story especially memorable for later readers.
He died in Paris in 1794, during the French Revolution. However embellished some parts of his own account may be, von der Trenck remains a striking 18th-century character: soldier, prisoner, wanderer, and writer all at once.