Georg Klindworth
Georg Klindworth ( born April 16, 1798 in Göttingen, † January 1882 in a suburb of Paris) was a German diplomat and secret agent who was in the service of several European statesmen and princes.
Life and work
Klindworth was the third child of a mechanic and watchmaker. About his youth Nothing is known. From 1814 (? ), He studied philology at the University of Göttingen, where he received his doctorate in 1817.
From 1819 Klindworth worked as private secretary to the Portuguese Ambassador in Berlin. In the years 1821/22 he was in the Prussian service. As an agent provocateur he tried to move the publisher Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus for anonymous publication of a liberal- democratic Article. The project failed and Klindworth had to leave Berlin. Three years later, in 1825, he was tutor to the children of a countess in Hildesheim. In 1827 he went to Brunswick, where he entered the service of Duke Karl II of Brunswick. He was there first private secretary in the ducal cabinet and from September 1828 Legationsrat of Foreign Affairs. In this role, he supported the Duke among others in a dispute with the Kingdom of Hanover.
In September 1830, Charles II was overthrown and fled to England. Klindworth, who served as State Council of Charles II, tried through diplomatic channels a return of the Duke to Braunschweig allow. Increasing conflict was the consequence that Klindworth the ducal services finally left in March 1832 after he had separated already in 1829 for a short time due to low pay of the Duke.
Klindworth now went to Paris and entered from 1832 for several years in the the French king Louis- Philippe I, in the Secret Cabinet, he played an important role services. In the 1840s he was commissioned by the Austrian statesman Metternich, the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston and other European princes and politicians with diplomatic missions and agents contracts. Mostly he worked simultaneously as a double agent for several clients.
From 1848 he was employed by the Württemberg King Wilhelm I, to this 1852 dismissed him for disloyalty. Klindworth now went from Stuttgart to Weimar. In the following years it various secret missions were still transmitted, for example by the Russian Tsar Nicholas I and his successor Tsar Alexander II. Klindworth In January 1882, died in a suburb of Paris.
Klindworths ( illegitimate? ) Daughter Agnes Street Klindworth ( 1825-1906 ) was a mistress of the musician Franz Liszt, with whom she led an extensive letter correspondence.
In the literature Klindworth is characterized as " significant political secret agent of international stature " and as " a man of extraordinary ability, enterprise, amorality and ubiquity ".