Max Ring

Max Ring (August 4, 1817 – March 28, 1901) was a German physician, novelist, poet, and dramatist.

Biography Max Ring was born in the town of Zauditz, Austrian Empire, the son of a farmer. He began studying medicine at the University of Breslau in 1836. To complete his medical studies, in 1838 he travelled to Berlin with his childhood friend Ludwig Traube. It was there where he met young intellectuals such as Moritz Carrière, Karl Grün and Heinrich Bernhard Oppenheim and made his debut as an author in 1839 with a volume of poems that he edited together with his friend Moritz Fränkel.

Graduating as in 1840, he began practicing medicine at Gleiwitz where he experienced the hardship and social conflicts in the countryside. He worked as a physician during the outbreak of the typhus epidemic in Upper Silesia and described the suffering he witnessed in a socially critical paper on the causes and course of the epidemic. This text underwent censorship. During the revolution in 1848, Ring took part in the political movement as a staunch democrat and was attacked with an anti-Semitic pamphlet by his opposition. Because of the nature of their deaths, Kleist and Vogel were denied church burial and were instead interred where they died and the gravesite fell into disrepair for most of the nineteenth century. It was freshened up when Kleist became admired by late-century nationalists and was commemorated with a large stonehead for the 1936 Olympic Games. A poem of Ring's was inscribed on the tomb. In 1941, Georg Minde-Pouet, a Nazi Kleist scholar and librarian, informed Germany's Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels that the quatrain on the tomb was written by a Jew, and Ring's words were removed.

Works

Gedichte. Leipzig, 1839 (with Moritz Fränkel) De Typho Abdominali, Berlin 1840 (Diss.; Digitalisat) Revolution. Breslau, 1848. (Gedicht) Berlin und Breslau. 1847–1849. Roman. 2 Bde., Breslau, 1849 Die Genfer. Trauerspiel in 5 Akten. Breslau, 1850 Die Kinder Gottes. Roman. 3 Bde. Breslau, 1851 Der große Kurfürst und der Schöppenmeister. Historischer Roman aus Preußens Vergangenheit. 3 Bde. Breslau, 1852 Stadtgeschichten. 4 Bde. Berlin, 1852 Aus dem Tagebuches eines Berliner Arztes. Berlin, 1856 Hinter den Coulissen. Humoristische Skizzen aus der Theaterwelt. Berlin, 1857 John Milton und seine Zeit. Historischer Roman. Frankfurt a. M., 1857 Rosenkreuzer und Illuminaten. Historischer Roman aus dem 18. Jahrhundert. 4 Bde. Berlin, 1861 Vaterländische Geschichten. 2 Bde Berlin, 1862 Neue Stadtgeschichten. 2 Bde. Berlin, 1865 Ein verlorenes Geschlecht. 6 Bde. Berlin, 1867 Lorbeer und Cypresse. Literaturbilder. Berlin, 1869 (Darin u. a. über Johann Christian Günther, Moses Mendelssohn, Heinrich von Kleist, Friedrich Hölderlin) Götzen und Götter. Roman. 4 Bde. Berlin, 1870 In der Schweiz. Reisebilder und Novellen. 2 Bde. Leipzig, 1870 Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. Berlin, 1870 Carl Sand und seine Freunde. Roman aus der Zeit der alten Burschenschaft. 4 Bde. Berlin, 1873 David Kalisch, der Vater des Kladderadatsch und Begründer der Berliner Lokalposse. Berlin, 1873 Der Kleinstädter in Berlin. 2 Bde. Berlin, 1873 Unfehlbar. Zeitroman. 4 Bde. Jena, 1874 Der große Krach. Roman. 4 Bde. Jena, 1875 Neue Stadtgeschichten. 3 Bde. Leipzig, 1876 Das Haus Hillel. Historischer Roman aus der Zeit der Zerstörung Jerusalems. 3 Bde. Berlin, 1879 Die Frauenverschwörung, zweiaktige Operette, Musik von Gustav Hinrichs, unter Hernahme des Stoffs des Lustspiels von Arthur Müller Die Verschwörung der Frauen oder Die Preußen in Berlin von 1858, 1886 Berliner Leben. Kulturstudien und Sittenbilder. Leipzig, 1882 Berliner Kinder. Roman. 3 Bde. Berlin, 1883 Die deutsche Kaiserstadt Berlin und ihre Umgebung. 2 Bde. Leipzig, 1883–1884 Die Spiritisten. Erzählung. Berlin, 1885 Erinnerungen. 2 Bde. Berlin, 1898