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Karl Julius Lange (November 13, 1755 - Winter 1813), German art dealer, author, journalist and secret police member in the Napoleonic age.

Born under the name Simson Alexander David in Brunswick/Lower Saxony as the tenth and youngest son of the "court jew" Alexander David, he grew up in a family with a great fortune and much political influence. His father was one of the most respected advisers of duke Charles (Karl)I., who needed the money of his "Kammeragent" or chamber agent for his luxury expenditures. With the death of his father (1765), young Simson inherited at least 10 000 gold taler, worth a few million dollars compared to the purchasing power of the present. Due to the financial unability and extravagance of his young mother Deborah Siemons, Simson was in danger of becoming bankrupt, even before he started as an adult his own business as an arts dealer. Only the intervention of his guardian saved him from ruin.

Under the name Alexander Daveson he started his business in the year 1778. Even while he had famous customers like the duke of Brunswick, the scientist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, his income seems to have been very modest. Plans to produce a collection of copies of ancient engraved gems never became reality. Shortly after he was involved in a scandal at the very popular lottery of nearby Kassel (April 1779), the new duke of Brunswick, Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand, sent him to jail. Despite a detailed investigation, there was no encriminating evidence against Simson. Maybe the successor to the throne only wanted to take revenge against the man who had sold lots of luxury goods to the former duke.

While he was in jail at Brunswick, the only man, who helped Simson was the author Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, who had great sympathies for outsiders of all kind. After his release Simson moved to Lessing at Wolfenbüttel and stayed with him until the death of the famous librarian and author (February 15, 1781). In his last months Lessing was a beneficiary of Simsons fortune and literally died "in the arms" of his young friend.

Soon after Lessings death Simson travelled to England, where he stayed nine years. Since no detailed information or documents were found in the archives about these years of Simsons life, it is left to speculation, what kind of profession he had. Maybe he worked as a teacher, translator, travel companion or even Deklamator (recitator).

In October 1790 Simson came back to Germany with the name Karl Julius Lange (apparently he was baptized) and entered the stage of the Hamburg theatre with "attic entertainment", excerpts from Shakespeare plays and parliamentary debates. The audience reacted with laughter. Nevertheless, Simson repeatedly tried to make a living as an actor. In Brunswick he was welcomed by the court and got a chance to perform with recitations in the local opera house.

After a short stay at Hannover and Vienna, where he published his first article about German language in the Wiener Zeitung, he went to Switzerland. In 1794 he settled at Schweinfurt, Upper Franconia, where he married the sister of a Bayreuth official and wrote his first, two-volume book (Über die Schweiz und die Schweizer/On Switzerland and the Swiss). It was widely discussed in the german press, because Karl Julius Lange critized the political system of Swiss cities like Zurich and Basel as undemocratic and inhuman.

For a few months Lange worked as a journalist for the Englische Blätter,a magazine about English politics. In 1796 he started his career as secret press agent of Karl-August von Hardenberg, the Prussian minister for the Bayreuth and Ansbach region. Hardenberg needed a man for his propaganda against local and regional noblemen, who felt overruled by Prussia and who looked for some help in Vienna, where the Austrian Emperor took any chance to weaken Prussia.

After several years as the editor-in-chief of the Deutsche Reichs- und Staatszeitung, Lange was sent to jail in May 1799 at Bayreuth for insulting the Emperor and the Austrian army. Even while he had published his biweekly newspaper and all his personal articles with the secret assistance and subsidies of Hardenberg, the minister couldn´t help him no longer, for the Berlin authorities had no interest in provoking the Austrian government.

Lange twice fled from jail and emigrated to Altona, then a Danish town next to Hamburg with a very liberal press law. The next years he published a lot of articles and books about his life at Bayreuth, his sentence and stubbornly tried to get a pardon from the Prussian king. Not before 1804, when political circumstances had changed a lot, he could return to Prussia and moved to Berlin, becoming a journalist and propagandist of Hardenberg again.

With the outbreak of the Prussian-French war in autumn 1806, Lange started a new paper Telegraph, the first german newspaper, who was published daily, including sundays and holidays. For he changed his political views after the great victory of Napoleon at Jena and Auerstedt in a very spectacular way and in the short period of only two weeks from a Prussian patriot to an admirer of Napoleon and the French army, Lange became the most hated man in Berlin. He was blamed being corrupt, opportunistic and an impertinent, for he critized the old Prussian regime as outdated and sweared at Queen Luise, the most admired woman of that time in Prussia.

After the withdrawal of the french from Berlin in December 1808, Lange went with the french army to Stettin and Erfurt, but his Telegraph was never published again after December 3, notwithstand the personal will of Napoleon, who tried to revive the paper in January 1809. Lange worked as a consultant of the french army in the censorship of German newspapers. The Bamberg journalist Hegel, later-on a famous philosopher, and the author Kotzebue mocked Lange as a corrupt servant of the french.

In the summer of 1811 Lange planed to write his memoirs in Frankfurt, but they were never published. According to newspaper articles of March 1813, Lange died at Minsk, maybe in January or February 1813. There ist no information about his job or even how he came there. Presumably he was a civilian official with the french army, who invaded Russia in 1812.

Category:1755 births Category:1813 deaths Category:German art dealers Category:German writers Category:German journalists