KLINGER, FRIEDRICH MAXIMILIAN VON (1752-1831), German dramatist and novelist, was born of humble parentage at Frankfort-on-Main, on the 17th of February 1752. His father died when he was a child, and his early years were a hard struggle. He was enabled, however, in 1774 to enter the university of Giessen, where he studied law; and Goethe, with whom he had been acquainted since childhood, helped him in many ways. In 1775 Klinger gained with his tragedy Die Zwillinge a prize offered by the Hamburg theatre, under the auspices of the actress Sophie Charlotte Ackermann (1714-1792) and her son the famous actor and playwright, Friedrich Ludwig Schröder (1744-1816). In 1776 Klinger was appointed Theaterdichter to the “Seylersche Schauspiel-Gesellschaft” and held this post for two years. In 1778 he entered the Austrian military service and took part in the Bavarian war of succession. In 1780 he went to St Petersburg, became an officer in the Russian army, was ennobled and attached to the Grand Duke Paul, whom he accompanied on a journey to Italy and France. In 1785 he was appointed director of the corps of cadets, and having married a natural daughter of the empress Catharine, was made praeses of the Academy of Knights in 1799. In 1803 Klinger was nominated by the emperor Alexander curator of the university of Dorpat, an office he held until 1817; in 1811 he became lieutenant-general. He then gradually gave up his official posts, and after living for many years in honourable retirement, died at Dorpat on the 25th of February 1831.
Klinger was a man of vigorous moral character and full of fine feeling, though the bitter experiences and deprivations of his youth are largely reflected in his dramas. It was one of his earliest works, Sturm und Drang (1776), which gave its name to this literary epoch. In addition to this tragedy and Die Zwillinge (1776), the chief plays of his early period of passionate fervour and restless “storm and stress” are Die neue Arria (1776), Simsone Grisaldo (1776) and Stilpo und seine Kinder (1780). To a later period belongs the fine double tragedy of Medea in Korinth and Medea auf dem Kaukasos (1791). In Russia he devoted himself mainly to the writing of philosophical romances, of which the best known are Fausts Leben, Taten und Höllenfahrt (1791), Geschichte Giafars des Barmeciden (1792) and Geschichte Raphaels de Aquillas (1793). This series was closed in 1803 with Betrachtungen und Gedanken über verschiedene Gegenstände der Welt und der Literatur. In these works Klinger gives calm and dignified expression to the leading ideas which the period of Sturm und Drang had bequeathed to German classical literature.
Klinger’s works were published in twelve volumes (1809-1815), also 1832-1833 and 1842. The most recent edition is in eight volumes (1878-1880); but none of these is complete. A selection will be found in A. Sauer, Stürmer und Dränger, vol. i. (1883). See E. Schmidt, Lenz und Klinger (1878); M. Rieger, Klinger in der Sturm- und Drangperiode (1880); and Klinger in seiner Reife (1896).
KLINGER, MAX (1857- ), German painter, etcher and sculptor, was born at Plagwitz near Leipzig. He attended the classes at the Carlsruhe art school in 1874, and went in the following year to Berlin, where in 1878 he created a sensation at the Academy exhibition with two series of pen-and-ink drawings—the “Series upon the Theme of Christ” and “Fantasies upon the Finding of a Glove.” The daring originality of these imaginative and eccentric works caused an outburst of indignation, and the artist was voted insane; nevertheless the “Glove” series was bought by the Berlin National Gallery. His painting of “The Judgment of Paris” caused a similar storm of indignant protest in 1887, owing to its rejection of all conventional attributes and the naïve directness of the conception. His vivid and somewhat morbid imagination, with its leaning towards the gruesome and disagreeable, and the Goyaesque turn of his mind, found their best expression in his “cycles” of etchings: “Deliverances of Sacrificial Victims told in Ovid,” “A Brahms Phantasy,” “Eve and the Future,” “A Life,” and “Of Death”; but in his use of the needle he does not aim at the technical excellence of the great masters; it supplies him merely with means of expressing his ideas. After 1886 Klinger devoted himself more exclusively to painting and sculpture. In his painting he aims neither at classic beauty nor modern truth, but at grim impressiveness not without a touch of mysticism. His “Pietà” at the Dresden Gallery, the frescoes at the Leipzig University, and the “Christ in Olympus,” at the Modern Gallery in Vienna, are characteristic examples of his art. The Leipzig Museum contains his sculptured “Salome” and “Cassandra.” In sculpture he favours the use of varicoloured materials in the manner of the Greek chryselephantine sculpture. His “Beethoven” is a notable instance of his work in this direction.
KLIPSPRINGER, the Boer name of a small African mountain-antelope (Oreotragus saltator), ranging from the Cape through East Africa to Somaliland and Abyssinia, and characterized by its blunt rounded hoofs, thick pithy hair and gold-spangled colouring. The klipspringer represents a genus by itself, the various local forms not being worthy of more than racial distinction. The activity of these antelopes is marvellous.
KLONDIKE, a district in Yukon Territory, north-western Canada, approximately in 64° N. and 140° W. The limits are rather indefinite, but the district includes the country to the south of the Klondike River, which comes into the Yukon from the east and has several tributaries, as well as Indian River, a second branch of the Yukon, flowing into it some distance above the Klondike. The richer gold-bearing gravels are found along the creeks tributary to these two rivers within an area of about 800 sq. m. The Klondike district is a dissected peneplain with low ridges of rounded forms rising to 4250 ft. above the sea at the Dome which forms its centre. All of the gold-bearing creeks rise not far from the Dome and radiate in various directions toward the Klondike and Indian rivers, the most productive being Bonanza with its tributary Eldorado, Hunker, Dominion and Gold Run. Of these, Eldorado, for the two or three miles in which it was gold-bearing, was much the richest, and for its length probably surpassed any other known placer deposit. Rich gravel was discovered on Bonanza Creek in 1896, and a wild rush to this almost inaccessible region followed, a population of 30,000 coming in within the next three or four years with a rapidly increasing output of gold, reaching in 1900 the climax of $22,000,000. Since then the production has steadily declined, until in 1906 it fell to $5,600,000. The richest gravels were worked out before 1910, and most of the population had left the Klondike for Alaska and other regions; so that Dawson, which for a time was a bustling city of more than 10,000, dwindled to about 3000 inhabitants. As the ground was almost all frozen, the mines were worked by a thawing process, first by setting fires, afterwards by using steam, new methods being introduced to meet the unusual conditions. Later dredges and hydraulic mining were resorted to with success.