Krez (surname)
From GenWiki
Geographical distribution
legend: less than 10 occurrence per million, up to 15 occ./mil., up to 30 occ./mil., up to 45 occ./mil., up to 60 occ./mil., more than 60 occ./mil.
Famous People Named Krez
Konrad Krez (1828-1897)
A 'Forty-Eighter', who emigrated to America from Landau in Rheinland Pfalz in 1850 following the failed 1848 Revolution, he worked as a lawyer in New York and in Wisconsin, but is remembered chiefly for his poetry and as the commander of a Union army regiment, the 27th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry, during the American Civil War.
Two books have been written chronicling Krez' life. The first, Ein Starkes Leben (A Strong Life), was written by Ludwig Finckh in 1936 as an historical romance. Finckh was well-known and widely read in his lifetime, but his fame has largely been eclipsed by that of his classmate and associate, the internationally renowned Nobel Prize winner, Herman Hesse.
More recently, Wolfgang Diehl published a scholarly, critical, literary biography of Konrad Krez in 1988, which documents much of the material in Finckh's account. A number of the Krez poems are also included and discussed in Diehl's Konrad Krez: Freiheitskaempfer und Dichter in Deutschland und Amerika.
The collected poems of Konrad Krez, An Mein Vaterland, were published in 1938 with a Foreword written by Ludwig Finckh. While numerous published translations are extant for a few of the more popular Krez poems, the biographical works about him are still written only in German.
A rough translation of Finckh's Foreword is available here.
