Important eighteenth-century German writers--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann Gottfried Herder, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing--took notice of his religious movement and his poetry and appreciated both. As a poet Zinzendorf was a bold creator, displaying flexibility in his use of the German language. His poetry is filled with high flights of imagination and can be read with enjoyment and interest today.
Nikolaus Ludwig, Count von Zinzendorf und Pottendorf, was born on 26 May 1700 in Dresden, capital of the Electorate of Saxony, to Georg Ludwig, Graf (Count) von Zinzendorf, and his second wife, the former Charlotte Justine von Gersdorf. The House of Zinzendorf was a noble Austrian family, founded in the eleventh century. One of Zinzendorf's godparents was Philipp Jakob Spener, founder of the Pietist movement, which stressed depth of feeling and strict observance. Six weeks after Zinzendorf's birth his father died; in 1704 his mother married Dubislav Gneomar von Natzmer, a Prussian general field marshal. Zinzendorf was reared by his maternal grandmother, Henrietta Catharina, Gräfin (Countess) von Gersdorf, in her castle in Upper Lusatia, east of Dresden. Her home was a center of Pietism.
When Zinzendorf was ten he was sent to a private school in Halle to be educated by August Hermann Francke, an important Pietist pedagogue.
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