This chapter provides an analysis of the significance of August von Kotzebue, who was the most popular playwright in Europe around 1800. He gradually disappeared from theatre repertories after his murder in 1819 and is not included in the canon of German dramatic literature. To the author, the important reasons are that the newly established discipline of literary history applied criteria that prevented his works from being regarded as valuable literature, and his views on politics and nationalism contributed to his exclusion. The chapter investigates Kotzebue’s position in German aesthetics and literature based on Simone Winko’s theory of ‘negative canonisation’. The establishment of a literary canon around 1800 needed a negative model to create criteria of ‘valuable’ literature, and works that did not fit into the aesthetics of German idealism were degraded. The concept of ‘negative canonisation’ changed the reception of Kotzebue, as did his cosmopolitan Enlightenment ideas, which made him a target for disparaging nationalists after 1815. The author regards Kotzebue as an independent thinker who refused to adapt to prevailing bourgeois national conventions, which led to the negative view of his plays and his exclusion from the German literary canon.