Otto von Leitgeb

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Otto Georg Ritter von Leitgeb (born October 24, 1860 in Pola , Istria , † October 2, 1951 in Sandhof , Klagenfurt ) was an Austrian writer .

Life

On his father's side, Leitgeb came from a family who had immigrated to Austria from Franconia in the 16th century ; the mother, Emilie Laban, was Hungarian. In the autumn of 1860, his father Georg, last lieutenant colonel in the naval artillery from Venice, moved to Pola, the central naval port of the Habsburg monarchy. There, on the Istrian peninsula , Otto von Leitgeb was born. After a short time in Trieste , he grew up in 1869, the year in which his father retired, in the Villa di Strazig near the country town (at that time approx. 15,000 inhabitants) Gorizia , where he first attended the Italian elementary school, then one German private school, finally attended the state high school. In an Italian milieu, the family always remained connected to German traditions. After graduating from high school (1880), Leitgeb studied law in Vienna (guest semester in Heidelberg ), then in Innsbruck and again in Vienna, before obtaining his doctorate in law in Graz in 1884 . After years of wandering, which took him to Tyrol and Carinthia, among others, Leitgeb lived as a freelance writer again in his parents' villa near Gorizia after 1887, the year his father died, and had been married to Antonie Irene Freiin von Reyer since 1898. At the beginning of the First World War he settled in Carinthia (near Klagenfurt ).

Otto von Leitgeb tried neither as a playwright nor as a lyric poet, instead only published prose, sometimes taking up historical subjects ("The Goose Man" is set in old Nuremberg, Sidera Cordis in Friuli in the 15th century), but more often depicts the present of the Habsburg south . He remained a realist all his life, but cautiously took up - as an example, the novella In memoriam - the impressionistic tendencies of Viennese modernism around 1900. His most important literary achievements are the three Friulian novellas The poor Mr. Moretti , The Forsaken God and The Vow .

Works

  • Finale. Two short stories (Sister Brigitte, A violin song; Leipzig 1896)
  • The goose man. A story (Stuttgart 1899)
  • Psyche. Novellas (Stuttgart 1899)
  • About love. Four novellas (Stuttgart 1900)
  • Sidera cordis. A novel from Friuli (Stuttgart and Leipzig 1901)
  • The forsaken god. Novellas (Stuttgart and Leipzig 1902)
  • The silent mill. Roman (Berlin 1903)
  • Afflicted hearts. Novellas (Berlin 1904)
  • Sun fragments. Roman (Berlin 1907)
  • The Song of Songs. Novellas (Berlin 1913)

literature

  • Wolfgang Strobl: "My dear old Dolomites". Austrian nobility from the turn of the century as guests in Toblach (Alexander von Warsberg, Lilly Wildgans, Otto von Leitgeb, Maria Hofteufel) . In: Der Schlern, vol. 94, 2020, issue 6, pp. 16–61.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Erich Nussbaumer: Spiritual Carinthia. Literary and intellectual history of the country . Verlag Ferd. Kleinmayr, Klagenfurt 1956 (without ISBN), p. 428.
personal data
SURNAME Leitgeb, Otto von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Leitgeb, Otto Georg Ritter von (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian writer
DATE OF BIRTH October 24, 1860
PLACE OF BIRTH Pola
DATE OF DEATH October 2, 1951
Place of death Sandhof , Klagenfurt