Background
Otto Erich Hartleben was born on June 3, 1864, in Clausthal, Germany. He was the son of Herman, a civil servant.
linguist translator author poet
Otto Erich Hartleben was born on June 3, 1864, in Clausthal, Germany. He was the son of Herman, a civil servant.
Hartleben was educated at gymnasium in Celle, Germany. He studied for the civil service in Stolberg (Harz) and in Magdeburg. He also studied law in Berlin, Leipzig, and Tuebingen.
Giving up his legal studies, Hartleben returned to Berlin where he lived as a freelance writer, eventually moving to Munich in 1901. In 1900, he had a resounding success with his “officer’s tragedy” Rosenmontag (Carnival Monday) which deals with an ill-fated affair between a simple girl and a young officer from an old military family. He used the proceeds to purchase the Villa Halkyone in Salò on Lake Garda. Here he founded in 1903 the Halkyone Academy for the Pure Sciences, which included among its members Peter Behrens, Otto Julius Bierbaum, Franz Blei, Gerhart Hauptmann, Alfred Kubin, Emil Orlik and Ferdinand Pfohl.
Hartleben’s legendary reputation in turn-of-century letters is due chiefly to the many artistic groups he founded or contributed to, from the Bavarian-Bohemian Beer Brotherhood at school in Celle (1885) to the Menschenclub (a club for “humans”) in Magdeburg (1890), the Karlsbad Idealists’ Club (1891), the Verbrechertisch (“Rogues’ Table”) in Berlin (1896), the Berlin Naturalists’ Society known as Durch (“Through”), the Berlin drama movement Freie Bühne (“Free Stage”), the Berlin Free Literary Society, the Leipzig "Auguren College", not to mention the lively interest he took in the Friedrichshagener Dichterkreis (Friedrichshagen Poets Circle).
He also co-produced the weekly journal Die Jugend (“Youth”), in which he made humorous jibes at contemporary society and its morals. One of his key characters was Serenissimus, the gone-to-seed ruler of an imaginary peppercorn principality.
Hartleben died in Salò, Italy.
Quotes from others about the person
“Otto Erich Hartleben had a short and moderately successful career during the 1890s as a writer of gently satirical comedies. He was an accomplished craftsman with a talent for conversational dialogue and characterization and with a facility for imitating the conventions of the contemporary naturalist stage repertory.” - Michael Winkler Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor
On December 2, 1893, Hartleben married Selma.
Among his youthful acquaintances there were Karl Henckel, Arthur Gutheil and the future industrialist and politician Alfred Hugenberg and together they published a volume of poetry Quartett in 1886. In Leipzig, he got to know Hermann Conradi and Adolf Bartels.