Fritz von Herzmanovsky-Orlando explained

Fritz von Herzmanovsky-Orlando (1877–1954) was an Austrian writer and illustrator.

Life

Herzmanovsky-Orlando was born on 30 April 1877 as Friedrich Josef Franz Ritter von Herzmanowsky (Baron Herzmanowsky) in Vienna, Austria-Hungary. he as the son of Emil Josef Ritter von Herzmanowsky, an Imperial and Royal official in the Ministry of Agriculture who came from Tarnów, and his wife, Aloisia von Orlando who had been born in Kosmonosy. He attended the private Theresianum school in Vienna before completing, in 1896–1903, a construction engineering degree at the Vienna University of Technology. Within the next year and a half he got to know his subsequent lifelong friend, Alfred Kubin, and in Munich associated with Cosmic Circle, a group of writers and intellectuals that included Karl Wolfskehl, Ludwig Klages and Alfred Schuler. In 1904/05, Herzmanovsky-Orlando worked as an employee and later as an independent architect. In 1911/12, he gave his career up due to chronically painful kidney tuberculosis. On 25 February 1911, he married Carmen Maria Schulista in Vienna. Because he was financially independent, he lived from then on as a privatier in art, drawing, collecting, restoring and writing. His disease led to several spa breaks and trips to the south. Among other things, he went with his wife in 1913 to the northeastern Adriatic, in 1914 to Egypt, Sicily and southern Italy for over four months. In 1916, due to illness, he moved to Meran which was Austrian until 1918, now Merano in Italy.

From the beginning of 1918, with official permission, he also bore his maternal surname. His mother's family came from the Swiss uradel, his grandfather Friedrich von Orlando was the lord of the manor (Rittergutsbesitzer) in Kleindehsa in the German Empire. Herzmanovsky-Orlando falsified his family tree to claim ancestry even before the Crusades. In 1932, he became a member of the NSDAP/AO, foreign branch of the Nazi party.[1]

Having become a German citizen as a result of the Anschluss of Austria to the German Reich in 1938, Herzmanovsky-Orlando was forced to leave South Tyrol in 1940 under the South Tyrol Option Agreement. Since he could not live north of the Alps due to illness, he moved to Malcesine on Lake Garda. He did not return to Merano until 1949. He spent the last years of his life in the nearby Schloss Rametz, where he died of uremia on 17 May 1954.[2]

Herzmanovsky spent many summers in his villa in Ebensee-Rindbach, his family's holiday home. Here he received several guests, including the journalist Anni Hartmann and Hedi Juer, his half-sister who lives in Australia.

In 1970, Herzmanovsky-Orlando-Gasse in Vienna – Floridsdorf (21st District) was named after him.

Work

Fritz von Herzmanovsky-Orlando was able to publish very little during his lifetime. Many of his works are only available in sketch form. His extensive literary work, which consists mainly of prose and plays, only became known posthumously through the collected works published by Friedrich Torberg.

As an editor, however, Torberg made significant changes to Herzmanovsky-Orlando's texts, which led to severe criticism from literary studies. For example, in Masquerade of Geniuses (Maskenspiel der Genien), Torberg changed the name of the "Empire of Tarock" completely arbitrarily from Tarockia (Tarockei) to Tarockania (Tarockanien), obviously based on the term Kakania (Kakanien) in Robert Musil's Man Without Qualities. Herzmanovsky-Orlando envisaged a certain harmony with Turkey or the earlier Byzantium. Only the second collected works, published by Germanists two decades later, gave a faithful rendering of the original text.

In his works, Herzmanovsky-Orlando fantasized about a mystical dreamland called "Tarockia" (Tarockei), which he portrayed in an extravagant, baroque style that bordered on the parodistic. He had Italian humanist, Cyriaco de' Pizzicolli, appear as the main character of his grotesquely fantastic novel, Masquerade of Geniuses.

In addition to contacts with the Munich Cosmic Circle and other, equally irrational-esoteric groups, he became involved in the esoteric and mystic, including the right-wing esoteric ideas of Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels and pseudoscience. Fritz von Herzmanovsky-Orlando was a member of the New Temple Order founded by Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels. An example of his esoteric orientation is his "discovery" that the legendary "saline women" in Tyrol, who also appear in his Tyrolean Dragon Play (Tiroler Drachenspiel), were actually yoga girls who at certain points, the so-called "earth navels" (Erdnabel), could cause gene mutations by dancing.

His only known work as an architect is the house at Wehrgasse 22 in Vienna – Margareten, which he built in 1910 together with Fritz Keller.

Works

Novels (Austrian Trilogy)

Plays

Audio drama

Ballets and pantomimes

Stories

Sketches, fragments and letters.

Books

Literature

External links

Notes and References

  1. Sinfonietta, 2001 issue, p. 336
  2. Monika von Gagern, p. 37,

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Fritz von Herzmanovsky-Orlando".

Except where otherwise indicated, Everything.Explained.Today is © Copyright 2009-2024, A B Cryer, All Rights Reserved. Cookie policy.