Oswald Ottendorfer

Valentin Oswald Ottendorfer ( born February 12, 1826 in Svitavy ( Zwittau ), Moravia, † December 15, 1900 in New York City ) was a German-born American journalist and patron of Moravian origin. He founded orphanages and hospitals, homes for the poor and libraries.

Life

Oswald Ottendorfer was born in a cloth weaving family as the youngest of six surviving children. The parents sent him to the grammar school of Piaristen in Litomyšl. After graduation he studied law in Prague, and later philosophy at the universities of Vienna and Heidelberg. The fields of study law and philosophy shaped his democratic worldview.

In the riots of 1848, he fought with the students on the barricades in Prague, Vienna and other Austrian-German cities. He corresponded with the Russian anarchist Bakunin and was wanted by the Viennese police wanted poster. Then he decided to emigrate to the United States.

Since he had not mastered the English language, he made his way in New York by first as a laborer in the harbor. He soon found a job as a journalist at the German New Yorker Staats-Zeitung and became friends with the publisher couple Jacob and Anna Uhl, who had also emigrated from Germany to New York.

The death of Jacob Uhl late 1850s brought for Ottendorfer, who had become the managing editor, and family changes with it: Well, he also took over the publishing house, he married the widow Anna Uhl and became the father of their six children.

For curing various ailments Ottendorfer traveled to European spas. In Austria -Hungary, but he was still on the wanted list, was not allowed to enter the country, not to visit his father Svitavy. An amnesty for the revolutionaries of 1848, there were only after the collapse of the Dual Monarchy (1867 ).

End of the 1870s, Anna and Oswald Ottendorfer were acquired wealth and great prestige. He was offered even the candidacy to the New York mayor's office, but he refused. Anna Ottendorfer had already launched several charitable institutions. Both acted according to the motto: " Anyone who has healthy hands, has the duty to help those who need help. "

Also in the old home town Svitavy lacked many things, especially in health and education. Delighted, the City Council took Ottendorfer offer: The donated hospital was inaugurated in 1886 solemnly as an orphanage and a poorhouse. The city honored the founders with a street named after him, which was also a statue was erected with his bust.

At the site of his birthplace Ottendorfer had a new house for a library building, a red brick building in historicist style, the Ottendorfer House, which also provides a fitting setting for lectures and concerts with its ballroom upstairs. The library was opened in August 1892 in the presence of Ottendorfer and one of his stepdaughters. It includes 23,000 German -language books and became a model for many other public libraries in Moravia. Even in his second home U.S. Ottendorfer has left a number of similar institutions.

Ottendorfer died in 1900 in his New York apartment. His grave is in the cemetery Greenwood.

The Ottendorfer house in Svitavy is obtained as President Masaryk visited the city in 1929, led the first way there. In 2008, an Esperanto Museum was inaugurated on the ground floor, which is worn as a branch of the Municipal Museum of the City of Svitavy and from Czech Esperanto Association.