Otto Erich Hartleben

Hartleben, Otto Erich 

Born June 3, 1864, in Clausthal; died Feb. 11, 1905, in Salò. German writer; a lawyer by education.

Hartleben’s dramas and prose works are influenced by naturalism and exhibit tendencies toward critical realism; these qualities are evident in the tetralogy The Liberated (1899; Russian translation, 1904), which concerns the position of women in bourgeois society, and in the play Love’s Carnival (1900; Russian translation under the title For the Honor of a Full Dress Coat, 1905), which re-creates the daily life and inner world of the Prussian officer class. In The Story of the Torn Off Button (1893) and in his comedies, Hartleben depicted German philistinism with irony and sarcasm.

WORKS

Ausgewählte Werke, vols. 1–3. Berlin, 1920.
In Russian translation:
Vlechenie. Moscow, 1905.
In the collection Iz novoi nemetskoi liriki. Berlin, 1921.

REFERENCE

Klement, A. von. Die Bücher von O. E. Hartleben: Eine Bibliographie. Salò, 1951.