HARTMANN, MORITZ

HARTMANN, MORITZ (1821–1872), German author and revolutionary. Hartmann was born in Dušniky, near Přibram, Bohemia. One of the first Jewish youngsters in Bohemia to receive a general high school education, Hartmann demonstratively abandoned Judaism as a youth, although he never formally converted to Christianity. Extolling the Hussites and the revived Czech national feeling of his time in Ein Tage aus der Böhmischen Geschichte (1845) and Kelch und Schwert (1845), he transferred the Jewish yearning for Zion to the Czech longing for independence and spoke of Prague as the "Slavic Jerusalem." Austrian objections to Hartmann's pro-German sympathies resulted in his flight to Leipzig and eventually to Paris, where he met *Heine and George Sand. Returning to Prague in 1847, he was briefly imprisoned and then became the central figure in "Young Bohemia," a group of German writers which included Siegfried *Kapper (later Hartmann's brother-in-law) and Friedrich Hirsch-Szarvady, later a Hungarian nationalist. Faced with the anti-Jewish excesses of the 1840s, Hartmann blamed the Czech people for the Prague disturbances and for the antisemitic tendencies of Czech nationalist leaders such as Karel Havliček-Borovský. He turned to German liberalism, and in 1848 he was elected delegate to the revolutionary German national assembly in Frankfurt, where he was a popular idol of the extreme left and was made a member of the assembly's delegation to Vienna.

Following Windischgraetz's suppression of the revolution, Hartmann became a fugitive and expressed his disappointment and anger with the liberals in his satirical Reimchronik des Pfaffen Mauritius (1849). His experiences during the 1848 Revolution and abortive Baden uprising were summarized in Bruchstuecke revolutionaerer Erinnerungen (1861), edited by H.H. Houben as Revolutionaere Erinnerungen (1919). Hartmann earned his living as a foreign correspondent, particularly during the Crimean War (1854), after which he moved first to Paris and then to Geneva, where he taught German literature from 1860 onward and married a Protestant. Following the general amnesty of 1868 he returned to Vienna and joined the editorial staff of the Neue Freie Presse. The many novellas which Hartmann published during the 1850s–1860s include a few stories on Jewish themes. His collected works in 10 volumes (ed. W. Vollmer) appeared posthumously in 1873–74 and a selection of his letters (ed. R. Wolkan) in 1921.

His son, ludo moritz hartmann (1865–1924), was a prominent Austrian Social Democrat and, as a result of his atheism and political activities, was denied a chair in history at the University of Vienna until after the fall of the Hapsburgs in 1918. Ludo Hartmann founded the Vierteljahres schriftfuer Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, his major work being a comprehensive Geschichte Italiens im Mittelalter (4 vols., 1897–1915). He was the Austrian republic's ambassador in Berlin from 1918 until 1921.

bibliography:

O. Donath, in: jggjČ, 6 (1934), 323–442 passim; M. Grunwald, Vienna (1936), index; J. Goldmark, Pilgrims of '48 (1930), index; H. Bergmann, in: G. Kisch (ed.), Czechoslovak Jewry, Past and Future (1943), 22–24; G. Kisch, In Search of Freedom (1949), index; A. Hofman, Die Prager Zeitschrift "Ost und West" (1957), index; The Jews of Czechoslovakia (1968), index. add. bibliography: O.Wittner, Moritz Hartmanns Jugend (1903); idem, Moritz Hartmanns Leben und Werke; vols. 1–2 (1906–7); St. Hoehne, "Moritz Hartmanns 'Krieg um den Wald': zur literarischen Verarbeitung von Vormaerz und 48er Revolution," in: Bruecken 4 (1996), 171–88; H. Blaukopf, "Moritz Hartmann (1821–1872)," in: Literatur und Kritik, 315/316 (1997), 99–106; E. Kleinschmidt, "Revolutionäre Spiegelungen: zu Moritz Hartmanns 'Reimchronik des Pfaffen Maurizius' (1849)," in: H. Kircher and M. Klanska (eds.), Literatur und Politik in der Heine-Zeit. Die 48er Revolution in Texten zwischen Vormaerz und Nachmaerz (1998), 185–203; S.P. Scheichl, "Zur Freundschaftskultur von Prager und Wiener Juden im Vormaerz: Briefe aus dem Umfeld von Moritz Hartmann," in: H. Denkler (ed.), Juden und juedische Kulturim Vormärz (1999), 165–80 (Forum Vormaerz-Forschung: Jahrbuch; 1998 = 4. Jg.); H. Beutin, "'Der ich komm' aus dem Hussitenlande': Tradition, Revolution und Demokratie in der Gedankenwelt Moritz Hartmanns," in: J. Dvorák (ed.), Radikalismus, demokratische Strömungen und die Moderne in der oesterreichischen Literatur (2003), 87–105; E. Bourke, "Moritz Hartmann, Bohemia and the Metternich System," in: D. Kopp (ed.), Goethe im Vormaerz (2004) 353–71 (Forum Vormaerz-Forschung: Jahrbuch; 2003 = 9. Jg.)