Oswald Ottendorfer

Oswald Ottendorfer

Valentin Oswald Ottendorfer (26 February 1826 in Zwittau, Moravia – 15 December 1900 in New York City) was a United States journalist associated with the development of the German-language New Yorker Staats-Zeitung into a major newspaper.

Ottendorfer was the son of a manufacturer, the youngest of six children. He was sent to live with a married sister in Brunn. There he studied the classics in the gymnasium. At the age of 20, he left to study jurisprudence at the University of Vienna, and then transferred to the University of Prague to learn the Czech language.

In 1848, he returned to Vienna, intending to finish his studies in Padua, which at that time was in the possession of Austria. However, the upheavals at that time enlisted his sympathies. Ottendorfer joined the Von der Tann volunteer corps, and briefly served in the first Schleswig-Holstein War. On returning to Vienna during the Vienna Rebellion, he found the revolutionaries in control of the government, and joined the mobile guard as a 1st lieutenant. During the storming of the city by government forces in October, he was in the battalion that was commanded by Robert Blum.

Many of his fellow revolutionaries were captured or killed. He managed to escape. He was concealed by a friendly porter in a bookstore until the excitement subsided, and then fled to the Bohemian frontier, and from there to Saxony. He subsequently became involved in the 1849 uprisings in Saxony and Baden, after the failure of which, he fled to Switzerland. He briefly considered giving himself up to the government in Vienna, but was informed that would cost him his life, and so went to the United States.

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