Heinrich Landesmann

Who was Heinrich Landesmann?

Heinrich Landesmann, Hieronymus Lorm was an Austrian poet and philosophical writer.

From his earliest childhood he was very sickly; at the age of fifteen his sight and hearing were almost completely destroyed; and later in life he became totally blind. He developed a form of tactile signing that was named after him.

When but sixteen years old he contributed a number of poems to various periodicals. In 1843 he completed his first important literary production, Abdul, the Mohammedan Faust legend, in five cantos.

His Wien's Poetische Schwingen und Federn manifested critical acumen, but also a tinge of political acerbity in its attack on the censor system of the Austrian chancellor Prince Metternich. His friends advised Landesmann to leave Vienna, and he went to Berlin, where he assumed the pseudonym Hieronymus Lorm in order to secure his family from possible trouble with the Viennese police. In Berlin he became a regular contributor to Kühne's Europa. After the revolution of 1848 he returned to Vienna. In 1856 he married; in 1873 he removed to Dresden; and in 1892 he settled in Brünn. A sister of Landesmann's was the second wife of Berthold Auerbach. Landesmann was distinctively a lyric poet. The peculiar vein of pessimism that runs through both his poetry and his prose writings has won for him the title of the "lyrical Schopenhauer".