HIRSCH, FRANZ ARNOLD:

By: Isidore Singer, Newell Dunbar

Austrian dramatist and miscellaneous writer; born in Horitz, Bohemia, June 15, 1815; died in Vienna Nov. 24, 1896. After leaving the gymnasium Arnold studied medicine at the University of Vienna (1838-41). He practised very successfully in Vienna as a homeopathist until 1852, when he definitively abandoned medicine for literature. After marrying Sophie Wehle he traveled several years, and lived by turns in Dresden, Florence, Rome, Paris, and London. In 1861 he settled in Paris.

Hirsch wrote, often under the pseudonym of "Eginhard Quelle," numerous papers on political economy and medicine, literary essays, short stories, and novels, mostly in "Das Familienbuch des Oesterreichischen Lloyd" in Triest, and feuilletons for Vienna periodicals. Among his plays were: "Der Familien-Diplomat" (1859), comedy in three acts, produced at the Hofburgtheater in Vienna, the famous comedian Beckmann making a great hit in it; "Sand in die Augen" (1861); "Eine Tour aus dem Contre-Tanz, oder So Passt's" (1862; after the French of Fournier and Meyer), "Zu Jung und Zu Alt" (1866), one-act pieces; "Blanca von Bourbon," tragedy in five acts, produced at the Dresden Theater Royal in 1860 (this play won for its author from the Grand Duke of Weimar, before whom he read it, the scholar's gold medal); "Die Fremde," "Dora," "Freund Fritz," "Postscriptum," etc., adapted from the French. Hirsch translated into German Napoleon III.'s "Idées Napoléoniennes."

S. N. D.