Oswald Ottendorfer, a revolutionist refugee, was the most distinguished editor of the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung, the foremost of American German-language newspapers. He found employment on the Staats-Zeitung in 1850 and later married the widow of the founder. Ottendorfer's influential paper became a strong supporter of the Union cause during the Civil War.

Ottendorfer was born on 26 January 1826 in Zwittau, Moravia, then a province of Austria-Hungary, now in Czechoslovakia. He was the youngest of six children of Vincenz Ottendorfer, a clothmaker in fair circumstances, and Catharine Neumeister Ottendorfer. While Ottendorfer was still young, his parents moved to Galicia, and he was sent to live with a married sister at Brünn. He attended the school of his native town and the gymnasia of Leitomischl and Brünn. At the age of twenty he left to enter the University of Vienna, where he studied mainly philosophy. He transferred to...