Fritz von Herzmanovsky-Orlando

His mother's family came from the Swiss uradel, his grandfather Friedrich von Orlando was the lord of the manor (Rittergutsbesitzer) in Kleindehsa in the German Empire.

Here he received several guests, including the journalist Anni Hartmann and Hedi Juer, his half-sister who lives in Australia.

As an editor, however, Torberg made significant changes to Herzmanovsky-Orlando's texts, which led to severe criticism from literary studies.

For example, in Masquerade of Geniuses (Maskenspiel der Genien), Torberg changed the name of the "Empire of Tarock" completely arbitrarily from Tarockia (Tarockei) to Tarockania (Tarockanien), obviously based on the term Kakania (Kakanien) in Robert Musil's Man Without Qualities.

In his works, Herzmanovsky-Orlando fantasized about a mystical dreamland called "Tarockia" (Tarockei), which he portrayed in an extravagant, baroque style that bordered on the parodistic.

He had Italian humanist, Cyriaco de' Pizzicolli, appear as the main character of his grotesquely fantastic novel, Masquerade of Geniuses.

An example of his esoteric orientation is his "discovery" that the legendary "saline women" in Tyrol, who also appear in his Tyrolean Dragon Play (Tiroler Drachenspiel), were actually yoga girls who at certain points, the so-called "earth navels" (Erdnabel), could cause gene mutations by dancing.