By resolution of the city council on June 29, 1967, a square in the Dotzheim (opens in a new tab) district was named after the Sudeten German teacher and local poet Gustav Leutelt on the occasion of the Gablonzer Heimattreffen in Wiesbaden and the erection of a memorial stone in honour of the poet.

Gustav Leutelt was born on September 21, 1860 in Josefsthal near Gablonz in Sudetenland (today: Josefův Důl u Jablonce nad Nisou in the Czech Republic) as the son of a teacher.

After attending school in Gablonz, Leutelt trained as a primary school teacher at the teacher training college in Leitmeritz. He then took up a position at the elementary school in his home town of Josefsthal and went on to head an industrial training school in Kamnitztal. From 1902, Leutelt worked for the magazine "Deutsche Arbeit", which was founded in 1901 with the aim of providing an overview of German cultural life in Bohemia.

After the death of his father, Leutelt returned to Josefsthal and took over his father's position as principal. In 1905, he became head teacher at the elementary school in Unter-Maxdorf and founded a local museum there. After his marriage, Leutelt moved to Ober-Rosenthal near Reichenberg. As a pensioner, he lived in Gablonz from 1926.

In addition to his profession as a teacher, Gustav Leutelt was also active as a poet and writer. From 1899 until 1944, he published around a dozen books of prose and poetry. In his prose, Leutelt mainly dealt with his home region, especially the Jizera Mountains. His stories and poems focused on the working and communal life of his homeland.

He dealt with social issues of Sudeten Germanism, without any explicit political tendency. His stories and novels are concentrated on individual fates in a classically austere form. They were of great cultural significance, especially for the Sudeten German minority. They gained particular renown in the 1930s and were also received in ethnic patriotic circles.

At the suggestion of the mayor of Gablonz, the Gustav Leutelt Society was founded in 1920, which is still committed to promoting and communicating Leutelt's work today. From 1934 to 1936, his collected works were published by Adam Kraft Verlag Karlsbad. A second edition was published between 1941 and 1943.

After the Second World War, complete editions of his works were published from 1953 to 1955 and from 1986 to 1990. In 1935, Gustav Leutelt was the first recipient of the Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff Prize for services to Germanness in the Sudetenland, Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia for his poetry, and in 1940 he was awarded the Goethe Medal for Art and Science, donated by Reich President Hindenburg in 1932. The Goethe Medal was also presented to Leutelt by NSDAP Gauleiter and Reich Governor Konrad Henlein. No laudatory speech by Henlein or details of the ceremonies surrounding the presentation of the medal have survived. There was probably no political connection to the National Socialist movement in the Sudetenland, the so-called Henlein movement, between 1933 and 1938.

At the end of the war, Leutelt was expelled from the newly founded Czechoslovakia under the Beneš Decrees. From then on, he lived in Seefeldern near Gotha, where he died on February 17, 1947.