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Austria

Author · Austria

Peter Altenberg

Died in 1919

Peter Altenberg is the name taken by Richard Engländer (1859-1919), the son of a wealthy Viennese merchant, who abandoned in turn law, medicine and a bookseller's apprenticeship in Stuttgart. In 1883 a doctor diagnosed in him a hypersensitivity of the nervous system and advised his father to place no constraint on him: from then on he lived without a profession, in the Viennese cafés and later in a hotel room. Dependent on collections made by his friends, and often committed in his last years because of alcohol, he was admired by Karl Kraus and set to music by Alban Berg.

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