Altenberg, Peter, pseudonym of Richard Engländer (Vienna, 1859-1919, Vienna), was the son of a well-to-do Jewish businessman. Abandoning his university studies and an apprenticeship with a bookseller, Altenberg came to regard himself as an outsider and social misfit. A familiar figure of Viennese night life, he had frequently to rely on the help of his literary friends in order to maintain the Bohemian way of life which gradually undermined his health; the Viennese café was his natural terrain. Impressed by the modernity of his work, Karl Kraus promoted the publication of his early prose, Wie ich es sehe (1896); subsequent volumes include Ashantee (1897), Was der Tag mir zuträgt (1901), Märchen des Lebens (1908), Neues und Altes (1911), and the overtly autobiographical collections Semmering 1912 (1913), Vita ipsa (1918), and Mein Lebensabend (1919). Influenced by the French prose poem, Altenberg described his short prose sketches as ‘extracts of life’, produced, as he once remarked to Schnitzler, by a ‘hand-mirror’. Noted for their visual and sensual quality, they depict all manner of everyday scenes encountered in the city, and are no less dedicated to the rediscovery of natural beauty and the haunting attraction of young women. Although his meticulously stringent style was highly effective in its use of irony directed against the Viennese scene, it is because of the life-enhancing atmosphere it succinctly evokes that it has become known as ‘Telegrammstil der Seele’.
The Oxford Companion to German Literature. Copyright © 1976, 1986, 1997, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
