Only now, seven decades after his death, are there signs of a positive reassessment of an author who, but for the outbreak of war in 1914, would have been a Nobel laureate.
Born in Vienna in 1859 as Richard Engländer, the eldest son of Moriz Engländer, a wealthy businessman, and Pauline Schweinburg Engländer, Altenberg did not make his literary debut until the mid 1890s. By then he was already a well-known eccentric, haunting both the artistic circles of the Habsburg capital and the less salubrious demimonde of cabaret performers and good-time girls. Like so many other creative figures of the Viennese fin de siècle, Altenberg was Jewish, though under the influence of his mentor Kraus he became a nominal Christian with the onset of the new century. His background, however, was that of the culturally assimilated Jewish bourgeoisie, whose standards he was vainly expected to emulate. The young Richard Engländer seems to have displayed no early promise as a writer and was spectacularly unsuccessful at cultivating the sort of career likely to appeal to his parents. He attended the Akademisches Gymnasium, which also counted or was later to count Franz Grillparzer, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, and Richard Beer-Hofmann among its alumni, and after finally graduating in 1878 he made abortive attempts at the professions of law and medicine and an equally dismal foray into the book trade in Stuttgart.
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