Medical opinion considered him incapable of regular employment because of an oversensitive nervous system; this inability to fulfill the norms of the work ethic led to a lasting rift with his mother, to whom he was attached with perhaps more than normal filial devotion. Altenberg never married, and it is tempting to perceive the beautiful yet estranged mother figure behind the many unsatisfactory affairs and unrequited passions which peppered his life and his writing. In Sigmund Freud's judgment, Altenberg suffered from "aesthetic impotence."
After his failure to establish himself even marginally in regular employment Engländer drifted ever more to the periphery of polite society. By 1902 he was living in a tiny room at the Hotel London, an establishment which was little different from a brothel, on Wallnerstraße. There he stayed for more than a decade, building up a fabled collection of picture postcards and nude pinups with which he covered the walls. (An artistic consequence of significance ensuing from this collecting mania can be found in Alban Berg's "Five Orchestral Pieces after Picture Postcard Texts of Peter Altenberg"; in the opinion of Igor Stravinsky this piece is not only one of the century's most innovative scores but also one of its most perfect.
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