Peter Rosegger - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Peter Rosegger was an Austria

Austria

Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...

n poet

Poet

A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...

from the province of Styria

Styria (state)

Styria is a state or Bundesland, located in the southeast of Austria. In area it is the second largest of the nine Austrian federated states, covering 16,401 km². It borders Slovenia as well as the other Austrian states of Upper Austria, Lower Austria, Salzburg, Burgenland, and Carinthia. ...

. He was a son of a farmer and grew up in the forests and fields. Rosegger (or Rossegger) went on to become a most productive poet and author as well as an insightful teacher and visionary. In his later years, he was honoured by officials from various Austrian universities and the city of Graz

Graz

The more recent population figures do not give the whole picture as only people with principal residence status are counted and people with secondary residence status are not. Most of the people with secondary residence status in Graz are students...

(the capital of Styria). He was nearly awarded the Nobel Prize

Nobel Prize

The Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...

in 1913 and is (at least among the people of Styria) something like a national hero to this day.

Early life

Rosegger was born as the first of seven children of a peasant

Peasant

A peasant is an agricultural worker who generally tend to be poor and homeless-Etymology:The word is derived from 15th century French païsant meaning one from the pays, or countryside, ultimately from the Latin pagus, or outlying administrative district.- Position in society :Peasants typically...

couple in the village of Alpl

Krieglach

Krieglach is a municipality in the district of Mürzzuschlag in Styria, Austria....

, now part of Krieglach

Krieglach

Krieglach is a municipality in the district of Mürzzuschlag in Styria, Austria....

, Styria. Since this little village, consisting only of a handful of farms, had neither a church nor a school, he and the other children would have had to walk to the larger village, St. Kathrein, in order to attend either. The way there takes two hours and as a result, Peter had very limited education, largely provided by a wandering teacher who taught him and other children from the region for a year and a half. His physical constitution was not sufficient for him to become a farmer

Farmer

A farmer is a person engaged in agriculture, who raises living organisms for food or raw materials, generally including livestock husbandry and growing crops, such as produce and grain...

like his father, as he was often sick and rather frail in general. So, he became understudy of a traveling tailor at the age of seventeen.

Success as a writer

His interest in literature prevailed, although he earned little money. He spent what he could afford on books and soon began to write himself. Eventually, he was discovered by the publisher of the Graz-based newspaper, Tagespost, published by Dr. Svoboda. He realized Rosegger's talent as an author and enabled him to attend the Akademie für Handel und Industrie (Academy for Trade and Industries) in Graz.

There, Peter von Reininghaus became his mentor. Von Reininghaus was a wealthy and influential industrialist

Graz Reininghaus

The grounds of the former Reininghaus brewery, covering 50 hectares, represent the largest undeveloped area near the center of Graz, Austria’s second largest city. They are southwest of the main train station in the district called Eggenberg, 2 kilometers away from Graz’s well-known clocktower...

, and Rosegger had a personal friendship with him for the rest of his life. However, he had a hard time studying, as he was not used to attending school regularly, and had little, and fragmentary, knowledge in many disciplines. He left the academy in 1869 at the age of twenty-six.

Soon after that, he was offered a chance to publish his literary works, namely by Gustav Heckenast, who had worked with Adalbert Stifter

Adalbert Stifter

Adalbert Stifter was an Austrian writer, poet, painter, and pedagogue. He was especially notable for the vivid natural landscapes depicted in his writing, and has long been popular in the German-speaking world, while almost entirely unknown to English readers.-Life:Born in Oberplan in Bohemia , he...

before. Peter Rosegger accepted, and his first book, Geschichten aus der Steiermark ("Tales from Styria"), was released in 1871. From then on, all of his works were published by Heckenast.

Rosegger changed to a new publisher twice after Heckenast's death, eventually ending up with Ludwig Staackmann, who made him a most generous offer. He had always been very faithful towards his publishers, and the relationship between them was one of friendship and familiarity. Rosegger started to publish Heimgarten in 1876, a monthly journal with articles and stories for the people of the country, whose main representative and interpreter he was.

Character and private life

In 1873, Rosegger married Anna Pichler. They had two children, but the marriage was short - Anna died giving birth in 1875. This affected Peter to a great degree, as is obvious from various letters he wrote to friends in that time. In 1879, Rosegger married again: Anna Knaur, with whom he had three more children and a very harmonious house life. She also cared for him during his many times of sickness.

He developed many brilliant and extraordinary ideas from the context of his time, and kept contact with unconventional personalities. Rudolf Falb

Rudolf Falb

Rudolf Falb Rudolf Falb Rudolf Falb (born April 14, 1838 in Obdach (Styria, Austrian Empire; died September 29, 1903 in Schöneberg, German Empire) was an Austrian popularizer of natural history who concerned himself with earthquakes, meteorology, astronomy and also with evolutionary linguistics...

, the creator of the popular "lunisolar flood theory," was not only his school teacher but remained a life-long friend. Although feeling strongly connected to his rural homelands, he was a liberal thinker with conservative roots. Fascinated by machines and technology

Technology

Technology is the making, usage, and knowledge of tools, machines, techniques, crafts, systems or methods of organization in order to solve a problem or perform a specific function. It can also refer to the collection of such tools, machinery, and procedures. The word technology comes ;...

, and being a faithful Christian

Christian

A Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in the Canonical gospels and the letters of the New Testament...

, he showed a sharp eye for the potentials and advantages, as well as for the dangers and downsides of both the church and the economic development of the late 19th century. As an author he aimed to entertain, to teach and also to help. He called for donations publicly at various occasions or used his influence in academic circles, thus contributing to the founding of one school (in Alpl, his home village), the building of two churches (one in Mürzzuschlag

Mürzzuschlag

Mürzzuschlag is a town in northeastern Styria, Austria, the capital of the Mürzzuschlag District. It is located on the Mürz river near the Semmering Pass, the border with the state of Lower Austria, about southwest of Vienna. The population is 8,745...

and one in St. Kathrein, rebuilt after it burned down) and other benevolent actions.

Honors

In 1903, at his 60th birthday, he was honoured by receiving the "Ehrendoktorwürde" (Doctor honoris causa) of the University of Heidelberg. The University of Vienna

University of Vienna

The University of Vienna is a public university located in Vienna, Austria. It was founded by Duke Rudolph IV in 1365 and is the oldest university in the German-speaking world...

and the University of Graz

University of Graz

The University of Graz , a university located in Graz, Austria, is the second-largest and second-oldest university in Austria....

also awarded him with similar decorations, and the German emperor Wilhelm II, as well as the Austrian emperor Franz Josef I of Austria gave Rosegger medals of honour (namely, the "Kronenorden 2. Klasse" and the "Ehrenabzeichen für Kunst und Wissenschaft"). He became citizen of honour in Graz and Vienna, and Franz Josef's successor Karl presented the ex-farmer-boy-now-national-poet with the Franz-Joseph-medal, a high-ranking accolade for an author.

Late life and death

Rosegger, who had been ill frequently and seriously, travelled back to his home in Krieglach in May 1918 in order to die where "the beautiful legend of the forest-farmer boy" had once begun, in the woodlands of the Styrian Alps

Alps

The Alps is one of the great mountain range systems of Europe, stretching from Austria and Slovenia in the east through Italy, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Germany to France in the west....

.
His birth house and the former "Forest School" (Waldschule) he helped to found in Alpl in 1902 are museums today. The region where he came from (the mountains of the Fischbacher Alps south of Krieglach and Mürzzuschlag) are now inofficially named "Waldheimat" ("Home in the Forest") after the name he gave it himself. The tourism industry in the region still profits from Rosegger's enduring popularity among readers.

Selected works