Peter Rosegger

Peter Rosegger (original Roßegger ) (31 July 1843 – 26 June 1918) was an Austrian writer and poet from the province of Styria. He was a son of a mountain farmer and grew up in the woodlands and mountains of Alpl. Rosegger (or Rossegger) went on to become a most prolific 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 (the capital of Styria). He was nearly awarded the Nobel Prize in 1913 and is (at least among the people of Styria) something like a national hero to this day.

Rosegger was born as the first of seven children of a peasant couple in the village of Alpl, in the mountains above Krieglach, 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 down the mountain 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 like his father, as he was often sick and rather frail in general. So, he became understudy of a traveling at the age of seventeen.

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, 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.

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