Hans Kaltneker

Born on February 2, 1895, in Temesvár, then part of Austria-Hungary and now Timișoara, Romania, he moved with his family to Vienna in 1906. While still a student at the Hietzing Gymnasium, he formed a literary circle with friends including Paul Zsolnay and Hans Flesch-Brunningen, and the group published its own magazine, Das neue Land.

He studied law at the University of Vienna, but writing was his real calling. His work included drama, lyric poetry, and prose, and he is remembered as an important early voice of Austrian Expressionism. Contemporary and later accounts describe his writing as unusually mature, intense, and visionary for someone so young.

Illness shaped much of his short life: because of lung disease, he spent long periods in Davos from 1912 onward, returning mainly for examinations, and he later lived in Gutenstein in Lower Austria. He died there on September 29, 1919, from tuberculosis, leaving a brief but powerful literary legacy.