author
Richard Beer-Hofmann
1866–1945
A key voice in Vienna’s modern literary world, he wrote with dreamlike intensity and helped shape the Young Vienna circle. His work ranged from lyrical prose to drama, and his life was marked by exile after fleeing Nazi rule.
1 Audiobook
Gedenkrede auf Wolfgang Amade Mozart
by Richard Beer-Hofmann
About the author
Born in Vienna in 1866, Richard Beer-Hofmann was an Austrian writer, poet, and dramatist associated with the Young Vienna movement. He studied law, but literature became his real calling, and he became part of the influential circle around writers such as Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Arthur Schnitzler.
Though he published relatively little, he earned lasting respect for the richness and elegance of his writing. He moved between prose, poetry, and drama, and later also worked in the theater with director Max Reinhardt. His best-known works include the novella Der Tod Georgs and the biblical drama Jaákobs Traum.
Beer-Hofmann was born into a Jewish family and left Austria in 1939, traveling by way of Zurich to New York. He became a U.S. citizen in 1945, the same year he died, after a life that connected the cultural brilliance of fin-de-siècle Vienna with the upheavals of the 20th century.