Peter Altenberg’s Semmering 1912
- You can take the poet out of the city…
a talk with Professor Andrew Barker
Thursday, 14 November 2002, 7:00 pm
at the Austrian Cultural Forum London
28 Rutland Gate SW7
Around the turn of the century Viennese society discovered the mountainous
landscape of the Semmering, and in the course of the following decade it
became one of the most popular summer spas of the Austrian monarchy. The
train journey to the luxury hotels, across plunging viaducts and past steep
rock faces was, and still is, a spectacular experience. Artists made a
habit of spending their holiday on the Semmering, with great figures from
Vienna´s cultural life such as Oskar Kokoschka, Adolf Loos, Karl Kraus and
Arthur Schnitzler counting among the regular guests.
With Semmering 1912 the writer Peter Altenberg, one of the most famous
representatives of Vienna´s coffee house literature, presented an
impressionistic kaleidoscope of the emotions he
experienced during his long sojourn at the Semmering´s most elegant hotel,
the Panhans. Altenberg, who was there to recover from nervous exhaustion
and alcoholism, fell hopelessly in love with the 12year old Klara Panhans:
the precisely composed prose sketches bear witness to this despairing love
of an elderly poet and are juxtaposed with elaborate descriptions of
nature, portrayal of hotel life and autobiographical recollections. What
has only recently emerged is that Altenberg also composed an album of 259
coloured postcards and photographs with the same title and which
recapitulates the written word in visual form. This recently discovered
album has now been reproduced for the first time in the context of a new
bibliophile edition of Semmering 1912. Andrew Barker, co-editor of this
new edition, will examine the unique fusion of textual and visual elements
in Semmering 1912 and talk about the impact of the mountain environment on
Altenberg´s work.
Peter Altenberg’s Semmering 1912 is part of the Austrian Cultural Forum’s
season Highly Inspired. Organised to coincide with the United Nations’
International Year of Mountains, the season (September – December 2002)
celebrates and questions the various ways in which mountains in general –
the Alps in particular – have inspired artistic and intellectual
achievement.
ACF contact: Karin Proidl, Tel 020 7584 8653, e-mail [log in to unmask]
For free tickets send a self-addressed envelope to ticket Office, Austrian
Cultural Forum London,
28 Rutland Gate, London SW7 1PQ; please indicate the event you wish to
attend.
|