Peter Rosegger

In his later years, he was honoured by officials from various Austrian universities and the city of Graz (the capital of Styria). He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature three times. He was nearly awarded the Nobel Prize in 1913 and is (at least among the people of Styria) something like a national treasure 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. The family lived in a simple 18th-century Alpine farmhouse, called Kluppeneggerhof. Living conditions were modest, the central room was used for eating, sleeping and working. Food was prepared over a hearth in the scullery. The farmhouse is now part of the Universalmuseum Joanneum, but even today the building ensemble can only be reached by foot. Since this little village, consisting only of a handful of farms, had neither a church nor a school, Rosegger 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 tailor at the age of seventeen.

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, the creator of the popular "lunisolar flood theory," was not only his school teacher but remained a lifelong friend. Although feeling strongly connected to his rural homelands, he was a liberal thinker with conservative roots. Fascinated by machines and technology, and being a faithful Christian, 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 and one in St. Kathrein, rebuilt after it burned down) and other benevolent actions.

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. His birth house, the former "Forest School" (Waldschule) he helped to found in Alpl in 1902 and his house in Krieglach, where he lived until his death in 1918, are museums today. The region where he came from (the mountains of the Fischbacher Alps south of Krieglach and Mürzzuschlag) are now unofficially 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.