Oskar KOKOSCHKA : Expressionist painter,
graphic artist, stage designer and poet, born at Pöchlarn (Lower Austria) on the 1st of March 1886. Educated at Kunstgewerbeschule
in Vienna. He painted numerous prophetic prewar canvases depicting the coming holocaust,
and several depicting himself with a grievous chest wound, which later events would bear
out as literally true. When the war started Kokoschka immediately volunteered for the army.
Served in Austro-Hungarian cavalry, first with Dragoon Regiment 3 and then as a Fähnrich
with 4th Squadron, Dragoon Regiment 15. On the 29th of August 1915 his squadron was ambushed
at a small wood near Sikiryczy in Volhynia. During the ensuing heavy fighting the unit
suffered many causalities. All the officers and aspirant officers were killed or captured
by the Russians. Fähnrich Kokoschka who performed heroically during this action was
so seriously wounded during his capture that his men later reported him as dead. A bullet
from a Russian machine gun had pierced his head, passing out through the back of his neck,
and his horse was killed from under him. Sometime later, as he lay in agony on the ground
among the dead and wounded, the Cossacks came through, bayoneting those who were still
alive.  One of the Cossacks stabbed him
between the ribs, piecing his lung, and though Kokoschka was secretly pointing a cocked
pistol at his executioner, he could not bring himself to pull the trigger. Shortly
thereafter, according to one account, he was picked up by men of his own division and
taken to a field hospital. By another account he was taken prisoner by the Russians,
but freed three days later by an Austrian infantry unit near the railway station at
Kiwercy. Whichever is true, he thereafter spent many months in hospitals in Poland.
Awarded Silver Bravery Medal 1st class. Promoted a year later to Leutnant der Reserve,
on the 1st of August 1916, at which time he was still in Hospital. In December he returned
to his regiment (where he soon earned the Karl Troop Cross) but in late January 1918 was
invalided to Oberloschwitz near Dresden.. Never returned to active duty but was promoted to
Oberleutnant der Reserve on the 1st of November 1918. After the war Kokoschka taught at
the Kunstakademie in Dresden, and later traveled through Europe, North Africa and
the Orient. Between 1933 and 1937 he lived in Vienna and Prague a year later where he
painted his self portrait "Selbstbildnis eines entarteten Künstlers" in 1937. The Nazis, rising
to power during these years, counted Kokoschka, despite his admirable war record, among the despised 'decadents', and consigned
books containing his art to the flames. He lived
in England during the war, and moved to Switzerland in 1953, at which time he founded
a summer academy "Schule des Sehen" at the castle of Hohensalzburg, which he directed
until 1962.
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Rainier Maria RILKE born, Prague, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary, 4 Dec 1875:
Austro-German poet who became internationally famous with such works as Duino Elegies
and Sonnets to Orpheus. ~~ At the outbreak of war in 1914, Rilke was in Munich,
where he decided to remain, spending most of the war there. Early in the war he wrote a
series of patriotic poems which he later renounced.
In December 1915 he was called up for
military service with the Austrian army at Vienna, but by June 1916 he had returned to
civilian life. The social climate of these years proved inimical to his way of life and to
his poetry and, by the time the war ended, he had come to feel almost completely paralyzed.
He would have only one relatively productive phase: the fall of 1915, when, in addition to
a series of new poems, he wrote the Fourth Duino Elegy. Rilke's Wartime Letters,
1914-1921 were published in 1940.
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Georg TRAKL
, Born 3 Feb 1886 in Salzburg. Expressionist poet whose personal and wartime torments made him Austria's foremost elegist of decay and death. He influenced Germanic poets after both world wars. Moody and withdrawn, Trakl trained as a pharmacist at the University of Vienna (1908–10)—partly, perhaps, to gain access to narcotics, for by 1913 he was a confirmed addict. Other compulsions were an abnormal affection for his younger sister, Grete, and restless wanderlust. The patronage of a periodical publisher and of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who secretly gave him part of a patrimony, enabled Trakl to devote himself to poetry; he brought out his first volume in 1913. The following year he became a lieutenant in the army medical corps  and, in Galicia, was placed in charge of 90 serious casualties whose agonies he, as a mere dispensing chemist, could hardly relieve. One patient killed himself while Trakl watched helplessly; he also saw deserters being hanged. He either attempted or threatened to shoot himself in the aftermath of these horrors and was sent to a military hospital at Kraków for observation. There he died of an overdose of cocaine, perhaps taken inadvertently.
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Franz WERFEL, born, 1890, Prague, the son of a wealthy Jewish glove manufacturer. Educated in Prague, where he met Franz Kafka and Max Brod. In 1909 worked for a time in a shipping firm. After studies in Leipzig and Hamburg, Werfel worked at a publishing company from 1911 to 1914. Edited the expressionist series Der Jüngste Tag with Walter Hasenclever and Kurt Pinthus. Werfel's first verse collection, Der Weltfreund, a celebration of human brotherhood, appeared in 1911, and is significant in the history of expressionism. On the eve of war, organized a pacifist society with Martin Buber, Gustav Landauer, and Max Scheler. From 1915 to 1917 Werfel served in the Austrian army on the Italian & Russian (Galicia) fronts. In 1916 his first play, a pacificistic adaptation of Euripides' Trojan Women, had a successful run in Berlin. After combat service on two fronts, Werfel was transferred to the war press bureau in Vienna, but his reading of pacifistic poems in the Vienneses cafés led to a charge of treason & he was arrested. Werfel's second book of poems, containing his pessimistic war poetry, Der Gerichttag (The Day of Judgment), appeared in 1919. While in Vienna, Werfel met composer Alma Mahler-Gropius, the widow of Gustav Mahler and wife of architect Walter Gropius. She was friends with many notable composers, artists & writers, and was painted repeatedly by Kokoschka & Klimpt. She divorced Gropius and took up with Werfel; they were married in 1929. In 1924 Werfel published Verdi, Roman der Oper (Verdi, A Novel of the Opera). Die vierzig Tage des Musa Dagh (1933; The Forty Days of Musa Dagh), an epic novel about Armenian resistance to the Turks, brought him international fame. Keeping ahead of a spreading Nazism, Werfel, a Jew, settled in an old mill in southern France.
With the fall of France in 1940 (reflected in his play Jakobowsky und der Oberst, written in 1944 and successfully produced in New York City that year as Jakobowsky and the Colonel), he decided to flee to the United States. In the course of his journey, he found solace in the pilgrimage town of Lourdes, France, where St. Bernadette had had visions of the Virgin. He vowed to write about the saint if he ever reached America and kept the vow with Das Lied von Bernadette (1941; The Song of Bernadette, 1942). His novel was the basis for a popular film (1943) that won four Academy Awards.
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Stefan ZWEIG, born 28 November 1881, in Vienna. He will studied
in Austria, France and Germany. His earliest essays were accepted by the Zionist leader
Theodor Herzl, literary editor of the Neue Freie Presse. A collection of poems
appeared in 1901. He earned a doctorate from Vienna University in 1904, with a
dissertation on Taine. After travelling widely, he settled in Salzburg in 1913. The next
year he married another writer, Friderike von Winternitz. Following the outbreak of war,
Zweig became an ardent pacifist. He worked in the archives of the Austrian War Office,
but was forced to move to Zürich when his pacifist views alarmed authorities. His first
major work, the dramatic poem, Jeremiah, which he will wrote in 1917 while still in
the army, portrayed the war as supreme madness. Zweig settled in Salzburg after the war
and wrote biographies, upon which his reputation mainly rests, as well as short stories,
novelettes, and essays.
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