Alban Berg

Friedrich Rückert was a German poet, translator, and professor of Oriental languages. Rückert was born at Schweinfurt and was the eldest son of a lawyer. He was educated at the local Gymnasium and at the universities of Würzburg and Heidelberg. From 1816-1817, he worked on the... editorial staff of the Morgenblatt at Stuttgart. Nearly the whole of the year 1818 he spent in Rome, and afterwards he lived for several years at Coburg . He was appointed a professor of Oriental languages at the University of Erlangen in 1826, and, in 1841, he was called to a similar position in Berlin, where he was also made a privy councillor. In 1849 he resigned his professorship at Berlin, and went to live on his estate Neuses near Coburg. When Rückert began his literary career, Germany was engaged in her life-and-death struggle with Napoleon; and in his first volume, Deutsche Gedichte , published in 1814 under the pseudonym Freimund Raimar, he gave, particularly in the powerful Geharnischte Sonette , vigorous expression to the prevailing sentiment of his countrymen.
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Karl Kraus was an Austrian writer and journalist, known as a satirist, essayist, aphorist, playwright and poet. He is regarded as one of the... foremost German-language satirists of the 20th century, especially for his witty criticism of the press, German culture, and German and Austrian politics. Kraus was born into a wealthy Jewish family of Jacob Kraus, a papermaker, and his wife Ernestine, née Kantor, in Jičín, Bohemia . The family moved to Vienna in 1877. His mother died in 1891. Kraus enrolled as a law student at the University of Vienna in 1892. Beginning in April of the same year he began contributing to the paper Wiener Literaturzeitung, starting with a critique of Gerhart Hauptmann's Die Weber. Around that time, he unsuccessfully tried to perform as an actor in a small theater. In 1894 he changed his field of studies to philosophy and German literature. He discontinued his studies in 1896. His friendship with Peter Altenberg began about this time.
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Adolf Franz Karl Viktor Maria Loos was an Austro-Hungarian architect. He was influential in European Modern architecture, and in his essay Ornament... and Crime he repudiated the florid style of the Vienna Secession, the Austrian version of Art Nouveau. In this and many other essays he contributed to the elaboration of a body of theory and criticism of Modernism in architecture. Born in 1870 in Brünn to an ethnically German family, Loos was nine when his father, a stonemason, died. He completed technical school in Liberec, Czech Republic, which is now Technical University Liberec and later studied at Dresden Technical University before moving to Vienna. Loos stayed in America for three years, where he had an uncle living in Philadelphia. He visited the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and appreciated the work of Louis Sullivan. He visited St. Louis and did odd jobs in New York. Loos returned to Vienna in 1896 a man of taste and intellectual refinement, immediately entering the Viennese intelligentsia.
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