Loitering Towards War

One day at Café Central in Vienna in 1894, Peter Altenberg was reading a story in the newspaper about the disappearance of a 15-year-old girl. He decided to write a short poem in her honour. Then, by mere chance, some of the great names of the Viennese literary world entered the café: Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Felix Salten, Richard Beer-Hofmann and Hermann Bahr. Schnitzler, surprised to find that Altenberg wrote poetry, abruptly took his poem and passed it along to Beer-Hofmann, who read it at a gathering that Sunday. Then Bahr, after hearing it in person, sought out Altenberg to write for a magazine. Later, the satirist Karl Kraus brought him to a publisher.