Otto Laaber

Otto Laaber (born October 28, 1934 in Klosterneuburg ; died July 15, 1973 in Vienna ) was an Austrian poet.

Life

Laaber came from an old farming family and grew up in Langenlebarn in Tullnerfeld . After attending the Realgymnasium Tulln he studied psychology and ethnology at the University of Vienna from the winter semester 1952/53 and in 1955/56 with a scholarship at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette , but broke off his studies and began to focus on a commercial profession. In 1970, however, he enrolled again in Vienna for history and English studies .

Between 1952 and 1959 Laaber regularly published poetry in the Viennese literary magazine Neuewege and took part twice in the Innsbruck Youth Culture Weeks. In the following years, however, he increasingly withdrew; It was not until 1972 that he reappeared and became a member of the Podium literature group . In 1973 he died by suicide . In his lifetime he had not found a publisher for a book of poetry. A selection of his poems introduced by Alfred Gesswein was published posthumously in 1976 and a further selection volume was published by Podium- Verlag in 2013 . For this example the poem Easter Experience :

The railway conductors do their duty,
politely puncturing tickets.
The bombers, however
, drove into the countryside.
General managers chat with little rodents.
One problem remains: the people.
One suspects: they exist.
Once again everything is for the best.

Works

• Inventory. Poems. with an afterword by Alfred Gesswein . Series Lyrik aus Österreich, Vol. 3. Grasl, Baden near Vienna 1976.
• Otto Laaber: selected poems 1952–1973. Podium, Vienna 2013, ISBN 978-3-902886-00-2 .

literature

• Gerhard Jaschke : Laaber, Otto. In: Wilhelm Kühlmann (Ed.): Killy Literature Lexicon . Authors and works from the German-speaking cultural area. 2., completely revised Ed. De Gruyter, Berlin 2010, vol. 7, p. 156.

Web links

• Literature by and about Otto Laaber in the catalog of the German National Library
• Short biography and poems of Laabers