Peter Altenberg and the Coffeehouse Bohemian

Adopting the  pen name of Peter Altenberg, Altenberg was born Richard Englander. The name of Peter Altenberg immortalized a childhood love of his, and the general positive experience of his youth which equally added a spirit to his writing and the lifestyle of his adulthood. His childhood virtually took on fairy tale proportions particularly when it stood against a society which Altenberg critically viewed and from which he wished to distance himself. Ingenuity, he felt, was the stamp of the adult word, and this attitude made his attempt at formal education, in the early 1880s, a challenge for him. Unable to find employment, he took up the life of the untied bohemian.
 

    The transient nature of his hotel-hopping was a retreat from the otherwise thick materialism  that came with general and grounded existence of a real home. During the waking hours,however, it was the coffeehouse which was his home, quite literally in the sense that he made his address there. Particularly in Cafe Griendsteidl and Central, though he made his rounds, his presence was monumental, and he breathed the essence of what made the coffeehouse image; His attraction to the minute details of simple existence and the brief prose he produced in response to them was equally a nod to the fact that his home at the coffeehouse gave him the space and the time to spare in order to observe life so closely. In his snippet on "Little Things," published in 1809, he trumpets, "That is why I put store in the little things of life, in neckties, parasol handles, cane handles, discrete remarks, pearls that roll under tables and nobody ever finds! The momentous things have no significance at all!"