George Trakl was born in 1887 in Salzburg and committed suicide in the military hospital at Cracow in November 1914. During his short life, spent studying chemistry and wandering between Austrian cities, he was tormented by alcohol, drugs, and a passion for his younger sister Grete, a brilliant pianist. A spiritual kinsman to Holderlin and Rimbaud, Trakl described his inner life as 'an infernal chaos of rhythms and images', but he was able, in his poems, to transfigure this chaos into a vision of Europe's spiritual crisis. Ludwig Wittgenstein recognized in Trakl's work 'the tone of a man of real genius'.
