75th anniversary of death - Austria / II. Republic of Austria 1989 - 4 Shilling

Georg Trakl was born on February 3, 1887 in Salzburg as the son of Tobias Trakl and his second wife Maria. In 1897 he entered the k.k. State Gymnasium, but left it in 1905 without a degree. The only way he now had access to was the study of pharmacy. An internship in the white angel pharmacy offered him free access to narcotics under whose influence he would stay his life. His further life was marked by the attempt to differentiate himself from the bourgeois lifestyle and an ever stronger attachment to the literary world of this time. The motives that were to dominate Trakl's poetry until the end of his life were death, grief, demise and decay. His first book of poems appeared in 1913, but the poet no longer experienced the publication of his second book. At the onset of World War I, he was drafted into Gallicia. The sensitive soul of the writer did not cope with the impressions he saw there. He was admitted to the Cracow clinic for psychiatric observation and died there on 3 November 1914 from a cocaine poisoning.