High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Rudolf Kassner (1873 1959) was an Austrian writer, essayist, translator and cultural philosopher. Rudolf Kassner was born on 11 September 1873 in Gross-Pavlowitz in southern Moravia. His maternal ancestors were peasants from Silesia. On the paternal side, also from Silesia, they were townsmen, officials and businessmen. A little after Kassner's birth, his father Oskar Kassner moved to Nikolsberg in southern Austria, where he leased imperial property, profitably cultivated beet, and ran a sugar factory. In his old age he moved to Vienna where he died in 1906. Rudolf Kassner had seven brothers and two sisters; of the ten he was the seventh. The children did not attend the local village school. Kassner's primary education was through a governess, Miss Bache. After her a tutor named Spatni prepared him for the annual examination meant for private students. In his later autobiographical writings we find some extremely intense recollections of this period of his childhood. His high school education was in the neighboring calm provincial town of Nikolsberg.