Robert Schindel
Robert Schindel (born 4 April 1944) is an Austrian lyricist, regisseur and author. Life and career. Robert Schindel was born on 4 April 1944 in Bad Hall, Upper Austria to Jewish communist parents. From 1950 to 1954, he attended elementary school and then the Bundesrealgymnasium in Vienna. In 1959, Robert Schindel left the Gymnasium; he was „entlassen wegen schlechter Führung“ ("dismissed because of poor leadership") and began an apprenticeship as a bookseller at Globus-Verlag in Vienna, which he broke off. This was followed by trips to Paris and Sweden, where he made his way as a dishwasher  among other things. According to his own statement, he was a member of the Communist Party of Austria from 1961 to 1967. In 1967, Schindel caught up with his Matura, studied philosophy and law for two semesters and was involved in Maoist circles. However, he described Café Hawelka as his real university, where he met H. C. Artmann and Oskar Werner among others. He became one of the founders of the student movement “Kommune Wien”, based on the Berlin model, and the literary magazine “Hundsblume”, in which he also published his lyrical texts. Other artists who became famous later, such  as Elfriede Jelinek and the twin couple Konstantin Kaiser and Leander Kaiser, also belonged to his circle. In 1970 Schindel published the novel "Kassandra". Robert Schindel is a member of the Freie Akademie der Künste in Hamburg and the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung. He founded the first state literary institution in Austria to promote creative writing and has been teaching there as a university lecturer at the Institute for Linguistic Art at the University of Applied Arts Vienna since 2009.