Norbert Conrad Kaser (19 April 1947 - 21 August 1978) was a writer and poet from the ethnically conflicted South Tyrol / Alto Adige region of north-eastern (since 1918) Italy. His literary works and polemical writings contributed significantly to the establishment of a new South Tyrolean literature during the later 1960s. Much of his work was published only after his death at the early age of 31. Kaser was politically engaged: while many of his attitudes defy easy pigeon-holing, he was born into the region's German-speaking community, and in most respects he comes across as part of the political-intellectual left. Outside Italy, Kaser's work has become better known across the German speaking world only posthumously.
Biography
Norbert C. Kaser was born in Brixen, a regional centre and the seat of a former Prince-Bishopric roughly 25 miles up-river of Bolzano. Paula Thum, his mother, was not married to Alois Mairunteregger (1913-1957), his father. Despite the social conventions of the time and place, Mairunteregger refused to "legitimize" his son retrospectively by marrying the child's mother. The infant was initially farmed out, looked after at one point by the "Grey Sisters of Saint Elizabeth". When Norbert was 10 his father was killed in an accident. By that time his mother had married Franz Kaser, a disabled war veteran and a carpenter by training, who adopted and thereby belatedly "legitimized" Norbert. Norbert Kaser was now able to grow up living with his mother and step-father. No longer able to work at his chosen trade, Franz Kaser instead supported the little family by working as a caretaker-gatekeeper with "J. Moessmer & Co., Nachfolger", a sheep-wool processing factory in nearby Bruneck. The job came with a "service flat", and the family accordingly lived on the factory premises. After completing his compulsory schooling Norbert Kaiser transferred to the "Humanistische Gymnasium" (secondary school) at Bruneck, along the Puster Valley. His school career was badly disrupted by serious kidney illness. For much of the time he was nevertheless able to contribute to the family budget, taking jobs washing cars, selling crockery and undertaking hotel clerical work. In 1966 he sat for but failed the Matura (schooling completion exam) which would have opened the way to university-level education. He now left the Puster Valley, relocating to Laas (Vinschgau), a small remote town near the Swiss frontier, some fifty miles to the west. The principal industry in Laas involved marble quarrying: here, during 1966/67, he took a teaching job at the local middle school.
1967 also marked what Kaser would describe as his "entry into literature". publishing his poem "die brücke" ("the bridge") in the "Südtiroler Zeitschrift", a locally produced and now defunct magazine which slightly unusually (even in the South Tyrol / Alto Adige) was published in two languages. That was quickly followed by his first little volume of poetry, which he entitled "probegaenge" (loosely, "rehearsal"), of which he distributed homemade copies to friends. Between 1967 and 1970 he produced seven such volumes. In 1968 Kaser joined the little Capuchin monastery in Bruneck. He remained with the order for only six months. Shortly after leaving, however, and at the third attempt, he passed the Matura school final exam as a "private student". He participated at the "Youth Culture Week" in Innsbruck during the second part of May 1969. Armed with his exam-pass, in October 1969 he relocated to Vienna, where he embarked on a university-level course in Art history, while living in "an allotment garden settlement" in the Hernals (north-central) quarter of the city.