[3] In 1958 he married and attended the City of Vienna's Library School, following which he worked for ten years as a librarian in adult education centres.
[2] Hinterberger discovered literature in the 1950s through the Bavarian author Oskar Maria Graf;[3] he began writing when he was 24 or 25 years old.
Hinterberger's Edmund "Mundl" Sackbauer, (anti-)hero of the television series Ein echter Wiener geht nicht unter, came to typify the Viennese renter in the German-speaking world.
In contrast, the original figure in Hinterberger's mid-1960s book Das Salz der Erde on which he based the series is a pitiful man in the throes of midlife crisis, who notices while on holiday in Italy that his control over his family is dissolving.
At the end of the book he leaves his wife, fails in his attempt to revive his self-confidence in a bordello, and is last seen uncertain whether in his outburst of emotion he has killed the prostitute or whether she is only injured.