Franz Xaver Kappus

Franz Xaver Kappus (17 May 1883 – 9 October 1966) was an Austrian military officer, journalist, editor and writer who wrote poetry, short-stories, novels and screenplays.

Franz Xaver Kappus was born on 17 May 1883 in Timișoara (also known as German: Temeschwar, Temeschburg or Temeswar, in Hungarian: Temesvár), in the Banat province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

As a 19-year-old officer cadet at the Theresian Military Academy in Wiener Neustadt, Lower Austria, Kappus wrote to Rainer Maria Rilke after learning that as a young man, Rilke, the son of an Austrian army officer, had studied at the academy's lower school at Sankt Pölten in the 1890s.

[2][3] Aside from his role in writing to Rilke and later publishing these letters, Kappus is largely forgotten by history.

[1] After World War I, he was the editor of several newspapers, including Kappus Deutsche Wacht (trans.

The first English translation of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet , published in 1934. Kappus had compiled ten letters he received from Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke between 1902 and 1908 and published them in Germany in 1929.