On October 20, 1923, Otfried Preussler is born in Reichenberg in Northern Bohemia. Among his ancestors in the foreland of the Isergebirge and Riesengebirge, there are glassmakersand peasants, rural craftsmen and some copper engravers, and among his relatives there are even two magicians. Both his parents are teachers, and in his spare time, his father does research in the local history.

From his earliest childhood, Otfried Preussler finds motives in the large library of the family. . 

The local popularstorytellers, above all his Grandmother Dora, who disposes of an inexhaustible fund of stories, have another formative influence on him.

Grandmother Dora

"My grandmother´s story book – which actually has never existed – is the most important of all the books I have ever known in my life."      

First grade in the Rudolfschule with teacher Effenberger, in 1930.

It is from his Bohemian home country that Otfried Preussler acquires his themes. As a little boy, he often makes excursions with his father, who collects the myths of the Bohemian Isergebirge. 

Together with his father, he often sits in the people´s parlours by the light of the oil-lamp in the evenings, listening to their stories about magicians, poachers, witches, water-sprites and ghosts.

After his childhood and youth in an environment which has an open mind for literature and art, the hard years of the war follow. Like most young men of his of his age, Otfried Preussler is drafted in the war immediately after his school-leaving examinationin Reichenberg in 1942.

He survives his war service on the Eastern front, but in 1944, as a 21-years-old lieutenant, he gets into Soviet captivity. He spends the next five years of his life in several Russian campsin the Tatar republic.

After being released from war captivity in June 1949,he is lucky to retrieve, in Rosenheim in Upper Bavaria, his expelled relatives and his bride from Reichenberg, Annelies Kind. They get married in the same year.

Church banns:

"The late returnee

Otfried Preussler

and the refugee girl

Annelies Kind" 1949

It is not easy to start from scratch, as a late returnee at the age of 26. His background, his inclination as well as practical reasons induce him to become a teacher.

Snapshot (1950)

To be able to support his family during his teacher education, he works in a second job as a local reporter on bike and begins to write stories for the children´s radio. After his studies, he works as anelementary teacher and keeps teaching until 1970.

"Whatever I could learn from my pupils, whatever I could learn from children in general, as far as stories for children are concerned - I think I have learned it during my years as a teacher. Those were years when it was also me who went to school - among other things as a storyteller." (1954)

      Together with his family, he lives in the Rübezahlweg near Rosenheim. His daughter Renate is born in 1951, his daughter Regine in 1953, and his daughter Susanne in 1958.      

The Preussler family (Christmas 1958)

Between 1953 and 1970 he was initially a primary school teacher, then a school principal in Rosenheim. There his talents as a storyteller and illustrator were put to good use, and often the stories he told the children would later be written down and published.

He won the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis in 1972 for Krabat.

Preußler resided in Haidholzen, near Rosenheim.

Source : http://www.preussler.de