By Ulli Hammerl
Georg Aigner experienced abuse, addiction and homelessness before meeting his wife, Evelyne, and turning his life around. He told Austrian street paper Apropos more.
Georg Aigner was born in Stuhlfelden, Pinzgau, and had six siblings. Physical abuse was part of his life from the very beginning. He smoked his first cigarette when he was just 10 years old, and first drank alcohol at 12.
At his father’s behest, he began an apprenticeship as a butcher. “The practical tasks were easy for me; I was good at them,” he says. “But vocational school was not for me.” He spent the following years working as a labourer in construction, then as a forestry worker in Austria, Germany and Switzerland. “I earned very well, but I drank it all away,” he admits.
He came to Salzburg in 1995 with the intention of escaping the confines of Pinzgau and starting a new life in the anonymity of the city. But, unable to find secure housing, the area around the railway station becomes his new home for the next five years.
This article first appeared in Apropos, a magazine sold on the streets of Salzburg, Austria, by people who have limited other ways of earning an income.