Born in Bozen/Bolzano, Hans Karl grew up with his family in the South Tyrolean Unterland, just few miles south of Bozen. He attended the Liceo classico in Bozen where he obtained the :de:Staatliche Abschlussprüfung|"Maturità", the Italian high-school diploma. Peterlini became a journalist in 1982. By that time he had already produced some youthful contributions to Dolomiten, the regional daily newspaper. In 1982 he took a job with ff – Südtiroler Wochenmagazin, a weekly news magazine with broadly liberal views on politics and economics. He remained with the Wochenmagazin till 1990, by which time he had become its editor in chief. After that he joined with Hubertus Czernin and the Lentsch family to set up a rival news magazine, Südtirol Profil. When the rival magazine folded he returned to ff – Südtiroler Wochenmagazin, resuming his role as editor in chief between 1998 and 2004. His career as a journalist placed him at the heart of a resurgence in the German languageprint media in South Tyrol which accompanied an acceptance of some political and cultural decentralisation by the authorities in Rome. Enduring themes in his writing included the balance of risks between violent confrontation and peaceful co-existence in recent South Tyrol history, coupled with related questions involving how people might grow beyond traditional cultural patterns and ethnic hostilities that had been a feature of the region since its involuntary incorporation into Italy during the second decade of the twentieth century. During the early years of the twenty-first century he published his first books on themes of South Tyrol terrorism, and his book "Wir Kinder der Südtirol-Autonomie". In 2004 Peterlini backed away from his journalistic career in order to become a student at the University of Innsbruck where he studied Pedagogy with a focus on psychoanalytical aspects. His objective was to be able to revisit the themes of his previous writing from a more academic perspective. His dissertation, submitted in 2006, was entitled "The Explosion of Power and Powerlessness", and attempted to provide a psychoanalytic perspective on the terrorist attacks in South Tyrol between 1956 and 1967. He undertook further related training. His doctorate, received from the Faculty of Education Sciences at the Free University of Bolzano, followed in 2010. The theme of his dissertation was "Homeland" as a catch-all for political identity in South Tyrol. Further elucidation comes from the Italian title used when it was published as a book, "Understanding the other". He received his habilitation from Innsbruck for a dissertation entitled "Learning and Power: Paradigms of Education and Training in Schools, Culture and Politics" and he received his corresponding teaching certificate. For the 2014/2015 academic year he obtained the teaching chair in "General Education Sciences and Intercultural Education" at Klagenfurt's Alpen-Adria University.
