Many of his plays were premiered at Vienna’s prestigious Burgtheater and were, for the most part, critically and commercially successful. He was, however, no stranger to controversy: he was forced to give up his army commission following the publication in 1901 of his satirical novel Lieutenant Gustl (which was said to have ‘tarnished the image of the Austro-Hungarian army’), and La Ronde was the subject of widely publicised criminal proceedings in Berlin in 1921 (see below, ‘The Struggle for Acceptance’).

Schnitzler’s last years were overshadowed by the suicide in 1928 of his daughter, Lili. His last novel, Flight into Darkness, was published in 1931. He died of a brain haemorrhage the same year in Vienna on 21 October.

Vienna 1900

The Austro-Hungarian Empire of 1867-1918 stretched from the Alps to the Russian steppe and from the forests of Poland to the shores of the Adriatic. Schnitzler’s Vienna was its political, economic and cultural capital. The city was home to the glittering Hapsburg court and a large and prosperous middle class. It had grown rapidly following the revolutions of 1848, with migrants drawn from every corner of the Empire by the city’s cosmopolitan energy, its reputation for tolerance and the opportunities for material and social advancement it could offer. Of a population in 1910 of over two million, one in ten was Jewish by faith or descent; although the recent influx of mainly Galician Jews had little in common with the assimilated and much wealthier minority prominent in the city’s academic, professional and cultural life.

Construction of the majestic Ringstrasse (Ring Boulevard) had started in 1857, and the city boasted magnificent new imperial and civic buildings, a thriving university, and a world-famous opera house and theatre. Vienna prided itself on catering for the civilised pleasures of urban life: its spacious parks and popular entertainments were thronged at weekends, middle-class audiences flocked to the latest operettas and the aristocratic splendour of the New Year Ball was legendary. The city’s elegant restaurants and, above all, its coffee-houses played a central part in its vibrant social, cultural and intellectual life.

Cautious political reforms following Austria’s defeat in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 had given Vienna a degree of political stability. The stock exchange crash of 1873, however, led to a twenty-year depression and, by the 1880s, the deficiencies of the all-powerful but sclerotic imperial system were starting to show. Society was rocked by a series of royal and political scandals. The narrow electoral franchise, which restricted voting rights to the educated and well-off, was coming under concerted attack, together with the Liberal political ascendancy which it had produced. In 1895 the populist demagogue Karl Lueger (1844-1910) was elected mayor of Vienna, and in 1901 twenty-one members of Georg von Schönerer’s (1842-1921) virulently anti-Semitic Pan-German Party entered Parliament.