Books by Arthur Schnitzler
“Another highly significant Austrian writer is Arthur Schnitzler. Most people have either read or seen his stage plays. Freud regarded him as his Doppelgänger. He said Schnitzler had put his (Freud’s) ideas into fiction. Schnitzler is very acute on the louche side of Viennese life. There was massive repression, officially, on sexual desire, which naturally had to find an outlet—Vienna was the city with the most prostitutes in Europe. There’s La Ronde by Schnitzler, which is a drama that’s particularly about that over-sensualised world. He was really a very, very good writer.” Read more...
Nicholas Parsons, Historian
“This was bold and prescient. Written in 1908, the story centres around an aristocratic composer and his brother who are not Jewish, but have many Jewish friends who they meet in artistic salons and elsewhere. The book runs the gamut of middle-class Jewish identity in Vienna—you have the Zionist, the Jewish semi-aristocrat (who’s pretending he isn’t Jewish), the converted Jew, atheists and believers, social democrats and Eastern European Jews…Freud called Schnitzler his doppelgänger. He said that Schnitzler understood intuitively what he himself had gathered by talking to lots and lots of patients.” Read more...
The best books on Jewish Vienna
Brigid Grauman, Journalist
Interviews where books by Arthur Schnitzler were recommended
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1
Tante Jolesch or the Decline of the West in Anecdotes
by Friedrich Torberg & Maria Poglitsch Bauer (translator) -
2
The Road into the Open
by Arthur Schnitzler & Roger Byers (translator) -
3
The Radetzky March
by Joseph Roth -
4
The World of Yesterday
by Stefan Zweig & Anthea Bell (translator) -
5
Last Waltz in Vienna
by George Clare
The best books on Jewish Vienna, recommended by Brigid Grauman
The best books on Jewish Vienna, recommended by Brigid Grauman
In the late 19th and early 20th century, Vienna had a vibrant intellectual and cultural life, embraced and at times led by key figures in its large Jewish community. All that would disappear with the rise of anti-Semitism and the Anschluss. Many Jews fled or committed suicide. Others were deported to concentration camps. After the war some went back, but Vienna would never be the same. Here Brigid Grauman, whose father’s family were assimilated Jews from Vienna, recommends books that evoke that poignant, tragic period that ended with World War II.
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1
Central Europe: Enemies, Neighbors, Friends
by Lonnie Johnson -
2
The Siege of Vienna: The Last Great Trial Between Cross & Crescent
by John Stoye -
3
Maria Theresa
by Edward Crankshaw -
4
Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World
by Richard Cockett -
5
The Man Without Qualities
by Robert Musil -
6
The Capuchin Crypt (aka The Emperor's Tomb)
by Joseph Roth
The best books on Austria, recommended by Nicholas Parsons
The best books on Austria, recommended by Nicholas Parsons
Today, the Republic of Austria is a small country in Central Europe, but for centuries, it was the fulcrum of events going on in Europe, as the Habsburgs led the Holy Roman Empire—and later the multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire—until it all fell apart after World War I. Nicholas Parsons, author of the excellent The Shortest History of Austria, introduces us to books and novels that bring to life the history of a political, intellectual, and cultural powerhouse.
