A haze of nostalgia has blanketed fin de
siècle Vienna since
1941, when The World
of Yesterday, Stefan Zweig’s elegy for the
“Austrian-Jewish-bourgeois culture that culminated in Mahler,
Hoffmannsthal, Schnitzler, and Freud” first appeared. The
Viennese bourgeoisie in the 1890s were, after all, the most
cultivated and refined middle class in the world, and they set an all
but unassailable benchmark in cultural accomplishment. It was an
era of relative innocence: the assumptions of the Enlightenment
and faith in the ideal of human progress were unquestioned; the
empire’s endemic anti-Semitism had been in abeyance for two
decades; the tremors of the tottering Hapsburg monarchy were
easily ignored. Zweig described this “golden age of security” as
an age of reason in which radicalism and violence seemed
impossible.

The irrational was relegated to the psyche. Arthur Schnitzler
and Sigmund Freud were charting the murky psychological depths of
the haute bourgeoisie with equal intensity. Yet Schnitzler’s
depictions of Viennese neuroses in his fiction and drama were far
more empathetic and, in their ambiguity, subtler than Freud’s
more objective and definitive case studies. For fear of being
unduly influenced, Freud was reluctant to read his fellow
doctor’s work. He even avoided meeting Schnitzler for many
years, confessing to the latter that he had done so out of a kind
of Doppelgängerscheu or apprehension before his psychological
double. Indeed, many of the psychological mechanisms analysed by
Freud—the transmutation of desires and fears in dreams,
hysterical manifestations of repressed libidos, the conflicts of