Yesterday’s End

One emblematic case is Stephanie Bachrach, the young friend of Arthur Schnitzler and brilliantly witty daughter of a Jewish stockbroker in Vienna. After her father’s bankruptcy and suicide, the former heiress of millions serves as a nurse during the war and takes her own life in 1917 – like so many other young women of her generation whose familiar world had broken apart. Arne Karsten shows us Schnitzler in his perceptive and sympathetic account of Bachrach’s fate. The book places the two figures alongside an abundance of representatives of the time – diplomats, members of the military, politicians, artists of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire – and weaves an intricate tapestry of a spectacular epoch, which became the funeral procession of the bourgeois age, not only in Vienna, but all over Europe.