Arthur Schnitzler (SHNIHTS-lur) was one of the most prominent writers living in the city of Vienna during the highly productive and creative late nineteenth, early twentieth century era that produced individuals such as Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Johannes Brahms. Born in that city on May 15, 1862, Schnitzler was the son of a famous Jewish professor of medicine and became himself a practicing physician upon graduation from the University of Vienna in 1885. For a time he was involved in studies in psychology. He was, however, more interested in a literary career and rather unsuccessful as a man of medicine. Schnitzler was somewhat of a dandy and a compulsive seducer but was at the same time always a keen observer of his own and his contemporaries’ behavior. He married in 1903 and had several children, one of whom, his daughter Lili, committed suicide in 1928. Schnitzler died on October 21, 1931, in Vienna and is buried there.

From 1888 to 1891, Schnitzler worked on the Anatol cycle of loosely connected dialogue sketches centering on the romantic obsessions of the young and frivolous bachelor Anatol, who becomes infatuated with a new woman—and attempts to seduce her—in every scene. The overwhelming mood of the sketches is one of a melancholy boredom, as Anatol, in repetitive but vain attempts, seeks to gain some sense of the authentic experience of himself and others. He is never able to penetrate to his true emotions and remains fixed in an illusory vision of life.

Light-O’-Love depicts two young frivolous women, Mizi and Christine, working girls from the outskirts of Vienna, who pursue love affairs with men of higher social status, in the vain illusion that they might elevate their class position. They are the prototypes of Schnitzler’s frequent character figures, the “sweet girl” (susses Madel), a kind of young, lower-class woman common to Viennese social circles and with whom the author was very familiar in his personal life. The young men of the play take such affairs and seductions lightly, and the ending is inevitably tragic. One of the men, Fritz, is killed in a duel because he has seduced a married woman. The Green Cockatoo is another of Schnitzler’s well-known one-act plays and takes place in France at the time of the 1789 revolution. As in many of his works, the action of this play revolves around the differences between reality and appearance, the typically Austrian theme of the theatricality of life.

Hands Around is the best known of Schnitzler’s plays and depicts a series of ten separate scenes involving a group of characters who have sex and go on to exchange partners in a cycle that links them to each other like a daisy chain. The series involves individuals from all levels of Viennese society. Because the scenes center so unabashedly on the sex act—the couples have nothing else to share except superficial talk—the play was banned from performance and publication in Germany and was involved in a court trial in Berlin in 1921. As in the earlier pieces, Schnitzler gives a devastating portrait of a decadent society in which people pursue fleeting sensations and in which true human interaction is reduced to a mere game of vanity and sexual conquest. The primacy of sexuality in Schnitzler’s plays and his keen observations of its role in motivating behavior once prompted Freud—who was doing his scientific work on sexuality and the psyche at the same time Schnitzler was writing his plays—to call the author his “double.” Both men seemed to be commenting on the same psychological phenomena from different perspectives.

The play