This chapter describes the many-sided aspects of Jewish life in Imperial Germany, in parallel to its general history up to 1914. Following an economic crisis 1873 and a decline of liberal faith, a wave of anti-Jewish sentiments spread – seemingly from Berlin – across the entire country. It brought about the establishment of new political parties with antisemitic programs, just when legal emancipation had been completed. This tension would become characteristic of Jewish life in the following era. It brought about extreme achievements in all spheres of life, but also daily confrontation with antisemitism. The latter deeply disappointed many Jews, but on the whole did not stop their integration and acculturation. Their fight against discrimination, moreover, strengthened their Jewish identity, despite further acculturation. The chapter describes Jewish cultural achievements as part of the period’s academic and artistic blooming, and the life of the Jewish bourgeoisie leading some of its members to disregard the dangers inherent in their situation.

Chapter 2: This chapter begins by observing that the repertoire of science plays is dominated by works in which scientific issues are the subject of the drama, rather than a mode of exploration, in symbiotic relationship with those of the theatre itself. This kind of symbiosis can occur only if the collaborative process is set up at the outset, so that the script evolves in concert with all aspects of staging and enactment – a method pioneered by Theatre de Complicité, under the direction of its founder Simon McBurney. Taking as a case study McBurney’s stage adaptation of Stefan Zweig’s novel Beware of Pity, the chapter explores the question of how consciousness might be staged, rather than talked about. Central to the experiment is the process of working with metaphor, both as literary conceit and as an approach to theatrical realization.

It is hardly surprising, given Gustav Mahler’s conservative disposition toward literature, that studies of his reception among writers have only marginally featured in an otherwise remarkably wide and sophisticated spectrum of critical engagements with the composer. The poets he set to music were inevitably older figures, usually folk-influenced, and he gave fin-de-siècle Vienna’s vibrant literary scene of coffeehouse intellectuals and salonnières (Arthur Schnitzler, Hermann Bahr, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, et al.) a comfortably wide berth. Nonetheless, important examples of his influence on subsequent writers do exist, first among them Thomas Mann, who based the name and physical description of the central character of his 1912 novella Death in Venice, Gustav von Aschenbach, on Mahler. This and subsequent cases are reviewed here, among them Stefan Zweig, Kurt Frieberger, Ingeborg Bachmann, Peter Rosegger, and others from the very recent past.

Hofmannsthal’s death in 1929 left Strauss in a quandary. The will to compose was undiminished, and a replacement of similar caliber was difficult to find. Over the ensuing twenty years, Strauss enlisted the services of three further librettists. First was the celebrated Jewish writer Stefan Zweig, who supplied the text for Die schweigsame Frau. After Zweig exiled himself from his Austria in 1936, the distraught composer turned to the Viennese theater historian Joseph Gregor as collaborator on Friedenstag, Daphne, and Die Liebe der Danae. Last was Clemens Krauss, whom Strauss entrusted with the libretto of Capriccio, Strauss’s last opera. Decades earlier, Strauss himself wrote the text for his first music drama, Guntram, but it was “song-and-dance-man” Ernst von Wolzogen (Feuersnot) whose racy libretto served to loosen the Wagnerian chains that bound the composer in Guntram and pointed Strauss in a direction that led the Hofmannsthalian masterpieces of the next three decades.