The career of the Austrian author and playwright Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931) unfolded in Vienna during the heady 19th-century fin de siecle era, when major social and intellectual shifts were sweeping the city.
It was the time of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud; of atonal composers Schoenberg, Webern and Berg; and of expressionist painters Oskar Kokoschka and Gustav Klimt -- the latter a leader of the Vienna Secession group of artists that aimed to show modern man his true face. This impassioned central European epicenter was the backdrop against which Schnitzler set his dramatic works.
A recurring theme in Schnitzler's writing is the tenet that all people, of whatever age or class, are united by the impulse of sex and the inevitability of death. His most famous play, "Hands Around," adroitly rings the changes on this dual theme.