This book focuses on one remarkable ten-month period when some of the most interesting people in the world – Sigmund Freud, Johannes Brahms, Johann Strauss, Gustav Klimt – lived in Vienna, which had one of the highest suicide rates in Europe. Why did so many people in this beautiful city decide to kill themselves? Author Frederic Morton uses newspaper articles, letters and journals to provide context for the most shocking suicide of them all – that of Crown Prince Rudolf, whose death, Morton argues, is comparable to Kennedy’s assassination. Many had believed that the Prince was Austria’s hope for a brighter future.
Morton, Frederic. A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888/1889. Penguin Books, 1979, p. vii.