ABSTRACT
The Freud family settled in Vienna at a time when the city was at the height of cultural, scientific and economic expansion. But it was also a time when this intellectual capital of Europe, in full glory, started to witness the dramatic decline of the Habsburg Empire. Distress and confusion immediately gave rise to something the novelist Hermann Brock later described as "the merry apocalypse" of Vienna, which had already inspired the satirist Karl Kraus. In painting, the Vienna Secession, co-founded by Gustav Klimt, a friend of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Arthur Schnitzler broke with conventional academic tradition to create a highly decorative style. At the court, the beautiful young Bavarian princess who, by marrying Franz Joseph — the longest reigning sovereign in Europe — had become Empress Elisabeth of Austria, seemed the strangest and most vulnerable feminine figurehead of end-of-century Vienna, not unlike Schnitzler's heroine in Fraulein Else.
