The last years of the Habsburg monarchy saw a remarkable flowering centered on Vienna and Prague; the music of Mahler and Schoenberg; the paintings of Schiele, Klimt and Kokoschka; the writings of Mach, Freud and Wittgenstein; the poetry of Rilke; the plays of Hofmannsthal; the stories of Kafka. One concern common to much of this work was to attack the widely held assumption about the nature of reality; this prepared the way for a rich harvest of fantasy, especially in the short story and the novel. This book explores this rich vein of the imagination with examples from the major writers — Hofmannsthal, Rilke and Schnitzler — as well as from the acknowledged masters of fantastic fiction, such as Gustav Meyrink (the Master of the Occult), Karl Heinz Strobl (the Master of the Macabre), Paul Leppin and Leo Perutz, and writers less immediately associated with fantasy such as Max Brod, Franz Theodor Csokor and Franz Werfel.
