Der Mörder: Eine Novelle

A young lawyer's secret affair with a woman beneath his station becomes a prison of his own making. Alfred is restless, his wealthy Viennese world calling him back to proper society, to a suitable marriage that will restore his place in the order of things. When his lover Elise falls ill, Alfred sees an opportunity too tempting to resist: a death that would free him for a brighter future with the respectable Adele. But murder is not so easily done, and Schnitzler maps every tremor of guilt, every rationalization, every moment where a man could stop and doesn't. This is not a story of the crime itself but of the corrosion that precedes it, the way desire and class consciousness can calcify into something monstrous. Written in 1921, it remains a searing portrait of moral bankruptcy hiding behind social propriety.