1 h 40 minAudiobook3 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at costPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What does love become when desire leaves no room for anything else?
Hans Kaltneker’s Love is a dark romance of obsession, sacrifice and ruin in the Vienna of the late Habsburg age. Cafés, theatres and music form a polished setting, while strict social rules stand against a hunger for feeling that manners cannot satisfy.
At its heart lies a difficult question: how much can love demand before giving becomes self-destruction? Kaltneker’s intense, feverish writing explores passion and its price. Here, love offers no promise of comfort, and the costs of feeling cannot simply be undone.
What you’ll discover
- Vienna behind the polish Enter a world where social rules meet secrecy, anxiety and an unsatisfied hunger for feeling.
- Desire at its darkest Explore obsession as a force that narrows life around a single consuming desire.
- The demands of sacrifice Consider where devotion ends and the surrender of comfort, reputation or self becomes harm.
- Passion with lasting costs Face a dark vision of love in which feeling carries consequences that cannot be undone.
- Emotion without easy comfort Meet Kaltneker’s feverish intensity in a romance that brings desire and ruin into close company.
Who will love it
For readers who love Viennese fiction, emotional intensity and stories of passion pushed to its limits, with obsession, sacrifice and the tension between social appearance and private feeling.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- Vienna at the end of an age
- Obsession as the engine of the story
- Sacrifice and what love demands
- Ruin and the price of feeling
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- Large print paperback
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- Large print hardcover
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Love
In the polished Vienna of the late Habsburg age, passion grows into obsession and love demands sacrifice.
Medium levelUnder 2 hours to read25 languages
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From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
Vienna at the end of an age
The Vienna of the Belle Époque was a city of cafés, theatres, music and strict social rules. Behind the polished surface, many writers saw anxiety, secrecy and a hunger for feeling that manners could not satisfy. Authors such as Arthur Schnitzler and Stefan Zweig turned this tension into fiction.
Hans Kaltneker wrote within that world, though he belonged to a younger group shaped by war and its aftermath. His short life fell across the collapse of the empire in 1918. That setting matters, because a society close to ruin gives a story of private ruin a larger echo.
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Who was Hans Kaltneker?
Hans Kaltneker was an Austrian writer who wrote in German and died in 1919. He worked in Vienna in the years around the First World War, and his writing is known for its intense, searching tone.
What period is Love set in?
The book is placed in the Viennese Belle Époque, the last decades of the Habsburg empire before the First World War. It was a time of refined city life and deep unease beneath the surface.
What kind of book is Love?
It is a dark romance, a work of fiction about passion, obsession and sacrifice. Readers should expect heightened feeling and a serious, sometimes painful mood rather than a light love story.
The author
Hans Kaltneker
1895–1919 · Austrian poet and playwright
Hans Kaltneker was an Austrian writer who wrote poetry, plays and prose in the early twentieth century. He was born in 1895 in Temesvár, then in Austria-Hungary and now Timișoara, Romania. He died of tuberculosis in Gutenstein, Austria, in 1919, at the age of twenty-four.
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