1 h 40 minAudiobook14 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at cost
Audiobook edition · 1 h 40 minPaperback · 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
You will love this book if you enjoy intense, poetic fiction, tales of obsession and moral extremes, the mystic Meister Eckhart, or the glittering, corrupt Vienna of balls, banks and bargains.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- Happiness becomes a demand for suffering
- Marriage becomes a weapon against Kathrin
- The Sad One gives cruelty meaning
- Private devotion turns into public harm
- Her ruin is planned with care
- Love risks becoming its own opposite
- Society supplies the means of destruction
- Cruelty leaves love an open question
Who’s who
- Prince SecundusA rich Viennese prince who loves Kathrin so fiercely that he sets out to destroy her and himself in the name of love.
- Kathrin NhiliusA beautiful baroness, married to another man, who believes that love must be tested by suffering through each other.
- The Sad OneA fallen angel with the face of Dante who visits Secundus at night and teaches him the last stage of love.
- SabineA proud young woman in mourning who accepts a loveless marriage with Secundus for rank and ten million crowns.
- Baron NhiliusKathrin's gentle, heavy husband, a rich speculator with a weak heart who tries to settle matters humanely.
- FantoSecundus's shrewd, loyal manager who plans his master's stock-market schemes and warns him of their cost.
- Adèle OstererThe elegant owner of Vienna's finest brothel, who speaks of her trade as a public service and takes Secundus's money.
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Love in 25 languages, side by side, paragraph by paragraph, once the book texts are online: the way to learn a language with a book you love.
Love
A prince kills a dog, buys a bride and ruins a baron, guided by a dark angel who speaks of love.
Medium levelUnder 2 hours to read2 languages
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In short
What would you do if the strongest proof of love you could imagine were to destroy the one you love? That question drives Love, a short, fierce novel set in Vienna by the Austrian writer Hans Kaltneker, who died in 1919.
Love at a glance
- Reading time
- About 1 h 5 min50 min fast, 1 h 20 min slow
- Length
- 15,700 words
- Library level
- Medium longer sentences, everyday words
Reading time at 238 words a minute (fast 300, slow 200). How long the classics take to read · Updated
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
A night of vows ends with a warning
The story begins in the dark, with two lovers who cannot find words big enough for what they feel. Each says I love you, once. The narrator adds that words are cloaks around naked thought.
Kathrin tells Secundus how she waited for him through years of marriage. At night she would rise from her warm bed and walk six barefoot steps across the cold floor to the door. It was a small sacrifice, offered to God and to him. She also tells him of her honeymoon in Cairo, where she stroked a leprous beggar in the dark of an archway. Secundus answers with jealousy, and she admits she loves her dog. He says he will have to kill him.
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Which edition is right for me
- 15-minute summary
- The key ideas of the whole book in about 14 minutes. A good first look, or a refresher.
Details
- Language
- English
- Reading time
- 1 h 5 min
- Level
- Medium level
Cite this edition
Kaltneker, Hans. Love. Library of Alexandria, 2026, libraryofalexandria.com/products/love.
Kaltneker, H. (2026). Love. Library of Alexandria. https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/love
Kaltneker, Hans. Love. Library of Alexandria, 2026. https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/love.
@book{kaltneker2026love,
author = {Kaltneker, Hans},
title = {Love},
publisher = {Library of Alexandria},
year = {2026},
url = {https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/love}
}
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What is Love by Hans Kaltneker about?
It follows Prince Secundus, who loves the married Baroness Kathrin Nhilius and sets out to ruin her, her husband and himself. A dark angel tells him that love in its last stage must sacrifice itself and be hated.
Who is the Sad One in Love?
He is a fallen angel with the face of Dante who visits Secundus at night. He calls Secundus his brother, teaches him a mystic doctrine of love, and urges him to go all the way to the end.
What does the quote from Meister Eckhart mean?
Eckhart describes three stages in which love separates a person first from things, then from spiritual comfort, then even from the hope of eternal life. The book uses this idea to explain Secundus's actions.
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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