About this book
Weissagung by Arthur Schnitzler opens with a chill: a playwright’s harmless commission collides with a decade-old prophecy, and the boundary between theatre and reality starts to blur. Set among the summer theatricals at a country castle, Schnitzler’s eerie ghost story follows an amateur troupe and a mysterious confession from the man playing the lead—he once dreamed himself on a bier, watched over by a mourning red-haired woman and two children, a scene that later appears on stage though the play did not yet exist. The unsettling mismatch of details—a bald man with a green scarf absent from the script—tightens the tale into a study of fate, suggestion, and theatrical illusion. Written during Vienna’s fin-de-siècle, the novella reflects Schnitzler’s psychological acuity and the era’s fascination with premonition, identity, and the uncanny. Elegant, compact, and quietly unnerving, Weissagung mixes literary fiction with elements of horror and supernatural suspense. Ideal for listeners who savor atmospheric ghost stories, psychological literary classics, or the tense ambiguity of Viennese modernism, this audiobook rewards attention with a slow-building, haunting resonance rather than cheap shocks.
