Deadly Communion

SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I WOULD LIKE TO THANK Hannah Black, Clare Alexander and Steve Mathews for their editorial assistance and useful comments; Nick Austin for the supply of excellent copy-editing skills and Simon Dalgleish for checking my suspect German; Luitgard Hammerer for translation services and consulting the Funeral Museum in Vienna with respect to my questions concerning embalming practices and legislation around 1900; Mirko Herzog for explaining the role of concierges around 1900 and providing information concerning the Sperrgeld. I would also like to thank Dr Yves Steppler, consultant pathologist, who on a memorable walk on Hampstead Heath alerted me to the fictional potential of the foramen magnum. Finally, I would like to thank Nicola Fox for continuing to be an exceptional human being and for doing all those things that need to be done while I blithely disengage from the real world.

The description of Ancient Egyptian mummification techniques was adapted from passages in The American Way of Death by Jessica Mitford. The medical faculty of Vienna’s obsession with pathology and its belief in the healing properties of cherry brandy is discussed in The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History 1848 — 1938 by William M. Johnston. The explanation that Freud offers Liebermann of the Oedipus complex is a bowdlerisation of excerpts from his letter to Wilhelm Fliess dated 15 October 1897, as well as selected passages in The Interpretation of Dreams and Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Freud’s views on polymorphous sexual perversity, cruelty and fetishism are taken from Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, and his account of the psychological significance of doppelgängers is freely adapted from his essay ‘The Uncanny’; however, it should be noted that many of these ideas are more accurately attributed to Otto Rank, whose landmark publication Der Doppelgänger appeared in an edition of Imago during 1914. The notion that doubling in dreams is a defence against castration fears can be found in The Interpretation of Dreams. The proposal for a highspeed pipeline running from the Innere Stadt to the Zentralfriedhof for the purpose of transporting corpses was made in the nineteenth century and is mentioned in Only in Vienna by Duncan J.D. Smith. Gustav Macé was a real French detective and the case details described by Rheinhardt are historically accurate. Rheinhardt’s description of contemporary female dress is based on a passage taken from The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig. Lieder and poetry translations were by William Mann, Lionel Salter and Richard Stokes. Information on the reform fashion movement and reform dresses came from Vienna 1900 and the Heroes of Modernism edited by Christian Brandstätter, Gustav Klimt: Painter of Women by Susanna Partsch, and Wonderful Wiener Werkstatte: Design in Vienna 1903— 1932 by Christian Brandstätter. House Vogl is based on photographs and descriptions of the Flöge sisters’ fashion house which was located in Vienna’s eleventh district. Information on the Flöge sisters and their fashion house can also be found in these volumes. Katharina Schratt’s dinner party — as reported in the society magazine — was based on a real gathering described in The Emperor and the Actress by Joan Haslip. The guest list is accurate. Details of Alfed Roller’s sets for the 1903 Court Opera production of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde can be found in Gustav Mahler: Vienna: the Years of Challenge by Henry-Louis de la Grange. I borrowed the Two Darlings — with gratitude and admiration — from Arthur Schnitzler’s 1902 short story ‘An Eccentric’.

Frank Tallis

London, 2009