Frequently Asked Questions

Arthur Schnitzler documented his life in several lists: when he went to the theater, when he gave public and private readings, which books he read, etc. (see project description). Our starting point was the travel list in which Schnitzler recorded his vacations. The diary can also be understood as a list that assigns relevant events to individual days. Ethically, it is unproblematic to include these lists and record them using today's means. Not only because more than seventy years have passed since his death, but also because Schnitzler himself measured himself with these lists.

As a biographical project, our undertaking is placed in the ancestral line of printed major German studies projects such as Goethe's Life Day by Day (edited by Robert Steiger). Also, for example, the Hugo von Hofmannsthal Letter Chronicle (edited by Martin E. Schmid) and the Theodor Fontane Chronicle (edited by Roland Berbig) record the most important places of residence. Only the last-mentioned has made it into the digital space so far: https://www.fontanearchiv.de/fontane-chronik (edited by the Theodor Fontane Archive). However, a place index is still missing here. Furthermore, the Alexander von Humboldt Chronology (edited by Ingo Schwarz), which currently records 1658 entries (March 2025), is worth highlighting. These records are comparatively small when compared to the nearly 4950 places and over 47,000 stays by Schnitzler that we have compiled. Thus, in addition to the specific biographical research interest in Schnitzler, we are also interested in the possibility of providing as free and standardized data as possible that can be networked with other projects.

In a certain way, the present data is a geographical commentary on the diary. The focus is on the question: At which places did Schnitzler stay? While the place index of the diary merely lists the mention of a place – regardless of whether Schnitzler was there or, for example, received visitors from that place – only the places of stay are recorded on this website. This is at the same time a correction of the place index of the diary created with Named Entity Recognition, which has some errors, especially with places marked only with abbreviations (such as 'B.') (Baden near Vienna? Berlin?). In addition, only implicitly mentioned places are also recorded here (such as 'at Mama's', 'in the coffeehouse') if other sources allow the exact identification of the place.

It is exciting, for example, that Schnitzler was very focused on Central Europe. He hardly knew today's Poland. Hungary, where both of his parents had their roots, remained largely foreign to him. The psychological reading that he avoided the impoverished Jewish East seems at least arguable. The mostly distancing and disparaging mentions of the Hungarian relatives fit this.

Another surprise lies in the knowledge of France that hardly extended beyond Paris, even though Schnitzler could at least read in French and had active language skills.

Schnitzler used the tram, the stagecoach, the bicycle, the railway, the car (as a passenger) and, twice, the airplane. Foundations have now been laid for questions in this regard. Subsequently, for example, a connection could be established between public transport and his everyday routes, or a geographical location of his bicycle excursions. Even the increasing use of the automobile could be traced. However, for all these questions, a recording of the means of transport would still have to be added.

If you browse through the years before, during and after the First World War, you can see very impressively what influence the war had on the life of a 50-year-old man who no longer had to fear being activated for frontline duty. The horizon is limited exclusively to Austria, Bavaria and Berlin. After the war, it took a few more years before Schnitzler could resume his travel activities. The major ship voyages (North Cape voyage, Mediterranean voyage, voyage around Europe) can be very well traced.

During the recording, we relied heavily on the use of authority data – in this case especially Wikidata. This means we checked whether a commonly used identification number already exists for a particular place. Especially when traveling to cities, it became apparent that Schnitzler visited many places that already had such an identification number. This can be taken as strong evidence that he traveled with Baedeker or another travel guide in hand and diligently worked through the recommended sights. No places discovered apparently by chance are recorded.

Expressions like 'errands in the city' are synonymous with: Schnitzler was in Vienna's 1st district. This can be particularly demonstrated by the shops named subsequently. Whether for him 'the city' had extensions into the inner districts is again uncertain. So far, we have found no relevant indication in this regard. 'The city' can in any case also be used to characterize the place of residence in the 18th district: The Cottage Quarter in Währing was definitely perceived as rural and suburban.

Parallel to 'errands in the city' (see above), we assume that Schnitzler noted certain everyday places hyponymically, i.e., used a more general superordinate term for specific places. This concerns, for example, the bank in Vienna, which, if not further specified, is likely to be the General Land Credit Institution in Vienna's 1st district. Doctor visits are also affected, in which cases the medical practices and not the private residential addresses are probably meant. An exception is the long-time family doctor Jacob Pollak: In the diary, it almost always remains unclear whether the mentions are connected with a visit to his practice or to his house. Other everyday places – such as tennis courts – we could not identify.

Schnitzler was born in Vienna's 2nd district and then lived for years in the 1st and 9th districts. The last years – it was almost 30 – he lived in the 18th district. Apart from the 1st district, only the Prater is a place of stay that Schnitzler regularly frequented throughout his life. Basically, Schnitzler's Vienna, although there were also areas characterized by proletariat and poverty within the first nine districts, was not one of the (incorporated) suburbs, where the inhabitants mainly pursued wage labor in factories, small businesses and manufactories. For example, he only came to Simmering when he attended a funeral or visited a grave. So when Schnitzler was outside the inner districts, the reasons were infrastructure facilities such as train stations and airports, or he visited private homes of wealthy friends and acquaintances.

Today, a quarter of Vienna's residential population lives on the other side of the Danube, in Floridsdorf and in Donaustadt. A stay by Schnitzler in Floridsdorf cannot be proven so far, the stays in Donaustadt can be counted on one hand.

When Schnitzler writes in his diary that he would walk along the Danube, in most cases the bank of the Danube Canal is meant. While crossing the canalized Danube north of the inner city is still natural for him, the Danube forms a natural border that also limits the horizon. Not coincidentally, the excursion restaurant that established itself beyond the Danube is named after Julius Payer's famous North Pole expedition "Zum Franz-Josefsland". Coming here was a step from the map into unmeasured and uninhabited territory.

No, that is a play by Ödön von Horváth. However, Schnitzler might have been able to write something similar, because the maps document for the first time Schnitzler's extensive walking and hiking activities in the Vienna Woods. They became established instead of the bicycle excursions after Schnitzler complained about the annoyance of automobile traffic at the age of 40 and gave away his bicycle. If you are now motivated to investigate how strong Schnitzler's need for movement was and whether it changed over the years, then one more hint is permitted: One must also include Schnitzler's practice of tennis in the answer.

The data is completely available in the form of XML documents (see GitHub). Specifically, these are XML/TEI documents. XML documents can be opened with any text program and are relatively easy to read for both humans and machines. A disadvantage is that XML produces a lot of 'useless' text, for example <persName><surname>Schnitzler</surname><forename>Arthur</forename></persName>. Since the files are therefore relatively large, we had to split the information into two files in most cases: One file contains mainly data on and identifiers for places, the other contains the breakdown of the identifiers with authority data as well as longitude and latitude.

Although the XML files (see GitHub) can be opened with any text program, the use of an XML editor is recommended. There are both free and paid versions of these. We use the Oxygen XML Editor, which offers a free trial period of one month.

An XML editor usually uses colors to distinguish the text content from the code elements. It also allows complex queries, for example using XPath. Nowadays, you can have ChatGPT and other AI assistants guide you step by step and generate appropriate XPath queries if the technical prerequisites are not sufficient. Converting the XML files into continuous texts is also easy to implement.

JSON is a file format in which values are lined up next to each other with commas and curly brackets. In contrast to the XML files, the GeoJSON files are therefore significantly smaller, but less immediately understandable. Error searching is also more difficult compared to an XML file, for example when a wrong character has been deleted.

The prefix 'geo' means that the first values are standardized and indicate whether it is a point, a line or a shape – then the respective coordinates follow. Further information is contained in the 'properties' area. However, this part is not standardized.

There are many freely available options on the Internet to display a GeoJSON file. Some of them are linked in the GeoJSON Wikipedia entry.

A CSV file contains a list of data values separated by commas. Each line contains related values. In a simplified form, a stay in Munich with arrival and departure dates could look like this:

person,place,start_date,end_date

"Arthur Schnitzler",München,1929-08-20,1929-08-21

A CSV file can be easily opened in Excel, Numbers, LibreOffice or as a Google Sheet. In the respective programs, for example, filtering, sorting and calculating can be done and diagrams can be generated.

Because Excel is proprietary software. The added value of Excel or XLSX compared to CSV seems small to us at the present time. In addition, the transformation of a CSV file to an Excel spreadsheet is immediately possible. However, we are happy to be corrected.

No. For pragmatic reasons, this was not taken into account. One of the difficulties is that only in the rarest cases is it clear whether Schnitzler moved from one place to another, or whether he was at home in between. In our data, Schnitzler visits a place only once a day. In reality, this was often different.

Especially older people are still familiar with the use of printed person directories and encyclopedias: Each book was a closed unit. When searching for people, one had to go through several indexes and hope to be successful. Digital authority data directories now bundle such information and offer unique, cross-project identifiers for persons, works, places and other things that allow unambiguous identification. This makes it easy to determine when different datasets are talking about one and the same entity. The probably best-known example in German-speaking countries is the Integrated Authority File (GND). We mainly rely on Wikidata, with which we can ensure the link to Wikipedia entries, to the GND and to the Vienna History Wiki.

The data is freely available with attribution (CC BY 4.0 license). Basically, you can do what you want with the data.

Kepler.gl is a website where you can visualize geographic data. We link the site because it gives you a quick way to interact with our data and build more complex views and filters. For example, a certain 3D view shows all points on the map as yellow rubber ducks. Knowledge value 0, fun factor 3.

It was automatically generated with the help of Claude/Anthropic.

The data comes from different sources, mainly from lists (see project description), the diary, the correspondence, the autobiography of Clara Katharina Pollaczek and other historical sources. Exact source documentation was omitted in view of the large amount of data.

The Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage (ACDH-CH) at the Austrian Academy of Sciences operates a web service called PMB – Persons of Modernity Base (see also the Wikipedia entry). This is a relational database that records the persons, places, works, organizations and events that are referenced in the digital Schnitzler projects (diary, letters, reading list…). By connecting our project to this database, the recording of places – also with authority data – was simplified (Thanks, Peter Andorfer!).

For using this website, the PMB does not need to be consulted. However, it contains further information about many places that may not have made it onto this website. For example, via the export function of the PMB, the just over 80 places of stay of Felix Salten can also be explored.

That was a pragmatic decision: Of course it would have been better if we had found a simple way to reference entire urban areas. But because that would have taken a lot of time and would have meant too often that we would have had to draw shapes ourselves, we instead limited ourselves to using georeferenced points (with longitude and latitude). Through the link with authority data, a conversion to areas should be possible in the future. A confusion that can arise from the points is resolved by the 'rule of the most precise point' (see below).

Because an area-based recording of the places of stay would not have been easily possible (see above), we do not work with polygons, but concentrate on individual points (comparable to pins). Let's take as an example a day on which Schnitzler stayed in Vienna and went to the Burgtheater. We could put two points on the map: at the Burgtheater and at St. Stephen's Cathedral. Now, however, the Burgtheater is in Vienna, so the indication of Vienna is more general and unnecessary. In other words: Whoever stays at the Burgtheater stays in Vienna. We therefore dispense with this duplication and prefer the more precise place to the more general one. This has disadvantages, for example when Schnitzler was in Weidling (a cadastral municipality belonging to Klosterneuburg) and in Klosterneuburg, and then the point is only set at Weidling.

The connecting lines that can be set for different views are not a chronology of the actual places of stay that begin in the morning at Schnitzler's residential address and return him there in the evening, after work is done. Instead, the computer tries to draw a circular movement and thus find the most direct connections between the respective places. This works sometimes better, sometimes worse. But it helps to see how far Schnitzler moved in a certain period of time.

No, that is intentional. When you display the connecting lines, occasionally individual points are not covered by them. An example is provided by Mödling in January 1895. The explanation for this lies in the rule of the "most precise point" that we just answered. The connecting lines connect Schnitzler's most exact places of stay, i.e., they go through specific points in Mödling, but not through the more general Mödling itself.

Our method for counting stays is based on the hierarchical structure of place information in our data collection and a consideration on a daily basis.

An example for clarification: If Arthur Schnitzler visits the Burgtheater on one day, this place is part of a hierarchy: The Burgtheater (1) is located in Vienna's 1st district (2), which in turn is in Vienna (3) and Vienna in Austria (4). Theoretically, four places could be counted here. Even if Schnitzler had also done unspecific errands in the 1st district on the same day, at least two places (Burgtheater and 1st district) could be assumed. However, we apply a specific counting method: For our statistics, we only consider the most detailed place mentioned per entry – the so-called "most precise point". This is the place that is lowest in the hierarchy and for which no subordinate places are specified in the respective entry. In the example, we therefore only count the Burgtheater.

According to this method, we arrive at the number of over 47,000 recorded stays – proof of presence at specific places on specific days. (Technically speaking: In the XML file wienerschnitzler_complete_nested.xml we use the XPath expression: "count(//place[not(listPlace)])" for this.)

An alternative counting method, in which, for example, a five-day stay in a hotel would be counted as a single stay, is conceivable, but cannot be reliably implemented with the available data. We also do not automatically combine stays in the same place on consecutive days. For example, if Schnitzler was in the Burgtheater on two evenings in a row, he was not continuously present there, which is why a merger would be misleading. However, an approximation of such a count is possible, since multi-day periods (e.g., multi-day trips) were usually also recorded as a single entry during data collection. Then we would speak of about 30,000 stays (see recording in the PMB).

For the number of different places of stay, however, we count every single place that appears in the data. This also includes those nearly 150 places that we have not yet been able to locate exactly geographically, but for which stays by Schnitzler are nevertheless documented. In total, this currently amounts to nearly 4950 different places. You can find the exact numbers for located and non-located places in the respective maps in the Directory of Places and in the Directory of Missing Places.

For schnitzler-orte, that list from Schnitzler's estate in the Cambridge University Library was evaluated that records his travels. For example, day trips or more precise location information within a city were not recorded. In addition, no comparison was made with the diary, so errors from the list were continued. The data presented here is not only considerably more extensive, but also more correct. At the end of the work (June 2025), an extract of the cities and villages was created, which brought schnitzler-orte up to date.

The series "Views of Vienna" was digitized by the Wien Museum and can be loaded in good resolution at https://sammlung.wienmuseum.at.

Several sources of error are possible, both on the side of transmission and on that of evaluation. Schnitzler may have made a mistake in the diary. We may have made a mistake in recording. Above all, however, there is great scope for interpretation of the source. For example, if Schnitzler writes in the diary that he visited Salten in Pötzleinsdorf (as in this entry), the actual address of his summer apartment was recorded here. When recording the directory of theater visits in Schnitzler's estate in the Cambridge University Library (folder A179), performances are often incorrectly dated by one day. This can be corrected in many cases with the diary or by comparison with daily newspapers. However, enough entries remain for which this control is not possible.

That is difficult to determine. So far, no cases have been proven in which Schnitzler deliberately wrote false things in his diary. In cases, for example, where differences occur between Schnitzler's directory of theater visits and the diary, the diary consistently proves to be more reliable in comparison with the theater programs in daily newspapers. Deviations also occur when calendar day and lived day differ. For example, when Schnitzler writes that he went to the coffeehouse at midnight. What follows belongs to the next calendar day.

No, the notebooks handed down in folder 254, which cover the period 1903–1931 and the year 1889, were not evaluated. Their edition is a desideratum, in the course of which the present data could also be revised and supplemented. Currently, this is not possible.

We usually consult the respective address book of a place. In Vienna, this is Adolph Lehmann's General Housing Directory. This always went to press at the end of the summer of the respective previous year, so that, for example, the Lehmann from the year 1900 is mainly reliable for the middle of 1899. Errors and changes were noted in a supplement until publication, which extends the time period of the reality depicted until the end of 1899. In the few cases where private documents of people are available without major research, these are of course preferred.

Frankly: In individual cases, we are not. This is a historical reconstruction. Not everything is exactly transmitted. For example, a theater performance may have been announced in a theater, the playbills were already printed, and then an actor fell ill and a different play was performed at short notice without this being noted in the newspapers. Or a residential address may be noted in the address book that, six months after printing, when Schnitzler visits the person, is no longer correct. Likewise, a doctor's visit could have taken place in the hospital outpatient clinic instead of in the office, where the doctor was also active. Or someone is at a sanatorium for a cure and Schnitzler only mentions the place when visiting. Was he now in the sanatorium? It is to be assumed. But there is no certainty. This even applies to reading the diary, which occasionally allows several interpretations. Consequently, we repeatedly made decisions with more or less certainty. Perhaps these can be supported or refuted with additional sources.

There is an entry in the diary for most, but not every day in Schnitzler's adult life. Many places are described exclusively with more general terms ('in the coffeehouse', 'walking in the area'). These cannot be located. In addition, the diary changes in the course of Schnitzler's life. To put it briefly, from the noticeable fame of his work, Schnitzler also placed more value on documenting his stays. Thus, we also do not know the houses in which the doctor Schnitzler made house calls. Likewise, the love relationships with the women he titled 'sweet girl', who lived in the suburbs or perhaps even outside the line (today Gürtel), can often not be geographically located. Both concern the period before 1900.

When is someone at a place? If Schnitzler picks up his partner at the Burgtheater, was he then in the Burgtheater? If he chats with Ludwig Hevesi in front of the "entertainment establishment Maxim", was he then at the place? What can be derived from it if he walked 'towards Freudenau'? For the present recording, which is interested in the geographical space in which Schnitzler stayed, he is at a place even if he does not go inside. Whether he was there or not, for example if he went 'in the direction' of a place, are individual case decisions.

Our primary goal is to list all named geographical places that Schnitzler visited. We wanted to leave out the visits to families mentioned in the diary in the original plan. However, over time we started to also record this data when it could easily be determined from the address directory. Nevertheless, there are still many gaps in this area that may be closed gradually, possibly never.

Basically, we tried to be especially precise in Vienna and accordingly invested more time in research here than, for example, to determine the exact location of a wine tavern in a mountain village. (But we tried it anyway.)

We consider this a weakness of our project. We do not have a closed, consistent vocabulary that runs through the data. One day we may possibly agree on that of GeoNames. However, that would also only partially solve the existing problem that we currently give each place only one type. To illustrate: A hotel can often be classified with several place types: inn, restaurant, coffeehouse, bar. In the meantime, there is no simple solution for this. The currently used vocabulary can be traced here. We apologize and ask for your understanding!

Frankly: We suspect more than we know. Of course, the project yields a lot of detailed knowledge about Arthur Schnitzler. The expansion of the place index to the diary is also valuable. From a historical perspective, the project exemplarily evaluates the geographical horizon of a financially well-equipped (but not rich) Viennese between 1880 and 1930. This also includes information on theater and cinema visits. In short: Something seems to exist here for which there is currently no comparison. When comparable data for other persons from different time periods are available at some point, when travel guides and historical timetables are digitally recorded, more complex questions will arise. Through our use of authority data and a free license, we are prepared for this and offer connection for other research projects.

This answer is from an AI and cost no additional money: "Yes. Documenting the places of stay of a historical person provides valuable insights into their life, influence and contemporary history. It contributes to research, education and the preservation of cultural knowledge, which justifies the use of time and resources."

Counter-question: What do you think?

Pretty certainly not. So far, it has only carried out this project. If you read this after the year 2025, it will also have already been deleted from the association register.

The board consisted of Martin Anton Müller and Laura Untner. The other six functionaries deserve to remain unnamed. We are very grateful to them for their support.

Martin Anton Müller and Laura Untner are independent scholars and not bound to institutions for the long term. However, the current workplaces and email addresses should also be visible in their ORCID entries in the future: Martin Anton Müller, Laura Untner.

No.

What amount are we talking about? We ask for contact.

In any case! We ask for contact.

We are happy about voluntary collaboration. Also in the course of an internship, additions can be worked out. We ask for contact.