About the work
Die Gefährtin is a one-act play that Arthur Schnitzler developed from 1896 onward out of his 1894 novella Der Wittwer (The Widower). It premiered on 1 March 1899 at Vienna's Burgtheater, on the same bill as Der grüne Kakadu and Paracelsus.
Plot
Professor Robert Pilgram mourns his late wife Eveline, whom he remembers as a devoted companion. Talking with his neighbour Olga and his physician friend Alfred, he is forced to realize that Eveline had kept secrets of her own from him; his picture of the marriage turns out to have been self-deception.
Cultural significance
Of the three one-act plays premiered that evening, Die Gefährtin drew the strongest applause, according to Schnitzler's diary. Critic Alfred Kerr praised precisely Schnitzler's deliberate omissions and silences as a dramatic device that exposes the gap between appearance and reality in bourgeois marriage.