About the work
Die letzten Masken ("The Last Masks") is a one-act play Arthur Schnitzler wrote in 1901; it premiered on 4 January 1902 together with the Lebendige Stunden cycle at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin and is still frequently staged on its own.
Plot
In a Viennese hospital ward, the dying journalist Karl Rademacher plans to finally tell his old friend, the now-celebrated writer Alexander Weihgast, the truth about his success. When Weihgast instead shows genuine, if shallow, sympathy, Rademacher abandons the reckoning and dies without revealing his secret.
Cultural significance
The play remains one of Schnitzler's most concentrated studies of illusion and truth in the face of death; the Arbeiter-Zeitung reviewed a 1962 revival at the Theater in der Josefstadt as a miniature Austrian drama of resignation.