Citation

Healy M. Austrian History Yearbook 2014; 45: 134-149.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2014)

DOI

10.1017/S0067237813000647

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

On 28 May 1914, the Viennese press reported that a young man from the sixteenth district in Vienna had attempted suicide. Sitting on a bench at the Pezzlpark, twenty-one-year-old laborer Karl P. shot himself in the head with a revolver. The motive, one newspaper reported, was said to be unrequited love. By chance, the same park bench would see more action later that day. Pregnant twenty-three-year-old laborer Marie B. was on her way to a birthing clinic when she went into labor. Sitting on what the newspaper now deemed the Selbstmörderbankerl, with the help of two nearby watchmen, she gave birth to a girl. The headline Death and Life on a Bench highlighted one extraordinary coincidence in an otherwise ordinary day in the city. © 2014 Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota.

Language: en