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The Jewish playwright who inspired Tom Stoppard to write his Holocaust history
Something unexpected arrives in the middle of Tom Stoppard’s magisterial Holocaust drama Leopoldstadt: a bedroom farce.
Fritz, a cavalry officer, is having an affair with the Catholic wife of Hermann Merz, a Jewish-born textile manufacturer who has recently been baptized and is striving to fully assimilate. During a card game, Fritz makes coarse, antisemitic remarks. Incensed, Hermann goes to Fritz’s quarters to challenge him to a duel, where he finds evidence that uncovers the infidelity: an unpublished play by Austrian playwright Arthur Schnitzler, inscribed to Hermann’s brother-in-law.
The Schnitzler manuscript is a clue. It’s also an Easter egg. As canny critics, like The New Yorker’s Helen Shaw, observed, this section draws liberally from Dalliance, Stoppard’s 1986 adaptation of Schnitzler’s play Liebelei, down to the callow dragoon named Fritz. And the scenes in this portion of the decades-spanning family saga follow the signature rhythms of Schnitzler’s scandalous boudoir romp Reigen — implied to be the unpublished play Hermann recovers — as one character from a previous scene holds over into another.
“Stoppard uses content and structure to point to a playwright whom many in the audience will not know, and even this unknowing is important,” Shaw wrote. “Stoppard’s subject, after all, is forgetting.”
Among educated, assimilated Viennese Jews — the central characters of Leopoldstadt —Schnitzler was a literary giant known for pieces skewering the bourgeoisie and their penchant for interclass adultery. But by 1900, the year in which Stoppard’s fictional Hermann confronts Fritz, Schnitzler was witnessing a change in Austria, which Stoppard dramatizes. Recently emancipated Jews started to be classed as a separate race, blamed for Communist thought and capitalist greed. A political strain of antisemitism was ascendent. The immigration of Yiddish-speaking, Orthodox Jews from Tsarist Russia rendered even Austrian Jews of long standing suspect.
In his heyday, from around 1900 to 1910, Schnitzler was perhaps the most famous dramatist in the German-speaking world, said Max Haberich, author of a 2021 biography of Schnitzler.
“His plays were popular,” said Haberich. “Each caused a scandal, but it was more because it went against the contemporary mores of the 19th century, and he just wrote about sex a bit too much for the times.”
Schnitzler’s engagement with his Jewishness was central, if by no means constant. Like Hermann, he lived in a society that would never let him forget his origins. He wrote a play, Professor Bernhardi, about a physician undergoing an antisemitic crusade from colleagues in his clinic. (The trendy British director Robert Icke recently adapted it.) That play was banned in Austria, not for anything below the belt, but rather for calling out structural Jew hatred.
One of Schnitzler’s two novels, Der Weg ins Frei, was devoted to the so-called Jewish question, wondering about where this diasporic people belonged in society. Like Leopolstadt, Haberich said, it presents a broad cross section of Viennese Jewish identity: Its cast includes Zionists and Orthodox observers alongside those who are completely assimilated or even ignorant of their heritage.
But Schnitzler himself was areligious and largely apolitical. He knew Theodor Herzl, and refused to promote one of his Zionist plays. An archival letter attests to his objection that his son attend Hebrew school.
But, Haberich said Schnitzler used matzo as tea biscuits. He had a dim view of those Jews who converted, calling them “renegades.” (He would no doubt regard Stoppard’s Hermann as weak for his opportunistic embrace of Christianity.) He self identified as an Austrian citizen of German nationality and of the Jewish race.
Today, Schnitzler may be best known for providing the source material for Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, which Kubrick, though Jewish himself, largely de-Judaized.
But the little-remembered dramatist also may have inspired Stoppard, late in life, to begin referring to himself as an English playwright of Jewish heritage — and to finally make good on that heritage in what would be his swan song.
Audiences tempted to regard Leopoldstadt as autobiography, about Stoppard’s family’s cataclysmic experience in the Shoah, face a problem: The Merz clan are Austrian and the Sträusslers — Stoppard’s surname at birth — were Czech. Stoppard blithely accounted for the difference in a 2022 New York Times profile.
“It was because I personally didn’t have the background I wanted to write about — bourgeois, cultured, the city of Klimt and Mahler and Freud,” he said. “Where better than Vienna?” And, Dowd wrote, Stoppard had visited Vienna in other plays — a slapstick affair called On the Razzle and, far more relevant, his two adaptations of Schnitzler.
Those who faulted Stoppard for his late confrontation with his family history may find Leopoldstadt frustrating. The drama engages with the fate of his relatives, murdered at Auschwitz, but only up to a point. It doesn’t, like his Velvet Revolution play Rock ‘n’ Roll or his translations of Vaclav Havel, explore his Czech side. The material is simply too close. Instead of going outside of his comfort zone, he returned to a place of relative safety: the conventions of Schnitzler.
Stoppard’s 1979 adaptation of Schnitzler’s Das Weite Land was a training ground for Leopoldstadt, boasting a cast of 29 characters, including a naval cadet who cuckolds a lightbulb manufacturer and is shot in a duel.
When Stoppard first took on Schnitzler, he did not yet know the full extent of his background. Yet he boosted not just Schnitzler but also the Jewish Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnár, in 1984’s Rough Crossing. Both writers had largely receded to obscurity; he helped the public to remember them.
Schnitzler died in 1931, before he could meet the fate of the Merzes. But before he did, he had a preview of what was to come in Stoppard’s native Czechoslovakia. On Nov. 3, 1922, during a reading of one of his plays in Teplice, he wrote in his diary the next day that a crowd of “Hakenkreuzler” — “Swastika types” — showed up to cause trouble. A fight broke out when the guards tried to eject them. Schnitzler hid under a table. Antisemitic protesters blocked the entrances, and he had to be escorted to safety.
“That marked him,” said Haberich. “He wrote about that in his diary and said ‘Is this how bad its become?’”
The post The Jewish playwright who inspired Tom Stoppard to write his Holocaust history appeared first on The Forward.
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Trump Safe After Being Rushed from White House Correspondents Dinner, Shooter in Custody
U.S. President Donald Trump is escorted out as a shooter opens fire during the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 25, 2026, in this screen capture from video. REUTERS/Bo Erickson
President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump were rushed out of the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner by Secret Service agents on Saturday night after a man armed with a shotgun tried to breach security, officials said.
A man armed with a shotgun fired at a Secret Service agent, an FBI official told Reuters. The agent was hit in an area covered by protective gear and not harmed, the official said.
All federal officials, including Trump, were safe. About an hour after Trump was rushed from the event, he posted on Truth Social that a “shooter had been apprehended.”
“Quite an evening in D.C. Secret Service and Law Enforcement did a fantastic job,” Trump added.
Shortly afterwards, he posted, “The First Lady, plus the Vice President, and all Cabinet members, are in perfect condition.” He said he would be holding a White House press conference on Saturday night.
Anthony Guglielmi, a Secret Service spokesman, said the service was investigating a shooting near the main screening area at the entrance to the event.
After the sound of shots, dinner attendees immediately stopped talking and people started screaming “Get down, get down!”
Hundreds of guests dove under the tables as Secret Service officers in combat gear ran into the dining room. Trump and the first lady had bent down behind the dais before being hustled out by Secret Service officers.
Many of the 2,600 attendees took cover while waiters fled to the front of the dining hall.
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Trump Cancels Envoys’ Pakistan Trip, in Blow to Hopes for Iran War Breakthrough
US President Donald Trump speaks on the day he honors reigning Major League Soccer (MLS) champion Inter Miami CF players and team officials with an event in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC, US, March 5, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
President Donald Trump canceled a trip by two US envoys to Iran war mediator Pakistan on Saturday, dealing a new setback to peace prospects after Iran’s foreign minister departed Islamabad after speaking only to Pakistani officials.
While peace talks failed to materialize Saturday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered his troops to “forcefully” attack Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, his office said, further testing a three-week ceasefire.
Trump told reporters in Florida that he decided to call off the planned visit by US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner because the talks in Islamabad involved too much travel and expense, and Iran’s latest peace offer was not good enough for him.
Before boarding Air Force One on Saturday for a return flight to Washington, Trump said Iran had improved an offer to resolve the conflict after he canceled the visit, “but not enough.”
In a social media post, Trump also wrote there was “tremendous infighting and confusion” within Iran’s leadership.
“Nobody knows who is in charge, including them. Also, we have all the cards, they have none! If they want to talk, all they have to do is call!!!” he posted on Truth Social.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi earlier left the Pakistani capital without any sign of a breakthrough in talks with Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and other senior officials.
Araqchi later described his visit to Pakistan as “very fruitful,” adding in a social media post that he had “shared Iran’s position concerning (a) workable framework to permanently end the war on Iran. Have yet to see if the U.S. is truly serious about diplomacy”.
Iranian media reported that Araqchi had flown to Oman’s capital Muscat, saying he will meet with senior officials to “discuss and exchange views on bilateral relations and regional developments”.
Sharif wrote in a post on X that he spoke with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian about the regional security situation and told him that Pakistan was committed to serving “as an honest and sincere facilitator — working tirelessly to advance durable peace and lasting stability.”
Tehran has ruled out a new round of direct talks with the United States and an Iranian diplomatic source said his country would not accept Washington’s “maximalist demands.”
IRAN AND US AT AN IMPASSE
Washington and Tehran are at an impasse as Iran has largely closed the Strait of Hormuz, which normally carries one-fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas shipments, while the US blocks Iran’s oil exports.
The conflict, in which a ceasefire is in force, began with US-Israeli airstrikes on Iran on February 28. Iran has since carried out strikes against Israel, US bases and Gulf states, and the war has pushed up energy prices to multi-year highs, stoking inflation and darkening global growth prospects.
Araqchi “explained our country’s principled positions regarding the latest developments related to the ceasefire and the complete end of the imposed war against Iran,” said a statement on the minister’s official Telegram account.
Asked about Tehran’s reservations over US positions in the talks, an Iranian diplomatic source in Islamabad told Reuters: “Principally, Iranian side will not accept maximalist demands.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt had said the US had seen some progress from the Iranian side in recent days and hoped more would come over the weekend, while Vice President JD Vance was ready to travel to Pakistan as well.
Vance led a first round of unsuccessful talks with Iran in Islamabad earlier this month.
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Hezbollah Says Ceasefire ‘Meaningless’ as Fighting Continues in South
Israeli military vehicles and soldiers in a village in southern Lebanon as the Israeli army operates in it as seen from the Israeli side of the border, April 23, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Ayal Margolin
Lebanon’s Hezbollah said a US-mediated ceasefire in the war with Israel was meaningless a day after it was extended for three weeks, as Lebanese authorities reported two people killed by an Israeli strike and Hezbollah downed an Israeli drone.
US President Donald Trump announced the three-week extension on Thursday after hosting Israeli and Lebanese ambassadors at the White House. The ceasefire agreement between the governments of Lebanon and Israel had been due to expire on Sunday.
While the ceasefire has led to a significant reduction in hostilities, Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah have continued to trade blows in southern Lebanon, where Israel has kept soldiers in a self-declared “buffer zone.”
Responding to the extension, Hezbollah lawmaker Ali Fayyad said “it is essential to point out that the ceasefire is meaningless in light of Israel’s insistence on hostile acts, including assassinations, shelling, and gunfire” and its demolition of villages and towns in the south.
“Every Israeli attack… gives the resistance the right to a proportionate response,” he added.
Hezbollah is not a party to the ceasefire agreement, and has strongly objected to Lebanon’s face-to-face contacts with Israel.
BUFFER ZONE
The April 16 agreement does not require Israeli troops to withdraw from the belt of southern Lebanon seized during the war. The zone extends 5 to 10 km (3 to 6 miles) into Lebanon.
Israel says the buffer zone aims to protect northern Israel from attacks by Hezbollah, which fired hundreds of rockets at Israel during the war.
Hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel reignited on March 2, when the group opened fire in support of Iran in the regional war. The ceasefire in Lebanon emerged separately from Washington’s efforts to resolve its conflict with Tehran, though Iran had called for Lebanon to be included in any broader truce.
Nearly 2,500 people have been killed in Lebanon since March 2, the Lebanese health ministry says.
ISRAELI MILITARY WARNS RESIDENTS TO LEAVE TOWN
Lebanon’s health ministry said an Israeli airstrike killed two people in the southern village of Touline on Friday.
Hezbollah shot down an Israeli drone, the group and the Israeli military said. Hezbollah identified it as a Hermes 450 and said it had downed it with a surface-to-air missile.
An Israeli drone was heard circling above Beirut throughout the day on Friday, Reuters reporters said.
The Israeli military warned residents of the southern town of Deir Aames to leave their homes immediately, saying it planned to act against “Hezbollah activities” there.
Deir Aames is located north of the area occupied by Israeli forces, and it was the first time Israel had issued such a warning since the ceasefire came into force on April 16. Posted on social media, the Israeli warning gave no details of the activities it said Hezbollah was conducting in the town.
The Israeli military also said it had intercepted a drone prior to its crossing into Israeli territory, and that sirens were sounded in line with protocol.
WAR-WEARY RESIDENTS SEEK END TO FIGHTING
The continued fighting has angered war-weary Lebanese, who say they want to see a genuine ceasefire put a full halt to violence.
“What’s this? Is this called a ceasefire? Or is this mocking (people’s) intelligence?” said Naem Saleh, a 73-year-old owner of a newsstand in Beirut.
Residents of northern Israel had mostly returned to daily life, but expressed pessimism about the longevity of the ceasefire with Lebanon.
“I believe that the ceasefire is so fragile, and unfortunately it won’t stand long, in my opinion,” said Eliad Eini, a resident of Nahariya, which lies just 10 km (6 miles) from the border with Lebanon.
On Wednesday, Israeli strikes killed at least five people in the south, including a journalist.
Israel’s Ambassador to Washington Yechiel Leiter, in his opening remarks at Thursday’s talks, said “Lebanon should acknowledge the temporary presence of the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) and the right of Israel to defend itself from a hostile force that is firing on the population.”
Lebanon’s Ambassador to the United States Nada Moawad, in a written statement sent to Reuters, called for the ceasefire to be fully respected and said it would allow the necessary conditions for meaningful negotiations.
Lebanon has said it aims to secure the full withdrawal of Israeli troops from its territory in broader talks with Israel at a later stage.
Trump said on Thursday that he looked forward to hosting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Lebanese President Joseph Aoun in the near future, and said there was “a great chance” the two countries would reach a peace agreement this year.
Hezbollah attacks killed two civilians in Israel after March 2, while 15 Israeli soldiers have died in Lebanon since then, Israel says.