Suicide in the Austrian Littoral at the Turn of the 20th Century
Suicide in the Austrian Littoral at the Turn of the 20th Century

Summary/Abstract: The paper seeks to examine the social image of suicide at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, focusing on the case of Trieste as a major Austrian urban centre, where the suicide rates were visibly increasing from at least the 1870s onwards. The perception of the growing presence of suicide in society made it possible to observe the reflections on suicide from the last quarter of the 19th century, originating from different parts of Europe (Morselli, Masaryk, Durkheim), and at the same time how the discourses around suicide shed light on a somewhat broader picture of society, including its fears (of social problems and change, not least the potential threat of the imitative effect that the daily press was believed to create by reporting on suicides). The newspaper discourse usually followed the scientific publications of the time, and the contemporaneous observations on the mass of suicides were confirmed through statistical analyses and medical, sociological, philosophical, and other debates, while raising many other social issues with which suicide in urban areas could be linked (alcoholism, the growth of the proletariat, poverty, changing values, etc.). All these factors shaped the public debate on suicide as a problem of modern society, with an emphasis on (big) cities, where the problem of suicide was much more pronounced than in smaller, non-industrial towns, or in the countryside of the Austrian Littoral.

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