Suicide in the Austrian Littoral at the turn of the 20th century

Abstract

The paper seeks to examine the social image of suicide at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, especially in the case of Trieste as a major Austrian urban centre, where the suicide rates were more visibly increasing at least from the 1870s onwards. The perception of the growing presence of suicide in society made it possible to observe what the reflections on suicide from the last quarter of the 19th century brought 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 also 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 of this 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.