Stefan Zweig, the master narrator, great philanthropist and Salzburg man-of-the-world, gave a funeral speech for Sigmund Freud, his fatherly friend and teacher, at the Golders Green Cemetery near London. As a different kind of scholar of the human soul, Zweig portrayed the bourgeois milieu whose pathologies and dreams he knew how to put into stories as successfully as no other. In his novella Angst (Fear), published in 1920, Zweig takes a sharp look at a society which only knows how to treat the dialectics of lies and truth with falsehood; with great psychological insight, he illuminates the inner world of a woman living in a “dull, silent” marriage with a successful lawyer. Coming from her lover, a musician, she is stopped at his door by a woman who knows her secret, claims to be his abandoned girlfriend and proceeds to blackmail her for increasingly large sums. The wife feels more and more compelled to confess everything to her husband in one liberating act. However, the longer she lets the moment of relief pass without action, the more impossible it seems ever to find her way back to truthfulness. When she threatens to get lost in the web of her own lies and only suicide seems to offer a solution, the story takes an unexpected turn.