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While arranging to move his home and office, Fritz Wittels died of a heart ailment of which he was aware, but which had not interfered with his activities in his practice of psychoanalysis and in his writing. His book, Sex Habits of the American Woman, is soon to be published, and two other books, Germany is Curable, and The Subsistence Army, were being prepared for publication.
Fritz Wittels began his literary work in 1897, at seventeen, with Die Nixen, Märchendrama in fünf Akten. At twenty-three he obtained an M.D. from the University of his native city, Vienna. In his unpublished autobiography Wittels says that he was born in Vienna, at 10 Nestroy Street, named after Johann Nestroy, a typical Viennese, who died in 1861, and who played in the comedies he wrote. Wittels quotes from Nestroy, 'I have the deepest contempt for all people including myself', adding, 'This cynicism, coupled with a disarming candor and phrased in his irresistible manner, is a product of Vienna, the city in which I lived for almost fifty years and which now lives in me. When I and others like me are gone, the Vienna we loved will be gone forever.'
Fritz Wittels was descended from Chaim Vital, the sixteenth century Jewish cabalist of Safed. The family Vital was of Italian Jewish extraction.1 He was one of four brothers and one sister. Besides Nestroy, he admired the Austrian poet, Ferdinand Raimund, the composers Johann Strauss and Jacques Offenbach.2 He attended Freud's lectures in 1905 in the old psychiatric clinic of the General Hospital on Saturday nights, read Freud's works of that early period, and became one of the first generation of psychoanalysts at twenty-five years of age. He attended the First International Psychoanalytic Congress