Background
He was born in Vienna as Egon Friedmann, the third child of a prominent silk manufacturer. His mother deserted the family when Egon was eighteen months old. His father died when he was thirteen, and he was raised by an aunt.
He was born in Vienna as Egon Friedmann, the third child of a prominent silk manufacturer. His mother deserted the family when Egon was eighteen months old. His father died when he was thirteen, and he was raised by an aunt.
Little is known of his early childhood. He was expelled from school at the age of fifteen due to misdemeanors, and was considered a poor student in most of the succession of schools he attended. He subsequently studied at the universities of Berlin and Heidelberg.
He joined the Viennese bourgeois circle of the Bohemian poet Peter Altenberg, a group consisting of poets, actors, journalists, and dancers, and became himself a central figure in Viennese cabaret society.
His own career as a cabaret performer began in 1901, as he starred in one-act parodies, monologues, and anecdotes, directed the Cabaret Fledermaus, and acted in his own plays.
When World War I broke out, Friedell, who was in Berlin at the time, was rejected for army service due to obesity. He returned to Vienna in 1915, giving lectures, which consisted of tirades against the “enemies.”
Friedell next turned to writing, an endeavor that led to his financial ruin. His work reflected his anti-Semitic and anti-liberal views; in 1920 he wrote the play "Judastragodie" (which premiered in 1923) about Judas’s betrayal of Christ. '
Friedell tried to make a deal with the Nazis to get his works published, using a friend’s connections with officials from the German Interior and Propaganda ministries, however, by 1936 he realized the futility of such efforts. By 1937 his works were banned in Germany.
In 1938, when a number of SA men knocked on his door looking for the “Jude Friedell,” he committed suicide by jumping out of the window to his death.
In the 1950s, his former secretary, Walther Schneider, published eight collections of his letters, essays, and aphorisms. In 1959, interest in Friedell revived when Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit was republished, becoming a best-seller for a while.
Friedell converted to Protestantism in 1897, and changed his name the same year in order to avoid confusion with his older brother, who was also a novelist and playwright.
He believed that the war was "the agency of Germany’s spiritual liberation” and that the “world’s barbarians” (the Russians, French, and British) were conspiring to separate the German and Austrian peoples.