SCHNITZLER, ARTHUR

SCHNITZLER, ARTHUR (1862–1931), Austrian playwright and novelist.

Arthur Schnitzler was a Viennese writer very popular before World War I for his "decadent" linkage of love, sexuality, and death. Some historians regard him as a voice of prewar culture at a peak of supposedly peaceful bourgeois creativity. Literary critics tend to set him aside as a marginal figure of emergent modernism, notable for some stream-of-consciousness narration (the novellas Lieutenant Gustl, 1900, and Fraülein Else, 1924; translated as Viennese Novellettes, 1931) and for allegedly Freudian treatment of the unconscious. Some feminists have admired his works for showing women who dream of erotic love only to be sexually used and discarded by men. Promiscuity of both sexes is another of his themes, most notorious in the play Round Dance (1900; Reigen), in which a circle of changing partners in compulsive coition enacted on stage—whore with a soldier at the outset, whore with a count at the end—shows love as bodies in a monotonous Totentanz, a dance of death.

Schnitzler also picked apart concepts of nationalism, both German and Jewish, in such works as the play Professor Bernhardi (1912) and the novel The Way to the Open (1908; Der Weg ins Freie,). His portrayals of manly violence, especially in dueling but also in war—particularly in Young Medardus (1910; Der Junge Medardus), a historical drama of Austria in the Napoleonic era—mocked the idea that honor finds exalted expression in combat, one on one or en masse. In World War I industrialized slaughter disillusioned multitudes of belief in such exaltation; Schnitzler's works gave prewar audiences a slightly subversive anticipation of such disillusionment. The fictive quality of collective entities that summon men to war—das Volk (the people), race, nation, fatherland—is emphasized in his private writings but only hinted in his public dramas and stories.

Schnitzler's father was a poor Jew who migrated from Hungary to Vienna, capital of the Habsburg Empire, abandoned the Yiddish and Magyar languages in favor of German, became a physician, and worked his way to a peak position in laryngology, treating actors and singers and harboring frustrated ambitions as a writer. Arthur too became a laryngologist, even working for a time in his father's clinic, and developed the use of hypnosis in treating speech problems that were psychological, without apparent organic cause. Father-son rivalry helped to make Arthur, the pampered son of a self-made magnate, disapprove his way of life as a womanizing playboy and to fear that he was a dilettante in medicine and in writing. That experience generated plays and stories that far surpassed the fame of a grudging father. Many readers, including the psychologist Theodor Reik and Sigmund Freud himself, have noted an affinity with Freudian ideas in Schnitzler's writing. Schnitzler disapproved their claim of affinity, or rather of scientific support for the writer's intuitive insights. "I have told Reik," he wrote to an inquirer, "that the Freudian methods of interpretation—from however deep a knowledge of human nature they may have emerged in their basic insights—will sometime signify to him not the one and the only saving way, but one among others, one that leads into the mystery of the writer's creativity, but also time and again leads past that into vagueness and error" (quoted in Sherman, pp. 201–202).

In My Youth in Vienna (Jugend in Wien), an autobiography written for posthumous publication, Schnitzler set apart the homeland (Heimat) that he loved—Vienna and environs—from the fatherland (Vaterland) of nationalist striving for one big German state, which he deplored. He clung nostalgically to the multinational coexistence that Habsburg Austria tried to maintain against German chauvinists and small-state nationalists, each against all, hastening the Habsburg collapse and the eruption of total war. He sympathized with the pacifist Bertha von Suttner, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1905 for writing against the arms race that portended war, but Schnitzler sympathized in private, smiling at her impracticality. His resistance to the anti-Semitism that attended nationalist politics was publicly expressed in Professor Bernhardi (banned in Vienna for its anti-Catholic passages) and in The Way to the Open, which has a pioneering diversity of Jewish characters instead of traditional stereotypes.

World War I made his works seem superficial, dated entertainments of a bygone time and place. Moviemakers have contributed to that reputation by occasional use of his style of linking prurience with mystery, to show love as sex and soul-searching in the absence of soul. In Youth in Vienna, Schnitzler took note of his reputation—"I am conscious of being an artist not of the first rank"—as he asked posterity to read his autobiography as a document of the age, and arguments of that sort persist among critics striving in his behalf. Stanley Elkin, for example, introduces an American selection of his work with condescension: "His plays remain chiefly, well, charming and conventional…. What we're talking about finally is melodramatics, soap opera, the peculiar pulled punches of all distinctly social art forms" (Elkin, foreword to Plays and Stories, pp. xi–xii). Similarly, the German critic Friedrich Torberg's afterword to Schnitzler's autobiography essentially characterizes him as entertainer who did transient service to a bygone social order. Torberg is somewhat defensive in comparing Schnitzler's achievement to Chekov's. Schnitzler, Torberg argues, does not belong with the great modernists who expressed profound revulsion toward the culture of "Crapland" ("Kakania," Robert Musil's sardonic name for the Habsburg Dual Monarchy), but the ephemeral amusements he catered to may show the global future of art more than one would like to imagine.

See alsoFreud, Sigmund; Hofmannsthal, Hugo von; Modernism; Vienna.

bibliography

Primary Sources

Schnitzler, Arthur. Viennese Novelettes. New York, 1931.

——. Jugend in Wien: Eine Autobiographie. Edited by Friedrich Torberg. Vienna, 1968.

——. My Youth in Vienna. Translated by Catherine Hutter. Foreword by A. J. P. Taylor. London, 1971.

——. The Road to the Open. Translated by Horace Samuel. Forward by William M. Johnston. Evanston, Ill., 1991; and Berkeley, Calif., 1992.

——. Plays and Stories. Edited by Egon Schwarz. Foreword by Stanley Elkin. Vol. 55 of The German Library series. New York, 1998.

Secondary Sources

Farese, Guiseppe. Arthur Schnitzler: Ein Lieben in Wien, 1862–1931. Munich, 1999.

Fliedl, Konstanze. Arthur Schnitzler: Poetik der Erinnerung. Vienna, 1997.

Gay, Peter. Schnitzler's Century: The Making of Middle-Class Culture, 1815–1914. New York, 2002.

Lindren, Irène. "Seh'n Sie, das Berühmtwerden ist doch nich so leicht!" Arthur Schnitzler über sein literarisches Schaffen. Frankfurt am Main, 2002.

Sherman, Murray H. "Reik, Schnitzler, Freud, and 'The Murderer': The Limits of Insight in Psychoanalysis." Modern Austrian Literature 10, no. 3/4 (1977), 195–216.

Swales, Martin. Arthur Schnitzler: A Critical Study. Oxford, U.K., 1971.

Thompson, Bruce. Schnitzler's Vienna: Image of a Society. London, 1990.

David Joravsky