Arthur Schnitzler

The Austrian dramatist and novelist Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931) is at his best in one-act plays and novellas that often deal with extreme situations - death, sexual conflicts, and neurotic and even psychotic states.

Born of Jewish parents in Vienna, where he spent almost his entire life as a physician, Arthur Schnitzler looked upon himself primarily as a scientist and never gave up his medical practice. His first creative period (1893-1900) saw the publication of numerous poems and sketches, largely centered on themes of infidelity and jealousy, and two major works, his first novella, Sterben (1894; Dying), and his first successful play, Anatol (1893).

In the mid-1890s Schnitzler was associated for a short time with a literary movement of impressionist writers, including Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who were violently opposed to the naturalism then in vogue in Berlin. But soon he broke away from café society - the Jung-Wien group, which gathered in Vienna's famous Café Griensteidl - and he never again joined any literary circle.

The highlight of Schnitzler's second phase (1900-1912) was his famous play Reigen (1900; La Ronde), which Eric Bentley has called "a great 'comedy' of sexual promiscuity." Banned, attacked, censored on its first appearance, and later withdrawn by Schnitzler himself, it has gradually won the reputation of a masterpiece of modern drama. La Ronde, in 10 brief dialogues between a man and a woman, reveals the attitudes of partners from all social classes before and after the act of love. Modern critics no longer see this play as pornographic but rather as a bitter, witty, and yet tender and melancholy examination of the human condition expressed through the metaphor of man's endless "round dance" of sexuality and desire.

As a writer of fiction, Schnitzler developed early in his career the technique known as stream of consciousness and later made famous by James Joyce. The best examples are two of his stories, Leutnant Gustl (1900; None but the Brave) and Fräulein Else (1925). The former is a long interior monologue describing an unpleasant young lieutenant who, insulted by a baker, broods until he reaches the decision to commit suicide in order to preserve his honor, only to be saved accidentally by the knowledge that the baker has died of a heart attack. In Fräulein Else Schnitzler used the stream-of-consciousness technique to reveal a psychotic young girl's motives for disrobing in a hotel lobby.

Schnitzler's third and last period, from 1912 to the time of his death, has often been referred to as "retrospective." To this phase belong such masterpieces as Frau Beate und ihr Sohn (1913; Beatrice) and Casanovas Heimfahrt (1918; Casanova's Homecoming) and the novella Traumgekrönt (1925; Rhapsody). In two important works, his long autobiographical novel, Der Weg ins Freie (1908; The Road to the Open), and the play Professor Bernhardi (1913), Schnitzler deals with racial and religious prejudice, specifically with anti-Semitism, which he sees as a problem of general human concern. He chooses many of his characters from the medical profession and assigns to them the role of the raisonneur who expresses his own tolerant views on life and love.

Further Reading

Schnitzler's My Youth in Vienna, translated by Catherine Hutter (1970), is his diary of his early years, through the 1870s. The most complete study of him in English is Solomon Liptzin, Arthur Schnitzler (1932). A good sampling of critical investigations is the eight papers delivered at the University of Kentucky in 1962: Studies in Arthur Schnitzler: Centennial Commemorative Volume, edited by Herbert W. Reichert and Herman Salinger (1963). The most comprehensive and reliable guide to the literature by and about Schnitzler is Richard H. Allen, An Annotated Arthur Schnitzler Bibliography 1879-1965 (1966).

Additional Sources

Psychoanalysis and old Vienna: Freud, Reik, Schnitzler, Kraus, New York: Human Sciences Press, 1978.

For more information on Arthur Schnitzler, visit Britannica.com.

Schnitzler, Arthur (Vienna, 1862-1931, Vienna), the son of a prominent Jewish laryngologist, studied medicine at Vienna University and qualified, but showed no inclination to emulate his father, though for a time he held a hospital appointment. For several years he led the life of a man about town, having liaisons of varying length, of which the most important were with the hotel-keeper's wife Olga Waissnix and the embroideress Jeanette Heger. From 1894 until 1899, his relationship with Marie Reinhard also provided him with much material which he exploited in his writing. He entered upon authorship as a boy, and in his mid-twenties had poems published in An der schönen blauen Donau, the literary supplement of the Neue Freie Presse. In 1893 he left hospital work for private practice, but his list of patients did not extend far beyond his circle of friends. He was soon able to live by his pen, and his chief occupations were his writing and his erotic experiences. In 1901 he was removed from the list of reserve officers of the Austrian military medical corps because his story Leutnant Gustl was held to insult the honour of the army. He married in 1903 and the marriage was dissolved in 1921. In 1928 his daughter committed suicide at the age of 18.

Schnitzler's work, which attracted public attention from 1895 (première of Liebelei in the Burgtheater), is concentrated on sex and death, and shows a remarkable capacity to create atmosphere and to pursue profound, ruthless, and often Freudian analysis of human motives, which he investigated most minutely in his own sceptical self. He was successful as a dramatist in both short and long forms. The seven one-act plays of Anatol (1893) were followed by other groups, Lebendige Stunden (1902), Marionetten (1906), Komödie der Worte (1915), and, the last performed, the cycle of Reigen (1900). His first full-length play, Das Märchen, appeared in 1894. An Ibsenist treatment of a ‘fallen woman’, it preceded Liebelei, which was followed by Freiwild in 1898, and Das Vermächtnis in 1899. All of these deal with illicit love, though Freiwild also raises the question of the code of honour and the duel. With Paracelsus (1899) and Der Schleier der Beatrice (1901) Schnitzler diverged for a short time unconvincingly into verse drama, though he adhered to prose for the ‘Groteske’ in one act, Der grüne Kakadu (1899), which has as background the French Revolution. The play Der einsame Weg (1904) marked his reversion to prose and was followed by the light-weight Freudian comedy Zwischenspiel (1906) and an implausible military-cum-erotic tragedy, Der Ruf des Lebens (1906). Komtesse Mizzi oder der Familientag (1909) was another light comedy, but Der junge Medardus (1910), set in Napoleonic times, represented a laboured attempt at historical drama. Das weite Land (1911) struck many as Schnitzler's most cynical work, but in 1912 he achieved a remarkable and balanced comedy on the theme of anti-Semitism in Professor Bernhardi. The war seems to have inhibited his dramatic vein, for the later plays, except for the verse drama Der Gang zum Weiher (1926), are superficial (Fink und Fliederbusch, 1917; Die Schwestern oder Casanova im Spa, 1919; Komödie der Verführung, 1924; Im Spiel der Sommerlüfte, 1930).

Schnitzler's greatest gifts emerge in his Novellen, which blend atmosphere and mood, so as to infuse into the almost invariably erotic material a bitter-sweet attractiveness, and occasionally invoke the uncanny. Outstanding among them are Sterben (1893), Die Frau des Weisen, Der Ehrentag (both 1897), Die Toten schweigen (1898), Leutnant Gustl, Frau Berta Garlan (both 1901), Der blinde Geronimo und sein Bruder (1902, of fraternal love, undermined but restored), Frau Beate und ihr Sohn (1913), Doktor Gräsler, Badearzt (1917), Casanovas Heimfahrt (1918; these last three were collected as Die Alternden, 1922), Fräulein Else (1924), Traumnovelle (1926, a Freudian fantasy), Spiel im Morgengrauen (1927), and Flucht in die Finsternis (1931). The volume of early stories, Die kleine Komödie, appeared posthumously in 1932.

Schnitzler is the author of two novels, Der Weg ins Freie (1908), a masterpiece in its portrayal of a stratum of Viennese society, and Therese (1928), a work in which the style and structure fail to sustain the long narrative; Therese, an orphan girl of good family, is seduced and goes steadily downhill, and in the end is murdered by her own illegitimate son.

Schnitzler's autobiographical Jugend in Wien (up to 1889), ed. by his son Heinrich Schnitzler and Th. Nickl, appeared in 1968, Meisterdramen in 1955, Gesammelte Werke (6 vols.), ed. R. O. Weiß et al., 1961-7, Meistererzählungen in 1969, and correspondence with G. Brandes in 1956, with H. von Hofmannsthal in 1964, with Olga Waissnix, Liebe, die starb vor der Zeit, in 1970 (new edn. 1981), with M. Reinhardt in 1971, and with Hedy Kempny, Das Mädchen mit den dreizehn Seelen, ed. H. P. Adamek, in 1984. Briefe 1875-1912, ed. Th. Nickl and H. Schnitzler, appeared in 1981, and Briefe 1913-1931, ed. P. M. Braunwarth, R. Miklin, S. Pertlik, and H. Schnitzler, in 1984; and an extensive edition of Schnitzler's diaries (Tagebuch) by W. Welzig et al. from 1981.

Schnitzler, Arthur (är'tʊr shnĭts'lər) , 1862–1931, Austrian dramatist and novelist. The son of a prominent Jewish Viennese physician, he studied and practiced medicine until he attracted critical notice with his drama Anatol (1893, tr. 1982), a cycle of one-act plays concerning a philanderer. He followed a similar format in La Ronde (1900, tr. 1982), a cycle of plays about related sexual liaisons, which later served as inspiration for a 1950 Max Ophuls film and a 1998 David Hare drama. Schnitzler's plays, novellas, and novels of fin-de-siècle Vienna are distinguished by their sparkling wit, brilliant style, and clinical observations of human psychology and social disintegration. His concern is with individual happiness, his approach is subtle and amoral, his tone unsentimental and ironic, and his dramatic problems often focused on love and sexual faithfulness. Among his more significant dramas are Liebelei (1895, tr. The Reckoning, 1907); The Lonely Way (tr. 1915), on artistic dedication; The Vast Domain (1911, tr. 1923); and Professor Bernhardi (tr. 1928) a tragedy about anti-Semitism. Of his novels, The Road to the Open (1908, tr. 1923) is autobiographical; he also wrote several novellas and numerous short stories.

Bibliography

See biography by S. Liptzin (1932); studies by B. Schneider-Halvorson (1983), P. W. Tax and R. H. Lawson, ed. (1984), and P. Gay (2001).

Quotes:

"Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief."

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