Arthur Schnitzler

Arthur Schnitzler

Arthur Schnitzler, ca. 1912
Born (1862-05-15)15 May 1862[1]
Vienna, Austria
Died 21 October 1931(1931-10-21) (aged 69)
Vienna, Austria
Occupation Novelist, short-story writer and playwright
Language German
Nationality Austrian
Ethnicity Jewish
Genre Short stories, novels, plays
Literary movement Decadent movement, Modernism
Notable works Dream Story, Reigen, Fräulein Else

Arthur Schnitzler (15 May 1862 – 21 October 1931) was an Austrian author and dramatist.

Personal life

Schnitzler's birthplace Praterstrasse 16

Arthur Schnitzler was born at Praterstrasse 16, Leopoldstadt, Vienna, capital of the Austrian Empire (as of 1867, part of the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary). He was the son of a prominent Hungarian laryngologist, Johann Schnitzler (1835–1893), and Luise Markbreiter (1838–1911), a daughter of the Viennese doctor Philipp Markbreiter. His parents were both from Jewish families.[2] In 1879 Schnitzler began studying medicine at the University of Vienna and in 1885 he received his doctorate of medicine. He began work at Vienna's General Hospital (German: Allgemeines Krankenhaus der Stadt Wien), but ultimately abandoned the practice of medicine in favour of writing.

On 26 August 1903, Schnitzler married Olga Gussmann (1882–1970), a 21-year-old aspiring actress and singer who came from a Jewish middle-class family. They had a son, Heinrich (1902–1982), born on 9 August 1902. In 1909 they had a daughter, Lili, who committed suicide in 1928. The Schnitzlers separated in 1921. Schnitzler died on 21 October 1931, in Vienna, of a brain hemorrhage. In 1938, following the Anschluss, his son Heinrich went to the United States and did not return to Austria until 1959; he is the father of the Austrian musician and conservationist Michael Schnitzler, born in 1944 in Berkeley, California, who moved to Vienna with his parents in 1959.[3]

Literary works

Schnitzler's works were often controversial, both for their frank description of sexuality (in a letter to Schnitzler Sigmund Freud confessed "I have gained the impression that you have learned through intuition – although actually as a result of sensitive introspection – everything that I have had to unearth by laborious work on other persons")[4] and for their strong stand against anti-Semitism, represented by works such as his play Professor Bernhardi and his novel Der Weg ins Freie. However, although Schnitzler was himself Jewish, Professor Bernhardi and Fräulein Else are among the few clearly identified Jewish protagonists in his work.

Schnitzler was branded as a pornographer after the release of his play Reigen, in which ten pairs of characters are shown before and after the sexual act, leading and ending with a prostitute. The furore after this play was couched in the strongest anti-semitic terms.[5] Reigen was made into a French language film in 1950 by the German-born director Max Ophüls as La Ronde. The film achieved considerable success in the English-speaking world, with the result that Schnitzler's play is better known there under its French title. Roger Vadim's film Circle of Love (1964) and Otto Schenk's Der Reigen (1973) are also based on the play. More recently, in Fernando Meirelles' film 360, Schnitzler's play was provided with a new version, as has been the case with many other TV and film productions.

In the novella Fräulein Else (1924) Schnitzler may be rebutting a contentious critique of the Jewish character by Otto Weininger (1903) by positioning the sexuality of the young female Jewish protagonist.[6] The story, a first-person stream of consciousness narrative by a young aristocratic woman, reveals a moral dilemma that ends in tragedy.

In response to an interviewer who asked Schnitzler what he thought about the critical view that his works all seemed to treat the same subjects, he replied, "I write of love and death. What other subjects are there?" Despite his seriousness of purpose, Schnitzler frequently approaches the bedroom farce in his plays (and had an affair with one of his actresses, Adele Sandrock). Professor Bernhardi, a play about a Jewish doctor who turns away a Catholic priest in order to spare a patient the realization that she is on the point of death, is his only major dramatic work without a sexual theme.

A member of the avant-garde group Young Vienna (Jung Wien), Schnitzler toyed with formal as well as social conventions. With his 1900 short story Lieutenant Gustl, he was the first to write German fiction in stream-of-consciousness narration. The story is an unflattering portrait of its protagonist and of the army's obsessive code of formal honour. It caused Schnitzler to be stripped of his commission as a reserve officer in the medical corps – something that should be seen against the rising tide of anti-semitism of the time.

He specialized in shorter works like novellas and one-act plays. And in his short stories like "The Green Tie" ("Die grüne Krawatte") he showed himself to be one of the early masters of microfiction. However he also wrote two full-length novels: Der Weg ins Freie about a talented but not very motivated young composer, a brilliant description of a segment of pre-World War I Viennese society; and the artistically less satisfactory Therese.

In addition to his plays and fiction, Schnitzler meticulously kept a diary from the age of 17 until two days before his death. The manuscript, which runs to almost 8,000 pages, is most notable for Schnitzler's casual descriptions of sexual conquests – he was often in relationships with several women at once, and for a period of some years he kept a record of every orgasm. Collections of Schnitzler's letters have also been published.

Schnitzler's works were called "Jewish filth" by Adolf Hitler and were banned by the Nazis in Austria and Germany. In 1933, when Joseph Goebbels organized book burnings in Berlin and other cities, Schnitzler's works were thrown into flames along with those of other Jews, including Einstein, Marx, Kafka, Freud and Stefan Zweig.[7]

His novella Fräulein Else has been adapted a number of times including the German silent film Fräulein Else (1929), starring Elisabeth Bergner, and a 1946 Argentine film, The Naked Angel, starring Olga Zubarry.

Selected works

Plays

Novels

Memorial in Vienna

Short stories and novellas

Nonfiction

Publications

References

  1. ↑ "This day, May 15, in Jewish history". Cleveland Jewish News.
  2. ↑ "The Road to The Open (JC Verite European Classics Book 1) – Kindle edition by Arthur Schnitzler, J. Chakravarti, Horace Samuel. Literature & Fiction Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.". amazon.com.
  3. ↑ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 20 February 2012. Retrieved 2012-01-25.
  4. ↑ Schnitzler's hidden manuscripts explored Archived 15 March 2010 at the Wayback Machine. at research-horizons.cam.ac.uk
  5. ↑ Arthur Schnitzler scandal at virtualvienna.net
  6. ↑ Barker, Andrew (2001). "Race, Sex and Character in Schnitzler's Fräulein Else." German Life and Letters. v. 54(1):1–9.
  7. ↑ Liukkonen, Petri. "Arthur Schnitzler". Books and Writers (kirjasto.sci.fi). Finland: Kuusankoski Public Library. Archived from the original on 10 February 2015.
  8. ↑ Dalliance was staged at the National Theatre by Peter Wood. It opened in the Lyttelton Theatre 27 May 1986.
  9. ↑ Sweet Nothings was directed by Luc Bondy at the Young Vic and opened on 25 February 2010.
  10. ↑ The Blue Room was staged at the Donmar Warehouse in London by Sam Mendes, opening on 22 September 1998.
  11. ↑ Undiscovered Country was staged at the National Theatre by Peter Wood. It opened in the Olivier Theatre 20 June 1979.

External links

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