Grand Austrian Perverts 1: Arthur Schnitzler

Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931) 

Photo by Ferdinand Schmutzer (c. 1912)

 

Ich schreibe über Liebe und Tod. Welche anderen Fächer gibt es?

 

 

I. 

 

If the Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler is known at all today in the English-speaking world, it's as the author of the 1926 work Traumnovelle, which was adapted for the screen by Stanley Kubrick as Eyes Wide Shut (1999), starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman [1].  

 

But he deserves, as a grand pervert [2] and pessimist, to be better remembered in my view ...

 

 

II.   

 

Schnitzler was born into a wealthy Jewish family in 1862. His father was a famous laryngologist - not something many people can say - originally from Hungary. And his mother was the daughter of a prominent Viennese doctor. 

 

So, no surprises then, that in 1879 young Arthur Schnitzler should begin studying medicine, qualifying as a doctor in 1885. Although he took up a job in Vienna's General Hospital, his heart wasn't in it: he wanted, rather, to become a writer and would eventually abandon the medical profession and opt for the life of a man of letters. 

 

In 1903, he married Olga Gussmann, an aspiring young actress and singer half his age, who also came from a Jewish middle-class background. The marriage lasted for eighteen years - and the couple had two children - before separating in 1921, ten years before Schnitzler's death.      

 

 

III.

 

As a member of the Austrian avant-garde, Schnitzler happily played with literary and social convention [3] and his works were regarded as controversial; both for their sexually explicit descriptions - much appreciated by Freud - and for their rebuttal of antisemitism.

 

Following the first public performance, in 1920, of his play Reigen (1909) [4], Schnitzler was not only condemned as a pornographer, but attacked in the vilest manner possible for his Jewishness. When asked by an interviewer why all his works betrayed the same perverse obsessions, he replied: 'I write of love and death. What other subjects are there?

 

Perhaps not surprisingly, Hitler was not a fan; describing Schnitzler's work as Jüdischer Dreck and his books were first banned by the Nazis, then burned by the Nazis. 

 

Fortunately, Schnitzler's papers - including manuscripts, letters, and an almost 8,000 page diary in which he recorded full details of his many sexual encounters and experiences - were saved from the flames and eventually ended up in Cambridge University Library.       

IV.

In closing, I'd like to mention Schniztler's philosophical pessimism. 

 

As Byung-Chul Han reminds us, in one famous aphorism, Schnitzler "proposes a relationship between bacilli and the human race" [5] and presents a vision "of an ontological or even a cosmic necessity for the general demise of life" [6]. 

 

It is a vision in which "the secret fate of every individual is to destroy the other" [7], not because of any evil intention to cause harm, but simply because: "Existence as such is already violence." [8]  

 

Notes

 

[1] Kubrick's version of Schnitzler's psycho-sexual fantasy makes significant changes to the original story and its setting; for example, the film takes place in New York in the late 1990s, not in Vienna in the early 1900s. Kubrick also removed all references to the Jewishness of the characters.      

[2] I am borrowing this phrase from D. H. Lawrence, who, in a letter to Aldous Huxley, once described St. Francis, Michelangelo, Goethe, Kant, Rousseau, Byron, Baudelaire, Wilde and Marcel Proust as grand perverts. Click here for my post on this subject.

[3] Schnitzler was a member of Jung-Wien, a society of fin de siècle writers who experimented with the more radical aspects of Modernism, challenging 19th-century realism and moralism, and promoting a politics of desire. Schnitzler was the first writer of German fiction to use stream of consciousness as a narrative mode. He was also a great practitioner of what is now known as microfiction.    

 

[4] Reigen - better known by its French title, La Ronde - was written by Schnitzler in 1897 and privately printed in 1900. It provocatively examines issues to do with class and sexual morality.  

 

[5]  Byung Chul-Han, Topology of Violence, trans. Amanda DeMarco, (Polity Press, 2018), p. 97. 

      The aphorism in question can be found in Arthur Schnitzler, Aphorismen und Betrachtungen, (S. Fischer Verlag, 1967), pp. 177-78. It is quoted in full (and translated into English) in Han's text, p. 97.

 

[6-8] Ibid., Note 41, p. 146.

 

 

To read the second post in this series on grand Austrian perverts - on Egon Schiele - click here.  

 

To read the third post in this series on grand Austrian perverts - on Freud - click here.

From Roman Amphitheatre to Nazi Death Camp (A Note on the Topology of Violence)

Postcards from Hell ...[1]

 

 

Oh, those Greeks! They regarded violence as an indispensable necessity [ἀνάγκη]: "tolerated like fate or a law of nature" [2] and cheerfully sanctioned acts of physical aggression as a legitimate means of conflict resolution.

 

I say cheerfully, because affectively discharging destructive energies is a good way of preventing neurotic conditions like depression and anxiety (even if it does have tragic consequences). As Byung-Chul Han notes: "External violence unburdens the psyche because it externalizes suffering." [3] 

 

The Greeks delighted in acts of appalling cruelty - including rape, torture, and arson - but they didn't internally agonise over them afterwards; indeed, their poets celebrated these acts and "Greek mythology is drenched in blood and strewn with dismembered bodies" [4].             

 

Of course, the Romans were just as cruel - if not worse - with giant public displays of staged violence designed to demonstrate the might and magnificence of Rome, free from all bad conscience. As Han writes, in the ancient world, violence was not only ubiquitous, it was "a significant component of social practice and communication" [5]. Power was spectacular, sensational, and bloody.    

 

But in the modern world, "brute violence was delegitimized [...] It has lost virtually every show-place" [6]. Auschwitz, with its gas chambers, is a million miles away from the Colosseum; unlike the latter, the former is located at the edge of town and what goes on there is kept hidden from the public.

 

Power continues to express itself, but does so without any sense of pride or glory: "It does not expressly draw attention to itself. It lacks all language and symbolism. It heralds nothing. It takes place as a mute annihilation." [7] 

 

This isn't to say being torn apart by wild animals in the Colosseum in front of a large crowd is preferable to being murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. 

 

But it is fundamentally different and it illustrates how violence itself has undergone a radical transformation, but without ever disappearing: "Violence is simply protean. It varies its outward form according to the social constellation at hand." [8]   

   

 

Notes 

 

[1] As these two picture-postcard images indicate, dark tourism is today a thriving industry. Whilst there are some who genuinely wish to get a better understanding of how violent power manifested itself in other times, places, and cultures, one can't help suspecting that, for most visitors, a day trip to Auschwitz, for example, is what Johnny Rotten would describe as a cheap holiday in other people's misery.        

 

[2] Byung-Chul Han, Topology of Violence, trans. Amanda DeMarco, (Polity Press, 2018), p. 3. 

 

[3] Ibid.

 

[4] Ibid.

      Han is surely recalling Nietzsche here, who famously describes how noble peoples - be they Greek, Roman, Arabian, Germanic, or Japanese - remain at heart magnificent blond beasts, avidly prowling round for spoil and victory and able to commit terrible deeds in a spirit of innocence and gay bravado. See On the Genealogy of Morality, Essay 1, §11. 

[5] Byung-Chul Han, Topology of Violence, p. 4.

[6] Ibid., p. 5. 

[7] Ibid. 

 

[8] Ibid., p. vii. 

 

War - What is it Good For?

 

Russian tank entering eastern Ukraine (24-02-22)

Photo by Nanna Heitmann / Magnum Photos

 

 

Well, if nothing else it reminds us that violence is one of those things which, as Byung-Chul Han says, never disappears; not even in its negative, fully visible and all too real form, which, as the Ukranians are now discovering, is "explosive, massive, and martial" [1]. 

 

Those who (naively) believed that the age of military conflict was over have been given a brutal wake up call by Vladimir Putin and the Russian Armed Forces. 

 

The invasion of Ukraine may only prove to be a temporary set back to the process of globalisation and the utopian dream of a world without borders, etc., but, on the other hand, maybe this would be a good time to reconsider violence in all its externalised macrophysical manifestations ...

 

 

Notes 

 

I know that many readers will think of the No. 1 single by Edwin Starr (Motown, 1970) when they read the title of this post, but what they might not know - unless they happened to work at Pendant Publishing back in the mid-1990s - is that this was originally the title of Tolstoy's novel War and Peace (1869) and it's this little known fact that I was recalling here. 

 

[1] Byung-Chul Han, Topology of Violence, trans. Amanda DeMarco, (The MIT Press, 2018), p. vii.