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.
