SCHNITZLER'S VIENNA

1. FIN-DE-SIECLE VIENNA

Vienna grew rapidly after 1848: the capital of the Habsburgs became the railway junction for Prague, Budapest, Cracow, and Trieste. The revolutions of 1848 ended serfdom in the Austrian lands, and enabled ambitious migrants from the provinces to swarm into the great city. Many of them, like Freud's father, were Jewish: they too were free to move after 1848, and Vienna was their principal destination. From a negligible presence at mid-century, the Jews grew to ten percent of the population by the end: 200,000 in a metropolis of 2 million. Emancipated from religious orthodoxy, they won commanding positions in the arts, journalism, law, medicine, commerce, and banking. The city was not a great industrial center, but its financial power fed the industrial development of Bohemia (now the Czech Republic). The city's Jews were either resented for their differences from the rest of the population or distrusted for their successful assimilation. Some blamed the Jews for capitalism, others for socialism. The result: a wave of populist anti-Semitism that would infect the young Hitler, who moved there in 1907.

The old medieval walls that had ringed the city were destroyed in 1855, and the Ringstrasse, a broad boulevard on the Parisian model, became the site of impressive buildings in a vareity of historical styles: imperial classical for the Parliament, the Opera, and the Burgtheater; gothic for the Church and the Town Hall; Art Nouveau for the Post Office. Like Paris, the city was full of cafes, and these became centers of intellectual life in many cases, places where a cross-fertilization of the humanities and the sciences occurred: where medical students might engage in fierce debates about Wagner's music and classical scholars, having passed rigorous exams in math and physics, could get excited about Einstein. Artisans and small merchants—the lower middle class—were also interested in opera and the other arts. The city had a well-deserved reputation for cultural vitality and hedonism, even if its official morality was conservative and smug.

But the sphere of politics was anything but gay. The financial panic and depression of 1873 embittered the political atmosphere and stimulated anti-Semitism. The liberals who had been the dominant players in politics in the 1860s soon found themselves on the defensive. The arrival of democracy in the Austro-Hungarian empire benefited not the liberals but rather nationalist, religious, and socialist parties. By the end of the century, an anti-Semite had become the mayor of Vienna, and Parliament had dissolved into warring nationalist camps. If intellectuals still flourished in the coffee-houses, semi-educated pseudo-intellectuals held court in the beer-halls. Many liberals felt that they were living on the edge of a volcano, that their world was on the verge of collapse and dissolution.

"It is this juxtaposition of an intellectual elite, universally educated, closely knit, with all the stimulus to lively debate on the one hand, and the feeling of impending doom on the other, which seems to provide the explanation why so much of the seminal thought of out century originated in Vienna.... And if the city's sensuality provided Freud with a backdrop to his thought about the roots of the sexual impulse, the tensions inherent in a political system about to break up also pointed to the wellsprings of aggression" (Martin Esslin). Arthur Schnitzler, Freud's contemporary and a fellow physician, was one of the most acute analysts of the city's distempers. The city's finest writers, artists, and psychologists, Carl Schorske tells us, were preoccupied with the probles of the nature of the individual in a disintegrating society.

2. SCHNITZLER, KAFKA, WEDEKIND

"I don't like Schnitzler at all," wrote Kafka to his fiancee in 1913, "and hardly respect him; no doubt he is capable of certain things, but for me his great plays and his great prose are full of a truly staggering mass of the most sickening drivel. It is impossible to be too hard on him. Those plays of his that I have seen dissolved before my watching eyes, and I forgot them while listening to them. Only when looking at his photograph—that bogus dreaminess, that sentimentality I wouldn't touch even with the tips of my fingertips—can I see how he could have developed in this way from his partly excellent early work—Wedekind I won't even mention in the same letter."

Schnitzler, Kafka, and Wedekind all belong to the Central European cultural universe: Vienna, Prague, Munich were centers of German high culture in the early twentieth century. Kafka went to the theater often, and his preference for Wedekind over Schnitzler is significant. Wedekind never sought a mass audience, but Schnitzler, a far more prolific writer, obviously did. (Schnitzler was one of the few great writers of his period who could make a very good living from his writing.) Wedekind was an Expressionist, whose first work focused on adolescence and the explosive power of sexuality. Schnitzler, one might say, was an impressionist, concerned with the ebb and flow of experience rather than its essence. Schnitzler's young men are typically older than Wedekind's—still young but already jaded. Their lives are not about to explode but to run down. Entropy rather than energy is Schnitzler's theme.

3. PLAYBOY

Schnitzler was thirty-eight years old in 1900—his sensibility had been shaped in the nineteenth century. He was born in 1862, six years after Freud, into an upper-middle class Jewish family in Vienna. His father was a distinguished physician, a throat specialist, many of whose patients were important figures in the worlds of theater or opera. The son, not surprisingly, became theater-mad at an early age. He became a student at the University of Vienna in 1879, and reluctantly followed his father into the medical profession. He was never really happy as a doctor, and persisted in trying to make another career for himself as a writer, in spite of his father's objections. In 1893, the year of his father's death, he had his first literary success with the publication of Anatol, a series of sketches about a neurotic playboy.

This type flourished in Vienna toward the end of the nineteenth century: successful fathers were in a position to subsidize their sons, who were none too keen on taking up the business or professional activities of their fathers. Instead they spent their time in theaters and cafes, discussing projects they rarely carried through, reading newspapers, playing billiards and cards, going to the race track. And of course there were women and love affairs. If Schnitzler was a master of the playboy type, he was even more famous for his depiction of the woman with whom the playboy was so often involved, das susses Madel, "the sweet girl." She is socially inferior and sexually accessible; he can buy her company with modest gifts. Each of the parties in this relationship is subject to a characteristic illusion: the young man pretends that there may be a future for their affair; the young woman tries to pretend that she is content with its impermanence. The break, when it comes, is likely to be awkward for the young man, painful the young woman. Far from being the femme fatale of the fin-de-siècle aesthetic imagination, she is fragile and vulnerable.

Here is an example of such a breakup from Schnitzler's autobiography: "Her stupid questions, which once had seemed to me the happiest proof of her love; her voice, which had once been capable of exciting me physically; her touch which had ravished me, all had only one effect and influence over me now—to enervate me. She became jealous, or behaved as if she were; there was scene after scene. I realized that I should have been devastated, but all I could feel was torture. Then she would kiss my hand, beg for forgiveness, we would rest side by side, and I was consumed by boredom. I ate oranges and was annoyed by the thought that I would have to get up in the middle of the night and go home. And as I held her in my arms, I was thinking of any other woman, longing for any other woman, a prostitute for all I cared, if only I could have kissed other lips, heard other sighs..." This affair had lasted four years and Schnitzler had noted every episode of lovemaking in his diary—there were exactly 563 of them. But on the day he had broken off this affair and reckoned his total he had already had 35 consummations with his new love, an actress.

Out of this unpromising material Schnitzler made his early artistic success. Sexual attraction and repulsion, the mechanics of sexual vanity, and their psychological roots and consequences, were his major subjects. His first hero, Anatol, is a pathetic narcissist and hypochondriac whose affairs run in circles. "There are so many illnesses," he reflects, "but only one kind of health! To be healthy is to be like everybody else... to be ill is to be different!" He's a minor league Don Juan, and like that great seducer he is plagued by the fear of death, of growing old, of getting tired. Instead of meaningful development, a series of mechanical repetitions. He treasures certain privileged moments in his love affairs, but they turn out to be empty and repetitive; he uses language to manipulate rather than communicate; he's in love with his own performance, but also disenchanted and bored by it. He's still young, but he begins to think about death. Eros and Thanatos are two sides of the same coin here: it's appropriate that a collection of Schnitzler's short stories is entitled Games of Love and Death. Schnitzler's early works, Carl Schorske tells us, "explored the compulsiveness of Eros, its satisfactions, its delusions, its strange affinity to Thanatos, and—notably in Reigen—its terrible power to dissolve all social hierarchy."

4. SCHNITZLER AND THE DANCE OF DEATH

What we have at the end of the nineteenth century is a reversal of the classic plot of the great realist novels of the mid-century—the story of the young man who comes to the big city and climbs the social ladder, learns to distinguish between reality and illusion, and struggles through many painful and embarrassing trials toward maturity. We have instead Ibsen's Oswald, who reverses the progress from country to city and finds he cannot escape from family ties after all; Strindberg's Captain, who finds that marriage is hell and regresses to infantile rage; and Schnitzler's Anatol, adrift in the Sargasso Sea of his own impressions and transient love affairs.

The circular structure Schnitzler used in Anatol he perfected in Reigen (La Ronde). Ibsen, in A Doll's House and Ghosts, had juxtaposed truth and falsehood; Schnitzler's characters can't even make that distinction. Promiscuity is the rule here, but purity is perpetually invoked and sentimentalized. "At heart this world is indifferent, flabbily permissive, shot through with an easy-going Gemutlichkeit (sentimentality).... This disintegrating world answers the sense of its own collapse with a kind of cynical hedonism, and yet continues to pay lip-service to traditional moral and social values. Hence it operates with double standards in every sphere of activity; it is a world that is difficult to fight because it so readily concedes its own weakness.... In Reigen the repetitiveness, the mechanical quality of the dialogue is sharply presented: statements of intense feeling, uniqueness, etc. are invariably relativized when they are repeated to another partner at a different time. All the characters, despite differences in social rank which color their language and attitudes, emerge as fundamentally interchangeable, as faceless, nameless marionettes frantically dancing the mad round of sex. Schnitzler is less concerned with the sexual act itself than with its linguistic 'before' and 'after.'" (Martin Swales).

What goes around in Reigen, of course, is not only sex but perhaps also death, or at least disease: we start with a prostitute and the suggestion is that she offers not only the gift of love but also a sexually transmitted disease. So here we have again the image of the dance of death, which since the late Middle Ages has reminded Europeans of their mortality and corruption. Our modern playwrights offer updated versions of that image. And the circular structure they adopt suggests irony, absurdity. Sometimes the valence is tragic, as in early Strindberg, but in Schnitzler's best work it's comic. Later, in the existentialist Theater of the Absurd of Beckett and company, it will be tragicomic, and for this kind of theater Schnitzler is just as much a pioneer as Strindberg.

Schnitzler was a distinguished novelist and short story writer as well as a playwright. Of his fictions, "Lieutenant Gustl" deserves special consideration, because it was a pioneering example of a new technique: the "stream of consciousness" (the phrase comes from the great American psychologist William James). The story describes the last day and night in the life of a young officer who is about to commit suicide, and it offers a striking portrait of the petty bourgeois mentality. Here Schnitzler confines his story to a single point of view and offers no explicit authorial commentary or criticism of his protagonist, yet what emerges is a powerful indictment of a particular kind of corruption and anti-Semitism. Schnitzler may have begun with superficial playboy types, but he knew very well that far more sinister characters and forces were lurking in the depths of Viennese society.

RECOMMENDED:

Carl Schorske, "Politics and the Psyche: Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal," in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage, 1981)—the best analysis of Schnitzler in his Viennese context.

Gabrielle Annan, "The Return of La Ronde," New York Review of Books, 21 July 1983.

Martin Swales, Arthur Schnitzler: A Critical Study (Oxford, 1971).

Peter Gay, "Sex and Longing in Old Vienna," New York Times Book Review, 11 July 1999.

A.J.P. Taylor, "Schnitzler's Vienna," From Napoleon to the Second International

(Penguin, 1997).

Martin Esslin, "Freud's Vienna," Freud: the Man, His World, His Influence, ed. Jonathan Miller (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972).