Introduction

Viennese Types and Habsburg Nostalgia

Iconographical representations of so-called ‘Viennese types’ were immensely popular in fin de siècle Vienna. Serial photographs of street vendors, laundry girls, knife grinders, and other characters deemed typical for the Viennese cityscape appeared in journalistic feuilletons, on postcards, and commercial advertisements.¹ The two images on the cover of this book, Polnischer Jude (Polish Jew, 1887) and Wäschermädel (Laundry Girl, 1886), are taken from one of the most prominent representatives of this visual trend: Otto Schmidt’s commercial photography series Wiener Typen (Viennese Types, 1873–c.1878). The photographs by Schmidt and others referred back to an older iconographical tradition of ‘Viennese types’ that emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century in the form of so-called Kaufrufe (vendors’ calls): little porcelain figurines and graphical etchings depicting street vendors in their traditional attire and with their typical attributes. The modern medium of photography appears to sit in tension with the anti-modern nostalgia these images evoked in the late nineteenth century. In a time of rather radical social change, brought about through processes of urbanization, industrialization, and migration, these ‘Viennese types’ were meant to embody an idealized urban legend of ‘Alt-Wien’ (old Vienna) – something that was already almost completely lost in modernization, but still palpable enough to be remembered and cherished.² This corresponds to the idealized image of the Habsburg Empire that Claudio Magris famously dubbed the ‘Habsburg myth’ in 1963.³

Many of his contemporaries saw Schnitzler’s writings as the literary pendant to this form of Viennese nostalgia: he was known for his literary depiction of Viennese social types, most notoriously for that of his ‘süße Mädels’ (sweet girls), and sentimentality and backwardness were the most common verdicts uttered by literary critics at the beginning of the twentieth century. The German literary critic Alfred Biese for example described Schnitzler’s literature in his Deutsche Literaturgeschichte as an ‘Anhauch von Sentimentalität und Mystik, endlich aber einer Mischung von parfümierter Erotik, Frivolität und altwienerischer Behaglichkeit’ (a breath of sentimentality and mysticism, but finally a mix of fragrant eroticism, frivolity and old-Viennese cosiness).4 This reputation of Schnitzler as the author of a ‘versunkene Welt’ (sunken world)⁵ would become even more prominent during the years of the First World War and, much to his dismay, would not cease to pursue him until the end of his life.

Although Schnitzler indeed remains well known for his notorious representation of such Viennese social types as the süße Mädel (sweet girl), scholarship has long since exonerated him from his reputation of backwardness. He has been established as the key critical observer of Viennese bourgeois society.⁶ Scholars have convincingly argued that, rather than participating in the perpetuation of the Habsburg myth, Schnitzler ‘pitilessly dissected its corpse’.⁷ My suggestion is, accordingly, that rather than indulging the longing for old-Viennese cosiness through the representation of typecast figures, Schnitzler’s prose reveals the psycho-sociological mechanisms behind this form of nostalgia.

If the sentimentalism of the ‘Viennese types’ photographs resonated with large parts of the Viennese bourgeoisie, it is because they addressed a need for individualization through the de-individualizing typecasting of ‘otherness’. In this way, they contributed to the romantic myth of the Habsburg monarchy as a stable social order, in which everyone had a legitimate place within a pluralistic society. Particularly in their seriality, these photographs create a vision of social harmony. The types depicted in them are almost exclusively representatives of the lower social classes, who had to live under often extremely precarious conditions. This precarity, however, is not addressed in the images. The implied spectator’s gaze of these photographs was therefore directed ‘von oben nach unten’ (downwards).8 While bourgeois portrait photography focused on the individual self, these ‘Viennese types’ remained – as the title indicates – de-individualized in their typological representation. Representing a social ‘otherness’, they were thus meant to produce a feeling of difference to the bourgeois individual, which in turn provided a reassuring sense of individuality for the latter.⁹ In this way, the ‘Viennese types’ worked to stabilize the power structures of a social order, which was increasingly under pressure.

By the time of Jacques Le Rider’s (1993, French original 1990) fundamental study Modernity and the Crises of Identity: Culture and Society in Fin-de-siècle Vienna, the terms ‘Vienna’ and ‘1900’ had become unthinkable without the immediate association of ‘crisis’.¹⁰ That this is also the tone of the key themes of Schnitzler, one of the key figures of the Jung Wien (Young Vienna) group, is not very surprising: from ‘epochale Lebenskrisen’ (epoch-making life crises),¹¹ to the ‘Krise des Gedächtnisses’ (crisis of memory),¹² or the ‘Krise des männlichen Blicks’ (crisis of the male gaze),13 to name just a few examples, the crisis of modernity at the beginning of the twentieth century proves to be inextricably linked to Schnitzler and his literature. Rather than giving yet another account of the well-researched subject of crisis in Vienna 1900 and Schnitzler’s writings, this study focuses on the way in which Schnitzler’s prose engages with the presence of forces that deny the existence of crisis and that aim to contain its subversive potential. These forces find their expression in the ‘Viennese types’: by dint of the de-individualizing typologization of the ‘other’, these photographs provided the bourgeois subject with a reassurance of their own legitimacy in a harmonious social order. In this way, they offered comfort in the face of one of ‘[d]ie tiefsten Probleme des modernen Lebens’ (the deepest problems of modern life), as identified by Georg Simmel,¹⁴ in his essay Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben (The Metropolis and Mental Life, 1903): ‘dem Anspruch des Individuums, die Selbständigkeit und Eigenart seines Daseins gegen die Übermächte der Gesellschaft […] zu bewahren’ (the demand of the individual to maintain the independence and individuality of his existence against the sovereign powers of society).

My claim in this book is that the coping mechanism of ‘stereotype and destiny’ in Schnitzler’s prose addresses precisely this difficult relationship between individual and society in the age of modernity. Schnitzler’s characters often display a striving for a somewhat paradoxical reassurance: while they long to be assured of their position within the social order, they also want to be certain of what one could call their individual ‘essence’. I call this paradoxical, because it implies the desire to be considered both as normal and special – thus to belong to the norm and to exceed it at the same time. The interrelation between stereotypes and destiny is closely linked to this paradoxical conflict: in short, stereotypes are ordering tools,¹⁵ which stabilize the position of the self within the norm by manifesting the difference of the stereotyped ‘other’.¹⁶ The belief in the higher power of destiny promises an individually laid out path of life, thus reassuring the subject of his or her singular identity. My readings in this study will show that the way in which Schnitzler’s characters invoke their own metaphysical destiny intersects with the formation of their perception through stereotypical representations of ‘otherness’. ‘Stereotype’ and ‘destiny’ are forces that are counter-critical in both senses of the word: the invocation of destiny as well as the practice of stereotyping work to contain the destabilizing effects of crisis by reassuring the protagonists of their privileged social position. And, in this way, they are prevented from developing a critical consciousness of the social and cultural conditions that surround and determine them. In an often almost tragic-comical way, they remain loyal to a system that has begun to disintegrate, while they are incapable of showing solidarity with those whom this system rejects, excludes and dominates. Therefore, the recognition of this coping mechanism is not only crucial when one tries to understand the concept of destiny in Schnitzler’s prose texts, but also when situating these texts in the context of modernism and its central questions concerning identity, subjectivity, and power. In order to make this clear, however, it is first necessary to contextualize Simmel’s remark in the broader theoretical context of modernity and modernism.

The Ambivalent Problem of Modernity

Le Rider makes an interesting distinction between ‘modernism’ and ‘modernity’:¹⁷ he understands ‘modernism’ as a dogmatic trust in ‘modern ideas’ such as in the idea of inevitable scientific, technological, and cultural progress, the triumph of reason, and the sovereignty and autonomy of the modern Enlightened subject. ‘Modernity’, in turn, is for him ‘a way of living, thinking and creating which was not afraid of change and innovation, but still kept a critical awareness of modernization; it expressed itself in aesthetic and theoretical language and kept its distance from “modernism”’. This differentiation is extremely useful when discussing the way in which writers and artists engaged with the social, political, economic, and cultural processes of modernization. It allows us to draw a demarcating line between anti-modern (i.e. conservative, traditionalist, nostalgic etc.) tendencies on the one hand, and a more critical questioning of the fundamental ideas of modernization (progress, autonomy, reason etc. – or what Le Rider defines as ‘modernism’) on the other. The latter, rather than being ‘anti-modern’, resonates more with a form of thinking that would later be known as ‘post-modernist’. And indeed, Le Rider argues that post-modernism, with its critical questioning of Enlightenment ideas and doubts regarding reason and reasonable individuals, ‘renewed and radicalized the activities of modernity’.¹⁸

I will refrain from using ‘modernism’ and ‘modernity’ in the way Le Rider suggests, as I find that most critics refer to the critical engagement with modernization, particularly through aesthetic devices, as ‘modernism’.19 Thus, when I refer to Schnitzler as a modernist writer, I am following this convention and am not suggesting that his works display a dogmatic belief in progress and reason. However, the link that Le Rider identifies between post-modernist thought and the critical problematization of modern trust in the Enlightened subject will prove helpful to my analysis of Schnitzler’s prose. Le Rider argues that more than other European centres of modernism, Vienna 1900 can be understood as a phenomenon of post-modernism avant la lettre, because its socio-economical, political, and cultural processes of modernization were accompanied by a particularly critical awareness of the problematic insecurities engendered by these processes.²⁰ The trust in inevitable progress and the triumph of reason and in the sovereignty of the enlightened subject was unsettled by feelings of alienation, estrangement, and objectification in all areas of life. On the one hand, the modernization of society was pushed forward in the name of reason and was thus based on the idea of the rational subject. On the other, this very modernization led to disciplining practices being applied to the individual, which undermined the sense of individual reason and autonomy. This sheds light on Simmel’s diagnosis of the individual’s struggle for independence from the sovereign powers of society, and has indeed been established as the ‘ambivalente Grundproblem der Moderne’ (ambivalent central problem of modernity).²¹

This ambivalence is also a central concern in the work of Eric L. Santner, who has described it in his study My Own Private Germany as ‘the central paradox of modernity: that the subject is solicited by a will to autonomy in the name of the very community that is thereby undermined, whose very substance thereby passes over into the subject’.²² Santner refers here to the way secular societies of the post-Enlightenment era are based on the idea of the autonomous subject, while the functioning of the same societies depends on the submission of individuals to societal norms and regulated performances. Therefore, too radical an understanding of autonomy threatens the social order. In order to maintain the idea of the enlightened and autonomous subject, the community, i.e. the social order, has to ‘pass over into the subject’, thus to be fully internalized and accepted as natural essence on the one hand or appear freely chosen on the other.

Seen in this light, we can recognize how this central problem of modernity does indeed extend to the concerns of post-modernist thought. The difficult question of what it means to be a subject, which has been at the heart of post-modernist thinking, seems to be already addressed in Simmel’s remark. As Judith Butler writes, the subject ‘is a figure of autonomy’,23 thus based on the very assumption that it acts independently, but at the same time becoming a subject means being subjected to a social order, which in turn is produced and reproduced through its subjects: ‘This is not simply to act according to a set of rules, but to embody those rules in the course of action and reproduce those rules in embodied rituals of action’.²⁴ If subjectivity is, then, the ‘lived and imaginary experience of the subject’,²⁵ the originality and autonomy of this experience is called into question.

This resonates intimately with Schnitzler’s conception of subjectivity in both his literary and non-fiction writings. ‘Es ist immer wieder beschämend’, he writes in one of his aphorisms, ‘in einem eigenen Erlebnis, dessen Einzigartigkeit man eben zu empfinden glaubte, das hundertmal Dagewesene, den typischen Kern zu erkennen’ (It is, time and time again, embarrassing to recognize in your own experience a typical core, to recognize it as something that has happened a hundred times before, even though it felt unique and original just a moment ago).²⁶ The iterative notion of ‘immer wieder’ (time and time again) enhances and multiplies the typicality of that which has happened a hundred times before and evokes an endless spiral of the repetition and recognition of experience, reminiscent of Butler’s repetitive embodied rituals of action. In an accordingly repetitive manner, Schnitzler’s literary writings, too, reveal this insecurity concerning the possibility of original experiences and their individual expression and communication. This raises the question of the subject’s room for agency in the process of subjection.

Butler’s theorization of power that is reproduced through the re-iterative performances of the subject correlates with the concept that the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has called ‘social destinies’.²⁷ I will argue in the following five readings that this Bourdieusian concept is significant for the understanding of the function of invocation of the higher power of destiny in Schnitzler’s prose. Bourdieu describes how social rites and institutions carry out a ‘performative magic’,28 which assigns individuals their social statuses and roles, and in this way take on a fate-like character:

‘Become what you are’: that is the principle behind the performative magic of all acts of institution. The essence assigned through naming and investiture is, literally, a fatum. […] All social destinies, positive or negative, by consecration or stigma, are equally fatal – by which I mean mortal – because they enclose those whom they characterize within the limits that are assigned to them and that they are made to recognize.²⁹

Bourdieu speaks here of the institution of identity that creates a certain kind of social essence, which imposes on a person not only a name, but also certain rules of behaviour: ‘It is to signify to someone what he is and how he should conduct himself as a consequence’.³⁰ This is obviously the case in more or less openly constructed social roles and symbolic functions, as for example when one is assigned a title of nobility or appointed to an academic position, but also at much earlier points in life, for example, as Butler has analyzed, when one is assigned one’s gender.³¹

In order to work, all these assignments of social essence require the reiteration of certain social performances through which they become realized and create the social facts that they describe: ‘Social essence is the set of those social attributes and attributions produced by the act of institution as a solemn act of categorization which tends to produce what it designates’.³² When the social order is perceived as natural and legitimate and thus unquestionable, these performances will feel either naturally given or freely chosen. However, when the social order is threatened by a state of crisis, the ordering tools which make that order appear self-evident become ‘visible’, and as such weakened in their power to naturalize given social facts. In this case, the compulsion to repeat the performances linked to one’s social role or symbolic function becomes palpable and can be perceived as coercive. Santner argues that the consciousness of critical upheaval at the end of the nineteenth century is such a crisis of ‘investiture’: the normative pressures of social destiny create a ‘loss of distance to some obscene and malevolent presence that appears to have a direct hold on one’s inner parts’.33 In other words, the fatal character of one’s social destiny begins to feel like a heteronomous force. Such a crisis of investiture is therefore ultimately a threat to the perceived legitimacy of the social order and its power structures. I will show in my readings that the invocation of a metaphysical destiny in Schnitzler’s prose can be seen as a coping mechanism for this feeling of being coerced by social destiny. The invocation of the higher power of destiny therefore works to contain a threatening loss of legitimacy of the social order.

As Santner argues in The Royal Remains, the modern shift from royal sovereignty to popular sovereignty opens up a ‘symbolic space’ at the foundation of the social order.³⁴ Building on Ernst Kantorowicz’s notion of the king’s two bodies, Santner suggests that the king’s second body, ‘seen to embody a “vertical” link to transcendence – to divine authorization – comes to be dispersed “horizontally” among the “people”’.³⁵ The central question of modernity is then how the sense of legitimacy of social orders can be maintained when this foundational authorization is missing. The risk of ‘exposure to the radical contingency of the forms of life that constitute the space of meaning within which human life unfolds’ creates an ‘ontological vulnerability’ (italics in original).³⁶ In order to minimize this vulnerability, cultures apply ‘defence mechanisms’³⁷ against the risk of this exposure. In the readings in this study, I argue that the practice of stereotyping and the invocation of the higher power of destiny emerge as precisely such a defence mechanism in Schnitzler’s prose.

Destiny as Defence Mechanism

As the invocation of a higher power of destiny engenders a structure of pre-determined inevitability, it may be well suited to fend off any exposure to the ‘radical contingency’ of the social order. Of course, it sits in tension with the post-Enlightenment conceptions of autonomy and individual responsibility. In the increasingly secularized era of turn-of-the-century Vienna, speaking of destiny may therefore appear almost like an anachronism, and yet, it proves to be a returning concept in Schnitzler’s prose. However, while the characters invoke their destiny as some form of higher power, there is a striking lack of reference to any religious framework: the belief in destiny appears to have become generally detached from the belief in a divine will. This resonates with Hermann Broch’s by now canonical dictum of Vienna 1900 as a ’Wertvakuum’38 (vacuum of values) – a sensation which peaked in both Germany and Austria by the end of the First World War and the collapse of both empires. Simmel observes in 1918 that many of his contemporaries seem to have lost their religion without losing their religiosity: one could say ‘sie hätten den Glauben abgetan, um die Gläubigkeit zu behalten’ (they had disposed of their faith in order to keep their piety), he writes.³⁹ Simmel seems to suggest that for these individuals, getting rid of religion was in fact a necessary condition for their moral codes to remain intact. He clarifies further that they understand religiosity no longer as necessarily linked to an external belief system but as ‘ein schlechthin von innen bestimmtes Verhalten’ (a form of conduct, which is plainly determined from within). Simmel’s description seems to resonate with the ‘obscene and malevolent presence that appears to have a direct hold on one’s inner parts’ that Santner speaks of.⁴⁰

As has been well documented, other than in Germany, the sense of decline of the Empire – or of the incipient decomposition of the emperor’s second body, to use Santner’s image – had set in already in the decades before the First World War. By 1900, democratic advances made by the liberalist movement in the nineteenth century had come to a halt. Emperor Franz Josef’s own pointed anti-modern attitude seemed to underline the beckoning expiration date of his rule and the hierarchical structures below him: ‘With political institutions paralyzed, the emperor and its court locked behind an unyielding façade, and a despotic (though avowedly neutral and impartial) bureaucracy, Austria was in what Hermann Broch called a “political vacuum”’.⁴¹ In his canonical novel Radetzkymarsch (Radetzky March, 1931) the writer Joseph Roth describes the decline of the Habsburg era as a process of physical decay: ‘Natürlich […] wörtlich genommen, besteht sie [the monarchy, M.K.] noch. Wir haben eine Armee […] und Beamte […]. Aber sie zerfällt bei lebendigem Leibe’ (Of course […] literally, the monarchy still exists. We have an army […] and civil servants […]. But its living body is falling apart).42 The shift from royal to popular sovereignty in Austria thus appears as a drawn-out transition period, caught up in a declining order that is no longer apt to reassure its subjects of its own legitimacy and therefore also calls the secured position of these subjects into question. Moreover, Le Rider stresses that the very idea of the Habsburg order was ‘founded not on rights but on duties’:⁴³ individual responsibility weighed heavily, but the hierarchical structures of the monarchy were meant to offer protection. The bureaucratic structure relied on the ‘performative magic’ of investiture.⁴⁴ Individual legitimacy of bourgeois subjects invested in this structure was therefore intimately dependent on the legitimacy of the hierarchical power investments of the social order. We will see in the individual chapters of this study that the civil servant who no longer feels fully addressed – and hence legitimized – by his social destiny is a recurring character in Schnitzler’s prose. I will show that the characters invoke their individual metaphysical destiny precisely when the legitimacy of their social destiny is called into question and the contingency of the social order threatens to be exposed.

The wavering protection through hierarchical structures therefore puts ‘a new political weight on every citizen’.⁴⁵ The shift of political authority is notably accompanied by the modern processes of secularization and the devaluation of holistic interpretative systems. Ostensibly, this reinforces the need for the autonomous reasonable subject, as it makes necessary the individual search for meaning and orientation. As Martina King puts it, ‘In einem pluralen Gemenge von Sinnverarbeitungsangeboten wird [dem Subjekt] die Konstitution von Identität, die jeweilige Selbstbeschreibung, ausschließlich eigenverantwortlich zugemutet’ (with the diverse range of interpretative systems offered [in the modern age, M.K.], constitution of identity and self-definition become entirely the subject’s individual responsibility).⁴⁶

By the same token, the invocation of personal destiny in Schnitzler’s prose may be understood as an individually laid-out path which originates within the self. Recalling Simmel’s remark about the deepest problem of modern life, destiny therefore appears to defend the individual’s independence from the sovereign powers of the social order. In a social and political moment in which the coercive quality of social destinies threatens to become palpable, the idea of destiny may therefore be a comforting reassurance of the subject’s individualized existence. In his article on Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle (Dream Story, 1925/26), Hans Joachim Schrimpf offers a definition of destiny in Schnitzler’s writings which seems to support this interpretation. According to him, ‘besagt Schicksal bei Schnitzler das unverwechselbar Zugemessene, das was das Leben im Ganzen und im Besonderen individuell auszeichnend zugewogen ist’ (destiny refers in Schnitzler’s texts to that which has been unmistakably tailored to the individual, or in other words to that which has been individually assigned to a person and which therefore distinguishes this person’s life in its entirety and uniqueness).47 In this way, the concept of destiny may at least superficially relieve the pressures of self-description and self-identification mentioned by King: finding one’s true inner self to fulfil one’s destiny becomes a moral obligation when holistic belief systems and their corresponding codes of conduct have been suspended.

Accordingly, destiny appears in Schnitzler’s prose as a force of individualization, or, in Schrimpf’s words, ‘aus dem Alltäglich-Festgelegten ein Durchbruch zum Eigenen’ (a breakthrough from the pre-assigned quotidian to a realm of one’s own).⁴⁸ In this way, destiny seems to stand in opposition to – religious or secular – social norms (the ‘pre-assigned quotidian’), a re-enforcement of the position of the individual within the normative pressures of society. It may appear counter-intuitive that this separation of the individual from the social order leads to an affirmation of the latter. That this is nevertheless the case becomes clear when one recalls what Bourdieu writes about the concept of the self: the ‘individual, the person, the self’, he remarks, ‘is also the seemingly most real of realities’.⁴⁹ Bourdieu speaks here of the way the concept of a unified self seems so immediately evident that it is almost impossible to be challenged. It is the idea of a self that exists, as it were, a priori. This conception of self gives human life an ‘origin (both in the sense of a starting point and of a principle, a raison d’être, a primal force), and a termination, which is also a goal’.⁵⁰ Destiny appears like an expression of this primal force, and following one’s destiny is then the realization of its goal. In a historical moment where the legitimacy of the social order and its power structures appear to be called into question, recourse to the ‘seemingly most real of realities’ will feel reassuring. In this way, this ‘breakthrough to a realm of one’s own’ is as much a symptom of crisis as it is a coping mechanism: particularly when the social order demands a heightened individualization, but at the same time the established interpretative patterns are increasingly weakened, the need to assure oneself of one’s own individual, but secured and legitimate, position becomes prominent. Recurring to the notion of one’s own individual destiny provides a sense of independent legitimacy when the social order fails to provide a source of security about one’s own place within it.

With his interpretation of destiny in Schnitzler’s texts, Schrimpf remains caught up in the perspective of the characters, for whom the belief in destiny indeed promises a way to individuation. As I wish to show in this study, however, this promise is a dead end and the protagonists’ attempts at self-realization qua destiny are doomed to fail. The focus on the self as a surrogate for divine authorization displaces the problem of a lack of a legitimizing origin without solving it. This also emerges in Schrimpf’s interpretation: his use of passive constructions (‘das was das Leben im Ganzen und im Besonderen individuell auszeichnend zugewogen ist’ – that which has been unmistakably tailored to the individual, it refers to that which has been individually assigned to a person) carefully avoids the question of this destiny’s source. One cannot help but wonder, who (or what) is responsible for the uniquely tailored assignments which unmistakably mark and delineate a life as an individual destiny. This question is also tightly linked to the debates about the relationship between individual and society: the beginning of the twentieth century saw a vivid emergence of philosophical and psychological explorations of what determines human character and personality. These discussions often focused on the question of a personal essence as opposed to an acquired social role. The idea of destiny, at least as Schrimpf introduces it, seems to be concerned with this essence, again in Bourdieu’s words, ‘the seemingly most real of realities, the ens realissimum, immediately freed to our fascinated intuition, intuitus personae’.51 For Bourdieu, this search for individual essence, however, is carried by a ‘socially reinforced narcissistic drive’ (my emphasis, M.K.).⁵²

If Bourdieu is correct in his assumption that the search for the self is socially reinforced, then the social order reinforces something that, on the face of it, seems to stand in opposition to it. This can be explained by the fact that Bourdieu’s conception of the subject does not allow for a clearly distinguishable demarcation between individual and social essence – or in fact individual and social destiny. His thinking intersects here with other (post-modernist) theorists like Butler and Santner. Moreover, three of these thinkers stress that, nevertheless, the idea of such an individual essence that is somewhat independent from the social order is necessary so that the coerciveness and at the same time contingency of the latter remains hidden.

It is the claim of this book that when Schnitzler’s characters invoke their personal destiny, they are moved by this ‘socially reinforced narcissistic drive’. Not only does the idea of a metaphysical destiny serve as interpretative frame, it can also provide one with a certain kind of individual trajectory and can even contain the fantasy of being ‘chosen’. In this way, the invocation of destiny can be understood as an attempt at re-establishing one’s sense of singularity, while the coercive power of social destinies may be seen as a kind of ‘stereotypy’ – not only in the pathological sense of the word as behavioural repetition compulsion, a coercive ‘immer wieder’ (time and time again), but also in the way that these social destinies have a typecasting effect on individuals.53 The conventionalized modes of conduct that the social destinies require can be seen as a threat to the possibility of original experience: if one’s actions, behavioural patterns and ways of perceiving begin to appear imposed by pre-formed, external structures, the longing for alternative, individualized ways of existence becomes stronger.

Stereotypes as Defence Mechanism and Destiny

Anton Zijderveld has defined stereotypes as a sub-category of clichés, which, by the same token, have a simplifying perceptual ordering function.⁵⁴ With their repetitive quality, which avoids the reflection on meaning, clichés ‘provide us, in an unobtrusive manner, with some degree of clarity, stability and certainty, while they do exert a social control which we will in no way experience as being oppressive or repressive, because we are hardly aware of them’.⁵⁵ Thus, clichés can be seen as a part of the repetitive performances that stabilize (and re-produce) the power structures of the social order. Furthermore, Zijderfeld suggests that by virtue of their reassuring repetitiveness, recognizability, and easy application, they may satisfy ‘some deep-seated, residually magic needs which we have otherwise covered with heavy layers of modern civilization’.⁵⁶ If clichés (and by implication stereotypes) have to be understood as secularized interpretative patterns, which replace those of metaphysics and religious cults in modern times, the functional relation between stereotypes and the belief in destiny becomes plausible. At the same time, the emphatic invocation of destiny must then be seen as a symptom of a threatening crisis, as it seems to indicate that the secular ordering tools of the dominant order have lost their capacity for satisfying those magic needs.

While the political, social, economic, and cultural processes of modernization at the end of the nineteenth century led in some parts of Europe to successful unifications (e.g. the building of nation states like Germany and Italy), within the Habsburg monarchy they highlighted massive heterogeneities engendered by a social, cultural, ethnic, religious, and even linguistic pluralism. Rather than a multi-cultural melting pot, Vienna 1900 appeared more like a ‘battleground for different nationalities’.57 The bourgeoisie in the urban centres experienced this complex diversity increasingly as threatening to their own existence and identity.⁵⁸ In contrast to the idealized idea of the Habsburg Empire as a harmonious culturally pluralistic society, Vienna, and Austria at large, became the site of increasing social and cultural tension. Against the backdrop of the threatening crisis of investiture and rising insecurities about the legitimacy of the social order, this increased the need for stable demarcation lines that would provide reassurance about the secured and legitimized position of the bourgeois subject.

The fascination with typologies and classification, which I have already discussed briefly with regard to the ‘Viennese types’ photo series, tends to be a common phenomenon in times of social insecurity. In the words of Helmuth Lethen: ‘When the external moorings of convention relax, when the blurring of familiar boundaries and roles and ideological constellations stimulate fear, elements of ideological stabilization and schematicism come more forcefully into play. In a classification mania, contemporary observers of the social field categorize phenomena ranging from body type to moral character, from handwriting to race’.⁵⁹ This ‘classification mania’ seeps into everyday practices of perception and experience. It is striking that the way Schnitzler’s characters perceive the world around them relies heavily on stereotypes, particularly those of ‘otherness’.60 Stereotypes function as an ordering process to confirm and reproduce the norm. While the activity of ordering is necessary for societies to define and reproduce themselves,⁶¹ stereotypes are key ordering tools, ‘part of our way of dealing with the instabilities of our perception of the world’,⁶² and thus equally necessary. While there is no way of avoiding stereotyping altogether, it is important to note that stereotypes almost always help to naturalize and legitimize the given dominant order: what stereotypes do is to identify one or more features of a social group’s situation, place a (generally) negative evaluation on them, and then establish them as innate characteristics so they become cause rather than effect.⁶³ Thus, they ‘present interpretations of groups, which conceal the “real” cause of the group’s attributes and confirm the legitimacy of the group’s oppressed position’.⁶⁴ This is, for example, the case when biologistic explanations are used to account for social inequalities, such as ethnic or sexual differences.

In this way, stereotypes can be understood as a specific form of social destiny: in their negative sense, particularly when they designate the position of ‘otherness’, they enclose the typecast person within the limits of the social position defined and legitimized by them. Stereotypes of ‘otherness’, then, are used to put individuals in ‘their place’, which can take on a form similar to an act of institution, as they are both enactments of communication with an immediate effect, i.e. performative speech acts:

The act of institution is thus an act of communication, but of a particular kind: it signifies to someone what his identity is, but in a way that both expresses it to him and imposes it on him by expressing it in front of everyone […] and thus informing him in an authoritative manner of what he is and must be. This is clearly evident in the insult, a kind of curse […] which attempts to imprison its victim in an accusation which also depicts his identity.65

There is, however, a decisive difference between the imposing and restricting effect of an act of institution and the typecasting of a person as ‘other’: while both impose a form of identity with prescriptive modes of existence onto the person, the first is, even though restrictive and determining, a confirmation of a position within the norm, whereas the second refers the individual to a place outside of it. Stereotypes tend to represent societal outsiders as opposed to social types, which are defined as ‘representations of those who “belong” to society’.⁶⁶ While constructed iconographically in a similar way, social types are not reduced to a fixed function within a fictional plot as is the case for stereotypes. Social types can take over a variety of roles and positions, ‘whereas stereotypes always carry within their very representation an implicit narrative’.⁶⁷ This narrative inherent in stereotypes is crucial, as it not only applies to the fictional representation of literary characters, but to typecast social groupings, for which it in fact can take on the quality of an unchangeable destiny: stereotypes deny the typecast person an individual development and restrict them within the boundaries of the stereotype’s narrative. A stereotype of ‘otherness’ is thus above all a stigma, and to be called into it through a speech act almost always takes on the form of an insult and hence does injury. As Judith Butler writes of such injurious speech acts:

To be injured by speech is to suffer a loss of context, that is, not to know where you are. […] Exposed at the moment of such a shattering is precisely the volatility of one’s ‘place’ within the community of speakers; one can be ‘put in one’s place’ by such speech, but such a place may be no place.⁶⁸

A stereotype of ‘otherness’, then, has an, as it were, negative fate-like quality: for members of the typecast group, it has an exclusionary and restrictive effect, and it denies them an individual development: the idea of a destiny in the sense of achieved ‘chosen-ness’ seems to be reserved for representatives of the norm. If stereotypes of ‘otherness’ define the norm through their own exclusion, they create a sense of security and legitimacy for positions within the norm, but also provide them with the possibility of an individual development (or ‘destiny’), while denying it to the typecast ‘other’.

However, when the contingency of the social order (which constitutes the positions within the norm) becomes exposed, the fatal quality of social destinies emerges. This can have unsettling effects on the stability of the social order and the reproduction of its power structures. It can create a moment in which ‘elites cease to believe in themselves’, which will ultimately lead to a wasting away of these elites. Stereotypes of ‘otherness’ and the invocation of an individual destiny thus work to reassure the elites of their legitimate and privileged position within the norm and in this way prevent any attempts ‘to cross the line, to transgress, desert, or quit’ this position.69

Stereotype and Destiny and the Risk of Failure

While Schnitzler’s characters strive for the fulfilment of their individual destiny, their efforts are ironically undermined by the repetitive and mirroring structures of the texts. It becomes clear that the conventionalized modes of conduct are not restricted to the symbolic function, i.e. the performances required by social status (e.g. as nobleman or ministerial official), but also to ‘private selves’. The most stabilizing effect of destiny may be yielded when one’s destiny appears to be found within the realm of the norm: for example when the arguably highest individualizing destiny – the experience of romantic love – becomes institutionalized in the form of marriage. Schnitzler’s narratives point up the pre-formed cultural narratives that influence the protagonists’ perception of the social reality around them and also their own actions: besides stereotypes of ‘otherness’, clichéd representations of the norm, for example conventionalized expressions of love or concepts of masculinity, also determine the protagonists’ behaviour and undermine their proclamations of originality.

Schnitzler’s texts also reveal the weakness of the defence strategies like stereotype and destiny by showing how easily they fail to really keep the subjects ‘on the right site of the line’, to ‘stop those who are inside, on the right side of the line, from leaving, demeaning or down-grading themselves’.⁷⁰ When the threatening lack of legitimacy of the social order produces the heightened desire for an individual, metaphysical destiny independent of one’s status and role within the dominant order, the excluded position of the ‘other’ may come to appear desirable in an idealized way. Particularly because it is not firmly secured within the realm of the norm, it seems to promise, despite the often highly restricting quality of the narrative within the stereotype, a certain paradoxical kind of freedom. It is precisely what Butler calls the ‘volatility of one’s place’ that can lead to such mystifications of the ‘other’.71 The perception of the ‘other’ is thus always highly ambivalent, contradictory even, and makes the ‘other’ appear at once abjected, demonized, and idealized. It is crucial that Schnitzler’s characters do not develop alternative identity constructions, but their failures and crises point up the inadequacy of existing ones. It becomes clear that the idealizing mystification of ‘otherness’ is also a cultural narrative inherent to the stereotype. The mystification of the formerly abjected ‘other’ often becomes linked with the idea of destiny: the desire to be chosen for something ‘special’, and thus to overcome the restrictions of the norm, cannot be thought positively, but needs to be associated with a position only known outside of the boundaries of the norm. Since the position of the ‘other’ is not developed independently, but only in relation to the norm, it does not provide the possibility of any new concept for rethinking the existing normative structures. This ambivalence, in which the stereotyped ‘other’ is used to define the self and still secure its position within the norm, but also becomes idealized as an ‘alternative’ mode of existence and a way to escape the restrictive structures of the dominant order, is a central topic in Schnitzler’s writings.⁷²

When, in states of crisis, the fascination with the position of the ‘other’ as an alternative existence becomes stronger, this obviously does have a destabilizing effect on the dominant order in its entirety: it is precisely a moment when those who ‘are on the right side of the line’ are beginning to leave, demean, or downgrade themselves. Thus, when representatives of the norm begin to cross that line, the social order and its norms are endangered. However, as Bourdieu points out, while a crisis is a necessary condition for the questioning of the dominant order, it is not a sufficient condition for the production of a critical discourse.73 As long as there is still a sufficient number of subjects securely located within the realm of the norm, it makes a difference for the stability of the dominant order whether those who are crossing the line are united by a shared critical discourse or whether they are individualized ‘cases’ that can be re-integrated as exceptional transgressions that can be perceived to prove the rule. It is this not-(yet)-critical, in-between state that Schnitzler’s texts describe. My claim in this book is that Schnitzler’s characters demonstrate that the belief in destiny brings about such individualization and prevents the development of critical awareness of the social structures around them. This also becomes reinforced on a stylistic level, where Schnitzler’s prose often features self-referential effects of Romantic and Gothic literature. I will show in my readings how the texts feature Romantic and particularly Gothic elements, which often seem to be of an almost ‘Hoffmannesque’ quality.⁷⁴ In this, the texts inscribe themselves into a literary tradition particularly known for its critical questioning of dogmatic trust in reason and progress.⁷⁵

The Gothic Horror of Stereotype and Destiny

Peter von Matt has pointed out E. T. A. Hoffmann’s influence on Modernist authors, albeit without mentioning Schnitzler explicitly:⁷⁶

Vom Erzähler E.T.A. Hoffmann laufen mehrfache Linien über ein Jahrhundert zu den modernen Autoren. Zu ihnen gehört die Kultur des Nachdenkens über das Erzählen während des Erzählens, des Redens über die poetische Arbeit in deren Vollzug selbst. […] Damit entdeckt und definiert sich die berichtete Welt als eine konstruierte. Das Erzählen wird von einem Medium, das gesicherte Welt vermittelt, zu einer Tätigkeit, in der eingestandenermaßen etwas aufgebaut und angefertigt wird.

There are several threads connecting the narrator E. T. A. Hoffman to the modern writers a century later. They include a cultivation of thinking about narration while narrating, of talking about the poetic work while doing it. In this way, the narrated world explores and defines itself as something that has been constructed. Narration, which used to be a medium representing a secured world, becomes a practice, which makes transparent its processes of construction.

Schnitzler’s texts also display this reflection about the narrative process and its constructed quality and, in this way, destabilize the cultural narratives that build the foundation for the normative system of social reality. Thus, the concept of destiny in Schnitzler’s writings at once covers up and reveals a much more uncomfortable threat for autonomy than its only ostensibly metaphysical determinism: if one cannot help but repeat the ‘assignments’ of one’s social destiny, one is not only restricted in one’s agency, but also endangered in one’s individuality and capacity for an original experience. Moments in which the compulsive quality of these repetitions threatens to become conscious are highly uncanny in the classically Freudian sense, as something familiar which should remain hidden begins to emerge.77 What comes to the surface is the constructed quality of the cultural narratives that constitute social reality, of the acts of performative magic which delineate the boundaries around the norm. In Schnitzler’s texts, these moments of exposure are marked by the recurring sensation of Grauen (horror), which appears to be an allusion to the Schauerroman (Gothic, or ‘shudder’, novel) of German Romanticism. ‘Das Grauen empfing überhaupt seinen ästhetischen Adel erst von der Romantik’ (Grauen, or horror, first received its aesthetic nobility from Romanticism), writes Manfred Schneider, who defines it as a ‘Verlust an Unterscheidungsfähigkeit’ (loss of the ability to differentiate).⁷⁸ According to Schneider, Grauen (horror) occurs when a subject is confronted with a fading of differences, which had been taken as given and secure before. In my reading of the Schnitzler texts selected in this study, I will show that the recurring sensation of Grauen (horror) corresponds to this definition and can thus be understood as relaying a Romantic disposition. This Romantic Grauen (horror) is in turn tightly linked to the complex of ‘stereotype and destiny’ in Schnitzler’s texts: as it occurs when formerly established differences appear to fade, it is connected to the blurring of the demarcating line between norm and ‘other’ provided by stereotypes. Thus, when stereotypes of ‘otherness’ become subtly twisted in Schnitzler’s texts, and the ‘other’ appears suddenly much closer to the self than can be comfortable, the protagonists experience a sensation of Grauen (horror). This resonates with Santner’s analysis of another German word for horror:

Entsetzen, which literally means to de-pose or de-posit, did indeed at one time signify the act of removing someone from a position of authority, the undoing of their Einsetzung or investiture. […] Horror thus places us in a semantic field of violent actions pertaining to the constitution and de-constitution of political and social realities; it can be understood as the experience of being violently thrown, removed, torn from one’s position or place, of an undoing – a flaying – of one’s symbolic skin.79

Although often to a less dramatic degree, horror (most eminently expressed through Grauen, but at times also through Schauer and Entsetzen) in Schnitzler’s prose texts marks precisely moments in which the symbolic status of the protagonist and their legitimate position within the social order (or the legitimacy of the order itself) appear called into question.

The invocation of destiny as a reaction to this horror also can be read further in this context of Romanticism: one of the symptoms of the Romantic concept of madness is the suspension of contingency,⁸⁰ which is one of the main effects of the belief in the higher power of destiny, particularly when arbitrary events are interpreted as prophetic signs. As a symptom of Romantic madness, this elision of contingency appears as a kind of coping mechanism to keep the Grauen (horror) of fading differences at bay.⁸¹ This underlines my claim that the invocation of destiny in Schnitzler’s texts has a compensatory function in the face of a weakened identification with the social order and its power investments. It completely denies any form of contingency and therefore protects against the ontological vulnerability, the missing authorizing link at the foundation of the law.

Through the subtle allusions to the literature of Schauerromantik (Dark Romanticism), the texts draw on the aspect of Romanticism that, as Andrew J. Webber has analyzed, can ‘be said to serve to unsettle new orders that are in danger of becoming fixed in damaging ways, making claims for subjectivity and mystery against the false security of a culture under the hegemony of positivism’.82 However, it will become clear that, while Schnitzler’s texts do have the potential to unsettle rigid, ‘naturalized’ boundaries, they do not endorse any mysticist tendencies. While the protagonists are prone to this kind of thinking, their often tragic failures demonstrate that the suspension of contingency through the invocation of destiny does not provide an escape, but a dead end. Schnitzler’s narratives are thus not necessarily to be understood as an ‘alternatives Erkenntnismedium’ (alternative cognitive medium)⁸³ to knowledge systems such as medicine or psychoanalysis, as is so often suggested, but as an alternative to stereotypical cultural narratives, serving to undermine their fate-like character.

A Psycho-Sociological Reading

While my analysis is informed by the psycho-sociological theories of thinkers like Butler, Bourdieu, and Santner, I want to stress that the way stereotype and destiny function together as a counter-critical coping mechanism has emerged from my readings of Schnitzler’s prose. My interpretation of destiny, in its conjunction with the practice of stereotyping, is concerned with the insights into psycho-social structures that are offered by his narratives. Taking my cue from Le Rider’s suggestion that Viennese modernism can be understood as a post-modernism avant la lettre, I find that Schnitzler’s prose seems to take into account how power structures are being produced and reproduced through the subject. While other scholars have noted the importance of the tension between social order (in the form of social roles) and individual in Schnitzler’s writing, I am suggesting that Schnitzler texts can be read in a way that not only makes the separation between social and individual ‘essence’ practicably impossible, but reveals the very pursuit of such an individual essence as a reinforcement of social power structures.

Compared with previous interpretations, this approach therefore leads to a different evaluation of the topic of destiny in Schnitzler’s work. So far, the topic of destiny in Schnitzler’s writings has been regarded mainly in this context of individual responsibility. The tension between free will and determinism is generally regarded as one of the most central themes in Schnitzler’s writings.84 As the main goal tends to be (more or less explicitly) to determine Schnitzler’s own position on the topic, critics have tried to evaluate his understanding of destiny and free will by taking into account not only his literary writings, but also his aphorisms and journal entries.⁸⁵ However, as Schnitzler never developed anything comparable to a philosophical or scientific theory about free will (or anything else), Horst Thomé has rightly pointed out that an exhaustive determination and definition of his position on the subject is probably impossible.⁸⁶ Critics generally struggle to pin Schnitzler down on either side, as determinist on the one hand or as defender of free will on the other. Accordingly, most critics come to the conclusion that, also in his literary writings, he did not aim for an unequivocal position.87

Consensus seems to have been reached about Schnitzler’s emphasis on the necessity of a concept of free will, no matter to what extent the human psyche may be determined by internal or external forces: only the assumption of a free will allows the subject to address individual and ethical responsibility. Thus, critics have focused on the ethical implications of Schnitzler’s writings, particularly on the ethical deficiency of most of his protagonists, who seem to serve as negative examples of responsible conduct.⁸⁸ Thomé, in particular, insists on the high importance of a concept of autonomy in Schnitzler’s literary writings, which is necessary for his ‘moralkritische Erzählung’ (ethically critical narrative).⁸⁹ This leads to an argument that Schnitzler’s characters avoid individual responsibility by escaping into conventionalized codes of social norms and roles. He also mentions in passing the de-individualizing and typologizing effect of those pre-formed social roles.⁹⁰ However, Thomé focuses more on the individual ‘moralische Versagen’ (ethical failure) of the characters, while my readings are concerned with the social power structures and cultural narratives that determine the perception and actions of the protagonists.91 In a similar vein, my conclusion differs from that of Wolfgang Lukas, who also proposes a reconstruction of the concept of destiny in Schnitzler’s writings.⁹² He shows that Schnitzler’s characters tend to appropriate other people’s destinies as their own, which creates a repetitive structure in the texts. While this seems to confirm my claim that Schnitzler’s texts undermine the originality and individuality of experience, Lukas states that for Schnitzler the subject is ‘für sein Schicksal in letzter Instanz immer selbst verantwortlich’ (after all always responsible for his or her destiny). In my readings of the texts selected in this study, I understand these appropriations less as autonomous acts than as internalizations of stereotypical cultural narratives.⁹³

I certainly do not want to deny that the ethical question of individual responsibility is a relevant topic for Schnitzler and that this is reflected in his literary writings. The characters’ behaviour often appears ethically more than questionable – particularly when it comes to their interactions with those who are socially inferior to them. However, we should be cautious with the judgement of the individual characters, as it allows the reader to take on an ethically superior position, which is not encouraged by the texts. I suggest that it is more productive to focus less on the autonomy of the characters, and therefore on their ethical failure to make the right choices, than on the constructed cultural narratives of normativity through which they perceive the world and which emerge in the texts as prompting those failures. What makes Schnitzler’s texts still relevant and interesting today is that, read in this perspective, they bring to awareness the constructed quality of the norms and conventions that form the social reality of the protagonists. By doing this, the texts evoke the effect of Romantic irony and ask readers to reflect in turn on the constructedness of the cultural narratives that influence their own perception of the world.

The corpus of this study consists of a representative selection of narrative works from the first three decades of the twentieth century, spanning most of Schnitzler’s writing career: all five narratives compiled in the volume Dämmerseelen (Dozing Souls) of 1907 (Das Schicksal des Freiherrn von Leisenbohg (Baron Leinsenbohg’s Destiny), Die Weissagung (The Prophecy), Das neue Lied (The New Song), Die Fremde (The Stranger) and Andreas Thameyers letzter Brief (Andreas Thameyer’s Last Letter) as well as the more substantial texts Der Weg ins Freie (Road into the Open, 1908), Traumnovelle (Dream Story, 1925/26) and Flucht in die Finsternis (Flight into Darkness, completed 1913, published 1931). This selection allows a paradigmatic analysis of the complex of stereotype and destiny in Schnitzler’s narrative writing: first, the texts provide rich material in terms of the representation of stereotypes of ‘otherness’ (race, gender, class, and madness). Second, they display the invocation of destiny in a differentiated range from more subtle ‘every-day superstitions’ in realistic settings to the extreme forms of psychotic delusions or the play with fantastic elements and supernatural higher powers.

It is not the aim of this book to trace a chronological development of the thematic complex of stereotype and destiny in Schnitzler’s work, as this would have posed a methodological problem: the work process of the two texts published later, Traumnovelle and Flucht in die Finsternis in both cases spans almost two decades between first drafts and publication.94 A reconstruction of the chronological development would thus have required a project of textual genealogy, which would have exceeded the frame of this study. Correspondingly, the chapters do not follow the chronological order of the publication of the texts, but are structured in a way that allows me to establish the framework for my argument from the beginning and develop it incrementally in the following chapters.

The first chapter on Schnitzler’s novel Der Weg ins Freie (Road into the Open, 1908) analyzes the practice of stereotyping as an essential part of the protagonist’s perception of the social reality around him. It will be argued that Georg’s function as a reflector figure allows the novel to explore the intersectionality of anti-Semitic and misogynistic stereotyping. The focus lies on physiognomy as a central aspect of stereotyping and on the specular function of the non-Jewish male protagonist Georg in his relationships to Jewish acquaintances and to his lover Anna. The close reading of the novel shows how the text toys with stereotypes and how it reveals their fate-like quality in a highly aesthetic manner: featuring different forms of representation such as the motif of modern photography on the one hand and Romantic imagery on the other, the novel refers as much to its own constructed quality as to that of the social reality it represents.

In the second chapter, on Flucht in die Finsternis (Flight into Darkness), the connection between social destinies and the invocation of a metaphysical destiny is developed in more detail. The reading suggests that the psycho-pathological crisis of the protagonist has to be understood as a crisis of investiture. A close intersection emerges between the protagonist’s weakened symbolic function (the subject’s secured and legitimized position in society), stereotypes of madness, and the development of his symptoms. This is supported by the motif of Romantic Grauen (horror), which occurs repeatedly in moments when the protagonist feels increasingly detached from his position within the norm of the bourgeois order. The invocation of the higher power of destiny then appears as coping mechanism that contains this anxiety. However, as the protagonist’s idea of his individualized destiny is fundamentally informed by stereotypical idealizations of madness, he is unable to develop a critical consciousness with regard to the bourgeois order.

The readings of Die Weissagung (Prophecy, 1905) and Andreas Thameyers letzter Brief (Andreas Thameyer’s Last Letter, 1903) in the third chapter address the function of destiny in relation to the representation of stereotypes of race (Jewishness and Blackness) in the texts. The ironic play with fantastic elements in Die Weissagung (The Prophecy), which toys with the presence of the higher power of destiny, is linked to both the protagonist’s social destiny and his use of anti-Semitic stereotypes. In Thameyer, the protagonist is unable to reconcile his experiences either with his stereotypical perceptions of Blackness and femininity or with his own position as representative of the bourgeois male norm. The text reveals how scientific and non-scientific discourses of sexual and racial difference reinforce the rigidity of the stereotypes that inform the protagonist’s perception. The inability to maintain the stereotypical boundary between self and ‘other’ is then experienced as a form of ‘infection with otherness’. This leads to an overwhelming sensation of Gothic Grauen (horror), which the protagonist can only escape through suicide. In this way, the novella underlines the fatal quality of social destinies.

The fourth chapter focuses in particular on Die Fremde (The Stranger, 1902), but also refers to Das Schicksal des Freiherrn von Leisenbohg (Baron Leisenbohg’s Destiny, 1903) and Das neue Lied (The New Song, 1905). The concept of romantic love is analyzed in its function as cosmic destiny. In the form of love, the individualizing function of destiny becomes most evident. My reading of Die Fremde (The Stranger) shows that the protagonist tries to replace his social destiny by his individualized cosmic destiny, which he claims to have found in the love for a woman. With regard to the ambivalent function of the stereotyped ‘other’, this chapter gives further substance to observations made in the previous chapters. All three texts undermine the protagonists’ striving for individualization by bringing to the fore their stereotypical perception of femininity as well as the clichéd quality of their love affairs. The analysis in this chapter reveals how the texts toy with literary quotations and stereotypes, and by doing so effectively create a polar tension between the protagonists’ claim to originality and the serial and stereotypical quality of their experience. With intertextual references to the motif of courtly love and masochism in Die Fremde (The Stranger) and Leisenbohg, and the play with idealized stereotypes of poverty in Das neue Lied (The New Song), this chapter also addresses the intersection of destiny and stereotypes of class.

Schnitzler’s perhaps most popular narrative, Traumnovelle (Dream Story, 1925/26), is analyzed in the concluding, fifth chapter. While the concept of love as destiny is explored in the previous chapter as a mode of transgression, it appears here in the institutionalized form of marriage. Love has thus become social destiny, from which both the protagonist and his wife – at least temporarily – seek to escape. Particularly the male protagonist seems to fight an ‘infection’ with ‘otherness’, which undermines his performances of habitus as a sovereign bourgeois subject. The chapter thus focuses on the aesthetics of infection through which the text negotiates the tension between normative social destiny and the seductive transgression that falsely promises an individualized destiny. Moreover, we will see that the text displays in paradigmatic fashion how stereotype and destiny occur as a composite coping mechanism in the face of an acute state of crisis.

¹  See Kos, Wolfgang (2013), ‘Einleitung,’ Wiener Typen: Klischees und Wirklichkeit, ed. by Wolfgang Kos, Vienna: Christian Brandstätter (= Exhibition Catalogue of Wiener Typen: Klischees und Wirklichkeit – 387. Sonderausstellung des Wien Museums, Wien Museum Karlsplatz, 25 April – 6 October 2013), 14–23, 14.

²  See Ponstingl, Michael (2013), ‘Otto Schmidts Spektakel der Wiener Typen,’ Wiener Typen, 192–201, 192.

³  See Magris, Claudio (2000), Der Habsburgische Mysthos in der österreichischen Literatur, Vienna: Zsolnay.

⁴  Biese, Alfred (1913), Deutsche Literaturgeschichte: Dritter Band: Von Hebbel bis zur Gegenwart, Munich: Becksche Verlagsbuchhandlung Oskar Beck.

⁵  Schnitzler, Arthur and Georg Brandes (1956), Ein Briefwechsel, ed. by Kurt Bergel, Bern: Francke, 146.

⁶  See Swales, Martin (1971), Arthur Schnitzler: A Critical Study, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 280; Janz, Rolf-Peter and Klaus Laermann (1977), Arthur Schnitzler: Zur Diagnose des Wiener Bürgertums im Fin de siècle, Stuttgart: Metzler; Fliedl, Konstanze (2005), Arthur Schnitzler, Stuttgart: Reclam, 70–72; Gay, Peter (2001), Schnitzler’s Century: The Making of Middle-Class Culture, 1815–1914, New York: Norton; Lorenz, Dagmar (2003), ‘The Self as Process in an Era of Transition: Competing Paradigms of Personality and Character in Schnitzler’s Works,’ A Companion to the Works of Arthur Schnitzler, ed. by Dagmar C. G. Lorenz, Rochester, NY: Camden House, 129.

⁷  Le Rider, Jacques (1993), Modernity and the Crises of Identity: Culture and Society in Fin-de-siècle Vienna, New York: Continuum, 17. Schnitzler’s precise analytical gaze has been plausibly linked to his professional medical background. See e.g. Boetticher, Dirk von (1999), ‘Meine Werke sind lauter Diagnosen’: Über die ärztliche Dimension im Werk Arthur Schnitzlers, Heidelberg: Winter; Herzog, Hillary Hope (2003), ‘“Medizin ist eine Weltanschauung”: On Schnitzler’s Medical Writings,’ A Companion to the Works of Arthur Schnitzler, ed. by Dagmar C. G. Lorenz, Rochester, NY: Camden House, 227–241; Müller-Seidel, Walter (1997), Arztbilder im Wandel. Zum literarischen Werk Arthur Schnitzlers, Munich: Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften). Through the example of Schnitzler’s play Professor Bernhardi (1912), Annja Neumann has recently shown that Schnitzler’s ‘dissecting practices’ go beyond his analytical observation of Viennese society, but inform his writing practice on several levels. On the one hand, Neumann identifies medical topographies through which the dramatic space is negotiated in the play; on the other, Schnitzler’s unpublished early drafts reveal the author’s anatomical approach to his own process of writing, editing, and re-writing. See Neumann, Annja (2016), ‘Schnitzler’s Anatomy Lesson: Medical Topographies in Professor Bernhardi,’ Jahrbuch Literatur und Medizin, Bd. 8, ed. by Christa Janson and Florian Steger, Heidelberg: Winter, 31–60.

⁸  Kos, ‘Einleitung,’ 15.

⁹  Ponstingl, ‘Otto Schmidts Spektakel der Wiener Typen’.

¹⁰  Le Rider, Modernity and the Crises of Identity.

¹¹  Lukas, Wolfgang (1996), Das Selbst und das Fremde: Epochale Lebenskrisen und ihre Lösung im Werk Arthur Schnitzlers, Munich: Fink.

¹²  Fliedl, Konstanze (1997), Arthur Schnitzler: Poetik der Erinnerung, Vienna, Cologne, Weimar: Böhlau.

¹³  Meyer, Imke (2010), Männlichkeit und Melodram: Arthur Schnitzlers erzählende Schriften, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 11.

¹⁴  Simmel, Georg (1995), ‘Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben,’ Gesamtausgabe, ed. by Otthein Rammstedt, vol. 7: Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1901–1908, vol. 1, ed. by Rüdiger Kramme, Angela Rammstedt, and Otthein Rammstedt, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 116–131, 6.

¹⁵  Dyer, Richard (2002), The Matter of Images: Essays on Representation, London: Routledge, 12.

¹⁶  Gilman, Sander L. (1985), Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness, Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press, 17.

¹⁷  Le Rider, Modernity and the Crises of Identity, 27.

¹⁸  Le Rider, Modernity and the Crises of Identity, 28.

¹⁹  See Gay, Schnitzler’s Century; Santner, Eric L. (2011), The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, xi.

²⁰  Le Rider, Modernity and the Crises of Identity, 37.

²¹  Goltschnigg, Dietmar (2009), ‘Fröhliche Apokalypse’ und nostalgische Utopie: ‘Österreich als besonderer Fall der modernen Welt,’ ed. by Charlotte Grolleg-Edler Vienna, Berlin: Lit Verlag, 1.

²²  Santner, Eric L. (1996), My Own Private Germany, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 145.

²³  Butler, Judith (1997), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

²⁴  Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 119.

²⁵  Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 122.

²⁶  Schnitzler, Arthur (1985), Aphorismen und Notate: Gedanken über Leben und Kunst, Leipzig and Weimar: Gustav Kiepenheuer, 33–34.

²⁷  Bourdieu, Pierre (1992), Language and Symbolic Power: The Economy of Linguistic Exchanges, ed. by John B. Thompson, Cambridge: Polity Press, 122.

²⁸  Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 122.

²⁹  Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 122.

³⁰  Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 120.

³¹  See Butler, Judith (1993), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex,’ London, New York: Routledge, xii.

³²  Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 121.

³³  Santner, My Own Private Germany, xii.

³⁴  Santner, The Royal Remains, xxi.

³⁵  Santner, The Royal Remains, xii.

³⁶  Santner, The Royal Remains, 5–6.

³⁷  Santner, The Royal Remains, 6.

³⁸  Broch, Hermann (1975), Schriften zur Literatur 1: Kommentierte Werkausgabe. Vol. 9/1, ed. by Paul Michael Lützeler, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 153.

³⁹  Simmel, Georg (1999), ‘Lebensanschauung: IV Das individuelle Gesetz,’ Gesamtausgabe, ed. by Ottheim Rammstedt, vol. 16: Der Krieg und die geistigen Entscheidungen, Grundfragen der Soziologie, Vom Wesen des historischen Verstehens, Der Konflikt der modernen Kultur, Lebensanschauung, ed. by Gregor Fitzi and Otthein Rammstedt, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 346–425, 359.

⁴⁰  Santner, My Own Private Germany, xii.

⁴¹  Le Rider, Modernity and the Crises of Identity, 22.

⁴²  Roth, Joseph (1932), Radetzkymarsch, Berlin: G. Kiepenheuer, 281.

⁴³  Le Rider, Modernity and the Crises of Identity, 16.

⁴⁴  Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 122.

⁴⁵  Santner, The Royal Remains, 5.

⁴⁶  King, Martina (2009), Pilger und Prophet: Heilige Autorschaft bei Rainer Maria Rilke, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 24.

⁴⁷  Schrimpf, Hans Joachim (1963), ‘Arthur Schnitzlers Traumnovelle,’ Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 82: 172–192, 175.

⁴⁸  Schrimpf, ‘Arthur Schnitzlers Traumnovelle,’ 175.

⁴⁹  Bourdieu, Pierre (2017), ‘The Biographical Illusion (1986),’ Biography in Theory: Key Texts and Commentaries, ed. by Wilhelm Hemecker and Edward Saunders, Berlin: de Gruyter, 210–216, 217.

⁵⁰  Bourdieu, ‘The Biographical Illusion (1986),’ 210.

⁵¹  Bourdieu, ‘The Biographical Illusion (1986),’ 216.

⁵²  Bourdieu, ‘The Biographical Illusion (1986),’ 216.

⁵³  In modern psychology, such compulsive repetitive behaviour in both animals and humans is called ‘stereotypy’. See the section V, F98.4, on ‘Stereotyped movement disorders’ in the International Catalogue of Diseases of the WHO: http://apps.who.int/classifications/icd10/browse/2016/en#/F90-F98.

⁵⁴  Zijderveld, Anton C. (1987), ‘On the Nature and Function of Clichés,’ Erstarrtes Denken: Studien zu Klischee, Stereotyp und Vorurteil in englischsprachiger Literatur, ed. by Günther Blaicher, Tübingen: G. Narr, 26–40, 28.

⁵⁵  Zijderveld, ‘On the Nature and Function of Clichés,’ 39.

⁵⁶  Zijderveld, ‘On the Nature and Function of Clichés,’ 35.

⁵⁷  Le Rider, Modernity and the Crises of Identity, 22.

⁵⁸  Goltschnigg, ‘Fröhliche Apokalypse’ und nostalgische Utopie, 2.

⁵⁹  Lethen, Helmut (2002), Cool Conduct: The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany, Berkeley: University of California Press, 23.

⁶⁰  Imke Meyer’s study Männlichkeit und Melodram provides a thorough analysis of the construction and deconstruction of bourgeois masculinity in Schnitzler’s narrative works and also touches on the topic of stereotypical representations of gender. Her analysis shows that Schnitzler’s male protagonists are caught up in a melodramatic mode of perception and self-fashioning, which reveals that the rigid structures of a monolithic ideal of masculinity are no longer able to contain the crisis-like experiences of the male bourgeois subjects. Meyer provides convincing exemplary readings that demonstrate how the male protagonists rely on conceptions of ‘otherness’ in order at once to project their own transgressive tendencies and to preserve their self-image as representatives of the bourgeois norm. My approach incorporates these insights in a broader analysis of the function of the conceptual link between stereotype and destiny.

⁶¹  See Dyer, The Matter of Images, 12; Gilman, Difference and Pathology, 16.

⁶²  See Gilman, Difference and Pathology, 15.

⁶³  Perkins, T. E. (1979), ‘Rethinking Stereotypes,’ Ideology and Cultural Production, ed. by Michèle Barrett, Philip Corrigan, Annette Kuhn, and Janet Wolf, London: Croom Helm, 133–159, 154.

⁶⁴  Perkins, ‘Rethinking Stereotypes,’ 55.

⁶⁵  Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 121.

⁶⁶  Dyer, The Matter of Images, 14.

⁶⁷  Dyer, The Matter of Images, 15.

⁶⁸  Butler, Judith (1997a), Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, New York, London: Routledge, 4.

⁶⁹  Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 122.

⁷⁰  Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 122.

⁷¹  Butler, Excitable Speech, 4.

⁷²  Wolfgang, Lukas recognizes a ‘Basisopposition’ (central opposition) between bourgeois norm and deviance. On the level of the literary characters, this is expressed through a binary opposition between ‘A-Figuren’ (A-characters), representatives of the norm or ‘A-Welt’ (A-world) and ‘B-Figuren’ (B-characters), representatives of deviance or ‘B-Welt’ (B-world). See Lukas, Das Selbst und das Fremde, 21–22. This classification is compatible with my approach in the way that it already introduces the desire of the protagonists to transgress the bourgeois norm and the fatal idealization of the ‘other’. However, Lukas does not take into account the stereotypical cultural narratives that lead to the ambivalent perception of the ‘other’. His classification of the B-characters seems to imply deviance mainly by choice: ‘Künstler,’ ‘Magier-Psychotherapeuten,’ ‘Abenteurer’ (artists, magician-psychotherapists, adventurers) attributing a particularly privileged social position to the B-world. See Lukas, Das Selbst und das Fremde, 24. My focus rather lies on stereotyped social groups that are considered as deviant and excluded from the norm.

⁷³  Bourdieu, Pierre (1977), Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 69.

⁷⁴  I follow here the suggestion of Andrew Cusack to describe the genre of the German Schauerroman as ‘German Gothic,’ a ‘species of border-crossing popular fictions referred to in Germany as Ritter-, Räuber- und Schauerromantik, and in Britain as the Gothic’. The advantage of using the term ‘Gothic’ to describe elements of Schauerromantik in works of Modernism is also that it brings out the comparability to other modern forms of Gothic fiction, such as the Victorian. See Cusack, Andrew (2012), ‘Introduction,’ in Popular Revenants: The German Gothic and Its International Reception, 1800–2000, ed. by Andrew Cusack and Barry Murnane, Rochester, New York: Camden House, 1–9.

⁷⁵  On Schnitzler’s knowledge and appreciation of Hoffmann’s work, see Aurnhammer, Achim (2013), Arthur Schnitzlers intertextuelles Erzählen, Berlin; Boston, MA: De Gruyter, 150.

⁷⁶  Matt, Peter von (1989), …fertig ist das Angesicht: Zur Literaturgeschichte des menschlichen Gesichts, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 236f.

⁷⁷  See Freud, Sigmund (1947b), ‘Das Unheimliche,’ Gesammelte Werke, vol. 12: Werke aus den Jahren 1917–1920, ed. by Anna Freud, Edward Bibring, Willi Hoffer, Ernst Kris, and Otto Isakower, London: Imago, 227–268, 251.

⁷⁸  Schneider, Manfred (1999), ‘Das Grauen der Beobachter: Schriften und Bilder des Wahnsinns,’ Bild und Schrift in der Romantik, ed. by Gerhard Neumann and Günter Oesterle, Würzburg: Könighausen und Neumann, 237–253, 247.

⁷⁹  Santner, The Royal Remains, 49.

⁸⁰  Schneider, ‘Das Grauen der Beobachter,’ 249.

⁸¹  Schneider, ‘Das Grauen der Beobachter,’ 249.

⁸²  Webber, Andrew J. (2005) ‘The Afterlife of Romanticism,’ German Literature of the Nineteenth Century 1832–1899, ed. by Clayton Koelb and Eric Downing, Rochester, NY: Camden House, 23–43, 40.

⁸³  Perlmann, Michaela L. (1987b), Arthur Schnitzler, Stuttgart: Metzler, 183.

⁸⁴  See Imboden, Michael (1971), Die surreale Komponente im erzählenden Werk Arthur Schnitzlers, Bern: H. Lang, 50; Swales, Arthur Schnitzler, 118–180; Segar, Kenneth (1973), ‘Determinism and Character: Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle and his Unpublished Critique of Psychoanalyis,’ Oxford German Studies 8: 114–127, 117ff; Scheible, Hartmut (1977), Arthur Schnitzler und die Aufklärung, Munich: W. Fink, 102; Dangel, Elsbeth (1985), Wiederholung als Schicksal: Arthur Schnitzlers Roman ‘Therese: Chronik eines Frauenlebens,’ Munich: Fink, 76; Thomé, Horst (1984), ‘Kernlosigkeit und Pose: Zur Rekonstruktion von Schnitzlers Psychologie,’ Fin de Siècle. Zur Naturwissenschaft und Literatur der Jahrhundertwende im deutsch-skandinavischen Kontext, ed. by Klaus Bohnen, Uffe Hansen, and Friedrich Schmöe, Kopenhagen and Munich: Fink, 62–87; Thomé, Horst (1993), Autonomes Ich und ‘Inneres Ausland’: Studien über Realismus, Tiefenpsychologie und Psychiatrie in deutschen Erzähltexten (1848–1914), Tübingen: Niemeyer, 598–722; Haberich, Max (2013), ‘“daß ich ja nicht im entferntesten daran gedacht habe, irgendeine Frage lösen zu wollen”: The Development of Arthur Schnitzler’s Position on the “Jewish Question” from Der Weg ins Freie to Professor Bernhardi,’ Journal of Austrian Studies 46 (2): 81–102, 91. See also Thomé’s literature overview on individual responsibility in Schnitzler (Autonomes Ich und ‘Inneres Ausland,’ 600, fn. 9). In the Schnitzler scholarship of the 1970s and 1980s, destiny is practically exclusively discussed in this context. See Just, Gottfried (1968), Ironie und Sentimentalität in den erzählenden Dichtungen Arthur Schnitzlers, Berlin: E. Schmidt; Imboden, Die surreale Komponente im erzählenden Werk Arthur Schnitzlers; Segar, ‘Determinism and Character’; Allerdissen, Rolf (1985), Arthur Schnitzler: Impressionistisches Rollenspiel und skeptischer Moralismus in seinen Erzählungen, Bonn: Bouvier; Dangel, Wiederholung als Schicksal; Luprecht, Mark (1991), What People Call Pessimism: Sigmund Freud, Arthur Schnitzler, and the Nineteenth Century Controversy at the University of Vienna Medical School, Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press. See also the literature overview in Lukas, Das Selbst und das Fremde, 264.

⁸⁵  See above all Imboden, Die surreale Komponente im erzählenden Werk Arthur Schnitzlers; Allerdissen, Arthur Schnitzler; Luprecht, What People Call Pessimism.

⁸⁶  See Thomé, ‘Kernlosigkeit und Pose,’ 86, fn.72.

⁸⁷  See Allerdissen, Arthur Schnitzler, 128.

⁸⁸  Often this is taken as an opportunity to highlight Schnitzler’s differences to his alleged Doppelgänger, Sigmund Freud, emphasizing Schnitzler’s focus on half-conscious states rather than unconscious ones, which would mitigate an ethical evaluation of the protagonist’s actions. See for example Swales, Arthur Schnitzler, 118–149; Segar, ‘Determinism and Character,’ 114–127, 120; Scheible, Arthur Schnitzler und die Aufklärung, 102–105). This frequently leads to an implicit critique of Freud and psychoanalysis, in which Schnitzler’s writings appear to provide an alternative (implicitly almost always superior) anthropological/psychological approach. The most extensive and thoroughly researched example of this kind of Schnitzler interpretation has been provided by Thomé, who takes into account not only Schnitzler’s literary texts, aphorisms, journal and medical writings, but also contemporary scientific and philosophical sources beyond Freud. See Thomé, ‘Kernlosigkeit und Pose’; Thomé, Autonomes Ich und ‘Inneres Ausland,’ 608–670. The way in which Schnitzler serves literary scholars as an agent for their own implied rejection of psychoanalysis would be a research project in itself, and cannot be pursued further in this book. Thomé concedes that literature occupies its own space (according to him, that of ethics) and that it is not its task ‘Seelenforschung praktisch in “Parallelaktion” zur Psychoanalyse zu betreiben’ (to undertake psychical research as an alternative to psychoanalysis). See Thomé, Autonomes Ich und ‘Inneres Ausland,’ 606.

⁸⁹  Thomé, Autonomes Ich und ‘Inneres Ausland,’ 630.

⁹⁰  Thomé, ‘Kernlosigkeit und Pose,’ 73.

⁹¹  See Thomé, Autonomes Ich und ‘Inneres Ausland,’ 608. Dangel seems to suggest a similar approach, when she states that, although Schnitzler stressed the importance of individual responsibility in his work, the small realm of agency is time and again interrupted by unknown powers. See Dangel, Wiederholung als Schicksal, 76. Already the title of Dangel’s book, Wiederholung als Schicksal (Repetition as Destiny), indicates interesting points of contact to the approach proposed here. Her focus lies solely on Schnitzler’s novel Therese, thus on a protagonist who could be considered as representative of ‘otherness’. While Dangel does not spell out the connection between social determinants and the notion of metaphysical destiny in the text, her reading implicitly brings out the negative, fate-like quality of the position of the ‘other’: ‘Ohne wirklich ein Schicksal zu haben, schicksalslos gleichsam, reproduziert Therese schicksalhaftes Leben’ (Without really having a destiny, practically fate-less as it were, Therese produces fateful life). See Dangel, Wiederholung als Schicksal, 91.

⁹²  See Lukas, Das Selbst und das Fremde, 277.

⁹³  However, Lukas’s argument that Schnitzler’s characters tend to appropriate other people’s destinies as their own, which creates a repetitive structure in the texts, confirms my claim that Schnitzler’s texts undermine the originality and individuality of experiences.

⁹⁴  Neymeyr, Barbara (2006), ‘Nachwort,’ Arthur Schnitzler, Flucht in die Finsternis, ed. by Barbara Neymeyr, Stuttgart: Reclam; Heinzmann, Bertold (2006), Arthur Schnitzler: Traumnovelle: Erläuterungen und Dokumente, Stuttgart: Reclam.