One  Stereotypes and Physiognomy in Der Weg ins Freie (Road into the Open)

The question of the main theme in Schnitzler’s first novel Der Weg ins Freie (Road into the Open, 1908) has been raised by various literary critics.¹ Two storylines seem to be developed rather independently of each other – the so-called love story between the young gentile composer Georg and the bourgeois Anna and a complex picture of the Viennese Jewish bourgeoisie and its controversial discussions of anti-Semitism and Zionism. As the reader sees the other characters and the events of action mainly through Georg’s eyes, the novel displays crucial mechanisms of the social practice of typecasting with regard to the relation between norm and the so-called ‘other’. Georg’s function in the novel is not as a moral lead but rather, as we will see later on, as a specular lens.² He has access to various cultural and social spaces, an asset which he puts to good use. Georg’s flânerie through the streets of Vienna can be understood symbolically as his idle roaming through a distinct selection of social fields: the exclusive club for the Viennese male nobility where his brother Felician passes his spare time is one of Georg’s sanctuaries but not a place he is restricted to. As a composer he finds himself also welcome in the intellectual circles that meet in coffee houses, he is invited to the salons and holiday resorts of rich families of the Jewish bourgeoisie such as the Ehrenbergs, and he enjoys his visits to the middle-class family home of his lover Anna Rosner.

While the title of the novel suggests a form of progress and development towards freedom, evoking the genres of Bildungs- or Entwicklungsroman (novel of personal development),3 Georg is already in the beginning freer than most of the other characters of the novel – as a non-Jewish male of the Viennese upper class he really is at liberty to go where he pleases (one could say, literally a Freiherr (free gentleman)).⁴ As Wolfgang Müller-Funk has described in some detail, the social milieus are realistically reflected in the localization of the houses and apartments of the characters.⁵ Georg lives, unsurprisingly, in the first district of Vienna, and thus in the very centre of urban life. Despite his objective freedom and privileges, however, Georg finds himself floating between the position of the insider, bringing with it the feeling of being locked in and the longing to escape, and that of the outsider who seeks entrance to exclusive circles. In what follows, this back-and-forth-movement will be mapped out in relation to the serving of contemporary stereotypes that seem to be worked into the narrative structure of the novel. However, in connection with the psychological embodiment of the characters, they appear subtly twisted in such a way that a gap between the signifier (stereotype) and the signified (the individual represented by the stereotype) becomes perceptible. Moreover, this gap is not a static incongruence but more likely caused by a shifting of signifiers; more than once the categories that define the boundaries between ‘self’ and ‘other’ seem to become unstable.

Stereotypes and Images of ‘Normality’

‘Nun ja, ein schöner, schlanker, blonder junger Mann; Freiherr, Germane, Christ – welcher Jude könnte diesem Zauber widerstehen?’ (WiF908) (Oh well, a slim handsome blond young man, a baron, a German, a Christian – what Jew could withstand the magic?)⁶ It is only in the last chapter that the reader encounters this condensed description of the protagonist Georg von Wergenthin. These words, sarcastically uttered by the young doctor Bertold Stauber, do not say anything about Georg as an individual character but refer to him as a type. The charm that Bertold mentions can only be understood as the charm of the norm, of the privileged position that Georg holds. According to Bertold’s characterization, Georg fulfils the contemporary criteria of the masculine norm to the extent that he seems to represent what Sander Gilman calls a ‘positive stereotype’,⁷ which appears to be something close to an idealized version of the self, the good other ‘which we fear we cannot achieve’. This is curious, however, in the way that the representative of the norm is usually not the one who is stereotyped but belongs rather to the grouping that does not need any labelling because it has the power to label different types of others in order to define itself. When one thinks of stereotypes, one generally rather means negative stereotypes, ‘which we fear to become’,⁸ and which imply a pejorative aspect.⁹ Bertold refers sarcastically to the way the privileged holder of the normative position functions as an idealized icon even for the marginalized group of the stereotyped other, in this case, the Jews. However, his comment also points out that this idealized image of the non-Jew is stereotypical in itself, as it fundamentally depends on the stereotypization of ‘the’ Jew (the non-Jew as everything the Jew is not). This dependency is, of course, a source of unease for representatives of the norm and needs to be repressed. The selection of terms that Bertold uses to describe Georg sheds light on this dependency that binds the self to the other, the norm to the stereotyped deviance, and therefore undermines the ordering function of stereotypes.

Unsettling the ordering function of stereotypes disrupts reassuringly rigid ideas of society and social roles and in the process ‘make[s] normality strange, that is, visible and specific’.10 Towards the end of the novel, Heinrich, who has often been considered as an alter ego not only of Georg but also of Schnitzler himself,¹¹ compares his writing self-dismissively with the work of a mad photographer: ‘Am Ende […] wird es ein Portät sein, aufgenommen von einem irrsinnigen Photographen durch einen verdorbenen Apparat, während eines Erdbebens und bei Sonnenfinsternis’ (WiF930) (The result […] will be a portrait taken by a mad photographer with a spoilt camera during an earthquake and an eclipse of the sun).¹² The use of photography as a metaphor refers to the topic of legitimate representation. Heinrich responds here to his fellow writer Nürnberger, who accuses him of rendering only distorted images of the people he seeks to describe. What Heinrich seems to admit with his response is that his writing does indeed make the world represented appear rather strange and abnormal. We may here assume an implicit articulation of the aesthetic goal of Schnitzler’s novel itself: a distortion not of reality but of normality to bring out the gap between social representations and the subjects repesented.¹³

This interpretation becomes more plausible when contrasted with another passage in the novel that also brings up the medium of photography. In the first weeks of their relationship, Georg and Anna spend much time wandering around Vienna together, exploring the city almost like tourists, enjoying floating through the streets without an actual destination:

Sie blieben vor verschiedenen Auslagen stehen, entdeckten unter einem Haustor den Glaskasten eines Photographen und waren sehr belustigt von der mühselig-ungezwungenen Haltung, in der hier Jubelpaare, Kadettenoffiziersstellvertreter, Köchinnen im Sonntagsstaat und für den Maskenball kostümierte Damen aufgenommen waren. (WiF702)

They remained standing in front of various shops. They discovered a photographer’s show-case by a housedoor and were much amused by the laboriously-natural poses in which golden and silver wedding couples, [representatives of, M.K.] cadets, cooks in their Sunday best and ladies in masked fancy dress were taken.14

Recalling the Wiener Typen (Viennese types) photo series discussed in the introduction of this book, the vitrine exhibits pictures of people in their social roles, and not as individuals (as underlined by the inclusion of ‘Stellvertreter’ (representatives) in the list). Anna and Georg are amused about the lack of authenticity which becomes obvious not only because of the clothes that are worn for the special occasion of the photo but also ironically because of the models’ attempts to look casual. Moreover, the fact that the cooks are apparently nevertheless recognizable as such even though they are depicted in their Sunday best underlines the failure of the photo to resemble the individualized portraits of bourgeois family members. Even though they were taken under normal conditions (probably not by a mad photographer, and with a working camera and not during any environmental catastrophe), these photographic representations fail to convince as individuals. They lack what Bourdieu has called a ‘belief effect’ that brings social types to ‘life’ in literature by virtue of psychological individuation.¹⁵ Together with Heinrich’s metaphor of photography for his own writing, this almost unremarkable passage might be read as a meta-fictional hint at the insufficiency of popular social and cultural representations, especially stereotypes.

The case for this is strengthened when one takes into account the fact that Heinrich at an earlier point in the novel points out what he considers to be his only true strength of both character and talent:

Das einzige, was mir eine gewisse Sicherheit gibt, ist eigentlich nur das Bewußtsein, in menschliche Seelen hineinschauen zu können … tief hinein, in alle, in die von Schurken und ehrlichen Leuten, in die von Frauen und Männern und Kindern, in die von Heiden, Juden, Protestanten, ja selbst in die von Katholiken, Adeligen und Deutschen, obwohl ich gehört habe, daß gerade das für unsereinen so unendlich schwer, oder sogar unmöglich sein soll. (WiF670)

The only thing that gives me a certain amount of confidence is simply consciousness of being able to see right into people’s souls … right deep down, every one, rogues and honest people, men, women and children, heathens, Jews and Protestants, yes, even Catholics, aristocrats and Germans, although I have heard that that is supposed to be infinitely difficult, not to say impossible, for people like myself.16

This again describes quite precisely Schnitzler’s own narrative technique, namely the psychological personalization of social types.¹⁷ Obviously, there is another meta-fictional twist implied here, when Heinrich refers to the prejudice that Jews are unable to understand the Catholic, noble, and German psyches. With Georg as main character and reflector figure, Schnitzler gives an evident example and proof of the falsity of this stereotype. It is the text’s play with stereotypes and how this ‘makes normality strange’ that will be the focus of what follows.

Physiognomy and Destiny

Physiognomic thought, one of the most obvious fields of stereotyping, is subtly but nevertheless persistently present throughout the novel. Already on the first pages, one of Georg’s Jewish acquaintances, Willy Eisler, casually refers to the Swiss physiognomist Johann Kaspar Lavater. Willy explains here that he feels rather sentimental about his time in the military, which for him seems to have meant predominantly a play with social identity: ‘So sehr ich mich dem Greisenalter nähere, es hat mir doch noch immer Spaß gemacht, so mit den gelben Aufschlägen umherzuwandeln, Sporen klirrend, Säbel schäppernd, eine Ahnung drohender Gefahr verbreitend, um von mangelhaften Lavaters für einen bessern Grafen gehalten zu werden?’ (WiF641) (Though I’m nearly an old man, I’ve always found it a joke to trot about with my yellow epaulettes, clanking my spurs, dragging my sabre along, spreading an atmosphere of impeding peril, and being taken by incompetent Lavaters for a noble count).18 This remark on the physiognomist Lavater is particularly interesting for our context of stereotype and destiny. Lavater’s main work, Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe (1775–1778), gave instructions to analyze facial features as signs of talent and character. Arguing that the human body was an expression of personality and ability, Lavater was ostensibly concerned with defending human individuality: ‘Jeder Mensch soll an sich selbst gemessen werden’ (Every man should be measured against himself).¹⁹ However, his exuberant work of four thick volumes, which are richly illustrated with portraits and silhouettes of distinctive profile pictures, invites the reader to classify and typecast individuals against a clearly Euro-centric, Aryan ideal. For Lavater, as for his successors in the physiognomic tradition, nature is destiny: the body delineates the boundaries of any individual’s abilities. In his study About Face, Richard T. Gray shows that ‘Lavater’s physiognomic theories display a hybrid character that attempts, in an uncanny manner, to fuse a scientific methodology with metaphysical speculation’.²⁰ By employing seemingly objective and positivistic strategies of empirical science (e.g. observation and classification), Lavater’s physiognomics were ultimately concerned with the metaphysical, internal characteristics of an individual. This practice led to the naturalization of cultural stereotypes, particularly with regard to race: Lavater’s judgements, derived from his interpretations of allegedly typical racial facial features, often anticipate the stereotypes associated with Blackness and Jewishness in Schnitzler’s times – some of which remain active and harmful in Western culture even today.²¹ Arguing that bone structure and facial features were an expression of pure pre-destination,²² Lavater’s text already paves the way for the legitimization of stereotypes as destiny.

Willy’s remark on Lavater reveals an awareness of the way these stereotypes serve as cognitive ordering tools in the Viennese society. The pleasure Willy draws from the fact that at least in his military uniform, he ‘passes’ as a Gentile noble man, is clearly a reaction to the experience of anti-Semitic stereotyping. On the face of it, his comment appears to self-ironically mock the aspiration to ‘pass’ as non-Jewish – a reflection on the seductive effect of the idealized non-Jewish norm, also addressed in Bertold’s characterization of Georg mentioned above.23 However, Willy seems to enjoy his ‘passing’ mainly for the unsettling effect it has on the people who fail to successfully typecast him, the ‘mangelhaften Lavaters’ (incompetent Lavaters). This becomes clear two pages later, when the subject of physiognomy and stereotypes is raised again by Georg – although without a conscious link to Willy’s comment:

Er [Georg] fühlte, daß Willy ein Mensch war, der ununterbrochen eine Stellung verteidigte, wenn auch ohne dringende Notwendigkeit. […] Er empfand es, wie schon öfter, sonderbar, daß Willy Jude war. Schon der alte Eisler, Willys Vater, der anmutige Wiener Walzer und Lieder komponierte, und sich kunst- und altertumsverständig mit dem Sammeln, zuweilen auch mit dem Verkauf von Antiquitäten befaßte und seinerzeit als der berühmteste Boxer von Wien gegolten hatte, mit seiner Riesengestalt, dem langen, grauen Vollbart und dem Monokel, sah eher einem ungarischen Magnaten ähnlich, als einem jüdischen Patriarchen; aus Willy aber hatten Anlage, Liebhaberei und eiserner Wille das täuschende Ebenbild eines geborenen Kavaliers gebildet. Was ihn jedoch vor anderen jungen Leuten seines Stammes und seines Strebens auszeichnete, war der Umstand, daß er gewohnt war, seine Abstammung nie zu verleugnen, für jedes zweideutige Lächeln Aufklärung oder Rechenschaft zu fordern und sich über alle Vorurteile und Eitelkeiten, in denen er oft befangen schien, selber lustig zu machen. (WiF643)

He felt that Willy was a man who was continually defending a position though there was no pressing necessity for him to do so. […] He felt now as he had done before, that it was almost extraordinary that Willy would be a Jew. Why, old Eissler, Willy’s father, who composed charming Viennese waltzes and songs, was a connoisseur and collector, and sometimes a seller of antiques, and objets d’art, and had passed in his day for the most celebrated boxer in Vienna, was, what with his long grey beard and his monocle, far more like a Hungarian magnate than a Jewish patriarch. Besides, Willy’s own temperament, his deliberate cultivation of it and his iron will had made him into the deceptive counterpart of a feudal gentleman bred and born. What, however, distinguished him from other young people of similar race and ambition was the fact that he was accustomed to admit his origin, to demand explanation or satisfaction for every ambiguous smile, and to make merry himself over all the prejudices and vanities of which he was so often the victim.24

Georg’s characterization of Willy shows various different aspects at once. First of all, it demonstrates how apt Willy’s ironic remark was, because Georg indeed seems to struggle with the incongruence of Willy’s performative and physical appearance and the stereotypical image of the Jew. On the contrary, both Willy and his father seem to embody ‘prototypes’ of acculturation. More than that, Willy seems to enjoy the confusion about his identity and to deliberately enforce it not only through his physical appearance but also through the usage of his voice, which is, much like physiognomy, also a central category of stereotypes and further highlights their performative aspect as social roles: ‘Willy sprach äußerst rasch, wie mit einer absichtlichen leisen Heiserkeit, scharf, salopp, mit ungarischen, französischen, wienerischen, jüdischen Akzenten’ (WiF641) (Willy spoke extremely quickly, with a deliberate though slight hoarseness, briskly and yet nonchalantly with a combination of the Hungarian, French, Viennese and Jewish accents).²⁵ However, according to Georg’s estimation, what makes Willy stand out from other acculturated Jews is the fact that he nevertheless does not deny his Jewishness. Thus, while Willy enjoys his performative game with identity, he does not allow his ‘passing’ to be complete and therefore uses it effectively to challenge rigid stereotypes and normative boundaries.

This leads back to the first sentence of the quoted passage: Georg sees in Willy someone who is always in a defensive position. If one takes into account Willy’s paradoxical situation of being a non-religious, ‘acculturated’ Jew in an increasingly anti-Semitic society, one has to be sceptical about Georg’s dismissive addition that ‘there was no pressing necessity’. Willy’s position is indeed in danger of being attacked from different directions: not only from anti-Semitic aggression, but also from the Jewish community which, in the face of such racist aggression, might call its members to return to their Jewish roots. This aspect is addressed in the novel, when the old Ehrenberg criticizes the writer Nürnberger. Because of his lack of faith, Nürnberger does not consider himself as Jewish. Ehrenberg confronts him: ‘Wenn man Ihnen einmal den Zylinder einschlagt auf der Ringstraße, weil Sie, mit Verlaub, eine etwas jüdische Nase haben, werden Sie sich schon als Jude getroffen fühlen, verlassen Sie sich drauf’ (WiF689) (If someone were to bash in your top hat in the Ringstrasse because, if you allow me to say so, you have a somewhat Jewish nose, you’d realise pretty quick that you were insulted because you were a Yiddisher fellow. You can take my word for it).26 Here, again, the linking between physiognomy and stereotype is striking. The Jewish nose might after all be the most widespread Jewish stereotype. The mentioning of the Ringstraße is certainly not coincidental. As the street with the most important buildings of Vienna, encircling the central district of the city, it can be understood as a representative, mobile ‘stage’ for the entire Viennese society. If racist harassment is possible on the Ringstraße, it means it has become broadly respectable. What Ehrenberg implies with his comment is the experience that once the anti-Semitic tendencies have gained a certain degree of social acceptance, people who are considered as members of the stereotyped social grouping ‘Jews’ cannot escape their Jewishness as it is no longer a question of individual self-articulation or choice.²⁷

In this way, the appellation ‘Jew’ is not only more than the neutral description of someone’s confessional membership, it is also more than ‘just’ an insult: it turns into the enunciation of an unchangeable destiny. Georg almost becomes aware of this fate-like implication of the position of Jews, when he actually tries to understand what the term ‘Jew’ implies for those addressed with it. This – for Georg very exceptional – moment of acknowledgement and recognition happens during a cycling tour with his friends Leo and Heinrich, where he spends almost the entire day listening to the heated discussion between the two others about Jewish identity and Zionism.

Zum erstenmal begann ihm die Bezeichnung Jude, die er selbst so oft leichtfertig, spöttisch und verächtlich im Mund geführt hatte, in einer ganz neuen gleichsam düstern Beleuchtung aufzugehen. Eine Ahnung von dieses Volkes geheimnisvollem Los dämmerte in ihm auf, das sich irgendwie in jedem aussprach, der ihm entsprossen war; nicht minder in jenen, die diesem Ursprung zu entfliehen trachteten wie einer Schmach, einem Leid oder einem Märchen, das sie nichts kümmerte, – als in jenen, die mit Hartnäckigkeit auf ihn hinwiesen, wie auf ein Schicksal, eine Ehre oder eine Tatsache der Geschichte, die unverrückbar festsstand. (WiF722)

He saw for the first time the designation of the Jew, which he himself had often used flippantly, jestingly and contemptuously, in a quite new and at the same time melancholy light. There dawned within him some idea of this people’s mysterious destiny, which always expressed itself in every one who sprang from the race, not less in those who tried to escape from that origin of theirs, as though it were a disgrace, a pain or a fairy tale that did not concern them at all, than in those who obstinately pointed back to it as though to a piece of destiny, an honour or an [sic] historical fact based on an immovable foundation.28

The oxymoronic formulation ‘düstern Beleuchtung’ (gloomy/melancholy light) not only expresses Georg’s realization of the inescapability of Jewish heritage and its implications but also the cloudiness of the said realization. Other terms like ‘dämmerte’ (dawned), ‘geheimnisvoll’ (mysterious), and ‘Ahnung’ (idea/premonition) insist that the subject is still utterly obscure for Georg. At the same time, they bring across a certain tendency of a metaphysical mystification of Jewishness, which is here explicitly referred to as a form of destiny.

This corresponds, in fact, to the contemporary discussions around the ‘Jewish question’ and does not have only metaphysical implications: central for the development of anti-Semitism at the beginning of the twentieth century was the debate about the ‘biology of the Jews’, thus genetic predispositions associated with Jewishness as a ‘race’.²⁹ The way Jewishness had become a biological marker of difference is comparable to the idea of an unchangeable destiny, very much in line with Lavater’s idea of physiognomy as fate: a biological predisposition is inescapable and cannot be shed like a religious confession or lost like the membership of a nation state. The idea behind it is that no matter what a Jewish person does, no matter how far their striving for ‘assimilation’ or ‘acculturation’ goes – they will stay different from the non-Jewish norm and never reach a fully accepted and recognized position in society. At the same time, the formulation ‘aussprach’ (expressed itself/spoke) brings to mind a performative speech act of interpellation which generates the subject by calling it.30 It also seems to hint at how identity has to be constantly reproduced through the repeated performances of the subject. The destiny of the Jew would thus have less to do with any natural (or even divine) preconditions than with the label ‘Jew’ and the complex web of social functions and meanings it entails. While this is obviously not part of Georg’s conscious reflections, the moment nevertheless marks a potential for understanding, for breaking rigid stereotypical patterns. This is demonstrated by Georg’s immediate reaction, which refers again to the relation between stereotypes and physiognomy and can be understood as a reminiscence of his conversation with Willy:

Und als er sich in den Anblick der beiden Sprechenden verlor und ihre Gestalten betrachtete, die sich mit scharf gezogenen Linien von dem rötlich-violetten Himmel abzeichneten, fiel es ihm nicht zum ersten Male auf, daß Heinrich, der darauf bestand, hier daheim zu sein, in Figur und Geste einem fanatischen, jüdischen Priester glich, während Leo, der mit seinem Volk nach Palästina ziehen wollte, in Gesichtsschnitt und Haltung ihn an die Bildsäule eines griechischen Jünglings erinnerte, die er einmal im Vatikan oder im Museum gesehen hatte. (WiF723)

And as he lost himself in the contemplation of the two speakers, and looked at their figures, which stood out in relief against the reddish-violet sky in sharply-drawn, violently-moving lines, it occurred to him, and not for the first time, that Heinrich who insisted in being at home here, resembled both in figure and in gesture some fanatical Jewish preacher, while Leo, who wanted to go back to Palestine with his people, reminded him in feature and in bearing of the statue of a Greek youth which he had once seen in the Vatican or the Naples museum.³¹

In Georg’s perception, his friends appear like silhouettes against the evening sky, which subtly hints again at the physiognomist Lavater. This implication demonstrates both Georg’s automatic attempt to integrate his new insights within the ordering patterns he has internalized and his failure. As with Willy, and here again ‘nicht zum ersten Mal’ (not for the first time), Georg has to acknowledge that the stereotypes do not exactly fit the individual: while Heinrich’s stereotypical Jewish appearance is betrayed by his refusal to be identified through his Jewishness, Leo’s classical beauty (the young Greek being a positive stereotype – albeit one co-opted by other cultures for their museum collections) contradicts his radical views on Jewish identity. For Abigail E. Gillman, this demonstrates that after the short moment where he broadens his usual perception, Georg immediately narrows his gaze again by ‘shrink[ing] Jewish characters into type-figures’.32 While this is certainly true, it is also a moment of confusion where the incongruence of stereotype and individual appears and the relativity and constructedness of stereotypes emerge.

Moreover, the passage demonstrates that the physiognomic interpretation tells always at least as much about the observing and describing subject as it does about the subject described.³³ Indeed, through Georg’s descriptions of Heinrich and Leo, we learn more about Georg himself than about the other two. The passage renders evident how strongly the cultural narratives inherent to stereotypes influence his perception of his Jewish friends. In fact, we learn less about him individually than about his ‘cognitive ordering tools’. As Peter von Matt writes, ‘Was im fremden Gesicht den Betrachter gegenwärtig macht, sind […] die moralisch-gesellschaftlichen Normen, seine Normen, welche sich mit der Gesichtsbeschreibung automatisch verbinden’ (The observer is made present in the description of the other’s face through the moral and social norms, the observer’s own norms, which are automatically connected with the description of a face).³⁴ The description of the cycling trip with Leo and Heinrich contains the entire range of Georg’s ambivalent positions towards Jews in general and his Jewish friends in particular; it encapsulates Georg’s ignorance and indifference as well as his potential to overcome internalized stereotypes. Even if only for a short time, he too feels affected by the urgency and determination both Leo and Heinrich display in their conflict. He finds himself for once in an outsider position and does not participate in the discussion. Only at the very end does he feel the need to intervene, when Leo utters an only seemingly improbable apprehension: ‘Aber wenn die Scheiterhaufen wieder angezündet werden …?’ (WiF724) (but supposing the mediaeval stake were to be lighted again?).35 During the previous discussion, Georg has felt too unfamiliar with the topic of discussion to have an opinion of his own. However, at this point he claims with certainty: ‘O […] diese Zeiten kommen doch nicht wieder’ (WiF724) (Oh […] those times will certainly not come again).³⁶ His friends find his aplomb amusing: ‘Die anderen mußten lachen, daß Georg sie durch diese Worte, wie Heinrich bemerkte, im Namen der gesamten Christenheit über ihre Zukunft zu beruhigen so liebenswürdig wäre’ (WiF724) (Both the others were unable to help laughing at George [sic] being kind enough to reassure them in that way about their future, in the name, as Heinrich observed, of the whole of Christendom).³⁷

It becomes clear that such a statement cannot be made independently of the social position of the speaker. The entire discussion is based on the function of the Jew as the other that is excluded and deviant from the norm. So when Georg enters the debate, the others cannot just take his statements as his individual opinion but perceive him as representative of the privileged norm. Obviously, Heinrich’s remark is meant to be humorous but it still reminds Georg of his outside position in this particular constellation of people and subject of discussion. Leo implicitly mentions this as well when he assumes that Georg might have been bored by the long discussion of his friends. However, when Georg reacts defensively, he stresses that he does not think of Georg as ignorant: ‘Leo hielt Georgs Hand fest. “Ich halte Sie für einen sehr klugen und auch für einen sehr guten Menschen […]”. […] “Sie sind mir wirklich sympathisch, Georg.” Er sah ihm tief in die Augen’ (WiF724) (Leo held George’s hand in a firm grip. ‘I take you for a very shrewd man and also for a very good sort […]’. […] I really feel a sympathy between us, George’. He looked him straight into his eyes).³⁸ It is hard to say what drives this unexpected praise but it gives a rare glimpse of an outside perspective on Georg. Since the text remains focalized through Georg’s perspective, it is impossible for the reader to know whether this is an authentic expression of Leo’s feelings for Georg in general or of a more spontaneous affect.³⁹ The sudden cordiality between the men is peculiar in this passage: ‘Sein [Leo’s] Ton bekam etwas wahrhaft Herzliches’ (WiF724) (His voice assumed a tone of genuine sincerity);40 and later, ‘“Glückliche Reise”, sagte Georg, reichte ihm [Heinrich] die Hand und drückte sie mit besonderer Herzlichkeit’ (WiF729) (‘Bon voyage’, said George, and shook hands with him with unusual affection).⁴¹ One may wonder whether this sudden feeling of connectedness emerges due to a better mutual understanding and acceptance or rather to a compensation for the articulation of difference that has evidently and inevitably been implicit in the conversation. Georg’s thoughts when he is finally alone demonstrate ambivalence between these two directions:

In diesem Augenblick wußte er, daß er mit keinem von beiden bei aller Sympathie jemals zu einer unbefangenen Vertrautheit gelangen werde, wie sie ihn noch im vorigen Jahre mit Guido Schönstein […] verbunden hatte. Er dachte darüber nach, ob das vielleicht wirklich in dem Rassenunterschied zwischen ihm und jenen begründet sein mochte, und fragte sich, ob er, ohne das Gespräch der beiden, durch das eigene Gefühl dieser Fremdheit sich so deutlich bewußt geworden wäre. Er zweifelte daran. Fühlte er sich nicht gerade diesen beiden und manchen anderen ihres Volkes näher, ja verwandter als vielen Menschen, die mit ihm vom gleichen Stamme waren? Ja spürte er nicht ganz deutlich, daß manchmal irgendwo in der Tiefe zwischen ihm und diesen beiden stärkere Fäden liefen als von ihm zu Guido, ja vielleicht zu seinem eigenen Bruder? (WiF730)

[A]nd he realised at this moment that in spite of all the sympathy he felt for both of them he would never attain with either that unrestrained sense of intimacy which had united him last year with Guido Schönstein and previously poor Labinsky. He reflected whether perhaps the fundamental reason for this was not perhaps [sic] the difference of race between him and them, and he asked himself whether leaving out of account the conversation between the two of them, he would of his own initiative have realised so clearly this feeling of aloofness. He doubted it. Did he not as a matter of fact feel himself nearer, yes even more akin, to these two and to many others of their race than to many men who came from the same stock as his own? Why, did he not feel quite distinctly that deep down somewhere there were stronger threads of sympathy running between him and those two men, than between him and Guido or perhaps even his own brother?42

Georg struggles here to understand and define his relationship with Leo and Heinrich. His contradictory pondering about the possible intimacy between himself and his Jewish friends in comparison to his bond with his non-Jewish friend Guido or his own brother demonstrates how deeply the afternoon with Leo and Heinrich has affected him. The expression ‘innere Fäden’ (inner threads) seems to imply an almost fate-like relationship between himself and his Jewish friends, which refers back to Georg’s ‘Ahnung’ (idea) about the ‘geheimnisvolle Los’ (mysterious destiny) of the Jews and the consolidation of Jewishness as destiny.⁴³ Strikingly, Georg feels like his own destiny is intertwined with that of his Jewish friends. Thus, he seems to some extent to identify with them, which might at first seem curious, considering his privileged position. However, as Georg’s character has been identified as ‘impressionist’,⁴⁴ this feeling of connection is less surprising: the character traits of the impressionist type – ‘Nervosität, Reizabhängigkeit, Verantwortungsscheu und “Wurzellosigkeit”’⁴⁵ (nervousness, dependence on external stimuli, lack of a sense of responsibility, and rootlessness) – were said to stem from the Jewish influence on Viennese culture: ‘Zur Identifikation mit dem Juden lud die Fungibilität des “impressionistischen Menschen” geradezu ein’⁴⁶ (The fungibility of the ‘impressionist character’ lent itself perfectly to an identification with the Jew). In this way, Georg’s identification with his Jewish friends ironically has anti-Semitic foundations: it might well be his restlessness and unsteadiness which make him relate to those of this ‘people’, and with Heinrich in particular he shares the tendency of procrastination and the lack of discipline.47 An anti-Semitic reading of the book could thus understand Georg’s sensation of connectedness with the Jews as proof of the latter’s devastating influence: ‘Die “pathologischen” Züge des Jungen Wien führte man auf den jüdischen Einfluß zurück und erklärte Dekadenz zu einem “semitischen” Phänomen’ (The ‘pathological’ traits of Young Vienna were explained with the Jewish influence and the feelings of decadence were declared a ‘semitic’ phenomenon).⁴⁸

From the first page on, the lack of productivity is a recurring topic in the text: ‘Er hatte wieder ein halbes Jahr oder länger nichts Rechtes gearbeitet’ (WiF635) (He had done no real work for six months or more).⁴⁹ While he shares this tendency of procrastination with Heinrich, the inner bonds he feels between himself and his Jewish friends are less likely to have their origin in this shared struggle with productivity, but rather in Georg’s self-image as an artist, which also explains his general fascination with Jewish circles. It is not only the unequivocally negative stereotype of Jewishness that seems to play a part in Georg’s fascination and identification with the Jews as a group, but also the positive mystification of the Jew as ‘quintessential outsider’,⁵⁰ which for him, as an aspiring artist, holds a certain promise. Georg’s status as a nobleman-artist makes him a suspect of potential dilettantism, which is one of his sorest spots: ‘Georg […] erinnerte sich jetzt, daß ein Kritiker ihn nach dem Konzert […] als “dilettierenden Aristokraten” bezeichnet hatte’ (WiF743) (George […] now remembered that after the concert […] a critic had described him as an aristocratic dilettante).⁵¹ The connection he feels has less to do with himself, Leo, and Heinrich as individuals, than with the respective stereotypes of their social roles. At another point, Georg almost realizes this with regard to Heinrich: ‘Er für seinen Teil wußte, daß es weniger Freundschaft war, die ihn zu dem jungen Schriftsteller hinzog, als Neugier, einen seltsamen Menschen näher kennenzulernen; vielleicht auch das Interesse, in eine Welt hineinzuschauen, die ihm bisher ziemlich fremd geblieben war’ (WiF708) (He for his part knew that it was not so much friendship that attracted him to the young author, as the curiosity to get to know a strange man more intimately. Perhaps also the interest of looking into a world which had been more or less foreign to him).52

Heinrich’s world of Jewish intellectuals is not only interesting because it is somewhat foreign to Georg, it is of particular interest to Georg because it is emblematically intertwined with the world of art: not only because Jews were perceived as dominating the artistic and literary avant-gardes,⁵³ but also because of the outsider position of the Jew. Not only is this outsider position itself practically a prerequisite to be taken seriously as an artist, the stereotype of the artist and the stereotype of the Jew share the label of a predisposition to mental illness. Through its idealized stereotype, insanity is linked to higher creativity and genius. If the Jews are said to be more prone to ‘madness’, the mystification of the Jew as mad creative genius seems a short step away.

This complexity of the stereotype of the Jew with its contradictorily pejorative and idealizing connotations also explains the constant ambivalence Georg feels toward his Jewish friends: while his perception is highly influenced by the negative stereotypes of the Jew, other stereotypical images of the Jew also give reason for his fascination – and for something which in fact could be described as the envy of the norm. The verdict ‘aristocratic dilettante’ suggests that due to his privileged position, Georg’s art can only be an idle and entertaining pastime. Implicitly, we also recognize here the mystification of suffering as creative potential. This is why there might be a hidden form of jealousy lying in Georg’s ambivalent feelings towards the Jews around him and particularly towards Heinrich: their ascription to Judaism, even though it is not necessarily practised or even actively declared by them, seems to give them a kind of open credit as artists, which is assigned to them by birth in the same way as the suspicion of dilettantism is assigned to him as an aristocrat. Looking closely at Georg’s repeated feelings of resentment towards Heinrich, his own sense of being excluded from the Jewish community becomes clear:

Er ist in seiner Art genau so krank, wie sein Vater es war. Dabei kann man doch nicht sagen, daß er persönlich schlimme Erfahrungen gemacht hat. Und er hat mal behauptet, daß er sich mit niemandem zusammengehörig fühle! Es ist ja nicht wahr. Mit allen Juden fühlt er sich zusammengehörig, und mit dem letzten von ihnen noch immer enger als mit mir. (WiF833)

He is quite as morbid [ill, M.K.] as his father was. And at the same time one can’t say that he has been personally through bad times. And he has asserted on one occasion that he felt there was no one with whom he had anything in common. It is not a bit true. He feels he has something in common with all the Jews and he stands nearer to the meanest of them than he does to me.54

‘Schlimme Erfahrungen’ refers here to experiences of anti-Semitism, which in Heinrich’s father’s case destroyed his political career and caused a lapse into mental illness. Georg’s remark that Heinrich himself has not had any experience of this kind is crucial: while it is here a rather dismissive comment about Heinrich’s – in Georg’s view – neurotic fear of anti-Semitism,⁵⁵ it also suggests that Heinrich has not ‘earned’ his suffering through experience, but that is has been ‘given’ to him by his Jewish birth. This is obviously foremost a negative perception of Heinrich which reproduces the equally negative stereotype of the ‘mad Jew’. However, through the fact that Georg immediately moves on to Heinrich’s ties to other Jews to whom he will always feel closer than to Georg himself, we can detect the feeling of rejection and jealousy. This makes the passage quoted earlier, which speaks of the ‘innere Fäden’ between Georg and his Jewish friends, appear more like a wish than a description of their actual relationship.

In fact, this moment of putative connection to his Jewish friends is followed by one of the very few times where Georg actually comes close to consciously analyzing his relationships to other people as well as the internal and external factors by which these are determined. He goes on wondering about the intimacy with Heinrich and Leo that was just expressed:

Aber wenn es so war, hätte er das nicht diesen beiden Menschen heute nachmittag [sic] in irgendeinem Augenblick sagen müssen? Ihnen zurufen: vertraut mir doch, schließt mich nicht aus. Versucht es doch, mich für einen Freund zu halten!.… Und als er sich fragte, warum er das nicht getan und an ihrem Gespräch teilgenommen hatte, da ward er mit Verwunderung inne, daß er während dessen ganzer Dauer eine Art von Schuldbewußtsein nicht los geworden war, gerade so, als wäre auch er sein Leben lang von einer gewissen leichtfertigen und durch persönliche Erfahrung gar nicht gerechtfertigten Feindseligkeit gegen die ‘Fremden’, wie Leo sie selbst nannte, nicht frei gewesen und hätte so sein Teil zu dem Mißtrauen und dem Trotz beigetragen, mit dem so manche sich vor ihm verschlossen, denen entgegenzukommen er selbst Anlaß und Neigung fühlen mochte. (WiF730)

But if that was so, would he not have been bound to have taken some opportunity this afternoon to have said as much to those two men? to have appealed to them? ‘Just trust me, don’t shut me out. Just try to treat me as a friend …’ And as he asked himself why he had not done it, and why he had scarcely taken any part in the conversation, he realised with astonishment that during the whole time he had not been able to shake a kind of guilty consciousness of having not been free during his whole life from a certain hostility towards the foreigners, as Leo called them himself, a kind of wanton hostility which was certainly not justified by his own personal experience, and had thus contributed his own share to that distrust and defiance with which so many persons, whom he himself might have been glad to take an opportunity to approach, had shut themselves off from him.56

This is a neat description of the functioning of stereotypes. Georg realizes his internalized hostility against the Jews has nothing to do with his real contacts with Jewish individuals. The fact that he had not been conscious of that internalized hostility before also explains his incomprehension of Willy’s allegedly defensive position discussed earlier: he had not been aware of the implicit hostility and discrimination Jews have to face on an everyday basis in an increasingly anti-Semitic society. This recognition might of course have been a turning point in Georg’s personal development, but this is not the case. His inner turmoil comes to an end with the ‘dumpfen Einsicht, daß reine Beziehungen auch zwischen einzelnen und reinen Menschen in einer Atmosphäre von Torheit, Unrecht und Unaufrichtigkeit nicht gedeihen können’ (WiF730) (dull realisation that clean relations could not flourish even between clean men in an atmosphere of folly, injustice and disingenuousness).57 Critics have discussed the authorial voice behind this statement and wondered whether it can be understood as some sort of key message of the novel or if it represents only Georg’s individual perspective.⁵⁸ Obviously, it is characteristic for the entire narrative structure of the novel that the authorial narrative voice blends in with the characters’ perspective (mostly Georg’s) to an extent that it becomes almost completely indistinguishable. Georg’s insight can certainly be seen as a true acknowledgement of the power of stereotyping and the power structures represented by it; and as has already been shown here and will be discussed in more detail later on, this is demonstrated by the interactions between the characters in the novel. What makes this recognition so ‘dull’ is the resignation attached to it for Georg. He realizes that the ‘atmosphere’ in Vienna is stupid and unjust but all he longs for is ‘diesem Unbehagen zu entfliehen’ (WiF730) (to escape this feeling of depression), and so he seeks comfort by meeting his lover Anna. On this note, he immediately represses the new threatening view he has gained on the society he lives in – because acting on his new insight would mean a deeper engagement with his own position and the newly discovered feeling of guilt. The novel here highlights clearly the privilege of the protagonist to let his newly gained insight into the workings of unjust power structures simply slip away. This fits well with the way Georg often reacts exasperatedly when Jewish characters confront him with anti-Semitic stereotypes and discrimination. One may interpret this reaction as a disguised form of the guilt he discovers after the day with Leo and Heinrich. This guilt shows itself nevertheless in various encounters with Jewish acquaintances but is immediately transformed into a general feeling of renunciation and hostility, as demonstrated in the examples discussed in the next section.

Stereotypes and Performative Speech Acts

Let us return once more to Bertold Stauber’s sarcastic characterization of Georg as the positive stereotype of the norm. Of course, Bertold’s hostility derives from the fact that he himself has shown some interest in Georg’s lover Anna, but certainly also from his personal experience of being discriminated against and stereotyped as a Jew. One of the first things the reader learns about Bertold is the fact that he has resigned from his mandated position in the Viennese parliament because of anti-Semitic insults against him.

‘[…] Und was das kräftigste Argument einer gewissen Sorte von Staatserhaltern gegen meine Ausführungen war, können sie sich ja denken, Herr Baron.’

‘Nun?’ fragte Georg.

‘Jud, halt’s Maul’, erwiderte Bertold mit schmal gewordenen Lippen. (WiF657)

‘And of course you can imagine what the strongest argument was, which a certain type of conservatives used against my points.’

‘Well?’ queried George.

‘Hold your jaw, Jew’, answered Berthold with tightly compressed lips.59

The passage is dominated by the theme of speech and performance. Bertold’s own outrage shows in his tightly shut lips, which, in the context of the insulting order to ‘shut up’, appears like an aggressive mimicry of the harassment itself. The incident took place in the parliament after Bertold had made a critical public speech that outraged the nationalist-conservative members, who demonstrated their disapproval not by engaging in the actual argument but by insulting Bertold and reducing him to the stereotyped role of ‘the’ Jew. As Butler writes, ‘[t]o be injured by speech is to suffer a loss of context, that is, not to know where you are’.⁶⁰ This is precisely what Bertold experiences: the insults take him out of the context of the parliamentary discussion because they are not at all related to the content of his own speech but deny him his right to be heard out and taken seriously as a politician in the arena of political speech: ‘Exposed at the moment of such 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 speech may be no place’.⁶¹ The anti-Semitic insult sends Bertold off the political stage to an uncertain non-place outside of the community of speakers, assigning him the position of the ‘other’.

Despite the obvious humiliation, Bertold stresses, however, that the main reason for his resignation is not the insults but the sheer inauthenticity of the whole farce. After the debacle he met one of his strongest opponents, the paper salesman Jalaudek, who ‘innocently’ greeted him with the words: ‘Habe die Ehre, Herr Doktor, auch eine kleine Erfrischung gefällig?’ (WiF657) (Hallo, Doctor, won’t you have a drink with me?).62 The reality of politics appears as pure theatrical performance, as ‘Komödienspiel’ (WiF659) (comedy),⁶³ as Bertold puts it, where the contents of the debates do not matter. This implies the idea that the public and political performance does not bear upon the real everyday life of the members of society whom the members of parliament are supposed to represent. Jalaudek’s comment at the buffet is meant to be ‘off stage’ and indeed shows his indifference to the debated matters. He has played his part and feels no need to stay in character during his break at the buffet. This, however, exemplifies the gap between the insulting and insulted position. The injury caused by the insulting speech ‘on stage’ is real and therefore Bertold cannot shrug off his role in the same way as Jalaudek. Analogously to Ehrenberg’s example of the anti-Semitic insult on the Ringstraße as representative stage for society, the parliament is exactly this: the place of social representation, and if anti-Semitism is acceptable here it might just as well be so in everyday life.

The text addresses here the fate-like function of stereotypes: the insult ‘Jud, halt’s Maul!’ turns out to be performative not only in the sense of the theatrical quality it seems to have for the speakers, but also in the way it becomes a performative speech act that assigns a certain social ‘destiny’ to the one who has been typecast by the insult. The performative aspect is underlined when Bertold shows his outrage by imitating his aggressors: ‘“Ruhig, Jud! Halt’s Maul! Jud! Jud! Kusch!” fuhr Bertold fort und schien in Erinnerung zu schwelgen. Anna sah vor sich hin. Georg fand innerlich, es wäre nun genug. Ein kurzes, peinliches Schweigen entstand’ (WiF657) (‘Be quiet, Jew! Hold your jaw! Jew! Jew! Shut up!’ continued Berthold, who seemed to somewhat revel in the recollection. Anna looked straight in front of her. George thought that this was quite enough. There was a short, painful silence).⁶⁴ Bertold’s outburst is almost reminiscent of a compulsive repetition or acting out in which he re-lives the offending incident. Also his ‘schmal gewordene Lippen’ (tightly compressed lips) mentioned earlier, while they are certainly mainly a sign of his anger, appear as a form of mimicry, not to say a performative realization of the insulting demand, which culminates in Bertold’s final decision to give up his political career. What appeared to be mainly theatrics in the parliament thus turns out to have a real effect, which, interestingly and significantly, seems to be denied not only by the harassers like Jalaudek, but also by Georg and Anna.

The formulation ‘in Erinnerung zu schwelgen’ (revel in the recollection) is striking, of course, as it suggests a pleasant memory and appears misplaced in the context of the experience of discrimination. The narrative perspective seems here totally congruent with that of Georg: in his perception, Bertold must find a distorted pleasure by being singled out and insulted or at least by being able to tell the story of his discrimination. For both Georg and Anna, Bertold’s way of talking about his experience is uncomfortable because while they do not consider themselves as anti-Semites they still do not seem to be able to identify with him or to show him their solidarity. It is clear that they would prefer if he did not take the incident so seriously and at least did not dwell on the details. This is an evident reaction of the disguised feeling of guilt of which Georg will become aware after the discussion between Leo and Heinrich analyzed above. The embarrassing or embarrassed silence in the room appears like an ironic completion of Bertold’s re-enactment as it follows after the order to ‘shut up’ quoted earlier. In this way, they reinforce not only Bertold’s humiliation but also the negation of the reality of anti-Semitism that comes along with Jalaudek’s behaviour.

Anna’s and Georg’s reaction proves that the manner in which stereotypes are transported and dealt with in the political field is closely connected to social reality. The question is also for whom the silence is meant to be embarrassing: for Bertold, because he made Anna and Georg uncomfortable, or for the latter because they do not know how to react? Evidently, Anna and Georg do not take the situation as seriously as Bertold and in this way implicitly accept Jalaudek’s separation of public and private speech and the resulting performative aspect of the former. This of course doubles the shame of the discriminating experience and makes the moment embarrassing for him. However, the embarrassment might well be on the side of Georg and Anna, who silence their latent feeling of guilt with their refusal to take the incident seriously. When, after his day with Leo and Heinrich, Georg comes to the realization that he himself might be guilty of a certain Leichtfertigkeit (levity) towards anti-Semitic tendencies, it is surely because of situations like this one, when the insulted and marginalized Jew is confronted by indifference and mockery rather than sympathy and solidarity.

Bertold realizes their incongruent points of view when he notices Anna’s leiser Spott (gentle derision) (WiF657):

‘Sie haben ja wahrscheinlich recht, Fräulein Anna’, sagt er, ‘wenn Sie darüber lächeln, daß ich wegen dieses läppischen Abenteuers mein Mandat niedergelegt habe. Ein parlamentarisches Leben ohne Komödienspiel ist ja überhaupt nicht möglich. Ich hätte es bedenken und selber mitagieren, dem Kerl womöglich zutrinken sollen, der mich öffentlich beschimpft hat. Das wäre bequem, österreichisch – und vielleicht sogar das richtigste gewesen.’ (WiF659)

‘You are probably quite right, Fräulein Anna’, he said, ‘if you smile at my resigning my seat on account of that silly incident. A parliamentary life without its share of comedy is an absolute impossibility. I should have realised it, played up to it and taken the opportunity of drinking with the fellow who had publicly insulted me. It would have been convenient, Austrian – and possibly even the most correct course taken.’65

The reason why for Bertold the incident is indeed not as ‘läppisch’ (silly) as it might seem to Anna and Georg, and therefore why he has much more trouble in accepting the ‘script’ of the putative comedy, is quite obvious: the part he has to play as ‘the Jew’ is not only far more uncomfortable than theirs, it also hinders him from playing others such as that of member of parliament. That it is indeed the mechanisms of stereotype that are at work here is shown precisely in the gap between public and private speech. Stereotypes are related to social roles and social status: ‘Status refers to a position in society which entails a certain set of rights and duties. Role refers to the performance of those rights and duties, it is relational. Stereotype refers to both role and status at the same time, and the reference is perhaps always predominantly evaluative’.⁶⁶ The evaluative aspect of the stereotype of the Jew in the Vienna of Der Weg ins Freie (Road into the Open) is certainly pejorative. The insult ‘Jud, halt’s Maul’ (Hold your jaw, Jew) belongs to this stereotype and is, in a way, stereotypical in itself. The parliament is a symbolic space of representation and it is no coincidence that Bertold’s discrimination is to be experienced here. The verbal abuse reduces him to the status and social role of a Jew, does not allow him to be perceived as a complex individual and member of society who is not only Jewish but also a doctor, a member of parliament etc. This is why Jalaudek is able to address him in an innocently friendly way at the buffet: at this point, the representative function has been replaced by the individual encounter where the stereotypical reduction is, if not eliminated, at least weakened.

Stereotypes do not necessarily cease to function in people’s minds when they are proven wrong by personal experience. This can be explained through the function of stereotypes within the social order. A stereotype is, first of all, a cultural representation of a specific social grouping which in cultural analysis is often addressed and scrutinized in so-called ‘image of’ works. As Richard Dyer points out, these works usually have a political impulse as they spring ‘from the feeling that how social groups are treated in cultural representation is part and parcel of how they are treated in real life, that poverty, harassment, self-hate and discrimination […] are shored up and instituted by representation’.67 This is what the passage about Bertold’s harassment at the parliament discussion demonstrates: the appellation ‘Jud’ puts members of the group in question in an inferior position as the term ‘Jew’, at least in the context above, is already an insult in itself that is enough to silence the addressed person. The words ‘halt’s Maul’, which would be expected to be infelicitous on the representative stage of parliament, therefore belong to the stereotype ‘Jew’, an explicit articulation of what the term connotes: a Jew is someone who should not have the right to speak in public. If we consider the parliament as space of representation and speech in the most literal sense, as it is the place where the representatives of society get together to debate, we get back to Dyer’s remark on the link between cultural representations and their corresponding reality in everyday life. As we have seen, this link is being denied or at least blurred by and for the non-Jewish characters in the novel, while Bertold sees himself forced to draw the consequences.

It seems obvious that there is both a gap and link between the ‘image’ or stereotype on the representational level and the individual supposed to be represented by the image. The public speech act, in this case, the public insult, reinforces the cultural image, while the private speech act seeks to soften or qualify it. This qualification, however, works only for the subject outside the stereotyped grouping. For the latter, the gap can only be perceived as further insult because it not only takes away the possibility of a real argument and examination of the structures within parliament and society but also any option of defence for the insulted individual and his social grouping. For Gilman, there is a difference between a normal form of stereotyping ‘which all of us need to do to preserve our illusion of control over the world’ and a pathological form.⁶⁸ The latter is incapable of distinguishing the individual from the stereotyped class, while the former still realizes that there is such a distinction. One can easily see how here the two different forms of stereotyping defined by Gilman melt into each other: the insults against Bertold are already a real aggression against an individual, so the incident is obviously to be considered as the second, pathological form of stereotyping. Nevertheless, the aggressors still distinguish between the role the individual represents (the Jew in parliament) and the individual person (Dr Stauber). Georg is even more on the borderline as he, unlike Jalaudek, is not part of any anti-Semitic movement and foregathers with various Jews on a regular basis but still cannot help but apply internalized stereotypes onto his Jewish acquaintances. As this happens on an at best half-conscious level, it rarely affects his interactions with Jews directly and thus appears to remain unnoticed by the latter.

We, thus, have here again in some way a distinction between public (what Georg actually says or does) and private speech (what he thinks and feels). After the passage with Bertold, his father, old doctor Stauber, arrives as well. As it turns out that the three Jewish families most present in the novel, the Ehrenbergs, the Golowskis, and the Staubers, are all somehow related, Dr Stauber casually drops another Jewish stereotype: ‘Und übrigens […] weiß der Herr Baron gewiß, daß alle Juden miteinander verwandt sind’ (WiF661) (Anyway […] the Baron is bound to know that all Jews are related to each other).69 This remark hints at the stereotype of Jewish inbreeding that was held as one explanation for another stereotype, that is, the assumption of the Jewish precondition for diseases and impurity.⁷⁰ Georg’s initial reaction is annoyance, covered by a polite smile towards the older man:

Seiner Empfindung nach bestand durchaus keine Notwendigkeit, daß auch der alte Doktor Stauber ihm offizielle Mitteilung von seiner Zugehörigkeit zum Judentum machte. Er wußte es ja, und er nahm es ihm nicht übel. Er nahm es überhaupt keinem übel; aber warum fingen sie denn immer selbst davon zu reden an? Wo er auch hinkam, er begegnete nur Juden, die sich schämten, daß sie Juden waren, oder solchen, die darauf stolz waren und Angst hatten, man könnte glauben, sie schämten sich. (WiF661)

There was no necessity at all, in his view, for Doctor Stauber as well officially to communicate to him his membership of the Jewish community. He already knew it and bore him no grudge for it. He bore him no grudge at all for it [German original reads: he did not bear anybody any grudge for it, M.K.]; but why do they always begin to talk about it themselves? Wherever he went, he only met Jews who were ashamed of being Jews, or the type who were proud of it and were frightened of people thinking they were ashamed of it.⁷¹

Gillman has noted that here Georg moves on smoothly from the individual remark to its type and from there to the ‘logical next step, by typecasting not the remark but the individual who uttered it – hence the move from singular to plural […]’.72 Moreover, one has to stress that Stauber’s remark really is already a stereotype itself, an ironic quotation of an opinion commonly held by the increasingly anti-Semitic Viennese society. The effect is, however, lost on Georg, who, just like in the earlier passage with Bertold, reacts with defensive withdrawal. In both passages, there seems to be an underlying misunderstanding between the Jewish person and Georg, the non-Jew with the non-anti-Semitic (self-)image.⁷³ Both Staubers seem to trust Georg to be ‘on their side’ and thus include him in their outrage against or ironic dismissal of anti-Semitic stereotypes. Yet Georg does not feel included but rather the opposite: for him, as he is not directly affected by anti-Semitism himself, the repeated mentioning of it is annoying. From Georg’s point of view, Stauber’s mentioning of his Jewishness is as unnecessary (lacking in Notwendigkeit (necessity)) as Willy Eisler’s constant defensive position. This shows Georg’s at least initial unwillingness to empathize with his Jewish acquaintances. Not being an anti-Semite for him means above all an indifference towards the Jewish question. Thus, the ironic remark of old doctor Stauber triggers the exact opposite reaction in Georg to that intended: while he obviously wanted to build a common ground of discussion by signalling that he believed Georg to be unaffected by stereotypical thinking about Jews, Georg’s inner response is to stereotype him.⁷⁴ So while Georg does not show any explicit aggression towards Jews, his inner stereotyping does have a real effect because it allows him to stay detached from their problematic position within society. In this way, he does not have to think about a possible responsibility to position himself against anti-Semitic forces or to openly demonstrate his solidarity with the Jews. This again shows the floating distinction between Gilman’s two types of stereotyping and the ever-present danger of slipping into the so-called pathological form. The character of Georg as protagonist and reflector figure plays an important role in this context. His reactions to Bertold’s experience as well as to Dr Stauber’s remark seem to demonstrate an unclear position between Gilman’s two categories of stereotyping: since he does not consider himself an anti-Semite, he would never consciously agree to the insults uttered at the parliament, nor to the stereotype mentioned by Dr Stauber. However, in his renunciation of Bertold’s outrage and in his unspoken thoughts towards Dr Stauber lies a latent acceptance of anti-Semitism as an ordering structure of society. Throughout the novel, he continually slips into an internalized application of stereotypes towards Jews and shows more than once this inner acquiescence in anti-Semitic tendencies.

This also becomes clear when Leo, who is a military officer, kills a former superior, who used to harass him because of his Jewishness, in a duel. Georg feels sympathy for the dead man and finds excuses for his behaviour: ‘[Georg] nickte nur und dachte an den armen jungen Menschen, den Leo erschossen und der eigentlich gar nichts anderes gegen die Juden gehabt hatte, als daß sie ihm so zuwider gewesen waren, wie schließlich den meisten Menschen – und dessen Schuld im Grunde nur darin bestanden hatte, daß er an den Unrechten gekommen war’ (WiF936) ([Georg] nodded and thought of the poor young man whom Leo had shot, who as a matter of fact had had nothing else against the Jews except that he disliked [rather: felt repulsed by, M.K.] them just as much as most people did after all – and whose real fault had only been that he had tried the wrong man).75

One cannot but notice the unusual notion of guilt that Georg’s musing implies. This passage can count as a representative example of the functioning of the narrative perspective in the novel. While the narrator indeed renders only Georg’s thoughts without any comment, there still seems to be a latent gap between Georg’s point of view and the narrative perspective which can be understood as a hint for the reader not to just accept the former as authorized. It seems striking that Georg should find it so natural to perceive Jews as repulsive while he himself appears extremely attracted by the company of his Jewish friends, particularly Leo. The choice of the word ‘zuwider’ (repulsive) again mocks the statement of the first subordinate clause, that Leo’s antagonist ‘had nothing more against the Jews but’, after which one would expect rather a minor annoyance than revulsion. These discontinuities are warnings for the reader not to take over Georg’s perspective without questioning.

Recognitions and Repetitions

The male gender of the Jew seems to be essential for the functioning of the stereotype ‘Jew’.⁷⁶ This is the case because the norm, which is stabilized by the stereotype of the Jew, is a norm of masculinity. The position of the Jew seems thus to be similar to that of Woman. In Der Weg ins Freie (Road into the Open), the two supposedly isolated storylines, Georg’s relationship to Anna and the descriptions of Jewish life, reflect upon this similar function through being connected by the non-Jewish male subject, Georg. After decades of discussions in Schnitzler scholarship about the coherence in the novel, more recent critics seem to tend to abandon earlier verdicts of ‘formlessness’ and incoherence. A convincing example is the interpretation by John Neubauer who argues that ‘the novel presents both gender and Jewishness as problems of identity for characters who are well into the third decade of their lives’.77 Through the protagonist, the novel creates a field of tension between the heterosexual and the homosocial and the latter is evidently dominated by Georg’s relationship to Jewish men.⁷⁸ Georg’s interaction with both topics, Jewishness (through his Jewish friends) and femininity (his relationship to Anna), seems to have a similar function: ‘Indeed, one of the key elements linking the love story to the Jewish Question is that Georg is simultaneously but differently attracted to Anna Rosner on the one hand and to the Jewish intellectuals and writers Bermann, Nürnberger and Golowski on the other’.⁷⁹

Anna’s storyline represents in exemplary form how stereotypes as cultural narratives take on the form of destiny in the sense that they elicit and engender a repetitive structure of performances which then create social realities. At the same time the text demonstrates that the fate-like character of these cultural narratives does not necessarily mean the fulfillment of the ‘promise’ some of them entail. It is striking how often the notion ‘bestimmt’ is used in combination with Anna. While Leo’s prophecy is that Anna is ‘bestimmt, im Bürgerlichen zu enden’ (WiF718) (destined to end her days in respectable middle-class life),⁸⁰ Heinrich stresses that she is ‘zur Mutterschaft bestimmt’ (WiF888) (She really seems to be one of the few women who are made to be mothers).⁸¹ No character in the novel draws more comments about her alleged ‘destiny’ than Anna, which is significantly explained by virtue of her physiognomy that apparently corresponds to the stereotypical image of motherly femininity: ‘[e]s gibt Frauen, die sehr häßlich werden in diesem Zustand [i.e. pregnancy] … Sie nicht, nein, sie nicht … Immer hatte sie so etwas Mütterliches in ihrem Aussehen’ (WiF752) (There are women who grow very ugly in that condition … but not she, no, not she … There was always a certain touch of the mother in her appearance).82 The strong impact of this link between stereotypical image, physiognomic trait, and the perception of a person becomes clear when the cultural narratives attached to the stereotype take on an almost magical quality that denies the possibility of deviance from them. When Georg is confronted with Anna’s not yet fully confirmed pregnancy, he finds it hard to believe: ‘Wie eine Beruhigung fiel ihm jene Äußerung Leo Golowskis ein, daß Anna bestimmt wäre im Bürgerlichen zu enden. Wahrhaftig es konnte nicht in der “Linie ihres Schicksals” liegen, von einem Liebhaber ein Kind zu bekommen’ (WiF738) (He felt almost reassured as there came into his mind that remark of Leo Goowski’s that Anna was destined to end her days in respectable middle-class life. Having a child by a lover really could not be part of her fate line).⁸³ Anna herself also seems to be convinced by the necessary completion of her ‘narrative’ and is willing to accept her ‘fate’ on the basis of the outlook of a ‘happy ending’ attached to it: ‘mit dem untrüglichen Gefühl, daß es einen Menschen auf der Welt gab, der aus ihr machen konnte, was ihm beliebte; mit dem festen Entschluß, alle Seligkeit und alles Leid hinzunehmen, das ihr bevorstehen mochte; und mit einer leisen Hoffnung, schöner als alle, die ihr je erschienen waren, auf ein beständiges und ruhevolles Glück’ (WiF711) (She had for the first time in her life the infallible feeling that there was a man in the world who could do anything he liked with her. Her mind was firmly made up to take all the happiness or all the sorrow that might lie in front of her, and she had a gentle hope, more beautiful than all her dreams of the past, of a serene and abiding happiness).⁸⁴

Her willingness to sacrifice herself for Georg not only corresponds to her Catholic background,⁸⁵ but is also an expression of her acceptance and internalization of her social ‘destiny’ as woman and mother in the bourgeois order. At the same time, a strong stereotypical narrative is at work here: the ‘Hoffnung, schöner als alle, die ihr je erschienen waren’ (hope, more beautiful than all her dreams of the past) stems from the fairytale of the prince, who marries the girl who has proven her ethical impeccability by enduring various strokes of fate. The danger of this narrative and its possible impact on women’s lives are in fact mentioned by Bertold Stauber with regard to the young socialist Therese Golowski: while he thinks her capable of doing great things for the Socialist Party, he fears she could go off course: ‘wenn sie nicht aus ihrer Bahn gerissen wird’ (WiF954) (if she isn’t torn away from her career [rather: path, track, M.K.]).86 Interestingly, this formulation evokes also the idea of a predestined path, but admits the possibility of going awry and losing it. When asked what could make Therese lose her path, Bertold replies: ‘entweder sie redet sich einmal um den Kopf […] [o]der sie heiratet einen Baron’ (WiF656) (she will either talk her head off one fine day […] [o]r she’ll marry a Baron),⁸⁷ and appeases the easily offended Georg: ‘Daß ich Baron sagte, war natürlich ein Spaß. Setzen wir statt Baron Prinz, so wird die Sache klarer’ (WiF656) (I only said ‘Baron’ for a joke, of course. Substitute Prince for Baron and I make my meaning clearer).⁸⁸ And indeed, when Georg’s and Anna’s relationship comes to an end, he wonders, ‘Wer weiß, ob ich sie nicht aus ihrer Bahn gerissen habe’ (WiF954) (Who knows, if I have not spoilt her life [rather: thrown her off her track, M.K.]),⁸⁹ thus repeating the very same formulation Bertold used. In this way, what will happen between Anna and Georg is already prefigured in Bertold’s comment, which also points to the serial quality of their experience. Moreover, the choice of expression ‘Bahn’ implies the assumption of a predetermined individual destiny. The use of train metaphors of destiny is a recurring element in Schnitzler’s text to which I will return in the next chapters.

Anna’s hope of becoming a singer has been replaced by this other, most beautiful hope, which of course means a possible marriage with Georg. This might be understood as confirmation of Leo’s characterization of Anna, that she is ‘dazu bestimmt, im Bürgerlichen zu enden’, but only if ‘bestimmt’ means here rather ‘determined’ than ‘destined’. It is the promising narrative that any suffering will be rewarded with a prize (the prince), which makes it possible for her to conceal the fact that her love affair with Georg is condemned in the moral standards of the Catholic and bourgeois setting of which she considers herself part. She plays the role of the bourgeois house-wife and mother so convincingly even to herself (‘Anna bedankte sich, als wäre sie nicht nur hier in der Villa Hausfrau, sondern innerhalb dieser ganzen, abendlich-stillen Welt’ (WiF849) (Anna thanked him with an air which indicated that she was not merely the hostess of the country house but of the whole world itself within the evening calm)⁹⁰ that she does not recognize the irony when she acts dismissively towards the lovers of Georg’s friends, Guido Schönstein and Heinrich. ‘Ich bin keine Rattenmamsell’ (WiF733) (I am not a Rattenmamsell),⁹¹ stresses Anna, referring to Guido’s lover who is said to be intellectually superior to the latter and makes him read literature and philosophy, which, however, seems to have no effect on him other than using Ibsen’s characters as nicknames for her. Georg’s reply is as deflecting as it is empty: ‘Das trifft mich nicht, liebes Kind, ich unterscheide mich auch in mancher Beziehung von Guido’ (WiF733) (That doesn’t apply to me, my dear child. There are many points of difference between Guido and me).92 The question is, however, in what ways are Georg and Anna different from Guido and his lover? Both couples consist of a young noble man and a socially inferior woman and neither man has so far shown any intention to marry his mistress. The same can be said for Heinrich’s actress who kills herself in the end and for whom Anna feels no sympathy at all: ‘Georg fühlte, daß ihre Güte hier völlig versagte. Er sah Widerwillen aus ihrer Seele fließen, nicht lau wie von einem Wesen zum andern hin, sondern stark und tief, wie ein Strom des Hasses von Welt zu Welt’ (WiF899) (George felt that her kindness completely failed here. He saw a loathing flowing out of her soul, not tepidly, as though from one person to another, but strong and deep like a stream of hate from world to world).⁹³ Considering that Anna has just lost her baby at this point, it may not be surprising that she has not much compassion left for other people’s suffering, but her renunciation seems to stem from more fundamental roots. Georg’s perception is unusually attentive here, which might be interpreted as the narrator’s voice behind Georg’s inner musing. Either way, the formulation ‘von Welt zu Welt’ describes the social chasm between the two women: Anna’s Catholic middle-class background forbids her from identifying and sympathizing with Heinrich’s lover from the lower artistic milieu.

Instead of solidarity, Anna thus feels the need to distance herself from the women who actually have a lot in common with her in terms of being utterly dependent on their male, socially superior lovers. By highlighting the parallels between Anna and Heinrich’s lover, the text both re-invokes and undermines the stereotypical dichotomy of the female as sinner and saint, mother and prostitute. It is no coincidence that these labels are assigned to the two women above all by the male friends of their lovers. While Georg’s friends feel entitled to make judgements on Anna’s ‘destined path’ particularly on the basis of her motherly appearance, Georg thinks himself able to see at first sight that Heinrich’s actress is a ‘fallen woman’: ‘So sehen Wesen nicht aus […], die dazu bestimmt sind, nur einem zu gehören’ (WiF836) (This is not how persons [rather: creatures, M.K.] look […] who are fated to belong only to one man, [italics in original]).94 Again, physiognomy is used to draw conclusions about a person’s character and with that about their destiny.

The parallelism between Heinrich’s and Georg’s ‘love stories’ reveals both women as the two sides of the same coin – the sinner and the saint, the split imagery of the feminine par excellence. In contrast to Heinrich’s ‘sinner’, Georg feels the need to present Anna as a flawless angel after her miscarriage (‘Er hatte das Bedürfnis, sie als vollkommenen Engel darzustellen’ (WiF888) (He felt the need of describing her as a perfect angel).⁹⁵ Darstellen (describing/representing) is here a crucial term: the text demonstrates how the cultural narrative of sinner and saint not only determines the male perception of the female characters, but also how much this typecasting perception functions as an assignment of social roles: Heinrich’s lover is already an actress, Anna is not (although her attempted singing career might put her also in the periphery of the artistic milieu), but both play the parts that are laid out for them with a tragic consistency and perfection. Stereotypes, as Dyer remarks, ‘always carry within their very representation an implicit narrative’.⁹⁶ The early death of the fallen woman is certainly one of those narratives. The death of Heinrich’s actress can be understood as the logical result of her role in the story, which de-individualizes her suicide considerably. This coincides with Nürnberger’s suspicion about the woman’s suicidal motives: ‘Warum sie sich umgebracht hat, können wir alle nicht wissen, und vielleicht hat die Arme es selbst auch nicht gewußt’ (WiF931f.) (None of us can know why she killed herself, and perhaps the poor girl herself didn’t know either).⁹⁷ This suggests the possibility that the actress did not make the independent and rational decision to kill herself but rather acted out of a spontaneous feeling, perhaps caused by the influence of cultural representations – stereotypes – that determined her self-perception.

The fictional quality of her death is underscored by another mirroring effect in the novel: the story of Nürnberger’s sister, which Georg keeps mixing up with that of Heinrich’s lover (see WiF834). Nürnberger’s sister used to be an actress who deluded herself about her career, getting lost in an imaginary world of glamour, while in reality she was too lacking in talent and looks to be really successful. It is only when she became really sick that, according to Nürnberger’s memories, she unleashed a hitherto hidden talent:⁹⁸ ‘Und das allersonderbarste war, wie in den letzten Wochen ihres Lebens das Talent, dem sie ihre ganze Existenz hingeopfert, ohne es wirklich zu besitzen, geheimnisvoll dämonisch zum Vorschein kam’ (WiF772) (And the strangest touch of all was the way in which, in the last weeks of her life, that talent to which she had sacrificed her whole existence without ever really possessing it manifested itself with diabolic uncanniness).99 While Nürnberger concedes that his memory might play a trick on him here, Georg insists on the truthfulness of his perception, because he likes the ending of the story: ‘“Warum denn?” fragte Georg, dem dieser Abschluss so gut gefiel, daß er sich ihn nicht verderben lassen wollte’ (WiF772) (‘But why’, asked George, who was so pleased with this finale that he did not want to have it spoilt).¹⁰⁰ The fictional quality of the story derives from the stereotype within: the fallen woman who regains some of her dignity and perhaps atonement through a tragic death. That Georg mixes up the fates of Nürnberger’s sister and Heinrich’s mistress even before the latter commits suicide points up the typological quality of their characters and Georg’s expectations and perceptions that are determined by the cultural narrative inherent to stereotypes.¹⁰¹ Thus, the actress’s suicide could be understood as one last performance with which she completes the role she is expected to play.

While Anna does not have to redeem herself in death, as she is Georg’s motherly angel, her death would be the last logical step in her sacrificial function. Significantly, Georg imagines her death twice. The first time is during the later stages of her pregnancy: ‘Plötzlich, er wußte nicht, woher der Gedanke ihm kam, fuhr es ihm durch den Sinn: Wenn Anna stirbt!….Wenn das Kind ihr Tod wäre! Er erschrak aufs tiefste, als hätte er mit dem Gedanken eine Schuld auf sich geladen’ (WiF846) (Suddenly, he did not know where the thought came from, the idea ran through his mind: ‘Supposing Anna dies … Supposing the child were her death …’ He felt deeply shocked, as though he had committed a crime by the very thought).¹⁰² Georg’s feeling of guilt derives from the wishful quality of his imagination of Anna’s death. This wish is obviously not articulated on a conscious level but corresponds to the role of the ‘saintly, self-sacrificing […] vessel’¹⁰³ he unconsciously expects her to play. Her death would free him from the modicum of accountability he might feel towards her, it would save him from the guilt of abandoning her but guarantee him the freedom and lack of commitment he seeks.104 He would have been able to benefit from her complementary effect on him without binding himself to her and without being responsible for her misery. The second time Georg imagines Anna’s death – once more marked by the extremity of Erschrecken (fright) – is when she suffers from the painful hours of labour, with the unborn child’s life hanging in the balance: ‘Und jetzt liegt sie da unten und stirbt … Er erschrak heftig. Er hatte denken wollen … sie liegt in den Wehen, und auf die Lippen hatte sich gleichsam gestohlen: sie stirbt’ (WiF872) (and now she lies down there dying … He gave a violent start. He had meant to say mentally … ‘She is lying in labour’, and the words ‘lies dying’ had as it were stolen their way on to his lips).¹⁰⁵ Schnitzler’s novel breaks the stereotypical pattern, however, by not letting Anna die but having her lose the child. Georg therefore does not escape his responsibility for leaving her on his own account. Georg even explicitly comments on this incongruence with the unconsciously expected pattern: ‘Und wenn Anna heute dahingegangen wäre, in der Stunde, da sie einem neuen Wesen das Leben gab, sie hätte gleichsam ihr Los erfüllt und ihr Ende hätte seinen grauenvollen, aber tiefen Sinn gehabt’ (WiF877) (And even if Anna had passed away to-day [sic], in the hour when she gave life to a new being, she would as it were have fulfilled her lot and her end would have had its terrible but none the less deep significance).¹⁰⁶ Here, the function of the stereotype as destiny is made explicit.¹⁰⁷ Losing the baby seems equivalent to losing her maternal function for Georg, and it certainly erases the absolute necessity for Anna to get married, which of course may ease some of Georg’s feeling of responsibility towards her. The still-birth can thus be seen as Anna’s last – even if unintentional – sacrifice for Georg that leads him to his Weg ins Freie. Like Heinrich’s actress and Nürnberger’s sister, she completes the part that has been laid out for her.

These parallels between Anna, Heinrich’s mistress, and Nürnberger’s sister are part of the iterative structure in the narrative, which brings about an almost uncanny effect of repetition compulsion. While basically all characters in the novel are striving in one form or another for a certain kind of self-realization and originality of experience, the text undermines this quest for individuality through various mirroring structures, inter-textual references, and stereotypical images which render the characters’ hope to fulfil their ‘destiny’ both ironic and uncanny: uncanny, because the structure of repetition has the effect of the return of the ‘Altbekannte, Längstvertraute’ (that which has been known and familiar for a long time)108 which had been repressed. Indeed, in order to maintain their idea of individuality and originality, the characters have to deny their Doppelgänger-like relationships to others (as with Anna, when she stresses ‘Ich bin keine Rattenmamsell’) and the influence that cultural narratives have on their perception.

While trying to secure their own sense of selfhood, the characters, and first of all Georg, become lost in an endless series of repetitions and mirror images. This is exemplarily exposed in a very short passage in the last chapter. After saying goodbye to Heinrich and Nürnberger, Georg is struck by an imaginary picture as if from one of his dreams:

Vor Georg erschien ein Bild, das er so oder so ähnlich irgendeinmal in einem Traum gesehen zu haben glaubte. Die zwei [Heinrich and Nürnberger] saßen sich gegenüber; jeder hielt dem anderen einen Spiegel vor, darin sah der andere sich selbst mit einem Spiegel in der Hand und so fort in die Unendlichkeit. Kannte da einer noch den anderen, kannte einer noch sich selbst? Georg wurde schwindelig zumute. Dann dachte er an Anna. (WiF934)

A scene which he thought he had seen some time or other in a dream came into George’s mind. The two sat opposite each other, each held a mirror in front of the other. The other saw himself in it with the mirror in his hands, and so on to infinity; but did either of them really know the other, did either of them really know himself? George’s mind became dizzy. Then he thought of Anna.¹⁰⁹

The image obviously refers to the figure of speech, ‘jemandem den Spiegel vorhalten’ (to hold up a mirror to someone). Nürnberger and Heinrich hold a mirror up to each other but since they do it simultaneously the effect of self-recognition becomes lost in a dizzying line of infinite reflection images. The fact that Georg thinks he has seen the twin image of Heinrich and Nürnberger in a dream may allow us to suspect the possibility of displacement. While Nürnberger and Heinrich certainly share a few similarities – they are both Jewish writers who do not consider themselves as mainly Jewish but above all Austrian – the thematic and narrative structure of the novel suggests a stronger parallelism between Heinrich and Georg himself. With the mirror motif, Georg’s own position as the novel’s ‘reflector figure’ comes into view. Gillman has pointed out that in contrast to the opinion of other critics,110 Georg is not merely an indifferent filter but rather ‘circulates within the Jewish world, observes the Jews, and for a time, becomes a cipher or figure for the Jewish experience’.¹¹¹ While Gillman does not use the term reflector figure, she refers nevertheless to Georg’s specular function when she quotes Heinrich’s comment on Georg’s feeling of guilt towards Anna and their stillborn child: ‘Nie in Ihrem Leben wäre Ihnen etwas derartiges eingefallen, wenn Sie nicht mit einem Subjekt meiner Art verkehrten und es nicht zuweilen Ihre Art wäre, nicht Ihre Gedanken zu denken, sondern die von Menschen, die stärker – oder auch schwächer sind als Sie’ (WiF957) (An idea of that kind [i.e. feeling of guilt] would never have occurred to you your whole life long if you hadn’t been intimate with a person of my type, and if it hadn’t been your way sometimes not to think your own thoughts but those of men who were stronger – or even weaker than you are).¹¹² According to Gillman, the notion of Verkehr (interaction) ‘creates the desire to emulate the other’, which ‘represents an enlightened reversal of the one-sided mimicry that is Jewish acculturation’.¹¹³

It seems hard to decide whether Heinrich’s evaluation is accurate and Georg’s feeling of guilt is indeed a mimicry of the behaviour and thinking patterns he has observed in his Jewish friends, or whether it belongs to the characteristic properties assigned to Jewishness, which makes Georg feel connected to his Jewish acquaintances, particularly Heinrich. Both are confronted with a case of death they feel indirectly responsible for – Heinrich for the suicide of his mistress and Georg for the death of his stillborn son – but they both are and were nevertheless unwilling to draw any consequences from this feeling of guilt except for the occasional touch of melancholia. Thus, after all, it is not only the feeling of guilt that Heinrich and Georg both share,114 but rather also the absolute refusal to take over responsibility, which is – under the label Verantwortungsscheu (avoidance of responsibility) – one of the ‘symptoms’ of both the so-called ‘impressionist character’ and of stereotypical Jewishness 217).¹¹⁵ When Heinrich then refuses to accept Georg’s feeling of guilt as genuine and ascribes it to the influence imposed by ‘einem Subjekt meiner Art’ (WiF957) (a person of my type),¹¹⁶ he in turn replicates the anti-Semitic stereotype of the decadent Jung Wien (Young Vienna) as an indicatively Jewish phenomenon. At the same time, with regard to Georg’s possible envy of the idealized Jewish outsider position as a prerequisite of artistic seriousness, Heinrich’s comment might be accurate in the sense that Georg ‘performs’ the feeling of guilt, maybe half-consciously to gain more artistic ‘depth’. This aspect of ‘Seelenschmerz’ as ‘creative accelerator’ is mentioned by Nürnberger, when he refers to Heinrich’s suffering after the death of his mistress:

Es rührt wohl daher, daß jeder Seelenschmerz irgendwie unserer Eitelkeit schmeichelt, was man von einem Typhus oder einem Magenkatarrh nicht behaupten kann. Und beim Künstler kommt vielleicht dazu, daß aus einem Magenkatarrh absolut nichts zu holen ist […] aus Seelenschmerzen hingegen alles, was man nur will, vom lyrischen Gedichte bis zu philosophischen Werken. (WiF931)

It comes no doubt from the fact that every emotional pain flatters our vanity somehow or other, and that you can’t say the same thing about an attack of typhoid or a catarrh in the stomach. Then there is this additional point about artistic people, for while a catarrh of the stomach provides positively no copy at all […] you can get anything you jolly well like out of your emotional pains, from lyric poems down to works on philosophy.¹¹⁷

Heinrich’s assumption that Georg’s feeling of guilt derives from his own influence on Georg might thus be an apt description in the sense that Georg is unconsciously trying to ‘exploit’ the inner turmoil he experiences due to the stillbirth of his child as a mode of self-fashioning which would give him more artistic credibility.

Heinrich’s habit of speaking his mind quite bluntly reveals a kind of selfishness that Georg must recognize in himself. When Heinrich tells him openly about his hostile feelings towards the mother of his deceased lover, for example (‘Man haßt doch niemanden mehr als jemand Gleichgültigen, der einem Mitleid abfordert’ (WiF943) (There is no one one hates more than someone who is quite indifferent to you and requires your sympathy),118 and his other experiences linked to the funeral of his lover, Georg shudders: ‘Georg empfand ein leises Grauen’ (WiF943) (George felt a slight horror).¹¹⁹ Akin to the Erschrecken (fright) in self-encounter noted before, this Grauen (horror), which appears with great frequency in Schnitzler’s writings to describe a feeling of horror and uncanniness, marks a moment in which Georg is reminded of the ‘längst Bekannte’ (what has been known for a long time) of his own story.¹²⁰ By recognizing himself in Heinrich’s expression of selfishness, he is not only reminded of his own ethically questionable behaviour and his feelings of annoyance towards her family (‘Nur irgendetwas störte ihn, ohne daß er gleich wußte, was es wäre. Ach ja, … der Besuch in der Paulanergasse, die trübseligen Räume, der kranke Vater, die verletzte Mutter’ (WiF927) (Only something troubled him without his immediately knowing what it was … Oh yes, the visit in the Paulanergasse, the depressing rooms, the ailing father, the aggrieved mother),¹²¹ but also of the stereotypical quality of his actions, which are mirrored in Heinrich’s story and in various others.¹²²

If we go back to the mirror image of Nürnberger and Heinrich, another reading of the passage seems possible: the two mirrors that keep throwing back and forth the images of both writers in an endless line of mise en abyme could be understood as reference to Georg himself, and in fact to his specifically aesthetic function as literary character and protagonist. The passage is striking in its poetic language and emblematic quality: it is one of several moments in the novel where the ‘projection’ of an image interrupts the flow of narrative and plot in a way that is reminiscent of Romantic writers.123 Particularly, the way in which it just appears in front of his eyes seems to be taken straight out of one of the narratives by E. T. A. Hoffmann, in which the motif of the suddenly appearing image occurs repeatedly.¹²⁴ Moreover, the endless series of mirror images brings to mind Friedrich Schlegel’s definition of the function of Romantic poetry:

Nur sie [Romantic poetry] kann gleich dem Epos ein Spiegel der ganzen umgebenden Welt, ein Bild des Zeitalters werden. Und doch kann auch sie am meisten zwischen dem Dargestellten und dem Darstellenden […] auf den Flügeln der poetischen Reflexion in der Mitte schweben, diese Reflexion immer wieder potenzieren und wie in einer endlosen Reihe von Spiegeln vervielfachen.¹²⁵

Only Romantic poetry can, like the epos, become a mirror of the entire world by which it is surrounded, an image of the age. And yet it can, more than any other form of writing, float on the wings of poetic reflexion in the middle between the object represented and he who represents; it can potentiate this reflexion time and again and multiply it like an endless series of mirrors.

The fact that both men in Georg’s dream image are literary writers, and that Georg has just witnessed a discussion between them regarding the functions of literature when the image occurs to him, makes it plausible to read it as a metafictional reflexion. Schlegel’s remark on the self-reflective function of literature would thus indeed fit here: while literature should aim at representing the world, it is first and foremost able to mirror itself, which is nevertheless more than just a poetological reflection but a reflection on what it means to know oneself.¹²⁶ This, however, can never be fully achieved: ‘Schlegels Vergleich dieser Selbstreflexion mit einem sich spiegelnden Spiegel weist zugleich darauf hin, dass die Suche der Literatur nach sich selbst nie zu Ende kommen kann. Der Versuch, über sich selbst zu wissen, bleibt notwendig eine Aufgabe, ein Projekt’ (Schlegel’s comparison between this self-reflection and a mirror that mirrors itself shows that literature’s search for itself can never come to an end. The attempt to know about oneself necessarily has to remain a project).127

It is this impossibility of completion that is expressed in Georg’s oneiric image and in his resulting feeling of dizziness: ‘Kannte da einer noch den anderen, kannte da einer noch sich selbst?’ (WiF934) (but did either of them really know the other, did either of them really know himself?)¹²⁸ This reflection of (self-)recognition is again linked to the discussion between Heinrich and Nürnberger on the possibility of an objective stance in literature, in which the latter complains about Heinrich’s attempt at being ‘fair’ when writing his play:

In solch einem Stück, das eine Zeitfrage behandelt, oder gar mehrere, wie es Ihre Absicht war, werden Sie mit Objektivität nie etwas erreichen. Das Publikum im Theater verlangt, daß die Themen, die der Dichter anschlägt, auch erledigt werden, oder daß wenigstens eine Täuschung dieser Art erweckt werde. Denn natürlich gibt es nie und nimmer eine wirkliche Erledigung. Und scheinbar erledigen kann eben nur einer, der den Mut oder die Einfalt oder das Temperament hat, Partei zu ergreifen. Sie werden schon drauf kommen, lieber Heinrich, daß es mit Gerechtigkeit im Drama nicht geht. (WiF929)

In a piece like that, which deals with a question of the day, or indeed several questions, as you really intended, you’ll never do any good with a purely objective treatment. The theatre public demands that the subjects tackled by the author should be definitely settled, or that at any rate some illusion of that kind should be created. For of course there never is a real solution, and an apparent solution can only be made by a man who has the courage or the simplicity or the temperament to take sides. You’ll soon appreciate the fact, my dear Heinrich, that fairness is no good in the drama.¹²⁹

To take up a position is here understood merely as a strategic, and almost aesthetic, move to cover up the impossibility of objective representation. Heinrich, in turn, rejects Nürnberger’s criticism: ‘Ich stehe auch nicht über den Parteien, sondern bin gewissermaßen bei allen oder gegen alle. Ich hab’ nicht die göttliche Gerechtigkeit, sondern die dialektische’ (WiF929) (I do not stand above parties either, but I belong to them all in a kind of way, or am against them all. I have not got the divine but the dialectical fairness).130 With this remark, Heinrich suggests that his refusal to take up a position in his play, to write in an, as it were, programmatic way, is not at all an attempt at coming to an objective mode of representation. The expression ‘dialectic justice’ implies precisely the never-ending chain of reflections expressed in Schlegel’s fragment as well as in Georg’s ‘dream image’, and refuses any attempt at the kind of Erledigung (completion) Nürnberger is requesting. Rather, it sounds like Heinrich is highlighting the inability to reach a point of completion and making of this a central aspect of his writing. This corresponds to the concept of Romantic irony as the knowledge of the impossibility of giving an adequate representation of the world and its infinite connectedness: ‘So wird Ironie die latente Sprachhaltung des Endlichen, der vom Unendlichen reden will’ (In this way, irony becomes the attitude for the man, who is finite, but wants to speak of infinity).¹³¹ This relativist (or maybe resigned) position in Romantic irony is expressed through meta-poetic reflections in the text, which make the reader aware of its own constructedness and fictional quality. By letting Heinrich and Nürnberger have this conversation, Schnitzler’s text does precisely that, reminding readers of the aesthetic and fictional quality of what they are reading, which produces the effect of a mise en abyme and thus potentially a similarly endless mirror effect to that described in Georg’s ‘dream image’. We are reading a literary text in which the characters are discussing a literary text which is explicitly not erledigt (completed), but dialectically structured, which makes it possible to assume that it might contain a similar self-referential scene, creating a virtually endless chain of ‘mirror images’.

Again, very much like in the passage in which Leo and Heinrich discuss ‘the Jewish question’, Georg is here merely a witness, an observer and listener, and not an active participant in the discussion. He is the medium through which the reader gets access to the discussions precisely without being confronted with a predominant position, because Georg does not have one. His function is to receive passively, rather than produce, as he realizes himself towards the end of the novel with regard to his art:

[N]icht schöpferische Arbeit, – die Atmosphäre seiner Kunst allein war es, die ihm zum Dasein nötig war; kein Verdammter war er wie Heinrich, den es immer trieb, zu fassen, zu formen, zu bewahren, und dem die Welt in Stücke zerfiel, wenn sie seiner gestaltenden Hand entgleiten wollte. (WiF921)

[I]t was not creative work – it was simply the atmosphere of his art which was necessary to his existence. He was not one of the damned, like Heinrich, who always felt driven to catch hold of things, to mould them, to preserve them, and who found his world fall to pieces whenever it tried to escape from his creative hand.132

In this, Georg resembles very much the artist figure in Hoffmann’s writings, as he is the one who ‘receives’ images, as if outside of his control.¹³³ Indeed, Georg has a few moments when images like that of the endless mirror sequence between Heinrich and Nürnberger appear without his active volition in front of his eyes.¹³⁴ However, he is unable to conjure up any image when he explicitly tries to do so as he visits again the house in which Anna gave birth to their dead child. He almost expects to see a ‘ghost’ of his former self on the balcony: ‘Der Georg dieses Sommers, der dort gewohnt hatte? Dumme Einfälle. Der Balkon blieb leer, das Haus war stumm, und der Garten schlummerte tief. Enttäuscht wandte Georg sich ab’ (WiF954) (the George of this summer who had lived up there. Silly fancies. The balcony remained empty, the house was silent and the garden was deep asleep. George turned away disappointed).¹³⁵

Georg’s failed attempt at receiving an image – which in this case appears like the hope for a sign for the future or an explanation for what has happened – highlights his passivity. Georg is a medium, not a producer, nor an active analyst. Through him, the reader is indeed presented with a picture that brings together different elements, ‘Zeitfragen’ (questions of the day) and ‘ewige Probleme […]: Tod und Liebe’ (WiF930) (eternal problems, death and love).136 However, Georg’s perspective does not offer a synthesis of these elements, except for the aesthetic one, the combination of them in a picture created by the narrative of the novel.

The text therefore defies the request for Erledigung (completion) and inscribes itself into a literary tradition that understands the striving for this kind of completion as inadequate. This does not mean that the novel takes on an Aestheticist position. It not only highlights its own fictional and constructed quality, but also that of the cultural narratives inherent in stereotypes that generally appear very much as erledigt (completed) and thus indisputable. In this way, it demonstrates how these cultural narratives, despite their constructed quality, nevertheless have a real impact on people’s lives. They are exposed as ordering structures that are essentially used to define the norm, and with that a sense of self. In this way, Schnitzler’s text is very much about what it means to ‘know about oneself’, comparable to Schlegel’s definition of Romantic literature. ‘Knowing about oneself’ is revealed as not only a never-ending process of mirror images, but also as one that depends on drawing lines between ‘self’ and ‘other’. Der Weg ins Freie (Road into the Open) displays the psychic mechanism and use of cultural narratives involved in the process of drawing these lines. This, however, remains for the most part unconscious for the protagonist.

This chapter has sketched out how Schnitzler’s novel plays with the way stereotypes can take on a fate-like function for the typecast individuals. Moreover, the text shows that not even the privileged position of the norm is completely free of determining cultural narratives. In the texts discussed in the following chapters, this aspect will become even more prominent. Feeling increasingly restricted by the cultural narratives that determine their own bourgeois male identity, the protagonists are drawn to the idea of an alternative destiny that transcends the restrictive boundaries of normativity. The idea that one’s identity is determined and restricted by cultural narratives is much more unsettling than the idea of a higher power of destiny, which is why Georg and his friends, but also other Schnitzler protagonists, are so eager to embrace the latter. As we have seen in Georg’s case, his status of a noble man leads to the suspicion of dilettantism, which he seeks to overcome through his connection to Jewish circles. What emerges here ever so subtly is the mystification of the social position of the stereotyped ‘other’ as a tempting alternative destiny to the privileged position within the norm. This romanticization of ‘otherness’, however, glosses over the essential difference between the conception of an individual destiny and the social position of the stereotyped ‘other’: the former implies the idea of ‘chosenness’, of being assigned an individual path, while the determining character of stereotypes function precisely in the opposite way, as it denies any form of individual development. The seductive pull of the position of the ‘other’ thus neglects the precarity of that position and therefore turns out to lead the protagonists to a dead end. As we will see in the next chapter, this is particularly the case in the novella Flucht in die Finsternis (Flight into Darkness) in which the yearning for a meaningful destiny on the one hand and a seductive play with the social position of the ‘other’ become ultimately overwhelming for the protagonist.

¹  See Swales, Martin (1971), Arthur Schnitzler: A Critical Study, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 29; Low, D. S. (1986), ‘Questions of Form in Schnitzler’s Der Weg ins Freie,’ Modern Austrian Literature 19 (3/4): 22–27; Segar, Kenneth (1992), ‘Aesthetic Coherence in Arthur Schnitzler’s Novel Der Weg ins Freie,’ Modern Austrian Literature 25 (3/4): 95–111; Gidion, Heidi (1998), ‘Haupt- und Nebensache in “Der Weg ins Freie”,’ Text + Kritik, Zeitschrift für Literatur 138/139: 47–60.

²  See Neubauer, John (2003), ‘The Overaged Adolescents of Schnitzler’s Der Weg ins Freie,’ A Companion to the Works of Arthur Schnitzler, ed. by Dagmar C. G. Lorenz, Rochester, NY: Camden House, 270.

³  On the failed Bildung (education/personal development) in the novel see Abigail Gillman’s 2004 article, ‘Failed Bildung and the Aesthetics of Detachment: Schnitzler’s Der Weg ins Freie,’ Confrontations/Accommodations: German-Jewish Literary and Cultural History from Heine to Wassermann, ed. by Mark Gelber, Tübingen: Niemeyer, 209–236. Detlev Arens claims that the novel blurs the distinction between Bildungsroman (novel showing an individual development) and Zeitroman (novel depicting social types of the time), which will become significant later on. See Arens, Detlev (1981), Untersuchungen zu Arthur Schnitzlers Roman ‘Der Weg ins Freie,’ Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 106.

⁴  Hawes, J. M. (1995a), ‘The Secret Life of Georg von Wergenthin: Nietzschean Analysis and Narrative Authority in Arthur Schnitzler’s Der Weg ins Freie,’ Modern Language Review 90 (2): 377–387, 378.

⁵  See Müller-Funk, Wolfgang (2006), ‘Der gewohnte Bezirk seines Daseins: Räumlichkeit und Topografie Wiens in Schnitzlers Der Weg ins Freie: Mit einem Vergleich der Filmversion von Karin Brandauer,’ Die Tatsachen der Seele: Arthur Schnitzler und der Film, ed. by Thomas Ballhausen, Barbara Eichinger, Karin Moser, and Frank Stern, Wien: Filmarchiv Austria, 211.

⁶  Schnitzler, Arthur (1913b), Road into the Open, translated by Horace Samuel, London: Howard Latimer, 350. All translations for the novel Der Weg ins Freie (Road into the Open) are taken from Horrace Samuel’s translation from 1913. All other translations from the German are my own.

⁷  Gilman, Sander L. (1985), Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness, Ithaca, NY, London: Cornell University Press, 20.

⁸  Gilman, Difference and Pathology, 20.

⁹  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, 144. There are certainly also so-called ‘positive’ stereotypes of ‘otherness’ that do not refer to the norm. While not pejorative on the surface, these stereotypes are nevertheless harmful and offensive, because they reduce the stereotyped individual to the narrative inherent to the stereotype and deny him or her an individual development. This will be discussed in more detail in Chapter Three of this book.

¹⁰  Dyer, Richard (2002), The Matter of Images. Essays on Representation, London: Routledge, 4.

¹¹  See Fliedl, Konstanze (1997), Arthur Schnitzler. Poetik der Erinnerung, Vienna, Cologne, Weimar: Böhlau, 218; Gidion, ‘Haupt- und Nebensache in “Der Weg ins Freie”,’ 48; 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, 93.

¹²  Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 377.

¹³  John Neubauer also uses the photography metaphor to describe Georg’s narrative function as ‘filter’ or ‘lens’ that renders an image of Viennese society that is rather unfocused and blurred as it is ‘continually changing according to the situations and his mood’. See Neubauer, ‘The Overaged Adolescents of Schnitzler’s Der Weg ins Freie, 270.

¹⁴  Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 85.

¹⁵  Bourdieu, Pierre (1996), The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 32.

¹⁶  Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 45.

¹⁷  See Gillman, ‘Failed Bildung and the Aesthetics of Detachment,’ 223. Gillman goes on to suggest that we therefore have to access Georg’s character ‘through psychology rather than typology’ and offers an insightful psychological reading of Georg’s character, also considering the information the text gives on his family background. See Gillman, ‘Failed Bildung and the Aesthetics of Detachment,’ 224. In contrast, Arens argues that ‘der Protagonist [gerät] gleichsam hinter dem Rücken der Intention zum Typus’ (the protagonist turns out as a type in spite of the opposite authorial intention. See Arens, Untersuchungen zu Arthur Schnitzlers Roman ‘Der Weg ins Freie, 106. Untersuchungen zu Arthur Schnitzlers Roman ‘Der Weg ins Freie,’ 106). Here, I propose to focus more on the specific tension between the typological and the psychological, between the individual and the general.

¹⁸  Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 8.

¹⁹  Lavater, Johann Caspar (1968–69), Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschnekenntnis und Menschenliebe: Eine Auswahl mit 101 Abbildungen I, Zurich: Orell Fussli, 167.

²⁰  See Gray, Richard T. (2004), About Face: German Physiognomic Thought from Lavater to Auschwitz, Detroit: Wayne State UP, 111.

²¹  Gray, About Face, 107.

²²  Lavater, Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschnekenntnis und Menschenliebe I, 46.

²³  This aspiration to ‘pass’ as non-Jewish is also addressed in Schnitzler’s Fräulein Else (1924). Else internally sneers at her extortioner, the art dealer von Dorsday, whom she suspects of having changed his name to hide his Jewishness: ‘Was hilft Ihnen Ihr erster Schneider, Herr von Dorsday? Dorsday! Sie haben sicher einmal anders geheißen’ (E8) (Your individually tailored clothes do not help you, Herr von Dorsday! Dorsday! You certainly used go by a different name). Moreover, Else takes pride in her own ability to ‘pass’: ‘O ich kann mir das erlauben [referring to using anti-Semitic stereotypes]. Mir sieht’s niemand an’ (E17) (Oh, I’m allowed to. In my case, no one can tell). On the subversive potential of ‘passing’ see Ginsberg, Elaine (1996), Passing and the Fictions of Identity, Durham and London: Duke UP, 4–5.

²⁴  Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 11.

²⁵  Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 8.

²⁶  Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 68.

²⁷  See also Swales, Arthur Schnitzler, 41, who already mentions in passing the ‘process of mutual image making’ in the novel, and also points out that this process is ‘even more fatal if there is a store of collective images which can drive the process of dehumanization to its ultimate conclusion’.

²⁸  Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 111.

²⁹  See Lipphardt, Veronika (2008), Biologie der Juden: Jüdische Wissenschaftler über ‘Rasse’ und Vererbung 1900–1935, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 188.

³⁰  See Althusser, Louis (1971), ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,’ Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, London: New Left Books, 127–188, 174.

³¹  Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 111.

³²  Gillman, ‘Failed Bildung and the Aesthetics of Detachment,’ 222.

³³  See Matt, Peter von (1989), … fertig ist das Angesicht: Zur Literaturgeschichte des menschlichen Gesichts, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 113.

³⁴  Matt, … fertig ist das Angesicht, 113.

³⁵  Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 113.

³⁶  Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 113.

³⁷  Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 113.

³⁸  Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 113.

³⁹  There is an almost erotic aspect to the sudden mutual attraction between Georg and Leo, which is underlined by Georg’s associative memory that Anna had once had a crush on Leo a few years ago: ‘Georg kam es manchmal so vor, als stünde seine eigene Sympathie für Leo mit jener längst verflossenen Neigung Annas für ihn in einem tieferen Zusammenhang. Denn nicht zum ersten Male fühlte er sich in ganz sonderbarer Weise zu einem Manne hingezogen, dem früher eine Seele zugeflogen war, die jetzt ihm gehörte’ (WiF726) (It always seemed to George as though his own sympathy for Leo were fundamentally connected with Anna’s long-past fancy for him. He felt, and not for the first time, curiously attracted to a man to whom a soul which now belonged to him, had flown in years gone by). See Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 115. This recalls Freud’s description of jealousy as a form of ‘detour’ for repressed homoeroticism when a man’s own attraction for another man is projected onto the woman (‘Nicht ich liebe den Mann – sie liebt ihn ja’ (It is not I who is in love with the other man, she is). See Freud, Sigmund (1943), ‘Über einen autobiographisch beschriebenen Fall von Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides),’ in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8: Werke aus den Jahren 1909–1913, ed. by Anna Freud, Edward Bibring, Willi Hoffer, Ernst Kris, and Otto Isakower, London: Imago, 239–320, 301 [emphasis in the original]. Even if Georg is not jealous of Leo, his associative thought of his lover Anna obviously brings an erotic dimension to his attraction towards Leo.

⁴⁰  Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 113.

⁴¹  Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 120.

⁴²  Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 120.

⁴³  The Greek mythology of the Moirai, who spin, measure and cut the ‘thread’ of humans’ life, is more explicitly used by the writer Nürnberger later in the novel: ‘Weder Sie noch ich wissen es, wo in diesem Augenblick ein Faden zu unserm Schicksal gesponnen wird’ (WiF933) (Neither you nor I know the place where a strand of our fate is being spun at this very moment, Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 381).

⁴⁴  Fliedl, Arthur Schnitzler, 219.

⁴⁵  Fliedl, Arthur Schnitzler, 217.

⁴⁶  Fliedl, Arthur Schnitzler, 217.

⁴⁷  Tiziane Schön’s reading focuses on the motif of ‘Nervenschwäche’ (weakness of the nerves) as generational symptom that fostered anti-Semitic prejudices. See Schön, Tiziane (2004), ‘Nervenschwache Generation – begabte Neurastheniker: Georg Hermanns Der kleine Gast als Berliner Pendant zu Arthur Schnitzlers,’ Der Weg ins Freie, Georg Hermann: Deutsch-jüdischer Schriftsteller und Journalist, 1871–1943, ed. by Godela Weiss-Sussex, Tübingen: Niemeyer. On the aspect of ‘sentimentality’ in the novel, see also Angela H. Lin, ‘Resisting “Bad Taste”: Sentimentality, “Jewishness”, and Modernity in Arthur Schnitzler’s Der Weg ins Freie,’ The German Quarterly 79 (3): 366–380.

⁴⁸  Fliedl, Arthur Schnitzler, 217.

⁴⁹  Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 2.

⁵⁰  Gilman, Difference and Pathology, 232.

⁵¹  Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 138.

⁵²  Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 92.

⁵³  See Gilman, Difference and Pathology, 233.

⁵⁴  Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 252.

⁵⁵  The fact that the young Jewish physician Bertold Stauber experiences the reality of anti-Semitism in politics in the Viennese parliament, which mirrors the experiences of Heinrich’s father, can be understood as a latent authorial distancing from the perspective of Georg, who wishes to dismiss Heinrich’s concerns as neurotic.

⁵⁶  Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 121.

⁵⁷  Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 121.

⁵⁸  See Segar, ‘Aesthetic Coherence in Arthur Schnitzler’s Novel Der Weg ins Freie,’ 107.

⁵⁹  Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 28.

⁶⁰  Butler, Judith (1997a), Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, New York, London: Routledge, 40.

⁶¹  Butler, Excitable Speech, 4.

⁶²  Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 28.

⁶³  Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 30.

⁶⁴  Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 28.

⁶⁵  Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 30.

⁶⁶  Perkins, ‘Rethinking Stereotypes,’ 142.

⁶⁷  Dyer, The Matter of Images, 1.

⁶⁸  Gilman, Difference and Pathology, 18.

⁶⁹  Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 33.

⁷⁰  See Gilman, Sander L. (1995), Freud, Race, and Gender, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

⁷¹  Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 33.

⁷²  Gillman, ‘Failed Bildung and the Aesthetics of Detachment,’ 221.

⁷³  In the manuscripts, Georg’s own active anti-Semitic thinking is made more explicit than in the final, published version. In one of the drafts (CUL A132,16), he compares Anna and Else and thinks of the latter dismissively as ‘freilich verjudet’ (jewified, of course).

⁷⁴  Gillman writes, ‘[t]he response as a whole exemplifies how the racist gaze reduces the Jews, no matter how different, to a single stereotype’. See Gilman, ‘Failed Bildung and the Aesthetics of Detachment,’ 221.

⁷⁵  Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 384.

⁷⁶  See Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender, 8–10.

⁷⁷  Neubauer, ‘The Overaged Adolescents of Schnitzler’s Der Weg ins Freie,’ 269.

⁷⁸  See Neubauer, ‘The Overaged Adolescents of Schnitzler’s Der Weg ins Freie,’ 270.

⁷⁹  Neubauer, ‘The Overaged Adolescents of Schnitzler’s Der Weg ins Freie,’ 269.

⁸⁰  Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 131.

⁸¹  Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 323.

⁸²  Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 148.

⁸³  Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 131.

⁸⁴  Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 96.

⁸⁵  See Gillman, ‘Failed Bildung and the Aesthetics of Detachment,’ 236.

⁸⁶  Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 26.

⁸⁷  Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 27.

⁸⁸  Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 27.

⁸⁹  Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 407.

⁹⁰  Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 273.

⁹¹  Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 124.

⁹²  Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 125.

⁹³  Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 388.

⁹⁴  Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 256.

⁹⁵  Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 323.

⁹⁶  Dyer, The Matter of Images, 15.

⁹⁷  Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 379.

⁹⁸  The connection between illness (particularly tuberculosis) and artistic refinement is another stereotype, which I will discuss in more detail in the next chapter.

⁹⁹  Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 173.

¹⁰⁰ Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 174.

¹⁰¹ It also highlights the fictional and constructed quality of the novel itself by prefiguring the actress’s death and in this way revealing it as a narrative ‘move’. I will elaborate on the function of self-referentiality at the end of this chapter.

¹⁰² Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 269.

¹⁰³ Bronfen, Elisabeth (1992), Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 218.

¹⁰⁴ Hawes’ analysis also shows how Schnitzler’s text exposes the ‘Ideologie der Freiheit’ (ideology of freedom) as ‘bloße Bezugslosigkeit’ (lack of interpersonal connectedness). See Hawes (1995b), ‘“Als käme er von einer weiten Reise heim.” Fremderfahrung als Erfahrung des eigenen entfremdeten Ichs in Arthur Schnitzlers Roman Der Weg ins Freie,’ Reisen im Diskurs: Modelle der Fremderfahrung von den Pilgerberichten bis zur Postmoderne; Tagunsgakten des internationalen Symposiums zur Reiseliteratur University College Dublin vom 10. – 12. März 1994, ed. by Anne Fuchs and Theo Harden, Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 516.

¹⁰⁵ Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 303.

¹⁰⁶ Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 309.

¹⁰⁷ Also the link between destiny and the sensation of Grauen (horror) seems prefigured here, which I will elaborate on in more detail in the next chapters.

¹⁰⁸ 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, 231.

¹⁰⁹ Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 381.

¹¹⁰ Cf. Krobb, Florian (2000), Selbstdarstellungen: Untersuchungen zur deutsch-jüdischen Erzählliteratur im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 158, but also Neubauer, ‘The Overaged Adolescents of Schnitzler’s Der Weg ins Freie,’ 270.

¹¹¹ Gillman, ‘Failed Bildung and the Aesthetics of Detachment,’ 220.

¹¹² Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 410.

¹¹³ Gillman, ‘Failed Bildung and the Aesthetics of Detachment,’ 220.

¹¹⁴ Although Heinrich claims that he does not even feel guilty about it and gives long explanations as to why he does not have to, this appears to be an attempt at negating his own feelings of guilt.

¹¹⁵ Fliedl, Arthur Schnitzler, 217.

¹¹⁶ Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 410.

¹¹⁷ Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 377–378.

¹¹⁸ Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 393.

¹¹⁹ Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 394.

¹²⁰ I will return to this aspect, and particularly its decisive Romantic colouring later on in this study.

¹²¹ Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 373.

¹²² Another young man in the novel, Oskar Ehrenberg, enjoys the company of a working-class girl whom he has no intention of marrying even though he has taken her out of the secure situation of a previous engagement. His statement reads like a premonition of the further development of the novel that shows the analogy between his and Georg’s love affair: ‘Solche Sachen dürfen nicht länger dauern als höchstens ein Jahr’ (WiF676) (Things like this oughtn’t to last longer than a year at the outside). See Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 1913b: 52. As a matter of fact, the action of the novel and with that the relationship between Georg and Anna lasts exactly one year.

¹²³ See Webber, Andrew J. (1996), The Doppelgänger: Double Visions in German Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 115.

¹²⁴ On the image in Hoffmann, see Kohns, Die Verrücktheit des Sinns, 194.

¹²⁵ Schlegel, Friedrich (1967), ‘Athenäum: Fragmente,’ Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe: Zweiter Band, ed. by Ernst Behler, Munich [et al.]: Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 182–183.

¹²⁶ See Kohns, Oliver (2007), Die Verrücktheit des Sinns: Wahnsinn und Zeichen bei Kant, E.T.A. Hoffmann und Thomas Carlyle, Bielefeld: transcript, 152.

¹²⁷ Kohns, Die Verrücktheit des Sinns, 152.

¹²⁸ Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 381.

¹²⁹ Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 375.

¹³⁰ Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 376.

¹³¹ Gockel, Heinz (1979), ‘Friedrich Schlegels Theorie des Fragments,’ Romantik: Ein literaturwissenschaftliches Studienbuch, Ernst Ribbat, Königstein/Ts.: Athenäum, 22–37, 28.

¹³² Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 366.

¹³³ See Kohns, Die Verrücktheit des Sinns, 194.

¹³⁴ Another striking passage in this respect is the moment in which Georg anticipates the trip to Italy he has planned with Anna because of her pregnancy. Significantly, he imagines himself not only alone without Anna, but also deeply immersed in his work: ‘Und wie ein Bild, von einer Laterna magica an einen weißen Vorhang geworfen, erschien ihm seine eigene Gestalt: er sah sich auf einem Balkon sitzen, in beglückter Einsamkeit, vor einem mit Notenblättern überdeckten Tisch; Äste wiegten sich vor den Gitterstäben; ein heller Himmel ruhte über ihm, und tief unten zu seinen Füßen, in traumhaft übertriebenen Blau, lag das Meer’ (WiF763) (His own form appeared before him like a picture thrown onto a white screen by magic lantern: he saw himself sitting on a balcony in happy solitude, in front of a table strewn with music paper. Branches rocked in front of the railings. A clear sky hung above him, while below at his feet lay the sea, with a dreamy blueness that was quite abnormal). See Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 162. It might be subtly ironic that this fantasy of productivity is once more an utterly passive experience in the sense that the image just appears in front of him without his active or conscious decision-making.

¹³⁵ Georg’s anticipation of seeing himself is highly reminiscent of Romantic Doppelgänger scenes, as in Adelbert Chamisso’s ‘Erscheinung’ (Apparition, 1828) or Heinrich Heine’s,‘Der Doppelgänger’ (The Double, 1828). See Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 406; Adelbert Chamisso (1975b), ‘Erscheinung,’ Sämtliche Werke, vol. 1, ed. by Jost Perfahl, Munich: Winkler, 383–384, Heinrich Heine (1973), ‘Buch der Lieder: Die Heimkehr, 20,’ Werke, vol. 1, ed. by Stuart Atkins, Munich: Beck, 172–173, 172f.

¹³⁶ Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 376.