Four  Love as Destiny and Cliché in Die Fremde (The Stranger), Das Schicksal des Freiherrn von Leisenbohg (Baron Leisenbohg’s Destiny) and Das neue Lied (The New Song)

Es ist immer wieder beschämend, in einem eigenen Erlebnis, dessen Einzigartigkeit man eben zu empfinden glaubte, das hundertmal Dagewesene, den typischen Kern zu erkennen.¹

It is always embarrassing to recognize in your own experience a typical core, to recognize it as something that has happened a hundred times before, even though it felt unique and original just a moment ago.

Arthur Schnitzler

The idea of love as cosmic destiny predates modern concepts. As a passionate force sent from a cosmic power, it was thought to be disruptive in pre-modern societies: ‘it uproots the individual from the mundane’, writes Anthony Giddens, ‘seen from the point of view of social order and duty it is dangerous’.² In the modern concept (since the late eighteenth century) of romantic love, this cosmic force of destiny does not stand in opposition to the force of social destinies and the order they constitute. Romantic love is based on the idea that it has a complementing function through which ‘the flawed individual is made whole’.3 In this way, it has a stabilizing effect, which provides orientation and the sensation of an individually laid out path of life.⁴ Romantic love can thus compensate for insecurities occurring in the social order and in this way it stabilizes not only the individual subjects, but also the dominant order in its entirety: when one feels less addressed by one’s symbolic function for example, the individualizing reassurance of a romantic relationship may keep one in one’s ‘place’, so to speak.⁵ When love is institutionalized in the form of marriage, it itself becomes a symbolic function (one is ‘pronounced’ husband or wife by an institutional authority) and thus also takes on the form of a social destiny which is fully integrated into the bourgeois order. However, since the concept of romantic love incorporated elements of the amour passion (as opposed to the pre-modern concept of marriage not being based on love at all due to its disruptive qualities), there seems to remain the risk of ‘deregulation’, of love unfolding its dangerous, uprooting potential.⁶ The construct of amour fou implies the possibility that love can become a road to ‘otherness’, bearing the same ambivalence of seduction and danger we have already encountered in the previous chapters.

The main focus of the chapter will lie on the narrative Die Fremde (The Stranger), which will be supplemented by readings of the shorter texts Das Schicksal des Freiherrn von Leisenbohg (Baron Leisenbohg’s Destiny) and Das neue Lied (The New Song). All three narratives are concerned with the individualizing quality of love. In the first two narratives, love appears indeed as a deregulated force close to madness that is no longer containable within the boundaries of the norm. Through stereotypes of enigmatic femininity and the clichéd promise of love as an original experience, the protagonists seem to try to find an alternative to their social destiny in the Bourdieusian sense. As already shown in the previous chapters, particularly in Flucht in die Finsternis (Flight into Darkness), this mystification of ‘otherness’ as an alternative, more original way of existence is a dead end, however. Accordingly, both narratives end with the protagonist’s demise, mediated by the mystifying work of stereotypes. In the third narrative, the protagonist is able to remain within the realm of the norm, although he too indulges in mystified stereotypes of ‘otherness’, but only at the expense of a socially inferior woman.

Destiny and Stereotypes of Enigmatic Femininity in Die Fremde (The Stranger)

Originally published under the title Dämmerseele (Dozing Soul) in 1902 in the Neue Freie Presse, Die Fremde (The Stranger) seems to have inspired the title of the entire compilation volume. The new title under which it was integrated into the volume already introduces the topic of ‘otherness’ per se. On the face of it, it is a tale of enigmatic and dangerous femininity of which the male protagonist becomes the victim: Albert, a ‘Vize-Sekretär’ (vice-secretary) in a ministry, falls in love with Katharina, whom he perceives as an enigmatic, almost otherworldly creature. This, however, seems to rather increase his fascination with her and when the opportunity appears, he proposes to her. She agrees and they get married, but on the fourteenth day of their honeymoon, Katharina disappears, leaving behind only an ambiguous note in their hotel room in Innsbruck. This is the actual beginning of the novella, while everything that has happened before is told from Albert’s perspective as he reminisces about his relationship with Katharina. It turns out that he had anticipated this moment and already decided to commit suicide when it arrived.

Before Albert meets Katharina in person, he hears rumours that attribute to her both mantic qualities and symptoms of insanity. We encounter here again the stereotype of the mentally ill as ‘spiritually more refined’.⁷ This gives way to the mystification of insanity as ‘otherness’, which is always ambivalent: Katharina seems at once fascinating and highly uncanny. It is a decisive property of stereotypes that they say more about the one who entertains them than those they speak about.⁸ It is thus safe to assume that the narrative, which is told entirely from Albert’s perspective (apart from very few comments from the authorial narrator), does not provide us with any reliable information about Katharina as an individual character, but is more telling about Albert whose perception of her is highly influenced by stereotypes.

Earlier critics have at least partly accepted Albert’s perspective, by either emphasizing Katharina’s mysteriousness,⁹ which is not explained through an authorial narrator,¹⁰ or even by blaming her for Albert’s death because of her alleged ‘schuldhaftes Versagen im Sozialen’ (culpable failure in inter-personal relationships).11 Imke Meyer is the first to point out that, by mainly adopting Albert’s perspective, the text is not concerned with rendering a clear picture of Katharina. Instead, the main topic is how Albert constructs a patriarchal image of femininity as an attempt to contain his own crisis of masculinity.¹² Meyer emphasizes that Albert uses his object of desire, Katharina, both to secure his self-image of masculinity and to escape his own mediocre bourgeois identity. He is thus, like so many of Schnitzler’s characters, caught in the paradoxical situation of feeling the desire to transgress the boundaries of the norm and yet to secure his position within them. These attempts at self-reassurance, however, have to fail due to another paradox that constitutes the entire endeavour: woman has to be the ‘other’ to man in order to mark a clear line of distinction that defines man as self. However, this ‘other’ has to be domesticated in order to contain the threat that absolute ‘otherness’ imposes on the norm. Yet this domestication can never be complete, so that the ‘other’ retains its liminal status in the bourgeois order.¹³ The somewhat contradictory urge to both transgress and secure the boundaries around the conception of ‘self’ within the norm is linked to a simultaneous demonization and idealization of the ‘other’. On the one hand, Albert perceives Katharina as the source of his downfall; on the other, he has to elevate her in order to confirm the insurmountable gap between them, so that she stays the inaccessible stranger he needs her to be.

The focus of my reading of Die Fremde (The Stranger) will fall on how Albert uses the emphatic evocation of love as destiny to regain a sense of individuality. Moreover, I will analyze how this very sense of individuality is in turn undermined by a looming realization of the seriality of experience, which is induced by the emergence of the cultural narratives that are at work in Albert’s perceptions. These cultural narratives draw upon literary material, particularly Romantic conceptions of femininity, love, and sexuality. I will only briefly sketch out how Albert constructs Katharina as ‘other’ and uses this construction of her to overcome his own bourgeois existence, in view of Meyer’s convincing discussion of these matters.

Social Destiny and Love as Cosmic Fate

Very early in the novella, it becomes clear that Albert feels restrained by his social destiny in the Bourdieusian sense. Compared with Flucht in die Finsternis (Flight into Darkness), there is less evidence about the failure of the symbolic function to properly address the subject, which would provide him with a secured and meaningful position within society. However, it is telling that once again, the protagonist, like Robert, works in a ministry. His mediocrity is pointedly stressed in the description of his character, but also his paradoxical position that seems to be at once secured but also devoid of meaning:

Er hatte sein anständiges Auskommen und konnte als Junggeselle ein recht behagliches Leben führen, aber Reichtum hatte er von keiner Seite zu erwarten. Eine sichere, aber gewiß nicht bedeutende Laufbahn stand ihm bevor. Er kleidete sich mit großer Sorgfalt, ohne jemals wirklich elegant auszusehen, er redete nicht ohne Gewandtheit, hatte aber niemals irgend etwas Besonderes zu sagen, und er war stets gerne gesehen, ohne jemals aufzufallen. (F553)

He had a decent salary and, as a bachelor, he could lead a rather comfortable life, but not in any way could he expect to become wealthy. A secured, but certainly not significant path was lying ahead of him. He dressed with great care, but without ever looking really elegant, he was articulate, but never had anything special to say, he was always well received by everyone, without really being noticed.

Albert’s life seems to be laid out in front of him, without any possibility of individual self-realization. The security of his bourgeois existence appears to be intertwined with a distinct feeling of constraint. At the same time, Albert’s position might be less secured than it initially seems. The word ‘Laufbahn’ (path/track) evokes the topographical quality of destiny, a journey with a ‘destination’, a train running on pre-determined tracks.14 In this way, the text indicates that Albert is unable to identify with his social role and as a consequence feels restricted by it. The protagonist thus becomes aware of his heteronomy, which, as we have seen in the last chapters, is already a sign of crisis. In contrast to that, Katharina seems to be completely free of determination:

Denn wenn sie über die Zukunft redete, so tat sie das nicht wie jemand, dem ein vorgezeichneter Weg ins Weite weist; vielmehr schien ihr alle Möglichkeiten nach wie vor offen zu stehen, und nichts in ihrem Verhalten deutete auf innere oder äußere Gebundenheit. So wußte Albert eines Tages, daß ihm ein unsicheres und kurzes Glück bevorstand, daß aber auch alles, was folgen könnte, wenn Katharina ihm einmal entschwunden war, jeglicher Bedeutung für ihn entbehrte. Denn sein Dasein ohne sie war vollkommen undenkbar geworden, und es war sein fester Entschluß, einfach die Welt zu verlassen, sobald ihm Katharina verloren war. In dieser Sicherheit fand er den einzigen, aber würdigen Halt während dieser wirren und sehnsuchtsvollen Zeit. (F556)

When she talked about the future, she did not talk like someone who has a predetermined path ahead of them; rather, all the possibilities seemed to be still open for her, and nothing in her behaviour gave him the impression that she felt any form of commitment. Thus, Albert realized one day that he had an insecure and brief moment of happiness in front of him, but that everything which would come after the moment when he would have lost Katharina was completely irrelevant to him. Because his existence without her had become entirely inconceivable, and therefore it was his unwavering decision to just leave the world as soon as Katharina was lost to him. This security provided him with the only form of stability in this time full of confusion and longing.

In the same way as Marco Polo appeared to be less restricted than von Umprecht and the other members of his regiment, Albert imagines Katharina as enjoying a freedom that is denied to him. While Katharina’s future appears to Albert to be free of restrictive determinations, it is precisely this indefiniteness of hers that gives Albert a fixed framework and a clear path of life. In this way, he uses her ‘otherness’ to make sense of his own ‘destiny’. Without her, his path lies predictable in front of him, but does not give him a secured sense of legitimacy and individual identity. Katharina’s freedom, attributed by Albert to her enigmatic personality, in fact seems to be linked to her lack of a symbolic function: as a fatherless, unmarried young woman known for problems with mental health, her position is precisely the opposite of the ‘sichere Laufbahn’ that Albert has to face. That her situation is a rather precarious one is ignored by Albert’s perception of her as a creature as if from ‘einer anderen Welt’ (F553) (a different world).15 Katharina seems to promise not only escape from the rigid structures of his social reality, but also access to something lying beyond these structures: ‘Sie sprach nicht viel, und ihre Augen pflegten oft, wenn sie in Gesellschaft war, wie in eine für die anderen unzugängliche Ferne zu blicken’ (F553) (She did not talk much, and when she was around other people, her eyes seemed to gaze into a distance which was inaccessible to the others). Albert’s fascination for Katharina is closely linked to the idea of freedom and knowledge which he attributes to her ‘otherness’. As we have already seen in the last chapter, the idealized freedom of the ‘other’ is a result of being excluded from the norm: Like Marco Polo, Katharina does not seem to be obliged to follow any rules or conventions – social or logical – nor to be confined to any predetermined destiny. The freedom of the ‘other’ is thus exposed and contrasted to Albert’s feeling of being completely subjected to an unchangeable destiny. This in turn mirrors Umprecht’s feeling of being stuck in a military service without purpose.

Albert thus feels restricted by his social destiny, which is completely independent of his relationship to Katharina. However, the emphatic way in which he invokes his individual metaphysical destiny as inseparably linked to Katharina reveals its function as a coping mechanism. We have already seen in the last chapters that the conventionalized modes of conduct that the social destinies require can be seen as a threat to the possibility of original experience and one’s sense of individuality: if one’s actions and patterns of behaviour and perception begin to appear imposed by pre-formed, external structures, the longing for alternative, individualized ways of existence becomes stronger. It is one of the main properties of the concept of love that it provides such an alternative: it can be seen as the individualizing currency par excellence.16 Based on the idea of exclusivity and the uniqueness of each of the two partners, it promises a realization of one’s individual destiny and an ongoing recognition of one’s individual status and value. Moreover, it is conventionally seen as following a logic independent from and thus alternative to that of reason, which seems to make it an ideal escape from the demands of the post-enlightened order to prove oneself as an autonomous subject of reason – demands which, as we have seen, appear increasingly impossible to fulfil. While – at least on the conscious level – Robert in Flucht in die Finsternis (Flight into Darkness) still fears becoming a ‘slave of destiny’, Albert practically embraces this kind of slavery from the beginning: a ‘slave of love’ is equally a ‘slave of destiny’, because love appears as ‘cosmic fate’.

While, on the face of it, Albert proceeds with the performances required by his bourgeois role – proposal, marriage, honeymoon – it nevertheless becomes clear that his understanding of love is of a rather pre-modern quality: instead of romance, the emphasis lies on passion, which was said to pose a threat to the stability of the dominant order by uprooting ‘the individual from the mundane’,¹⁷ ‘generating a break with routine and duty’.18 In this view, love is perceived as disruptive for the social order, as is expressed in Albert’s musings: ‘Er […] begriff mit einem Male alle Gefahren und allen Wahnsinn, in die heftige Leidenschaft den besonnensten Mann zu stürzen vermag’ (F553) (He suddenly understood that even the most level-headed man could be thrown into danger and insanity by deep passion.

Albert’s identification with the bourgeois order is so weakened that the institutionalized form of individualization through love is not enough for him. He yearns for an experience that cannot be provided by a domesticated ‘otherness’ of sexual difference, but only by an encounter with a more radical form of ‘otherness’. The love incorporated into the bourgeois order is no longer able to provide a satisfactory sense of individuality and originality of experience.¹⁹ However, while he seeks this individuation in the relationship with Katharina, it turns out that he is highly dependent on cultural narratives of ‘otherness’ that are always products of the dominant order they define by virtue of their exclusion. The ‘other’ cannot be thought of without its relation to the norm. In this way, the text undermines Albert’s ‘narrative’ of his individual ‘destiny’ as a product of pre-formed cultural fantasies. The text, as I will show in the next section, reveals Albert’s construction of Katharina as the enigmatic ‘other’: a stereotype of femininity that seems to have a decisively literary and aesthetic quality. Albert thus seems to ‘fictionalize’ – and thus aestheticize – his own life in order to suspend the social reality around him. That this strikingly corresponds to the ‘symptoms’ of one of the most dominant literary movements of the Viennese fin de siècle should alert the reader: Die Fremde (The Stranger) can be read as an implicit critique of the Aestheticism of Viennese décadence.

Masochistic Courtly Love and the Suspense of Reality

Albert’s infatuation with Katharina is highly literary in character. In the way that it depends on her constant inaccessibility, it takes on the form of courtly love: the insistence on Katharina’s freedom, with the corresponding emphasis on his dependence on her, follows the logic of the servile knight’s love for his lady. Correspondingly, Katharina appears in Albert’s perspective as a higher being: ‘Katharina trug sich immer einfach, aber ihre hohe Gestalt und ganz besonders ihre einzige, ja königliche Weise, das Haupt zu neigen, wenn sie jemandem zuhörte, verlieh ihr eine Vornehmheit von ganz eigener Art’ (F553) (Katharina’s demeanour was always simple, but her tall figure and particularly the unique, even regal manner, in which she used to bow her head when listening to someone, gave her a completely unique elegance). Even after their wedding, Katharina has to stay out of reach for Albert to maintain this impossibility of their relationship, the quintessence of the knight’s relationship to the lady. In his study The Metastases of Enjoyment: On Women and Causality, Slavoj Žižek points out that the Lady has to be someone ‘with whom no relationship of empathy is possible’.20 Katharina’s apparent lack of empathy (‘Vielleicht lag es daran, das Katharina diesen Dingen [his past and family history] nicht das geringste Interesse entgegen brachte’ (F554–55) Maybe it was because Katharina showed not the slightest interest in these matters) and her behaviour that does not seem to follow any conventional or logical rules offer enough material for Albert to construct his image of her as such an incommensurable, sovereign being for whom he is ‘zu jedem Opfer bereit’ (F553) (ready to make any possible sacrifice).

Meyer also describes how Albert elevates Katharina, but without reference to the conventions of courtly love. Interestingly, however, she situates Die Fremde (The Stranger) within the discourse of femininity in the tradition of Sacher-Masoch’s Venus im Pelz.²¹ Žižek, in turn, points out how courtly love is rooted in masochism, ‘a specific form of perversion articulated for the first time in the middle of the last century in the literary works and life-practice of Sacher-Masoch’.²² The transformation of romantic love into ‘perverted’, often sado-masochistic forms, is typical for the literature of décadence around 1900, which is accompanied by an increasing demonization of femininity.²³ In her 1986 study, Marmorbilder: Weiblichkeit und Tod bei Clemens Brentano und Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Marlies Janz has analyzed the connection between the literature of German Romanticism and the décadence of 1900 with regard to imaginations of femininity.²⁴ In Die Fremde (The Stranger) this connection is played out in Albert’s attempt to suspend social reality through his relationship with Katharina.

Žižek stresses the theatrical aspect of masochism and the importance of the masochist’s agency: ‘It is the servant, therefore, who writes the screenplay […]: he stages his own servitude’.25 This seems to be what Albert does, when he inverts the relation of power and dependence between Katharina and himself: he ignores the fact that Katharina is in quite a precarious situation – a woman of poor means and without the protection of a male relative – and is thus actually dependent on a man like Albert to secure her social status through marriage. In other words, by staging Katharina’s unavailability as well as his own dependence on her (‘Aber je unfaßlicher ihm ihr Wesen zu entgleiten schien, umso hoffnungslos dringender rief seine Sehnsucht nach ihr’ (F555) - However, the more her essence seemed to slip away from him, the more hopelessly urgent became his longing for her), Albert stages a theatrical, masochistic game that suspends the reality of the bourgeois order and its inherent power structures, in which Katharina does not come close to the privileged position he attributes to her.

What distinguishes Albert from the average masochist described by Žižek is his inability to keep this suspension of reality within the boundaries of a setting based on a contract or any other clear-cut frame which would mark the game as fictional. Normally, ‘the surrealistic passionate masochistic game, which suspends social reality, none the less fits easily into that everyday social reality’.²⁶ It is thus not per se subversive but rather an institutionalized outlet that, by deflecting disruption into that contained space, in the end actually protects and thus confirms the social order. In Albert’s case, the game soon begins to permeate every part of his life and leads to a permanent suspension of reality. However, since the game is rooted in the values of the same order it tries to suspend, it can also only lead to the annihilation of the subject. We thus encounter here the familiar fading of differences between reality and fiction, as well as between norm and ‘other’, with the attendant sensation of Grauen (horror).

At one point, Albert realizes that Katharina does not differentiate between life and art. When she sees the painting of a landscape in a gallery, she incorporates it into her memory:

Einmal besuchte sie mit Albert das Künstlerhaus und stand lang mit ihm vor einem Bild, das eine einsame grüne Höhenlandschaft mit weißen Wolken darüber vorstellte. Ein paar Tage darauf sprach sie von dieser Gegend, als sei sie in Wirklichkeit über die Höhen gewandelt, und zwar als Kind in Gesellschaft ihres verstorbenen Bruders. (F555)

One time, she and Albert went to the art gallery, and she spent a long time looking at a painting which depicted a mountainous landscape with white clouds in the sky above. A few days later, she talked about this landscape, as if she really had strolled over these heights, when she was still a child together with her deceased brother.

Significantly, Katharina’s apparent access to the realm unreachable for normal people seems to go hand in hand with the blurring of the boundary between fact and fiction, or more precisely between social and aesthetic space. Katharina constructs her childhood memory with the help of the aesthetic image. In the same way as she incorporates the painted landscape into her memory, she does not seem to distinguish between real, imagined, or aesthetic experiences:

Doch alles, was sie berichtete, Erzählungen wirklicher Geschehnisse und Geständnisse ferner Träumereien, schwebte wie im gleichen matten Schimmer vorüber, so daß Albert nicht wußte, was sich in ihrem Gedächtnis lebendiger eingeprägt: jener Orgelspieler, der sich vom Kirchturm herabgestürzt hatte, der junge Herzog von Modena, der einmal im Prater an ihr vorübergeritten war, oder ein Van Dyckscher Jüngling, dessen Bildnis sie als junges Mädchen in der Liechtenstein-Galerie gesehen hatte. (F555)

But everything she talked about, stories about actual events or confessions about distant daydreams, everything floated past in the same soft shimmer, so that Albert could not know what appeared more realistic in her memory: the organ player, who had ended his life by jumping from a church tower, the young count of Modena, who in the Prater had once ridden past her on his horse, or the young man painted by Van Dyck, whose portrait she had seen in the Lichtenstein Gallery when she had been a young girl.

It is then that Albert realizes ‘wie sich sein Staunen in ein schmerzliches Grauen zu verwandeln begann’ (F555) (how his wonder began to turn into painful horror). This Grauen (horror) derives from the uncanny dissolving of the boundaries that secure the social reality: the differences between inner and outer worlds, between aesthetics and reality, are beginning to fade. Moreover, the sensation also refers uncannily, in the Freudian sense, to something well known that should have remained hidden. Katharina’s practice of incorporating aesthetic experiences into her life can be seen as a perfect mirroring of Albert’s own ‘strategy’: his construction of his dependent relationship with Katharina and her inaccessible ‘otherness’ is, after all, precisely that. The narrative he constructs, drawn from pre-existing cultural fictions, as will become clearer in the next section, starts to take over his existence, and his loss of control over it can only be glossed over by the final action that leads to his own death.

Romantic Imagery of Femininity and the State of Transition

In order to uphold his self-image as enlightened bourgeois subject, Albert attributes this fading of differences solely to Katharina, as if she had infected him with her ‘otherness’. In fact, she appears to have an almost drug-like, sedating effect on him: ‘Und da ihm jede Kraft gebrach, sie aus ihrer verschwommenen Art des Daseins emporzuziehen, fühlte er endlich, wie ihn der verwirrende Hauch ihres Wesens zu betäuben und wie sich allmählich seine Weise zu denken, ja selbst zu handeln, aller durch das tägliche Leben gegebenen Notwendigkeit zu entäußern begann’ (F556) (And since he did not have the strength to pull her out of her fog-like existence, he finally felt how the confusing breath of her being began to sedate him and how his thinking and even his actions began to dispose of all quotidian responsibilities).

The use of terms associated with opiates and sedatives is striking, as well as Katharina’s ‘fog-like existence’ as opposition to the necessities of everyday life, thus the bourgeois order. The pointedly poetic language in this passage highlights the fact that Albert’s perception of Katharina and his imagination of her as his destiny is influenced by literary clichés of love and stereotypes of femininity.27 As in Die Weissagung (The Prophecy), the narrative stages here several ‘recognition scenes’ for the reader through the use of motifs and imagery familiar from Romantic literature, but also from the contemporary literature of Aestheticism influenced by it.

The word ‘emporziehen’ (pull up) evokes the myth of the water spirit Undine, who, in the eponymous fairy-tale novella by the Romantic author Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, causes the demise of her human husband. The association of femininity with narcotic effects is in turn highly reminiscent of Brentano’s fusion of beauty and inebriation as a compensation for the dissociated self who rejects the bourgeois order. The dissolving boundaries of art and life also are a typical feature of Brentano’s writings, or more precisely, the dissolution of the self in aesthetic experience.28 This, in turn, is also one of the main features of Viennese Aestheticism at the fin de siècle. Schnitzler’s text not only seems to bring out the Romantic inheritance of the writing practices of contemporary literary tendencies, but also to distance itself ironically from them. By revealing Albert’s image of Katharina as a constructed one that not only fully depends on Albert’s own perspective, but also on the influence of literary concepts of love and femininity, the text undermines Albert’s claim that his individual metaphysical destiny is ‘responsible’ for the events.

Albert’s aestheticization of his own life through Katharina and its deconstruction are pointedly revealed in the passage regarding their honeymoon:

Sie reisten miteinander ins Gebirge. Durch sommerliche Täler fuhren sie, die sich weiteten und engten; ergingen sich an den milden Ufern heiter bewegter Seen und wandelten auf verlorenen Wegen durch den raunenden Wald. An manchen Fenstern standen sie, schauten hinab zu den stillen Straßen verzauberter Städte, sandten die Blicke weiter den Lauf geheimnisvoller Flüsse entlang, zu stummen Bergen hin, über die blasse Wolken in Dunst zerflossen. (F556)

They went on a holiday in the mountains. They drove through summery valleys, which widened and narrowed; they walked by the soft shores of cheerful choppy lakes and strolled on lost paths through the murmuring woods. They would stand by different windows, looking down onto the quiet streets of enchanted towns, sent their gazes further along the course of mysterious rivers, over the silent mountains, where the pale clouds dissolved into mist.

In Katharina’s presence, the obviously pleasant but not necessarily arcane experience of travelling through beautiful landscapes becomes overloaded with fairytale-like and mystic signifiers: lost paths, murmuring woods, enchanted towns, and enigmatic rivers. This other-worldly setting, however, is undermined by the following sentences, which bring the whole passage down to the rounded figure of a tourist brochure: ‘Und sie redeten über die täglichen Dinge des Daseins wie andere junge Paare, spazierten Arm in Arm, verweilten vor Gebäuden und Schaufenstern, berieten sich, lächelten, stießen mit weingefüllten Gläsern an, sanken Wange an Wange in den Schlaf der Glücklichen’ (F556–7) (And they talked about the everyday matters of life like other young couples, wandered around arm in arm, lingered by buildings and shop windows, had discussion, smiled, cheered with wine-filled glasses, happily fell asleep cheek to cheek).

The emphasis on their comparability to others (‘wie andere junge Paare’, like other young couples) and the descriptions of quite a mundane tourist trip seem at first to be continuous with the travels through an apparently magical landscape. Together they appear to draw the picture of a perfect honeymoon that is only overshadowed by Katharina’s occasional outbursts of strangeness:

Manchmal aber ließ sie ihn allein, in einem matthellen Gasthofzimmer, darin alle Trauer der Fremde dämmerte, auf einer steinernen Gartenbank unter Menschen, die sich des duftenden Blütentags freuten, in einem hohen Saal vor dem gedunkelten Bild eines Landsknechts oder einer Madonna, und niemals wußte er in solcher Stunde, ob Katharina wiederkehren würde oder nicht. (F557)

But sometimes she left him alone, in a half-lit hotel room, in which the melancholy of foreignness began to dawn/doze, on a stony garden bench among people who enjoyed the fragrant blossoming day, in a hall with high ceilings in front of a darkened painting of a farm hand or a Madonna, and he never knew in these hours, whether Katharina would return to him or not.

While Katharina’s behaviour seems to interrupt the unlimited happiness of their vacation, a closer look shows that the real interruption is in fact this short episode of normalcy, which threatens to destroy Albert’s construction of a destiny meant to be fully determined by Katharina’s otherness. That they indeed talk about the ‘täglichen Dinge des Daseins’ (everyday matters of life) stands in contrast to Albert’s decision not to discuss his financial situation with Katharina, because ‘er jede Aussprache über dergleichen Dinge für überflüssig hielt’ (F556) (he thought any discussion about things like that unnecessary). Albert’s claim is that ‘der verwirrende Hauch ihres Wesens’ (confusing breath of her being) is to blame, when he feels that ‘sich allmählich seine Weise zu denken, ja selbst zu handeln, aller durch das tägliche Leben gegebenen Notwendigkeiten zu entäußern begann’ (F556) (his thinking and even his actions began to dispose of all quotidian responsibilities). Should it turn out that Katharina is actually capable of normality, this construction of a higher necessity would crumble. Those cherished moments, in which he and Katharina cannot be distinguished from any other young couple, are only enjoyable to Albert as long as they are embedded in the mysterious framework of her underlying strangeness.

Moreover, the formulation that describes his loneliness when Katharina leaves him temporarily on their trip is only on the face of it purely negative: the hotel room, ‘darin alle Trauer der Fremde dämmerte’ (in which the sadness of foreignness began to dawn), evokes the properties attributed to Katharina. The ‘Fremde’ (foreignness), here indicating the foreign land, nevertheless connotes the title and thus Katharina herself. With ‘dämmern’ (dozing/dawning), Albert also describes Katharina’s state of being (‘Und so dämmerte auch jetzt ihr Wesen hin’ (F555) - And thus also dozed her entire being), which obviously also alludes to the novella’s original title and that of the volume Dämmerseelen (Dozing Souls). In this way, being left alone in the hotel room allows Albert to enter into his imagination of Katharina. However, grammatically he still projects the ‘Dämmerzustand’ (state of dozing) onto an incorporeal ‘Trauer der Fremde’ (melancholy of foreigness). In this way, Albert, like Robert in Flucht in die Finsternis (Flight into the Darkness), seems to enjoy a sort of transition state, which allows him an existence at once inside and outside of the bourgeois order. This, however, is only ‘enjoyable’, as long as the narrative of his fatal destiny is still perceived as an inevitable truth. Should it turn out that it was possible to lead a bourgeois marriage with Katharina, ‘wie andere junge Paare’ (like other young couples), then the idea of his individually laid out metaphysical destiny, as opposed to his social destiny, would be in danger. This is why Katharina abandoning him without further notice is actually a reassuring proof of his own construction of destiny: ‘Denn unablässig und untrüglich in ihm wie der Schlag seines Herzens war das Gefühl, daß nichts sich geändert hatte seit dem ersten Tag, daß sie frei war wie je und er ihr völlig verfallen’ (F557) (He had the persistent feeling, unerring like his own heartbeat, that nothing had changed since the first day, that she was free, while he had completely and irreversibly fallen for her).

Seriality, Replication, and Originality of Experience

What has emerged from the analysis so far can be summarized as a tension between seriality and originality of experience. Albert’s fascination with Katharina’s strangeness is above all an attempt to elevate his own existence, to free it from mediocrity and transform it into something ‘special’. In the description of their honeymoon the ‘threat’ of seriality is already present – the formulation ‘wie andere junge Paare’ (like other young couples) as well as the use of plural forms without determining articles (‘verweilten vor Gebäuden und Schaufenstern […], stießen mit weingefüllten Gläsern an’ lingered in front of buildings and shop windows, cheered with wine-filled glasses) not only evoke the stereotypical quality of their experiences in the sense that many others have done and will do the same, but also the fact that, during the short journey, they themselves already fall into a seriality of repetitive actions which form their experience together and mark it as ‘happy’ (‘Schlaf der Glücklichen’ – ‘sleep of the happy’). Happiness seems already to be typecast, something that it is only possible to have by virtue of recognition – and therefore cannot be an original or unique experience.29 The possibility of original experience thus seems to be drawn into question by the novella. At the same time, the text exposes Albert’s intense longing for precisely that. The use of Romantic topoi seems to underline the aspect of seriality and the inability to avoid repetition, quotation, and reference. More poignantly still, the text not only plays with Romantic topoi, but rather seems to take on a stance of second-order repetition – the quotations are not direct quotations of Romantic texts, but rather of the neo-Romantic discourse of Aestheticism: not homage as such, but a parody of homage.

This effect of repetition and mirroring is subject to further complication: the construction of Albert’s apparently so unique fate is also undermined by two other cases of male suicide mentioned in the novella. The first is Katharina’s brother, who squandered his father’s entire estate in addition to his mother’s allowances and left his mother and sister stranded after his death. The second is mentioned in connection with the rumour of Katharina’s mystical abilities: one night she dreamed of the death of the famous organ player Banetti, whom she had allegedly admired, and on the same day it turned out that Banetti had thrown himself off a church tower. The information about these two suicides, more or less connected to Katharina, is given to Albert, before he starts courting her. In this way, she seems fit to become constructed as femme fatale in the literal sense of the word – a woman that seals a fatal destiny for the men around her.

Moreover, Banetti’s death may also refer to another literary ‘case’ of male suicide: Nathanael’s lethal jump from the ‘Ratsturm’ (tower of the city hall) in Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann. In this way, the seriality would occur not only within the text, but point to a – literary – tradition of male suicide connected to a suspension of reality, to a fading of differences, and particularly to a form of constructed femininity. Besides the allusions to the Romantic texts already mentioned, Albert can be seen as a sort of latter-day Nathanael whose love for the automaton Olimpia turns out to be merely projections of his own self. I have said that the compulsory inaccessibility of Katharina creates the impression of courtly love, and Žižek stresses that the incommensurable Lady functions as ‘a kind of automaton’.30 While Nathanael ironically feels understood by the actual automaton Olimpia, Albert stresses at any opportunity Katharina’s lack of interest in him as a person and her general incommensurability. In this way, she appears somehow ‘soulless’, in a similar way to the automaton Olimpia. This radical ‘otherness’ is strikingly expressed in both cases through the motif of voice, as in the description of Katharina’s beautiful but expressionless singing, with echoes of Olimpia: ‘Zuweilen sang Katharina mit einer angenehmen Stimme, aber beinahe völlig ausdruckslos, einfache, meist italienische Volkslieder, zu denen er sie auf dem Klavier begleitete’ (F554) (Sometimes Katharina sang simple, mostly Italian folk songs, with an agreeable voice, almost completely devoid of expression).

While both strike the right note, there seems to be something missing: the expression of feeling or inwardness, in short, subjectivity. As Mladen Dolar writes, referring to Kempelin’s ‘Sprech-Maschine’ (speech machine), a voice is ‘the most human of effects, an effect of “interiority”’,³¹ which makes a machine that is able to imitate a human voice in a believable way highly uncanny. When a person, who is supposed to be human, lacks this distinctly human effect of the voice, they in turn become uncanny. Katharina’s mechanical soullessness seems once more rather an effect of Albert’s projections. In Die Fremde (The Stranger) it is not the automaton that functions as woman, but the woman as automaton – or artwork. Through this parallel to Hoffmann’s text with regard to the male construction of femininity, Die Fremde (The Stranger) seems to relay a Romantic position that undermines the male gaze. Hoffmann’s texts already developed a critical and ironic distance to the Romantic constructions of femininity and exposed them as projections of the unsettled male self.³² In this way, the second-order repetition in Schnitzler’s text becomes two-fold: on the one hand, it takes up an opposition to the literary discourse of Aestheticism and décadence by mocking the Romantic influences on these texts. On the other hand, Die Fremde (The Stranger), like other Schnitzler texts we have seen, features touches of the ‘Hoffmannesque’, which seem to underline the text’s ironic distance. These meta-textual references to the repetitive structure of the text not only count once more as a sign of Romantic irony in Schnitzler’s texts, they also further undermine Albert’s attempts at proclaiming his uniquely individual destiny. Achim Aurnhammer finds similar parallels between Schnitzler’s novella Der letzte Brief des Literaten (The Writer’s Last Letter, 1917) and Hoffmann’s Rat Krespel (Councillor Krespel, 1818) and Der Sandmann (The Sandman, 1917).33 Aurnhammer shows that the intertextual reference to Hoffmann’s texts reveals how Schnitzler’s protagonist longs to achieve a sense of authenticity ‘im inszenierten Nachgefühl’ (by engendering real emotions through the theatrical staging of experience).³⁴ This can also be said about Albert in Die Fremde (The Stranger).

Katharina’s preference for Italian folk songs seems to be another reference to German Romanticism: particularly in early Romantic literature, Italy appeared as a cipher for the idealized home of art and art lovers.³⁵ Katharina demonstrates a general affinity for Italy: the organ player Banetti, whom Katharina is said to have adored for a while, not only has an Italian-sounding name, but also committed suicide ‘in einem kleinen lombardischen Dorf’ (F552) (in a small Lombardian village). Moreover, the man from whom Katharina will be expecting a child at the end of the novella is also Italian, Andrea Geraldini from Verona. And last but not least, Theoderic, whose statue seems to induce a trance-like fascination in her, was not only king of the Ostrogoths but also became the ruler of Italy in AD 493.³⁶ This fascination for Italy seems to express a certain sentimental longing for the ideal of romantic love that Albert only knows in its ‘perverted’ form of distanced, courtly love. In the sense that Italy was perceived in Romanticism as idealized locus amoenus, Katharina’s affinity for it could be understood as a mirroring of Albert’s yearning for an exotic ‘otherness’: she in turn might be longing for a place of security and wholeness that she is only able to find in art (paintings and music), as expressed in her incorporation of the painted landscape mentioned earlier. In this context, Albert’s feelings of inadequacy with regard to the ideal of masculinity seem to be confirmed through Katharina. Her fascination with the statue of Theoderic the Great can be understood as a longing for a type of masculinity belonging to the era of the ancien régime, which has become unreachable for the bourgeois man.37

The passage with the statue is told strictly from Albert’s perspective. The narrator renders Albert’s account of the scene in the internally focalized narrative mode. It is certainly convincing that Albert identifies with Theodoric (or rather, with his own interpretation of the statue), whose ‘Haltung war von erhabener Müdigkeit, als sei er sich der Größe und Zwecklosigkeit seiner Taten bewußt, und als ging sein ganzer Stolz im Schwermut unter’ (F558) (posture was of a sublime tiredness, as if he were aware of the greatness and purposelessness of his deeds, and as if his entire pride were drowning in his melancholia).³⁸ Theodoric stands for an ideal of patriarchal masculinity that seems to belong to a time long gone and is no longer able to give orientation but only represent tired resignation for the modern man. At this point, the novella addresses most explicitly the contemporary father–son conflict so overtly present in other writing of the time.³⁹ Theodoric the Great in this text seems to fulfil the same function as Alexander the Great in Hofmannsthal’s Märchen der 672. Nacht (Fairytale of the 672. Nights):⁴⁰ the ideal of the great father that cannot be reached, except that here the resignation that Albert feels is already projected onto the figure of the king. In ordering a copy of the statue as a last present to Katharina, he seems to erect a monument for himself – or rather for the idea of masculinity he wished but failed to represent. This failure is – by virtue of the statue – directly linked to imitation: he obviously cannot buy the original but has to order a copy. The fact that he is not even the original ordering customer, but only takes over the statue somewhat like a ‘hand-me-down’ from a deceased lord whose heirs refused to pay for the order, intensifies the seriality and lack of originality of the courtly gesture. It also introduces the aspect of class differences, signifying that in his striving to overcome his bourgeois identity, Albert reaches for the crumbs left behind by the nobleman. Moreover, we can understand this refusal of the lord’s heirs to take over the statue as a hint that the concept of masculinity – that Albert struggles to fulfil, tries to overcome, and still cannot let go of – is outdated.

However, we must not overlook Katharina’s fascination with the statue. If we accept that Theodorich stands for the old ideal of masculinity, it follows that Katharina is as much determined by the traditional gender order as Albert. This fits in well with her preference for older men, which Albert observes before their marriage: ‘Die jüngeren Herren behandelte sie mit einiger Unachtsamkeit, lieber unterhielt sie sich mit reiferen Männern von Rang oder Ruf’ (F553) (She treated the younger gentlemen with disregard, she preferred to talk to more mature men with a respectable status and reputation). This preference might well have a lot to do with Katharina’s precarious social and financial situation, but that does not exclude the interpretation that here the failing of the ‘Sohnesgeneration’ (generation of sons) to reach the standards set by the fathers also plays a role. Particularly the attribute ‘von Rang und Ruf’ (with a respectable status and reputation) puts the emphasis on symbolic rather than economic capital.

The ending of the narrative provides a moment of deconstruction of both Albert’s and Katharina’s idealized, mystified, and stereotypical conceptions of ‘otherness’: the now strictly authorial voice of the narrator tells the reader that Katharina, after briefly looking at Albert’s copy of the Theoderic statue, sits down to write a letter to the father of her unborn child, Andrea Geraldini, but, as the narrator knows, will never receive a reply. The ideals of romantic love and masculinity could thus not be found in the man with the promising Italian-sounding name either. Moreover, for this stranger, Katharina seems not to have had a comparable effect of mystery, which ultimately confirms her function as Albert’s projection screen. In these last sentences, the precarity of her situation, which Albert had ignored in his perception of her, because it would not have fitted into his narrative of courtly love, is made plainly visible.

Albert in turn has already been buried for weeks. With his suicide, he has indeed fulfilled his ‘destiny’: as an act of honour according to the moral code of the dominant order, aping that of the courtly regime, it confirms his place within the norm, which he would not have been able to keep had he stayed alive. In this way, here too, social destinies are indeed ‘mortal’. As we shall now see, in Das Schicksal des Freiherrn von Leisenbohg (Baron Leisenbohg’s Destiny), the ironic play with the concept of courtly love encountered in Die Fremde (The Stranger) is taken to a further extreme. Similarly to Die Weissagung (The Prophecy), this text toys with fantastic elements, allowing it to challenge the cliché of love as destiny in a more radical, parodic way.

Courtly Love and Seriality in Das Schicksal des Freiherrn von Leisenbohg (Baron Leisenbohg’s Destiny)

Das Schicksal des Freiherrn von Leisenbohg (Baron Leisenbohg’s Destiny) was first published in 1903 under the title Novelette in the Neue Freie Presse. The novella tells of the unrequited love of the Freiherr von Leisenbohg for the opera singer Kläre Hell. Leisenbohg has to witness how Kläre engages in various love affairs without ever considering him as a potential lover. After the death of her greatest love, the Fürst von Bedenbruck, Kläre seems to have lost all interest in romance. However, when the Norwegian singer Sigurd Ölse arrives in town for an engagement at the Vienna Opera, Leisenbohg fears Kläre might turn to him, and is even more joyfully surprised when she finally responds to his own ten years of courtship and spends the night with him. However, his moment of bliss is cut short the next morning when he learns that Kläre has left the city without leaving so much as a note. Heartbroken and confused, Leisenbohg starts travelling around aimlessly until he is reached by an urgent telegram from Ölse, containing the plea to come see him in Norway immediately. Upon arrival he learns that Ölse had met Kläre on the train and had become her lover. Yet now Ölse fears that he is doomed: the Fürst Bedenbruck had uttered a curse on his death bed, condemning the first man Kläre should ever take as her lover to ‘Wahnsinn, Elend und Tod’ (SL596) (madness, calamity, and death). Leisenbohg drops dead on the spot.

Love as Individualizing Destiny

Leisenbohg’s love for Kläre takes on the form of courtly love in a similar way to Albert’s infatuation with Katharina in the sense that it is based on her unattainability. While Kläre indeed rejects Leisenbohg and is thus inaccessible to him in a much more literal sense than Katharina is to Albert, the masochistic game of courtly love is here again constructed by the ‘servant’ himself. Leisenbohg aligns himself and his life completely with Kläre: he gives up his career in order to be near her, ends relationships with women as soon as she seems to become available (only to be disappointed again) and uses his contacts to arrange her engagement at the Vienna Opera. In short, he constructs his life as a tale in which the sacrificial behaviour will have to be rewarded in the end.

However, his unrequited love for Kläre has a latent, secondary gain of ‘illness’: it allows him to live a life on the margins of bourgeois existence: during his ten year long courtship of Kläre, she enjoys several love affairs. Leisenbohg also allows himself relationships with other women, but deliberately keeps them uncommitted in order to be free and ready as soon as Kläre might finally turn her love to him: ‘Immer, wenn er einen in ihrer Gunst wanken sah, hatte er seiner Liebsten den Abschied gegeben, um für alle Fälle und in jedem Augenblick bereit zu sein’ (SL584) (Whenever he saw that her current lover was losing grace, he had ended his current love affair, in order to be ready just in case). Moreover, it turns out that the career he sacrificed in order to be close to Kläre was ‘eine vielversprechende Staatskarriere’ (SL582) (a very promising career in the civil service). Reading the narrative on its own, this might not appear like significant information, but since Leisenbohg is now, after Robert and Albert, the third ‘Ministerialbeamter’ (SL581) (civil servant in a ministry) who seems to feel not fully identified with his symbolic function, it is possible to recognize a pattern here.41 It is thus safe to assume that Leisenbohg, too, constructs this narrative of love as destiny here as an attempt at overcoming his social destiny. His love allows him to construct the narrative of an individualized destiny for himself. The late success with Kläre and her numerous erotic encounters before him are turned around and embraced as proof that it is the destiny of both of them to be with each other: the delayed fulfilment becomes the ‘notwendige Abschluß seiner bisherigen Beziehungen zu Kläre’ (the necessary conclusion of his relationship to Kläre) and he has the impression that ‘es gar nicht anders hätte kommen können’ (SL588) (another outcome would not have been possible). Moreover, the belief in the higher power of destiny is then explicitly linked with the claim of exclusivity and originality: ‘Und er ahnte den Tag voraus, da Kläre ihm sagen würde: Was waren mir alle anderen? – Du bist der einzige und erste, den ich je geliebt habe […]. Gewiß; sie hatte keinen geliebt vor ihm, und ihn vielleicht immer und in jedem!’ (SL588) (And he anticipated the day when Kläre would tell him: What did the others even mean to me? – You are the first and only one whom I have loved. Certainly, she had not loved anyone before him, and maybe she had always loved him in each of her previous lovers).42

The idea of true love as exclusive, individualizing experience can be seen as the key theme of the narrative. All characters seem to be in one way or the other ‘infected’ by this idea: Kläre assigns unique status to her love for Prince Bedenbruck as the one true love, as expressed by ‘jene seltsame Handbewegung […], mit der sie seit dem Tod des Fürsten alle Andeutungen von der weiteren Existenz leidenschaftlicher oder zärtlicher Beziehungen auf Erden abgewehrt hatte’ (SL586) (that strange hand gesture, with which, since the prince’s death, she had dismissed all further existence of passionate and affectionate relationships,). Of course, Bedenbruck’s curse, identified by Freud as an expression of the taboo of virginity, is also rooted in the idea of the exclusivity of love.⁴³ The serial repetition of this claim to the originality and exclusivity of love obviously undermines that very claim in each case. Of course, the fact that Kläre in the end ‘uses’ the prince’s curse on Leisenbohg in order to be with Sigurd has the parodic effect of a reductio ad absurdum that contradicts the claims of exclusivity and uniqueness made in the text.

The novella in this way exposes the impact of the cultural narratives of clichés on the experience of reality. While Leisenbohg, very much like Albert in Die Fremde (The Stranger), strives for an original and individual experience of love, he is confronted with its serial quality that seems to turn his feelings and gestures of affection into a cliché. While he apparently sought to escape the repetitive performances and conventional forms of conduct of his social destiny, it turns out that even the ‘cosmic fate’ of love is structured by pre-formed narratives, conventionalized modes of conduct, and the repetition compulsions of cliché. When Leisenbohg finds out about Kläre’s betrayal, this is the moment of feeling ‘cheated’ by cliché, as described by Cave, ‘being brought to a moment of fullness only to find that it is empty’.44

Horror as Experience of Seriality

Of course, this is also the point when the reader is made aware of the sensation of Grauen (horror). It appears when Ölse informs Leisenbohg of the curse uttered by Prince Bedenbruck on his deathbed:

‘Erinnerst du dich des Abends’, fragte Sigurd, ‘an dem wir alle in Klärens Haus zu Gaste waren? Am Morgen dieses Tages war Kläre mit Fanny auf den Friedhof hinausgefahren, und auf dem Grabe des Fürsten hatte sie ihrer Freundin das Grauenhafte anvertraut.’ – ‘Das Grauenhafte –?’ Der Freiherr erbebte. (SL595)

‘Do you remember that night’, Sigurd asked, ‘when we all were at Kläre’s house? On the morning of that day, Kläre had gone to the cemetery with Fanny, and by the prince’s grave she told her friend about the horror.’ – ‘About the horror –?’ The baron shuddered.

As in the case of Thameyer, Grauen (horror) is here related to the fear of emasculation: the curse of the Prince Bedenbruck repeats the paternal threat of castration and makes Kläre into the forbidden maternal object of desire.⁴⁵ At the same time, Kläre becomes the enigmatic and inaccessible femme fatale, whose seductive power is poisonous to her male victim. The Grauenhafte here is thus tightly linked to the deconstruction of Leisenbohg’s tale of love according to which he and Kläre were ‘destined’ for each other. The fact that it is Ölse who brings up the Grauen (horror) is not contradictory to this interpretation: after all, he had the same experience when Kläre’s friend Fanny told him about the curse.

Even before Leisenbohg learns about the curse, but is already stricken by Kläre’s unexplained disappearance, the Grauen (horror) is prefigured in the way that he externalizes his depressed and, at the same time, increasingly hysterical mood: ‘Über der Stadt lag es wie ein ewiger grauer Dunst; die Leute, mit denen er sprach, hatten verschleierte Stimmen und starrten ihn merkwürdig, ja verräterisch an’ (SL592) (There was something like a grey mist hanging over the city; the people, whom he talked to, had veiled voices and stared at him strangely, yes, even treacherously). Strikingly, the grey fog thus reappears here in a very similar way to Thameyer’s description of the scene where his wife’s ‘Versehen’ (miss-seeing, maternal impression) allegedly took place. Leisenbohg’s paranoid impression of the people around him, their ‘veiled voices’ and ‘treacherous gazes’, is also reminiscent of Thameyer’s paranoid ideas of hearing people talking about him and his ‘case’ (See AT517). Voice and gaze appear as markers of dishonesty: the ‘veiled voices’ might not disclose what their speakers are holding back, but nevertheless they display their veiled character and thus the presence of uncanny double-talk. The gazes are treacherous, which in itself seems to bear a double meaning: on the one hand, it implies that through the way the people stare at Leisenbohg they give something away – presumably that they know more than Leisenbohg does himself. On the other hand, their treacherous looks might imply the betrayal of Leisenbohg, in the sense that they do not tell him what they know.

This Gothic atmosphere is then retrospectively applied to the long-desired sexual encounter with Kläre. Leisenbohg tries to make sense of Kläre’s disappearance by pathologizing her:

Die eine Stunde der Lust, die er mit Kläre erlebt hatte, schien ihm wie von dunklen Schauern umweht. Es war ihm, als hätten ihre Augen in der gestrigen Nacht wie im Wahnsinn geglüht. Nun begriff er alles. Zu früh war er ihrem Ruf gefolgt. Noch hatte der Schatten des verstorbenen Fürsten Bedenbruck Gewalt über sie, und Leisenbohg fühlte, daß er Kläre nur besessen hatte, um sie auf immer zu verlieren. (SL591)

The single hour of passion, which he had shared with Kläre, now appeared to him to be marred by dark showers. He seemed to remember that last night her eyes had glowed in madness. Now he understood everything. He had followed her call too soon. The shadow of the deceased Prince Bedenbruck still had power over her, and Leisenbohg knew that he had possessed Kläre only to lose her forever.

Leisenbohg’s attempt at integrating Kläre’s at this point still enigmatic behaviour into his usual interpretative patterns clearly fails. His claim to the contrary (‘Nun begriff er alles’ – Now he understood everything) is undermined by the strong irony of the following sentence: the idea that his ten years of courtship had not been long enough and that some strategic waiting on his part could have led to the fulfillment of his dreams must be doubtful to the reader. Moreover, we encounter here again the strikingly Gothic colouring of the passage: the ‘dunklen Schauern’ (dark showers) seem like a direct reference to the Gothic fiction the text evokes, again with the typological arsenal of grey fogs, glowing eyes, and, last but not least, the moment of Grauen (horror) itself. The sensation of Grauen (horror) in Leisenbohg is thus tightly linked to the deconstruction of love as individualizing experience.

However, in a similar way to Die Weissagung (The Prophecy), the Grauen (horror) here also marks a moment in which enacted performance and reality become indistinguishable: it is crucial that it is not the night with Kläre but only when he witnesses Ölse’s ‘performance’ that leads to Leisenbohg’s death. It thus seems as if the re-enacted performance of the curse in fact activates it, a logic which is reminiscent of the way the law of the social order is dependent on repeated performances and speech acts. By rendering Bedenbruck’s curse in first-person narration, Ölse performatively adopts the position of the latter: ‘Ich spreche […] und ich lasse Fanny sprechen, und Fanny läßt Kläre sprechen, und Kläre läßt den Fürsten sprechen’ (SL596) (I am speaking, and I am letting Fanny speak, and Fanny is letting Kläre speak, and Kläre is letting the Prince speak), he explains, after Leisenbohg could only exclaim in confused exasperation: ‘Wer spricht?’ (Who is speaking?). Introduced by the multiple voices and perspectives in Ölse’s report, the dead Bedenbruck makes a ghost-like appearance: ‘Es war ihm [Leisenbohg], als hörte er die Stimme des toten Fürsten aus dreifach verschlossenem Sarge in die Nacht klingen’ (SL596) (He felt like he was hearing the Prince’s voice sounding from his threefold locked-up coffin into the night). This play with the several narrative perspectives (metaphorically cast as locks on the coffin) not only ironically takes the effect of seriality to an extreme, it also self-referentially points up the fictional constructedness of the narrative itself. This, in turn, underlines the constructed quality of Leisenbohg’s perception of reality, particularly of his tale of love and destiny. And it thus also brings to the fore the fictionalization and, with it, the aestheticization of life, which could be understood again as a subtle critique of Aestheticism in the text.

Fictionality and Performance

The interpretation of the text as critique of Aestheticism is supported by the interesting double-performance Ölse provides for Leisenbohg. Only at first does he take on the role of Bedenbruck and become his mouthpiece: ‘Sigurd, aus dessen Mund die Stimme des toten Fürsten tönte, hatte sich erhoben, groß und feist stand er in seinem weißen Flanellanzug da und blickte in die helle Nacht’ (SL596) (Sigurd, whose mouth was speaking in the Prince’s voice, had raised from his seat, tall and big he stood in his white flannel suit and gazed into the bright night). Then, however, Ölse appears as a Pierrot, which has multiple connotations: with his white costume and the black accessories, the Pierrot in literature around 1900 symbolizes, according to Julia Bertschik, ‘das weiße Blatt Papier, noch unbeschrieben, aber schon mit den ersten Spuren schwarzer Schrift versehen: aus der traditionellen Kunstfigur wird so eine Figuration der Dichtkunst’ (the white sheet of paper, still blank, but with the first marks of black writing).46 This underlines the aesthetic quality of Ölse’s performance, but also the meta-fictional character of the entire passage. Moreover, Ölse, with his face, which ‘entbehrte im Zustand der Ruhe wohl manchmal des besonderen Ausdrucks’ (SL585) (in a state of calm his face sometimes lacked any special expression) becomes, in his function as Pierrot, a projection screen and mirror image for Leisenbohg. Thus, while Ölse represents, on the one hand, Bedenbruck, and thus Leisenbohg’s challenger, he also stands in for Leisenbohg himself. The character of the Pierrot in the Commedia del’arte, with his submissive and relentless admiration for Columbine, is the epitome of unrequited love: ‘Pierrot selbst agiert im Verhältnis zur dämonischen “femme fatale” Columbine unterwürfig-passiv, gewissermaßen als eine in unschuldiges Weiß gekleidete, männliche “femme fragile”’ (In comparison to the demonic femme fatale Columbine, Pierrot himself behaves submissively and passively, one could say like a male femme fragile, dressed in innocent whites).⁴⁷ In this way, we can read the passage as a Doppelgänger scene: Leisenbohg dies the second that Ölse announces what he assumes to be his own destiny: ‘der Elende, an dem sich der Fluch erfüllen soll, bin ich! … ich! …ich! …’ (SL596) (the wretched man, who is supposed to receive the curse, is I! …I! …I! ...).

If Ölse as a Pierrot both functions as mirror image for Leisenbohg and symbolizes Dichtkunst (the art of literature/poetry) per se, then Leisenbohg is confronted with his own aesthetically constructed self-image which is based on his tale of love as destiny. However, the Pierrot presents him with an alternative way of storytelling: while he himself has constructed his relentless courtship of Kläre as a sign of heroic determination and masculinity, which would end with a reward worthy of the long wait, he now sees himself, mirrored by Ölse, as the effeminate figure of the Pierrot who has become the powerless victim of the cruel game played by a demonic woman and (implicitly) more potent men than himself: the Prince Bedenbruck and, paradoxically, also Ölse. Leisenbohg has to realize that Ölse, his Doppelgänger-competitor, has won and that he himself has become the ‘proxy figure’ that had to be sacrificed to make way for Ölse as Kläre’s new lover. Correspondingly, he drops dead ‘lautlos […] wie eine Gliederpuppe’ (SL597) (silently, like a jointed doll). Apart from the obvious comparison to a puppet whose strings have been dropped as a metaphor for the lack of agency, the remark ‘lautlos’ (silently) may also imply that Leisenbohg has now fully become the Pierrot himself: one of the most remarkable traits of the Pierrot is that he has no voice, that he is silent. While Ölse’s voice had initially been a marker of his virility (see SL585), it had become ‘weniger voll’ (SL593) (less sonorous) after his affair with Kläre. However, he significantly regains the full volume of his voice after Leisenbohg’s death.48

The figure of the Pierrot can thus also be seen here as a death omen, as is the case in Pierrot Hypnotiseur (1892) by Schnitzler’s contemporary Richard Beer-Hofmann.⁴⁹ Bertschik reads the Pierrot as a comment on the image of the decadent dandy of the turn of the century: ‘Ob in seinem weißen oder schwarzen Kostüm, der Pierrot verkörpert als dandyistisches Subjekt theatraler Metamorphosen in jedem Fall das gefürchtete Nichts hinter vielfältigen Masken.⁵⁰ Er steht somit für die existentielle Gefährdung individueller Identität und persönlicher Autonomie’ (Whether in his black or white costume, as the dandy-like subject of theatrical metamorphosis, the Pierrot embodies in any case the dreaded nothing behind various masks. He symbolizes therefore the existential danger of individual identity and personal autonomy).

This, in turn, brings together the key themes linked to the complex of ‘stereotype and destiny’ developed so far: the feeling of being coerced into empty repetition compulsions by one’s social destiny produces precisely these feelings of a threat to individuality and autonomy. Bertschik elaborates further that the Pierrot can be understood as a symbolic figure for the cognitive practice of over-determination (‘Bedeutungsüberlastung’), which ultimately culminates in an absolute emptiness of meaning (‘Bedeutungsentleerung’).⁵¹ We have already come across the tendency of over-determination several times in previous chapters, and here too it plays a significant role. Already described in Leisenbohg’s perception of his relationship to Kläre, it is ironically carried to extremes by Ölse, the Pierrot. Early on in the text, Ölse reveals his mysticist tendencies:

Unter anderem erzählte er, daß ihm auf der Herreise auf dem Schiff von einer an einen russischen Großfürsten verheiratete Araberin aus den Linien seiner Hand für die nächste Zeit die verhängnisvollste Epoche seines Lebens prophezeit worden war. […] Er hatte freilich allen Grund, an solche geheimnisvolle [sic] Beziehungen zwischen unbegreiflichen Zeichen und Menschenschicksalen zu glauben. (SL586)

Among other things he told the story that, when travelling by ship on his journey to Vienna, he had had his palm read by an Arabian woman, who had been married to a Russian Prince. She had foretold him that the coming time would be the most calamitous period of his life. Of course, he had reason to believe in such mysterious relationships between unfathomable signs and human destinies.

This of course evokes the symptoms of Romantic madness: the denial of contingency corresponds to an over-determined understanding of meaning, while the experience of ‘Bedeutungsentleerung’ (emptiness of meaning) can be found in the sensation of cliché as a trivialization of meaning.52 The idea of love as destiny, as a ‘cosmic fate’, leads to the practice of over-determination comparable to Romantic madness: contingency is abolished when destiny brings two lovers together. However, as has already been shown above, those claims of individuality and uniqueness of the experience of love are ironically undermined by the repetitive structure of the text, which brings to the fore their cliché-like quality and thus the threatening emptiness behind conventionalized gestures of love.

While for Imboden, Das Schicksal des Freiherrn von Leisenbohg (Baron Leisenbohg’s Destiny) tells of the power of destiny, in the face of which the individual can only succumb,⁵³ Perlmann stresses that the text is not at all about the ‘Evozierung des Unheimlichen, sondern […] dessen ironische Entlarvung vermittels der Entlarvung seiner Anhänger bzw.⁵⁴ Opfer’ (evocation of the uncanny, but about its ironical exposure through the exposure of its followers or victims). Fliedl also concludes that Leisenbohg is not a real ‘Schicksalsnovelle’ (novella of destiny), but rather a parody of that genre.⁵⁵ My reading of the text shows that all three positions are in a way right: it is certainly true that the narrative does not support mysticist tendencies and the belief in a higher cosmic power. The belief in destiny, particularly in love as destiny, is exposed as fallacy and indeed ridiculed through parodic and ironic elements. However, the text leaves the reader with a certain ‘indigestible’ remainder which purely rationalistic-realistic interpretations (Leisenbohg believes in destiny, which is why he dies when he learns about the curse due to autosuggestion) cannot fully resolve. And while the narrative certainly treats the topic of destiny in a parodic manner, it seems to go beyond a simple light-hearted trivialization of a literary genre. I would like to suggest that there is indeed an uncanny remainder in the text, which is tightly linked to the topic of destiny: destiny, however, is not to be understood as metaphysical force, but as a derivative of social conditioning. In this way, the text nevertheless raises uncomfortable questions of autonomy and individuality. It exposes the invocation of destiny, particularly love as destiny, as a coping mechanism to create a comforting feeling of individuation. That this promise inherent in the concept of romantic love is undermined by the irrepressible sensation of cliché calls into question the possibility of an original experience independent of pre-formed cultural narratives.

Seriality and Performance in Das neue Lied (The New Song)

In Das neue Lied (The New Song), first published under the title Erzählung in 1905 in the Neue Freie Presse, the tension between seriality and individuality can be understood as central theme. The reader recognizes very soon a rather typical seduction plot: a young woman from a poor but respectable family falls victim to the seduction of a socially superior man who abandons her as soon as the relationship demands more than an uncommitted self-indulgent love adventure. The classical ‘case’ is further complicated by a tragic element lying outside of the control of all characters: the woman, the singer Marie Ladenbauer, is struck by a severe case of meningitis which leaves her terminally blind. Her lover, Karl Breiteneder, the son of a successful owner of a turnery, leaves her without a word when he learns of her affliction. When he finds out by accident that Marie is giving her first singing performance after her illness, he spontaneously attends it, but afterwards he finds himself unable to talk to her and ignores her attempts at conversation. Marie then leaves the room in an unattended moment and commits suicide.

Idealizing Stereotypes of Poverty

Das neue Lied (The New Song) is thus not about the protagonist constructing a narrative of love as destiny for himself. Rather, he is able to remain detached and actually eager to stress the seriality, and thus arbitrariness, of his relationship to Marie. He is not willing to recognize her as an individual behind the stereotypical image. In contrast to the first two protagonists of the narratives discussed in this chapter, Karl does not construct a tale of love as destiny for himself. However, while Marie is not an enigmatic, unreachable femme fatale to Karl, it becomes clear nevertheless that he uses her as a way to temporarily suspend his social reality and that his perception of her is highly influenced by pre-formed cultural narratives. As a young woman from the Viennese periphery, who earns her money through performance art, she represents paradigmatically the more than familiar Schnitzlerian stereotype of the ‘süße Mädel’ (sweet girl).56 Marie’s family are portrayed as respectable people who have to work hard to make ends meet. In Karl’s perspective, they are set up to represent the positive stereotype of einfache, aber gute Leute (simple but good people). The way their honesty and cleanliness are described parallels the ethical impeccability of the poor with their capability of maintaining a clean home and outer appearance. Through the cliché ‘poor but clean’ we encounter here, in a more subtle way than in most of the other narratives discussed so far, the idealization of the ‘other’ that is contrasted with the feeling of inauthenticity in the bourgeois order. In this case, it is not the enigmatic femininity of an almost otherworldly creature, the insight of a Jewish magician or the potentially more creative lifestyle of insanity that seems to promise an alternative way of being or access to a less restricted existence, but the more authentic, more ‘real’ interactions and relationships of the less privileged milieu of performance artists. One could also argue that the way Karl’s perspective depicts Marie and her family is reminiscent of the ‘Viennese types’ photo series discussed in the introduction to this book. They create for him the image of old-Viennese cosiness and reassure him of his own privileged position. All we learn about Karl’s family and other social contacts is the hypocritical attitude of his father and that his acquaintances in the coffee house are less reliable than the Ladenbauers in terms of the payback of gambling debts. The things he notices in the Ladenbauers’ house are almost all related to a certain kind of reciprocal engagement and commitment. It appears that Karl has used Marie and her family to create an escape from his everyday life, going beyond the conventional and almost institutionalized transgression of a little love adventure. When Marie falls ill, Karl realizes that it is expected of him to behave like a lover and friend – a role he formerly only ‘performed’ when it was convenient.

The escape and sanctuary which he thought existed separately from his normal existence thus comes to pose demands. And of course he fails to fulfil them. It therefore is important that it is strictly Karl’s perspective when the narrator remarks about the memories of their love affair: ‘So schöne Erinnerungen gab es manche, und die beiden lebten sehr vergnügt, ohne an die Zukunft zu denken’ (NL622) (There were many of these beautiful memories, and both of them lived happily without thinking of the future). It is by no means clear that Marie had indeed never had the hope of becoming more serious with Karl – since she ‘hing an ihm, ohne viel Worte zu machen’ (NL621) (she was attached to him without making a great play of it), we only know that she conveniently never uttered any demands or claims. Karl used Marie and her family as mirror devices rather than engaging in an actual relationship with them. The bright and friendly atmosphere in the Ladenbauers’ home invited him to imagine himself as a part of it. The short passage is full of little recognition scenes, from which Karl can gain reassurance about himself: the immediate payment of gambling debts is a form of acknowledgement of Karl as the winner. The exchange of cigars between him and Marie’s brother can also be understood as a performance of male mutual recognition. Marie’s behaviour towards him among the group of people is another form of recognition: ‘Aber Marie sah zu Karl herüber, grüßte ihn scherzend mit der Hand oder setzte sich zu ihm und schaute ihm in die Karten’ (NL621) (But Marie looked over to Karl, jokingly waved her hand at him or sat next to him and looked into his cards). The greeting as most basic form of recognition is here combined with a reassuring understanding of Karl as a person: the literal act of Marie looking into his cards can also be understood metaphorically in the sense that he feels like he has nothing to hide from her.

Uncanny Recognition Scenes

When Karl learns about Marie’s terminal blindness, he is stricken by a sudden fear: ‘Er hatte plötzlich Angst, Marie wiederzusehen. Es war ihm, als hätte er nichts an ihr so gern gehabt, als ihre Augen, die so hell gewesen waren und mit denen sie immer gelacht hatte’ (NL622) (He was suddenly afraid to see Marie again. He felt as if he had loved nothing as much as her eyes, which had been so bright and with which she had always smiled). Marie’s gaze had the reassuring impact of recognition without demanding his part of the mutual movement. When she loses her eyesight she seems to also have lost her complementary function for Karl. However, the mirroring effect seems to be restored in an uncanny way: ‘Da war ihm, als ob sie ihre toten Augen in die seinen versenken wollte und als könnte sie tief in ihn hineinschauen’ (NL631) (He felt like she wanted to let her dead eyes sink into his, as if she could look deeply inside him). This is obviously linked to a sensation of guilt, as she reminds him of his interpersonal failure, but her disability also makes impossible her function as perfect projection screen which never failed to invoke good feelings in him (‘ihre Augen, […] mit denen sie immer gelacht hatte’ (NL622) – her eyes, with which she had always smiled). The knowledge she appears to have of him becomes uncanny and threatening, in contrast to his former willingness to let her ‘see his cards’. The uncanny effect of her ‘dead’ eyes can be read once more as a Hoffmannesque element, reminiscent as it is of Nathanael’s revelation when he sees Olimpia’s dark eye holes in her puppet face. The realization that Olimpia is not a real woman but an automaton is traumatic because it destroys Nathanael’s illusion of recognition through Olimpia and in this way threatens his own sensation of integrity. Marie’s blindness is a different form of ‘otherness’ than that which she represented to Karl before: it no longer provides him with a secured sense of self, but rather represents absolute otherness and in this way threatens rather than reinforces Karl’s identity:

Und plötzlich fühlte er gar, wie sie seine Hand berührte und streichelte, ohne daß sie ein Wort dazu sprach. Nun hätte er so gern etwas zu ihr gesagt: irgendetwas Liebes, Tröstendes – aber er konnte nicht … Er schaute sie von der Seite an, und wieder war ihm, als sähe ihn aus ihren Augen etwas an; aber nicht ein Menschenblick, sondern etwas Unheimliches, Fremdes, das er früher nicht gekannt – und es erfaßte ihn ein Grauen, als wenn ein Gespenst neben ihm säße … Ihre Hand bebte und entfernte sich sachte von der seinen, und sie sagte leise: ‘Warum hast du denn Angst? Ich bin ja dieselbe.’ Er vermochte wieder nicht zu antworten und redete gleich mit den anderen. (NL632)

And suddenly he even felt that she was touching and stroking his hand, without saying a word. Now he would have liked to say something to her, something nice, comforting – but he could not … He looked at her from the corner of his eye, and again it was as if something was looking at him from her eyes; but it was not a human gaze, but something uncanny, something foreign, which he had not known previously – and he was overwhelmed by a feeling of horror, as if a ghost were sitting next to him … Her hand trembled and was removed from his, and she said softly: ‘Why are you afraid? I’m just the same as I’ve always been.’ He was unable to respond and immediately talked to the others.

The Gothic colouring of this passage with words such as ‘Unheimliches’ (uncanny), ‘Grauen’ (horror), and ‘Gespenst’ (ghost) is striking. A Freudian reading of the passage would suggest that Marie’s blinded eyes stand symbolically for the traumatic moment when the little boy realizes that the woman is lacking a penis, assuming she must have been castrated and establishing the fear of castration in the boy’s psyche. And to some extent, this interpretation might prove fruitful for the analysis of Das neue Lied (The New Song). If we accept that Marie used to function as a mirror device for Karl, the reflection she gives now is significantly lacking. It is her inability to return the gaze, which makes her, like Olimpia the automaton without any ‘Sehkraft’ (power of vision), ‘ganz unheimlich’ (completely uncanny).57

With her urgent comment ‘Ich bin ja dieselbe’ (I’m just the same) Marie insists on her self-identity. This reveals her expectation of the individuality and originality of her relationship with Karl, based on the idea of love as the original experience and mutual recognition of each other’s individuality. In contrast to that, Karl stresses repeatedly the aspect of seriality of their relationship, which seems to diminish its significance and also his own responsibility: the fact that Marie is a woman, ‘die schon so manches erlebt hatte’ (NL621) (who had quite some experience), in his reasoning makes his unexplained withdrawal after her illness less grave: ‘Natürlich dachte er auch von Tag zu Tag weniger an sie und nahm sich vor, sie ganz zu vergessen. Er war ja nicht der erste und nicht der einzige gewesen’ (NL623) (Of course, every day he was thinking less about her, and he decided to forget her completely. After all, he had not been the first or the only one). Karl’s father, too, who expresses his dismay about his close relationship to Marie, refers to the seriality of this kind of relationship: ‘in den Familien von meine Mädeln hab’ ich doch nie verkehrt!’ (NL621) (I have never associated with the families of my lovers). In this way, the seriality is thus even multiplied as a cross-generational phenomenon. When Marie tries to convince Karl that she is still the same person she used to be, she misinterprets Karl’s fear: by insisting on her individual personality, she contradicts the typological character of their relationship. With her blindness, Marie takes on an individual trait that sets her apart from the type of the ‘süße Mädl’ (sweet girl) she used to represent for Karl. This, however, is exactly what Karl does not want, because it demands a real interpersonal relationship and requires him to step out of the pre-formed narrative in which he merely plays the role of the social type he represents.

Stereotypes and Social Destinies

Karl’s moment of Grauen (horror), when he looks in Marie’s blind eyes, appears to be linked to an almost ontological crisis. What has drawn him to the Ladenbauers’ household in the past seems to be connected to an experience of reassurance about his own presence, an experience of belonging. While his privilege to go to work only when it suits him is obviously convenient on the face of it, we might here once again assume a failing of the symbolic function: ‘Er war froh, daß er keine Verpflichtungen hatte, in die Stadt zu gehen, obzwar ihm ja sein Vater auch diesmal einen versäumten Wochentag nachgesehen hätte, wie er es schon oft getan’ (NL621) (He was glad that he did not have any commitment to go into the city, although his father would have forgiven him another missed working day, as he had so often). Implied in this liberty to more or less come and go as he pleases is also the question of whether he is needed at all. Karl’s social status, while it is certainly not precarious in the sense of the financial uncertainty that Marie’s family has to face, seems nevertheless somehow suspended and undefined. This is underlined by the shifting ways in which he is addressed by Rebay and the Ladenbauers. They seem to performatively underline the class differences by calling him at times ‘Herr von Breiteneder’, which would imply that Karl is a nobleman. Besides the fact that this exaggerated sign of respect barely hides the aspect of mockery in it, it also underscores the fact that Karl in fact does not belong to the milieu of the performance artists. Marie’s blindness seems to cut through the illusory farce of harmonious ‘togetherness’: in fact, it destroys the quality of ‘Augenblick’ (moment) of their relationship: ‘und die beiden lebten sehr vergnügt, ohne an die Zukunft zu denken’ (NL622) (and both of them lived happily without thinking of the future). In this way, Marie’s loss of eyesight confronts Karl with his own insincerity and the simulatory character of his relationship to Marie and, with that, of his entire life situation, which leaves him to the prefigured path as heir of his father’s turnery: ‘der Vater wußte aus Erfahrung, daß sich die Breiteneders bisher noch immer zur rechten Zeit zu einem soliden Lebenswandel entschlossen hatten’ (NL621) (The father knew from experience that the Breiteneders had always taken the respectable path of life when it was time to do so). Read like this, Karl’s Grauen (horror) might also be directed at the bourgeois life he has to face after acknowledging that his relationship to Marie is not – at least from his side – based on any real interpersonal bond and responsibility. Jedek’s comically recursive reassurance of Karl’s ‘Da-sein’ (existence/being there) seems rather to call his identity into question: ‘Weil ich g’wußt hab’, Sie sein da, hab’ ich ihr g’sagt, daß Sie da sein. Und weil sie so oft nach Ihnen g’fragt hat, während sie krank war, hab’ ich ihr g’sagt: “Der Herr Breiteneder is da …”’ (NL630) (Because I knew that you are here, I have told her that you are here. And because she asked for you when she was ill, I have told her: ‘Herr von Breiteneder is here …’). It seems as if the fact that Marie is no longer able to see for herself whether Karl is da or not, makes his ‘being there’ in fact questionable for himself. This culminates in Karl’s sudden inability to make himself heard: ‘Er rief: “Marie! Marie!” Aber es hörte ihn niemand, und er hörte sich selber nicht’ (He yelled: ‘Marie! Marie!’ But no one heard him, and he did not hear himself). He then seems to have become the ‘Gespenst’ (ghost) he mistook Marie for, when looking into her blind eyes.

It thus becomes clear that, also for Karl, the love affair with Marie has an individualizing function, which secured his place within the norm. In contrast to the other protagonists, he does not become seduced by the mystified stereotype of enigmatic ‘otherness’ and does not turn to the higher power of destiny. Nevertheless, he enjoys the temporary suspension of reality and – at least for him – secured transgression of the bourgeois norm by becoming attached to Marie. That he is able to uphold this safe boundary, however, is only due to the fact that he is not willing to engage with Marie individually and overcome the stereotypical image he has of her.58 In this way, the stereotype does indeed become Marie’s ‘destiny’. As soon as she is no longer able to provide the de-individualized surface of the stereotype assigned to her, the only place left for her is that of the absolute ‘other’. Accordingly, Karl perceives it as almost inappropriate when she sings one of her clichéd old songs, ‘als wenn sie wirklich noch mit ihrem Schatz aufs Land gehen, den blauen Himmel, die grünen Wiesen sehen und im Freien tanzen könnte, wie sie’s in dem Lied erzählte’ (NL625) (as if she could still go to the country with her darling, as if she could still see the blue sky, the green fields, and as if she could still dance outdoors, as she said in the song). The new song, which Marie’s accompanist Rebay wrote for her is in turn seen as the creation of an alternative position: ‘Eine Existenz hab’ ich dem Mädel gründen wollen! […] Gerad mit dem neuen Lied!’ (NL628) (I wanted to give the girl a livelihood! […] Especially with the new song!). No longer able to perform the role of the carefree ‘süßes Mädel’ (sweet girl), Marie is now confined to performatively repeating her sad ‘destiny’ time and again: ‘Ja freilich ist es ein trauriges Lied […] – es ist ja auch ein trauriges Los, was ihr zugestoßen ist. Da kann ich ihr doch kein lustiges Lied schreiben?’ (NL628-9) (Well, of course it is a sad song – after all it is a sad fate that has been bestowed on her). The sad song is thus considered appropriate with regard to Marie’s actual sad ‘destiny’. The performance of the song – and particularly the repeated performance – functions as a manifestation of the agony described in the lyrics, which is then confirmed by Karl’s immediate rejection. Marie’s suicide might, then, be understood not only as a direct reaction to Karl’s behaviour itself, but also as a refusal to accept her ‘trauriges Los’ (sad fate) and the compulsion to confirm it through never-ending repeated performances.

The repetition of performances as a constituting element of social reality has emerged in all narratives discussed in this chapter, underscoring the tension between the typological and the individual as central conflict in Schnitzler’s writings. This tension is negotiated through the complex of stereotype and destiny: while Albert’s and Leisenbohg’s proclamations of the originality and uniqueness of their destinies becomes undermined by the repetitive structure and stereotypical elements of the texts, it is in turn Karl’s failure to acknowledge Marie as an individual beyond the stereotype that not only contributes substantially to Marie’s ‘trauriges Los’ (sad fate), but also seems to lead to a certain form of self-alienation. While all three protagonists use romantic love outside marriage as an escape from their social destinies, in Traumnovelle (Dream Story), which I will discuss in the next chapter, love occurs in the institutionalized form of marriage and therefore, as a social destiny in itself.

¹  Schnitzler, Arthur (1985), Aphorismen und Notate: Gedanken über Leben und Kunst, Leipzig and Weimar: Gustav Kiepenheuer, 33f.

²  Giddens, Anthony (1992), The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love, and Eroticism in Modern Societies, Oxford: Polity Press, 38. See also Luhmann, Niklas (1995), Liebe als Passion, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 96.

³  Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy, 45.

⁴  On socio-structural conditions that determine the need for individualization through relationships, see Luhmann, Liebe als Passion, 15–17.

⁵  This is also hinted at in Flucht in die Finsternis (Flight into Darkness), when Robert gets engaged to Paula with the hope she might ‘save’ him.

⁶  See Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy, 38.

⁷  Sontag, Susan (1991), Illness as Metaphor & AIDS and its Metaphors, London: Penguin, 32.

⁸  See Zijderveld, Anton C. (1987), ‘On the Nature and Function of Clichés,’ Erstarrtes Denken: Studien zu Klischee, Stereotyp und Vorurteil in englischsprachiger Literatur, ed. by Günther Blaicher, Tübingen: G. Narr, 26–40, 27.

⁹  See Fliedl, Konstanze (2005), Arthur Schnitzler, Stuttgart: Reclam, 160.

¹⁰  See Just, Gottfried (1968), Ironie und Sentimentalität in den erzählenden Dichtungen Arthur Schnitzlers, Berlin: E. Schmidt, 116.

¹¹  Gutt, Barbara (1978), Emanzipation bei Arthur Schnitzler, Berlin: Spiess, 70.

¹²  See Meyer, Imke (2010), Männlichkeit und Melodram: Arthur Schnitzlers erzählende Schriften, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 53.

¹³  See Meyer, Männlichkeit und Melodram, 47.

¹⁴  See also the traintrack scenes in Flucht in die Finsternis (Flight into Darkness) and Die Weissagung (The Prophecy) discussed in Chapters Two and Three in this book.

¹⁵  See Meyer, Männlichkeit und Melodram, 62.

¹⁶  See Luhmann, Liebe als Passion, 123–61, 222.

¹⁷  Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy, 38.

¹⁸  Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy, 40.

¹⁹  This corresponds to Robert’s memories of his married life in Flucht in die Finsternis (Flight into Darkness), but is also hinted at in von Umprecht’s fantasy of leaving his wife and children, as we have seen in the last chapter. It may also be one explanation for Georg’s inability to commit to Anna in Der Weg ins Freie (Road into the Open).

²⁰  Žižek, Slavoj (1994), The Metastases of Enjoyment: On Women and Causality, London, New York: Verso, 90.

²¹  See Meyer, Männlichkeit und Melodram, 60.

²²  Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment, 91.

²³  See Hilmes, Carola (1990), Die Femme Fatale: ein Weiblichkeitstypus in der nachromantischen Literatur, Stuttgart: Metzler, 15.

²⁴  Marlies Janz shows for the examples of Brentano and Hofmannsthal that ‘Erfahrung des Ich-Zerfalls und der Identitätsauflösung bei beiden Autoren aufs engste verknüpft ist mit Bildern einer mortifizierten Weiblichkeit’ (for both writers, the experiences of ego dissociation and disintegration of identity are tightly linked to images that associate femininity and death). See Janz, Marlies (1986), Marmorbilder: Weiblichkeit und Tod bei Clemens Brentano und Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Königsstein/Ts.: Athenaeum, 9.

²⁵  Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment, 92.

²⁶  Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment, 92.

²⁷  A similar effect can also be observed in Schnitzler’s Das Tagebuch der Redegonda (Redegonda’s Diary) and, as we will see in the next section, Das Schicksal des Freiherrn von Leisenbohg (Baron Leisenbohg’s Destiny). Both novellas also feature variations of courtly love, in terms of the man’s undying admiration for an inaccessible woman, and in both cases the texts refer not only to their own fictionality, but also introduce characters who are so influenced by literary clichés and stereotypes that they are unable to emancipate themselves from them and finally fall victim to their own constructed narratives.

²⁸  See Janz, Marmorbilder, 72.

²⁹  This question of originality of experience is most famously addressed, of course, in Schnitzler’s Reigen (La Ronde, 1900).

³⁰  Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment, 90.

³¹  Dolar, Mladen (2006), A Voice and Nothing More, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 10.

³²  See Hilmes, Die Femme Fatale, 16 and 37.

³³  See Aurnhammer, Achim (2013), Arthur Schnitzlers intertextuelles Erzählen, Berlin, Boston, CA: De Gruyter, 150–153.

³⁴  Aurnhammer, Arthur Schnitzlers intertextuelles Erzählen, 153.

³⁵  See Battafarano, Italo Michele (1996), Deutsche Romantik-Sehnsucht nach Italien: Wackenroders Auffassung der Kunst der italienischen Renaissance in den ‘Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders,’ ‘Italien in Germanien’: Deutsche Italienrezeption 1750–1850, ed. by Frank-Rutger Hausmann, Tübingen: Narr, 351–371, 357.

³⁶  See Lafferty, Sean D. W. (2013), Law and Society in the Age of Theoderic the Great: A Study of the Edictum Theoderici, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 5.

³⁷  In his essay on Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle (Dream Story), which I will turn to in Chapter Five, W. G. Sebald remarks that the ideal of masculinity that influenced the wishes and expectations of the bourgeois woman at the beginning of the twentieth century was already threatened by extinction: ‘Bemerkenswert ist zunächst die Tatsache, daß das erotische Leitbild des Kavaliers, auf das die bürgerliche Frau ihre Wunschvorstellungen projiziert, für sie in der Regel gar nicht mehr erreichbar war, weil das ersehnte Wesen selber einer im Aussterben befriffenen Spezies angehörte beziehungsweise, wie der Fall Leutnant Gustl zeigt, bloß als seine eigene leere Hülle herumparodierte’ (Of course it is noteworthy that the erotic ideal of the cavalier, which functions as projection screen for the sexual wishes of the bourgeois woman, was normally unachievable, because the desired creature belonged to a species that was either about to be extinct or, as the case of Lieutenant Gustl shows, he represented nothing more than a parody in his own empty shell). See Sebald, W. G. (1985), Die Beschreibung des Unglücks. Zur Österreichischen Literatur von Stifter bis Handke, Salzburg: Residenz, 48.

³⁸  See Meyer, Männlichkeit und Melodram, 67.

³⁹  See Brittnacher, Richard (2000), ‘Welt ohne Väter: Söhne um 1900. Von der Revolte zum Opfer,’ Kursbuch 140: 19–31.

⁴⁰  The ‘Kaufmannssohn’ (son of a sales man) in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Das Märchen der 672. Nacht keeps reading and fantasizing about the ‘große König der Vergangenheit’ (great king of the past). The narrative, however, brings out the failure of the protagonist to reach the requirements of this ideal of masculinity. See Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1975), ‘Das Märchen der 672. Nacht,’ Sämtliche Werke, vol. XXVIII: Erzählungen 1, ed. by Ellen Ritter (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer), 13–30, 18.

⁴¹  One can find another similar case in Die Weissagung (The Prophecy), where von Umprecht’s uncle, the art lover Freiherr von Schottenegg, who provides the setting for the narrator’s fatal drama, has led a sort of ‘double existence’. When very young he had attempted an acting career, but then had given it up,

um noch ohne erhebliche Verspätung in den Staatsdienst treten zu können und damit dem Beruf seiner Vorfahren zu folgen, den er dann auch zwei Jahrzehnte hindurch treu, wenn auch ohne Begeisterung erfüllte. Aber als er, kaum vierzig Jahre alt, gleich nach dem Tode seines Vaters das Amt verließ, sollte sich erst zeigen, mit welcher Liebe er an dem Gegenstand seiner jugendlichen Träume noch immer hing. (W598)

in order to become a civil servant and in this way follow his ancestors’ footsteps. He fulfilled his official duties diligently, but without passion for two decades. However, when he left his office at just about forty, right after his father’s passing, it became clear how much he was still attached to the matters of his youthful dreams.

⁴²  This cliché of looking for the one true love in other love affairs returns in Traumnovelle (Dream Story), as we will see in the next chapter.

⁴³  See Freud, Sigmund (1947a), ‘Das Tabu der Virginität,’ 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, 161–180, 178.

⁴⁴  Cave, Terence (1988), Recognitions: A Study in Poetics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 459–460.

⁴⁵  Katan claims that Kläre is a mother figure for Leisenbohg. See Katan, M. (1969), ‘Schnitzlers Das Schicksal des Freiherrn von Leisenbohg,’ Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 17 (3): 904–926.

⁴⁶  Bertschik, Julia (2005), Mode und Moderne: Kleidung als Spiegel des Zeitgeistes in der deutschsprachigen Literatur (1770–1945), Köln: Böhlau, 158.

⁴⁷  Bertschik, Mode und Moderne, 160.

⁴⁸  For the interpretation of Ölse’s voice as a sign of impotence/virility, see Katan, Schnitzlers Das Schicksal des Freiherrn von Leisenbohg.

⁴⁹  Bertschik, Mode und Moderne, 166.

⁵⁰  Bertschik, Mode und Moderne, 167.

⁵¹  Bertschik, Mode und Moderne, 167.

⁵²  Zijderveld, ‘On the Nature and Function of Clichés,’ 28.

⁵³  See Imboden, Michael (1971), Die surreale Komponente im erzählenden Werk Arthur Schnitzlers, Bern: H. Lang, 86.

⁵⁴  Perlmann, Michaela L. (1987b), Arthur Schnitzler, Stuttgart: Metzler, 119.

⁵⁵  See Fliedl, Arthur Schnitzler, 169.

⁵⁶  See Janz, Rolf-Peter and Klaus Laermann (1977), Arthur Schnitzler: Zur Diagnose des Wiener Bürgertums im Fin de siècle, Stuttgart: Metzler, 41–54.

⁵⁷  Webber, Andrew J. (1996), The Doppelgänger: Double Visions in German Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 137. Webber describes here the uncanny effect of the automaton Olimpia.

⁵⁸  Recall that the inability to distinguish the individual from the stereotyped class counts for Gilman as the ‘pathological’ form of stereotyping. See Gilman, Sander L. (1985), Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness, Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press, 18.