In a letter to Hugo von Hofmannsthal, dated 17 August 1895, Schnitzler confessed his ‘große Sehnsucht’ (great longing) to write a ‘sehr einfache Geschichte, die in sich ganz fertig ist. Eine Flasche, die man ausgießt, ohne daß etwas nachtröpfeln darf und ohne daß etwas zurückbleibt’ (very simple story, which is completely rounded and finished. A bottle, which one can pour out completely in one go, without any dribbles or leftovers remaining at the bottom).1 This describes a satisfying consumption of the literary work as a unity. It also stands in opposition to the explicit lack of Erledigung (completion) defended as ‘dialectic justice’ by the fictional writer Heinrich Bermann in Der Weg ins Freie (Road into the Open) (see WiF929). Schnitzler’s own prose texts, while they can certainly stand alone and be read individually, unfold an iterative structure of recurring themes, motifs, and character types, which seems to deny the possibility of Erledigung (completion). This repetitive structure has also emerged from the readings undertaken here, exemplified in particular through the recurring motif of Grauen (horror). This motif does not only refer each time to other Schnitzler texts, but, with its Gothic colouring, also to the Romantic tradition from which it is taken. The analysis of this recurring motif of the sensation of Grauen (horror) has underscored the central claim of this book that stereotype and destiny function as individual coping mechanisms and cultural defence strategies in Schnitzler’s prose. I have shown in the readings of this book how the sensation of Grauen (horror) also underscores the connection between the individual crisis-like experiences of the protagonists, who, while on the face of it confronted with quite different problems (lack of creativity, mental illness, prophecies of death, illegitimate babies, enigmatic femmes fatales…), seem to be united by a fundamental conflict: the desire to be reassured of their privileged position within the norm and to transgress it at the same time. As it repeatedly occurs when the protagonists experience a fading of differences, particularly between self and ‘other’, stereotype and destiny work in order to protect the protagonists from this experience of horror.
The idea of destiny emerges precisely in these moments when the familiar becomes uncanny, i.e. when the social order and its power structures are being called into question. Therefore, it has become clear that in Schnitzler’s prose, destiny works to reinforce the dominant order and prevent critical consciousness in relation to it. It thus responds to the protagonists’ need for individual self-realization, but since it is based on the assumption of a higher power, it also negates individual responsibility and impedes self-realization in the sense of a process of becoming conscious of one’s own position within the social order. In this way, the belief in destiny is to be understood as a marker of crisis, but nevertheless also as an effect that reinforces the power structures of the social order. The ambivalent problem of modernity, the subject’s claim to autonomy in the face of the normative pressures of the social order, is played out in the way Schnitzler’s characters struggle with their sense of individuality and originality of experience.
The same can be said about the stereotypes of ‘otherness’ that influence the protagonists’ perception. Stereotypes as ordering tools stabilize the boundaries between norm and ‘other’ and work to keep subjects in their assigned positions of the social order. However, my readings of Schnitzler’s texts have shown that the protagonists are not only prone to this kind of pejorative typecasting, but also to a certain stereotypical mystification of ‘otherness’. This, like the invocation of destiny, is a marker of crisis, as it suggests that the identification with the normative pressures of social destinies is weakened. However, as these stereotypes of ‘otherness’, also in their idealized form, are dependent on the norm they help to define, they do not contain any positive or alternative concepts of identity construction, which is why they, too, prevent the protagonists from developing of a critical position. By examining the link between stereotype and destiny, this study has offered a new perspective on the concept of destiny in Schnitzler’s prose. Moreover, it has provided an analysis of the way these texts engage with the power structures of the Viennese bourgeois order at the beginning of the twentieth century.
In Schnitzler’s prose, these idealizing stereotypes of ‘otherness’ are often linked to the idea of being chosen for a unique destiny. We have seen these fatal effects in Flucht in die Finsternis (Flight into Darkness), when the play with idealized stereotypes of madness is accompanied by a belief in destiny that suspends contingency altogether, or in Die Fremde (The Stranger) and Das Schicksal des Freiherrn von Leisenbohg (Baron Leisenbohg’s Destiny), when stereotypes of enigmatic femininity are aligned with the individual destiny of the protagonists. In Die Weissagung (The Prophecy), too, the stereotypical mystification of enigmatic Jewishness is linked with the idea of an inescapable individual destiny and covers up the feelings of restriction caused by the protagonist’s social destiny. And in Das neue Lied (The New Song), Karl’s idealizing gaze on the precarious life in the suburbs lets him appear more seriously involved with Marie than he actually is.
If the protagonists manage to remain in, or to return to, their position within the norm, it is to some extent always at the expense of a stereotyped ‘other’. In Der Weg ins Freie (Road into the Open), Georg enjoys the opportunity to get insights into the world of his Jewish friends, but he does not develop any sense of real solidarity with them in the face of an increasingly anti-Semitic society. Moreover, while the idealized stereotype of maternal femininity becomes Anna’s ‘destiny’, it prevents Georg from a critical evaluation of his behaviour towards her. In the end, his male and non-Jewish privilege allows him to venture along on his ‘Road into the Open’. Albeit in somewhat different ways, stereotypes of femininity also help the protagonists in Das neue Lied (The New Song) and Traumnovelle (Dream Story) to return to their bourgeois existence. While Karl’s typecasting of Marie becomes her ‘destiny’, Albertine is spared through the proxy figure of the dead woman who fulfils the stereotypical narrative of sacrificial femininity for her and in this way allows Fridolin to experience a stabilization of his position within the patriarchal bourgeois order.
What the readings in the five chapters of this study have shown is that this conflict applies to both representatives of the bourgeoisie and of the aristocracy. While for the former, the latter are often still subject to a certain mystification, as is hinted at in Traumnovelle (Dream Story) and Die Fremde (The Stranger), the protagonists who are in fact of noble descent turn out to be merely bourgeoises with a title: both von Umprecht and von Leisenbohg fail fatally and in the same way as their bourgeois counterparts Robert and Albert. All of them are tempted by stereotypical narratives of ‘otherness’, which seem to promise an escape from their social destinies. Georg von Wergenthin’s actions towards his socially inferior lover are mirrored in those of Karl Breiteneder. The suicide of Karl’s lover, the singer Marie Ladenbauer, returns as a motif in Der Weg ins Freie (Road into the Open) in the side-storyline of Heinrich Bermann’s lover – the nameless actress. Both of them are, of course, representatives of the ‘süßes Mädel’ (sweet girl) – a (stereo)type of femininity coined by Schnitzler.
For the sake of consistency, this book has focused on the male perspective and therefore neglected to look at the key texts by Schnitzler which feature female protagonists like Frau Bertha Garlan (Ms Bertha Garlan, 1900), Frau Beate und ihr Sohn (Ms Beate and Her Son, 1913), Fräulein Else (Miss Else, 1924), and Therese (1928). Particularly Fräulein Else, one of Schnitzler’s best-researched texts, would lend itself paradigmatically to show how stereotypes as social destiny can indeed be fatal, as Bourdieu would have it. Her suicide (or at least suicide attempt, depending on which interpretation in the scholarship one supports), akin to the death of the unknown woman in Traumnovelle (Dream Story), can be seen as an expression of ‘Weibliches Sterben an der Kultur’ (female dying through culture) and therefore as a sacrifice that protects the patriarchal order.2 Moreover, scholars have pointed out how much Else’s perception is formed not so much by individual experiences, but by her literary reading.3 Here she resembles male protagonists like Albert in Die Fremde (The Stranger) or Baron Leisenbohg or Wehwald in Das Tagebuch der Redegonda (Redegonda’s Diary, not discussed in this book), whose expectations of love in particular are formed by literary clichés. For female characters, however, the incorporation of these cultural narratives is even more harmful, because they assign to them the objectified position of the ‘other’. Else’s internalization and anticipation of the male gaze and its stereotypical expectations of femininity has been well documented in the scholarship.4 Schnitzler’s novel Therese can be seen as another example, in which Schnitzler maps out the performative repetition compulsion of stereotypical social destinies. Therese’s life is depicted as a succession of failures, which indeed take on the form of a social destiny. Her precarious position after her father’s death mirrors that of other female characters in Schnitzler’s prose: Katharina in Die Fremde (The Stranger), Maria in Der letzte Brief des Literaten (The Writer’s Last Letter, not discussed in this book), or Paula in Flucht in die Finsternis (Flight into Darkness). All these women end up being exploited by the male protagonists for the theatrical mise en scène of their individual destiny.
Schnitzler’s contemporary, the writer Auguste Hauschner, explained his insight into female perspective as a result of his own positionality as an Austrian Jew: both women and Jews had in common, Hauschner wrote, that they had belonged to the oppressed for thousands of years.5 The last chapter has made visible the parallels between the Jewish characters Marco Polo and Nachtigall, which highlight above all their equivalent stereotypical function for the repetitive protagonists. They appear as Jewish ‘stock figures’, identified with a dangerous yet fascinating half-world, which promises a certain kind of freedom and insight inaccessible to the representatives of the non-Jewish (or, at least in Fridolin’s case possibly acculturated) bourgeois norm. This stereotype is at once reproduced and demystified by Heinrich Berman, who explains to Georg:
Wir verstehen euch jedenfalls viel besser, als ihr uns. Wenn Sie auch den Kopf schütteln! Es ist ja nicht unser Verdienst. Wir haben es nämlich notwendiger gehabt, euch verstehen zu lernen, als ihr uns. Diese Gabe des Verstehens hat sich ja im Lauf der Zeit bei uns entwickeln müssen … nach den Gesetzen des Daseinskampfes, wenn Sie wollen. (WiF757)
At any rate we understand you much better than you do us. Although you shake your head! Do we not deserve to? We have found it more necessary, you see, to learn to understand you than you did to learn to understand us. This gift of understanding was forced to develop itself in the course of time … according to the laws of the struggle for existence if you like.6
In this way, the stereotype becomes linked to the precarious position of the Jews, which is also hinted at in Die Weissagung (The Prophecy) and Traumnovelle (Dream Story), although it is ignored by the protagonists. This emphasis on the special form of insight of the Jews brings out the link between the stereotyped figure of Marco Polo and other Jewish characters in Schnitzler’s writings. As I have demonstrated in the first chapter, Georg too is affected by the ambivalent stereotype of the Jew, and, through contact with Heinrich, seeks insight into ‘eine Welt, die ihm bisher ziemlich fremd geblieben war’ (WiF708) (a world which had been more or less foreign to him).7 This formulation returns in Traumnovelle (Dream Story), when Fridolin feels increasingly alienated from his bourgeois existence and moves ‘aus dem gewohnten Bezirk seines Daseins in irgendeine andere, ferne, fremde Welt’ (T28) (into some strange and distant world);8 and here too it is the Jewish ‘doorman’ Nachtigall who grants access to this world.
The comparable function of stereotypes of Jewishness and femininity is then also underscored in Die Fremde (The Stranger) through the recurrence of the foreign world, which Albert attributes to Katharina. Karl, in Das neue Lied, is horrified at the ‘Unheimliche, Fremde’ (NL632) (uncanny, foreign element) that he thinks he discerns in Marie’s blind gaze. And in the last stages of his illness, when Robert, in Flucht in die Finsternis (Flight into Darkness), flees to the countryside to escape Otto’s alleged murderous intentions, the well-known scenery appears to him as a ‘fremde, nie vorher geschaute Gegend’ (FiF105) (a foreign land, which he had never seen before), which links his experience of mental illness to the encounters with ‘otherness’ made by the protagonists in the other texts. While stereotypes are designed to create tight categories of similarity and alterity, they recurrently serve to project Schnitzler’s protagonists into more ambiguous territories.
The element of foreignness is tightly linked to the concept of destiny in Schnitzler’s writings. As I hope to have shown in this study, however, these moments of alienation are not moments of individual self-realization. In my readings, destiny is not ‘aus dem Alltäglich-Festgelegten ein Durchbruch zum Eigenen’ (breakthrough to a realm of one’s own).9 It is also not at all irrelevant how these attempts at finding one’s individual destiny turn out, contrary to what Schrimpf suggests: ‘Dabei ist es von sekundärer Bedeutung, wie die Erzählfiguren aus der Erprobung hervorgehen’ (It is here of secondary significance, how the characters emerge from the trials of fate).10 In opposition to this, I have taken the recurring failures of the protagonists seriously. All protagonists share feelings of inadequacy and restriction, long for the originality and individuality of their experiences and are threatened by the ‘stereotypy’ of their actions, which often appear like repetition compulsions. These repetition compulsions seem to be mirrored in the iterative structure of Schnitzler’s oeuvre, which can be read as a performative effect: while the protagonists proclaim that they are destined for an individual path of life, the effect of seriality in Schnitzler’s writings precisely contradicts that.
One could then say that what may appear as a certain kind of ‘stereotypy’ in Schnitzler’s writings has a poetological function,11 which brings to the fore the compulsive repetition inherent in the construction of identity or social essence. Through their repetitive structures, Schnitzler’s texts create their own clichés, but they also play with the incorporation of cultural clichés and elements from other literary traditions, particularly that of Romanticism. By doing so, the texts stage recognition scenes for the readers and constantly give them the feeling of ‘having been here before’.12 We recall that the sense of cliché, as described by Cave, is the feeling ‘of being cheated, of being brought to a moment of fullness only to find that it is empty’.13 It is this feeling of being cheated that Schnitzler’s texts can evoke, particularly if read together, which has also emerged from the readings undertaken here. However, this sense of betrayal goes beyond the simple recognition of a literary cliché: it is linked to a moment of irritation or dissatisfaction. To use Schnitzler’s own metaphor, there seems to be a remainder in the bottle that we cannot swallow.
This is mirrored in many critical responses to Schnitzler’s work: the discussion about coherence in Der Weg ins Freie (Road into the Open), the arguments for and against the element of choice and its ethical implications in Flucht in die Finsternis (Flight into Darkness), the attempts at rationalizing the fantastic elements in the Dämmerseelen (Dozing Souls) texts or at solving the question of whether Fridolin dreams about his adventures in Traumnovelle (Dream Story) or really experiences them. Schnitzler’s texts seem to provoke a need to find unequivocal solutions or Erledigungen (completions/definite solutions). With regard to the set of readings undertaken here, I would like to suggest that, in contrast to Schnitzler’s own idea of a successful art work, this lack of ‘Erledigung’ (completion) is part of what continues to make his writings interesting. By almost always offering the reader the perspective of the protagonists through internal focalization, these texts suggest that stereotype and destiny may be set up as coping mechanisms not only for the characters, but also for the readers. However, the protagonists’ (existential or interpersonal) failures cast these mechanisms into question. And where some of the protagonists may get away with using the coping mechanism of stereotype and destiny, Schnitzler’s texts give an account of the price that is paid by those stereotyped as ‘other’.
That stereotypes of ‘otherness’ continue to help define normative concepts qua exclusion seems almost too trivial a fact to be pointed out. The stereotype of magical or supernatural ‘otherness’, which we have encountered in Die Fremde (The Stranger), Die Weissagung (The Prophecy) and Traumnovelle (Dream Story), is still used in cultural productions today. In fact, the representation of the ‘other’ as someone who has access to the supernatural world or who provides some other form of intuitive wisdom to the protagonist is so common that cultural critics and scholars have found new names to describe these stereotypes: in mainstream Hollywood films, for instance, the frequent occurrence of the so-called ‘magical Negro’, a Black side-character, whose magical powers and/or spiritual insight help the white protagonist through a crisis, has been critically analyzed. Albeit ostensibly represented in a positive light, this character is nevertheless denied any individual development but seems to exist exclusively to help the white lead in his or her journey of self-realization. Therefore, this cinematic trope continues to reproduce marginalizing stereotypes of Blackness and suppress Black agency.14 The way many films still represent female characters as complementary ‘others’ for the male protagonists has led to the controversial term ‘Manic Pixie Dream Girl’, coined by the film critic Nathan Rabin in 2007.15 The term describes a female character who exists exclusively to help the male protagonist find their way (or ‘destiny’) again after an experience of crisis. Her complete availability, desirability, and lack of ambitions and desires of her own highlight the stereotypical function of this character, which is contrasted with the more individualized narrative of the male protagonist. Schnitzler’s characters thus find their latter-day equivalents in contemporary culture, and what has emerged from the five readings of Schnitzler’s prose in this book is a psycho-social structure that is still at work today. As Schnitzler’s texts make us aware of the stereotypical cultural narratives that influence the protagonists’ perceptions, they also can function as an incentive to reflect on the narratives that prevail in our own culture: we may ask whom of us these contemporary narratives exclude and stereotype in order to grant some of us the privilege of feeling normal and special at the same time.
1 Schnitzler, Arthur and Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1964), Briefwechsel, ed. by Therese Nickl and Heinrich Schnitzler, Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 59.
2 Bronfen, Elisabeth (1993), ‘Weibliches Sterben an der Kultur: Arthur Schnitzlers “Fräulein Else”,’ Die Wiener Jahrhundertwende: Einflüsse, Umwelt, Wirkungen, Vienna, Cologne, Graz: Böhlau.
3 Aurnhammer, Achim (2013), Arthur Schnitzlers intertextuelles Erzählen, Berlin; Boston, MA: De Gruyter, 185.
4 See Weinhold, Ulrike (1987), ‘Arthur Schnitzler und der weibliche Diskurs: Zur Problematik des Frauenbildes in der Jahrhundertwende,’ Jahrbuch für Internationale Germanistik, 19 (1): 110–145; Bronfen, ‘Weibliches Sterben an der Kultur,’ 466–467; Rabelhofer, Bettina (2006), Symptom, Sexualität, Trauma: Kohärenzlinien des Ästhetischen um 1900, Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 210.
5 See Beier, Nicolaj (2008), Vor allem bin ich ich: Judentum, Akkulturation und Antisemitismus in Arthur Schnitzlers Leben und Werk, Göttingen: Wallstein, 162.
6 Schnitzler, Arthur (1913b), Road into the Open, translated by Horace Samuel, London: Howard Latimer, 155.
7 Schnitzler, Road into the Open, 92.
8 Schnitzler, Arthur (1928), Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, [no translator named], London: Constable Publishers, 59.
9 Schrimpf, Hans Joachim (1963), ‘Arthur Schnitzlers Traumnovelle,’ Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 82: 172–192, 175.
10 Schrimpf, ‘Arthur Schnitzlers Traumnovelle,’ 176.
11 Katrin Schumacher offers a first sketch of Schnitzler’s Akte der Wiederholung (acts of repetition) as his ‘poetologisches Prinzip’ (poetological principle). See Schumacher, Katrin (2011), ‘Wieder. Einmal. Wieder: Arthur Schnitzlers Akte der Wiederholung,’ Contested Passions: Sexuality, Eroticism, and Gender in Modern Austrian Literature and Culture, ed. by Clemens Ruthner and Ralleigh Whitinger, New York, etc.: Peter Lang, 197–208, 205.
12 This adds a further aspect to a claim by Konstanze Fliedl: if Schnitzler’s work after 1900 is concerned with the question ‘Wie kann die Kunst die Erinnerung retten?’ (How can art save memory?), then the never-ending return to familiar places may be a way to seek to achieve it. See Fliedl, Konstanze (1997), Arthur Schnitzler. Poetik der Erinnerung, Vienna, Cologne, Weimar: Böhlau, 25.
13 Cave, Terence (1988), Recognitions: A Study in Poetics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 458.
14 See Glenn, Cerise L. and Landra J. Cunningham (2009), ‘The Magical Negro and White Salvation in Film,’ Journal of Black Studies 40 (2): 132–152; Hughey, Matthew (2009), ‘Cinethetic Racism: White Redemption and Black Stereotypes in “Magical Negro” Films,’ Social Problems, 56 (3): 543–577.
15 See Rabin, Nathan (2007), ‘The Bataan Death March of Whimsy Case File #1: Elizabethtown,’ http://www.avclub.com/article/the-bataan-death-march-of-whimsy-case-file-1-emeli-15577 (accessed on 1 June 2017).