The Skeptic of Vienna
By Reuben Brainin
The literary world is celebrating the seventieth year of Arthur
Schnitzler, one of the foremost
story-tellers of our time. Reuben Brainin, dean of Hebrew literature, and a
personal friend of Schnitzler, here gives an appreciation of the Austrian Jewish author as
he understands him – as a man, a writer and a Jew. – The Editor.
At the beginning of the twentieth century Arthur
Schnitzler’s most famous writings were his »Anatol,« »Liebelei,« »Sterben,« »Leutenant
Gustl.« A light sort of writing, in form and in content. Dialogues: between
people of elegant manners and wellmanicured ideas; between graceful and polite
sentimentalists; between people disappointed in love but still hunting for the
supreme thrill: between intellectual esthetes unfit for the hardships of life, with
too soft hands and backbones; between women who avidly seek the perfect lover and
try
to escape the everyday drabness of their prosaic existence. And above the
tribulations and often petty tragedies of Schnitzler’s puppets there always hung the cloud of inevitable death, which
whipped them into life and yet, at the same time, paralyzed them. The thought of the
end, which made them realize the futility of love and yet drove them on to find that
elusive something which might cheat the Grim Reaper of his victim. This is the
essence of Schnitzler’s first literary decade.
But to that should be added a fine, skeptical, often ironic smile, the smile of Arthur Schnitzler who, instead of pitying his
contemporaries, just looks at them sadly as they struggle against their fate. A smile
that makes us weep.
I still remember my surprise when I met Arthur
Schnitzler for the first time at Vienna,
in September, 1903. I had expected to find a snob, an elegant idler, a
middle-aged »Anatol.« His reputation –
conceptions of authors by readers are mostly misleading – was that of a polished,
brilliant and rather superficial literateur in his personal life. But the Schnitzler I met, then in his forties, impressed
me much more as a scholar than as a novelist in vogue. His medical training – Schnitzler is a graduate physician and for some
years was attached to a Vienna hospital – had
influenced him strongly. His interest in psychology was that of a man of science. When he spoke of people and of sociological
currents it was in the language of a sober observer, a studious research worker and
a
pitiless prober. It had been his lot, as a physician, to handle a human species
naked, without official garb, without the distinction of rank. He had found himself
almost in the role of a spiritual and physical father confessor. During our
conversation, on my first visit to him, we spoke primarily of the Jewish renaissance
movement and the awakening of the Jewish national consciousness. He modestly assumed
the role of the listener eager to be informed. There were moments when he struck me
as pedantic, rather too serious, almost solemn.
In later years, at subsequent meetings, my first impressions were merely confirmed. . . Arthur Schnitzler the man was the very
antithesis of the dandy the intelligentsia of Europe visualized him. It was the old trap into which readers fall so
readily – that of shaping the author in accordance with the personages or heroes of
his works – which was responsible for the distorted legend that had been created
around Arthur Schnitzler the Viennese author.
You will ask me: »But to what extent is Arthur
Schnitzler a Jew?« If you will forgive me – the question is rather
unnecessary and petty. Jewishness cannot be measured in doses or percentages. And
surely not when it comes to a personality like Arthur Schnitzler, with so distinct an outlook upon life. Born at Vienna, of what we are wont to call an assimilated
family – his father was a distinguished physician and a Professor at the University of Vienna – Arthur Schnitzler although he personally did not experience
any virulent anti-Semitism, clearly recognized the anomalous position of the Austrian Jew. He pondered on the Jewish question
long and sincerely. He gathered material laboriously. When, a year before the world war, he published
»Professor Bernhardi,« a play centering
around a medical Dreyfus case and exposing the
anti-Semitic tendencies in Vienna’s medical and
government circles, he stamped himself as a foe of the assimilationist movement.
But the story of Professor Bernhardi is told
with an ironic smile. No attempt is made to effect a reform; nor is the author
inclined to let his indignation get the best of him. The last word before the curtain
goes down is characteristic of Schnitzler.
Somehow it leaves you doubtful as to whether Professor Bernhardi, who was condemned to two months in jail because he
forbade a priest to give absolution to a patient, was an idealist or merely a fool.
None the less the play created a furore and showed clearly where Schnitzler stood with regard to his Jewishness. No more
ruthless caricature of the assimilated and converted Jew has been written than Schnitzler’s »Professor Bernhardi.«
Thus Schnitzler is inscribed in the German
literary Who’s Who as a Jewish author, although – except in »Professor Bernhardi« and his novel »Der Weg Ins Freie« – he has not concerned himself with Jewish
questions. He was satisfied to write of the Viennese, of the sentimental, romantic loves of half-baked girls, of elegant
officers, of disillusioned servant girls, derailed doctors. After the war, it is
true, he gave us »Casanova’s Homecoming,« a
pseudo-historical novel in which he reveals himself at the very acme of his creative
talent and which constitutes one of his rare excursions outside of Vienna.
One cannot even attempt to condense so prolific an author and so genuine a
personality as Schnitzler into the framework of
an article. In contemporary literature Arthur
Schnitzler is considered one of the great trio of which Gerhardt Hauptmann and Thomas Mann are the other members. This despite the subject-matter of his
works, which, as already mentioned, deal with rather superficial joys of life. For
the critical reader, however, there are always two stories in any Schnitzler book: One that plays in the foreground and is of
apparently only local interest and skin-deep significance: but in the background,
if
one cares to delve deeper into Schnitzler’s
stories, there is enacted the eternal human tragedy of man in search of love, in fear
of death and in a fruitless struggle to liberate himself from the material and
sensual world.
It is on this second plane that Arthur
Schnitzler reminds one of Anatole
France – a skeptic to whom nothing human is foreign, an observer who finds
the eternal problems in the everyday life of a harlot or a soldier just as tragic
as
the tribulations of a statesman or an artist.
As Schnitzler enters his seventieth year – a
commanding figure who has managed to keep himself above all the petty political
gibbering of Europe, whose creative output has always been marked by an artistocratic
distinction that made it possible for him to say and discuss everything without ever
becoming vulgar – he represents the genuine artist. There is nothing of the
professional man of letters in him. No jealousies, no best-seller attitude to
literature. He hates, and always has hated, the literary charlatan who strives for
effect and hastens to catch the latest literary vogue or school, hoping by means of
his ability to be up-to-date to squeeze through the narrow gate of immortality. Schnitzler’s books may not live much longer than
the first half of the twentieth century – but to us, his contemporaries, he is a
vital, nay, inspiring personality and author.
