In Dream Story, Fridolin has similar reactions after his visit to the morgue, where the deadness of a dead woman does not prevent her from seeming to reach out to embrace the living.ĭespite early dismay at the realization of his own mortality, Schnitzler observed with clinical equanimity what was physiologically common to all men. does the composed, even the frivolous man experience a feeling of embarrassment or fear. And only in infrequent moments, when the corpse apes the living man he once was in some grotesque motion. He stalks like a pedantic schoolmaster whom the student thinks he can mock. At the head of the bed on which the dead man lies, even if the man who has just breathed his last is unknown to you, stands Death, still a grandiose ghostly apparition. like my colleagues, I tended to exaggerate … my indifference to the human creature become thing … I never went as far in my cynicism as those who considered it something to be proud of when they munched roasted chestnuts … at the dissecting table. In the dissecting room, as Schnitzler recalls, students confronted the common humanity of the cadaver: What reason was there to feel inferior? As Shylock had pointed out, Jews and Christians bleed under identical circumstances. The common anatomy of mankind assimilated Jews to Gentiles. Medical science was, in a sense, an ecumenical religion. Hypocrisy could scarcely be distinguished from good manners. Respect for religion was a gesture to please the older generation young Schnitzler enjoyed fasting not least because it sharpened his appetite for the delicacies which greeted its end. Their observation of High Days and Holy Days was, however, no more than pious politeness. Unlike many successful families (the Wittgensteins were a prime example), the Schnitzlers did not renounce Judaism. Only in the 1890s was the odiously affable Karl Lueger elected mayor of Vienna on an overtly anti-Semitic ticket, although individual Jews were indeed some of his best friends.
Frederic raphael professional#
In the first decade after Arthur’s birth, professional and social life in Vienna showed few signs of the aggressive anti-Semitism which was to be marked – and politically rewarding – long before the end of the century. For a long while, assimilation to Christian society seemed a feasible destiny for the Jewish elite.
When he specialized, as a laryngologist, he became rich and comfortable.
Medicine offered Schnitzler père a stable, respectable career. On the surface, however, it was business, and pleasure, as usual.
After them, Vienna soon became the forcing ground for a variety of diagnoses and putative cures: psychological for neurotic individuals political or nationalistic for the fractious elements of a disintegrating empire.
By a pretty, untranslatable pun, Traum (the German for a dream) and trauma were almost indistinguishable in the Vienna which was at home to both.Īrthur Schnitzler’s father (whose family name had been Zimmermann) had come to Vienna from Hungary before the disasters which fostered Austro-Hungary’s crisis of identity. Who can be surprised that Adler’s ‘discovery’ of the inferiority complex, and of compensating assertiveness, was made in a society traumatized by dazzling decline? It was as if the city which spawned Arthur Schnitzler and Sigmund Freud feared to awake from its tuneful dreams to prosaic reality. Yet conscious acceptance of Austria’s vanished supremacy was repressed by the brilliance and brio of its social and artistic life. Austria had already suffered preliminary humiliation by the French, under Louis-Napoleon, but Sadowa confirmed that she would never again be a major player in the world’s game. The effect of that defeat on the Viennese psyche cannot be exactly assessed. In 1866, Bismarck’s Prussia destroyed Austro-Hungary’s bravely incompetent army at Sadowa. Although, when he died in 1931, Schnitzler had survived Franz-Josef by fifteen years, his creative life was determined by the protracted twilight of an empire which lost its hegemony, and its nerve, when he was four years old. The dual kingdom survived only two more years before being dismantled by the Treaty of Versailles. By the time Arthur Schnitzler was born in Vienna in 1862, Franz-Josef had been on the throne of Austria-Hungary for ten years.
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