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Arthur Schnitzler (May 15, 1862 - October 21, 1931) was an Austrian writer and doctor. His best known works are Dream Story and La Ronde. He was banned during Nazi Germany and his works publicly burnt.

Biography

Schnitzler (1862-1931), the son of a prominent Jewish laryngologist, was born in Vienna and began studying medicine at the University of Vienna in 1879. He received his doctorate of medicine in 1885 and worked in Vienna's General Hospital, but ultimately abandoned medicine in favour of writing.

His works were often controversial, both for their frank description of sexuality (Sigmund Freud, in a letter to Schnitzler, confessed "I have gained the impression that you have learned through intuition — though actually as a result of sensitive introspection — everything that I have had to unearth by laborious work on other persons") as well as for the strong stand against anti-Semitism represented by works such as Professor Bernhardi and Der Weg ins Freie. (Interestingly, however, although Schnitzler was himself Jewish, "Professor Bernhardi" is the only one of his works with a clearly-identified Jewish protagonist; in the second, the hero has many Jewish friends, but is a non-Jew himself.) Schnitzler was branded as a pornographer after the release of his play Reigen, and his works were later cited as an example of "Jewish filth" by Adolf Hitler. (Reigen was made into a French language film in 1950 by the German-born director Max Ophuls under the title La Ronde. The film achieved considerable success in the English-speaking world, with the result that Schnitzler's play is better known there under the French title Ophuls used.) In response to an interviewer who asked Schnitzler what he thought about the critical view that his works all seemed to treat the same subjects, he replied, "I write of love and death. What other subjects are there?"

Despite his seriousness of purpose, Schnitzler frequently approaches the bedroom farce in his plays (and had an infamous affair with one of his actresses, Adele Sandrock). Professor Bernhardi, a play about a Jewish doctor who turns away a Catholic priest in order to spare a patient realization that she is on the point of death, and who as a result is forced out of the cooperative clinic he helped found and given two months in jail, is his only major dramatic work without a sexual theme.

A member of the avant garde group Young Vienna (Jung Wien), Schnitzler toyed with formal as well as social conventions. With his 1900 short story "Lieutenant Gustl," he was the first to write German fiction in stream-of-consciousness narration. ("Lieutenant Gustl"'s unflattering portrait of its protagonist and of the army's obsessive code of formal honor caused Schnitzler to be stripped of his commission as a reserve officer in the medical corps — something that must be seen against the rising tide of anti-semitism of the time.) He specialized in shorter works like novellas and one-act plays, and in short short stories like "The Green Tie" (Die grüne Krawatte) he showed himself to be one of the early masters of microfiction. However he wrote two full-length novels, "Der Weg ins Freie" a novel about a talented but not very motivated young composer that gives a brilliant description of a segment of pre-World War I Viennese society, and the artistically less satisfactory Therese.

In addition to his plays and fiction, Schnitzler meticulously kept a diary from the age of 17 until two days before his death, of a brain hemorrhage in Vienna. The manuscript, which runs to almost 8,000 pages, is most notable for Schnitzler's casual descriptions of sexual conquests — he was often in relationships with several women at once, and for a period of some years he kept a record of every orgasm. Collections of Schnitzler's letters have also been published.

Selected works

Plays

• Anatol (1893), a series of seven acts revolving around a bourgeoisie playboy and his immature relationships.
• Flirtation (Liebelei - 1895), also known as The Reckoning, which was made into a film by Max Ophüls and adapted as Dalliance by British playwright Tom Stoppard.
• Fair Game (Freiwild - 1896)
• Hands Around (Reigen) also called La Ronde, is still frequently presented. Max Ophüls directed the first movie adaptation of the play in 1950; Roger Vadim directed a second version in 1964; and it was recently reworked by British playwright David Hare as The Blue Room
• Paracelsus (1899)
• The Green Cockatoo (Der grüne Kakadu - 1899)
• The Lonely Way (Der einsame Weg - 1904)
• Der Ruf des Lebens (1906)
• Countess Mizzi (Komtesse Mizzi oder Der Familientag - 1909)
• Living Hours (1911)
• Young Medardus (Der junge Medardus - 1910)
• The Vast Domain (Das weite Land - 1911), adapted as Undiscovered Country by Tom Stoppard.
• Professor Bernhardi (1912)
• The Comedy of Seduction (Komödie der Verführung - 1924)

Novels

• The Road Into the Open (Der Weg ins Freie - 1908)
• Therese. Chronik eines Frauenlebens (1928)

Short stories and novellas

• Dying (Sterben - 1895)
• Lieutenant Gustl (Leutnant Gustl - 1900)
• Berta Garlan (1900)
• Blind Geronimo and his Brother (Der blinde Geronimo und sein Bruder - 1902)
• The Prophecy (Die Weissagung - 1905)
• Casanova's Homecoming (Casanovas Heimfahrt - 1918)
• Fräulein Else (1924)
• Dream Story (Traumnovelle - 1925/26), later adapted as the film Eyes Wide Shut by American director Stanley Kubrick)
• Night Games (Spiel im Morgengrauen - 1926)
• Flight into Darkness (Flucht in die Finsternis - 1931)

Nonfiction

• Youth in Vienna (Jugend in Wien), an autobiography published posthumously in 1968
• Diary, 1879-1931

Comedies of Words and Other Plays (1917)

Publications

• Theodor Reik Arthur Schnitzler als Psycholog (Minden, 1913)
• H. B. Samuel Modernities (London, 1913)
• J. G. Huneker Ivory, Apes, and Peacocks (New York, 1915)
• Ludwig Lewisohn The Modern Drama (New York, 1915)

See also

• Richard Plant