ARTHUR SCHNITZLER’S THE ROAD INTO THE OPEN
University of California Press, 1992
reviewed by Tony Roberts
One of the almost forgotten masterpieces of twentieth century European
literature is the Viennese author Arthur Schnitzler’s 1908 novel, The
Road into the Open (Der Weg ins Freie). It explores the
foundering of liberalism in Vienna through the life of a self-absorbed young
composer and his Jewish friends. We witness the effects of anti-Semitism
rather than the acts themselves and in that, for me, lies the novel’s
poignancy and relevance today.
While Schnitzler is perhaps of marginal interest, he is still recognised
as a stylish, unconventional writer —the excellent Lieutenant
Gustl (1900); the infamous La Ronde (Reigen/1897);
and the short stories collected in Night Games
(Spiel im Morgengrauen/1926). His
plays, stories and novels catalogue the frequently sexual hypocrisies of his
Vienna (1862-1931), as well as exploring its dreams. In fact Freud famously
acknowledged to Schnitzler that he had avoided him as if he were his double
(“Doppelgänger’), given their like-minded explorations of the unconscious,
their similar ages, imaginations and their Jewishness.
The similarity of their preoccupations is perhaps not as surprising as it
first appears. Lionel Trilling, writing of Freud and literature in The
Liberal Imagination (1950) noted the following: ‘To pass from the
reading of a great literary work to a treatise of academic psychology is to
pass from one order of perception to another, but the human nature of the
Freudian psychology is exactly the stuff upon which the poet has always
exercised his art.’ Schnitzler, however, is more cynical than clinical.
Arthur Schnitzler was born into a wealthy
Jewish family in the heart of Vienna in 1862, the son of a respected
Hungarian laryngologist. Both Schnitzler and his younger brother studied and
practised medicine, though he soon gravitated to literature, to fiction and
drama. As a man about town, he found the theatre and the coffeehouse more to
his liking. His hedonism included the pursuit of sex and romance, even after
his marriage at the age of forty. His conquests and orgasms were all
painstakingly recorded in his lifelong diaries. In his writing Schnitzler
frequently championed women, even as he exploited them. His wife, an
aspiring actress, gave birth to two children before the couple separated in
1921, a decade before his death.
The plot of
The Road into the Open
is
hardly complicated. A young aristocratic composer, Baron Georg von
Wergenthin, talented but irresolute, visits Viennese salons, takes bicycle
rides, chats in coffeehouses with his Jewish friends (where he indulges, we
assume, in the talk of the times). He desires one or two of the young women
he knows quite well, and begins a relationship with the lower middle-class
Anna Rosner.
Publicly Georg is the darling of his Jewish friends, for his promising
talent and his background. And yet as
Carl E. Schorske explained in Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and
Culture (1979),
‘Although on the surface this society loves his person and encourages his
art, it actually reinforces in him, by virtue of its hopeless pluralism, a
sense of drift, isolation, and futility.’ Privately he is ironically
dismissed by one acquaintance as ‘a handsome, slender, blond young man;
Baron, German, Christian, —what Jew could resist the magic!’ And to his
hostess he is an attractive catch, though ‘too cool, too aloof, too bland’.
Little happens to Georg personally in this calmly paced and seemingly
meandering novel. He procrastinates over commitment romantically and
artistically, as he does over the offer of a position as conductor with a
German opera company. What drama the novel offers— save in the
romance—occurs off stage and so we learn of it by report.
Georg and his handsome brother, Felician, have recently lost their father,
which has contributed to Georg’s sense of drift. Felicien is an example of
steadiness to Georg, though only on occasions can they talk more intimately
than as ‘good acquaintances’. A good swordsman, he works currently in the
Governor’s office, and intends to enter diplomatic circles. He gently chides
Georg on his failure of resolve as far as his musical talent goes, as does
his friend Else Ehrenberg, and both Else and Anna’s doctor, Doctor Stauber,
remind Georg of his obligations in his relationship with Anna.
He is blissfully self-centred. He admires the modest Anna, who sings
beautifully and whom he often accompanies on the piano, but conceives of her
really as a reflection of his own aspirations:
‘Anna was better suited than anyone else to counteract his tendency toward
frivolousness and carelessness and to spur him on to purposeful and
productive activity.’
His attraction to her is fragile, however: ‘Even as he had left Anna at her
door three days ago, after the first evening of complete fulfillment, he had
become aware, before any other feeling, of the pleasure of being alone
again.’
Georg is able to airily discuss what should be done when Anna intimates her
pregnancy, though he is surprised to find his life carrying ‘obligations of
a serious kind’. That same evening at a soiree that Anna attends he is
whispering to the enchanting Sissy about their taking a trip together. A
little later he is wondering about possible marriage with Elsa and on
another occasion steals a furtive kiss from Theresa in the garden.
The most embarrassing moments in the novel are perhaps Georg’s conversations
with Anna’s parents, when the pregnancy is confirmed. Her mother is crushed
at the news, while sitting ‘powerless across from the noble seducer’. Georg
has approached their talk with some delicacy, though a few days later, when
Anna’s father comes to see him, we learn he ‘felt nothing but a vacant
boredom’. Again he tries to make little of the situation. On neither
occasion does he mention marriage. At least he is described as appearing
‘distasteful to himself’ and as having ‘an unpleasant aftertaste’ for few
days after the interviews.
Bermann, who both loves and hates Vienna, is one of a community of educated
people who mix socially and readily discuss Nietzsche and Ibsen, or listen
attentively to piano recitals and lieder. Anna, for instance,
has given singing lessons to the
‘chirping’ Else she has known since schooldays. They both know the
scandalous Theresa Golowski, agitator of the Social Democratic Party, whose
life, like that of her brother, Leo—once Anna’s infatuation—‘was not moving
toward any clear goal’. A number of characters seem lost amid generational
differences. In Vienna the times have politicized them.
Herr Ehrenberg, at whose home the salons take place, is a wealthy
businessman who has an eye to visiting Jerusalem before his death. He feels
strongly about anti-Semites (‘Grab the next fellow, you’ll catch one’). When
he claims his son, Oscar, is one, his wife says he sees them everywhere and
a guest explains, ‘It’s the latest national illness of the Jews.’ Father and
son later cause a public scene over ‘a Catholic gesture’ outside church,
which results in their grave alienation.
The roots of anti-Semitism, racial and cultural, are of course deep, but in
Vienna the 1848 Revolution gave hope for future democratic change and in
1867 when the Austro-Hungarian Empire came into being after disastrous years
for the Habsburg Empire, Jews benefitted from religious freedom. Allowed
access to the professions (though hardly to government and the military) the
Jewish population asserted itself, as well as growing enormously through
immigration. Anti-Semitism, however, was never dormant and in times of
economic downturn became rabid as ever. As a consequence, the journalist
Theodor Herzl established modern Zionism as a political movement in 1897 and
this is the talk of the novel.
In reality some saw their own experience of the city in a positive light.
Amos Elon in The Pity of It All (2002)
reminds us that there were those like
Stefan Zweig who were fully aware that the Jewish contribution to the
economy and culture of the city had been crucial to its eminence. Zweig, a
younger writer than Schnitzler, published in 1942
The World of Yesterday
(Die Welt von Gestern). Here he
remembered his Viennese upbringing
nostalgically (‘We
lived well, we lived with light hearts and minds at ease in old Vienna’). As
Elon says, Walter Benjamin echoed this when he wrote of the
‘bourgeois security’ of his home life, while neither novelist Robert Musil
nor satirist Karl Kraus could avoid coming to a much darker view, that
Austria provided ‘a proving ground for the apocalypse’.
Elon offers Schnitzler’s view from ‘My Youth in Vienna’ (1912). The Jew in
public life, he argued, “could not ignore the fact that he was a Jew; nobody
else did, not the Gentiles and even less the Jews. You had the choice of
being considered insensitive, obtrusive and fresh; or of being
oversensitive, shy and suffering from feelings of persecution.’ At the time,
city affairs had been dominated for thirteen years by its opportunistic
mayor, Karl Lueger, who stirred anti-Semitism wherever it suited his
populist and nationalist agenda.
The salon dialogue of Schnitzler’s novel (à la his French
contemporary, Proust, also Jewish) might be gossip or talk of art or
platonic love (‘We cherish untroubled memories only of missed
opportunities’). That is because a number of characters are what William M.
Johnston in The Austrian Mind (1972) described as ‘votaries of
carpe diem’, who ‘evade the future with the insouciance of an
overrefined and dying elite’. Nevertheless, omnipresent here and in the
conversation of coffeehouses is the urgent issue of the increase of
anti-Semitism in the city.
Two subjects predominate and are violently argued among the men: whether a
Viennese Jew is a Jew first or an Austrian and, as a corollary, whether one
should be an optimistic assimilationist or an ardent Zionist.
Self-examination results in polarization. Georg claims to have met in Vienna
‘only Jews who were ashamed of being Jews, or such that were proud of it and
afraid that someone might think they were ashamed,’ To Schnitzler the
questions can only be resolved on a personal basis.
Even Georg has a casual anti-Semitism, though it barely registers on his
feelings. At one point he thinks idly of ‘the poor young man whom Leo
had shot and who actually had no more against the Jews than that they had
been as unappealing to him as they were to most other people’. Little wonder
that paranoia is widespread.
Herr Ehrenburg’s is the voice of the betrayed: ‘Who created the Liberal
movement in Austria? … The Jews!... By whom have the Jews been betrayed and
abandoned? By the Liberals. Who created the German Nationalist movement in
Austria? The Jews. By whom have the Jews been left in the lurch…’ why do I
say left in the lurch… spit on like a dog? By the Germans! And it will be
just the same for you with Socialism and Communism. When the soup is finally
served, you will be driven from the table. It has always been that way, and
always will be.’
The problem is compounded by disagreement among Georg’s Jewish friends about
what is to be done. There is a clash on the subject of ‘Homeland Palestine’.
Leo Golowski, whom Georg admires, is the Zionist. His friend Heinrich
considers such an enterprise an ‘affliction’. Georg is undecided between
Leo’s proud spurning of those who feel he is inferior and Heinrich’s belief
that it is nonsensical to desert a homeland for a destination for which Jews
could feel no homesickness. Georg, however,
recognizes that ‘he would never achieve, through any amount of sympathy, a
truly natural intimacy’ with Leo and Heinrich; the times and his nature are
against it.
On another occasion he accuses the latter of being ‘a worse anti Semite than
most Christians I know’. Bermann laughs the idea off, but his cynicism about
his people has this behind it, in his eyes: the weight of being held
responsible for the acts of others deemed your own ‘kind’; the feeling of
alienation—the need to be watchful in one’s own land; and a hatred of those
Jews who try to appease their enemies. Appeasement would eventually fail
anyway.
With the move from a cultural to a racial definition of anti-Semitism, any
hope of assimilation was neutralized.
This point is given some force in the novel when Heinrich Bermann talks of
making his late father the subject of a political drama: ‘A Jew who loves
his country… I mean like my father did, with feelings of solidarity, with
enthusiasm for the dynasty, is absolutely a tragicomic figure. That is… he
was, in the liberalized period of the seventies and eighties, since even
clever men are under the influence of the verbal delirium of the times.
Nowadays such a man would be exclusively comic.’
To Bermann—as to Schnitzler—there would be no solution to the Jewish
‘problem’ in their lifetime and so ‘Everyone must discover for himself how
to escape from his anger, or his despair, or his disgust, to somewhere where
he can breathe free again.’ He believes that moving to Jerusalem is one
option, though he fears ‘the roads to our destination do not run through the
outside world, but lie within ourselves.’ Each person must find an ‘inner
way’. This inner way is the way into the open for Georg, also. It is the
hard freedom that results from a self-examination he has barely begun.
The First World War would lead to the collapse of the Habsburgs and
eventually to the 1938 Anschluss, when Austria embraced the Nazis with great
enthusiasm, even outpacing the Germans in the violence of their
opportunistic anti-Semitism. Schnitzler, who died in 1931, two years before
Hitler’s inauguration as Chancellor, could hardly be expected to envision
the coming apocalypse, but in my view he illuminated courageously and with
literary flair the effects of the disintegration of a briefly sane society
that made it possible.
Tragically, of course, the disease of anti-Semitism is still with us —which
would hardly have surprised Schnitzler.