Patricia A. Simpson, Montana State University

Arthur Schnitzler’s The Road into the Open

“Das 20. Jahrhundert wurde in Wien erfunden” (“the 20th century was discovered in Vienna”). It is perhaps a radical statement, as the editors of a volume on Vienna at the turn of the century indicate. Given the names we associate with that place and that time, from Sigmund Freud and Ludwig Wittgenstein to Arnold Schoenberg, Gustav Mahler through the representatives of Art Nouveau (Jugendstil), it seems fitting to declare 1900 the inaugural moment of cultural modernism as well. No roster of the Viennese modern would be complete without the name Arthur Schnitzler, who is known outside the German-speaking world largely for his controversial play about sexual encounters, Reigen – “La Ronde” or “Roundelay.” In this paper, I focus instead on one of his lesser-known works in order to explore the role of political anti-Semitism and historical influence on the novel, Der Weg ins Freie (The Road into the Open). This work, which the author locates in Vienna, 1900, raises questions about the relationship between Viennese Modernism and late Imperial Austria as a geographical and discursive totality, riddled with fissures. Published in serial form in “Die neue Rundschau” (Berlin 1908), the book first appeared in that same year. No other literary work, to my mind, so aptly portrays the fraught politics and socio-cultural negotiations of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the late 1890s and early 20th century. I locate my reading of this novel within the context of Freudian psychoanalysis, but I also reference the emergence of the ‘German” Reich as historical counterpoint to the fracturing Austrian Empire.

Peter Berner, Emil Brix, Wolfgang Mantl, “Zur Einführung,“ Wien um 1900. Aufbruch in die Moderne (Wien: Verlag für Geschichte und Politik Wien, 1986) 10.