11 - The Viennese Legacy of Casanova: The Late Erotic Writings of Arthur Schnitzler and Franz Blei

Summary

ACCORDING TO PAUL ENGLISCH, that meticulous historian of erotic literature, Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931) and Franz Blei (1871–42) were both eroticists, a reputation they still possess to the present day. The two Vienna-based writers did indeed have a passion for the depiction of erotic motifs. Arthur Schnitzler, who is best known for his socially critical accounts of fin-de-siècle bourgeois Vienna, did so most famously in his play Reigen (La Ronde, 1897). The less well known Franz Blei, recognized today for his satirical portrayal of his fellow writers in Das grosse Bestiarium der modernen Literatur (The Grand Literary Bestiarium, 1920), edited numerous volumes of erotic world literature and translated writers as prominent as Oscar Wilde and André Gide. Both Schnitzler and Blei participated in the clandestine erotic culture that flourished in Vienna before the First World War, which was characterized by censorship and taboos. Their literary careers continued well into the First Austrian (and Weimar) Republic. Most studies of erotic literature, however, do not extend beyond the First World War period.

This essay will examine the later erotic writings of Schnitzler and Blei in order to demonstrate that toward the end of the First World War, and in anticipation of radical political change, both writers turned to Casanova for inspiration, thus creating a second wave of Viennese Casanova adaptations that featured the aging womanizer and his engagement with youth. In contrast to the immediate fin de siècle, in which Casanova had served as an identification figure for young bourgeois men, Schnitzler and Blei now used the Casanova figure to voice a generational critique of society.