3 - Schnitzler as Humanist Institution

Summary

From Blume's 1936 dissertation to the aftermath of National Socialism, very little productivity was evident in Schnitzler scholarship, with no criticism of monograph size matching that of Körner's investigation until Françoise Derré's L'oeuvre d'Arthur Schnitzler: Imagerie viennoise et problèmes humains (1966). But the mid-sixties is too late to take up the discussion, because enduring criticism of general nature, though lesser scope, is apparent much earlier, for example in Oskar Seidlin's 1953 edition of the correspondence of Schnitzler and Brahm. For that reason, criticism discussed in this chapter spans the time from the early fifties to the early seventies, beginning with Seidlin's discussion of Schnitzler as an impressionist and ending with Ernst Offermanns's calling Schnitzler a critic of impressionism. If this contrast sounds simplistic — it is taken from Herbert Seidler's 1976 research review — it at least documents the increasing agility of scholarship in reconciling voluntarism, “which regards man as a free agent responsible for his acts,” with determinism, “which views man as governed by forces beyond his control.” If they are without choice, Schnitzler's characters are slaves to their impressionism in a nihilistic universe; if free will becomes an ingredient in their makeup, however, they can be wary of viewing life as unconnected impressions and nothing more, and such wariness enables the step toward meaning and ethics.

At the same time that Schnitzler's books were being blacklisted in Europe during the thirties and forties, primary Schnitzler scholarship was being produced by refugees who had settled in the United States and by exiles who had returned to Europe after the Second World War.