Schnitzler’s hidden manuscripts

Arthur Schnitzler was an inspirational Viennese novelist and playwright, but a large part of his work, which was hampered by both aesthetic criticism and racial hatred, has still to be published.

This weekend sees the 75th anniversary of his death and to mark the occasion scholars from all over Europe and the UK will be attending a special conference at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH).

The event has been organised by Lorenzo Bellettini, a PhD student from the University’s Department of German, who is studying selections from Schnitzler’s drafts, notes, diaries and letters in an effort to understand better what shaped him as both a writer and controversial thinker.

But the Cambridge connection with Schnitzler goes back much further. When the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938, Schnitzler’s works were faced with the threat of destruction because he was Jewish. They were rescued from the Nazi book-burnings by a Cambridge student, Eric Blackall, who was studying in Vienna at the time, and organised their formal donation to the University. More than 30,000 pages of Schnitzler’s writings have been housed in Cambridge University Library ever since.

“Schnitzler has inspired playwrights and even filmmakers, from Tom Stoppard to David Hare and Stanley Kubrick, but much of his work, particularly his letters to European writers and critics has been neglected by scholars,” Lorenzo Bellettini said.

“At this conference we want to focus on that unpublished legacy, stored in the University Library, and on how that sheds new light on his work and opens up new avenues for study. The aim is also to examine how he influenced the intellectual culture of his own time, and afterwards, in Europe.”

Schnitzler was born in 1862, died in 1931, and despite long and frequent travels which took him all around Europe lived his entire life in Vienna. He started as a physician and later became a writer of plays, fiction and poetry. His Jewish background meant that much of it was concerned with anti-Semitism, but even more focused on the study of love, relationships and the obscure realm of the human psyche. The sexual themes of his work, which were mirrored by his own active social life, which involved innumerable lovers – sometimes more than one at the same time - made him a controversial figure among many contemporaries. At the same time, he was also revered by other critics because of his wit, his insight into men and women, and his grasp of the way sex, love and hate intersect.

As Sigmund Freud once wrote in an admiring letter to Schnitzler: “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.”

The conference begins today (Friday) at 2pm and continues tomorrow. Full details can be found at the CRASSH website, following the links to the right of this page.