Schnitzler’s hidden manuscripts explored

Now, more than 75 years after his death, unpublished letters and drafts by the Austrian Jewish playwright Arthur Schnitzler, which were rescued from destruction by the Nazis, are being put on public display for the first time.

Starting this week (Wednesday, 21 May), manuscripts, letters and photographs selected from a vast archive of material at Cambridge University will go on show at a London exhibition celebrating Schnitzler’s life and work.

The collection, which contains more than 30,000 pages, was left behind by the Jewish writer after his death in 1931. When the Nazis annexed his country seven years later and commenced their programme of systematically burning works by Jewish authors, the documents were rescued by a Cambridge student, Eric Blackall, who arranged for them to be sent to England.

The archive has been available to researchers at the University Library ever since but most of it has remained unread, either by academics or members of the general public. Now a PhD student, Lorenzo Bellettini, has embarked on a project to study some of the thousands of letters, drafts and other papers that Schnitzler left behind.

Since his death, Schnitzler has gained near-cult status thanks, in part, to the reverence he aroused among later generations of writers for stage and screen. His work is credited as having inspired Stoppard’s Dalliance and Undiscovered Country, David Hare’s The Blue Room and Stanley Kubrick’s final film, Eyes Wide Shut.

His fans also numbered contemporaries such as Sigmund Freud, who, in an admiring letter to the author wrote: “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”.

Among the documents going on public display this week will be examples of Schnitzler’s correspondence with Freud and the Zionist founder, Theodor Herzl. Bellettini, who has curated the exhibition as part of his wider research project, hopes that it will help to popularise Schnitzler by making public some of the material contained in what have been called his “hidden manuscripts”.

“The aim is to make the material visible, understandable and enjoyable,” Bellettini said. “By using these original documents, letters and literary sketches – most of which have been locked away in an archive since the 1930s – we hope to tell the story of Schnitzler’s life and work and give people a fresh insight into some of the key themes from his life.”

Bellettini’s work is already helping to develop our understanding of the influential Austrian writer. The Cambridge archive includes the only surviving example of a letter Schnitzler wrote to Freud, in which he openly states his admiration for the neurologist. It also contains correspondence from Herzl, who urged Schnitzler to move to Palestine and become “the leading playwright of the Jewish state”.

The research has also revealed new insights into the furious creative process behind Schnitzler’s writing. Even as a teenager – and despite the disapproval of his laryngologist father Johann (who wanted Schnitzler to follow him into medicine) – Schnitzler was writing entire novels in secret, including one that stretches to 600 pages in length. Bellettini has identified cases where he spent more than 20 years drafting and re-drafting texts, as well as letters from the 1890s in which he describes intensive periods of reading, listening to music and theatre-going. During one two-month stint in Paris, Schnitzler visited the opera and theatre every single day.

As well as popularising Schnitzler, Bellettini hopes that the exhibition will contribute to a more balanced understanding of the writer’s life. Despite his popularity among later generations of writers, our understanding of the man himself remains distorted. The sexual themes in his work caused controversy during his own lifetime, while his real-life sexual exploits, chronicled obsessively in his diaries between 1887 and 1892, have led to accusations of “satyriasis” (the male equivalent of nymphomania).

“Schnitzler’s sexual relationships have made him something of a cliché,” Bellettini said. “The more you look into his writings, however, the more you realise that this was one manifestation of furious, obsessive creative energy. My hope is that by looking at his relationships with other creative writers, friends, philosophers, poets and politicians we can reveal more about this side of his character.”

Arthur Schnitzler’s Hidden Manuscripts, curated by Lorenzo Bellettini, will be on display at the Maughan Library and ISC, King’s College London, Chancery Lane, London, from Wednesday 21 May to Saturday 26 July. Opening hours are Monday to Saturday, 9.30-17.00. The exhibition is free and open to the public.

In the interests of preservation, high-resolution facsimiles are displayed in place of the fragile originals. The creation of these facsimiles has been made possible by the generous support of the Ingeborg Bachmann Centre (Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London) and the Austrian Cultural Forum.