While staying with her aunt at a fashionable spa, Else receives an unexpected telegram from her mother, begging her to save her father from debtor's jail. The only way out, it seems, is to approach an elderly acquaintance in order to borrow money from him. Through this telegram, Else is forced into the reality of a world entirely at odds with her romantic imagination – with horrific consequences.
This English translation of Arthur Schnitzler’s “Der Weg ins Freie” (1908) was first published in 1913 and is one of only two novels—the other being “Therese” (1928)—by the Viennese author, who was better known for his short stories and plays, including “Reigen” (“Round Dance”), known to most English-speaking readers as “La Ronde.” “The Road to the Open” tells the story of the aristocratic young composer Georg von Wergenthin-Recco who has talent but lacks the drive to get down to work and spends most of his time socializing with members of the assimilationist, artistically sensitive Jewish bourgeoisie of Vienna and other non-Jews like himself who enjoy their company. A love affair with a Catholic lower middle class girl, combined with the author’s authentic descriptions of the milieu, the arts, the psychology of love, and the anti-Semitism that was coming to dominate so much of life and politics in the Austria-Hungary of the time, make this novel a classic. “One of the most important, representative, revelatory works of Austria at the turn of the century....The best English version of the novel.”—Marc A. Weiner, Indiana University “In Arthur Schnitzler the two strands of Austrian fin-de-siècle culture, the moralistic and the aesthetic, were present in almost equal proportions. Small wonder that Freud hailed Schnitzler as a ‘colleague’ in the investigation of the ‘underestimated and much-maligned erotic.’”—Carl Schorske, author of Fin-de-Siècle Vienna
The novella, one of the most sophisticated genres of narrative literature, owes its development primarily to German belles lettres. In the present collection, Mr. Steinhauer has assembled a representative sampling that ranges from the Enlightenment to the postwar periods and reveals the scope and flexibility of this art form. Included are Wieland's Love and Friendship Tested, Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas, Chamisso's Peter Schlemihl, Hoffmann's Mademoiselle de Scudery, Keller's Clothes Make the Man, Meyer's Sufferings of a Boy, Mann's The Bajazzo, Fontane's Stine, Hauptmann's Heretic of Soana, Kafka's Hunger Artist, Schnitzler's Fraulein Else, and Bergengruen's Ordeal by Fire.
Seminar paper from the year 2020 in the subject Literature - Comparative Literature, grade: 15, Leuven Catholic University, language: English, abstract: This paper examines Paul Czinner's "Fräulein Else" from 1929, both as an adaption of Arthur Schnitzler's novella of the same name and as an individual project. The aim is to analyse how visual choices highlight the narrative and how elements of the original story are introduced into the new media. It will therefore examine whether and how specifically the change of media is responsible for the different interpretations. The focus will be on how the medium influences the depictions of the narrative instances through visuality. This is significant for the present work as narrative instances expresses themselves, according to Kuhn, primarily on a visual and a linguistic level. First, the difference between narrative instances in film and literature will be examined in a theoretical part. This will be based on Markus Kuhn's narrative model. Interesting approaches can be drawn from the work of Sandra Poppe's research on film adaptations and visuality as a connecting element between adapted work and adaption. The narrative instances of novella and film will then be examined for differences and similarities. The aim is to get an overview of whether and how the special type of narrative situation in Schnitzler's work was visually incorporated into the film. Films are an interface between writing and image in many regards. Starting from the screenplay, one can observe many functions of written text in movies. Therefore, transmediality is inherent to film. A special form of this correlation is adaption. Film adaptions of literary work struggled to be recognized as their own art form for the longest time. The status as secondary media has been abolished by now. Under this newer perspective, it is fruitful to study criticized movies through contemporary lenses.
