At the turn of the twentieth century, dueling was required of officers and gentlemen in Austria. This study examines the importance of honor to the Viennese playwright Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931) and to his society. It shows the extent to which discourses of class, gender, and race sustained dueling. It also identifies the sociological factors that transformed those discourses and thus helped to abolish dueling in post-war Austria and Germany.
An analysis of the scholarly criticism of the great Viennese writer up to the year 2000. Schnitzler, one of the most prolific Austrian writers of the 20th century, ruthlessly dissected his society's erotic posturing and phobias about sex and death. His most penetrating analyses include Lieutenant Gustl, the first stream-of-consciousness novella in German; Reigen, a devastating cycle of one-acts mapping the social limits of a sexual daisy-chain; and Der Weg ins Freie, a novel that combines a love story with a discussion ofthe roadblocks facing Austria's Jews. Today, his popularity is reflected by new editions and translations and by adaptations for theater, television, and film by artists such as Tom Stoppard and Stanley Kubrick. This book examinesSchnitzler reception up to 2000, beginning with the journalistic reception of the early plays. Before being suspended by a decade of Nazism, criticism in the 1920s and 30s emphasized Schnitzler's determinism and decadence. Not until the early 60s was humanist scholarship able to challenge this verdict by pointing out Schnitzler's ethical indictment of impressionism in the late novellas. During the same period, Schnitzler, whom Freud considered his literary "Doppelgänger," was often subjected to Freudian psychoanalytical criticism; but by the 80s, scholarship was citing his own thoroughgoing objections to such categories. Since the 70s, Schnitzler's remonstrance toward the Austrianestablishment has been examined by social historians and feminist critics alike, and the recently completed ten-volume edition of Schnitzler's diary has met with vibrant interest. Andrew C. Wisely is associate professor of German at Baylor University.
Arthur Schnitzler durchlebte eine Zeitenwende: der Erste Weltkrieg verwandelte Osterreich von einem multinationalen Imperium in einen deutschsprachigen Kleinstaat. Beides, das Vorher und das Nachher, markiert Schnitzlers Zeitgenossenschaft. Er lebte in einer geistesgeschichtlichen und literarischen Umbruchsphase. Der burgerlich-liberale Konsens, der Schnitzlers Milieu charakterisierte, wurde in seinen Grunduberzeugungen herausgefordert. Wissenschaftliche und technische Errungenschaften kennzeichnen Schnitzlers Zeitgenossenschaft. Arthur Schnitzler lived through a time of profound political, social and intellectual change: the First World War transformed Austria from a huge multi-national empire into a small Alpine republic; the liberal middle-class consensus which characterised the author's personal background began to disintegrate during this time, and new departures not only in science and technology but also in literary styles and conventions posed new challenges to a politically involved and acutely socially aware modern writer.
Extending his investigation into the ethical life of the white American South beyond what he wrote in Southern Honor (1982), Bertram Wyatt-Brown explores three major themes in southern history: the political aspects of the South's code of honor, th
By illustrating the quintessentially different self-perceptions of three German writers of Jewish background, all born in or around 1880 in Berlin, this book examines a range of German-Jewish identities in a socio-cultural context in Wilhelmine Germany. Moritz Goldstein (1880-1977), the conflict of his dual identity and the interplay between being a German writer and a cultural Zionist is covered first. Particular attention is given to the genesis of his essay 'Deutsch-jüdischer Parnaß' with its call for Jews to vacate their seats in German literary culture. The range of positions unfolding in the debate, following its publication in 'Der Kunstwart' in 1912, serves to illustrate the spectrum of German-Jewish self-definition at the time. In the second part, the writings of Julius Bab (1880-1955) are examined in so far as they shed light on his advocation of a synthesis of 'Deutschtum' and 'Judentum'. The far side of the spectrum of German-Jewish self-definition is represented by Ernst Lissauer (1882-1937), who propagated complete assimilation, considering the Jewish element as an obstacle which had to be overcome on the road to 'Deutschtum'. This study depicts how external cultural and political influences shaped the transformation of their ideas of what it meant to be Jewish in Germany and how they responded to increasing anti-Semitism. By recognising the way in which the individual's cultural identity was constantly refashioned in the face of external challenges, a fuller understanding of the evolving self-perception of German Jews is reached.
The chronological range covered by the individual essays is more than two hundred years, from the Classical Enlightenment to the early twenty-first century. Some of the studies encompassed by this volume undertake the analysis of one composer's settings of a particular poet's work - albeit with rather more critical rigour. Others trace the ways in which a literary text is modified and adapted before and as it develops as one of the principal components of an opera. Several share new insights into the complex relationships of individual works with the literary and musical traditions out of which they emerge (or which they transform and renew) - or set such works in the political contexts of their genesis or reception, often using a key historical moment, a turning-point or a 'snapshot', as the starting-point for a wide-ranging investigation. In some cases the words and the music are those of the same 'composer', the relationship here shedding light on the process of composition itself. Literary works are often scrutinized for the light they shed on a musician's creative processes, but the importance of music to writers - as audiences, but also as amateur or even semi-professional practitioners - is no less important as an investigative standpoint.
