The Perils of Post-holing: Arthur Schnitzler versus Hugo von Hofmannsthal in Carl Schorske’s Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

Yvonne M. Ivory

In his 1981 study “Geschichte und Drama bei Arthur Schnitzler,” Ernst Offermanns pieces together Schnitzler’s concept of history and outlines Schnitzler’s understanding of the similarities between the writer of history and the writer of fiction. For Schnitzler-according to Offermanns-the Historiker is not just an academically-trained professional historian, but a type of thinker who has a “Flair für die Zusammenhänge, die Intuition vom Werden der Dinge” (35). This Geistestypus is what Schnitzler terms a Kon­tinualist (as opposed to a journalistic Aktualist) and has an “Interesse für Zusammenhänge, ein stets wacher Sinn für Kontinuität” (Aphorismen 99, em­phasis in original).

Schnitzler sees the same traits in the artist, particularly in the author, for whom the task of ordering the Zusammenhänge and Kontinuitäten is primary: “Kunstwerk und Geschichte (als Vorstellung und Darstellung) haben dies gemeinsam: sie reduzieren die unendliche Vielheit der die Realität konstituierenden ‘Kausalitätsketten’ und lassen ein Geschehen als kontinuierlich, als notwendig oder gar sinnvoll erscheinen” (Offermanns 39). The writer and the historian therefore produce works with similarly comforting effects, as they both make sense of the seemingly arbitrary na­ture of experience:

Die beruhigende Wirkung der Kunstwerke erklärt sich vor allem dadurch, daß im Kunstwerk das, was wir Zufall nennen, ausgeschaltet ist. Ebenso scheint der Zufall aus der Geschichte (insoweit sie vergangen ist) ausgeschaltet, und alles Historische wirkt als Notwendigkeit. (Aphorismen 99)

For Schnitzler, then, the task of the historian and the task of the (re­sponsible) writer are almost identical; and from the turn of the century on he sets about writing with a view to producing the kinds of explanatory narratives that he expects of an historian. He focuses on the inner life of individuals in his drama and prose, for it is in the individual that Schnitzler (like Wilhelm Dilthey, the influential historian of ideas who was a con­temporary of Schnitzler) sees the most important expression of the histori­cal moment. For Schnitzler, just as for Dilthey, history is not made up of empirical facts, but it is rather a struggle among ideas that are embodied in the individual. The individual is an expression of the ideas and forces of his era:

Wir überschauen immer nur eine gewisse Anzahl von Kausalitätsketten, und auch diese nur zu einem gewissen Punkt, während jeder Augenblick, den wir durchleben, den Kreuzungspunkt von unendlich vielen Kausalitätsketten darstellt, die aus der Unendlichkeit kommen und in die Unendlichkeit gehen. (Schnitzler, Aphorismen 99)

If Schnitzler differs from Dilthey in his conception of the individual, he does so only insofar as the latter’s dialectical system of Wechselwirkung offers agency to the individual, who can actively contribute to and change the ideas of his era. Schnitzler’s individual is fated to act out the story he has been given: He is a passive vessel through which history expresses itself. The only individuals who can rise above this situation and become active forces in life are those Schnitzler terms “positive Typen,” those who constantly try to reflect on the continuities of life; and these are typically historians and artists: “Interesse für Zusammenhänge . . . ist überhaupt ein Charakteristikon der positiven Typen. Beim Historiker (Kontinualisten) wird es zum Drange, ja zur Leidenschaft, die Zusammenhänge im engeren und im weiteren Sinne zu entdecken, den Ablauf der Dinge zu wissen, das Werden zu verstehen” (99, emphasis in original).

Offermanns argues that the turn towards history made by Schnitzler in the early years of the twentieth century (a turn which can be traced in his aphorisms from this period) led to a more optimistic view on his part of the value of writing. Schnitzler made a conscious decision to use writing as a positive act of interpretation, as a way of presenting the kind of all-encompassing commentary on current and past events that the Viennese could not find in the non-contextualized Aktualistische newspaper reports of the day. This explains for Offermanns Schnitzler’s growing interest in his­torical drama, and might also explain his decision to write at this juncture what would be his only novel (Der Weg ins Freie-a portrayal of two years in the life of a Viennese aristocrat named Wergenthin).

In Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, his landmark treatment of culture and society in the Austro-Hungarian capital at the turn of the century, Carl Schorske also examines Schnitzler’s historical positionality; but Schorske’s analysis of Schnitzler’s writings of this period differs markedly from that of Offer­manns: for Schorske, Schnitzler is a pessimistic (20), despairing (14) author, one who can only shatter illusions (15). While Schorske acknowledges Schnitzler’s skill in portraying Viennese society (“he described as no other has done the social matrix in which so much of twentieth-century sub­jectivism took form: the disintegrating moral-aesthetic culture of fin-de-siècle Vienna” [15]), he ultimately focuses on Schnitzler’s frustrations and failures: “caught between science and art, between commitment to old morals and new feelings, [he] could find no new and satisfying meaning in the self, as did Freud and the expressionists; nor could he conceive a solution to the political problem of the psyche, as Hofmannsthal was to do” (14). Though Schorske clearly sees Schnitzler as a great “social observer” (14) who man­ages to produce a well-rounded portrayal of an important historical mo­ment, he [Schorske] cannot interpret the writing and publication of a novel such as Der Weg ins Freie as a positive act. Indeed, it would seem that in Schorske’s analysis the failures and submissions that characterize the life of Wergenthin in the novel are mapped onto the life of its author: If Wer­genthin finds no satisfaction in the self, it must be inferred that Schnitzler finds no satisfaction in the self (14).

Carl Schorske is clearly a very sophisticated reader and analyst of texts: His reading of Der Weg ins Freie, for example, though short, is taut and in­sightful. Given his level of sophistication, it seems surprising that Schorske should so readily read the negative inferences of Der Weg ins Freie as evi­dence of Schnitzler’s negative mood at the time. It is particularly interesting to see this misunderstanding of Schnitzler’s purpose when we compare Schorske’s analysis of Schnitzler with his portrayal of Hofmannsthal. Later in the same essay (“Politics and the Psyche: Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal”) he writes about Hofmannsthal’s vision of the artist’s function in a “society and culture [that] seemed to him [Hofmannsthal], as to Schnitzler, hope­lessly pluralistic, lacking in cohesion or direction”:

“…[T]he nature of our epoch,” he wrote in 1905, “is multiplicity and indeterminacy. It can only rest on das Gleitende …” … Hofmannsthal saw it as the trial of the noblest creatures to take into themselves “a wholly irra­tional mass of the non-homogeneous, which can become their enemy, their torture.” For the poet, this trial was actu­ally the call to his proper function in the modern world: to knit together disparate elements of the time, to build “the world of relations [Bezüge]” among them. (19)

These are sentiments so similar to those expressed by Schnitzler in his aphorisms, that one could easily be persuaded that the passage was not about Hofmannsthal at all. Schnitzler’s Zusammenhänge are echoed in Hof­mannsthal’s Bezüge; Schnitzler’s “unendlich vielen Kausalitätsketten” are Hofmannsthal’s “irrational mass” and Schnitzler’s “positive Typen” are matched by what Schorske calls Hofmannsthal’s “noblest creatures.” And when Hofmannsthal stops short of bringing history into the equation, Schorske intervenes with appropriate Schnitzler-like language:

The poet would do his unifying work not by imposing law, but by revealing the hidden forms in which the parts of life are bound to each other. Thus the poet, rather like the historian, accepts the multiplicity of things in their unique­ness and reveals the unity in their dynamic inter-relation­ship. He brings the discordant into harmony through form. (19, my emphasis)

It is precisely this sentiment, this vision of the purpose of poetry, that leads Schorske to read Hofmannsthal so positively. He argues that Hofmannsthal found satisfactory resolutions to the dilemmas of fin-de-siècle Vienna by adding an ethical dimension to the writing of poetry/literature; and implies that Schnitzler did not because for him that ethical dimension was missing: “Schnitzler’s ambivalence between old morality and new reality is not shared by Hofmannsthal. The ethical life is for him a life of continually re­newed sensibility, a life creating ever-new forms of relationship” (20).

Following through on this thought, Schorske lays out Hofmannsthal’s strategy as a social commentator: Hofmannsthal sees the need for art to make sense of and explain seemingly irrational political and societal pro­cesses; he thus uses writing to “canalize” (i.e., channel) the irrational by means of “dynamic form” (20); and ultimately applies this theory of writ­ing to politics, showing in his plays how dynamic form (e.g., ritual) in the political sphere can create harmony out of the cacophony of mass democ­racy (21). This procedure finds no parallel in the work of Schnitzler, ac­cording to Schorske, because Schnitzler sees aesthetic culture as languishing in a “paralysis of drift” (22). Given Schnitzler’s above-quoted aphorisms, Schorske’s assessment of Schnitzler must be challenged; and indeed a major element of his argument in the essay-that Hofmannsthal’s application of the principles of art to politics constituted an alternative to “Schnitzlerian pessimism” (20)-must be reconsidered.

Schorske has based his entire analysis of Hofmannsthal’s project on Hofmannsthal’s notion that the writer imposes form on “hopeless plurali­ties.” Had Schorske acknowledged the same impulse in the theoretical writings of Schnitzler, he would have understood that Schnitzler does not see only paralysis in the aesthetic culture of which he is a part; and that Schnitzler, too, writes with a view to canalizing the irrational. And although Hofmannsthal is more direct about presenting in his plays examples of the kinds of political “dynamic form” that might improve his society, Schnitzler can hardly be accused of not believing that dynamic form in politics is a necessity. Schnitzler does not set his fiction in imaginary states, in utopian settings, or in the distant past, as Hofmannsthal does: in deciding to portray possible ways of living in a the real world (contemporary Vienna) Schnitzler is faced with the task of showing realistic examples of how the irrational can be canalized.[i] In this sense, it is Schnitzler who is the more engaged author, who is more eager to believe in the possibilities literature can offer for the improvement of society.

In a later essay on Hofmannsthal (“The Transformation of the Gar­den,” 1967) which is also included in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, Schorske inad­vertently shows just how far his initial skewed reading of Hofmannsthal as a positive alternative to Schnitzler was to bring him. He finds a transforma­tion in Hofmannsthal around 1906, a transformation that leads the drama­tist to stop creating artificial environments in his work and to start trying to produce realistic representations of the society around him. “The poet now accepted reality as it was: insistently incoherent,” (318) writes Schorske. He hails Hofmannsthal’s change of direction, finding that he “had rescued the function of art from the hedonistic isolation into which his class had car­ried it and had tried to redeem society through art’s reconciling power” (318). Hofmannsthal

defined the poet’s role with a new clarity: “It is he who binds up in himself the elements of the times.” In a soci­ety and culture that he saw as essentially pluralistic and fragmented, Hofmannsthal set literature the task of estab­lishing relationships. The poet must accept the multiplicity of reality, and … bring unity and cohesion to modern man. … Where others saw conflict or contradiction, the poet would reveal hidden ties and develop them. (317)

It seems we have come full circle, and returned unannounced to Schnitzler’s vision of the author, and thus to a point where Schorske’s analysis is most misleading. While his assessment of Hofmannsthal is not incorrect, its implications for his analysis of Schnitzler are not minor: Any reader of Schorske’s text who is not familiar with Schnitzler’s writings will assume that Hofmannsthal was in some way Schnitzler’s superior, being the more modern and the more adaptable of the two writers. This would be a minor blemish on the fabric of the text[ii] were it not for the fact that this de­scription of Hofmannsthal occupies a privileged position on two counts in Schorske’s text. First, it is clear that Schorske has a particular investment in what a writer like Hofmannsthal has to say, because he [Schorske] sees the historian as a type of author. Hofmannsthal, “rather like the historian,” does his “unifying work . . . by revealing the hidden forms in which the parts of life are bound to each other” (19) just as for Schorske the historian must “be willing to undertake the empirical pursuit of pluralities as a pre­condition to finding unitary patterns in culture” (xxii). Thus in Schorske’s text Hofmannsthal serves as something of a precursor of Schorske, as a thinker whose ideas have special resonances for the cultural historian. Sec­ond, in the context of the overall structure of Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, Hof­mannsthal’s turn is used as a linchpin: It signals the end of bourgeois no­tions of art and heralds the rise of a new, explosive moment in modernism; it is paradigmatic for Schorske of the stage between aestheticism (art as “hedonistic isolation” [318]) and expressionism (“art whose surface [is] broken, charged with the full life of feeling of man adrift and vulnerable in the ungovernable universe” [362]).

It is my contention that Schorske’s valorization of Hofmannsthal and misrepresentation of Schnitzler’s project cannot simply be attributed to a lack of familiarity with the sources I have cited above,[iii] but that it is also due in part to the very structure of Fin-de-Siècle Vienna and indeed to the methodology explicated in the introduction and used by the historian throughout the work.

Though he at no point directly addresses why it is that most of the es­says in this volume concentrate on two or more individuals, and play those individuals off against one another, it can be inferred from Schorske’s comments on other characteristics of the work’s structure why it is that he has chosen to apply such a technique. In explaining the overall structure of the work as a kind of sampling, or “post-holing” he argues that “each area” he looks at must be examined “in its own terms” (xxii) and that one “cen­tral idea” will “as in a song cycle … act to establish a coherent field in which the several parts can cast their light upon each other to illuminate the larger whole” (xxviii). Similarly, one could argue that “several parts” are in­troduced in the guise of separate individuals in each essay, and that in each case a central idea allows them to “cast their light upon each other.” The drawback of this method as it plays out in the Hofmannsthal/Schnitzler es­say is that it leads to the temptation to make dualistic, compare-and-contrast assertions about the figures being examined. Instead of a pluralistic reality brought into loose cohesion through form, we end up with a pluralistic re­ality brought into a misleading duality through the concentration on in­dividuals: Schnitzler is pessimistic (22), Hofmannsthal optimistic (22); Schnitzler is suspended (13), Hofmannsthal engaged (19) and dynamic (20); Schnitzler is committed to the past (15) Hofmannsthal to the future (22); Schnitzler is ambivalent (14), Hofmannsthal daring (22); and so on.[iv]

A second problem that arises from Schorske’s methodology has to do with the way he believes historians should use fictional texts when writing history. He establishes in his introduction that “[h]istorians had been too long content to use the artifacts of high culture as mere illustrative reflec­tions of political or social developments” (xxi); and finds that instead of simply appropriating texts as needed, cultural and intellectual historians should utilize those “new internal methods of analysis in the humanistic disciplines [that] disclose … in works of art, literature, and thought autonomous characteristics of structure and style,” because “a knowledge of the kinds of analysis practiced by modern humanists is necessary for coming to grips with the makers of twentieth-century … culture” (xxi). Schorske’s position on this matter has been highly influential: echoes of his language can be found in theoretical works by such eminent historians as Roger Chartier, for whom:

[t]he relationship of the text to the real … is constructed according to discursive models and intellectual categories peculiar to each writing situation. This leads one to avoid treating fictional works as simple documents, realistic re­flections of a historical reality. Instead, one should pose their specificity as texts situated in relation to other texts and whose rules of organization as formal elaborations aim to produce something other than a description. (Char­tier 39-40)

Chartier and Schorske want, then, to maintain specificity when dealing with texts, so that the text does not simply feed an argument or act as superficial evidence that a particular analysis is accurate. However, to a certain extent what they criticize is precisely what Schorske does in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna. Al­though he is careful to read texts as competently as a literary critic might do,[v] he still uses them as sites in which the over-arching elements of his historical analysis can be seen to be reflected. This is not necessarily a bad practice: It simply points to the possibility that a denial of the importance of using texts as evidence of certain historical phenomena is a mere trope. It also has the problematic effect of making texts less visible in those essays where authors are do not figure prominently. If it is his intention to only deal with texts when he has clearly established a diachronic line for a work and its author, then the historian is bound to be reluctant to introduce any literary work in passing. In “Politics in a New Key: An Austrian Trio,” for example, Schorske will readily quote from Schnitzler’s diaries regarding Theodor Herzl, but does not even footnote those long passages in Der Weg ins Freie where Zionism and its effects on Viennese society are portrayed and debated. Thus a clear line is drawn between the fictional and the sup­posedly non-fictional text, with the latter privileged and the former ren­dered invisible. Ultimately, in the practical application of a theory that seeks to renew the historian’s interest in fiction, Schorske separates the pro­duction of fictional texts from “real life” in ways that he may not have in­tended to do.

Carl Schorske’s Fin-de-Siècle Vienna is an extraordinarily rich introduc­tion to culture and politics in Vienna at the turn of the century. But, as can only be expected in a work of this scope, it is not without its problems. Fo­cusing on one element of his argument, in this case his comparison of Ar­thur Schnitzler and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, means bringing to light some of the pitfalls inherent in making a study as wide-ranging as this. This does not invalidate Schorske’s analysis, however; it merely illustrates that any cloth woven so carefully out of such unwieldy threads is bound to produce its own idiosyncratic patterns, some of which represent contradictions. I would argue that these patterns, even when imperfect or skewed, are not a failure of the work, but a sign of its richness: If we read Fin-de-Siècle Vienna as a kind of “post-holing” of the mind of an eminent historian, we find that it not only offers insights into the production of cultural artifacts at the turn of the century, but also in the latter half of the twentieth century. If there is any merit at all to Raymond Williams’ assertion in Culture and Society that “one of the central ways of understanding the two extraordinary cen­turies which have so greatly changed the world … is through the detailed and complex thinking about culture which has been active and vibrant at every stage,” (ix) then Carl Schorske’s Fin-de-Siècle Vienna remains an im­portant contribution not only to political and cultural history of the Jahrhundertwende, but also to our understanding of the meaning of culture in the twentieth century.

Notes