The Road into the Open

"This was bold and prescient. Written in 1908, the story centres around an aristocratic composer and his brother who are not Jewish, but have many Jewish friends who they meet in artistic salons and elsewhere. The book runs the gamut of middle-class Jewish identity in Vienna—you have the Zionist, the Jewish semi-aristocrat (who’s pretending he isn’t Jewish), the converted Jew, atheists and believers, social democrats and Eastern European Jews. I found it fascinating. Freud called Schnitzler his doppelgänger. He said that Schnitzler understood intuitively what he himself had gathered by talking to lots and lots of patients. The two weren’t friends, but they admired each other and met a number of times. Everyone in Schnitzler’s novel is preoccupied with the issue of whether they feel Jewish first or Austrian. And that’s fundamental to the whole Jewish Austrian way of being. The character called Bermann, who is a writer and a little bit Schnitzler himself, says Jews don’t suffer from a persecution complex, but from a security mania that will be their downfall. They’re not lucid enough. Schnitzler basically felt that the only solution for German-speaking Jews was to find their own answer—whether Zionism or socialism—while staying aware of their Jewish background because nobody was going to let them forget it. “My father was always aware that he had escaped death in a concentration camp” The book also expresses the sexual mores of Vienna in those days. Schnitzler coined the expression ‘sweet young thing’, for the pretty young woman of working-class origin—who works in a shop or as a seamstress—and with whom boys from richer backgrounds have affairs. Vienna wasn’t a good place to be a woman if you were poor. Schnitzler was himself a compulsive womanizer. He kept diaries that were saved from book-burning by a Cambridge scholar who took them out in 1938, and they have since been published extensively. There’s thousands and thousands of words about his sexual conquests and he even counted the number of orgasms he had. But he was also culturally voracious. He frequently went to the theatre and wrote an excellent play called Professor Bernhardi about anti-Semitism. It concerns a Jewish professor who runs a clinic in Vienna where one of his patients is a young woman dying after an abortion. The priest wants to visit her but Bernhardi won’t let him because he says that she’s happy right now, and would learn she’s dying. Her death causes the start of an anti-Semitic campaign against the professor. Schnitzler was tackling anti-Semitism head-on long before the Second World War."