The German Genius

for one of his regular strolls in Vienna (he was such a familiar figure, says Clive James, that he was “practically part of the Ringstrasse”), when he encountered an attractive young woman who called herself “Jeanette.” Socially they were poles apart. He was from the well-educated bourgeoisie, she was an embroiderer. Nonetheless, two days later she visited his rooms and they became lovers. Over the next months Schnitzler recorded in his diary every sexual encounter that took place. When the affair ended, acrimoniously, at the end of 1889, he was able to calculate that in the intervening two years they had made love 583 times. The exactitude was remarkable, but so was Schnitzler’s potency: he had been away from the city many times and on occasions, to keep up his tally, he and Jeanette had performed five times a night. 1
    This admixture of scientific certitude, bravado, experimentation, and sexual license (in a pre-Salvarsan world) illustrates as well as anything the miasma of ideas swirling around in Vienna at the close of the nineteenth century. And in 1900, among German-speaking cities, Vienna certainly took precedence. If one place could be said to represent the mentality of continental Europe as the twentieth century began, it was the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
    T HE O RIGINAL C AFÉ S OCIETY
     
    The architecture of Vienna played a crucial role in determining the unique character of the city. The Ringstrasse, a circle of monumental buildings that included the university, the opera house, and the parliament building, had been erected in the second half of the nineteenth century around the central area of the old town, in effect enclosing the intellectual and cultural life of the city inside a relatively small and accessible area. There had emerged the city’s distinctive coffeehouses, an informal institution that helped make Vienna different from London, Paris, or Berlin. 2 The marble-topped tables were just as much a platform for new ideas as the newspapers, academic journals, and books of the day. These cafés were reputed to have had their origins in the discovery of vast stocks of coffee in the camps abandoned by the Turks after their siege of Vienna in 1683. Whatever the truth of that, by 1900 Viennese cafés had evolved into informal clubs where the purchase of a small cup of coffee carried with it the right to remain there for the rest of the day and to have delivered, every half hour, a glass of water on a silver tray. Newspapers, magazines, billiard tables, and chess sets were provided free of charge, as were pen, ink, and (headed) writing paper. Regulars could have their mail sent to them at their favorite coffeehouse; at some establishments, such as the Café Griensteidl, large encyclopedias and other reference books were kept on hand for writers who worked at their tables. 3
    L EADERSHIP AS AN A RT F ORM
     
    A group of bohemians who gathered at the Café Griensteidl was known as Jung Wien (Young Vienna). This group included Schnitzler; Hugo von Hofmannsthal; Theodor Herzl, a brilliant reporter, an essayist, and later a leader of the Zionist movement; Stefan Zweig, a writer; and their leader, the newspaper editor Hermann Bahr. His paper, Die Zeit , was the forum for many of these talents, as was Die Fackel ( The Torch ), edited no less brilliantly by Karl Kraus, more famous for his play Die letzten Tage der Menschheit ( The Last Days of Mankind ). 4
    The career of Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931) shared a number of intriguing parallels with that of Freud. He too trained as a doctor and neurologist and studied neurasthenia. But Schnitzler turned away from medicine to literature, though his writings reflected many psychoanalytic concepts (he thought love affairs provided an education). His early work explored the emptiness of café society, but it was with the story “Lieutenant Gustl” (1901) and the novel Der Weg ins Freie ( The Road into the Open ; 1908) that Schnitzler really made his mark. “Lieutenant Gustl,” a sustained interior monologue, takes as its starting point an episode when a “vulgar civilian” dares to touch the lieutenant’s sword in the busy cloakroom of the opera. This gesture provokes in the lieutenant confused and involuntary “stream-of-consciousness ramblings” that in some ways prefigure Proust. In The Road into the Open , the dramatic structure of the book takes its power from an examination of the way the careers of several Jewish characters