Both men were sons of doctors, growing up in Jewish families that integrated into the middle class of the dominant society, but that also witnessed a growing tide of anti-Semitism. Schnitzler ...actually attended medical school with Sigmund Freud (although he later dropped out to pursue a career writing for the stage) and incorporated psychoanalytic theories, in particular those concerning dreams and the unconscious, into his works (see Cohn; Luprecht 1-2; Santner; Swales 24 and i4iff; Urbach 25).
Nineteenth-century Vienna is well known to medical historians as a leading center of medical research and education, offering easy access to patients and corpses to students from all over the world. ...The author seeks to explain how this enviable supply of cadavers was achieved, why it provoked so little opposition at a time when Britain and the United States saw widespread protests against dissection, and how it was threatened from mid-century onward. To understand permissive Viennese attitudes, we need to place them in a longue durée history of death and dissection and to pay close attention to the city's political geography as it was transformed into a major imperial capital. The tolerant stance of the Roman Catholic Church, strong links to Southern Europe, and the weak position of individuals in the absolutist state all contributed to an idiosyncratic anatomical culture. But as the fame of the Vienna medical school peaked in the later 1800s, the increased demand created by rising numbers of students combined with intensified interdisciplinary competition to produce a shortfall that professors found increasingly difficult to meet. Around 1900, new religious groups and mass political parties challenged long-standing anatomical practice by refusing to supply cadavers and making dissection into an instrument of political struggle. This study of the material preconditions for anatomy at one of Europe's most influential medical schools provides a contrast to the dominant Anglo-American histories of death and dissection.
This dissertation examines the autofictional works of three Jewish women writing in German, combining a close textual analysis with a narratological framework in order to understand how narrative, ...storytelling, and writing are used at both the diegetic and meta-levels to negotiate familial and cultural memory and to construct a contemporary German Jewish identity. The works analyzed herein—Barbara Honigmann’s Roman von einem Kinde (1986), Damals, dann und danach (1999), and Ein Kapitel aus meinem Lebens (2004); Gila Lustiger’s So sind wir (2005); and Katja Petrowskaja’s Vielleicht Esther (2015)—are all written by second- or third-generation post-Holocaust Jews whose familial pasts include stories of exile, deportation, and internment, and whose individual presents are marked by trauma, intergenerational silence, and multiplex identities. As they navigate these heavy subjects, interweaving stories of their parents’ and grandparents’ lives alongside tales from their own childhoods and contemporary lives, each of these authors also thematizes narrative itself, rendering storytelling, writing, and literature as significant to these works as the stories and anecdotes contained within them. Using memory theory from a variety of scholars to examine this thematization of narrative and its connection to memory, identity, and family dynamics, I argue that, rather than being used to merely recount the past, narrative in these works becomes the very site in which familial and individual identity is constructed and construed. In addition, each chapter also centers on a narratological element that is particularly salient in each of the three authors’ work, specifically: plot/narrativity, metanarration, and intertextuality. I then relate the thematization of narrative at the diegetic level to the author’s own construction of narrative at the meta-level, using feminist narratological scholarship to explore the interrelation of content and form. This dissertation serves to further the ongoing scholarly conversation on memory, identity, and belonging in relation to contemporary German Jewish life and, in its conception of narrative as contingent on cultural context rather than as proceeding from universal norms, also contributes to postclassical feminist narratology and works to broaden our understanding of the role of narrative in human life.
Der Aufsatz erörtert die moderne Verführungsfabel von Schnitzlers Erzählung “Fräulein Else” und das sozialpsychologische Profil seiner Protagonistin auf der Folie des bürgerlichen Trauerspiels im 18. ...Jahrhundert, insbesondere Lessing. Er zeigt, dass Schnitzlers subtiles psychologisches Porträt seiner Titelfigur auch als eine Auseinandersetzung mit dem Versagen des sanften Patriarchen aufgefasst werden kann, den die Schriftsteller der Aufklärung als Repräsentanten kleinfamilialer Intimität in die deutsche Literatur eingeführt hatten. Das geschieht anhand einer Diskussion des weiblichen Figurenbewusstseins und des Figurenhandelns an den beiden szenischen Höhepunkten der Novelle. In der abschließenden Erörterung von Elses Tod werden auch die fragwürdigen Aspekte von Schnitzlers Repräsentation des weiblichen Sterbens zur Diskussion gestellt.
This study traces a genealogy through German and Austrian literature and film from the onset of the twentieth century to the present day that conveys a haunting imposition of Europe’s violent history ...on its contemporary moment. The narratives and films from the onset of the 20th Century to the present day – especially those by Germans and Austrians, who seem to carry on their shoulders a painful awareness of the haunting violence left by European history – attest to this legacy of memory in both its voluntary and involuntary aspects. Both of these nations have histories of frequent governmental transition and various forms of state. I argue that the ghost comes to portray the ruptures in society that characterize the last century and a half of western, and more recently, globalized society, analyzing critical outlooks expressed in literary and filmic forms.
The dissertation is a cultural history of statistics in the first half of the twentieth century in the German-speaking world. It examines how statistical models and data have been employed in ...literature, architecture, education, and political theory. The first chapter discusses the use of probability theory in Robert Musil's novel The Man Without Qualities. It is argued that the connection between narrative and science is staged in terms of probability theory. The second chapter examines Rudolf Brunngraber's novel Karl und das 20. Jahrhundert and argues that quantitative economic data and a positivist narrator render the text a novel peculiar to the Vienna Circle. In the third chapter, texts by Otto Neurath, Josef Frank and Philipp Frank are examined from the perspective of the law of large numbers. The thesis here is that all three intellectuals were looking for ways to combine collective political goals and individual freedom in order to support the democratic socialism of Austro-Marxism. In the fourth chapter, a novel by Hermann Broch is interpreted as genealogical precursor to his theoretical writings. What Broch claims to be a general anthropology turns out to be literary fiction and therefore calls for a rethink of the foundations of human rights.
While the notion of masculinity in crisis has become a commonplace in fin-de-siècle literary studies, Schnitzler's novella Andreas Thameyers letzter Brief has thus far been investigated primarily ...with respect to the (pathological) psychology of its protagonist and the contemporary medical discourses surrounding the theme of "maternal impression." This essay seeks to reframe the text, placing it within historical discourses on masculinity, the body, and heterosexuality, and their intersections with colonial discourses on race and whiteness. Such a reading illuminates the complex construction of and multiple threats to urban bourgeois masculinity, masculine hegemony and the control of women, and the influence of colonial discourses on this empire without colonies.Re-contextualized within its historical discourses, the essay proposes that the novella needs to be understood as a damning indictment of white western masculinity in fin-de-siècle Austria.
Arthur Schnitzler's novella Fräulein Else is an inner monologue of a nineteen-year-old bourgeois woman of fin-de-siècle Vienna. This literary form allows direct access to both latent and manifest ...content, that is, to Else's conscious, preconscious, and unconscious thoughts. Insight into her mental data exposes psychical conflict and uncovers sexual desire. For Else, this desire creates the affect shame due to her internalization of the social code of Vienna, which denies her sexual expression. Her psychical conflict reflects inefficacious attempts to maintain the social bond by adhering to the social code and avoiding the shameful exposure of her sexuality. Else's failure to uphold the social standards regarding female sexuality in fin-de-siècle Vienna finds representation in an act of exhibitionism, which creates irrevocable shame that ultimately ends in self-destruction. This paper utilizes an amalgamation of psychoanalysis and sociological frameworks to locate the causality of Else's shame in the relationship between sexuality and society.
Jakob Wassermann was a German writer and a novelist of Jewish origin. Contemporary to famous writers such as Stefan Zweig, Arthur Schnitzler, Thomas Mann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Sigmund Freud, he ...managed to live among Jewish people on German ground. In Wassermann’s life, the most problematic fact was perhaps the case of his Jewish origin and the German society in which he grew up. Wassermann’s general idea, the conception of mankind and his worldview differs from views of many other authors, especially without a Jewish origin. The aim of this paper is to show and understand Jakob Wassermann’s avowal to Judaism and/or his thoughts about being a German. Thus, different essays, non-fictional texts, his autobiography and different speeches of Wassermann have been analysed and shown – mostly chronologically – in this paper. Jakob Wassermann (1873-1934) Yahudi kökenli bir Alman yazardır. Yaşadığı zaman diliminde çok tanınan bir yazar olması sebebiyle çağın ileri gelen isimleriyle sıkı arkadaşlık bağları kurar. Bunlardan bazıları, Stefan Zweig, Arthur Schnitzler, Thomas Mann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal ve Sigmund Freud’dur. Wassermann, Arthur Schnitzler’in ısrarı nedeniyle Viyana’ya göç etmiş ve Batı Edebiyatı’nda Viyana Grubu olarak adlandırılan gruba dahil olur. Jakob Wassermann ve arkadaşları Yahudi kimlikleri nedeniyle bu zor dönemlerde Avrupa – özellikle Alman – topraklarında yaşamlarını sürdürmeye çalışır. Yahudilerin, özellikle yazarların bu dönemde kimlikleri dolayısıyla toplum içerisinde yaşamış oldukları sıkıntılardan en önemlisi kendi dinî kimlikleriyle olan çelişkili ilişkileridir. Wassermann bu bakış açısını kendi otobiyografisinde de ele alır, zira kendi hayatının en sorunlu kısmının Yahudi kimliği ile alakalı olduğunu belirtir. Wassermann’daki diğer bir sorun, Alman kimliğini de taşımasıdır. Hayatı boyunca iki kimliği birleştirmeye çalışsa da bu pek mümkün olmaz. Wassermann’ın dünyaya ve insanlara bakış açısı Yahudi olmayan diğer yazarlardan farklıdır. Bu sebeplerden ötürü makalede hedeflenen, Jakob Wassermann’ın Yahudilik ve Alman ırkıyla alakalı bakış açısını ve fikirlerini ortaya koymaktır. Bunun için yazarın farklı yazıları, mektupları, kurgusal olmayan makaleleri ve otobiyografisi incelenerek yazarın kendi iç dünyası yansıtılmaya çalışılır ve yazarın hangi ırka daha yakın hissettiği irdelenir. Bu makalenin sonunda hedeflenen az tanınan yazar Jakob Wassermann hakkında genel bilgi aktarmanın yanı sıra, yazarın Yahudi kimliğine yönelik detaylı bilgi verilmesidir.
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