Do we/can we discuss plays? I'd suggest ANATOL if so....

I believe Schnitzler was also involved in the Zionist movement, but I may be mixing him up a bit with other Viennese of his era (I just did my absolutely BEST Freudian slip ever, in honor of that era, and wrote "other Viennese of his eros.")

> Do we/can we discuss plays? I'd suggest ANATOL if so....

Schnitzler also wrote short stories. The stories may be in the pblic domain, but I do not know what the status of the translations might be. http://www.mdle.com/ClassicFilms/Guest/birchard.htm My family had a lot of books, many bought on the cheap at local book fairs. I recall two Modern Library editions, bound in limp black leather, which I dipped into as a child, and I think both were book by Schnitzler. One of them was definitely Anatol, which I recall as quite dashing and exotic, and the other may have been Schnitzler's short stories. I don't think the books were any later than some time in the '30's. Ah, the chilled wines and gorgeous concubines and sophisticated conversations!

Those interested in reading Schnitzler should have a look for the Modern Library version.

<<Schnitzler sounds interesting and I'm wondering if anyone on the list knows his work and could tell us whether he wrote stories in our genres. >>

I recently uncovered Schnitzler as well, over dinner. <g> Last week at a dinner party I met Schnitzler's grandson, who is a documentary filmmaker and writer. I have worked with his wife for several months, but was unaware of the connection to Schnitzler.

If we can locate a public domain translation, I too would like to read a short story by Schnitzler.

>I believe Schnitzler was also involved in the Zionist >movement, but I may be mixing him up a bit with other >Viennese of his era (I just did my absolutely BEST >Freudian slip ever, in honor of that era, and wrote >"other Viennese of his eros.")

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Schnitzler was a friend of Theodor Herzl (founder of Zionism) but he considered Herzl's solution to anti-Semitism to be facile. Schnitzler's own writings on anti-Semitism are complex and thorough. He considered it a manifestation of the universal human condition of spiritual malaise. There are many works here, as many as on that other great theme of his: sex. But the best remains in my mind the play _Professor Bernhardi_ which is an analysis of the form and social structure of the various types of anti-Semitism and also of all the dehumanizing forces with which society is infested; I suspect Bierce would have greatly enjoyed this one.

Like his contemporaries Freud and Adler he was a bourgeois Jewish doctor and he had like them worked as an assistant in Meynert's clinic; his specialty was hypnosis. I much prefer his tales to his plays with the exception of Bernhardi and Carroll's favorite _Anatol_. I also particulary like the novels that deal with his obsession with death and old age (_Beatrice_ and _Casanova's Homecoming_). His early tales were the basis of a wonderful BBC series _Vienna 1900-Games with Love and Death_ in the early 70's dramatized by Robert Muller and directed by Herbert Wise.

All his characters in spite of their wit and command of language cannot communicate with each other; they are entraped in the roles society gives them and allow those roles to satisfy their basic desires thereby losing all hope of more lasting fulfillment.

There is a fine though incomplete autobiography (_My Youth in Vienna_) published long after his death[1932] in 1968 and translated into English in 1970-71. My edition is published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson: 1971.

Wow! And wasn't the Nicole Kidman play on Broadway a version of LA RONDE? Maybe it's still running, I'm out of touch....

I sent to Gaslight via Netscape a quote from Sunset Blvd. which was kind of very a propos -- I'll reconstruct it if I don't see it here. I think the key I pressed said "Mail Later" -- whatever THAT means.

I suspect this movie is going to be one hot item. I wonder what kind of music Kubrick uses this time. The scores of his movies were always integral -- imagine 2001 without THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA and THE BEAUTIFUL BLUE DANUBE, for instance.

I had mentioned this series in an early note. I remember seeing it in London Ontario in the 70's. I suspect it was on PBS but it could have been the CBC or TVO. It was really quite good. There was a sort of mini Schnitzler revial in the mid 1970's. The series was based on 5 works: Mother and Son (aka Beatrice) which I have already mentioned in connection with his concerns on aging and death; The Man of Honour (aka The Murderer); A Confirmed Bachelor (aka Dr. Graesker); The Spring Sonata (aka Bertha Garlan); and The Gift of Life (Sterben). Robert Stephens played the central character Doctor Graesler. It was really quite good although terribly fattening in a coffee and chocolate sort of way. Penquin paperbacks published a companion set of tales to the series.

And Carroll Bishop notes:

> Freud later wrote to Schnitzler: "You know through intuition, or rather >through self-observation, everything that I have discovered >by laborious work on other people."

Freud is constantly making such claims and it is one of the least charming features of this man. I have noted earlier that Adler, Freud, and Schnitzler were all at Meynert's clinic. The similarity derives from the influence of Meynert and of course Josef Breuer I suspect.

To my mind one of the many but perhaps the most outrageous remark of this type occurs in Freud's _An Autobiographical Study_: "The large extent to which psycho-analysis coincides with the philosophy of Schopenhauer-not only did he assert the dominance of the emotions and the supreme importance of sexuality but he was even aware of the mechanism of repression - is not to be traced to my acquaintance with his teaching. I read Schopenhauer very late in my life. Nietzsche, another philosopher whose guesses and intuitions often agree in the most astonishing way with the laborious findings of psycho-analysis, was for a long time avoided by me on that very account; I was less concerned with the question of priority than with keeping my mind unembarrassed."

Actually questions of priority were a very big deal for Freud and that chapter on "The Metaphysics of Sexual Love" in Schopenhauer's _The World as Will and Representation_ (E.J. Payne translation) must have been a bitter pill indeed. And I wonder what the brillant Lou Andreas-Salome so greatly loved by Nietzsche, Rilke, Schnitzler and of course Freud would have to say about the "unembarrassed" mind of Freud.