Schnitzler’s Hidden Manuscripts

This series publishes works of scholarship drawn from the whole subject range of traditional Germanistik, originating both in Great Britain and in the Republic of Ireland. The weight of the series mainly falls on literature, theatre and cultural history from the eighteenth century onwards, in some cases with a strong comparative dimension.

This volume, which takes its title from an international conference held at the University of Cambridge in November 2006, aims to shed new light on Schnitzler’s œuvre and his period by focusing on his as yet largely unpublished literary remains, his ‘hidden manuscripts’. Among the key topics covered in this collection are: the reconstruction of the adventurous rescue of the manuscripts from Vienna in 1938 and a description of their current locations; an overview of the author’s life, in its historical context, on the basis of such private documents as his diaries and letters; the plethora of existing variants, both published and unpublished, and their usefulness for our understanding of Schnitzler’s work, from the Anatol cycle to the ‘scandalous’ Reigen – in the light of the discovery of its original manuscript – and Schnitzler’s planned (but never completed) work on the historical figure of Emperor Joseph II; Schnitzler’s difficult relationship with one of the most influential journalists of his time, Karl Kraus, and his literary friendship with a close but hitherto neglected contemporary, Gustav Schwarzkopf; the network of intertextual references ‘hidden’ in the revolutionary monologue novella Lieutenant Gustl against the background of Hermann Bahr’s modernist theory of literature; and finally, Schnitzler’s ‘hidden legacy’ in our own epoch. This book contains contributions in both English and German.