The Road into the Open

Arthur Schnitzler was born in Vienna into an affluent family, well connected to Vienna’s theater elite—his father, a prominent laryngologist, treated some of the city’s best singers and actors. Although he received his medical degree from the University of Vienna in 1885, Schnitzler did not practice medicine for long, turning instead to a writing career. openly contemplating and depicting sexuality, much of his work aroused controversy among middle-class audiences in Austria-Hungary and Germany. Schnitzler’s writing, especially his plays, impressed his acquaintance Sigmund Freud. Schnitzler himself participated in the peer review of psychology papers during his short medical career, but the playwright did not consider himself a part of the group of psychoanalysts that gathered around Freud. He reached the peak of his popularity just prior to World War I, but Schnitzler and his work fell out of fashion following the war, and he became increasingly the target of antisemitic vitriol. After Hitler designated his works as “Jewish Filth,” they were banned by the Nazis in Austria and Germany. Best remembered as a playwright, Schnitzler wrote a series of genre-defining novellas, notably Traumnovelle (1926), which was the basis for Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999).