The Stranger (Schnitzler)

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The foreigner is a short story by the Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler , which first appeared on May 18, 1902 in the Viennese daily newspaper Neue Freie Presse under the title Dämmerseele .

A man falls in love to the point of giving up himself with a woman who is constantly subject to mood swings and twilight states. She accepts his marriage proposal, but leaves him during the honeymoon.

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Albert von Webeling, who went on honeymoon in Innsbruck , found a farewell letter from his wife Katharina, with whom he had only been married for two weeks. He remembers the history of their marriage.

After Albert first met young Katharina two years ago, despite warnings from a friend, he fell in love with the woman, who was known to be subject to strong mood swings. Although Albert initially did not see any chances with Katharina, he vowed, out of the vehemence of his feelings for her, that he would kill himself if she were to marry another man. After her rumored engagement to a count broke, Albert made her a marriage proposal, which she unmovedly accepted. Albert soon realized that his fiancée moved as if in a persistent state of twilight and was prone to inexplicable, spontaneous actions, and that he had entered “a wondrous but uncertain and dark epoch of his life”. Despite his firm belief that happiness would not last, he married Katharina with the resolve to end his life as soon as she left him.

Albert makes all the preparations to put his resolution into practice, pocket a revolver and goes out to find a quiet place for his suicide. On the way he happened to see Katharina and secretly followed her into the court church . There she lingers absent-mindedly and finally kisses the foot of the bronze figure of Theodoric . Albert arranges for an imitation of the bronze sculpture to be erected on the couple's Vienna estate, which costs him all of his fortune, and then shoots himself in the forest.

In a short epilogue, the reader learns that after her stay in the Hofkirche, Katharine had a brief affair with a strange man and became pregnant. She does not return to Vienna until a few weeks later. She pauses for a while in front of the Theodoric figure, then writes a letter to the father of her unborn child who is said to be living in Verona , but it is never answered.

Emergence

Schnitzler deals with the origin of the text in a sheet handed down in the estate folder 170 (today the German Literature Archive Marbach ): “1901.26.6 With O [lga Gussmann]. Innsbruck Court Church. The statue of Theodoric. / 1902.6.3. Wrote "Theodoric". / Later title “Dämmerseele”. “There is a relationship in terms of content with the evening walk dialogue , which was unpublished during his lifetime , and which was likely to have been created in the near future and which shares the motif of the court church.

reception

After the novella was first published, Paul Goldmann wrote in a feature section that Schnitzler overemphasized the subject of “love and death”.

Schnitzler leaves the reader in the dark in order to ultimately disappoint him, writes Michaela L. Perlmann.

Giuseppe Farese calls the story “strange”. Schnitzler also shows in the novella that the other person - in this case your own wife - cannot be understood.

expenditure

  • First printing: Arthur Schnitzler: Dämmerseele. In: Neue Freie Presse, No. 13553, May 18, 1902, p. 31f. Online at Anno
  • Arthur Schnitzler: The Stranger . In: Dusk souls. Novellas. S. Fischer, Berlin 1907, 132 pages
  • Arthur Schnitzler: The Stranger. P. 396-405 in Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Ed.): Arthur Schnitzler: Leutnant Gustl. Stories 1892–1907. With an afterword by Michael Scheffel , S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1961 (2004 edition), 525 pages, ISBN 3-10-073552-8

literature

  • Michaela L. Perlmann: Arthur Schnitzler. Metzler Collection, Vol. 239, Stuttgart 1987. 195 pages, ISBN 3-476-10239-4
  • Giuseppe Farese: Arthur Schnitzler. A life in Vienna. 1862-1931 . Translated from the Italian by Karin Krieger . C. H. Beck, Munich 1999. 360 pages, ISBN 3-406-45292-2 . Original: Arthur Schnitzler. Una vita a Vienna. 1862-1931. Mondadori, Milan 1997

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Arthur Schnitzler Archive Freiburg, M3, Die Fremde
  2. ^ A b Giuseppe Farese: Arthur Schnitzler. A life in Vienna. 1862-1931 . C. H. Beck, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-406-45292-2 , p. 107.
  3. ↑ Michaela L. Perlmann: Arthur Schnitzler. Metzler Collection, Vol. 239, Stuttgart 1987, ISBN 3-476-10239-4 , p. 140.