The next

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The next is a story written in 1899 by the Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler . It first appeared - posthumously - in 1932 in the Wiener Neue Freie Presse .

The next one tells of a young widower who, after a period of mourning, meets a young woman who is exactly like his deceased wife. His unsuccessful attempt to find the perfect image of the deceased in the young woman (with whom she even shares the name) ends fatally.

content

Gustav, a small Viennese office worker in his mid 30s, loses his young wife Terese due to an illness after seven happy years of marriage. While she was bringing her innocence into the marriage, he had only had a brief but violent relationship with a married woman before. After several months of mourning, Gustav found himself starting to look after young women again. Torn between the newly burgeoning joy in the sensuality of life and the shame about this “injustice” towards the dead (whose decaying body he sees in fantasy pictures), he comforts himself with the prospect of renouncing the world and himself in the foreseeable future to retire to a monastery. He meets a young woman who not only looks deceptively similar to the deceased, but also bears her name. On the third day she invited him to her apartment, where they slept together. Afterwards he climbs into a fit of frenzy because the young woman, who makes no secret of her long list of previous lovers, seems to him like a mockery of her predecessor. He stabs her and then calls passers-by to be arrested. He sees another fantasy of his rotting wife and "for the first time since her death he felt anything like peace in his soul."

background

The next one takes up the plot and motifs of Georges Rodenbach's short novel Das tote Brugge (1892), in which a widower also encounters the outwardly perfect (but ultimately disappointing compared to the "original") image of his deceased wife, but dispenses with its symbolism.

Astrid Lange-Kirchheim noted in her essay Remembered Love? a connection between motifs from the Pygmalion - and Orpheus and Eurydice myth, Rodenbach's Das tote Brugge , Schnitzler's The Next , Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac's crime novel D'Entre les morts (1954) and Alfred Hitchcock's film Vertigo - From the realm of the dead ( 1958).

expenditure

  • Arthur Schnitzler: The Next, in Neue Freie Presse, Vienna, March 27, 1932
  • Arthur Schnitzler: Collected Works. The narrative writings, Volume 1, Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1961, WA 1970
  • Arthur Schnitzler: Mrs. Berta Garlan: Stories 1899-1900, Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2004, ISBN 978-3596294039

literature

  • Achim Aurnhammer: Schnitzler's The Next, in Germanic-Romanic monthly , Carl Winter University Press, Heidelberg 1994
  • Astrid Lange-Kirchheim: remembered love? In: Wolfram Mauser and Joachim Pfeiffer (eds.): Erinnern. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2004.

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