The dead are silent

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Cover of the first edition, 1898

The dead are silent is a novel by Arthur Schnitzler that appeared in October 1897 in the multilingual magazine Cosmopolis in Paris. In the spring of 1898 she completed the collection of short stories The Wise Woman's Wife . The story describes a married woman's carriage ride with her lover. When an accident occurs and her companion dies, she tries to return to her old life.

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Franz is expecting his married lover Emma on a carriage ride near Vienna's Praterstern . Her husband is a professor and that evening is professionally bound. On the journey, the lover tries to persuade Emma to flee or to divorce. You drive first through the Vienna Prater and then over the Reichsbrücke . The apparently drunk Fiaker driver immediately causes an accident in which both are thrown out of the carriage and Franz dies. Emma sends the driver to the nearest houses to get help. She begins to fear being discovered with the dead woman and knocks over the lantern at the scene of the accident. Then she escapes over the Reichsbrücke back to the Praterstern, from where she first takes a rental carriage to the inner city and then another home. She manages to get to the apartment shortly before her husband. But while she could get away with it, one final turn of the story makes it clear that she will confess everything to her husband.

Time and place of action

Although not explicitly stated, implicit information, above all the mention of the Tegetthoff memorial , which was only erected on the Praterstern in 1886 and the Vienna Voluntary Rescue Society founded in 1881 , allow the action time to be set in the immediate presence of its creation. The main place of action is the 2nd district of Vienna , including Praterstrasse , Prater Hauptallee , Lasallestrasse and Reichsbrücke as well as Wagramerstrasse in Kaisermühlen . The action time is concentrated on a period of three to four hours in an evening in autumn, probably in October.

Origin and a farewell

On March 22, 1897, Schnitzler noted in his diary that he had begun the “other farewell”. This makes the text appear as a direct counterpart to the earlier novella Ein Abschied . The basic situation from which Schnitzler worked is constructed in mirror image: In both stories there is a wife, the husband and her lover. While A Farewell deals with how the lover processes the death of the beloved, while Die Toten is silent the lover dies and the wife has to deal with it. The actual writing should have been finished the following day. In mid-July he sent the piece to Emil Heilborn . Until then, the first manuscript had been revised and finally polished.

The surviving text witnesses are a one-sided sheet on which the plot is sketched; a five-page action sketch and a 107-page manuscript. All of them are in Schnitzler's estate in the Cambridge University Library and have been edited as facsimile with transcription since 2016.

Motive influences

A letter with which the English suffragette Fanny Hertz (1830–1908) replied to a letter from the author contains the information (not in the text) that Schnitzler had called the husband a doctor. Based on this, the surprisingly clear behavior of the husband, who did not notice the years of deception, turns out to be an embodiment of the treatment methods presented by Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud in studies on hysteria in 1895 . In addition to the adultery that weighs on her, there is the accidental death of the lover, which triggers a lively activity of the stream of consciousness as a traumatic event in Emma and absences also occur as in the condition seconde . Similar to the case studies of the studies, the understanding of the title “The dead are silent” also describes the therapeutic solution to the “talking cure”: Emma must not be silent, and the end also suggests the solution to her clinical picture: “And she knows that in the next moment she will tell the whole truth to this man whom she has betrayed for years. / And while she walks slowly through the door with her boy, always feeling her husband's eyes fixed on her, a great calm comes over her, as if many things would be fine. ”It is therefore one of the very first literary treatments of psychoanalysis even before it got its name.

The central carriage ride shows intertextual parallels to Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert .

reception

interpretation

The story is narrative divided into two parts, with Franz appearing to be the main character until the accident, while Emma becomes the main character in the second part and her inner perspective is described. The conversation between the two in the carriage raises strong doubts as to whether they really love each other, or whether the affair that has now been going on for "years" has become a formality, a bourgeois game with its own laws, just like marriage. The carriage ride has its mirror-image equivalent in Emma's walk, which goes back the traveled distance on foot. If at the beginning the lover waits for Emma, ​​at the end it is the husband. In the first part, the stormy weather and the wobbling carriage serve as external signs to shape the inner state of the lovers. The second reduces the outside view to a closer observation of the inside view. Schnitzler continued to deal with these questions: immediately after the first edition appeared, Schnitzler read Les lauriers sont coupées by Édouard Dujardin and, based on this, developed the flow of consciousness technology , which he then used in places in Ms. Bertha Garlan and on a grand scale in Lieutenant Gustl . Sprengel points to a rare tone in Schnitzler's early work. At the end of the novella, the betrayed husband wants his wife Emma to build a bridge to honest dialogue.

Edits

Movie

volume

Web links

literature

First printing and first edition
  • The dead are silent. In: Cosmopolis , Volume 8, Issue 22, October 1897, pp. 193-211. ( online )
  • The dead are silent . In addition to flowers , Ein Abschied , Die Frau des Wise und Der Ehrentag , contained in: Arthur Schnitzler: Die Frau des Wisen. Novellettes. S. Fischer Verlag, Berlin 1898.
Further editions
  • Arthur Schnitzler: The dead are silent . Historical-critical edition. Edited by Martin Anton Müller with the collaboration of Ingo Börner, Anna Lindner, Isabella Schwentner. Berlin, Boston: de Gruyter June 2016 (Arthur Schnitzler: Works in Historical-Critical Editions , edited by Konstanze Fliedl ).
  • Arthur Schnitzler: The dead are silent. In: AS: Narrative writings . S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1961 (Collected Works), Volume I, pp. 296-312.
  • Arthur Schnitzler: The dead are silent. In: AS Leutnant Gustl. Stories 1892 - 1907. Ed. Heinz Ludwig Arnold . With an afterword by Michael Scheffel . S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2004, pp. 165-183. ISBN 3-10-073552-8
Secondary literature
  • Wiese, Benno from: "The dead are silent", the German novella from Goethe to Kafka. Interpretations, Vol. 2, Düsseldorf: August Bagel 1962, p. II, 261-279
  • Cook, William K. "Isolation, Flight, and Resolution in Arthur Schnitzler's Die Toten Schweigen". The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 50, No. 3 (May 1975): 213-26. doi : 10.1080 / 00168890.1975.9934772 .
  • However, Rolf. "The extinction of eros: 'The dead are silent'." In Arthur Schnitzler. Impressionistic role play and skeptical moralism in his stories, by Rolf Allerdissen. Bonn: Bouvier, 1985.
  • Surowska, Barbara: “Flaubert's motifs in Schnitzler's novella» The Dead Silence «”, Orbis Litterarum 40/4 (April) (1985), pp. 372–379.
  • Knorr, Herbert. “[The dead are silent].” In experiment and play - structures of subjectivity in storytelling Arthur Schnitzler, 1020: 83–92. European university publications. Series I, German Language and Literature, Publications universitaires européennes. Série I, Langue et littérature allemandes; European university studies. Series I, German language and literature. Frankfurt am Main, New York: P. Lang, 1988.
  • Marzinek, Ralf: “The problem of language in Arthur Schnitzler's novella 'The Dead Silence'. For the narrative mediation of the figure consciousness. “, The magic triangle. Polish-German aspects of Austrian and German literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, Frankfurt a. M. 1992, pp. 29-48.
  • Matthias, Bettina: Masks of Life, Faces of Death: on the relationship between death and representation in Arthur Schnitzler's narrative work, Epistemata Bd. 256, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann 1999.
  • Meyer, Imke: Anxiety and the Imperial City: Arthur Schnitzler's' The Dead Silence. In: Austrian Studies, Vol. 27, Placing Schnitzler (2019), pp. 210–223, DOI 10.5699 / austrianstudies.27.2019.0210
  • Micke, Norbert: "" The dead man on my lap "- for the dramatic-analytical portrayal of the Eros / Thanatos motif in Arthur Schnitzler's story The Dead Silence", in: Lindemann, Klaus and Norbert Micke (eds.): Eros and Thanatos. Stories between the turn of the century and the First World War, Paderborn 1996, pp. 33–52.
  • Tebben, Karin: “'Dream becomes life, life becomes dream'. Arthur Schnitzler's The Dead Silence (1897) ”, Musil-Forum. Studies on Classical Modernism 27 (2001), pp. 103–118. [1]
  • Küpper, Achim: “Transition as a borderline experience: Arthur Schnitzler. Water, bridge and island in three stories from the end of the century (with a look at art around 1900) ”, Sprachkunst 39/2. Half-year (2008), pp. 219–249.
  • Aurnhammer, Achim: Arthur Schnitzler's intertextual storytelling, linguae & litterae 22, Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter 2013.
  • Guntersdorfer, Ivett Rita: “'I have the honor!' Schnitzler's novellas 'Die Toten Schweigen' and 'Leutnant Gustl' alla Schopenhauer ”, in: Burwick, Roswitha, Lorely French and Ivett Rita Guntersdorfer (eds.): On the way to modernity. German and Austrian literature and culture, Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter 2013, pp. 101–123.
  • Dear Claudia. “The faithless wife's hysteria. Pathological intimacy around 1900. “Tà katoptrizómena 10, no. 53 (2008). http://www.theomag.de/53/cl1.htm .

(More general :)

  • Michaela L. Perlmann: Arthur Schnitzler. Metzler Collection, Vol. 239. Stuttgart 1987. 195 pages, ISBN 3-476-10239-4
  • Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Ed.): Arthur Schnitzler. Publisher edition text + kritik, magazine for literature, issue 138/139, April 1998, 174 pages, ISBN 3-88377-577-0
  • Giuseppe Farese: Arthur Schnitzler. A life in Vienna. 1862-1931 . Translated from the Italian by Karin Krieger . CH Beck Munich 1999. 360 pages, ISBN 3-406-45292-2 . Original: Arthur Schnitzler. Una vita a Vienna. 1862-1931. Mondadori Milan 1997
  • Peter Sprengel : History of German-Language Literature 1870–1900. From the founding of the empire to the turn of the century . CH Beck , Munich 1998, ISBN 3-406-44104-1

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See HKA, p. 267
  2. ↑ Arthur Schnitzler: Diary . Ed .: With the participation of Peter Michael Braunwarth, Konstanze Fliedl, Susanne Pertlik u. Reinhard Urbach ed. v. the commission for literary forms of use of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, chairman: Werner Welzig . tape 1893-1902 . Publishing house of the Academy of Sciences, Vienna 1989.
  3. ↑ Arthur Schnitzler: The dead are silent. Historical-critical edition . In: Martin Anton Müller, with the collaboration of Ingo Börner, Anna Lindner and Isabella Schwentner (Ed.): Works in historical-critical editions. Edited by Konstanze Fliedl . de Gruyter, Berlin / Boston 2016, ISBN 978-3-11-047614-9 , pp. 1-2 .
  4. ↑ See HKA, p. 4 and utta Müller, Gerhard Neumann: Der Nachlass Arthur Schnitzler . Directory of the in the Schnitzler archive of the University of Freiburg i.Br. material. With a foreword by Gerhart Baumann and an appendix by Heinrich Schnitzler: Directory of the estate material available in Vienna . Fink, Munich 1969, p. 86.
  5. ↑ Historical-critical edition, pp. 2–3. The reference to Freud / Breuer already in Claudia Lieb: The hysteria of the faithless wife. Pathological intimacy around 1900, http://www.theomag.de/53/cl1.htm
  6. ↑ HKA, p. 264
  7. ↑ For Perlmann (p. 121, 6. Zvu) this means that the title is actually reversed, because the dead man does not keep silent, but makes Emma speak.
  8. ↑ Barbara Surowska: Flaubert's motifs in Schnitzler's novella “The Dead Silence”. In: Orbis Litterarum 40 (1985), H. 4, pp. 372-379. Achim Aurnhammer: Arthur Schnitzler's intertextual storytelling. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter 2013, pp. 39–46.
  9. ↑ HKA, pp. 5 and 7
  10. ↑ Arbeiter-Zeitung. December 1, 1897, accessed February 29, 2016 .
  11. ↑ HKA, p. 8
  12. ↑ Perlmann, p. 121, 17. Zvo claims that after the accident it became apparent that Emma did not love Franz.
  13. ^ Sprengel, p. 286, middle
  14. ^ The dead are silent, publisher's website. Retrieved May 19, 2016 .