Escape into the darkness

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Escape into darkness is a novella by Arthur Schnitzler , which, written between 1912 and 1917 under the working title Wahn , appeared in May in the Vossische Zeitung in Berlin and in July 1931 in the Neue Wiener Tagblatt . In the same year the story was published in book form by S. Fischer .

Brief summary and explanation of the title

In paranoia , someone murders his brother: the sick Robert, who thinks his healthy brother Otto, overworked by his work as a doctor , is insane , confesses in writing before killing him: "One of us had to go into the dark." Robert the dead into the afterlife.

content

Otto mocks his brother as an "incorrigible hypochondriac " because Robert looks for and finds omens of a mental illness in himself. When his memory fails, Robert takes leave, leaves his work on the statistics of the Lower Austrian primary school system and withdraws. He leaves his future bride Alberta to an overseas rival without a fight. Robert cannot separate reality from imagination : Has he now killed Alberta and secretly buried it or not? And what was it like ten years ago when his young wife Brigitte died suddenly after three years of marriage? Does he have that on his conscience too? Robert, not lazy, is looking for a new lover. The young, widowed piano teacher would have been the right one for him - as he repeatedly stated towards the end of the novella. But for Robert, the Councilor of the Section, the impoverished, vulnerable teacher is only good for an entertaining night in a hotel room. Miss Paula Rolf, “a clear-eyed, clever being”, already around thirty, would be the right woman for him. Perhaps, so Robert weighs up, he could even admit his "crimes" to her. At first Robert is put off by Paula's disarming insight. Robert knows that his brother Otto thinks he's a fool. But he doesn't want to be considered an idiot. Robert thinks hard: Did he kill Paula? Is it teeming with murderers around it? Did his section head, the widowed Baron Prantner, assassinate his own wife? Robert actually has to read that from the conduct of the indulgent superior.

Robert had committed an enormous foolishness at the time when his memory failed. He had left a letter with his brother Otto in which he asked the doctor to kill him as painlessly as possible as soon as the incurable disease broke out clearly. Robert wants the letter back on which he believes his life hangs. Otto brings the document, but meets a suspicious brother. Robert fears that Otto might poison him.

The sick man is finally looking for something to stop at Paula. The logical thinking lady listens to the hair-raising stories in amazement. That rival who had taken Alberta out of him had come over from America and was following Robert; most likely out of jealousy. Maybe the American killed Alberta over there. An escape plan is hatched. Paula, now something like Robert's bride, is supposed to flee with me. Incidentally, Robert also fled from Brother Otto, the doctor who wanted to bring him to an institution for observation . The sick person confesses his own illness to the healthy brother and escapes headlong solo. According to Robert's will, Paula is supposed to start her early honeymoon one train later for safety reasons. Paula doesn't come. Worried brother Otto knocks on the hotel room door and is shot by Robert. The patient runs out into the night, runs and runs and falls to his death - away from the hotel - in the alpine rocky landscape.

reception

  • Farese asks why the author hesitated with the publication until the end and sees Schnitzler's oppression "in the terrible years of Finis Austriae " as one of the possible causes , which seems to emerge from the text. Two days before his death, Schnitzler got his hands on the first review of the novella and after reading it had reason to be happy.
  • Sprengel, Scheffel and Le Rider allude to autobiographical elements in the novella. It means the tense relationship with the brother Julius .
  • At the end of his interpretation, Lönker names three further references (authors: Hans-Ulrich Lindken, Harald Schmidt and Heide Tarnowski-Seidel). Arnold also cites the work of Kenneth Segar (Oxford 1988), Volker Sack (Stuttgart 1989) and Barbara Melley (Milan 1992).

Web links

Wikisource: Escape into Darkness  - Sources and full texts

literature

First edition in book form
  • Arthur Schnitzler: Escape into the Dark. Novella. Linen with cover illustration by Hans Meid . S. Fischer Verlag Berlin 1931. 172 pages
expenditure
  • Arthur Schnitzler: Escape into darkness and other short stories. (enthallt same time: Game at dawn , Dream Story ). Forum books (Bermann-Fischer, Stockholm / Allert De Lange, Amsterdam / Querido, Amsterdam) 1939. 350 pages.
  • Arthur Schnitzler: Escape into the Dark. S. 379–477 in Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Ed.): Arthur Schnitzler: Casanovas Heimfahrt. Stories 1909 - 1917. With an afterword by Michael Scheffel . S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1999. 495 pages, ISBN 3-10-073553-6
  • Arthur Schnitzler: Escape into the Dark . Edited by Barbara Neymeyr . Reclam, Stuttgart 2006. Epilogue: pp. 122–143. ISBN 978-3-15-018459-2 .
Secondary literature
  • 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 1900–1918. Munich 2004. 924 pages, ISBN 3-406-52178-9
  • Gero von Wilpert : Lexicon of world literature. German Authors A-Z . S. 555, right column, 1. Zvu Stuttgart 2004. 698 pages, ISBN 3-520-83704-8
  • Jacques Le Rider : Arthur Schnitzler or The Vienna Belle Époque . Translated from the French by Christian Winterhalter. Passagen Verlag Vienna 2007. 242 pages, ISBN 978-3-85165-767-8
  • Fred Lönker: Escape into the darkness. Madness - Psychopathological Fate or Metaphysical Logic? P. 240-251 in Hee-Ju Kim and Günter Saße (eds.): Interpretations. Arthur Schnitzler. Dramas and stories. Reclams Universal Library No. 17352. Stuttgart 2007. 270 pages, ISBN 978-3-15-017532-3

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Sprengel, p. 242, 15. Zvu
  2. ↑ The printing is already announced in March and April in the daily newspaper on the title page of the Sunday, so no reprint from the Vossische.
  3. ↑ Source, p. 490, 4. Zvo
  4. ↑ Source, p. 469, 9. Zvu
  5. ↑ Farese, p. 190 below
  6. ↑ Farese, p. 335, 6. Zvo
  7. ^ Sprengel, p. 242 below
  8. ↑ Scheffel in the afterword of the source, p. 487
  9. ↑ Le Rider, pp. 93 to 96
  10. ↑ Lönker, p. 251 below
  11. ↑ Arnold (Ed.) Anno 1998, p. 160, left column, chap. 3.5.7