sweet girl

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"Sweet girl" was a type of woman in Vienna of the fin de siècle , which particularly in the literary work of Arthur Schnitzler became famous.

characterization

The term sweet girl describes a sexually accessible young woman of low class from the Viennese suburb, whose relationship with a “higher-ranking gentleman” from the city is socially tolerated. Their charm lies in their cheerful naturalness and life-affirming vitality. She is the revealing lover of either the upper class young men who enjoy their love before they find a wife who is appropriate to their class, or the older men of the same class who are recovering from their marriage with her. She is a prisoner of her milieu and, despite all the affection of the young gentleman from a good family, is just a toy, with which he enjoys himself for a while, but which he then puts away again when things get serious.

Characteristic for the sweet girl is her mixture of petty bourgeoisie, a sense of reality and decency with simultaneous readiness to be erotically subservient to the respective "young man". As an interchangeable love object for bourgeois sons, it returns to where it came from, in the suburbs, after one or more of these love relationships have ended.

Such relationships are characterized by social and emotional ambivalence , but are definitely based on reciprocity: The young woman has access to much higher social circles, although the probability of marriage is extremely low. The sweet girl is loved in downtown Vienna , but married in the suburbs, i.e. in the outskirts like Wieden , Josefstadt or Mariahilf . There, marriage to a young man of their own kind is usually the only thing left to expect.

At the same time, the sweet girl represents a (locally and historically) specific counter-type to the femme fatale . As a social character, she is distinguished in particular from the prostitute on the one hand and the class-appropriate but sexually inaccessible higher daughter on the other, and thus stands in contrast to the "good girl from good." Home ”.

Arthur Schnitzler

In both the dramatic and epic works of Arthur Schnitzler , the sweet girl can be found as a common artistic cliché of Viennese modernism in the fin de siècle . He used the expression for the first time in the little Christmas shopping scene that appeared in the Frankfurter Zeitung for Christmas 1890. This type of woman then shaped his early pieces: Annie in Anatol (1893), Christine in Liebelei (1895); later explicitly as “the sweet girl” in Reigen (1900) and in the story Kleine Komödie (1895).

Schnitzler recorded the expression for the first time in his diary in September 1887 when he met Jeanette Heeger:

On September 5th I followed a young girl with Kuwazl, with whom I had spent some evenings - she struck me with the way she talked and I loved her. Two days later she became my lover and captivates me with her convincing sensuality, with her motherly wit and many other things. (...) You can't think of a more pleasant relationship - a dear, sweet girl who asks nothing but me - but in the most extensive measure - the suppers in a lonely city restaurant or in my room - initially in the Prater - it will be something nice to remember .

In his autobiography Jugend in Wien , Schnitzler describes the archetype of the sweet girl :

She was depraved without sinfulness, innocent without virginity, fairly sincere and a bit mendacious, mostly in a very good mood and yet sometimes with fleeting shadows of care over her bright forehead, after all not quite well as a bourgeois daughter, but as a sweetheart the most bourgeois and unselfish creature, that thinks.

Schnitzler also mentions the discovery of this type as an "idea" for his literary work. The first sweet girl claims to have met him (years before Jeannette Heeger) in November 1881, when the name for it did not even exist. Schnitzler's definition is therefore a kind of first literary description :

Prototype of a Viennese woman, charming figure, made for dancing, a little mouth that reminds me of the little fan in its movements [Schnitzler's first childhood sweetheart Franziska Reich] (...) made for kissing - a pair of bright, lively eyes. Clothing of simple taste and a certain grisette type - the walk swaying back and forth - agile and uninhibited - the voice bright - the language vibrating in natural dialect: what she speaks - only as she can speak - yes, must, that means fun-loving , with a slight hint of hastiness. 'You're only young once,' she says with a half-indifferent shrug. - There is nothing to be missed, she thinks ... That is reason bathed in the bright colors of the south. Reckless with a defensive hint of brittleness. She calmly talks about her lover, with whom she broke up a few weeks ago, and with a smile and a high-spirited tone tells how she now fools so many who think of being easily connected to her, but which is by no means French, passionately demonic has touched, but secretly humorous, as long as you are not the fool yourself.

In his novella Game at Dawn , Schnitzlers describes a former sweet girl who has worked her way up to an ice-cold businesswoman and is now driving her former lover to suicide. In this player story from his late work, Schnitzler gives an aged sweet girl the opportunity to take revenge. The lieutenant, who once treated her like a prostitute, now meets her again as an indebted gambler who, in dire need, hopes for the help of his uncle - who is now her husband.

Schnitzler usually depicts the sweet girl's bridegroom without any sympathy. He is a rather unaesthetic appearance that lacks the shine "to which girls fall for when they love the noble seducer".

Bertold Heizmann draws attention to the correspondence of Schnitzler's literary cliché with Freud's considerations on a certain type of male object choice, which is characterized by "the more or less pronounced 'prostitute' of the beloved and the intention to 'save' them".

Predecessor characters

Even with Johann Nepomuk Nestroy , girls from simple backgrounds appear with their lovers from the bourgeoisie. In The Girl from the Suburbs or Honestly Lasts Longest , such a girl is genuinely loved by a wealthy young man, but in the same play some young seamstresses are also supposed to serve as a pastime for rich men. In Nestroy's »Kampl or The Girl with the Millions and the Seamstress« a young man desires a sewing girl as an object of his temporary love and wants to pay her for it.

Such girls also appear in the Comédie- Vaudeville La Jolie Fille du Faubourg by Paul de Kock and Varin and in Henri Murger's Scènes de la vie de bohème ( La Bohème ).

The sweet girl is an operetta by Heinrich Reinhardt with the libretto by Alexander Landesberg and Leo Stein .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Gudrun Brokoph-Mauch: The woman in Austrian literature at the turn of the century
  2. ↑ Bertold Heizmann; Arthur Schnitzler, Traumnovelle (Reclam, explanations and documents) Stuttgart 2006, p. 22. Janz dedicates the chapter on the social character of the sweet girl in: Rolf-Peter Janz, Arthur Schnitzler: On the diagnosis of the Viennese middle class in the fin de siecle . Stuttgart (Metzler), 1977, pp. 41-54.
  3. ↑ Cf. Rolf-Peter Janz / Klaus Laermann, Arthur Schnitzler: On the diagnosis of the Viennese middle class in the fin de siècle. Stuttgart (Metzler) 1977, p. 44: “For the young gentleman of the city, for whom the maitress is too expensive or too boring, who sees his health endangered by a prostitute, for whom the relationship with the married woman is too risky, but who for his part, the young lady who is appropriate to her position cannot or does not want to marry (yet), the sweet girl is recommended as a lover. "
  4. ↑ Frankfurter Zeitung, No. 358, December 24, 1891, pp. 1-2. Also in the first edition of Anatol. See AS: Anatol. Historical-critical edition. Edited by Evelyne Polt-Heinz and Isabella Schwentner with the assistance of Gerhard Hubmann. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter 2012, p. 900. See also Arthur Schnitzler: On my own account, unpublished text, Cambridge University Library, folder 20,8, p. 8.
  5. ^ Arthur Schnitzler, Diary, October 19, 1887
  6. ↑ Quoted from Werner Jung : The sweet girl. Representations of women by Arthur Schnitzler. Archived copy ( Memento of March 10, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
  7. ^ Diary of November 25, 1881 | Arthur Schnitzler: Youth in Vienna. An autobiography , Berlin and Weimar (Aufbau-Verlag) 1985, third book, p. 118 f.
  8. ^ Lit. Heizmann: Arthur Schnitzler, Traumnovelle p. 22; see. also: Sigmund Freud, On a special type of object choice in men , in: Ders., Contributions to the psychology of love life (GW, 8) Frankfurt a. M. 1969, pp. 66-77.
  9. ↑ Daniela Altenweisl, The sweet girl http://othes.univie.ac.at/7969/1/2009-11-25_0202801.pdf