Within the established discourse of crisis and identity in Arthur Schnitzler's prose, Marie Kolkenbrock's study offers a compelling addition with an original focus. She discerns how the Viennese author represents the psychosociological mechanisms behind a form of Habsburg nostalgia that romanticizes a seemingly stable social order. Under the monarchy's crumbling social structures around 1900, many of Schnitzler's privileged male protagonists paradoxically strive to be recognized as part of the norm and, at the same time, to be assured of a place outside of the norm. Connected to the conflicting pulls of societal expectation and individual desire are two interrelated coping mechanisms: the practice of stereotyping (which provides ordering tools that stabilize the self in its difference to typecast “others”) and the invocation of the higher power of destiny (which provides a sense of unique existence). With these mechanisms, however, the central characters often deny individual responsibility and fail to develop a critical mindset for the changed social reality around them.
Touching on core concerns of identity, subjectivity, and power in modernism, Kolkenbrock's solid theoretical framework is largely informed by poststructuralism and thinkers such as Eric Santner, Judith Butler, and Pierre Bourdieu. In five main chapters, the author then scrutinizes the manifold relationships between stereotypes and destiny across Schnitzler's oeuvre from the first three decades of the twentieth century.
The first chapter closely reads the novel Der Weg ins Freie, delving into physiognomic thought and performative appearances within the context of stereotyping. Kolkenbrock contends that through the lens of the non-Jewish, aristocratic reflector-figure Georg, who surrounds himself with Jewish friends and acquaintances, paradoxical typecasting (both antisemitic and idealizing) is on display. Similarly, Georg's middle-class lover, Anna, is ascribed a predetermination for motherhood. This further exemplifies how the practice of stereotyping engenders repetitive performances, which take on fate-like qualities in the constructed social order when her child is stillborn.
Schnitzler's novella Flucht in die Finsternis, central in the second chapter, investigates the protagonist Robert's looming loss of a secured, symbolic status in the bourgeois order—a crisis of investiture—in its interplay with his mental illness. The cultural narrative around diagnosed “madness,” equally threatening and alluring, connects to destiny. Within his apparent transitional state toward delusion, Robert constructs a narrative for himself outside of the repetitive structures of social norms, which ultimately leads to fratricide and suicide. What Schnitzler called his Wahnsinnsnovelle evokes for Kolkenbrock also an aesthetic and literary quality with ties to the German Schauerromantik, in particular Hoffmannesque elements of Grauen (horror), Romantic madness, the uncanny “other,” and the Doppelgänger motif.
Chapters 3 and 4 are devoted to the five novellas of the Dämmerseelen collection, all of which feature moments of Grauen for the protagonists when they experience obstacles in their supposedly prescriptive path and have encounters with an enigmatic “other.” Kolkenbrock analyzes two novellas, Die Weissagung and Andreas Thameyers letzter Brief, as texts that depict stereotypes of racial difference and destiny. Whereas the protagonist of the former dies in what appears to be his destiny foretold by a Jewish magician, the titular letter writer of the latter compulsively performs his social destiny by killing himself. After his wife gives birth to a Black child, he no longer feels able to conform to normative pressures of masculinity and seeks to reestablish his family's reputation.
Dämmerseelen's other three novellas, Die Fremde, Das Schicksal des Freiherrn von Leisenbohg, and Das neue Lied, deal with romantic love as cosmic fate (and in the latter story as a temporary escape from social reality) in Kolkenbrock's convincing model. In Die Fremde in particular, she identifies protagonist Albert's attempt to substitute his ordinary social destiny with a special higher destiny, which is, however, premised on cultural stereotypes of a nearly otherworldly feminine “other” and clichéd promises of love as the individualizing experience par excellence. Schnitzler here also offers a subtle critique of Viennese décadence and its aestheticism.
The final chapter exposes how, in the famous Traumnovelle, love in its institutionalized form as marriage turns into a social destiny, albeit with moments of transgression. When Albertine reveals her extramarital erotic fantasies, the preconceived roles of passive wife and domestic mother, as well as Fridolin's sense of an active male self, are harmed. In an intriguing reading of the text's multiple plays with notions of infection, Kolkenbrock interprets that when the healthy “body” of the norm is invaded by “otherness,” the threat of a “social death” is impending (210–11). Equal parts foreboding and tantalizing, Fridolin's nocturnal journey around a masked ball remains a temporary flirt with an individualized destiny, and the couple returns to the familiar norm of bourgeois love. It is a questionable victory though, as Albertine helps to reinstate the double standards of a patriarchal gender system that has devalued her in the first place, and an unknown woman (a proxy figure for her) lies dead at the morgue.
This study's nuanced and remarkably cohesive readings are well-versed in social theory, cultural history, and narratology. Going beyond the established discourse of crisis in early twentieth-century Vienna, Kolkenbrock homes in on the belief in destiny as an indicator of crisis as well as an effect that reinforces existing power structures. In addition to making a substantial contribution to Schnitzler scholarship, her book offers a thorough examination of the complex of stereotyping, which illuminates broader psychosociological phenomena. After excavating the repetitive structures in Schnitzler's texts that take up and create clichés (while also borrowing features from other literary traditions), she briefly but suggestively points to their uses today. Figures such as the “magical Negro” and the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” in cinema are contemporary equivalents to the stereotyped, flat characters in Schnitzler's oeuvre whose representation is reduced to helping the protagonist cope in moments of crisis (246).
