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Though he could accept Zionism as a spiritual or moral movement, the idea of founding a Jewish state struck him as “a nonsensical defiance of the whole spirit of historical evolution.” Defiance, in other words, of assimilation. His family and mine were nothing if not assimilationist. On my mother’s side, we are three generations of baptized Protestants—loyal Austrians who were totally unprepared for what happened when the Nazis came to power. In 1939, only eight years after my grandfather’s death, all Jewish businesses in Vienna were closed or destroyed or “Aryanized.” We were not allowed to drive cars, or visit public parks or theaters or libraries. We were not allowed to own radios or use the post office. We could not attend universities, were not permitted to work as doctors, pharmacists, musicians, actors. Jews were forced to scrub Vienna’s sidewalks, were kicked and beaten by jeering bystanders. Jewish places of worship were closed or destroyed. Those who did not have the good fortune or quick wit or sufficient funds to emigrate were sent to the concentration camps. Many of them were murdered. Arthur Schnitzler wasn’t alive to see his works banned, his books burned, his family—my family—scattered to the far corners of the earth. I have asked myself if these events have put a barrier between his time and mine, made it impossible for readers today to see him as anything other than a chronicler of decadence at the turn of the century. A Viennese Original, charming, a little risqué, definitely dated. In the radicalized, politicized days following the First World War, it was fashionable to portray him this way, but I think that this misses the point of his genial talents. It is the fact that he risked diving down into the murky depths of his own motivations and half-conscious desires that makes him, I believe, a writer who transcends time and place. In those deep waters, distinctions among culture and era and class become less important than the things that people have in common: their fantasies, nightmares, passions, fears, self-delusions. Today, seventy-five years after his death, Schnitzler’s works are a staple of the European theater repertoire. In Germany and Austria, his books continue to rank high on the lists of perennial bestsellers. In America, the strong response to the Mint Theater Company’s outstanding 2003 production of Far and Wide is further indication to me of my grandfather’s capacity to evoke universal longings and contradictions. Though the fashions have changed and the music is different, Arthur Schnitzler is still writing about us. A passage in one of Nietzsche’s letters reads: There is a basic division in the ways of men: those who wish for peace of soul and happiness must believe and embrace faith, while those who wish to pursue the truth must forsake peace of mind and devote their lives to inquiry.
The second way was clearly my grandfather’s: rigorous, self-searching honesty,