Christine and in her world. The idyll, however, is soon shattered by Theodor’s arrival. Theodor wants Fritz to get some rest before the duel, which is set for the next morning.

Act 3 takes place in Christine’s room, two days later. Neither Christine nor Mizi has any news from Fritz and Theodor, who have pretended to go to the country for a day or two. Eventually, Theodor arrives and informs them that Fritz has been killed in the duel and that he has already been buried. After a powerful emotional outcry, Christine rushes out of the room, ostensibly to look for Fritz’s grave, but the audience is led to agree with her father’s assessment that she will never return.

Schnitzler himself, as well as contemporary critics, considered Liebelei to be a first-rate play. A century after its premiere, the universal elements of its subject matter remain relevant: unrequited love, a likable but unstable young man between two women, the conflict between private happiness and public morality. The topic of dueling, which assumes such an inordinate importance in some of Schnitzler’s other dramas, is downplayed in Liebelei. In this drama, Schnitzler does not attack the social code that demands that Fritz and the cuckolded husband engage in a duel. Rather, the duel is subsumed in the topic of the unhappy relationship between Christine and Fritz. While she loves him and thinks of him day and night, he gets himself killed for the sake of another woman.

The plot of Liebelei is tautly constructed. Every scene has a strictly defined purpose, either for the characterization of the protagonists, or for the propulsion of the dramatic action. Similarly, Schnitzler’s use of the German language (with the proper Viennese inflection) for purposes of characterization is superb.

The Vast Land

In Liebelei, part of the dramatic conflict arises from the difference in Fritz’s and Christine’s social standing. There is no such class conflict in The Vast Land, whose long list of characters includes more than a dozen protagonists, all of whom belong to the upper bourgeoisie. The main topic of the play is again the relationship between man and woman, but only between members of the upper classes. At the same time, the scope is broadened to a portrayal of the moral disintegration and emotional impoverishment of this social class. The settings of this tragicomedy are a villa in a resort near Vienna and a fashionable hotel in a resort in the Alps. The time of the play is the early twentieth century—the advent of modernity. The exterior dramatic action consists of four adulterous relationships, which are begun with varying degrees of attraction or passion, and which are terminated with varying degrees of nostalgia or resignation. The real dramatic conflict, however, takes place within “the vast land” of the protagonists’ souls, and there the beginning, the middle, and the end remain one big riddle.

The main character of the play is Friedrich Hofreiter, the owner of a large lightbulb factory. During a few expository scenes, the audience learns that Friedrich has recently terminated an affair with Adele Natter, the wife of his banker, and that Alexei Korsakow, a young pianist who had been Friedrich’s friend, has recently committed suicide. During several scenes in act 1, Friedrich discusses Korsakow’s suicide with his wife, Genia. At first he believes that Genia had an affair with Korsakow, but then she shows him a love letter that Korsakow had written to her shortly before his death. From this letter it becomes manifest that Genia had remained faithful to her husband and that, moreover, she still loves him, in spite of his own infidelity. In a series of syllogistic arguments, Friedrich explains to Genia his shock at losing his friend Korsakow, whom she, by her “so-called fidelity,” has driven to suicide. For this reason, she has become so strange and uncanny to him that he wishes to leave her for a few days. He decides, on the spur of a moment, to accompany his friend Dr. Mauer on a hiking holiday in the Alps.

The conversation between Friedrich and Genia is the starting point of a series of entanglements that eventually leads to disastrous results. Friedrich, Dr. Mauer, and Erna Wahl (a young woman in her twenties who loves Friedrich, but who is being wooed by Dr. Mauer) together brave death as they scale a dangerous mountain peak. During this expedition and back at their hotel, Friedrich starts an affair with Erna. Meanwhile, at home in the villa, Genia, who during her conversation with her husband had prided herself on being faithful to him “for her own sake,” now begins an affair with a young ensign of the Austrian navy. Adele Natter starts another affair, this time with an army officer. Friedrich returns to the villa earlier than expected and observes the ensign as he climbs out of Genia’s bedroom window in the middle of the night. He challenges the ensign to a duel and kills him.

The starkness of the dramatic action is relieved by several humorous episodes, but in essence The Vast Land is a very serious drama. Throughout the play, there occur exchanges of views that merit close attention because they illuminate Schnitzler’s concern with contemporary society. One example is the conversation between Friedrich and Dr. von Aigner, the manager of the hotel in the Alps. About twenty years before the action of the play, von Aigner had been happily married and yet had had an affair with another woman. He had felt compelled to confess the affair to his wife, and they had both sensed that their marriage had come to an irrevocable end. Musing on this, Dr. von Aigner undoubtedly speaks with the voice of the compassionate psychologist Arthur Schnitzler:Has it not occurred to you what kind of complicated beings we humans are? There is room for so much at the same time within us! Love and deception . . . faithfulness and infidelity . . . adoration for one and desire for another one, or for several others. We do try to create some order within us, as well as it can be done, but this order is only something artificial. . . . That which is natural is chaos. Yes . . . the soul . . . is a vast land. . . .

Dr. von Aigner has reached this insight and this serenity twenty years after the breakup of his marriage. He maintains the clean break and his clear and honest position and will presumably continue to do so for the rest of his life. This attitude stands in marked contrast to the new generation, with its practice of “sliding” in and out of affairs, which is so roundly condemned by Dr. Mauer:I would have no objections at all against a world in which love would be nothing but a precious game. . . . But then . . . honesty, if you please! Honesty to the point of an orgy . . . that I would accept. But this mixture of caution and impudence, of cowardly jealousy and mendacious equanimity, of raging passion and empty pleasure that I see here—that I find wretched and horrible.

Dr. Mauer’s condemnation of the mendacity of the “love” relationships of the upper classes occurs toward the end of act 4; the entire previous action has prepared the audience for it. Thus, this scene might provide an effective end for a tragicomedy, but the playwright had not yet finished with his main character: Friedrich, who has been quite indifferent to his wife’s affair with the ensign, suddenly provokes a duel with him. Friedrich admits to Genia that he feels neither hatred, nor rage, nor jealousy, nor love. Yet this “enlightened” modern man must save his honor by killing his wife’s lover. During act 5, Friedrich is revealed as being capable of emotions, after all: first when he admits to having experienced hatred when he confronted the ensign during the duel and again in the very last lines of the play when he “whines softly” at the approach of his son. Act 5 illustrates the cruelty and immorality inherent in the practice of dueling. It therefore does have a function in arousing audience response in an Aristotelian sense. In terms of plot structure, however, the final act is an anticlimactic appendage.

Professor Bernhardi

In Professor Bernhardi, Schnitzler dealt with a topic that was so sensitive that the censorship office prevented its premiere in Austria in 1912. The play finally had its premiere in Vienna on December 21, 1918, after the abolition of censorship and the demise of the monarchy. The dramatic conflict revolves around the person of Professor Bernhardi, a professor of internal medicine and the director and cofounder of a prestigious private clinic in Vienna. The action takes place around 1900. Bernhardi is a Jew, as are several of his colleagues in the clinic. During act 1 two main strands of action emerge: A young woman is dying of the aftereffects of an abortion. As the result of an injection, she is filled with euphoria and happiness during her last hour; she even expects her lover to appear and to take her with him. When the Catholic priest arrives to hear her confession and to give her extreme unction, Bernhardi refuses him access to the patient so as not to destroy her euphoric happiness. She dies without having received the sacraments of the church. The secondary action concerns the headship of the department of dermatology, which has recently become vacant.

During the remainder of the play, these two strands of action become intertwined. Bernhardi’s refusal to allow the priest access to the dying girl has outraged members of the clerical-nationalist and anti-Semitic parties. The clinic’s board of trustees resigns, which entails the risk of severe financial setbacks for the institution. A member of the clerical-nationalist party is about to launch a parliamentary inquiry. Through an intermediary, Bernhardi is offered a deal: If he agrees to the appointment of a less qualified (but non-Jewish) candidate to the headship of the dermatology department, the parliamentary inquiry will not be held. Bernhardi refuses. The selection committee chooses the most competent candidate (who happens to be Jewish), with Bernhardi, as director, breaking a tie vote. A few days later the parliamentary inquiry is launched. In his reply, the Minister of Culture and Instruction, who is also a physician and supposedly Bernhardi’s friend, at first defends Bernhardi but toward the end of his speech suggests that the Minister of Justice should conduct an investigation to clear the air. Consequently, Bernhardi is charged with having interfered with religious practices. During the trial, a nurse and one doctor testify that Bernhardi had shoved the priest. Even though the priest himself contradicts this false testimony, Bernhardi is sentenced to two months in jail. He refuses to appeal or to ask for clemency, and he serves his full sentence. Meanwhile, both the liberal and the social-democratic presses portray him as a hero. On his release he is greeted with ovations and conducted to his home in triumph. On the afternoon of his release, Bernhardi confronts his “friend,” the Minister of Culture, ostensibly to get back his license to practice medicine, which he has lost as a consequence of his term in jail and which he needs in order to treat a prince who has summoned him. The ensuing conversation is interrupted by a telephone call from the Ministry of Justice: The nurse who had testified against Bernhardi has retracted her false testimony; a new trial will have to be held during which Bernhardi will presumably be completely rehabilitated. Bernhardi flatly refuses to cooperate with the “fraud” of a new trial; all he wants is his peace and quiet.

Throughout the play, Bernhardi’s “medical-humane inspiration” in respecting the dying girl’s final hour of happiness is mentioned again and again. In this way, considerable empathy for the humane, freethinking Professor Bernhardi is created, particularly in view of the fact that his adversaries condemn his ethical and philosophical stance in the same breath as they condemn his Jewishness. This is especially true of the speech by the member of parliament who launches the inquiry and who speaks of “personalities who, through origin, education, and qualities of character, are not in a position to understand the religious feelings of the ancestral Christian population.” During the last scene, the audience’s feeling of complete empathy for Bernhardi is attenuated by the fact that his rehabilitation will be achieved (even without his participation) through the confession and repentance of the simpleminded Catholic nurse Ludmilla and through the urgings of her father confessor. Thus, at the end of the play, a measure of justice is reestablished in the world around Bernhardi. It is characteristic of Schnitzler’s acute sense of justice that, writing in 1912, he was able to end his play on such a humane note.