Race, Sex, and Character — Arthur Schnitzler: Fräulein Else (1924)

Acknowledged as a peerless chronicler of Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century, Arthur Schnitzler unwrapped the social and psychological realities of the society that nurtured both Freud and Hitler. It is also often noted that Schnitzler's works written after 1918 rarely reflect life in the postimperial era. Instead, despite their diminishing relevance to the troubled new realities of the First Republic, Schnitzler continued to evoke the pre-war days until the end of his working life. The monologue novella Fräulein Else, published in 1924 but set in 1896, therefore seems typical of an author apparently working in a time warp. As W. E. Yates notes, true to his lifelong apolitical habits, Schnitzler did not react to external crisis by publicly confronting it; rather he reworked old material or turned inward.

Although Schnitzler resisted suggestions that his work was autobiographical and “resented all written references to his personal life,” the publication of his diaries and letters has revealed evidence of the real life impetus for many of his works, including Fräulein Else. In 1917, for instance, he wrote at some length about Stephi Bachrach, a Jewish military nurse whose suicide by morphine and veronal is reminiscent of the fate of the fictional Else. Bachrach's father had already committed suicide in 1912 after suffering financial ruin, a fate that threatens Else's father in the novella.