The author disavowed his interviews with the press
“DAS ZEITLOSE IST VON KÜRZESTER DAUER”
Interviews, Meinungen und Proteste 1891–1931
ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
Edited by Martin Anton Müller Two volumes, 754pp. Wallstein. €48.
“I NEVER GIVE INTERVIEWS.” Such was the Austrian playwright Arthur Schnitzler’s response in 1923 to James Lincoln Benvenisti, an American-born journalist who arrived unannounced on the doorstep of his Viennese villa to ask for his views on the “Jewish question”. By contrast, he seems to have welcomed a visit in 1915 from Herman Bernstein of the New York Sun, conversing with him, as Schnitzler’s diary reveals, “about general political matters, war and peace in the broadest sense; about the future of the Jews, the dangers and senselessness of orthodoxy, Zionism etc.” Yet the article, published in 1916 not in the widely circulated daily Sun, but in the more exclusive monthly Vanity Fair, contains no trace of this back-and-forth. Schnitzler figures in his own words only in the final sentence, where his thoughts about the “horrors of the European catastrophe” and his “optimistic” belief in the “universal peace movement” are paraphrased rather than quoted. Reluctantly, intermittently and almost always with regrets, between 1897 and 1931 Schnitzler gave – or gave into – more than eighty interviews and “conversations”.
Collected in the first volume of this two-volume set of “Interviews, Opinions and Protests”, superbly edited by Martin Anton Müller, the interviews are highly unstable texts, often entertaining to read, but disconcertingly heterogeneous in format and frequently cavalier in matters of attribution and fact. They even prove resistant to an accurate count. The seasoned Hungarian reporter Jób Paál, for example, extracted three articles – one in German for the Viennese daily Neues Wiener Journal that was later incorporated into two longer pieces published in his native language – from a single, apparently cordial exchange in the mountain resort hotel where Schnitzler and he were staying in the summer of 1931. David Ewen, another American writing, like Benvenisti, for Jewish journals such as the American Hebrew and B’nai B’rith Magazine, squeezed four, partially overlapping articles out of one visit on August 15, 1930.
Textual indeterminacy often matches the numerical ambiguity. The first of Ewen’s articles sported the loaded title “Anti-semitism, a Healthy Influence”, a phrase parsed in the text in increasingly problematic formulations that would eventually compel Schnitzler to disavow its content entirely. The article’s appearance in German translation, as “What Is Good About Antisemitism”, in the Neue Jüdische Monatsschau in Berlin – and, in unauthorized, shortened form, as “Antisemitism
