Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal, and the Austrian Theatre

Arthur Schnitzler and Hugo von Hofmannsthal were the principal dramatists of Vienna during the period between the intellectual upheaval at the turn of the 20th century and the political upheaval of World War I. In this book W.E. Yates explores the connections, similarities and contrasts between the personalities and theatrical works of these men, showing how their different reactions to events and the critical reception of their plays shed light on Austria's shifting cultural and intellectual climate. Yates describes the two dramatists and their uneasy friendship - the creative but conservative Hofmannsthal, whose work reflected the seeds of political developments to come, and the ironically objective Schnitzler, dogged by controversy and anti-Semitism (whose hostile reception from the press is documented in his own collection of some 23,000 press clippings). Analysis of key plays is organized around major issues of the time - "the Jewish question", sexual morality and World War I and its aftermath - showing the playwrights' different treatments of these subjects. Yates explains, for example, that Schnitzler was anti-militarist throughout the war, but that Hofmannstal's post-war involvement with the Salzburg Festival - with its connections to pan-German sentiment - exemplifies his conception of the role of the theatre in ideological myth-making. In the conclusion of the book, Yates surveys the fate of the two dramatists' reputations and works in the 1930s and explores how the disintegration of the Habsburg monarchy led to the subversion of cultural and political standards under Fascism.