Phil 's Library tagged literature →  View Popular

Hugo von Hofmannsthal was born in Vienna on February 1, 1874. He was the only child of Dr. jur. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, a wealthy bank director, and his wife Anna. His family was originally Jewish but had converted to Catholicism many years before.

From an early age, Hofmannsthal showed himself to be an exceptionally talented child, both as an avid reader as well as a writer of poetry and plays. He entered the literary scene at age 16 through the publication of his first poems and essays under the pseudonym of Loris. His father introduced him to the circle of writers called Jung Wien at Café Griensteidl where Hofmannsthal became acquainted with Hermann Bahr, Arthur Schnitzler, and Stefan George. With the latter Hofmannsthal shared a fifteen-year-long friendship. George was both a father and a friend to Hofmannsthal and published many of Hofmannsthal’s poems in his journal, Blätter für die Kunst until, years later, they parted and went separate ways. 

Hugo von Hofmannsthal (February 1, 1874 – July 15, 1929), was an Austrian novelist, librettist, poet, dramatist, narrator, and essayist.

Hofmannsthal was born in Vienna, the son of an upper-class Austrian mother and an Austrian-Italian bank manager. His great-grandfather, to whom his family owed the noble title "von Hofmannsthal," was a Jewish merchant ennobled by the Austrian emperor. He began to write poems and plays from an early age. He met the German poet Stefan George at the age of seventeen and had several poems published in George's journal, Blätter für die Kunst. He studied law and later philology in Vienna but decided to devote himself to writing upon graduating in 1901. Along with Peter Altenberg and Arthur Schnitzler, he was a member of the avant garde group Young Vienna (Junges Wien). Hofmannsthal met the composer Richard Strauss, and wrote libretti for several of his operas, including Elektra (1909), Der Rosenkavalier (1911), Ariadne auf Naxos (1913, rev. 1916), Die Frau ohne Schatten (1919), Die Ägyptische Helena (1927), and Arabella (1933).

The vagaries of Arthur Schnitzler’s reputation in the English-speaking world have been curious. Often praised but little read, best known for filmed versions of his work, from Max Ophuls’s marvelous “La Ronde” (1950) to Stanley Kubrick’s dreadful “Eyes Wide Shut” (1999), Dr. Schnitzler (1862-1931) gave up the practice of medicine early on, but kept his sharp, unsparing clinical eye. Popular mythology likes to see Vienna before and after the turn of the last century as a frothy operetta, full of elegance, charm and decadent sex. But another major Austrian Jewish writer, Hermann Broch (d. 1951), more pointedly described the period as a “values vacuum.” If the Viennese obsessively pursued their pleasures, they also obsessively hastened their own destruction through alcoholism, venereal disease, duels and suicide. And in this death-haunted world of dazzling exteriors and dismal secrets, Schnitzler really knew his way around.

Desire and Delusion presents three long stories, “Flight into Darkness” (1931), “Dying” (1895) and “Fräulein Else” (1926)

However, Schnitzler's dominant Jewish theme is not anti-Semitism from Gentiles. It is about the terrible conflicts within the Jewish community over Hertzl's notion of a Palestinian homeland and the question of assimilation. The bulk of Schnitzler's characters are assimilationists, converted and not converted, or Jews in secret while publicly Catholic. They fight bitterly among themselves, the assimilationists believing the publicly practicing Jews are fools and the cause of much anti-Semitism. The "real" Jews, on the other hand, resent the assimilationists as cowards and traitors if not out-right heretics.

The irony is, of course, as Schnitzler could not fully have foreseen, the issue was not assimilation or orthodoxy. In the world of just one generation later, Jews of every stripe were seen as cut of one cloth -- evil capitalists, the cause of all of Austria's problems. That this claim was absurdly applied equally to the underclass Jews only compounds the foolishness of it, though the underclass Jews were attacked in their own right as undercutting traditional crafts and artisans by their hawking of manufactured goods.

He well deserves his reputation as an astute observer and recorder of the nature of life in fin-de-siecle Vienna. The Road to the Open is not only no exception, but is perhaps one of the best examples of how he earned that reputation.

The main story-line is quite simple, even thin, particularly from our perspective a hundred years later. George von Wergenthin, a very young baron, has an affair with a woman not of his class. This was a common, routine, fairly well accepted and expected practice. She becomes pregnant and this long story works out the details of how George and Anna Rosner's lives play out. The novel is hardly about their lives; rather it is a revealing portrait of upper class Vienna at the turn of the century.