"In the Beginning was the Garden": Arthur Schnitzler and the Politicization of Jewish Identities in Fin-de-Siecle Central Europe

Abstract

In the late 1860s, the Hungarian-born laryngologist Johann Schnitzler travelled with his family to the town of Nagykanizsa (Groß-Kanizsa), not far from Lake Balaton and the Croatian border, where he had grown up. His young son Arthur was unimpressed. Years later, he recalled only “a farmyard, a few hens, a wooden fence, the railroad nearby, trains passing, the whistle of a locomotive fading into the distance”. Despite the desolate image, the visit also prompted in the famous playwright a retrospective reflection about his ambivalent attitude towards this generational heritage: I don’t know when my ancestors settled in Gross-Kanizsa, or for that matter in Hungary, where they have wandered before that or settled down after having left their original home in Palestine two thousand years before. The only thing I am sure of is that neither a longing nor homesickness ever tempted me to return to Gross-Kanizsa; and if fate had chosen to direct me to this town in which my grandparents once lived and my father was born, I would have felt like a stranger, perhaps even an exile. Thus I am tempted to come to grips at this point with the curious view that a person, born in a certain country, raised and active there, is supposed to recognise as his homeland another country, not the one in which his parents and grandparents lived decades ago but the one his ancestors called their native land thousands of years before, and this not solely for political, sociological or economic reasons—which would bear discussion—but emotionally.1