Arthur Schnitzler's The Last Letter of a Litterateur: the Artist as Destroyer

Austrian, German, and Swiss writers of the period between 1890 and 1960 express in their treatment of the artist as a literary character a repeated complaint in work after work: the artist hero cannot feel. If he could overcome his emotional sterility, if he could only love, so their plaint and perplexity goes, he would create better works and feel fulfilled. The reasons for his plight and the degree of insight into it that he shows vary, and it is this variation which gives dignity, weight, and interest to the problem. The artist's inability to feel makes his work sterile, without passion, form without life, “cool, smooth, and insolent.”1 The artist who suffers from “the impotence of the heart”2 recurs as a serious or comic figure throughout the works of Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Musil, Kafka, Werfel, minor and major Expressionists, and even such post WW II authors as Günter Grass and Max Frisch.

At the core of all “impotence of the heart” treatments there is a fantasy of an oedipal drama whose dramatis personae easily can be separated from their various disguises. The youthful artist protagonist is a son figure with a mission to