Die Frau des Weisen: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe by Arthur Schnitzler (review)

The current president of the Arthur Schnitzler Gesellschaft, Konstanze Fliedl, serves as editor of the society’s project to publish historical critical editions of Schnitzler’s works. The task involves tracing the genesis of a work of literature by tracking chronologically each manifestation of the work in order to bring to light the creative process, both to better understand the work at hand and to shed light on the author’s approach to his craft. Though this might be an obvious task for most literary scholars, I had little experience with this methodology. Although I have long considered it to be a laudable endeavor to provide the most accurate text possible, I had little interest in the meticulous examination of manuscripts and text variants. That Schnitzler’s printed works contain significant errors and are in dire need of historical critical editions is convincingly demonstrated on the society’s website with ample examples of textual variants and transcription errors.

In 2011 the first in the series, Leutnant Gustl, appeared in print; Die Frau des Weisen is the sixth edition to appear and has been followed by Die Toten Schweigen and Ein Abschied. This volume draws almost exclusively from the Schnitzler archive at Cambridge University Library and provides the facsimiles of the early sketches and two later manuscripts, which they term HA1 and HA2. These two manuscripts comprise the majority of this volume. Opposite each page of the facsimiles is a detailed transcription and notation system that accurately mirrors the structure of the text, including strikeouts and margin notes. Schnitzler’s handwriting is difficult to decipher at best, but given his editorial marks, the variety of writing materials, and cross-outs of entire lines, these manuscripts are, for the uninitiated, almost illegible. The manuscripts are followed by the printed version, which first appeared in 1897 as a series in the weekly journal Die Zeit and is essentially the version with which most of us are familiar.

As an appendix, the editors included an undated outline of a possible drama titled Der Weise, which evidence indicates that it predates the conception of a prose version. While the sketch appeared in a posthumous collection of material, the appendix is based on a typed version found in Schnitzler’s papers in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach.

The editors point to the origin of Die Frau des Weisen in the early 1890s in the form of one of the first brief sketches, dated 1894. Using Schnitzler’s Tagebuch and indications found in unpublished letters, they identify three distinct periods of its composition, beginning with June through July of 1895 with a completed version of his “Historiette.” Unsatisfied with the result, Schnitzler reworks the material from September to October, but after reading what is speculated to be HA1 aloud to Marie Reinhard at the end of October, he observed that it was unsuccessful. The second period of composition took place in December of that year, resulting in the version assumed to be HA2. The third period began in September 1896 and ended at the end of that year with the story in Hermann Bahr’s hands, in which form it was printed in Die Zeit.

The scholarship behind the work is impressive and an indication of the magnitude of the contribution this project will bring to Schnitzler scholarship. As one who had not been familiar with the historical-critical texts, I experienced something akin to a revelation as I read the two previous manuscripts that led to the eventual work with which I was familiar. Having at hand the facsimile pages and an accessible and dependable transcription, I could follow the author’s struggle with the material throughout the process, as evidenced by the bold slashes rejecting words, lines, and even full pages. It was fascinating to follow the metamorphosis of sentences and phrases from the merely acceptable to the aesthetically crafted, as can be seen in this brief example from HA1:

Und...