“Der Mensch ist eine Bestie”: Anna Heeger, Maria Chlum, Maria Reinhard und Arthur Schnitzler by Rolf-Peter Lacher (review)

In his introduction, Rolf-Peter Lacher lets his readers know his book has a modest goal. It will not be about the “Wiener Moderne” and its “intellektuelles Program” (author’s quotation marks), nor will it deal with Schnitzler as a representative figure of the fin-de-siècle, or as a Jew, a German, a member of the bourgeoisie, or a doctor. His focus will be exclusively on the fate of three of the writer’s lovers—Anna Heeger, Maria Chlum, and Maria Reinhard. In this endeavor, however, Lacher is anything but modest. Putting himself forward as the women’s savior, he has produced nothing less than a tirade against the writer they once loved.

Lacher, the author of Die integumentale Methode in mittelhochdeutscher Epik (1988), began to take an interest in the lives of these women, when he believed he had unearthed the real cause of Maria Reinhard’s sudden death on March 18, 1899. At the time, she had been in a liaison with Schnitzler for four years. According to Lacher, Reinhard did not die from an infection caused by a burst appendix; rather, it was the result of a botched abortion. He makes his case by first inferring that two comments in Schnitzler’s diary connote a pregnancy. For February 2, 1889, the entry reads, “Vm. bei Mz Rh.—Wieder neuen Sorgen,” and, ten days later, “Abd. mit Mz. Rh., … Sie war wieder verstimmt, weil ich das Heir. auf die lange Bank schiebe. Ich ärgerte mich.” As evidence for the abortion, he cites the presence of Schnitzler’s younger brother at Maria’s sickbed. Since Julius was a surgeon as well as an expert on the treatment of appendicitis, Lacher asks why he had not arranged for Maria to go to a hospital. In his eyes, it could only have been to avoid public acknowledgment of the real cause of death.

Combing through Schnitzler’s diaries, Lacher draws on that same combination of inference, innuendo, and circumstantial evidence to describe the writer’s nefarious role in the life of each of these women—as well as their demise. He claims that the poverty in which Anna Heeger’s life ended in 1903 was the result of Schnitzler’s rejection of her thirteen years before. He also insinuates that Schnitzler could have warned Maria Chlum about the lover from whom she contracted syphilis in 1900. The harsh cure for the disease left her an invalid until she took her own life in 1925. Throughout, Lacher presents Schnitzler as a cold observer who deliberately manipulated his lovers for the sake of his art and who had little concern for their humanity.

The uncensored publication of Schnitzler’s diary forty years after his death makes the most personal details of his life available to all comers. It is no news that he had fraught relationships with all three of the women Lacher focuses on. In fact, he would have been the last to deny it. The quotation Lacher used for the title of his book, “Der Mensch ist eine Bestie,” is Schnitzler’s own assessment of his behavior toward Anna Heeger as recorded in his diary on December 24, 1889. But what Lacher leaves out entirely in his lengthy (and often salacious) summaries of the diary entries is the record that Schnitzler kept of his own emotional turmoil in these relationships. The unfeeling automaton Lacher presents is his own creation. A far more balanced approach to the writer’s stormy affairs can be found in Ulrich Weinzierl’s Arthur Schnitzler: Lieben Traumen Sterben (1994).

There are few references to Schnitzler’s work in Lacher’s 250 pages. When they occur, they are used to support the litany of bad behavior. But if Schnitzler, the writer, is a negligible quantity, what is the value of ferreting out all of the details of his erotomania? Lacher explains what inspired his approach at the...