Arthur Schnitzler

Arthur Schnitzler was a doctor who wrote about sex and death with clinical exactness and was stripped of his army rank for it. He was born to a prominent Jewish medical family in Vienna, qualified in medicine, worked in psychiatry and laryngology, and kept practising for years while writing. Freud wrote to him that he had avoided him out of a kind of fear of meeting his double, since Schnitzler had reached by intuition what Freud had reached by laborious work. Reigen, written in 1897, is ten scenes of sexual encounter in a chain from prostitute to soldier to maid up through the classes and back down; he circulated it privately for years, and its 1921 Berlin and Vienna performances produced riots, a blasphemy trial and antisemitic street protests. Lieutenant Gustl in 1900 is one of the first works in German written entirely as interior monologue, and its portrait of a stupid officer's honour code cost Schnitzler his reserve commission. Traumnovelle became Kubrick's last film. His diaries run to eight thousand pages and record everything, including a numbered tally of his orgasms. Reigen was filmed by Max Ophuls as La Ronde in 1950 and the play was withdrawn by Schnitzler himself from German-language performance for the rest of his life after the 1921 riots. Fraulein Else is a second interior monologue, spoken by a young woman asked to sell herself to save her father. His son Heinrich took the diaries and papers to America and later to Cambridge, where a scholar had them microfilmed just before the Nazis could seize the Vienna house. His daughter Lili killed herself at eighteen. The Nazis burned his books in 1933.

• Lived: 1862 CE – 1931 CE
• Nationality: Austrian
• Roles: writer