Arthur Schnitzler – digitally published ‘Flucht in die Finsternis’

The novella „Fluch in die Finsternis” (1931), published shortly before the author's death, focuses on the psychological portrait of a character who tries in vain to prevent his own descent into madness, and on the question, developed through the example of his failure, of where exactly the responsibility for one's own actions ends and the transition from “normality” to mental illness begins.

The richly documented estate material of the novella, which was written over a period of around 27 years, comprises more than 30 documents and almost 1,000 pages. The reconstruction of the text's genesis, which has now been worked out in detail for the first time as part of the Wuppertal edition, clearly shows how much the author struggled with his work. A meandering movement through different motifs and subjects as well as various character and plot constellations becomes apparent. It also shows that the novella was essentially completed many years before its publication and is therefore wrongly considered one of Schnitzler's “late works”.

Some of the surviving manuscripts of Flight into Darkness are unprecedented in their complexity, even for Schnitzler, an author who often worked on his texts for decades. For their documentation, new functionalities were implemented specifically for this edition, for example for the purpose of displaying inserted pages and pages reused in different places in the text. An interactive timeline, enriched with unpublished sources on the history of the work's creation, provides further information on the various phases of Schnitzler's work on his novel. A “reading text”, based on the book's first edition and also showing printing variants, provides a reliable and quotable text of the novella, while a factual commentary offers information for a better understanding of it.

A new feature of the entire digital edition is the direct link to the digital edition of his diaries, which has been in development for several years at the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage in Vienna (https://schnitzler-tagebuch.acdh.oeaw.ac.at) and has become an indispensable tool for Schnitzler research.

More background information on the research project

The research project Arthur Schnitzler Digital: Digital Critical Edition (Works from 1905 to 1931) is being carried out by researchers at the University of Wuppertal, the University of Cambridge and University College London in cooperation with Cambridge University Library, the German Literature Archive in Marbach, the Arthur Schnitzler Archive in Freiburg and the Trier Centre for Digital Humanities. The German sub-project, founded in early 2012 and funded as a research project by the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences and Arts as part of the Academies' Programme, is working on works from 1914 onwards.