Arthur Schnitzler – digitally published ‘Traumnovelle’

The novella focuses on the story of a married couple, Fridolin and Albertine, who reveal their longing for erotic adventures with other partners to each other for the first time, then threaten to lose each other, but ultimately find their way back to each other as a result of a mutual process of realisation and seem to be “dreamlessly close” to each other. Schnitzler completed his conciliatory tale in 1925 after a lengthy writing process closely interwoven with his own life story and the breakdown of his own marriage.

The fascinating way in which his story of (un)faithfulness, love and jealousy took shape over the course of around forty years, with parts of the plot appearing in parallel in other works by the author and Tales from The Thousand and One Nights (ein Märchen aus Tausendundeine Nacht) gaining in significance, can now be traced in detail with the help of the first complete edition of the material, comprising almost four hundred pages. The edition also presents the draft of a film script, initially written by hand and then expanded into a 29-page typescript, which Schnitzler began at the end of 1930, i.e. after his novella was printed, at the request of director G. W. Pabst. The planned film adaptation did not come to pass during Schnitzler's lifetime – but his script is also considered one of the sources for Kubrick's congenial film adaptation of the masterpiece, completed almost seventy years later.

Access the digital edition and the ’Traumnovelle’ here: Arthur Schnitzler digital

More background information on the research project

The research project Arthur Schnitzler Digital: Digital Historical-Critical Edition (Works 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 Marbach, the Arthur Schnitzler Archive 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.

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Marylen Reschop
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Contact persons for this topic

Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Lukas
Faculty of Humanities and Cultural Studies
E-Mail wlukas[at]uni-wuppertal.de 

Prof. Dr. Michael Scheffel     
Faculty of Humanities and Cultural Studies
E-Mail scheffel[at]uni-wuppertal.de