Crisis of identity of German Jews in fin-de-siecle Vienna: Operas and plays by Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler, Zemlinsky, and Schreker

The objective of my dissertation is to address the implications of politically marginalized. identity through the lens of allegory inspired by Walter Benjamin. Against the historical setting of Vienna from the decline of liberalism in the 1880s to the immediate aftermath of the WWI, I attempt a historical and theoretical interpretation of the crisis of identity of German Jews, focusing on the operas and plays of four German artists of Jewish descent.The introduction maps out the general turn from politics to psyche with the upsurge of political anti-Semitism, and deconstructs the popular "myth of Habsburg" by examining the rising populism and edmic tension. Hofmannsthal tried to overcome his poetic 'pre-existence' by recasting the shadow of Enlightenment for entering into the 'Soziale.' His utopia of "conservative revolution," of restoring polis based on oikos, is seen in his sanctification of motherhood and the sacrifice of women in the opera, grounded on the reduction of difference into the same, by means of cultural and biological reproduction. Schnitzler's postmodern skepticism and nihilism guide the post-liberal generation towards interior liberation through "the lonely way" of eros or art. Flaneur and melancholic are examined for its gender inhibition, while the quotidian practices illuminate the undercurrents of Eros and Thanatos. Schnitzler's view of Nietszchean post-histoire is embodied in the collapse of the Freudian family romance. Hierarchy gives way to anarchy as the ethical line is ruptured. The haunting return of the repressed in the family turns the home into the space of the uncanny, the secret yet familiar. Both Zemlinsky and Schreker based their post-Wagnerian late romantic operas on Oscar Wilde's fairy tale and anatomized the stigmatized body of the outsider. Zemlinsky's opera is read both as an autobiographical metaphor of his aborted affair with Alma Mahler and as an allegory of the emasculated, hysterical identity of the Jewish male. The dwarf's shock of self recognition as the abject other shows how the invisible panoptic gaze of authority controls the interpellation, formation and deformation of identity. Schreker's opera reflects the dilemma of Jewish assimilation as discussed from Bataille's theory of exchange. The Apollonian/Dionysian duality, mirrored by the garden and the cave, is seen from Bakhtin's theory of the grotesque and carnivalesque.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, Santa Barbara, 1999.School code: 0035