Ghostly Letters: Legacies of Death Letters in Schnitzler's Short Stories

Abstract

This essay examines narratives in which Arthur Schnitzler explores the unconscious of Vienna's fin‐de‐siècle society through the leitmotif of the haunted letter. Examining five short stories written between 1880 and 1930, the essay argues that letters written by characters who anticipate their readership after their deaths reflect the uncanny paranoia and hysteria of modernity. Through an analysis of Schnitzler's narrative techniques, the essay investigates the author's psychological portrayal of modern society with the literary tool of the death letter, highlighting modernist instability and uncertainty, especially that of the bourgeois man. This essay argues that Schnitzler makes his critique of anxiety increasingly explicit over time in his published writings, showing one's social acceptance to be a catalyst for violence towards the self and others, while also continuing to problematize Viennese masculinity in his unpublished writings.