And even if you managed somehow to conduct yourself so that nothing showed, it was impossible to remain completely untouched; as for instance a person may not remain unconcerned whose skin has been anaesthetized but who has to watch, with his eyes open, how it is scratched by an unclean knife, even cut until the blood flows.

Schnitzler responded to the Jewish condition without affecting to provide a solution. His fame as a writer (he won the ‘Oscar’ of the Viennese theatre, the Grillparzer Prize, in 1908) immunized him from artistic frustration; it did not spare him vicious critical attacks. He was accused of being a Hungarian upstart or, worse, a corrupting outsider (his famous Reigen – later filmed as La Ronde and ‘improved’ recently by David Hare in The Blue Room – was banned as immoral for twenty-five years).

Medical familiarity with syphilis as a source of dementia punctuated levity with horror. A keen, not to say addictive, pursuer of sexual quarry, Schnitzler was not immune to squeamishness. Reluctance to take all his opportunities was a matter less of moral refinement than of clinical caution: his father had shown the adolescent Arthur lurid pictures of the effects of venereal infection. He mocks his own juvenile attempts to redeem fallen women:

While the pretty young tow-headed Venus reclined naked on the divan, I leaned against the window frame, still fully dressed in my boyishly cut suit, my straw hat and cane in my hands, and appealed to the conscience of my beauty, who was bored and amused at the same time, and had certainly expected better entertainment from the sixteen-year-old customer who was urging her to find a more decent and promising profession… I tried to emphasize what I had to say by reading some appropriate passages from a book I had brought along for the purpose… I left her with two gulden for which I had my mother to thank. She had given them to me after I had declared that I simply had to have the Gindely Outline of World History.

The hero of Dream Story is no youth, but he is similarly affected by the apparent innocence of a young prostitute. All his life, Schnitzler’s imagination dwelt on the habits and inhabitants of fin de siècle Vienna. His touch was light, and remorseless. He was certainly no more indulgent to Jews than to anyone else. One of his few full-length novels, Der Weg ins Freie, or The Road to the Open, was published in 1908 and dealt, with his usual scepticism, with the various answers to what was called the Jewish question. It was typical of his clinical egotism that he refused to be gulled by any panacea, including Zionism.

Schnitzler’s friend Theodor Herzl, his elder by two years, failed to achieve equal success as a writer, though he did become a fluent journalist. It is usually alleged that Herzl wrote his Zionist manifesto, Der Judenstaat, as a result of the endemic, and epidemic, anti-Semitism which he observed when he was in Paris, covering the Dreyfus trials for his Viennese newspaper. In fact, no less plausible reasons for the creation of a Jewish state were to be found, in abundance, at home.

Earlier, like many bright young Jews impatient of the ghetto mentality, the student Herzl had seen his future identity as closely linked with Germanism. He was a keen member of a Verbindung until the ‘Alemannic’ Association decided to ‘bounce’ its Jewish members. Only then, as Robert Wistrich remarks, in his Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph, was Herzl’s ‘allegiance to the semi-feudal values and German nationalism of the Austrian Burschenschaften… shaken to the roots’. He had previously enjoyed ‘the romantic ritual of the Teutonic student… the sporting of glamorous swords, coloured caps, and ribbons’. On the rebound, Herzl came to advocate a sort of Jewish Austria in Palestine. When he invited Schnitzler to imagine his plays being performed in Jerusalem, the reply was dismissively terse: ‘But in what language?’ Schnitzler belongs inextricably to mittel-Europa. He could not imagine himself, or his work, without them. ‘En Europe,’ E. M. Cioran was to say, ‘le bonheur finit à Vienne’ (‘Happiness ends at Vienna’). Does this mean that beyond Vienna there is no happiness or that in Vienna there is none? Cioran offers a typically ambiguous tribute to a city where the dyarchy of love and death shadowed the dual monarchy of the ageing Franz-Josef.

The writer of fiction is free to invest himself in all his characters, and in no single one of them. Arthur Schnitzler accepted, and maybe somewhat gloried in, being doubly alienated: as a Jew and a doctor, he was resigned to being marked off from the society he amused and adorned. Why then should he try to be as other men were? If the Jew was an object of suspicion, he could return the sour compliment by regarding Vienna with an unblinking eye and listening with an accurate ear. The unveiling of unacknowledged (and often unsavoury) motives was typical of Austro-Marxism, of logical positivism, of psychoanalysis and of Schnitzler, whom Freud saluted as his ‘alter ego’. Freud said that Schnitzler was an artist who had come by instinct and narcissistic intuition to conclusions about the primacy of the erotic which Freud himself claimed that he had discovered by the scientific observation of others.

The ‘hero’ of Traumnovelle, or Dream Story, is a doctor who, in obvious ways, resembles his author. He neither indulges nor spares himself in the trenchancy of the notes on his own case. Fridolin’s adventure is not, we may assume, a transcription of his author’s own adventures, or dreams (it is too shapely and too artful), but in his autobiography Schnitzler wrote that his writings were an intrinsic element of his existence: ‘even if the story relating to some of them may not belong to literary history, it certainly does belong in the story of my life’.

The tone and attitudes to be found in Dream Story are certainly true to the spirit both of Schnitzler’s personal life and of decadent Vienna.