When Arthur Schnitzler published his novella Fräulein Else in 1924, it quickly attracted scrutiny from the pharmaceutical industry. As a memo discovered in the corporate archives of the pharmaceutical giant Bayer reveals, the research officers at the company sensed that the text by the Austrian author and physician had implications for their own core business of innovating and selling drugs.Footnote 1 This is so because Fräulein Else mobilizes Veronal, the world’s most popular soporific well into the twentieth century, to put the novella’s protagonist into a somnolent state at the edges of consciousness: Veronal connects pharmaceutical and literary experiments. The article at hand demonstrates that the drug is central to grasping the novella’s formal work, contemporary gender politics, and corporate discursive strategies.

In literary history, Fräulein Else features as a modernist classic for two reasons: for its dialogue with Sigmund Freud who famously called Schnitzler his »doppelgänger«Footnote 2 and for »perfecting«Footnote 3 the interior monologue, a narrative technique which relates thoughts, feelings, and sense perceptions of characters without marked auctorial remediation.Footnote 4 This technique creates the impression that one can witness all mental events in Else’s consciousness, including the Veronal poisoning at the end of the novella. Sweeping studies have examined Fräulein Else’s narrational strategies,Footnote 5 aspects of gender and sexuality,Footnote 6 and the text’s historical contexts,Footnote 7 but it has never been attempted to read the novella with a focus on Veronal. In which ways does Schnitzler – a physician with the reputation of writing literary case studies that are »›correct‹ from a clinical point of view«Footnote 8 – integrate the medical and pharmacological knowledge of his time? How does Schnitzler’s use of Veronal inflect the interior monologue and (female) agency in the text? To what extent does Fräulein Else present an intervention into public health debates?

Schnitzler’s Fräulein Else includes a critical rewriting of contemporary discussions about Veronal: the text negotiates a public health crisis caused by a »white market drug,«Footnote 9 a market that supplied medically and legally approved substances which develop their own agency. Agency is here understood in terms of Thomas de Quincey’s definition given in his quintessential drug narrative: »Not the opium-eater, but the opium is the true hero of the tale; and the legitimate centre on which the interest revolves. The object was to display the marvellous agency of opium.«Footnote 10Mutatis mutandis, this article centers on Veronal and seeks to shed light on its cultural, medical, and literary agency in Schnitzler’s work.

This approach requires both continuing and disrupting existing scholarship. It continues a longstanding scholarly project which demonstrates that the literary and medical writings of the author-physician are inextricably intertwined.Footnote 11 Yet it also disrupts existing scholarship which has paid too little attention to the role of medicinal drugs in Schnitzler’s oeuvre, although they feature frequently in his writings.Footnote 12 Veronal in Fräulein Else, for example, has been mainly considered a suicide prop; in particular, it has elicited speculation as to whether the ingested dose of Veronal suffices to kill the protagonist.Footnote 13 But if one approaches Fräulein Else with a main focus on the medicinal drug, it becomes evident that Veronal plays a foundational role for the text (and the culture from which it emerged), and that Schnitzler’s engagement with issues of public health was by no means limited to questions of sexual and social hygieneFootnote 14 – it also reaches into the social scaling of pharmacology.

Read alongside Schnitzler’s medical writings, Fräulein Else reveals that the author-physician considers medicinal substances an attempt to provide a »techno-fix« that, on a societal level, cannot address the deeper social issues that have given rise to many diseases in the first place; instead of providing a cure, drugs generate new problems such as addiction or accidents. The large-scale distribution of pharmacological substances effectively covers up symptoms, causes, and social side effects by pushing them into the latency of individual suffering. To unmask these systematic shrouding mechanisms, Schnitzler does not turn to psychoanalysis, but to literature. The interior monologue of Fräulein Else serves to render visible the problems associated with Veronal in their social situatedness. The novella therefore reads like a case study that stages them within the framework of a dramatic conflict.

All in all, this approach nuances existing studies: it does in no way encourage or imply a reductive reading that promotes a monocausal pharmacological interpretation of the novella. Veronal is one of many elements in the repertoire of Schnitzler’s interior monologue. Still, a sustained focus on the pharmacological dimension of Schnitzler’s Fräulein Else reveals that the text comprises a literary intervention into public health policy. The article at hand unfolds this facet of the text in five steps. Its first and second section provide historical context and situate Schnitzler’s novella vis-à-vis newspaper reports about Veronal suicides. The third section sketches the public health theory of the author-physician and situates Fräulein Else within other narratives about drug accidents in his work. The fourth and fifth sections weave all strands together and bring to bear these insights on a close reading of the finale of the novella, which focuses especially on Veronal’s literary agency.

I.

Bayer’s case officers immediately sensed the significance of Veronal in Fräulein Else. The soporific holds the dramatic structure of the plot together as the novella systematically builds up to a lethal overdose of the drug: Set in pre-war Austria, Else, the 19-year-old daughter of a debt-ridden Jewish lawyer from Vienna’s upper-class circles, is tasked with fending off the imminent collapse of her family’s social and economic capital while she sojourns in the Dolomites. Within a few hours, she must secure a significant loan from the wealthy acquaintance Dorsday. Yet the aging beau does not play along: in exchange for the loan, he solicits a strip show. Feeling betrayed and trafficked by her family, Else decides to provoke an éclat: she disrobes in public, falls into a trance, and commits suicide with an overdose of Veronal.

Schnitzler’s narrative has garnered much scholarly attention, which has shed light on a wealth of different aspects. The most incisive readings, however, typically center on Else’s disrobement in the music room. This focus has largely eclipsed the text’s relation to the drug culture of the early twentieth century, when the consumption of soporifics such as Veronal registered as a normal »expression of popular culture and the social climate.«Footnote 15 In the novella, the drug is present almost from the outset. Its first appearance is closely connected to the nervous wait for the announced letter from Else’s mother that sets the plot into motion (14);Footnote 16 it furthermore serves as a quotidian complement to Else’s desire to try »hashish« with a potential lover (14);Footnote 17 it counters the onset of her menstrual pain (14);Footnote 18 it is called upon as a tranquillizer (35); and Else habitually uses it as a soporific (96-97). Such practices and alleged off-label usages were not unusual. An advertisement brochure preserved in the corporate archives of the pharmaceutical giant Bayer promotes precisely such a use of sedative drugs as a hallmark of modernity:

In der heutigen, unruhig hastenden Zeit, bei der erhöhten Inanspruchnahme aller geistigen und körperlichen Fähigkeiten tritt an den Arzt häufiger die Notwendigkeit heran, seinen Patienten, gleich welcher sozialen Stellung, ein Beruhigungs- oder Schlafmittel zu verordnen. So vielseitig auch die Ursachen dafür sein mögen, von der einfachen Agrypnie und Unruhe bis zu den schwersten Erregungszuständen, so vielgestaltig, so individualisierend muß auch die Behandlung sein.Footnote 19

The copy in the brochure aimed at physicians insinuates that life under the conditions of modernity deregulates a traditional economy of rest and excitement. Physicians were to attend to the resulting psychophysical tensions with tranquillizers and soporifics. In principle, this is no news – knowledge of sleep-inducing tinctures that contained extracts from the opium poppy or the mandrake goes back to antiquity. With the rise of the pharmaceutical industry in the nineteenth century, however, the magic of sleep-inducing products became a mass-market product and could be had for the price of a meal or less.Footnote 20 Yet Bayer suggests that these remedies could enter the physician-patient-relationship as tools of individualization. Tailor-made assemblages of drugs supply the patients, regardless of their social standing, with a sense of incommensurability; they integrate the symptoms into their subjecthood. From this perspective, sedatives and soporifics serve to restore not only social functionality, but also emerge as a »technology of the self.«Footnote 21 In contrast to classic technologies of the self, such as the regimes of hygiene and dietetics that demand to reorganize one’s life so that the symptoms disappear with their causes, soporifics provide an »enhancement in our capacities to adjust and readjust our somatic existence according to the exigencies of the life to which we aspire.«Footnote 22 This is the constellation in which Veronal must be seen.

Veronal constituted the first barbiturate in use as a sedative and soporific. Invented by the Nobel prize-winning chemist Emil Fischer and the acclaimed clinician Josef von Mering,Footnote 23 the drug was introduced in collaboration with the pharmaceutical giants Bayer and Merck in 1903 and withdrawn from the market in the mid-1950s. Veronal quickly rose to a blockbuster drug on a global scale and »transformed«Footnote 24 the market for sleep medication. This massive clinical and commercial success was due to a confluence of several factors, but it cannot be overstated that on top of the significant pharmacological innovation the narrative packing of the barbiturate played a decisive role for Veronal’s success. This is already apparent in the name of the drug. For instance, it was fabled that the inventors had tested the substance during train travel to Switzerland and only woke up when they arrived at Verona, which then gave its name to the drug. Other interpretations see the name of the soporific as a reference to the sleeping potion used by the lovers of Verona – Romeo and Juliet – as this drug puts Juliet in a very deep sleep.Footnote 25 These well-crafted stories are as important to the success of Veronal as the chemistry itself. As Walter Benjamin put it: »Heute nisten in den Firmennamen die Phantasien, welche man ehemals im Sprachschatz der ›poetischen‹ Vokabeln sich thesauriert dachte.«Footnote 26 A magical aura surrounded the phrase ›Veronal‹, an aura that evoked the narrative of the ideal sleep medication and attached it to the soporific, so that it not only had a chemical but also a suggestive effect.Footnote 27

Bayer’s advertisement strategy further strengthened this suggestive effect. In brochures sent to physicians, Veronal’s manufacturers aggressively claimed to do away with the experiential difference between ›natural‹ and ›artificial‹ sleep that dogged existing sleep medication – then as now, falling asleep on soporifics feels different from simply dozing off, but in the early-twentieth century the phenomenological experience strongly resembled the forced blackout of anesthesia and narcosis with which soporifics shared a developmental history.Footnote 28 Veronal, by contrast, promised that one would awake »frisch und ohne das Gefühl einer Benommenheit,« while it induced »einen vollkommen ruhigen, traumlosen, dem physiologischen Schlaf gleichenden, mehrstündigen Schlaf.«Footnote 29 In an age in which insomnia had come to count as »die häufigste Klage, die dem praktischen Arzt begegnet,«Footnote 30 this promise proved extremely lucrative: Veronal’s manufacturers derived up to 30% of their revenue from the drug.Footnote 31

These sale figures were only possible because of extremely lax legal regulations. In the early twentieth century, the German government did not commonly interfere with the introduction of new soporifics: a consensus existed among legislators that »new drugs could […] basically be put to the test in the medical offices of general practitioners«.Footnote 32 If the industry narrative of Veronal as a quasi-ideal soporific without side-effects dominated scientific and professional communication, a different take on this story began to form in the back pages of local newspapers. The massive reach of the soporific soon triggered media events that did not fit the carefully curated grand narrative of the pharmaceutical industry. Local newspapers started to run infrequent news stories about suicides, overdoses, and off-label use, faits divers that were only connected by a single feature: Veronal.

This unsupervised social experiment affected especially women.Footnote 33 Their bodies typically required a different dosage than the one suggested on the package, which was calculated with male bodies in mind. The female physique also responded differently to accumulated residues of the soporific in the body,Footnote 34 a problem further acerbated in cases of Veronal addiction or simply drug use on successive days, as the long half-life of the drug could increase the effective dose massively. It thus hardly comes as a surprise that even contemporary statistics show that women suffered significantly more often from allegedly accidental overdoses than men.Footnote 35 Still, it took German legislators more than five years until Veronal moved from an over the counter-drug to the list of extra-potent drugs such as cocaine. But even when it got designated as »poison,« this classification only meant that one technically required a prescription to buy it.Footnote 36 Then as now, many physicians write out prescriptions quickly.Footnote 37 In other words, Veronal constituted a typical white market drug – a market for a drug which could not be purchased on the black market, because its distribution was perfectly legal.Footnote 38 This is the situation into which Schnitzler’s Fräulein Else intervenes.

When an internal press informant breaks the news that the »prominent author and Viennese physician Dr. Arthur Schnitzler« published a story that culminates into a »›Veronal poisoning‹« (BAL: V),Footnote 39 the company responds with horror. Alarmed that a wide circulation of Schnitzler’s Fräulein Else could undermine the »trust« (BAL: V) in their product, Bayer decides to lobby the author to persuade him

von dieser Anti-Propaganda für unser Präparat doch in Zukunft lieber abzusehen und sich für seine Helden oder Heldinnen, die er aus diesem oder jenem Grunde in ein besseres Jenseits befördern will, eine andere Todesart auszusuchen und den Hinweis auf Veronal in einer vielleicht nötig werdenden zweiten Auflage unbedingt zu streichen (BAL: V).

We do not know whether an emissary from Bayer ever knocked on Schnitzler’s door. To be sure, the author’s subsequent Traumnovelle (1925–26), which also includes a poisoning, drops any references to specific brands.Footnote 40 Nevertheless, Veronal continues to feature in all further reprints of Fräulein Else and even showed up in a close-up shot when the novella was turned into a silent film a few years later.Footnote 41 Veronal’s significance is highlighted further by the fact that its appearance constitutes an anachronism – in 1896, when Fräulein Else supposedly takes place,Footnote 42 the drug was not yet available. Given that Schnitzler knew his medical history and deliberately set his novella Sterben (1894) at moment before a particular therapy was invented that would have impacted the plot, this anachronism cannot be overstated. If Schnitzler has Else consume a drug which was not available at the time, he deliberately blends the interwar period with the prewar Habsburg Empire.Footnote 43 But what makes the specific brand name so fundamental to Fräulein Else? To what extent does the portrayal of Veronal also include a portrayal of nineteenth-century drugs such as morphine? As we will see, the brand name Veronal is indispensable to the novel, because it links in with newspaper reports about Veronal suicides, but it also updates the theory of public health crises developed in Schnitzler’s earlier medical writings, which are indeed based on morphine.

II.

Paradoxically, the nexus between Schnitzler’s novella and contemporary newspaper reports on cases of suicides using the drug becomes most evident in the filing system of Bayer’s corporate archives – here, the note on the publication of Fräulein Else sits among clippings of Veronal poisonings that had appeared in the press.

This conjuncture did not come about by accident. Schnitzler regularly mined the press to find new subjects on which he could write; over the years, he amassed a rich archive of newspaper clippings.Footnote 44Fräulein Else emerged from a rewriting of one of these news reports. Schnitzler’s diaries show that he took note of several cases of Veronal poisoning; he especially noticed a Viennese case whose text he excerpted from the Neue Freie Presse: »Die dreißigjährige Private Stephanie Bachrach nahm … etc. Morphin und Veronal … gestorben … Die Ursache der That ist unbekannt.«Footnote 45 This sparse note made a deep impression on Schnitzler because he knew this woman well: she was the girlfriend of a close friend and they had been moving in the same circles for years; Stephanie Bachrach had even provided the model for a character in his novel Der Weg ins Freie (1908).Footnote 46 Despite his private grief, Schnitzler – an author who specialized in covering social hot-button issuesFootnote 47 – was, however, ultimately less interested in documenting this specific case than in converting it into a »case study«Footnote 48 of a Veronal suicide that could circulate more widely and raise societal awareness.

As a seasoned writer of popular books and plays, Schnitzler immediately understood how to get a gripping story out of a reticent press report that resembled an uncounted number of other notes on Veronal suicides: he rewrote the story in the interior monologue. Instead of presenting a narrative on Else, the text foregrounds her point of view, which would normally be eclipsed.Footnote 49 The novella’s interior monologue thus draws on the promise that fiction could render transparent the inmost motives of a person, claiming to reveal the web of delicately interwoven impulses, affects, and social dynamics at play.

Fräulein Else not only introduces the newspaper report as catalyst. When Else incessantly describes her own motives and actions as if print media were to report on them, we see the way a human subject can be mediatized. In her imagination, she stages fictional versions of her suicide that seem to come straight out of an operetta, a cheap novella, or a gossip magazine, genres that she evokes herself to describe her self-fashioning (29, 34, 67).Footnote 50 For this reason, one cannot miss the slips into the diction of yellow press captions when she ponders her suicide options. Take, for example,Footnote 51 this passage:

Ich werde Veronal trinken. Nur einen kleinen Schluck, dann werde ich gut schlafen... Aber ich könnte auch vors Hotel gehen [...] und dann weiter, weiterflattern über die Wiese, in den Wald, hinaufsteigen, immer höher, bis auf den Cimone hinauf, mich hinlegen, einschlafen, erfrieren. Geheimnisvoller Selbstmord einer jungen Dame der Wiener Gesellschaft. Nur mit einem schwarzen Abendmantel bekleidet, wurde das schöne Mädchen an einer unzugänglichen Stelle des Cimone della Pala tot aufgefunden... (109-110).

Set less than 200 kilometers from Verona, Else tries to slip into a different role than that of the bartered bride.Footnote 52 She always wanted to go »on stageFootnote 53 and she draws on a familiar repertoire of melodramatic role models that speak to her. Else thus turns into the »author«Footnote 54 of her own death, not unlike Emma Bovary in Gustave Flaubert’s eponymous novel.Footnote 55

Veronal has a highly ambiguous part to play within these fatal self-experiments of becoming glamorous – the soporific comes with the reputation of being the suicide aid of the stars. In the year in which the novella appeared, for instance, a suicide attempt of the »famous film actor Max Linder«Footnote 56 made big headlines in Vienna and the German press in 1924. Even years later, Veronal’s image of being dangerously glamorous persisted – for example, in the first Hollywood movie with an all-star cast, the Academy Award-winning film version of Vicki Baum’s novel Menschen im Hotel (1929) (Grand Hotel, director Edmund Goulding, 112 min, 1932, USA). Here, Greta Garbo shines in the role of an aging actress who tries to take her life with Veronal but is rescued by a gentle diamond thief. Else grapples with the power and sway of such prefabricated cultural scripts. They open up the possibility that she could leave behind her dilemmatic social position as a »junge Dame aus guter Familie« (32) and model the dazzling role of the diva she would like to become.Footnote 57 In other words, the interior monologue makes readers notice what Schnitzler calls Else’s »Mittelbewusstsein«Footnote 58 – a pre-consciousness knowledge of the extent to which the privileged young white woman is the product of the conditions under which she lives. Else perceives the world through the internalized norms, scripts, and codes of a society that actively works against her flourishing, even though it has simultaneously inculcated her with a »cruel optimism« about attaining happiness in the future.Footnote 59 Veronal embodies this double bind.

III.

All this leads to the heart of Schnitzler’s thought about pharmaceutical drugs from a public health perspective. There can be little doubt that the trained physician immediately understood that Veronal presented more than a problem of irresponsible use by individual patients, as the pharmaceutical industry framed the problem. For example, Bayer’s case officers argued that Fräulein Else had to be purged from the reference to Veronal because it allegedly encourages »charakterschwache[] Personen geradezu zu Selbstmordversuchen mit Veronal « (BAL: V). The company therefore not only mobilizes theories of mimetic imitation – »Beispiel und Nachahmung,« as Ferdinand Flury’s has it in his statistic of death by poison.Footnote 60 The company also reduces literature to stories of contagion, to socially infectious transmitters that can trigger a ›Werther effect‹, as one calls the notion of a causal relation between a suicide as model and subsequent suicides as imitations.Footnote 61 However, for physicians like Schnitzler who opposed pharmacological ›techno-fixes‹ something else was at stake: it was not irresponsible individual users who constituted the core problem of legally and medically approved drugs, but rather the effects of their social scaling and especially the close connection of the medical to the industrial apparatus.

Schnitzler does not explicitly comment on the scaling of Veronal prescriptions. Still, since he has Else consume this drug at a moment before it has historically been invented, the pharmacological anachronism strongly suggests a connection to his earlier medical reviews in which he espouses a public health theory based on morphine.Footnote 62 A key aspect of these reviews is that they ground the practice of medicine in a deeper social awareness. They sought to further »nicht allein das medizinische Denken der Ärzte, sondern auch ihr soziales Verständnis.«Footnote 63 In particular, Schnitzler’s reviews of pharmacological works (including the review of a book by the co-inventor of Veronal, Josef von Mering), reveal a stark ambivalence about a medical profession putting treatments with drugs front and center: »[Es] gibt mehr Heilmittel als früher, aber nicht im gleichen Maße mehr Heilungen.«Footnote 64 In contrast to physicians like the preanalytical Freud who proposed curing morphine addiction through the prescription of additional drugs such as cocaine,Footnote 65 Schnitzler contends that focusing on drug treatments covers up symptoms instead of effectively addressing the problems at stake. For this reason, he generally believes that prescribing drugs instead of considering the situation of the individual patient in detail does more harm than good. For example, his review of a medical book on morphine addiction for the medical journal Internationale klinische Rundschau leaves no doubts about this:

Das Morphium! Noch immer steht es weit oben an, und doch darf zugleich als bestes Beispiel unserer Unzulänglichkeit gelten. Das Morphium, dieser souveräne Schmerzenstiller, ist allzu oft nur ein falscher Freund der Leidenden; es läßt sich seine Gefälligkeiten allzu teuer bezahlen, es fordert mit der Zeit die Freiheit, zuweilen auch das Leben. [...] Es steht aber kaum zu zweifeln, daß uns in der nächsten Zeit noch ähnliche Erkenntnisse werden beschieden sein. In manchen Giften, denen man nach unsäglichen Gedankenmühen ihre versteckte Heilkraft abzuringen verstand, wird der ursprüngliche Genius neu erwachen, und sie werden sich in ihrer wahren Gestalt der betrogenen Menschheit zeigen, als das, was sie sind: als Gifte.Footnote 66

Schnitzler describes a dangerous dynamic inherent in the use of morphine. The drug pretends to be a healing force, yet it develops an agency of its own and tends to drag its users into dependency and even death. In making this argument, Schnitzler recovers the original ambivalence of the Greek term »pharmakon« which contains two meanings, both poison and medicinal substance.Footnote 67 For ancient thought, the fine-tuning of the dose governs the relation between the poisonous and the healing aspects of the pharmakon; for Schnitzler, it seems evident that an addictive substance will in the long run develop its own agency and transform any potential remedy into a poison. For instance, if a drug is to continue exerting an effect on a body used to it, the dose must necessarily be increased more and more, until it eventually becomes poisonous. One is reminded of Paul Virilio’s insight that the invention of the car implies the car crash, the invention of the train implies the train wreck,Footnote 68 and – to spell out the analogy – that morphine implies morphine addiction and morphine death. By the same token, Schnitzler predicts that Veronal will necessarily produce Veronal poisonings and Veronal suicides.

Fräulein Else is not the first literary text in which Schnitzler stages fatal drug incidents arising from an alleged misfunctioning of the medical system aided and abated by physicians and pharmacists. The drama Der Ruf des Lebens (1906) and the story Der Mörder (1911) provide two points in case. In the drama, the physician Dr. Schindler persuades the young Marie Moser to administer morphine to her terminally ill father so that she can go out for a night without having to worry about him. When Marie invertedly overdoses the morphine and kills her father, she explains to the physician that this accident was hardily inevitable given the pharmacological agency of the drug.Footnote 69 Schnitzler’s drama frames the incident not only as the result of medical malpractice but also as the outcome of too much confidence in pharmaceutical treatments present in the medical system. Schnitzler’s story Der Mörder (1911) elaborates further on this point, when he extends the responsibility from the physicians to pharmacists. Here, he sends the jurist Alfred »von Arzt zu Arzt, von Apotheker zu Apotheker«Footnote 70 in order to procure enough morphine to get rid of his mistress Elisa who has become a nuisance to him. Alfred soon gets hold of the required dose by playing the medical system: »Er [...] suchte [...] nacheinander drei Ärzte auf, gab sich überall als einen von unerträglichen Schmerzen gepeinigten Kranken aus, der, seit Jahren an Morphium, gewöhnt, mit seinem Vorrat zu Ende gekommen sei, nahm die erbetenen Rezepte in Empfang, ließ sie in verschiedenen Apotheken anfertigen und fand sich [...] im Besitze einer Dosis, die er für seine Zwecke mehr als genügend halten durfte.«Footnote 71 What Schnitzler writes about morphine, transfers directly to Veronal: countless court cases whose records survived in Bayer’s archives demonstrate that it was still common among pharmacists to sell Veronal over the counter; one could also use a single prescription ad infinitum in multiple pharmacies. What is more, many people who »had no suicidal intentions were comforted by the possession of fatal quantities of barbiturates; they felt empowered at times of emotional disablement.«Footnote 72 This raises the question: Does Else take her life with Veronal, or does Veronal take Else’s life? Schnitzler’s text dramatizes a dialectics of agency, in which the same drug that seems to empower Else in a psychologically challenging situation entangles her in a dynamic that ultimately leads to a fatal chain of contingent events.

IV.

Against this backdrop, one must reconsider whether Else will recover from the amount of Veronal she ingests towards the end of the novella. Some scholars argue that a suicide would require a higher dose of the soporific than Else has at her disposalFootnote 73 and that she is to wake up again when the interior monologue of the novella breaks off.Footnote 74 As a feminist intervention, this reading makes sense, even if it is unlikely: as we have seen, the contextual framing grounds the novella in newspaper reports about Veronal suicides, an implicit theory of pharmaceuticals as a public health issue, and Schnitzler’s repeated narratives about fatal morphine abuse. For this reason, one should ask a different set of questions about the novella’s ending: To what extent does Schnitzler’s depiction of Else’s liminal state of consciousness correspond to the symptomatology of fatal poisonings in contemporary medical literature? Does Veronal change the interior monologue, which is, after all, meant to represent Else’s state of consciousness directly? If so, does the drug alter how the text is narrated?

To assess whether the novella gives Veronal agency on the level of language, a close reading of its finale is necessary. The passage begins when Else has been carried back to her hotel bed after her public disrobing and subsequent blackout in the music room. She hovers in a strange twilight state and is being attended to by the physician Paul and his lover Cissy who comment on every change in her condition. When Dorsday, the wealthy man who has originally solicited a strip show, appears in the doorway, Paul and Cissy briefly leave their watch to talk to him. Else immediately gulps down the prepared glass with ten grams of Veronal while she is unobserved.Footnote 75 Schnitzler himself insisted that Else consumes the overdose of the soporific only in this very last scene.Footnote 76 He was adamant about the sequence, because it generates a contrast between the representation of consciousness in the final scene and two earlier moments of clouded consciousness – Else’s daydream on a park bench and the odd twilight state after her disrobement in the music room. The final passage differs from these two scenes insofar as Schnitzler ties the change in Else’s condition to her consumption of a pharmacological substance. Thus, Schnitzler treats Veronal not only as a prop for a suicide, but also as the »medium of form.« This term is meant to pinpoint that the soporific affects literary devices and modes of presentation in the interior monologue.

Many scholars have interpreted the last scene of Fräulein Else, yet even the most persuasive readings have overlooked the fact that Schnitzler systematically integrates the clinical symptomatology of Veronal poisoning.Footnote 77 To ensure that these symptoms are noticed and correctly named, he positions the physician Paul at Else’s bedside. If one attends to the clinical picture of Veronal poisoning in the last scene, the passage can be divided into four sections of varying length that capture the gradual onset of Veronal’s effects.

A slight variation of the phrase »Ich habe Veronal getrunken« (131, 131, 132, 132) marks the beginning of each of these four sections – latency, first effects, full effects, and the threshold of death. During the period of latency, the impact of the soporific is barely perceptible, as Else herself remarks »Ich habe Veronal getrunken. Ich werde sterben. Aber es ist geradeso wie vorher. Vielleicht war es nicht genug…« (131). She first registers the effects of Veronal when she is beginning to get tired (»müde,« 131); at the same time, Paul comments on Else’s pulse which »geht ruhig« (131) und »ziemlich gleichmäßig« (132).Footnote 78 In the next section, the effect of the soporific has become so strong that Paul cannot wake up Else even though he makes no fewer than nine attempts. She enters a state described as dream-like (133). In the last section, Else’s body starts to shiver (»zittern.« 135), before she succumbs to a loss of consciousness that causes the interior monologue to break off; in the first printing, Schnitzler additionally marked this moment with the paratext »Ende« (136) so that the text grinds to a halt in three steps: Else loses consciousness, the interior monologue breaks off, and the paratext dissolves any ambiguity about the outcome.Footnote 79

It is clear that Schnitzler integrated what the medical literature and reassuring leaflets from the pharmaceutical industry call the »charaktistische Symptomenbild« of Veronal poisoning: it consists in »[t]iefer Bewußtlosigkeit bei relativ guter Atmung«Footnote 80 accompanied by physiological processes such as »Zittern«; interventions such as »Anrufen« can no longer arouse the patient.Footnote 81 If one believes the testimony of the pharmaceutical industry, this specific clinical presentation is rarely seen. In their words, Veronal poisonings are »eigentlich recht selten« and »beziehen sich auf Anwendung enormer Dosen, die entweder durch unglücklichen Zufall oder (was noch öfter der Fall ist) in selbstmörderischer Absicht [...] eingenommen wurden.«Footnote 82 On that matter, the ten grams of Veronal swallowed by Else correspond exactly to the »tödliche Dosis«Footnote 83 established by contemporary medical and juridical cases. From this perspective, there can be no doubt that the novella does not end well for Else.

V.

The textual nature of Else’s body raises another question: How do the effects of the soporific impact the literary devices of the interior monologue? Linguistic changes in the interior monologue become especially apparent when Veronal comes into its full effects, acting forcefully on Else’s consciousness. At the outset, this intensifies structures of displacement and condensation, and gives rise to an even more prominent, associative logic for linking images, similar to the dream scene earlier in the novella where Else is under the impression that she has poisoned herself with hashish (72). Furthermore, fragments of phrases used earlier in the novella flare up in Else’s consciousness (such as »Filou,« »Fiala,« »Sträfling,« »Matador,« 133). This generates a kind of temporal regression, which calls up half-coherent quotes and voices from ever more distant moments in Else’s adolescence and childhood (134). This culminates in her memories of lullabies (136).Footnote 84 When the events take their course, the sixfold repetition of the verb »laufen« (134–35) unmistakably evokes the German idiom »Das Geschehen nimmt seinen Lauf« (to run its course). Similar devices infiltrate Else’s language as she succumbs to Veronal; her language seems to warp when, for example, Veronal turns into »Veronalica« (134), a phrase that recalls a female name and assigns Else the role of the vera iconFootnote 85 of the soporific.

In the final sequence of the novella, the impact of Veronal on the body of language intensifies. Up to this point, the text has only alluded to changes in Else’s perception, for example, that the voices at her bedside have registered as mere »Brausen« (142). But now, Fräulein Else incorporates such a voiding of semantic meaning at the level of form. These changes foreground the possibilities and limitations of the interior monologue. This literary technique can create the impression of consciousness in the present moment, but it struggles with the representation of temporal lapses and is only able to show moments in which the mind appears blank or empty by drawing on typographical devices such as punctuation marks, hyphens, or special characters, and syntactical ellipses. This interplay between Sprachkörper and Schriftkörper stands out in the last paragraph of the novella (136):

›Else! Else!‹

Sie rufen von so weit! Was wollt Ihr denn? Nicht wecken. Ich schlafe ja so gut. Morgen früh. Ich träume und fliege. Ich fliege… fliege… fliege… schlafe und träume… und fliege… nicht wecken… morgen früh…

›El…‹

Ich fliege…ich träume… ich schlafe… ich träu… träum – ich flie……

In this passage, the attempts to wake Else fail; the insistent calls demonstrate how the young woman succumbs to the soporific effect of Veronal: her sleep deepens to a point where her interior monologue finally breaks off. The text is shot through with explicit typographic signs that serve to highlight the fact that black print on white paper constitutes Else’s voice. Her language crystallizes into signs that act as placeholders for other signs which cannot be uttered; the marked visuality of the ellipses exposes the artificiality of the perspective; a void takes hold within the interior monologue. If Else‘s consciousness is captured in the Sprachkörper, Veronal seems to control the Schriftkörper, and the passage shows precisely how typography chips away language.

Consequently, the syntagmatic structures of the text come apart. Else’s clauses begin to lose their grammatical objects, and even subjects and verbs. The sentence construction becomes elliptical and fragmented, and the meaning of what remains becomes voided. Enunciations such as »ich schlafe« pinpoint a psychophysical state that troubles language; it also recalls paradoxical phrases from Else’s earlier dream such as »Ich habe ja schwarze Trauerkleider an, weil ich tot bin« (73). Thus, her language loses the capacity to produce meaning and only retains a gestural quality, before it peters out in empty repetitions, dots, and dashes.

Finally, metaphors of physical, mental, and somatic activity which had entered the text when Else ingested Veronal drive the prose forward, but gradually flatten into self-referential cues to intertextual references. The assorted verbs »to fly,» »to dream« and »to sleep« clearly stem from a line in a lullaby by Clemens Brentano that reads: »Schlafe, träume, flieg, ich wecke / bald Dich auf und bin beglückt.«Footnote 86 Sleeping, dreaming, and flying indicate a strongly aestheticized form of dying, one that is still heavily imbued with romantic fantasies of death. Such fantasies pervade the genres with which Else’s imagination has proven to be intimately familiar: operettas and cheap novellas (29, 34, 67). Yet one could also identify ›flying‹ as a reference to the physiological dream-theory of the English psychologist Havelock Ellis whom Schnitzler has read. Ellis contends that dreams involving flying indicate »trouble with breathing and the heart or an anesthesia of skin sensations during sleep.«Footnote 87 This somatic interpretation suggests reading the metaphors of movement and especially the experience of flying as an effect of Veronal poising. Still, why does Schnitzler quote this lullaby to indicate Else’s death? The quotation reminds the reader that Else must be understood as a body made from text. As a displaced soothing mechanism that seems to arise from a flashback of childhood memories, the lullaby also reinforces the cruel optimism of the protagonist who is unaware that she will not wake up the next morning. Most importantly, however, the lullaby with its stress on monotonous repetition empties out meaning; what remains is the breakdown of form that foregrounds the typographic system. All in all, Else’s Veronal sleep therefore dismantles the apparatuses of language, and it reveals the technical underbelly of representation implicit in the interior monologue: hermeneutic reading, literary form, grammatical conventions, and the materiality of signs.

VI.

Based on a discovery in the corporate archives of Bayer Inc. – the finding that the pharmaceutical giant took notice (and issue) with the mention of Veronal in the novella – the article proposed a reading that situates Schnitzler’s Fräulein Else in the context of the drug culture of the early twentieth century and reveals that the text makes a literary intervention into debates about public health.

This claim is substantiated in three ways: Firstly, the form of the novella incorporates press reports about Veronal suicides which Schnitzler adapts in a case study format seen from a first-person perspective. Secondly, Fräulein Else links in with Schnitzler’s earlier stories that update his theories about the inherent dialectics in the prescription of powerful pharmaceutical agents such as morphine: wherever drugs such as Veronal are distributed, he reasons, there will be Veronal accidents as well. From this point of view, the fatal incident staged in Fräulein Else can no longer be parsed as ›irresponsible behavior of a feeble female character‹ as the pharmaceutical industry suggests. Rather, the novella showcases the dangers of white drug markets that make legally- and medically-approved substances such as Veronal easily accessible, while underestimating their risks. Schnitzler’s novella also highlights that this system especially hurts the female population. Finally, the article focuses on the specific literary agency associated with Veronal. It shows not only that Schnitzler bases the finale of his novella on the symptomatology of a poisoning with soporifics. This also goes hand in hand with an increasing destruction of the textual body of the novella in which its typography comes to the fore. The article therefore highlights that Schnitzler’s literary and medical concerns are intimately related.