Im New Yorker: Leo Carey über Arthur Schnitzler

On July 26, 1928, Schnitzler's daughter, Lili, eighteen years old and newly married, was about to go out for a walk with her husband but went back to get something from the bathroom, took his revolver, and shot herself in the chest. She died the next day. It was an event her father might easily have written. Even at the time, the ever-faithful Clara privately thought that Schnitzler's moral softness had blighted Lili's upbringing and contributed to her demise. For Schnitzler, the brutal force of the event was impossible to withstand. To Clara he wrote that "the word pain has become ridiculous, as I now realize that I experience for the first time what God meant by it." Yet the utter incomprehensibility of what Lili had done was emphatically Schnitzlerian. As she lay dying in hospital, she had time to confide that she had not really wanted to kill herself. It had been a "moment of nervousness," an inexplicable impulse, almost an accident.