“Will you please answer this immediately as the matter is very urgent,” scrawled Cambridge student Eric Blackall from Vienna to his university in March 1938. Almost 80 years later, this urgent matter has been finally resolved: Cambridge University has officially acquired the archive of the great Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler.



Blackall had been asked to save the archive by Schnitzler’s widow, and was desperate to spirit it out of the country before it could be burned as part of the Nazi campaign against “anti-German” literature.

This vast archive ran to more than 40,000 pages from the author of Traumnovelle (Dream Story), adapted by Stanley Kubrick as Eyes Wide Shut, and Reigen (La Ronde, or The Blue Room), a play that explores a series of sexual encounters that the author himself judged “completely unprintable”. But Cambridge agreed to preserve his papers, and Blackall managed to ship more than 12 cases of documents to the UK under a diplomatic seal.

Correspondence between the student and the university about the smuggling of the material has “the character of a spy novel”, according to Cambridge, with Blackall writing in code about the need to see that “mother” – Schnitzler’s widow, Olga – and “child” – the archive – make it to England.



The documents have been in Cambridge ever since, but their ownership was disputed. Although Olga signed the archive over to the university, according to Schnitzler’s last will it was her son, Heinrich, who was the author’s legal heir. Schnitzler died in 1931, and his estate remained in his Vienna house with Olga, who was considered to be his widow even though the couple divorced in 1921, said Cambridge University.

Vast archive saved by a Cambridge student in 1938 …Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler. Photograph: Culture Club/Getty Images

Heinrich agreed to leave the archive in the custody of the university, but remained its owner. Now Cambridge has announced an agreement with Schnitzler’s grandsons, putting an end to what it called “a legally awkward” situation.

“There was this dilemma that it had been given to Cambridge, but by someone who was not in a legal position to do so,” said Cambridge research associate Dr Annja Neumann. “And by the time Heinrich wanted the papers in California, Cambridge had already invested a lot of work in it.”

The Schnitzler archive includes more than 30,000 manuscripts and letters and features an alternative ending to Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle, in which the Viennese doctor who observes an orgy is punished, rather than forgiven, by his wife, as well as documents showing the extensive revisions to which he subjected his work, and at least 20 notebooks.

Arthur Schnitzler’s draft of Traumnovelle (which became Eyes Wide Shut). The Austrian author’s papers have been officially signed over into the care of Cambridge University Library. Photograph: Cambridge University Library

“We’ve just started deciphering the notebooks,” said Neumann. Schnitzler had notoriously bad handwriting. “They are about anything and everything – a mixture of ideas on plays, recipes, phone numbers – they’re really exciting.”

The manuscripts, meanwhile, are “almost like a palimpsest of layers of text,” said Neumann. “He had a lot of revisions ... you can see how the plays developed, how he changes things, sometimes starts from scratch again.”

It also features correspondence between the author and the likes of Henrik Ibsen and Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, as well as Schnitzler’s only surviving letter to Freud. The father of psychoanalysis described Schnitzler as his literary doppelganger – “I have gained the impression that you have learned through intuition – though actually as a result of sensitive introspection – everything that I have had to unearth by laborious work on other persons,” wrote Freud. In the letter included in the archive, the author congratulates Freud on his 50th birthday.

“My dear Professor,” Schnitzler wrote in 1906, in a translation by UCL’s Judith Beniston, “Even if you have almost forgotten who I am, allow me nonetheless to add my congratulations to the many that you will be receiving today. I have your writings to thank for a multitude of strong and profound stimuli, and your 50th birthday gives me an opportunity to tell you this and assure you of my most sincere and warmest admiration.”

Neumann said that Schnitzler was “critical of Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis, but he used the free association technique that Freud developed in his 1895 Studies on Hysteria in the 1890s, and introduced interior dialogue into German literature, which was quite revolutionary.”

Cambridge is currently making the archive accessible to the public, with teams of scholars in the UK and Germany working to decipher and analyse the materials, and there are plans for digital editions of Schnitzler’s 1905-31 works to be hosted by the library. “ They promise an exciting new view of the works and the creative processes of this key figure,” said professor Andrew Webber, who is leading the UK team, and who called the Schnitzler papers a “treasure of Modernist literary culture”.

Neumann has also just launched a crowdsourcing initiative, Transcribing Schnitzler, asking the public for help in deciphering the author’s “difficult” handwriting in a series of unpublished sketches and drafts.

“Arthur Schnitzler’s unique legacy continues to resonate and inspire, just as it has over the last 75 years. As one of the world’s great research libraries, we are committed to making this fascinating archive available to as many people as possible,” said Cambridge University librarian Anne Jarvis.

“Cambridge University library has always been proud of the role it played in saving the Schnitzler archive from certain destruction – and we are delighted to have reached agreement with the family to ensure that this unique collection remains in Cambridge and continues to benefit from the expert care and conservation it has received over the last eight decades.”