Marital Crisis, Open Marriage, Separation and Divorce in Schnitzler’s Dramas

This chapter is of central importance to the volume’s theme. It comprehensively summarises the intricacies of Austrian divorce law, draws on the unpublished manuscripts of Schnitzler’s plays to shed new light on the attempt to explore new norms governing married couples, including experiments with open marriage, and provides a new reading of Schnitzler’s play Zwischenspiel (1905), which has so far received scant critical attention. Here Leydecker demonstrates that its depiction of divorce differs significantly from contemporary plays, but also ignores the realities of Austrian divorce law at the time of writing. Reviewed by Professor Ritchie Robertson (Oxford) as ‘very useful’.