Professor Bernhardi

Professor Bernhardi is a drama Arthur Schnitzler, which was first performed successfully ( in the presence of the author ) on November 28, 1912 at the Little Theatre, Berlin, with Bruno Decarli as Bernhardi and Alfred Abel as a chaplain. Because of the system-critical content performances in the Danube monarchy were up to their decomposition, 1918, prohibited. [Note 1] The piece came in 1918 with Alfred Bernau at the German National Theatre in Vienna for performance.

Content

In 1900, the young Philomena Bejer is due to an abortion in critical condition in the " Elisabethinum ", a Vienna hospital. The Jewish or Jewish -born medical director Professor Bernhardi prohibits a Catholic priest to give her the sacrament of death, because the euphoric patient does not know that they will die, and he wants to spare her the agony. During a confrontation between two dies, the sick, when she learns of a nurse from the presence of a clergyman.

Professor Bernhardi is considering to distance themselves from his behavior but decides against it after he will be ostracized by his Christian or non-Jewish colleagues visibly. The matter reached a political dimension, as an unnamed parliamentary party uses the incident to provide a clerical argued parliamentary question to the Minister of Education.

Bernhardi was also not addressed by his deputy and the competitor, the German national Ebenwald, proposed "trade" to vote on the renewal of an institutional body for forest -level candidates rather than the highly qualified Jewish physician Dr. Wenger.

The Minister of Education, a former colleague, friend as well as foe Bernhardi, basically telling him to support, aimed at answering the parliamentary question, but against him. A trial for religious fault is announced - the agreement between teaching and Minister of Justice.

Bernhardi announces even before the trial started his directorship, but for the time being will remain as head of department in Elisabethinum.

In the process the nurse about Bernhardi incorrectly states that he had attacked the priest physically. The statements of his colleagues who were present during the incident will be disregarded because of the alleged Jewish solidarity. Bernhardi is forbidden the exercise of the medical profession, and he is sentenced to two months in prison.

After the trial, the priest visited Bernhardi and tells him that he had been at his side in the process. As Bernhardi asks why he did not do before, before sentencing said, this explains that the interest of the Church stand in the foreground and a fiasco would have inflicted damage in court. As Bernhardi objecting that he was obliged in the first place, not to lie, this requires him unsuccessfully the admission that he had acted not only from a medical interest, but also of hatred towards the church.

After the end of his sentence Bernhardi is the figurehead of the Liberals. It is clear that Bernhardi has lost both the rank of professor and doctoral degrees, and thus the law of professional practice as a physician based on his conviction.

Supposedly trying to solicit a way of professional practice to Bernhardi goes to the Minister of Education. This says to apparently, but it shows that he does not intend to help him back to the doctor's degree. The conversation escalated, the viewer gets the impression that Bernhardi would actually come to the minister of education to these to confront his lower from the perspective Bernhardi attitude.

Figures

• Professor Bernhardi: Jewish or Jewish -born intellectual. Head of Elisabethinum with no apparent interest in ideologies or religions. Supposedly camp, objective and strive for conciliation. Does the Elisabethinum to take the German national professor Ebenwald as head of department and hire.
• Professor Ebenwald: Deputy Director of Elisabethinum. If after Bernhardi resignation to the conductor. Ebenwald is basically German national anti-clerical and thus, has a cousin in Parliament, who probably belonged to the clerical party. Although many Jews in Austria were also German national, is Ebenwald decides to support the clericals and against " the Jews " Bernhardi. Therefore His anti-Semitism is gaining the upper hand over the anticlericalism of his conviction or in other words, he uses the clericals and their concerns, damaging Jews.
• Professor Flint: kk Minister of Culture and Education, Full Professor of Medicine and childhood friend of Bernhardi, later his opponents. Flint is free of ideology, neither German national, clerical or liberal (code word for Jew- friendly ), but only committed to its own earnings targets, which he tries to achieve with opportunism. Flint is the most exciting personality of the piece and serves as an allegory for the amoral pursuit of results.
• Oskar Bernhardi: son of Professor Bernhardi. Assistant physician in Elisabethinum. The role is in the piece largely irrelevant, but remember off that Arthur Schnitzler assistant physician in the clinic his father was.

Topic

In-depth dialogues addressed anti-Semitism, problems of ethics and jurisprudence as well as of Catholicism. Ultimately, it is but primarily and eternally valid to navigate between ethics and the feasible, the actual voltage points Jews and Christian clericals are definitely only at the time contemporary understandable instruments of the author, to color the actual goals of action: should one individually correct and ethical act - as Bernhardi - or should one pursue collective, big goals. Schnitzler gives his answer so that collective goals are to be rejected in disregard of personal ethics.

As an example of the " Elisabethinum " Schnitzler served the General Outpatient Clinic in Vienna. Schnitzler - himself a Jew - had worked as a young physician at the clinic; his father Johann Schnitzler directed the hospital until his death in 1893. Flint, the Minister of Culture and Education, bears traces of the Viennese mayor Karl Lueger.

By the end of the Habsburg monarchy in 1920 the piece in Austria was forbidden. Also from the 1930s, the piece was then little or no longer listed primarily in Austria and the German Reich, even after 1945 in the German-speaking area (including Austria and Switzerland ) is rare. In Vienna it is interpreted since about 1980 as a metaphor for the downfall of the West, including on the one hand the disintegration of the equally polyglot - liberal, German national and clerical- dominated monarchy be understood, on the other hand, the rise of political anti-Semitism, the culture medium of the Hitlerite mentality.