Abstract (eng)
Suicide emerged as an area of academic research in the late 19th century, as new branches of science developed: sociology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis conducted profound investigations into the reasons for suicide, with particular attention to the suicides of young people. The Vienna Psychoanalytic Society dealt especially with this topic in a collection of articles published in 1910. Emile Durkheim published his seminal sociological study “Suicide” in 1897.
At the beginning of the 20th century the literary depiction of suicidality features new qualities. Suicide is no longer exclusively contextualized through moral prejudices. Outstanding literary texts in the modern period of German literary history portray the act of suicide in an empathic manner, and in all its psycho-social dimensions. The literary discourse, intuitively, anticipates findings that would be gained in the field of suicidology after World Word II.
This thesis concentrates on the avant-garde of the literary discourse by centring the analysis around three texts of Modern German Literature. Hermann Hesse’s “Beneath the Wheal” (1906) depicts a failed ‘coming of age’ narrative that finally ends up in suicide. Here suicide is not associated with blame and honour. Instead, the situation of the protagonist is comprehensibly presented by laying emphasis on the psycho-social setting. A similar conclusion can be drawn with regard to Arthur Schnitzler’s “Fräulein Else” (1924). This narrative demonstrates, furthermore, the ambivalence of suicidal thoughts through the structure of an interior monologue novella.
When Friedrich Torberg wrote his novel “Young Gerber” (1930), adolescent suicide stories had already been established as a genre. At the same time, the scientific discourse had developed significant theories with regard to suicide. Therefore, the analysis of Torberg’s novel has to take into account these two developments.
The methodological approach in this thesis is based, on the one hand, on the inter-discourse analysis, as it has been proposed by Jürgen Link. With this approach it is possible to illustrate the relationship between the literary and the scientific discourse. By applying this theory I have tried to reconstruct a historical framework for the reception of the analysed texts: “Literatur vermittelt als Vehikel stets (vom Autor intendiert oder nicht) ein gesellschaftliches ‘Wissen’.” (Link 1980: p. 137). On the other hand, this thesis is related to the field of literary anthropology, as it proposes that literary discourse can anticipate scientific findings and at the same time provides a public forum to discuss scientific results.