The Man Without Qualities, Volume 2

by Robert Musil

  That is more or less the sense of the transition from individualism to the collective view of the world / mission of the world (there is in this no supposition that the value of the individual should cease, only that it be more precisely evaluated).

  ***

  One day, the General was sitting before the two of them and said in astonishment to Ulrich: “What, you don’t read the newspapers?”

  Brother and sister blushed as deeply as if the good Stumm had discovered them in flagrante, for even though in their condition everything might have been possible, that they might have been able to read the newspapers was not.

  “But one must read the newspapers!” said / admonished the General in embarrassment, for he had stumbled upon an incomprehensible fact, and it was discretion that caused him to add reproachfully: There have been big demonstrations against the Parallel Campaign in B.!

  Truly, while Ulrich and Agathe had been living behind closed crystal panels—by no means abstractly and without looking at the world, but looking at it in an unusual, unambiguous light—this same world bathed every morning in the hundredfold light of a new day. Every morning cities and villages awaken, and wherever they do it happens, God knows, in more or less the same way; but with the same right to existence that a giant ocean liner expresses when it is under way between two continents, small birds fly from one branch to another, and thus everything happens simultaneously, in a fashion as uniform and simplified as it is uselessly varied in innumerable ways, and in a helpless and blessed abundance reminiscent of the glorious but limited picture books of childhood. Ulrich and Agathe also both felt their book of the world open before them, for the city of B. was none other than the one where they had found each other again after their father had lived and died there.

  “And it had to happen precisely in B.!” the General repeated meaningfully.

  “You were once stationed in the garrison there,” Ulrich affirmed.

  “And that’s where the poet Feuermaul was born,” Stumm added.

  “Right!” Ulrich exclaimed. “Behind the theater! That’s apparently what gave him his ambition to be a poet. Do you remember that theater? In the ‘8o’s or ‘90s there must have been an architect who plunked down such theatrical jewel boxes in most of the bigger cities, with every available nook and cranny plastered with decoration and ornamental statues. And it was right that Feuermaul came into the world in this spinning-and-weaving city: as the son of a prosperous agent in textiles. I remember that these middlemen, for reasons I don’t understand, earned more than the factory owners themselves; and the Feuermauls were already one of the wealthiest families in B. before the father began an even grander life in Hungary with saltpeter or God knows what murderous products. So you’ve come to ask me about Feuermaul?” Ulrich asked.

  “Not really,” his friend responded. “I’ve found out that his father is a great supplier of powder to the Royal Navy. That’s a restraint on human goodness that was laid on his son from the beginning. The Resolution will remain an isolated episode, I can guarantee you that!”

  But Ulrich was not listening. He had long been deprived of the enjoyment of hearing someone talk in a casual, everyday fashion, and Agathe seemed to feel the same way. “Besides, this old B. is a rotten city,” he began to gossip. “On a hill in the middle there’s an ugly old fortress whose barbettes served as a prison from the middle of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century and were quite notorious, and the whole city is proud of them!”

  “Marymount,” the General affirmed politely.

  “What a very merry mount!” Agathe exclaimed, becoming irritated at her need for die ordinary when Stumm found the wordplay witty and assured her that he had been garrisoned at B. for two years without having made this connection.

  “The true B., of course, is the ring of the factory quarter, the textile and yarn city!” Ulrich went on, and turned to Agathe. “And what big, narrow, dirty boxes of houses with countless window holes, tiny alleys consisting only of yard walls and iron gates, a spreading tangle of bleak, rutted streets!” After the death of his father he had wandered through this area several times. He again saw the high chimneys hung with dirty banners of smoke, and the streets /roadways covered with a film of oil. Then his memory wandered without transition to the farmland, which in fact began right behind the factory walls, with heavy, charged, fruitful loam that in spring the plow turned over black-brown; wandered to the low, long villages lying along their single street, and houses that were painted in not only screaming colors but colors that screamed in an ugly, incomprehensible voice. It was humble and yet alien-mysterious farmland, from which the factories sucked their male and female workers because it lay squeezed between extensive sugar-beet plantations belonging to the great landed estates, which had not left it even the scantest room to thrive. Every morning the factory sirens summoned hordes of peasants from these villages into the city, and in the evening scattered them again over the countryside; but as the years went by, more and more of these Czech country people, fingers and hands turned dark from the oily cotton dust of the factories, stayed behind in the city and caused the Slavic petite bourgeoisie that was already there to grow mightily.

  This led to strained relations, for the city was German. It even lay in a German-language enclave, if at its outermost tip, and was proud of its involvement since the thirteenth century in the annals of German history. In the city’s German schools one could learn that in the vicinity the Turk Kapistran had preached against the Hussites, at a time when good Austrians could still be born in Naples; that the hereditary bond between the houses of Habsburg and Hungary, which in 1364 laid the groundwork for the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, was forged nowhere else but here; that in the Thirty Years’ War the Swedes had besieged this brave town for an entire summer without being able to take it, the Prussians in the Seven Years’ War even less so. Of course this made the city just as much part of the proud Hussite memories of the Czechs and the independent historical memories of the Hungarians, and possibly, too, even part of the memories of the Neapolitans, Swedes, and Prussians; and in the non-German schools there was no lack of indications that the city was not German and that the Germans were a pack of thieves who steal even other people’s pasts. It was astonishing that nothing was done to stop it, but this was part of Kakania’s wise tolerance. There were many such cities, and they all resembled one another. At the highest point they were lorded over by a prison, at the next highest by an episcopal residence, and scattered around in them were some ten cloisters and barracks. If one ranked what were indeed called “the necessities of state,” one would not, for the rest, encompass its homogeneity and unity, for Kakania was inspired by a hereditary mistrust, acquired from great historical experiences, of every Either/Or, and always had some glimmering that there were in the world many more contradictions than the one which ultimately led to its demise, and that a contradiction must be decisively resolved. The principle of its government was This-as-well-as-that, or even better, with wisest moderation, Neither/Nor. One was therefore also of the opinion in Kakania that it was not prudent for simple people who have no need of it to learn too much, and they did not regard it as important that economically these people should be immodestly prosperous. One preferred to give to those who already had a great deal, because this no longer carried any risks, and one assumed that if among those other people there was some skill or capacity, it would find a way of making itself known, for resistance is well suited to developing real men.

  And so it turned out too: men did develop from among the opponents, and the Germans, because property and culture in B. were German, were helped by the state to receive more and more capital and culture. If one walked through the streets of B., one could recognize this in the fact that the beautiful architectural witnesses of the past that had been preserved, of which there were several, stood as a point of pride for the prosperous citizens among many witnesses to the modern period, which did not content themselves with being merely Gothic, Renaissance, or
Baroque but availed themselves of the possibility of being all these things at once. Among the large cities of Kakania, B. was one of the wealthiest, and also displayed this in its architecture, so that even the surroundings, where they were wooded and romantic, got some of the little red turrets, the crenallated slate-blue roofs, and the rings of embrasured-like walls that the prosperous villas had. “And what surroundings!” Ulrich thought and said, hostile to but settled in his home region. This B. lay in a fork between two rivers, but it was a quite broad and imprecise fork, and the rivers were not quite proper rivers either but in many places broad, slow brooks, and in still others standing water that was nevertheless secretly flowing. Nor was the landscape simple, but it consisted, leaving aside the farmland considered above, of three further parts. On one side a broad, yearningly opening plain, which on many evenings was delicately tinged in tender shades of orange and silver; on the second side shaggy, good old German wooded hills with waving treetops (although it happened not to be the German side), leading from nearby green to distant blue; on the third side a heroic landscape of Nazarene bareness and almost splendid monotony, with gray-green knolls on which sheep grazed, and plowed brown fields over which hovered something of the murmured singing of peasants’ grace at table as it pours out of humble windows.

  So while one might boast that this cozy Kakanian region in the middle of which B. lay was hilly as well as flat, no less wooded than sunny, and as heroic as it was humble, there was nevertheless everywhere a little something missing, so that on the whole it was neither this way nor that way. Nor could it ever be decided whether the inhabitants of this town found it beautiful or ugly. If one were to say to one of them that B. was ugly, he would be sure to answer: “But look how pretty Red Mountain is, and Yellow Mountain too…and the black fields…!” and as he toted up these names, which were so sensual, one had to concede that it was indeed a quite respectable landscape. But if one called it beautiful, an educated B.’er would laugh and say that he was just back from Switzerland or Singapore, and that B. was a lousy hole that couldn’t even stand comparison with Bucharest. But this, too, was merely Kakanian, this twilight of the emotions in which they took up their existence, this restless sense of having been all too prematurely laid to rest, in which they felt themselves sheltered and buried. If one puts it this way: for these people everything was simultaneously lack of pleasure and pleasure, one will notice how anticipatorily contemporary it was, for in many respects this most gentle of all states was secretly raging ahead of its time. The people who inhabited B. lived from the production of textiles and yarn, from the sale of textiles and yarn, from the production of and trade in all those things people use who produce or sell textile and yarn, including the production and management of legal disputes, diseases, acquired skills, diversions, and such other things as belong to the needs of a big city. And all the well-off people among them had the quality that there was no beautiful or famous place in the whole world where someone who was from this city would not meet someone else who was also from this city, and when they were home again the consequence of this was that they all bore within themselves as much of the wide world as they did the amazing conviction that everything great ultimately led only to B.

  Such a condition, which derives from the production of textiles and yarn, from industriousness, thrift, a civic theater, the concerts of touring celebrities, and from balls and invitations, is not to be conquered with these same means. That might have succeeded in the struggle for political power against a refractory working class, or the struggle against an upper class, or an imperialistic struggle for the world market of the kind other states conducted—in short, being rewarded not according to merit but by a remnant of the animalistic pouncing on prey, a process in which the warmth of life keeps itself alert. But in Kakania, while it was true that a great deal of money was unlawfully earned, there could be no pouncing, and in that country, even if crimes had been permitted, it would have been with strict attention to their being committed only by officially certified criminals. This gave all cities like B. the appearance of a great hall with a low ceiling. A ring of powder arsenals in which the army kept its guns surrounded every fairly large town; big enough, if struck by lightning, to reduce an entire quarter of the city to rubble: but at every powder arsenal provision had been made by means of a sentry and a yellow-and-black sentry pole that no disaster should befall the citizenry. And the police were furnished with sabers as tall as the officers and reaching to the ground, no one knew why anymore, unless it was from moderation, for it was only with their right hand that the police were the instruments of justice; with their left they had to hang on to their swords. Nor did anyone know why on promising building sites in growing cities the state, peering far into the future, constructed military hospitals, warehouses for uniforms, and garrison bakeries, whose giant unwalled rectangles later interfered with development. That is in no way to be taken for militarism, of which old Kakania was thoughtlessly accused; it was only common sense and prudence: for order cannot be otherwise than in order more properly: it is, so to speak, already by its very nature in order while, with every other kind of conduct the state engages in, this remains eternally uncertain. This order had become second nature in Kakania in the Franzisco-Josephenian era, indeed it had almost become landscape, and it is quite certain that if the quiet times of peace had lasted longer, the priests, too, would have got swords just as long, as the university professors had got them after the finance authorities and the postal officials, and if a world upheaval with entirely different views had not intervened, the sword would perhaps have developed in Kakania into a spiritual weapon.

  When the conversation had proceeded to this point, partly in an exchange of views, partly in the reminiscences that were their silent accompaniment, General Stumm put in: “That, by the way, is something Leinsdorf said already, that the priests really must receive their swords at the next concordat, as a sign that they, too, are performing a function in the state. He then hedged this with the less paradoxical remark that even small daggers might suffice, with mother-of-pearl and a gold handle, of the kind officials used to wear.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “He was,” the General replied. “He pointed out to me that in Bohemia during the Thirty Years’ War priests rode around in mass-robes of gilt that were leather below—in other words, proper mass-dragoons. He is simply exasperated at the general hostility directed against the state, and recalled that in one of his casde chapels he still has such a garment preserved. Look, you know how he’s always talking about the constitution of ‘61 having given capital and culture the lead here, and that this has led to a big disappointment—”

  “How did you actually happen to meet Leinsdorf?” Ulrich interrupted him with a smile.

  “Oh, that came about when he was on his way back from one of his estates in Bohemia,” Stumm said, without going into greater detail. “Moreover, he has asked you to come see him three times, and you haven’t gone. In B. on the way back, his car blundered into the riots and was stopped. On one side of the street stood the Czechs, shouting: ‘Down with the Germans!’ on the other side the Germans shouted: ‘Down with the Czechs!’ But when they recognized him they stopped that and asked in chorus in both German and Czech: *What’s going on with the Commission to Ascertain the Desires of the Concerned Sections of the Population, Count?’ and some screamed ‘Phooey!’ at him and others ‘Shame!’ This stupid Resolution, that one should let oneself be killed for one’s own ideas but not other people’s, appears to have spread by word of mouth, and because we suppressed it we’re now suspected of wanting to be the murderer of nationalities! That’s why Leinsdorf said to me: ‘You’re his friend; why doesn’t he come when I call him?’ And all I could do was offer: If you wish to entrust me with something, I will inform him!’ “ Stumm paused.

  “And what…?” Ulrich asked.

  “Well, you know it’s never really easy to understand what he means. First he talked to me about the French R
evolution. As is well known, the French Revolution lopped off the heads of many of the nobility, and astonishingly he finds that quite proper, although stones had almost been thrown at him in B. For he says that the ancien regime had its mistakes, and the French Revolution its true ideas. But what ultimately resulted from all the effort? That’s what he was asking himself. And then he said the following: Today, for example, the mail is better and quicker; but earlier, while the mail was slow, people wrote better letters. Or: Today clothing is more practical and less ridiculous; but earlier, when it was like a masquerade, far better materials were used. And he concedes that for longer trips he himself uses an automobile because it’s faster and more comfortable than a horse-drawn coach, but he maintains that this box with springs on four wheels has deprived traveling of its true nobility. All that’s funny, I think, but it’s true. Didn’t you yourself once say that as mankind progresses one leg always slides backward whenever the other slides forward? Involuntarily, each of us today has something against progress. And Leinsdorf said to me: ‘General, earlier our young people spoke of horses and dogs, but today the sons of factory owners talk of horsepower and chassis. So since the constitution of ‘61, liberalism has shoved the nobility aside, but everything is full of new corruption, and if against expectations the social revolution should ever happen, it will lop the heads off the sons of factory owners, but things won’t get any better either!’ Isn’t that something? You get the impression that something is boiling over in him. With someone else, one might perhaps think that he doesn’t know what he wants!”