The Man Without Qualities, Volume 2

by Robert Musil

  But in the meantime we’ve only got as far as the national revolution?

  “Do you know what he wants?” Ulrich asked.

  “After the business in B., Drangsal tried to have him informed that now one would really have to let oneself be unconditionally swept up in the Ideal of Man, and Feuermaul is supposed to have expressed himself to the effect that it’s better as an Austrian not to master the resistance of the nationalities than it is as a German to transform one’s country into a field for army maneuvers. To this Leinsdorf’s only response was that that wasn’t realpolitik. He wants a proclamation of power; which is to say, of course it should also be a proclamation of love; that, after all, had been the original idea of the Parallel Campaign. *We must, General’—these were his words—proclaim our unity; that is less contradictory than it seems, but also not as easy!’ “

  Hearing this, Ulrich forgot himself and gave a rather more serious response. “Tell me,” he asked, “doesn’t all the talk about the Parallel Campaign ever seem rather childish to you?”

  Stumm looked at him with astonishment. “Well, yes,” he replied hesitantly. “When I’m talking this way with you, or with Leinsdorf, it does sometimes seem to me that I’m talking like an adolescent, or that you’re philosophizing about the immortality of cockchafers; but doesn’t that come with the subject? Where it’s a question of sublime missions, one never has the feeling of being able / allowed to talk the way one really is.

  Agathe laughed.

  Stumm laughed along with her. “I’m laughing too, dear lady!” he affirmed in a worldly-wise way, but then seriousness returned to his face and he went on: “But strictly speaking, what the Count means is by no means so wrong. For instance, what do you understand by liberalism?” With these words he again turned to Ulrich, but without waiting for a reply he went on again: “What I mean is that people ought to be left to themselves. And it will also have struck you that that’s now going out of fashion. It’s given rise to a lot of nonsense. But is that all it is? It seems to me people want something more. They aren’t content with themselves. I’m not either; I used to be an amiable person. You didn’t really do anything, but you were satisfied with yourself. Work wasn’t bad, and after work you played cards or went hunting, and there was in all of that a certain kind of culture. A certain wholeness. Doesn’t it seem so to you too? And why isn’t it like that anymore today? As far as I can judge from myself, I believe that people feel too clever. If you want to eat a schnitzel, it occurs to you that there are people without one. If someone is after a pretty girl, it suddenly goes through his mind that he really ought to be thinking about settling some conflict or other. That’s this insufferable intellectualism that you can’t ever shake off today, and that’s why there’s no going forward anywhere. And without knowing it themselves, people again want something. That means they no longer want a complicated intellect, they don’t want a thousand possibilities for living; they want to be satisfied with what they’re doing anyway, and for this all they need is to get back some belief or conviction or—well, how to describe what they need to do that? I’d like to hear your opinion about all this!”

  But that was only self-satisfaction on the part of the animated and excited Stumm, for before Ulrich could even pull a face, he sprang his surprise: “Of course one can just as well call it belief as conviction, but I’ve thought a lot about it and prefer to call it single-mindedness!”

  Stumm paused, with the idea of garnering applause before he unveiled further insights into the workshop of his mind, and then there mingled with the weighty expression on his face another, which was as superior as it was tired of enjoyment. “We used to talk a lot about the problems of order,” he reminded his friend, “and so we don’t have to stop over them today. So order is to a certain extent a paradoxical notion. Every decent person has a yearning for internal and external order, but on the other hand, you can’t bear too much of it; indeed, a perfect order would be, so to speak, the ruination of all progress and pleasure. That is (already) inherent, as it were, in the concept of order. And so you have to ask yourself: what is order after all? And how does it happen that we imagine we’re not able to exist without it? And what kind of order is it that we’re looking for? A logical, a practical, an individual, a general order, an order of the emotions, of die mind, or of actions? De facto, there’s a heap of orders all mixed up: taxes and customs duties are one, religion another, military regulations a third; there’s no end of searching them out and enumerating them. I’ve been preoccupied with this, as you know, and I don’t believe that there are many generals in the world who take their profession as seriously as I’ve had to do this past year. I’ve helped after my fashion in the search for an encompassing idea, but you yourself ended up proclaiming that to order the spirit one would need an entire global secretariat, and even you’ll have to admit that we can’t wait for such an ordering. But on the other hand, one can’t use that to let everyone do whatever he wants!”

  Stumm leaned back and drew breath. The most difficult part had now been said, and he felt the need to excuse himself to Agathe for the gloomy dryness of his behavior, which he did with the words: “You must excuse me, but your brother and I had an old and difficult account to settle; but from now on it will also be more suitable for ladies, for I’m again back to where I was, that people don’t have any use for complicated intellect, but would like to believe and be convinced. For if you analyze this, you’ll find that the least important thing about the order to which man aspires is whether reason will approve of it or not; there are also totally ungrounded kinds of orders: for instance, the one that’s always asserted in the military about one’s superior always being right, meaning, of course, so long as his superior isn’t around. How I puzzled over this as a desecration of the world of ideas when I was a young officer! And what do I see today? Today it’s called the principle of the leader—”

  “Where did you get that?” Ulrich asked, interrupting the lecture, for he had the distinct suspicion that these ideas were not just taken from a conversation with Leinsdorf.

  “Everyone wants strong leadership! And partly from Nietzsche, of course, and his interpreters,” Stumm replied nimbly and learnedly. ‘‘What’s already being called for is a double philosophy and morality: for leader and for led! But as long as we’re talking about the military, I must say that the military excels not only in and for itself, as an element of order, but also in always making itself available when all other order fails!”

  “The decisive things are happening above and beyond reason, and the greatness of hfe is rooted in the irrational!” Ulrich brought up, imitating his cousin Diotima from memory.

  The General grasped this immediately but did not take offense. “Yes, that’s the way she used to talk, your cousin, before she started investigating the proclamations of love in, as it were, too great detail.” With this explanation he turned to Agathe.

  Agathe was silent, but smiled.

  Stumm again turned to Ulrich. “I don’t know whether Leinsdorf has perhaps said it to you too; at any rate, it’s marvelously right: he maintains that the most important thing about a belief is that one always believe the same thing. That’s something like what I’m calling single-minded-ness. ‘But can civilians do that?’ I asked him. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Civilians wear different suits every year, and every few years there are parliamentary elections so they can choose differently every time; the spirit of single-mindedness is much rather to be found in the military!’ “

  “So you convinced Leinsdorf that a strengthened militarism is the true fulfillment of his aims?”

  “God forbid, I didn’t say a word! We merely agreed that in the future we would do without Feuermaul because his views are too unusable. And for the rest, Leinsdorf has given me a whole series of assignments for you—”

  “That’s superfluous!”

  “You should quickly get him access to socialist circles—”

  “My gardener’s son is a zealous member of the par
ty—that I can do!”

  “That’s just fine! He’s only doing it out of conscientiousness, because he once got the idea in his head. The second thing is that you should go see him as soon as possible—”

  “But I’m leaving in a few days!”

  “Then as soon as you get back—”

  “It doesn’t look as if I’m ever coming back!”

  Stumm von Bordwehr looked at Agathe; Agathe smiled, which encouraged him. “Crazy?” he asked.

  Agathe shrugged her shoulders indecisively.

  ‘‘Well, let me summarize once more—” Stumm said.

  “Our friend has had enough philosophy!” Ulrich interrupted him.

  “You certainly can’t say that about me!” Stumm angrily defended himself. “It’s just that we can’t wait for philosophy. And I don’t want to lie to you: of course whenever I visit Leinsdorf I have orders to influence him in a certain way if it’s possible, that you can imagine. And when he says that the most important thing about a belief is that one always believe the same thing, he’s thinking above all of religion; but I’m already thinking of single-mindedness, for that’s more comprehensive. I don’t hesitate to assert that a truly powerful philosophy of life can’t wait around for reason; on the contrary, a true philosophy of life must be absolutely directed against reason, otherwise it would not get into the position of being able to force its submission. And the civilian world seeks such a single-mindedness in constant change, but the military has, so to speak, an enduring single-mindedness! Madame,” Stumm interrupted his ardor, “you should not believe that I’m a militarist; quite the contrary, the military has always been even a little on the raw side for my taste: but the way the logic of these ideas grabs hold of you is like playing with a large dog: first he bites for fun, and then he gets carried away and goes wild. And I would like to grant your brother, as it were, one last opportunity—”

  “And how do you connect that with the proclamation of power and love?” Ulrich asked.

  “God, in the meantime I’ve forgotten,” Stumm replied. “But of course these eruptions of nationalism that we’re now experiencing in our fatherland are somehow eruptions of the energy of an unhappy love. And also in this area, in the synthesis of power and love, the military is, in a certain sense, exemplary. A person has to have some kind of love for his fatherland, and if he doesn’t have it for his fatherland, then he has it for something else. So you just need to grab hold of that something else. As an example that just occurs to me, take the term conscript-volunteer. Who would ever think that a conscript is a volunteer? That’s the last thing he is. And yet he was and is, according to the sense of the law. In some such sense people have to be made volunteers again!”

  On the Young Socialist Schmeisser

  Conversations with Schmeisser

  [Schmeisser (the name means “flinger” or “hurler”) is the left-wing counterpart to the proto-Fascistic Hans Sepp. Peter Lindner seems to represent apolitical, amoral youth.]

  It was not the first time that Count Leinsdorf had expressed the opinion that a practitioner of realpolitik had to make use even of socialism in its search for allies against progress as well as nationalism, for he had repeatedly begged Ulrich to cultivate this connection, since out of political considerations he did not just now wish to be caught doing it himself. He advised starting by approaching not the leaders but the young up-and-comers, those who were not completely corrupted and whose vitality permitted the hope that through them one might acquire a patriotically rejuvenating influence over the party. Then Ulrich remembered cheerfully that there lived in his house a young man who never greeted him but looked away disdainfully whenever they met, which happened rarely enough. This was Schmeisser, a doctoral student in technical sciences; his father was a gardener, who had already been living on the property when Ulrich took it over and who had since, in exchange for free lodging and occasional gifts, kept the small old grounds in order partly with his own hands and partly by indicating and supervising any work that became necessary. Ulrich appreciated the fact that this young man, who lived with his father and earned the money for his studies by tutoring and doing a little writing, regarded him as one of the idle rich, who was to be treated with contempt; the experiment of inaction to which he was subject sometimes made him regard himself in this fashion, and he found pleasure in challenging his faultfinder when, one day, he stopped to talk with Schmeisser. It turned out that the student, who, moreover, seen from closer up, might already be twenty-six years old, had also been waiting for this moment, and immediately discharged the tension of the encounter in violent attacks, which ended between an attempt at conversion and the proffering of personal contempt. Ulrich told him about the Parallel Campaign, and thought he was doing the right thing by making his assignment out to be as ridiculous as it was while at the same time indicating the advantages a determined person might be able to draw from it. He was expecting Schmeisser to fall in with this scheme, which then with God’s help might develop in rather strange directions; this young man, however, was no bourgeois romantic and adventurer, but listened with a crafty look around the mouth until Ulrich ran out of things to say. His chest was narrow between broad-boned shoulders, and he wore thick glasses. These really thick glasses were the beautiful part of his face, which had a sallow, fatty, blotchy skin; these thick glasses, made necessary by hard nights over his books and assignments and made stronger by poverty, which had not permitted him to consult a doctor at the first sign that he needed them, had become for Schmeisser’s simple emotions an image of self-liberation: when he spied them in the mirror, shining over his pimpled countenance with its saddle nose and sharp proletarian cheeks, it seemed to him like Poverty crowned by Intellect, and this had happened, especially often since, against his will, he had come to admire Agathe from afar. Since then he had also hated Ulrich, to whom he had previously paid scant attention, for his athletic build, and Ulrich now read his damnation in these glasses and had the impression of chattering away like a child playing in front of the barrels of two cannons. When he had finished, Schmeisser answered him with lips that could barely separate themselves for satisfaction at what they were saying: “The party has no need of such adventures; we’ll arrive at the goal in our own way!”

  That was really giving it to the bourgeois!

  After this rebuff it was hard for Ulrich to find more to say, but he went straight at his attacker and finally said with a laugh: “If I were the person you take me for, you ought to pour poison in my water pipes, or saw down the trees under which I stroll: why don’t you want to do something of that sort in a case where it might really be called for?”

  “You have no idea what politics is all about,” Schmeisser retorted, “for you are a social-romantic member of the middle class, at most an individual anarchist! Serious revolutionaries aren’t interested in bloody revolutions!”

  After that, Ulrich often had brief conversations with this revolutionary who didn’t want to start revolutions. “I already knew when I was a cavalry lieutenant,” he told him, “that in the short or long run mankind is going to be organized according to socialist principles in some form; it is, as it were, the final chance that God has left to it. For the fact that millions of people are oppressed in the most brutal way, in order for thousands of others to fail to do anything worthwhile with the power that derives from this oppression, is not only unjust and criminal but also stupid, inappropriate, and suicidal!”

  Schmeisser responded sarcastically: “But you’ve always settled for knowing that! Haven’t you? There’s the bourgeois intellectual for you! You’ve spoken to me a few times about a bank director who’s a friend of yours: I assure you, this bank director is my enemy, I’ll fight him, I’ll show him that his convictions are only pretexts for his profits; but at least he has convictions! He says yes where I say no! But you? In you everything has already dissolved, in you the bourgeois lie has already begun to decompose!”

  Ulrich objected peaceably: “It may be that my way of t
hinking is bourgeois in origin; to some extent it’s even probable. But: Inter faeces et urinam nascimur—why not our opinions as well? What does that prove against their correctness?”

  Every time Ulrich spoke this way, reasoning politely, Schmeisser could not contain himself and exploded anew. “Everything you’re saying springs from the moral corruption of bourgeois society!” he would then proclaim, or something similar, for there was nothing he hated more than that form of goodness opposed to reason which is found in amiability; indeed, all form, even that of beauty, was for him an object of suspicion. For this reason he never accepted even one of Ulrich’s invitations, but at most let himself be treated to tea and cigarettes, as if in Russian novels. Ulrich loved to provoke him, although these conversations were completely meaningless. Since the year of liberation in ‘48 and the founding of the German Empire, events that only a minority now personally remembered, politics probably seemed to the majority of educated people more an atavism than an important subject. There was next to no sign that behind these external processes that plodded along out of habit, intellectual processes were already preparing for that deformation, for that propensity for decline, and for the suicidal willingness arising from self-loathing, which undermine a state of affairs and apparently always form the passive precondition to periods of violent political change. Thus his whole life long Ulrich, too, had been accustomed to expect that politics would bring about not what needed to happen but at best what ought to have happened long since. The image it presented to him was mostly that of criminal neglect. The social question too, which formed the whole of Schmeisser’s universe, appeared to him not as a question but merely as an omitted answer, though he could list a hundred other such “questions” on which the mental files had been closed and which, as one might say, were waiting in vain for manipulative treatment in the Office of Dispatch. And when he did that, and Schmeisser was in a gentle mood, the latter said: “Just let us first come to power!”