The Man Without Qualities, Volume 2

by Robert Musil

  —But now tell me, finally—Ulrich asked, having already become impatient—what kind of letters these are that you wanted to show me. They appear to be love letters. Did you intercept Gerda’s love letters?

  —I wanted to show you these letters. You should read them. I would just like to know now what you would say about them. Fischel handed Ulrich the whole packet and sat back, preoccupied meanwhile with other thoughts, gazing into the air through his pince-nez.

  Ulrich glanced at the letters; then he took one out and slowly read it through. Director Fischel asked: —Tell me, Herr Doktor, you used to know this singer Leontine, or Leona, who looks like the late Empress Elizabeth; may God punish me, this woman really has the appetite of a lion!

  Ulrich looked up, frowning; he liked the letter, and the interruption bothered him.

  —Well, you don’t have to answer, Fischel placated him. —I was just asking. You needn’t be ashamed. She’s no royalty. I met her a little while ago through an acquaintance; we found out that you and she were friends. She eats a lot. Let her eat! Who doesn’t like to eat? Fischel laughed.

  Ulrich dropped his gaze to the letter again, without responding. Fischel again gazed dreamily into the firmament of the room.

  The letter began: —Beloved person! Human goddess! We are condemned to live in an extinguished century. No one has the courage to believe in the reality of myth. You must realize that this applies to you too. You do not have the courage of your nature as goddess. Fear of people holds you back. You are right to consider ordinary human lust as vulgar; indeed, worse than that, as a ridiculous regression from the life of us people of the future into mere atavism! And you are right again when you say that love for a person, animal, or thing is already the beginning of taking possession of it! And we don’t even need to mention that possessing is the beginning of despiritualization! But still you have to distinguish: being felt, perhaps also being sensed, is called being mine. I only feel what is mine; I don’t hear what is not meant for me! Were this not so, we would be intellectualists. It’s perhaps an inescapable tragedy that when we love we are forced to possess with eyes, ears, breath, and thoughts! But consider: I feel that I am not, so long as I am only I myself, I-self. It’s only in the things outside me that I first discover myself. That, too, is a truth. I love a flower, a person, because without them I would be nothing. The grand thing about the experience of “mine” is feeling oneself melt away entirely, like a pile of snow under the rays of the sun, drifting upward like a gentle dissipating vapor! The most beautiful thing about “mine” is the ultimate extirpation of the possession of my self! That’s the pure sense of “mine,” that I possess nothing but am possessed by the entire world. All brooks flow from the heights to the valleys, and you too, O my soul, will not be mine before you have become a drop in the ocean of die world, totally a link in the world brotherhood and world community! This mystery no longer has anything in common with the insipid exaggeration that individual love experiences. In spite of the lust of this age one must have the courage for ardor, for inner fire! Virtue makes action virtuous; actions don’t make virtue! Try it! The Beyond reveals itself in fits and starts, and we will not be transported in one jump into the regions of untrammeled life. But moments will come when we who are remote from people will experience moments of grace that are remote from people. Don’t throw sensuality and supra-sensuality into a pot of what has been! Have the courage to be a goddess! That’s German! …

  —Well? Fischel asked.

  Ulrich’s face had turned red. He found this letter ridiculous but moving. Did these young people have no inhibitions at all about what was exaggerated, impossible, about the word that will not let itself be redeemed? Words constantly hitched up with new words, and a kernel of truth hazed over with their peculiar web. —So that’s what Gerda’s like now, he thought. But within this thought he thought a second, unspoken, shaming one; it went something like: —Aren’t you insufficiently exaggerated and impossible?

  —Well? Fischel repeated.

  —Are all the letters like that? Ulrich asked, giving them back to him.

  —How do I know which ones you’ve read! Fischel answered. —They’re all like that!

  —Then they are quite beautiful, Ulrich said.

  —I thought as much! Fischel exploded. —Of course that’s why I showed them to you! My wife found them. But no one expects me to have any clever advice in such questions of the soul. So fine! Tell that to my wife!

  I would rather talk to Gerda herself about it; there’s a lot in the letter that is, of course, quite misguided—

  —Misguided? To say the least! But talk to her! And tell Gerda that I can’t understand a single word of this jargon, but that I’m ready to pay five thousand marks—no! Better not to say anything! Tell her only that I love her anyway and am ready to forgive her!

  The telephone again called Fischel to business. He, who all his life had been only a solid clerk, had begun some time ago to operate on the stock exchange on his own: from time to time and with only small amounts, the scanty savings he possessed and a few stocks belonging to his spouse, Clementine. He could not talk to her about it, but he could be quite satisfied at his success; it was a real recreation from the depressing circumstances at home.

  ***

  Ulrich is driven to see Gerda. He hadn’t spoken to her since the hysterical scene. Conscience impels him. But he finds Gerda very much taken up with Hans Sepp.

  Ulrich seeks to be conciliatory with Gerda and to be kind. She pays him back with her involvement with Hans Sepp, which Ulrich perceives as intellectual felony.

  Arnheim has become the ideal, the messiah, the savior. The spiritual man of intellect for our time.

  Effect of the nabob.

  Leo Fischers belief in progress is part of the problem of culture.

  Hans Sepp stimulated by the conflict of the national minorities.

  “German-ness” as a vague reaction to the cultural situation.

  Ulrich receives a Stella shock [Goethe’s play—TRANS.] (letters!) for Agathe.

  Gerda is “beyond” love. Also against religious mysticism. In future: conflict indicated in letter.

  ***

  Double orientation: Mysticism - Antidemocracy

  ***

  Soon after his visit to the Fischels’, Ulrich was again driven to see Gerda. He had not seen her since the sad scene that had taken place between them, and felt the desire to speak kindly and reasonably to her. He wanted to suggest that she leave her parents’ house for a year or two and undertake something that would give her pleasure, with the aim of forgetting him and Hans Sepp and taking advantage of her youth. But he found her in the company of Hans Sepp. She turned pale when she saw him come in; the thoughts flew out of her head, and even though she looked composed, there was really nothing at all in her that she could compose; she suddenly felt nothing but an emptiness surrounded by the stiff, disciplined, automatic motions of her limbs.

  —I don’t want to ask your pardon, Gerda—Ulrich began—because that isn’t important—

  She interrupted him right there. —I behaved ludicrously—she said—I know that; but believe me, it’s all over.

  —I’ll only believe that everything’s fine when I know what you’re up to and what your plans are.

  Hans Sepp was listening with the jealous eyes of one who does not understand.

  —What makes you think that Fraulein Fischel has plans? he asked.

  Ulrich remembered the letters that Leo Fischel had shown him. Since then he had had a lot of sympathy for this young person in whom mystic feelings raged. But at the same time, seeing him reminded him, God knows why, of a skinny dog that wants to mount a bitch much too big for him. He collected himself and, ignoring his question, asked Hans to explain to him what he wanted. —That is to say, he added, he would like to know what he had in mind to turn his ideas into reality when he was not talking about “human being,” “soul,” “mystery,” “ardor,” “contemplation,” and the like, bu
t about the future Dr. Hans Sepp, who would be compelled to live in the world.

  Ulrich really wanted to know, that was sincerely to be heard in his question; and in addition he had managed to invest it with a Masonic choice of words that astonished Hans, and Gerda’s glance rested on Hans with a challenging reproach. Hans scratched his head, because he did not want to be rude and felt embarrassed. —Those aren’t my ideas—he finally said—but those of German youth. Ulrich repeated his request to show him how they could be made reality. Hans thought he knew what Ulrich was getting at: whenever Hans courted Gerda with such ideas, the words were like the texture of an orchestra through which, as voice, the sight of Gerda hovered; could one tear that apart and separate it? —You’re asking me to make a political treatise out of a piece of music! he said.

  Ulrich added: —And the language of politics, of trade, of arithmetic, is the language of the fallen angels, whose wings have long since become as vestigial as, say, our caudal vertebra. It can hardly be articulated in such a language—is that what you mean? But that’s exactly why I would like to know what you’re thinking of doing. Hans gave him the simplest answer to this: —I don’t know! But I’m not alone. And if several thousand people want something that they can’t picture, then one day they’ll get it, as long as they remain true to themselves!

  —Do you believe that too, Gerda? Ulrich asked.

  Gerda wavered. —I’m convinced too—she said—that our culture will perish if something isn’t done.

  Ulrich jumped up. —My dear children! What concern is that of yours? Tell me what you’re proposing to do with each other!

  Hans set about defending his view. —Don’t talk down to us! It’s quite certain that this hugger-mugger called culture will perish, and everything else along with it—and nothing will prevail against it but the New Man!

  —But Hans overestimates the significance of love between people, Gerda added. —The New will also leave that behind.

  Hans was really a melancholy person. An emerging impurity on his skin could put him in a bad mood for days, and that was no rare occurrence, for in his petit-bourgeois family care of the skin did not rank very high. As in many Austrian families, it had stopped at the state it had reached before the middle of the nineteenth century: that is, every Saturday the bathtub or a wash trough would be filled with hot water, and this served for the cleaning of the body that was forgone on all the other days. There were just as few other luxuries in Hans Sepp’s family home. His father was a minor government functionary with a small salary and the prospect of an even scantier pension, which in view of his age was imminent, and the principles as well as the conduct of life in his parents’ house were distinguished from those at the Fischels’ about the way that a cardboard box carefully tied together with knotted bits of string, in which the common people pack their belongings for a journey, differs from a magnificent valise. If he looked around, all that Hans Sepp could claim as a distinction was his German name, and it had taken him a long time before he learned to regard it as more than a gift of fate, on the day that he became acquainted with the view that being German meant being aristocratic. From that day forward he bore a noble name, and it is not necessary to waste words about how nice it is to know that one is personally distinguished; one should rather write a whole book about how one ought to want not to be distinguished but to distinguish oneself; but that would turn into a book that would be absolutely and completely unsocial.

  The titles Count and Prince pale in comparison with the title Hans Sepp. No one today values belonging to a secret clan whose signs are an ox’s head or three stars. On the other hand, to have a German name when one had German sentiments was, among lower-class youth in Austria, a rarity. The friends through whom Hans had been introduced into the movement were named Vybiral and Bartolini. It had about it something of a symbolic cover, the miracle of the manifestation of the Holy Spirit, when one was named Hans and in addition had the family name of Sepp.

  Hans Sepp felt himself one of the elect, and in the absence of a bathroom he acquired the ideal of racial purity. But within this ideal there is enclosed the ideal of purity of principles. In this way, even in his early years, Hans Sepp came to fight for all the commandments of morality, which is otherwise the privilege of the incapacity for sinning, and is a position in which one has no desire for any further changes. It is a quite remarkable thing when young people become enthusiastic about virtue: a union of fire and stubbornness.

  This union is facilitated if there is the possibility of combining the affirmation with a powerful negation. But in order to arrive at the real significance of such a negation, one must leave aside what is accidental, in this case the racial aspect, which is the form in which it expresses itself though not its sense.

  But that was just the smaller and less serious advantage. Far greater is the advantage that a young person who adopts a negative view of the world makes the world into a comfortable nest. It is well-nigh impossible to demonstrate something as notorious as the meager intellectual content of one of those novels that among the German public pass for profound; it is much easier to make this credible by saying that these novels aren’t German, or at least it penetrates reality more easily. One should not (on the whole) underestimate the advantage of saying no to everything that is considered great and beautiful. For, first, one almost always hits upon something true, and second, determining it more precisely, and the process of proving it, are in all circumstances extremely difficult and, in terms of having any effect, futile. In Germany there was once the ideal: “Test everything and keep the best”; this ideal ended in filth and scorn; it was the ideal of the dignified life and the cult of the home, which, in a time of obligatory specialization deprived of the aid of interconnections, had the same inner consequence as the purposefulness of a snail: I’ll hitch a ride on anything. One must never forget this impotence into which we have put ourselves if one wishes to understand the idealism of maliciousness and evil. When the change of worldview to which every new outfitting of humanity is called stalls and becomes impossible, almost nothing remains but to say no to everything; the lowest point is always a point of rest and balance.

  ***

  Closing one’s eyes and gently touching one’s leg is the simplest picture of the world one can have.

  ***

  So there are two main lands of pessimism. One is the pessimism of weltschmerz, which despairs of everything; the other is the contemporary kind, which exempts one’s own person from the process. It is quite understandable that when one is young one would rather consider other people bad than oneself. This was the service that the German worldview performed for Hans Sepp. He did not so soon experience the futility of ordering his ideas, he could free himself from everything that oppresses us by calling it “un-German,” and he could appear ideal to himself without having to restrain himself from besmirching / scorning the ideals of everyone else.

  However, the most remarkable aspect of Hans Sepp was still a third thing. But one should not be deceived by this manner of presentation, taking one thing after another; in reality these reasons were not layers swimming atop one another; any two of them were always dissolved in a third. And what needs to be added to the two reasons named above can perhaps be called, in a correspondingly broad sense, “religious.” If one were to have asked Hans Sepp whether, in school, he had believed in the teaching of his catechist, he would have answered indignantly that the German must cut himself loose from Rome and its Jew religion, but it would also not have been possible to win him over to Luther, whom he would have characterized as a pusillanimous compromiser with the Spirit of the World. Hans Sepp’s religion did not fit any of the three great European religions; it was a plant of unintelligible ancestry run to seed.

  This wild religious nature of nationalism is very peculiar.

  Break off: This would be the place to develop the possibility of the Other Condition as something like the component freed by the weathering of religion as well as of liberal heroi
sm.

  Perhaps as a supplement to Lindner religious development. But in contrast to Professor August Lindner, God had never once appeared to Hans Sepp. In spite of that, or indeed perhaps just because of it, because he could not bring his vague feelings of faith and love into the solid framework of religion, they were in him especially wild.

  ***

  One cannot say whether it is a remnant of bisexuality, the remnant of another primitive stage, or the lost natural tenderness of life, this need to make a community out of people. To feel every action inwardly, that is, a symbol…

  Of this kind his love for Gerda, which is really less for the woman than for the person.

  His misunderstanding of Ulrich, whom he considers a rationalist because he does not understand the difficulty of what Ulrich has an intimation of, and because he makes things easy for himself through community, insolent youthful hordes, etc.

  ***

  (Definition after Unger: Symbol. View sees in those events we cannot incorporate in any order (e.g., those of the Pentateuch) images to represent the higher world that our consciousness cannot grasp in any other way.)

  ***

  Excitement also in the air as the guests left Diotima’s house! Gusts of wind ran behind waves of darkness; the streetlamps reeled in their light on one side and let it flow out widely on the other; the leaves in the canopies of the trees pulled and tugged at their thin stems, or suddenly became quite still, as if on command; the clouds played high above the rooftops with the pale fire of the moon like dogs playing with a brown cat; pushed it, jumped over it, and when they retreated, it cowered with arched back, motionless in their midst. Ulrich had fallen in with Gerda and Hans Sepp; all three were surprised that it had already got dark.

  Feuermaul had had an effect on Gerda. It seemed to her horribly ruthless that one is an “I,” calmly mirrored in the eyes of a “you.” She applied it to the whole nation. To universal love. It was a new emotion; how was it to be understood? One is no longer linked with just one other person. That’s basically always horrible; one can’t stir on account of the other; in spite of love one must feel a lot of resentment. It’s also quite unnatural; the only natural thing is getting together to raise a brood, but not for one’s whole Hfe, and not because of oneself, or love. Individual love seemed to her like a snowman, hard, cold; on the other hand, if the same thing is spread like a blanket over the whole field … she imagined life beneath the pure soft snow cover that hovered before her, warm and protecting every seed. —Strange—Gerda thought—that I happened to think of a snowman! But then she still felt only the other, distant, soft, melting—even if that was not quite the case! —Loving many, many people! she said to herself softly. And it was like: Sleeping with everyone; but with no one so brutally to the very end, but only as in a dream that is never quite clear. Kissing everybody, but the way a child lets itself be stroked. To say something nice to everyone, but not giving anyone the right to forbid her saying it to his enemy as well… She felt happy and anxious as she portrayed this to herself, like a tender being that has to slip through rough hands until the hands, fumbling beside it, also learn to be tender.