modernism representations of national culture - the man without qualities - central european...

4/6/2016 Modernism: Representations of National Culture - The man without qualities - Central European University Press

http://books.openedition.org/ceup/1081 1/15

CentralEuropeanUniversityPressModernism: Representations of National Culture | Ahmet Ersoy, Maciej Górny, Vangelis Kechriotis

The man withoutqualities

http://books.openedition.org/

http://books.openedition.org/ceup



1

2

34

5

Robert MusilTraducteur Sophie Wilkins et Burton Pikep. 215-223

Texte intégral

About the author

Title: Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The man withoutqualities)Originally published: Berlin, Rowohlt, vol. I (1930), vol.II (1933), and vol. III (1943)Language: GermanThe excerpts used are from Robert Musil, The Manwithout Qualities, translated by Sophie Wilkins andBurton Pike (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), pp. 28–31,575–577.

Robert Musil [1880, Klagenfurt – 1942, Geneva]: writer,dramatist and essayist. Musil spent most of his childhoodin Steyr and Brünn (Cz. Brno), where his father, anengineer, was appointed to the chair of MechanicalEngineering at the German Technical University in 1891.Between 1892 and 1894, Musil attended the militaryboarding schools at Kismarton (Ger. Eisenstadt) inHungary, and then, until 1897, in Mährisch Weißkirchen(present-day Hranice, Czech Republic). Between 1898 and1901 he studied at the German Technical University inBrünn, qualifying as an engineer. Following his militaryservice (1901–1902), he worked as an unpaid assistant atthe Technical University in Stuttgart. In 1904, he obtainedhis grammar school matriculation and went to Berlin tostudy psychology and philosophy. In 1909, Musilcompleted his doctoral studies at the University of Berlinwith a thesis on the Austrian physicist and philosopherErnst Mach. Mach’s theory that the world was to be



6

understood objectively based on sensory experiences wasoften adopted by Musil in his literary works. Between 1911and 1914, Musil worked as a librarian at the TechnicalUniversity of Vienna. When the First World War started,Musil was a journalist for the Neue Rundschau. Afterserving briefly on the Italian front, he was transferred tothe ‘War Press Service’. After the war, Musil worked as acivil servant and, from 1921 as a theatre critic, essayist andwriter in Vienna. His play Die Schwärmer (Theenthusiasts) was published in 1921, for which Musil wasawarded the prestigious H. Kleist Prize in 1923. He alsoreceived the G. Hauptmann Prize in 1929. Between 1931and 1933, Musil lived in Berlin. In 1932, the MusilGesellschaft (Musil Society) was established in Berlin,aiming to provide Musil with the necessary financialmeans to continue working on the novel Der Mann ohneEigenschaften (The man without qualities). After Hitler’sappointment as Germany’s chancellor, Musil returned toVienna, but immigrated to Switzerland in 1938, where helived until his death in 1942. Musil’s first novel DieVerwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß (The confusions ofyoung Törless) was highly acclaimed when published in1906. Many of the themes discussed in this novel, likesexuality and alienation, were explored in Musil’ssubsequent writings. Musil’s main novel, Der Mann ohneEigenschaften remained unfinished. The first two partswere published in 1930 and 1933, but the third waspublished posthumously by his widow in 1943. Musil’scomplete works were published during the 1950s,generating successive waves of critical scholarship abouthis contribution to Austrian and world literature.Main works: Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß[The confusions of young Törless] (1906); Vereinigungen[Unions] (1911); Die Schwärmer [The enthusiasts] (1921);Drei Frauen [Three women] (1924); Vinzenz und die



7

8

Context

Freundin bedeutender Männer [Vinzenz and the friend ofimportant men] (1924). Nachlaß zu Lebzeiten[Posthumous papers of a living author] (1936); Über dieDummheit [About stupidity] (1937); Der Mann ohneEigenschaften vols. I–III [The man without qualities](1930– 1943); Diaries, ed. by. A. Frisé, 2 vols. (1976).

Since the publication of the studies by Carl Schorske,William M. Johnston, William McGrath, Allan Janik andStephen Toulmin in the 1970s and 1980s, Vienna hasbecome a fashionable scholarly topic. Schorske, forexample, explained the origins of the modernist culture ofVienna through the retreat of the heirs of Austrianliberalism, the children of the bourgeoisie, from thepolitical realm — where various illiberal collectivismsthreatened the liberal assumptions of historical, rationalprogress — and into the cultural temple of the aestheticand psychological. It was a form of ahistorical modernism,Schorske contended, epitomized by the concept of Viennaas a “garden.” Another of Schorske’s interpretations,namely his perception of the emergence of a “politics in anew key,” proved equally resilient in the scholarship.Fin-de-siècle Vienna was the home not only of literarypersonalities like Hugo von Hofmannsthal and ArthurSchnitzler, composers like Arnold Schönberg and GustavMahler, or painters like Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt,but also of the pan-German and antisemitic politicianGeorg von Schönerer and the charismatic populist mayorof Vienna, Karl Lueger. After the 1890s, these twoindividuals shaped Austrian politics. The often discussedcrisis of liberalism and the rise of right-wing, conservativeand antisemitic forces in Vienna was often associated with,or considered a consequence of, the election of Karl Lueger



9

10

11

as mayor in 1897. Moreover, the growing nationalismamongst Germans, Hungarians, Czechs and otherminorities became more radical with the beginning of thetwentieth century.The emergence of mass politics in the ‘new key’ challengedthe existing cultural and political order when the newintellectual elite rejected traditional politics, and turned toa form of aesthetic modernism and the occult and,ultimately, abandoned those societal values that hadnurtured them. Yet, the youth’s revolts against theirspiritual and biological ‘fathers’ also generated anunprecedented cultural creativity and syncretism thateventually prompted the rise of modernism and modernityin Vienna, as it did in other European capitals at the timelike Paris, London and Berlin.Finally, one particular characteristic of the Viennesemodernity was its Jewish dimension. Most lawyers,physicians, and journalists as well as prominentintellectuals, art patrons and artists were Jewish or ofJewish descent. Assimilation into the dominant Austro-German culture was these groups’ preferred option, butthe rise of antisemitism in Europe and the HabsburgMonarchy prompted some Jewish intellectuals, TheodorHerzl among them, to think of various forms of politicalidentity for Jews separate from the traditional ideologies ofthe day: liberalism and conservatism.Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften powerfully reflectsthis cultural and political environment. The book tells thestory of Ulrich, a man without qualities in Vienna of 1913.The book is as much about the main character as it is aboutAustria before the outbreak of the First World War: bothUlrich and Austria are experiencing severe identity crises.Musil approached these crises — spiritual, cultural andpolitical — not only in terms of their content, but also as asearch for new techniques for engaging with modernity.



12

13

Influenced by Mach’s philosophy, Musil believed that ascientific view of the world could fulfill an organizingfunction counteracting the disruptive effects of politicalideologies. This scientism also signals his association withthe cultural critique of modernism shared by other fin-de-siècle authors like Herman Hesse, Georg Trakl and MaxFrisch.The first part of the novel concentrates on introducing themain characters and their cultural and political settings. Itis here that Musil offered one of the most lastingdescriptions of the Habsburg Monarchy as “Kakania,” “k.k.” (short for kaiserlichköniglich) and “k. u. k.” (kaiserlichund königlich) respectively. It is this expression that aptlyreflects the excessive relationship between nationalidentity and Austrian culture. Since 1867, the Austro-Hungarian Empire perfected its own brand of co-evolutionin a constantly refined process of sublime simulation andblatant gratuitousness. The Empire’s symbioticdramaturgy of Catholic and Habsburg ceremonies, theenormous cast of its century-old intricate bureaucracy withits minutely defined, painstakingly differentiated roles, therole-playing in the assimilation of Vienna’s multi-ethnictransplants from all regions of the dual monarchy, and thehistrionic excesses of representation in competition withother empires offered a problematic historical context andan anachronistic poetics of politics. In portraying Ulrich asa man from Vienna, without qualities, Musil explicitlyconnected these two dimensions of his character: he wassituated at the centre of the Empire, but felt marginal andexcluded.In the excerpts selected here, Musil described a societycharacterized by routine and stratification, that of thewaning Austro-Hungarian Empire with its manyhierarchies, categorizations and contradictions. Hesatirized impulses to invest the Empire’s national spaces



14

15

with symbolic value, as he knew that reality indicated thecontrary, namely lack of ethnic solidarity and harmony inVienna and other centers of the Empire. The historicalcontext described by Musil was permanently in flux, andthe fractured national identities of the Empire foundexpression in the identity of the novel’s main character.This tension between the individual and its larger socialunit (community and state) is also reflected in Musil’s twoalternating narrative modes throughout the novel: oneoffering a scientific, objective and detached perspective,the other posing an individualized existentialist account.These are two main ways of explaining the situation in pre-1914 Kakania, and both led to a perception of time,memory and space as distended and distorted. To this end,Ulrich’s personal life does not make sense according to thetraditional pattern of a Bildungsroman identity quest. Infact, Ulrich — like Kakania — is described through aconglomerate of layered social discourses and a collectionof commercial advertising, banal conversations,bureaucratic fixation and militaristic audacity, allcharacterizing features of the Viennese elite before andduring the First World War.Musil’s ‘The man without qualities’ can, ultimately, be readas an evaluation of the ethical and the aesthetic in theemerging Austrian national identity after 1914. Morespecifically, the novel dramatizes the attempt toaesthetically bridge the two conditions. Ulrich constantlyattempts to elevate his existence to the level of ordinaryexperience, but he fails due to the unacceptability of theobliteration of practical social values this experienceentails. The failure also points to what the Austro-Hungarian Empire was to experiment after 1918, that is,abandoning the quest for a multinational identity andreconciling with its new form of existence in a nationalstate. This was to be a state organized not around dynastic



16

17

18

The man without qualities

and religious principles but around a host of practical andpragmatic considerations and guided by the hybrid realityof conflicting claims to what constituted a modernAustrian identity.After his death Musil’s work was almost forgotten inGerman speaking countries, and his writings only startedto reappear in the beginning of the 1950s. Yet, today, dueto the ever growing scholarship on modernity, and the roleAustria played in the emergence of the modern aesthetic,art and literature, Robert Musil is constantly discussed andanalyzed. Scholars like David Luft, Stefan Jonsson andHannah Hickman in particular, describe him as one of themost important analysts of the transition from nineteenth-century idealist modernity to its more somber, twentieth-century version.MT

There, in Kakania, that state since vanished that no oneunderstood, in many ways an exemplary state, thoughunappreciated, there was a tempo too, but not too muchtempo. Whenever one thought of that country fromsomeplace abroad, the memory that hovered before one’seyes was of white, wide, prosperous-looking roads datingfrom the era of foot marches and mail coaches, roads thatcrisscrossed the country in every direction like rivers oforder, like ribbons of bright military twill, the paper-whitearm of the administration holding all the provinces in itsembrace. And what provinces they were! Glaciers and sea,Karst limestone and Bohemian fields of grain, nights onthe Adriatic chirping with restless cicadas, and Slovakianvillages where the smoke rose from chimneys as fromupturned nostrils while the village cowered between twosmall hills as if the earth had parted its lips to warm its



19

child between them. Of course cars rolled on these roadstoo, but not too many! The conquest of the air was beingprepared here too, but not too intensively. A ship wouldnow and then be sent off to South America or East Asia,but not too often. There was no ambition for worldmarkets or world power. Here at the very center of Europe,where the world’s old axes crossed, words such as “colony”and “overseas” sounded like something quite untried andremote. There was some show of luxury, but by no meansas in such overrefined ways as the French. People went infor sports, but not as fanatically as the English. Ruinoussums of money were spent on the army, but only justenough to secure its position as the second-weakest amonghe great powers. The capital, too, was somewhat smallerthan all the other biggest cities of the world, butconsiderably bigger than a mere big city. And the country’sadministration was conducted in an enlightened,unobtrusive manner, with all sharp edges cautiouslysmoothed over, by the best bureaucracy in Europe, whichcould be faulted only in that it regarded genius, and anybrilliant individual initiative not backed by noble birth orofficial status, as insolent and presumptuous. But then,who welcomes interference from unqualified outsiders?And in Kakania, at least, it would only happen that agenius would be regarded as a lout, but never was a merelout taken—as happens elsewhere for a genius.All in all, how many amazing things might be said aboutthis vanished Kakania! Everything and every person in it,for instance, bore the label of kaiserlichköniglich(Imperial-Royal) or kaiserlich und königlich (Imperial andRoyal), abbreviated as “k.k.” or “k.&k.,” but to be surewhich institutions and which persons were to bedesignated by “k.k.” and which by “k.&k.” required themastery of a secret science. On paper it was called theAustro-Hungarian Monarchy, but in conversation it was



20

called Austria, a name solemnly abjured officially whilestubbornly retained emotionally, just to show that feelingsare quite as important as constitutional law and thatregulations are one thing but real life is something elseentirely. Liberal in its constitution, it was administeredclerically. The government was clerical, but everyday lifewas liberal. All citizens were equal before the law, but noteveryone was a citizen. There was a Parliament, whichasserted its freedom so forcefully that it was usually keptshut; there was also an Emergency Powers Act thatenabled the government to get along without Parliament,but then, when everyone had happily settled forabsolutism, the Crown decreed that it was time to go backto parliamentary rule. The country was full of such goingson, among them the sort of nationalist movements thatrightly attracted so much attention in Europe and are sothoroughly misunderstood today. They were so violent thatthey jammed the machinery of government and brought itto a dead stop several times a year, but in the intervals andduring the deadlocks people got along perfectly well andacted as if nothing had happened. And in fact, nothingreally had happened. It was only that everyone’s naturalresentment of everyone else’s efforts to get ahead, aresentment we all feel nowadays, had crystallized earlier inKakania, where it can be said to have assumed the form ofa sublimated ceremonial rite, which could have had a greatfuture had its development not been cut prematurely shortby a catastrophe.For it was not only the resentment of one’s fellow citizensthat had become intensified there into a strong sense ofcommunity; even the lack of faith in oneself and one’s ownfate took on the character of a deep self-certainty. In thiscountry one acted—sometimes to the highest degree ofpassion and its consequences—differently from the wayone thought, or one thought differently from the way one



21

22

acted. Uninitiated observers have mistaken this for charm,or even for a weakness of what they thought to be theAustrian character. But they were wrong; it is alwayswrong to explain what happens in a country by thecharacter of its inhabitants. For the inhabitant of a countryhas at least nine characters: a professional, a national, acivic, a class, a geographic, a sexual, a conscious, anunconscious, and possibly even a private character to boot.He unites them in himself, but they dissolve him, so thathe is really nothing more than a small basin hollowed outby these many streamlets that trickle into it and drain outof it again, to join other such rills in filling some otherbasin. Which is why every inhabitant of the earth also has atenth character that is nothing else than the passivefantasy of spaces yet unfilled. This permits a person all butone thing: to take seriously what his at least nine othercharacters do and what happens to them; in other words, itprevents precisely what should be his true fulfillment. Thisinterior space—admittedly hard to describe—is of adifferent shade and shape in Italy from what it is inEngland, because everything that stands out in reliefagainst it is of a different shade and shape; and yet it is inboth places the same: an empty, invisible space, withreality standing inside it like a child’s toy town deserted bythe imagination.Insofar as this can become visible to all eyes it hadhappened in Kakania, making Kakania, unbeknownst tothe world, the most progressive state of all; a state justbarely able to go along with itself. One enjoyed a negativefreedom there, always with the sense of insufficientgrounds for one’s own existence, and lapped around by thegreat fantasy of all that not happened irrevocably as by thebreath of those oceans from which mankind had onceemerged.Events that might be regarded as momentous elsewhere



23

were here introduced with a casual ,,Es ist passiert…”—apeculiar form of “it happened” unknown elsewhere inGerman or any other language, whose breath couldtransform facts and blows of fate into something as light asthistledown or thought. Perhaps, despite so much that canbe said against it, Kakania was, after all, a country forgeniuses which is probably what brought it to its ruin. […]And so this reflection on the principle of psychicequilibrium leads us from the beautiful example ofBonadea1 to the sad case of Kakania. For Kakania was thefirst country in our present historical phase from whichGod withdrew His credit: the love of life, faith in itself, andthe ability of all civilized nations to disseminate the usefulillusion that they have a mission to fulfill. It was anintelligent country, it housed cultivated people who, likecultivated people all over the globe, ran around in anunsettled state of mind amid a tremendous whirl of noise,speed, innovation, conflict, and whatever goes to make upthe optical-acoustical landscape of our lives; like everybodyelse, they read and heard every day dozens of news itemsthat made their hair stand on end, and were willing towork themselves up over them, even to intervene, but theynever got around to it because a few minutes afterward thestimulus had already been displaced in their minds bymore recent ones; like everyone else, they felt surroundedby murder, killings, passion, self-sacrifice, and greatness,all somehow going on within the Gordian knot that wasforming around them, but they could never break throughto these adventures because they were trapped in an officeor somewhere, at work, and by evening, when they wherefree, their unresolved tensions exploded into forms ofrelaxation that failed to relax them. There was the specialproblem for persons of cultivated sensibilities, at least forthose who did not devote themselves so single-mindedly tolove as Bonadea: they no longer had the gift of faith or



24

credit, nor had they learned to fake it. They no longer knewwhat their smiles, their sighs, their ideas, were for. Whatexactly was the point of their thoughts, their smiles? Theiropinions were haphazard, their inclinations an old story,the scheme of things seemed to be hanging in midair, oneran into it as into a net, and there was nothing to do orleave undone with all one’s heart, because there was nounifying principle. And so the cultivated person wassomeone who felt steadily mounting up a debt that hewould never be able to pay off, felt bankruptcy inexorablyapproaching; and either inveighed against the times inwhich he was condemned to live, even though he-enjoyedliving in them like anyone else, or else hurled himself withthe courage of those who have nothing to lose at every ideathat promised a change.It was the same as anywhere else in the world, of course,but when God cut off Kakania’s credit, He did it in sospecial a style that whole nations had their eyes opened tothe high cost of civilization. Like bacteria they had beensitting pretty in their culture medium, without botheringtheir heads about the proper curvature of the sky above oranything, when suddenly things tightened up. Althoughmen are not normally aware of it, they must believe thatthey are something more than they are in order to becapable of being what they are; they need to feel thissomething more above and around them, and there aretimes when they suddenly miss it. What is missed issomething imaginary. Nothing at all had happened inKakania, and formerly it would have been thought of as theold, unobtrusive Kakanian way of life, but this nothing hadbecome as disturbing as getting no sleep or seeing no sensein anything. And so it was easy enough for the intellectuals,once they had persuaded themselves that an ethnicallyhomogeneous culture was the answer, to make theKakanian ethnic minorities believe it, as a kind of



25

substitute for religion or for the ideal of the Good Emperorin Vienna, or simply as a way of understanding theincomprehensible fact that there are seven days in theweek. There are so many inexplicable things in life, but oneloses sight of them when singing the national anthem. Itwould naturally be at such a moment that a good Kakaniancould have joyfully answered the question of what he wasby saying: “Nothing,” meaning that Something that couldmake of a Kakanian everything he had never yet been! Butthe Kakanians were not so stiff-necked a people andcontented themselves with a compromise, in that everynationality tried only to do with every other nationalitywhatever suited its own purposes. It is naturally hard inthese circumstances to empathize with grievances notone’s own. After two thousand years of altruistic teachings,we have become so unselfish that even if it means you or Ihave to suffer, we are bound to take the part of the otherfellow. But it would be wrong to think of the notoriousKakanian nationalist rivalries as particularly savage. It wasmore a historical process than a real one. The peopleactually quite liked each other; even though they did crackeach others heads and spit in each other’s faces, it wasdone as a matter of higher cultural considerations, as whena man who normally wouldn’t hurt a fly, for instance, willsit in court under the image of Christ Crucified andcondemn another man to death. It is only fair to say thatwhenever their higher selves relaxed a bit, the Kakaniansbreathed a sigh of relief and, born consumers of food anddrink as they were, looked with amazement upon their roleas the tools of history.Translated by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike inRobert Musil, The Man without Qualities (NewYork: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), pp. 28–31 and 575–577.



Notes1. Bona Dea (“the good goddess”): Roman deity worshipped only bywomen on the Calends of May.

Auteur

Robert Musil

© Central European University Press, 2010

Conditions d’utilisation : http://www.openedition.org/6540

Référence électronique du chapitreMUSIL, Robert. The man without qualities In : Modernism:Representations of National Culture : Discourses of CollectiveIdentity in Central and Southeast Europe 1770–1945: Texts andCommentaries, volume III/2 [en ligne]. Budapest : Central EuropeanUniversity Press, 2010 (généré le 06 avril 2016). Disponible surInternet : <http://books.openedition.org/ceup/1081>. ISBN :9786155211942.

Référence électronique du livreERSOY, Ahmet ; GÓRNY, Maciej ; et KECHRIOTIS, Vangelis.Modernism: Representations of National Culture : Discourses ofCollective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe 1770–1945: Textsand Commentaries, volume III/2. Nouvelle édition [en ligne].Budapest : Central European University Press, 2010 (généré le 06 avril2016). Disponible sur Internet :<http://books.openedition.org/ceup/985>. ISBN : 9786155211942.Compatible avec Zotero

http://www.openedition.org/6540

modernism representations of national culture - the man without qualities - central european...

Documents