Excerpts from Robert Musil: Literature and Politics — Robert Musil (translated by Genese Grill)
Publisher’s introduction: “Literature and Politics presents Robert Musil’s writings on the relationship between literature and politics from World War I through World War II and elucidates his personal struggle to bear witness during the Age of Totalitarianism. In essays, addresses, aphorisms, and unpublished notes on contemporary events, Musil charts the increasing dangers to artists and ethical thinkers of extreme ideological conscription, the subtle and not so subtle changes in public and political discourse, the epoch-making events and dire existential threats of his times. Musil acts as a cultural seismographer, interrogating causes and symptoms in himself and his world, as he moves between Nazi Germany and pre- and post-Anschluß Austria, ultimately escaping to Switzerland where he and his Jewish wife, Martha, lived in exile until his death in 1942. The writings question concepts of race, identity, and nation, and untangle the complex relationship between nation and artist and between the individual and the collective, celebrating the rich and irreducible nature of individual creative work as the bulwark of a free, ethical, and pluralistic society.”
PREFACE TO A CONTEMPORARY AESTHETICS
[End of 1935 or beginning of 1936]
Princip, the student who, in 1914, with his pistol shots so enraged the venerable Great Powers that they attacked each other, was secretly a Serbian poet, and this was something from which the Great Powers have not recovered to this day; and the man who saw to it, through his spirited, but stubborn and somewhat one-sided attributes, that this War had no end, namely Georges Clemenceau, obviously had a poet living inside him—a poet who didn’t get enough air, who had become rather poisonous and who influenced the politics of his master in the direction of his own prejudices. I also know of a fairly good light novel written by Mussolini before he came to power—one that might be read in any family—and this successful statesman, despite his real fame, is now having a play that he wrote produced. Is it a surprise that he is every inch an artist, as many of his admirers assert! The German revolution, further, yielded, soon after its victory, the remarkable phenomenon of the publication of dramas and novels written by many of its leaders and deputy leaders which had not been heard of before—providing an insight that no revolution up to this time has offered. In a word, one must remind those irredeemably blind people who despise literature that even Nero set Rome on fire once, and this not just because he was mentally ill, as is maintained, but above all because he was a writer. Their respect for writing will increase if they notice that amateur writers, writing dilettantes, but also writers who for one reason or another never fully managed to devote themselves to writing, have set the world on fire.
Compared to them, the real or fully developed writers are not dangerous in any way and, aside from spiritual theft, bourgeois bankruptcy, and offences against public decency, have never done anything serious at all. The source of restlessness in the kind of people who destroy worlds is transformed in these writers to a quietly burning and nourishing hearth-flame and they make a well-ordered export business out of the adventures of their fantasy. So, if one wants to prevent revolutions, one must encourage the writing of literature; and Germany’s erstwhile revolutionary party, the Social Democrat Party, had actually put that into practice, by placing good novels in all their libraries, while having their librarians warn the workers against reading them, because these writings were nothing but opiates intended to put the revolutionary proletariat to sleep. It was admittedly a surprising success, for the party of these strictly controlled revolutionaries has been hounded out of Germany, in the most passionate fashion, by a party whose members enjoy the reading of novels to an inordinate degree—even if they aren’t the best novels—by a party, indeed, whose members even write novels themselves.
It is probably dangerous for revolutionaries to read good books or to admire beautiful pictures. Science, too, is dangerous for them; they prefer popular science, and attend lectures in educational clubs which provide them with a prospect of solving the world’s mysteries. The well-known assertion that the arts and sciences flourish in peaceful times can obviously be turned on its head, and is then still capable of demonstrating a relationship between cause and effect; for it is the blossoming of the arts and sciences which makes the times peaceful, insofar as it divests them of something whose loss puts the driving forces of history to sleep. Nietzsche has already made clear this reciprocal relationship in his comment: “no one can spend more than he has: that is true of an individual, it is true of a people. If one spends oneself for power, for power politics, for economics, world trade, and military interests—if one spends in this direction the quantum of understanding, seriousness, will, and self-overcoming which one contains, then it will not be available for the other direction. Culture and the state—one should not deceive one-self about this—are antagonists: ‘Culture-State’ is merely a modern idea. The one lives off the other, the one thrives at the expense of the other. All great ages of culture are ages of political decline: what is great culturally was always unpolitical, even anti-political.” (Note 1) Remarkably, Nietzsche forgot to include fantasy in the list of shared provisions on which both politics and culture feed, although fantasy is precisely what an adventurer, a creative writer, a politician, an historian, a philosopher and a soldier must have in common and which they must, at mutual expense on the part of these many sides, give one-sided shape to; one could even say that they all must also have a certain level of intelligence in common. But what does their fantasy amount to if it doesn’t attain to this level? Are they then devoid of fantasy? Is their fantasy stupid? Or do they have a criminal fantasy? Do they have the fantasy of bad men or that of bad novels?
Nietzsche, in making his assertion, had decline caused by over-refinement dancing before his eyes and this assertion expresses a basic rule about the division of spiritual energies, which, by the way, tends to be most attractive in its most extreme cases; this is so because in a perfect state there would be no place for the strenuous music of Beethoven, and because otherwise politics would have to disappear under perfect cultural conditions. If one returns, however, to what can actually be experienced, the above observation says nothing more than that a people cannot be simultaneously political and spiritually creative, thus happily arranging for the non-creative people to enjoy the greatest degree of spiritual freedom of action, since it says nothing at all that would contradict the possibility that a people could be, at one and the same time, spiritual and lacking in political creativity. So, we are going to investigate how culture and politics get in each other’s way: this is how, today, we might begin the preface to an aesthetics.
[…]
SELECTED APHORISMS
Every certainty sleepwalks. (Sleepwalking is the primal image of every spiritual certainty.)
It is probably true that mankind would much rather be made to feel than to think. A creative writer who assaults their thinking, provokes a counter-response of criticism and the resistances that keep the reader’s personal belief system intact.
On: the vanity of the artist: an anecdote of the well-known sort (Tag) (Note 2): in company, a famous tenor says: “A genius is always modest. There are hours when I ask myself whether I really am the greatest singer in the world.”
Well: to be the greatest singer, creative writer, et cetera, or at least (when one is young) to become that person, is a thought that may strike a chord with everyone. If someone says: I am just a small man—if this doesn’t happen through a sense of resignation after failure—it is a positively exceptional case. But the following aspect of the question occurred to me: when the answer to a question is as meaningless as it is hard to avoid, shouldn’t one conclude that the question itself has been posed incorrectly?! That “the greatest,” “the first,” and suchlike, would be the question that does service in the place of “great”? One can be great without being the greatest (see Rilke-talk scalar, etc.). (Note 3) Business and other social relations are the guilty parties.
Even bad artists have good reasons and intentions. See Volume 1 of Man without Qualities. Fürst mentions Semper as an example. Older notes on Charlemont and about an anthology—where? (Note 4)
Applause. From the beginning I have had the feeling that applause is not intended for me, doesn’t express the direct relationship between me and the people whom I have addressed; instead, I press a button and the applause comes out. In Goethe’s time, by contrast, one thought of it as follows: contact with good people or with the goodness in one’s own breast, and complemented this merely with lamentation about vacillation or suchlike. Today we see this as a social phenomenon (of course not all of us): in this too is expressed the transformation toward a new relationship between the individual and the masses.
Question: Is there a problem hidden in the way that bad artists of a given period take the good painters of the past as their models, and not the bad ones? Admittedly they are also the famous ones. The bad artists are thus also the obvious students [of their famous predecessors].
The aversion of contemporaries to the idiosyncratic has ceased to exist. The young person’s desire to be famous is a powerful driving force. The forms and contents have been lived through and used up in the meantime. It is with such simple reasoning that one could probably find an explanation for all this.
So maybe it isn’t a problem at all, but probably a peculiar and unfavorable process of history.
A loss of the quality of genius that turns into an expression of the times.
On the two addresses: all bullies and braggarts start out with the assumption that we had too much culture, that, in other words, we were already in a state of excess culture and cultural decline, while in reality we had too little culture.
In place of the maltreatment of women, we can use the example of the maltreatment of animals, as in Italy. Hard to say why that should be an obstacle to culture: as an experiment one could take this to its extreme—a certain incoherent naïveté is necessary, as with children, as, in fact, in Italy; and indeed, within a more general cultural condition, it doesn’t have, as symptom, the same significance as it did in the Middle Ages. One cannot condemn out of hand an entire people; even the errors have functional interrelations; an analogue of moral valuation of the individual will prove necessary, which can never come to any conclusion, that is, which can never be apodictic; it will be decided on the basis of frequencies and relations. In the end, a value judgment will be “set” within a whole. What happens then with the genius on the individual level and the fruitful revolution at the level of the whole?
Historical justice presupposes historical shrewdness: The latter works in a highly mysterious manner, is however in part nothing but the former. The emotions, which both drive life forward and shroud it from view, have come to rest. Up to this point it is understandable, but a little more can be added here: namely, shrewdness and justice only dare to speak about what remains firmly in the past. If someone—like myself for example—attempts to apply them to what is alive around us today, he is thought to be a freak, an outsider and an irritating disturber of the peace of the Weltanschauung.
Stehr, Kolbenheyer are not appreciated enough, complains the Völkischer Beobachter, people are still only reading Thomas Mann. Rightly so, comments Der Tag. Not one thinks of me. (Note 5)
The irreality of film is compared to that of the fairy tale. The act of disregarding the most immediate probability. It is the logic of feeling, of wishes. But today these are the wishes of middle-class people.
Intelligent [Rich in spirit] and filled with feeling [Geistreich und Gemütvoll] is a term of praise one often hears in German, without anyone noticing that they should be the same thing.
We as Translator-Volk. Our broad-mindedness is thought to derive from this and sometimes, as well, a mystical psychologem. But isn’t there also a tangible and sober explanation, one that we are experiencing right now?! German literature doesn’t suffer from a lack of important men, but time and again others take precedence over them. The others always creep over them. Those of my generation and their immediate neighbors have had to discover themselves in Scandinavian, Russian, French literature because, in this process, the German tradition had lost its own spirit. It will be the same for our successors too!
How does Lichtenberg put it? “It seems to me that the German’s strength consists preeminently in original works in which an eccentric brain has already prepared the way; or, to express it differently, he is a consummate master of the art of becoming original through imitation. He possesses a sensitivity which can pick up forms in an instant, and can play his murky music (Note 6) using all the notes given to him by the original mind of a foreigner.” About 150 years ago! And how it foretells im- and ex-pressionism!
Is that something inherited? I believe it is the fault of building one thing on top of the other, of our literature being transmitted with complete absence of spirit. We are important, but we don’t know anything about this!
Immortality of works of art, The: is their indigestibility.
Explicate this! Just like history back in the stage of pictography (look at the countless biographical novels and novelistic biographies today).
How does one most easily become a prophet? By foretelling the future? No. By pointing out the way history should follow? No. Rather, when one says something stupid and others imitate it. (It is safest to say something senseless; it will happen at some time!) (It is enough to bring a stupidity to market.)
Only for gourmets (applied to myself!): said by the sow to the other sows as she, accustomed to pig swill, finds a piece of good bread.
It is inherent in every powerful artistic movement that works are deemed good (bad) which do not deserve this. The motivating power which makes a movement also makes this happen. But isn’t it also inherent—of the essence of every movement—that its end will be premature?
Internationality of art. Is this true or not? That art always arises out of the contact between favorable national conditions with extra-national tradition. Greece. The Renaissance. Franco-German Gothic. “Modernism.” The spirit (progress, art, of its essence) is only international; national is the protective and restrictive (distinctive) aspect of art.
The fully developed Antisemite has a completely paranoid state of mind. Sees, everywhere he looks, corroborations; cannot be refuted. One must not let things go that far! The roots of antisemitism are: ignorance of the concept of objectivity. Belief that everything higher is false or depraved (lack of respect on the part of the ignorant person). Lack of the inhibition that is culture….
One strives for an ideal of the heroic spirit. One doesn’t make it easy for oneself and others when one writes. And the shameless way in which they declare writers who write like them[selves] to be great writers (spirits) is truly without bounds.
I am convinced that one wrote better German with the quill pen than with the steel-point, and with the steel-point better than with the fountain pen. When, someday, the Parlo-phone is fully developed, one won’t be able to write German at all.
The counterpart to this: idiots today already deem one a classical writer when one writes a halfway post-classical German. I don’t want to give any examples, but if I did, I would point to Stoessl, L. Frank and ... Joseph Roth. (Note 7)
The creative writer rushes ahead of political developments. (What is literature, becomes politics a little later.) In Germany they are still searching for the writer who is the expression of the political achievements; in Austria they already had him in advance of achievements: Anton Wildgans! (Note 8) The counterfeit writer of the average man who has risen to the status of absolute monarch. In him are united the philistine bourgeoisie of all parties who aspired to be heroic.
While reading George Meredith, The Egoist, German by Hans Reisiger, Paul List Publisher, Leipzig, section (page 135): “As Vernon says: ‘a nothing picked up by the vultures and bleached in the desert.’…”: I had the following impression from the style of an over-effusive time: the sentence in fact only wants to express “nothing” (perhaps, since it refers to an insignificant face, white, bright ... is also meant; but probably not, because the quote isn’t supposed to fit at all); but it surrounds the “nothing,” it drapes it, it uses it as an impetus to say something beautiful, even if it hardly has a relationship to it. While this is unbearable when treated inconsequentially, it is actually quite beautiful when carried out with talent. Appeared in 1877, wasn’t that the time of the large tulle bows under ladies’ chins? When my parents were a young married couple.
Mankind enjoys a much earlier flowering as lyric poet than as narrator; it only appears that the poems of children are closer to those of adults than the stories that children tell each other. Except if these are fairy tales, of which I have too limited an experience. It may be that the form—and this is certainly true of the fairy tale—is more easily imprinted than the form in which a story is narrated, which, even to an adult, is rarely clear. Children’s stories even have their own form. My stories were all endless.
New idiom: The elders among the students’ groups in Cologne blame the leader of the Medical Faculty because he has allowed a lack of discipline similar to that under the Weimar system to creep in among the students at lectures. Thus, it is ordained that the non-Aryan students are only allowed to sit down after the Aryans. (By the way, this ranking sequence for seating is, according to the director, an old custom—one for peasants and royalty.)
The era of the actor, said Nietzsche. The divine X and Hitler. What kind of need is behind this?
In literature, the competition between two ideals plays an important role: that of the creative writer, who gives form to what his contemporaries feel, and that of the creative writer who goes on ahead of his contemporaries.
But I love you: “What does that really mean? and ?” (A concept from the realm of physics or from another area of natural science.)
“Ach, that is complicated”
“So?”
“I don’t know anymore; I have forgotten. But I love you!”
With this simple dialogue, the world is set to rights. It is enacted daily in countless instances. And we can conclude from this that—soul and contentment, and self-consciousness, and the “closure” of the world around a human being—are not a matter of knowing.
But we can also conclude that mankind (after a while) would not put up any resistance if the apple of knowledge were forbidden once again! Possibility of a speedy descent back down the stages of culture.
(Addendum: In the long run, even this ... “I love you” is unbearable. This is how knowledge starts up again.)
Those who portray nature: who write that the chaffinch fluttered its wings and who list, with feeling, the zoology and botany of the area, in order to put themselves and the reader in the mood, proceed in exactly the same sentimentality as Herr [Government Counselor] Meseritscher, who lists who was there and which clothes the ladies wore. It is an asyntactic state of mind showing that the observer has been accepted into society. To be, for instance, a healthy human being, a lover of nature. The next step is to anthropomorphize the trees and animals. The last step: to feel oneself addressed by God (or by the gods). These are states with a minimum of reality. In general, this then leads to the necessary ratio of intoxication to sobriety. It could be, that ultimately a certain degree of intoxication was necessary; but this is the kind of intoxication which does not allow any sobriety whatsoever to be added to the next draught of purification, because the intoxication could not tolerate it. It still remains to be asked whether this behavior might be suitable for mass uprisings? For cross-country sporting events? Mankind is washed within like automobiles in a giant garage. But why shouldn’t more be achievable? Or is this undesirable?
On the quality of genius or can gods be enemies? (contradict each other?) Borchardt–Rilke, Hofmannsthal–Stehr–Musil; perhaps I have been unfair to George: the intensification of the personal contrasts with its embodiment, often conflicts with it. Then those who take pleasure in choosing the paradigm create the epochs which surpass each other. The Ur-Völker [primitive peoples] made their gods into enemies.
Secular mayflies: Stendhal was broadly correct with his prophesy that he would be famous in a hundred years. But will this fame last for longer? Is it still lasting now? So, the particular lot seems to be as follows: to be famous a hundred years later for just a few years. Then what is the point of writing, and with what intention does one write? This question is hard to answer.
Perhaps one is there merely to keep a function alive. The community turns to us on all occasions of rejoicing. Seen this way, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare are to be characterized less by their greatness than by their “times,” by their success in meeting the needs of an economic boom cycle. This fits with the way that Dante is admired—although nowadays it is impossible to understand some of what he writes—it fits with the realization that Homer perhaps never lived, and Shakespeare is quoted with all his copyist mistakes. Even the phenomenon of Jesus, provided it is not seen as an instance of the divine, can support this explanation.
That German extra-faculty lecturers and professors are instructed in Weltanschauung by 25-year-old SS-men in Outdoor Sports Camps is only different in degree from the fact that, in Austria, of five representatives of the system of continuing education [Volksbildswesen] (and x priests) there is only one representative of academia. Victory of the world riddles and similar educational concepts! (Note 9)
Slap-dash history of mankind. Sunshine follows rain and rain follows sunshine: that is more or less how the popular conception of our history goes. In the first book of The Man without Qualities I likewise called it something like ‘Slap-dash History.’ I also announced the ideas of the General Secretariat [of Precision and Soul] and of partial solutions, but these are not anything but metaphors: what are the real causes and conditions of this slap-dash approach? Probably the “emotional psychology” of the mighty, the satisfaction system of the individual, the ephemeral nature of guiding principles and suchlike.
On elegant literary criticism. While reading Peter Altenberg: is he a great creative writer? Feeling: mostly no, sometimes yes. But such books of sketches are tiresome; see Polgar. Why are they more tiresome than novels? One might expect the opposite. Is Baudelaire tiresome—poèmes en prose?
Indeed; it’s also impossible to read poems one after the other.
Ethics. My ethics has—although I like to overlook this—a “highest good.” It is spirit. But how is this different from the philosophers’ idea, which is less pleasing to me, that reason is the highest good?
Crisis of the novel. The bad conscience of the novel; it is the bad conscience of love (and of the hero. Thus, the more or less worm-eaten hero). If we add the problematic of the “hero” we have the crisis of the novel. (Note 10)
Title of a reflection: The Nation One Can Take Seriously and Literature. Inspired by an official literary history; up until now we haven’t taken any of it seriously, but now we already have to beg.
Timelessness without eternity. Don’t writers want to write for their times? Don’t they have the illusion that they are of their times, as if they were part of something that was rising up, something which makes their personal rising easier? Normally it is this way, even great talents share the time’s illusion that it is a beautiful time. Being relatively free from one’s time, is relative supra-timeliness (eternity). (Is also important for the foreword, for justification of this contemplative work in an agitated time.)
Happy end for higher purposes (Note 11): I don’t love novels wherein the hero loses his money or is otherwise struck down by fate. This novel (Tampico) is, insofar as one can judge based on the translation, the most uncultivated of all that I know of this author, but the most gripping. (Note 12) And the devil of a fellow, his hero, is defeated by a cold, bland scoundrel. If he had unmasked and destroyed him, we would have had a good old serial newspaper novel with victory to the strongest or to the virtuous; but that is not refined enough. Is it refined, then, to turn it on its head? It is not even the lowest level of refinement; it is rather the highest level of crudeness, according to my tastes. Why? If one wanted to take it seriously and not orient oneself to the bad formula, the whole thing would have to turn out differently.
I might almost say that victory and defeat would have to disappear entirely from the horizon.
But that is considered from only one side. From the other side, they would enter into another relationship with each other. It comes, then, to a further question: how does one depict successful people of action?
Have the expectations of a philosopher in the answers and the questioning of a writer! I could idealize myself like this.
Mythos of the 20th century (Note 13): A book with that title would not have been taken very seriously before. Except perhaps if this mythos were the mythos of the machine. Rightfully, unrightfully?
Nobody has taken the trouble to ask this question.
Administration of justice had, doubtlessly, become mechanized, cookie-cutter. Now there is soul in it all of a sudden: the boot camp, the isolation tank, whippings....
Question for music and psychoanalysis: Isn’t the symbolism of music the same primitivism that covers psychoanalysis?
Charitas: “Which she knew from Varenka .… And that was how Kitty wanted to be” (Anna Karenina I, 344. See also Lindner: isn’t this doubtlessly effective recipe related to the habit of the ... sects: castrate yourself, to be free of the disquiet of sexuality?!) (Note 14)
A line of development: First they ruined the theater. It has come to the point that with few exceptions one is a theater writer without being a writer. They create their own guild and there are hardly any connections between inside or outside. If this goes on, tomorrow they will speak of a film writer. One has already begun, slowly, to get used to it. (Compare Federal-Culture.) (Cultural Political Culture.)
[Stefan] George: He has taken on new importance. (But don’t forget that he was almost the only one who truly stood up for the autonomy of art.)
Serious creative writer and the normal writer. My standpoint: like genius and talent. One can be a small genius. A great talent can, on occasion, be elevated. See, for example, Thomas Mann on this subject.
Leiden und Größe der Meister (Suffering and Greatness of the Masters), p. 54, a section which provides another antithesis. (Note 15)
There were postcards of wrestlers before there was film. Moreover, also of opera singers and actors. Example of a need that has grown up amid particular circumstances.
What need? Being there, touching, preserving a flower fallen from the bouquet, museum of Matterhorn victims, etc.
Great writer. On this subject one would have to mention the increase in the publication of books between 1890 and 1930. Then it would be a matter of economic property. Indeed, today the good writer has to go into isolation again. It is an obituary in advance.
The total state and art. Is now here. State of art loving and art match-makers.
Literature is produced in bulk. Thus, it is also correct to handle it as bulk: Russia, Germany.
Hero and genius: When there was talk of Pilsudski’s genius, the newspaper called him benevolently the hero of the nation. Perhaps it should have been just hero, because hero of a nation is limiting, like when one says to a girl: “your hero”; and perhaps he was really a genius too, I don’t know: but it is good to differentiate between genius and hero. Had the Germans been able to do this, much would have been left undone.
Karl Kraus and Hitler. When Karl Kraus enters the lecture hall, the audience stays standing until he sits down. And that, despite the fact that he has fully failed. They love him “more than ever.” Hitler’s failures have the same effect of increasing the love. That is the ruinous nature of the Kraus craze. What happened had already been prepared for. They remain faithful to him, even if he doesn’t deserve it. Is this a simple matter of the effect of an on and off switch? Blind need to love? Need for illusions?
How writers are: In Herr Blaschik’s autograph collection, Paul Frank wrote: “Highest artistry: to say the deepest thing in the plainest way. Vienna, December 3, 1928”! (Note 16)
Mistaking for classics: I insert a comment about Mann by Auernheimer. (I didn’t insert it.) The members of the Mann family seem to think Thomas is one. That is, in part, to be expected of the type of the Great Wind-bellows and completes the la diva drama; in part there is this to say: even Wildgans shows a propensity to be a classic. If the better type of average man feels himself described, if someone writes like him, but in a higher style, then he deems him classic. (In the best case, one quality instead of all of them that are needful). One rumples one’s nose about the Nazis, but we saw the same thing long ago with Kernstock. (Note 17) He spoke like them; he was as unpoetic as they are. Thomas Mann may not be an expression of a party, but he is the expression of an unpolitical spiritual averageness. Thus, for everyone. Thus, the real classic.
Strange bedfellows: It is really one of the most remarkable questions: Götz “admires” Stoessl and me; Schönweise Broch and me; many Thomas Mann and me. Thomas Mann calls Nietzsche and Fontane fathers. (Note 18) And what does a publisher do? And the ideal reader? Isn’t a reader who only loves one author suspicious that his reading capabilities are not quite what they should be? That would be perfect for the next topic!
Root of the novel. A very good marker of our literature can be found already in Thomas à Kempis in the Imitation of Christ in the chapter on the avoidance of superfluous words: “Why, indeed, do we converse and gossip among ourselves when we so seldom part without a troubled conscience? We do so because we seek comfort from one another’s conversation and wish to ease the mind wearied by diverse thoughts. Hence, we talk and think quite fondly of things we like very much or of things we dislike intensely. But, sad to say, we often talk vainly and to no purpose; for this external pleasure effectively bars inward and divine consolation. Therefore, we must watch and pray lest time pass idly.” (Note 19) (German from Felix Braun. Alfred Kröner Publishers: Kröner’s paperbacks editions, vol. 126). Here is the origin and critique of narration!
Sometimes it is immodesty to not talk of one’s self, and to make objective judgments about all sorts of objective problems instead. To speak thus about the errors and mistakes of the time instead of saying that the time hadn’t understood the writer himself, making the rest but a scaffold for that. To paint, thus, yourself and your subject against the background of the times, instead of pretending that you can paint a picture of the times!
Schopenhauer remembered the soldiers who defeated the 1848 revolution in Berlin in his will. He was, without a doubt, reactionary. But is he still reactionary today, where this new spirit which he despised is regarded as the detritus of a newer one? The genius is mistaken, but in the future. At least very often. That is a classic example of his function in collectivist systems.
How the times telescope into each other: I had a million contemporaries in common with Schopenhauer, since I was born twenty years after his death. Goethe had exchanged intensive letters with him about the doctrine of colors. He suffered under Fichte. Wagner sent him the Nibelungen Ring. Nietzsche had, in his youth, dedicated the hymn Schopenhauer as Educator to him. He himself was born before the French Revolution.
It occurs to me how untimely my art is. My nation has gone from peace to war, indeed, from not being able to imagine that there could be anything for us besides peace to the abiding condition of living for war. From monarchy to republic, from republic to tyranny. From the betrayers of fatherland to a compromise with socialism, etc. The nation is utterly caught up in all of this, the nation makes everything itself, especially makes everything accord to its own principles, and it is comprehensible that it has no interest in a writer who says that something should exist beyond all these events—a condition, moreover, which they cannot even approach. The livelier things got, the more frivolous literature stepped forward. What should writers believe in then, when they can’t believe in themselves?! Russia offers the stability of a framework.
One must differentiate between geniuses, genius-supporters, and common people. The genius supporters, although very useful, are nevertheless often worse enemies of the genius than the philistines. He who could coin a new substitute word for genius, would do humanity the greatest service today.
Frau Jacobi and consorts: over the course of many experiences, it has emerged that I am an excellent touchstone for everything half good which associates itself with a certain refinement: it rejects me. Culture Club, Zsolnay Publishing House, Concordia, Frau Mahler, Academy, Stefan Zweig and Herbert Reichner. One can forecast by such figures. (Note 20)
On Frau Jacobi, above all: can a person who has no connections or merely false connections to art benefit it? In general, that can be affirmed, if this person lets takes advice. At the deepest level such a person will do harm, but only a few notice that.
Cruelty comes from domestication. The drive no longer serves its naïve aim.
Polgar: The model of a spirit-filled journalist. Since hardly any German journalists have spirit—many are clever—he is taken as a writer or even a philosopher. (Note 21)
And Fontane too, when he writes an essay for Polgar’s 60th birthday, praises him without distance or criticism. This happens in our criticism typically like this: 1) in what direction does criticism have to express itself? 2) A lyricism is allowed to increase through back pedaling in this direction. —This is simply rough and inexact work.
For example: “Polgar sees the small things, and under his eyes they become great pictures of the inner world.” “His improvisations...tenderly Japanese in their conception.” “We live in a damaged time and its lyricist...is Alfred Polgar.” “His voice, between skepticism and melancholy, between tenderness and malice, between a comprehension of earthly fleetingness and love for life, is a voice that bears witness for us, in so far as we, human beings of an intermediate time, of an infinite transition, become song.” “We discover in him really everything that we are and are not”: what a confession of failure is this last one!
Cultural politics. It would be abstruse to think that Pächt could have received the professor title for his activities amid the German attrition. Schreyvogl and Nüchtern, on the other hand, have [received] it. (Note 22) Without even questioning it, in this area the government has always done precisely the reverse of what was required (on the problem of culture, how it is suddenly becoming authoritarian).
Beloved thought: “…(Even a poor and simple man may be a rich and whole human being) streaming into the work, in the work he completes himself. The universum of his I brings concentration to the picture, from which no paths lead outward....” H.F. Krauson: Henri Julien Rousseau. (Note 23) Oblique creation of a paradox which is, in itself, not unjustified.
A difference: It is not that the genius is a hundred years ahead of his time, but that the average man is a hundred years behind it. An example: Günther—Linné. (Note 24)
Broch: He makes the philosophical novel suspect. He is wrong, but if I polemicize against him it is either a philosophical battle or I would have to personally attack. Can I criticize this novel immanently? Is a novel of ideas bad if its ideas are wrong? And from what point on? Is it bad if the form has deficiencies? But why doesn’t one excuse these?
National Socialism. A possible form of criticism: You can’t help it; you mean well; you suffered a bad premonition; but in this Germany, where the publishers are as bad as the authors and the public, after this democracy, nothing else is even possible!
I and we, 1: are the points of origin for every spiritual human being of every generation. Where are we? What should we do? What will I do in the midst of this? Etc. One may not abandon oneself to any illusions: the dead are always only instruments of the living. (On this: the telescoping of the times.)
Society pages: The Viennese newspapers are already reporting this kind of news in more or less the same style! Does that show a lack of character? No, it is too much of a (lost) character and too little intelligence. They contemned it and made fun of it: that doesn’t help them at all; they can do it!
The fate of a book reflects neither its relationship with the Volk nor with the best people, but, instead, the appreciation or rejection and the interests of a class of people of more or less average ability.
I and we, 2: For the young person, only the present is of primary importance; all of the past is a cemetery. Instead of cramming him with birth and death dates, one would first have to make him understand that his true, burning life resides in this past, in an infinitely more intimate way than it resides in the present.
New spirit: Don’t make yourself ridiculous! The spirit is since? still the same one, even if its way of presenting itself changes; the individual just has more or less of it!
Beginning and end of the highly fraught European concept of personality fall away in an age of tyranny! How remarkable. So much completion and so few origins. (But personal and collective tyrannies?)
Youth overvalues the newest, because it feels itself to be the same age as it. What a disaster if their newest is bad!
Reading. That one would one day have to describe it. Indeed, this is important for reading novels: to live in another world. World for everyone, world for few are subcategories.
Heroic: After the heroic has almost died out in art (its last representative Robert Musil, before him the Duse), it has come to Hitler. (Note 25)
On the psychology of the dream: The primary thing is the loosening of the imagination, the constant gliding, the kind of thinking which one grasps in half sleep. An emotional tendency overtakes one under certain circumstances and makes a story out of it.
Bad society. Can’t one place the development of an average person under the category: falling into bad society, namely into that of the other average people? (For example, if I had joined a student organization).
Thomas Mann. That he can praise so many writers, not just like them, is related to his success in the present; for the present loves, side by side, most of them too. Also, critics, literary historians, publishers have to be able to love much. But could there also be the possibility of loving literature itself even if one deems it badly represented! I am the extreme opposite in my criticisms of almost everything. In part that signifies an untimeliness, in part perhaps naughtiness? These possibilities present themselves: autism, negativism, fanaticism, with its varieties (system, rigidity, schizothymic components, etc.). It is true that I really seldom feel “warm,” but I can feel warm and then I do experience a loosening up; but it is also true that, for example in the case of Thomas Mann, I didn’t really alter my judgment, but just rearranged it differently. At the same time, I easily judge beginners and their ilk too favorably, feel myself non-objective, but does that go deep down?
Political questions, in so far as they play a role in Notes and Fragments (Note 26), are already divided into: power (and other condition) and collectivism-individualism. On the latter alternative:
I) It is obvious that collectivism needs the individual. Then it is a matter of differences of valuation of the individual. What is liquidated is the age of the genius. And, indeed, of the cultural. This moribund history since the Renaissance. As mountains sometimes have their highest elevations at the end: Kant, Goethe...; but the actual peaks were Hegel, Fichte, competition for the systematic totality of God. The rise in the number of published books, the Ullsteinization, also are already a part of collectivism. (Note 27) Thereby the genius is divested of his real position. Can I reinstate it?
2) But to expect the new achievement from the masses is perhaps not just mysticism after all. See the historical philosophy in War and Peace. The masses make their leader for themselves. (Note 28) One could attribute it to the concept of chance. Certain types have an elevated chance in certain situations, and out of the possible leaders, the actual one creates himself. The genius would be he who is the most “untimely.”
Architecture: Representative manifestation of a future-directed will. —Bad architecture is architecture which is directed toward a will of the past; but it can be attractive. Modern building style: present-day will, created out of the conditions, thoroughly correct as style of the times. The will of the future naturally has no means of expression save that of the mimicry of buildings, thus a very limited means and really it is overvalued by the dilettante.
While observing handworkers, etc. Politics: Of course, we intellectuals are also looking fully naively after our own professional interest when we demand culture of the state. Namely, as in a utopia of a spiritual state. The devil only knows how that would look in reality.
Worth Noticing: Around 1900 small print runs. After 1919 large ones. Apparently progress. The merchant takes control of literature, then the War Press Department, and finally the state. A consistent development.
Eternal character of literature. Is there a special one, even irrespective of an over-valuing, which is not entirely unobjectionably delimiting? Relative simplicity of conception, with strong imagery and suchlike, might promote an enduring preferential position. (The beginning is, however, decisive.)
Reading: Many people have an inclination to devalue that which they cannot reach (fox—grapes—sour!). Perhaps everyone has a tendency to do this. Forgotten books, even obscure ones, or ones not easily found at his friends’ houses, are difficult for a young person to obtain. Eulogize them to him as something that has been wrongfully forgotten, and he will develop a repugnance to them! (Why books that have fallen into obscurity remain there.)
Uncertainty and Expectation: most tender conditions. Mostly we find out ahead of time what happens in novels, but how lovely it must have been when Anna Karenina appeared in the newspaper; what will happen? How will it end? There is something to this technique. And how it has been industrialized into nosiness, a là Wallace and Doyle. (Note 29) These people would count among the outlawed in a state, were it a culture state.
And what is this aesthetic of the “what will happen?”
Repeatedly read: the phenomenon whereby Vanity Fair pleased me two times and that the third time, despite not recalling, I couldn’t read it? That I skimmed [Georg Christoph] Lichtenberg without interest and devoured him fourteen days later? Certainly, whatever is a matter of personal conditions in this is easily understood; but what is objective in a book? (Together with: I was swept away, etc., is a bad mode of criticism.)
Way of the Führer. Beginning with the instantiation of the encroachment of politics upon literature and its autonomy: how does the Führer make himself further known there? In politics, his legitimation is in his leadership, certainly not the case in literature. He isn’t even the visible expression of his times; he has already left this writer behind him. Isn’t there a political parallel in Kant?
Loerke: Isn’t this writer deeply unmusical? For he experiences music the same way I do. (Note 30)
Without nation: Do we not live just as well—for example Blei in Spain—in lands wherein we know nothing of their laws, etc., as in our own?! Observing a certain general European morality suffices to keep the individual from coming into conflict. (Note 31)
Fame. There are two fundamentally different kinds of being well-known: those whom one knows and those whom one should know. The fame of the one kind follows from natural inclinations, that of the other from the demands of culture. And that is really the difference between notoriety and renown or, expressed less archaically, between being infamous and being famous. One should pay attention to this difference; but it doesn’t happen, because the notorious want to be respected and the famous would also like to be notorious.
Eclecticism almost amounts to a light-hearted riddle if one poses the question like this: Why is it that the bad artists of every era take the good artists of the past as their models, and not the bad ones? Despite the fact that, somehow or other, it becomes clear that an imitator can find pleasure in originals and weak people can derive pleasure from the strong. This merely highlights the uncertain humanity of an eclectic person. And, also, the fact that the weaker talent must seek success where it has already been found; indeed, for such a person, success plays an even greater role than it does for those chosen by fate—this is natural. There is also bondage to the means of expression that lie to hand, which it would neither be possible nor favorable to slough off totally; and the eclectic merely falls prey to this, with all too little resistance. Giving a precise description of this eclectic, who is pure of heart, could make the narrow road of art very clear. His counterpart, the industrious artist, is different from him not so much in his ability as in the way this ability is applied. But with all this I have only touched upon the personal precondition for eclecticism and it has, in addition, a supra-personal precondition. Because it requires—only in this way is eclecticism even possible as a matter of deliberate choice and taste!—that posthumous success belongs to the important artists, that the overvalued false masters lose their attraction along with the renewal of the times, and that the natural attraction which the mediocre exerts upon the mediocre is overcome by something different. So, this actually presupposes that bad taste changes sooner than good taste; yes, it even presupposes that it changes on its own, somewhat in the way starlight emerges after the setting of the harsh daytime sun. This is that so-called historical justice, which is supposed to right itself after the fact.
Does it exist? In part, of course, it is simply an invention of the historians, who once upon a time frightened their tyrants with the observation that the history of the world was the world court of justice, at a time when the tyrants weren’t writers themselves. (In those good old days politics and culture were still in opposition to each other; there wasn’t even any such a thing as cultural politics and its possible product, ‘cultural political culture.’) Still, on the other hand, there really exists, however limited in scope, such a thing as historical justice and wisdom, and it is constantly at work. And even the usual explanation that is given of it is correct, namely that it is connected to the “distance from the events,” which, on their own, right themselves over time. What then does this distance mean?
1 From Twilight of the Idols, sect. 4: “What the Germans Lack.” — Trans.
2 A newspaper. — Trans.
3 Scalar: scientific term denoting an isotropic variable amount; a numerical value that remains the same despite transformations of coordinates. — Trans.
4 Bruno Fürst, friend and colleague of Musil’s, art historian and scholar. Gottfried Semper, influential German architect and art theorist (1803–1879). Alice Charlemont-Donath, model for Clarisse in MwQ. — Trans.
5 Hermann Stehr (1864–1940), German writer; Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer (1878–1946), Austrian novelist, playwright, and poet. — VB: A National Socialist newspaper. — DT: A liberal Austrian paper banned after the annexation of 1938. KA: Personen Register and Register Institutionen und Organe (Index of Institutions and Venues). — Trans.
6 Harpsichord music with broken octaves. — Trans.
7 Otto Stoessl, Austrian writer, literary and theater critic (1875–1936), wrote, among other things, a negative critique of Musil’s experimental novella, Unions in Österreichische Rundschau (Wien: Halbmonatsschrift, 30 June 1912). Leonhard Frank, German social-critical writer, pacifist, and socialist (1882–1961), who wrote, among other things, a screenplay of The Brothers Karamazov (1931). Josef Roth, Austrian novelist (1894–1939). His most famous novel was The Radetzky March (1932), an account of the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its outdated heroic values. KA: Personen Register. — Trans.
8 Anton Wildgans, the celebrated dramatist, lyric poet, and director of the Viennese Burg-Theater, under whose management Musil’s play Die Schwärmer (The Utopians) was rejected, was for Musil one of the chief vexations of the Viennese Culture industry and a symbol of the spiritual constitution of the country. Wildgans is for him the “counterfeit writer parading before the average man who has risen to the status of absolute monarch. The philistine ‘Bürger’ (bourgeois) of all parties, who aspired to be heroic, are united in him”. —Trans.
9 This may refer to simplistic attempts in the popular press and popular fiction to solve the kinds of problems that defeat men and women of genius. — Trans.
10 See eponymous essay “Krisis des Romans” [Crisis of the Novel]. — Trans.
11 “Happy end” is in English in the original. — Trans.
12 Tampico, by Joseph Hergesheimer (1880–1954), 1926 novel adapted into the Hollywood film, The Woman I Stole, starring Fay Wray in 1933; translated from the American by Paul Baudisch (Berlin: Knaur 1927) (= Romane der Welt [Novels of the World], ed. by Th. Mann and H. G. Scheffauer). — Trans.
13 Title of Alfred Rosenberg’s 1930 book celebrating National Socialist ideology. — Trans.
14 English from p. 244 in Penguin Classics edition of Anna Karenina, tr. Pevear and Volokhonsky, 2000. Part II, Ch. 33. — August Lindner, Christian pedagogue figure in MwQ who tries to repress his sexuality. — For “sects,” see Musil’s notes on Flaubert’s list of sects at the end of his “Temptation of St. Anthony” where Musil remarks: “Origenes [...] castrated himself” (notebook 10/66) and “Valesianer 3rd century, dismembered himself in order to avoid fleshly temptations” (notebook 10/67/19). — Trans.
15 Thomas Mann’s Leiden und Größe der Meister: Neue Aufsätze (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1935) 54, on Goethe’s career as writer: “Writer …. It is […]quite an unfruitful critical mania to differentiate didactically between Dichtertum [poetic writing, which tends to be thought of as high art] and Schriftstellertum [writing more associated with a career as writer] — unfruitful and even impossible, because the boundaries between them bifurcate through the interior of a personality, not on the outside, amid the publications. And even on the inside the boundary is fluid to the point where it cannot be distinguished. There are so many dichterische elements in the schriftstellerische, so many schriftstellerische in the dichterische, that the separation starts to look like an unrealistic obstinacy, only born from the desire to pay homage to the subconscious, pre-conscious, to that which one experiences as the truly ingenious, at the expense of the rational, relegating the rational to a position of disrespect.”]
16 Herr Blaschik has not been identified, but Paul Frank (also Paul Franck and originally Paul Frankl) was an Austrian author and film writer born in Vienna 1885, who died in Los Angeles in 1976. KA Personen Register. — Trans.
17 Ottokar Kernstock (1848–1928), Austrian writer and priest, leader of the Augustine Choir. In 1916 Kernstock was offered the position of Manager, but declined after public protest (by Karl Kraus, among others). KA Personen Register. — Trans.
18 Richard Götz (1886-1943), Austrian literature and theater critic. Ernst Schönwiese (1905–1991), Austrian writer, correspondence partner of Musil’s between 1935–37). Hermann Broch (1886–1951), Austrian novelist. “Musil saw Broch as a competitor for the primary position in the area of the modern German novel.” Theodor Fontane (1819–1898), German novelist and journalist. KA Personen Register. — Trans.
19 Book I §10: “Avoiding Idle Talk,” from The Imitation of Christ (New York: Cosimo, 2007) 8. — Trans.
20 Jolande Jacobi (1890–1973), Austrian psychoanalyst, Secretary of the Culture Club (see below), and presumably the person “who spreads culture through hosting public events” mentioned in Musil’s SDS-speech (1934) (LP, ###). KA: Personen-Register. The Kulturbund [Culture Club] was founded by the publicist and eventual Nazi sympathizer Karl Anton (Prince) Rohan in 1922 in Vienna. The writer Friedrich Schreyvogel, who also was later a Nazi sympathizer, was the secretary. In 1925, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Hans Kelsen, Ignaz Seipel, Paul von Zsolnay, Anton Wildgans, Hans Tietze, and others were “co-opted” as founders. Between 1926 and 1933, the Culture Club developed into an organization presenting lectures by and to the highest intellectual society of Vienna. After 1933 the Kulturbund was utilized by the Austrian government as a platform for the propagation of the Ständestaat “Austrian-Idea,” and eventually became an out and out tool for the cause of “making National Socialism acceptable in Vienna’s salon society.” Jewish members, like Jolande Jacobi, who had been secretary of the club since 1928, were systematically purged from the organization. German emigrants, or those suspected of leftist leanings, were not invited to lectures or readings. After the Anschluß the club was dissolved. Paul Zsolnay publishing house: founded in 1923 in Vienna. Concordia: Journalist and writers’ organization with the original goal of financial support of members in distress; later a central organ of high society (presenters of the Concordia Balls since 1863). Mahler: Alma Maria Mahler-Werfel, known as the most beautiful woman of Vienna, married to Gustav Mahler (1902). Walter Gropius, the architect (1915), and Franz Werfel, the writer (1929); Akademie der Dichtung [Academy of Literature]: On March 3, 1926, the “literary section” of the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin was founded. Although Thomas Mann suggested Musil for membership in 1931, he was rejected. Stefan Zweig (1881–1942), Austrian writer. Wolfgang Theodor Reichner (1873–1922): official in the Austrian Royal and Imperial government, Ministerialrat in the Federal Ministry after WWI, model for the bank director Leo Fischel in MwQ. Information paraphrased from KA Register Institutionen und Organe and from: Klaus Amann: Zahltag. Der Anschluß österreichischer Schriftsteller an das Dritte Reich. 2. Expanded edition (Bodenheim: Philo, 1996), 168–185.
21 Originally (until 1914) Alfred Polak (1873 in Vienna-1955); Austrian writer, journalist, and critic. KA Personen Register. Despite Musil’s distinction here between journalist and serious creative writer, he was a great admirer of Polgar’s style, and modelled his own feuilleton and small prose writings on him to some extent. — Trans.
22 Otto Pächt (1902–1988), Austrian Art historian; Musil’s friend and correspondence partner (1935–1939). Friedrich Schreyvogel (1899–1976): Austrian writer; Hans Nüchtern (1896–1962): Austrian writer and director; 1924–1938 literary director of the RAVAG (Radio-Verkehrs A. G., Wien). KA Personen Register. — Trans.
23 Unknown author, from an article in Der Wiener Tag, 10/27/1935. KA: Personen Register. — Trans.
24 Originally Hans Friedrich Karl Günther (1891–1968), German eugenicist and National Socialist racial theorist; Carl von Linné, also known as Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778), Swedish doctor and natural scientist. KA: Personen Register. — Trans.
25 Eleonora Duse (1858–1924), celebrated Italian actress, beloved of D’Annunzio. — Trans.
26 “Notizen und Fragmente” [Notes and Fragments] was Musil’s subtitle for his planned aphorism collection. — Trans.
27 “Ullsteinisierung” refers to the Ullstein publication concern that was one of the most powerful media forces of the Weimar Republic. For Musil it symbolized the industrialization and commercialization of the contemporary culture industry. KA: Register Institutionen und Organe. — Trans.
28 In War and Peace Tolstoy argues that Napoleon was not a great man, not a genius, and that his phenomenal rise to power was created by the people, by chance, and by circumstance. — Trans.
29 Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace (1875–1932), British writer (especially of mysteries), screenwriter, director, journalist, and playwright. KA: Personen Register. — Trans.
30 Oskar Loerke (1884–1941), German writer, correspondent of Musil’s. KA: Personen Register. — Trans.
31 Franz Blei moved to Mallorca in 1932 for political and financial reasons. KA: Personen Register. — Trans.
***
Robert Musil (6 November 1880 – 15 April 1942) was an Austrian philosophical writer. His unfinished novel, The Man Without Qualities (German: Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften), is generally considered to be one of the most important and influential modernist novels.
Genese Grill is a writer, scholar, and translator, fascinated with the remarkable words and images humans arrange in their attempts to make sense of the world. She is the author of The World as Metaphor in Robert Musil's 'Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften' (Camden House, 2012), translator of four editions of Musil's writing (all published by Contra Mundum Press), and also the tender, worried mother of many rapscallion and muddy-faced essays.