Excerpts from the Project titled The Spy — Robert Musil (translated by Genese Grill)

Translator’s Note: These sketches from 1919/1920 for a novel project Musil called The Spy, include a number of plot lines and characters that appear ten years later in the first volume of The Man without Qualities (1930). These texts are Musil's notes for further development, and are thus in many instances a sort of shorthand or reminder to himself about connections to plans and thought processes the reader will not understand. This is not the style in which he would have presented the final prose, though we do see him playing with language, metaphors, and syntax in these rudimentary drafts, and he has often kept phrases and full sentences as is in later more polished versions. Some of the conceptions and characters don’t appear until even later, either in the second volume (1933), or in unpublished drafts for the novel’s continuation that Musil was still working on when he died in 1942.  In the years directly following World War I, Musil, who had succumbed to the widespread initial enthusiasm for the war and who had experienced the battlefield as a mystical experience of heightened aliveness, was trying to understand the War’s origins. What did it mean that human kind was capable of such violence? His first novel, The Confusions of Young Törleß, had already struggled with the way a person could seem perfectly socially upstanding and actually be a thief, how an elegant woman (the young cadet’s mother for instance) could seem proper and untouchable, but turn into something quite different behind closed bedroom doors. The War only further convinced Musil of the potential of human beings—himself included—to be both brave men and cowards, reformers and destroyers. He called this the Theorem of Human Shapelessness and the drive to understand it was a primary impetus for his magnum opus.

In this early draft for a novel, related to some other sketches from these years (including one mentioned in these notes called The Priest), Musil tries to deal directly with the relationship between violence and love, saintliness and cruelty, and introduces a character, the sex murderer Moosbrugger, who will figure in The Man Without Qualities as a representative of the demons and nightmares that Musil suspects are more or less present in all human beings. Here, Alexander Unrod, who becomes Achilles in the later sections (and who will later morph into Anders in other versions, finally to become Ulrich in the later novel), becomes obsessed with Moosbrugger’s case, and tries to save him. I personally find this obsession and identification with a brutal and misogynist sex murderer rather disturbing, but I suppose that is the point. None of us is innocent.

In these draft sketches for a novel, we also find a brutal section (published by Musil in a different version as a short story) called “The Inn at the Outskirts,” which reveals Achilles’ violent feelings toward the sort of woman Musil would elsewhere identify as “passively sensual”—she tends toward nymphomania and does not take responsibility for her desires, but rather lets things happen to her as if she had no agency. She is a goad to masculine anger and violence and one does not have to look long into Musil’s biographical situation to find her model in his mother, who carried on a decades-long affair that infuriated her son. The gruesome tale is, by the way, revealed later in this sketch to have been a dream, or nightmare. As we read in the later novel, “If society as a whole could dream, it would dream Moosbrugger.” 

Over the years of writing and conceiving, this violent strain in the novel is softened, as Alexander becomes Achilles becomes Anders becomes Ulrich, as Musil himself settled into a real happy love for a real woman, his wife Martha (herself a sensual passive type if there ever was one), and becomes more and more reconciled to his mother’s infidelity. While no one knows precisely what Musil would have done in the conclusion to the novel, in later drafts he seems to minimize Ulrich’s identification with Moosbrugger and it seems likely that he would not have had Ulrich orchestrate his escape from jail. If one reads the English version of the posthumous papers, one may think that these drafts (placed at the end of the 2nd volume) were written after the published material; this is not, however, always the case and many of the scenes about Moosbrugger or Ulrich and Agathe’s journey were sketched out, like these drafts for The Spy, decades before.

It is not clear from these sketches, but the plot line of The Spy deviates greatly from that of the later novel in that the male protagonist actually becomes a spy in Galizia, where he proceeds to prostitute his sister as part of the scheme. The sister, who is named Agathe (goodness) will be familiar to readers of The Man Without Qualities. She is already sketched here in nucleo—though with some differences.

The long-estranged sister of our hero Achilles in this early version is the older, not the younger, of the incestuous siblings. Martha was 6 years older than Robert, but it is also worth considering that in an even earlier version of this reunion, the male character meets his mother, not his sister over his father’s corpse. Some theorists (Walter Fanta, for one) see the sibling incest motif as a displacement of a mother-son erotic tension or relationship too difficult to acknowledge.  The siblings in this version commit a crime (as they do in “The Criminals” section of the later novel), but here the forgery of their father’s testament is more explicitly laid out. Their flight from the law and their fear of discovery, these plot lines that are relegated to the drafts over the decades, are already sketched out here.

While in the later novel, the story of the siblings’ meeting at the “house of the dead,” where their father has died, occurs much later in the book, and their travels to Italy and consummation only appear in the unfinished drafts of the novel, here the sibling reunion occurs simultaneously with the Moosbrugger trial and with the appearance of a circle of reformers and idealists around a woman called the second Diotima (whom Achilles recognizes as the woman from the “Inn on the Outskirts” nightmare). As in the later novel’s “Parallel Campaign,” these patriots of Austro-Hungary are vying to create some sort of action to parallel a German jubilee.  The story of Clarisse’s madness and journey, including a seduction that is left out of the later novel, is also simultaneous with these other plot lines. As Fanta and others have pointed out, over the decades of writing the novel, Musil exponentially displaced the sibling love affair, its consummation and climax (along with its inevitable guttering out and disillusionment) further and further into the future, into the realm of the possible. While the psychoanalysts argue that this displacement was necessary because Musil could not deal with his feelings for his mother, I see it rather as an aesthetic-mystical reflex: by putting off the inevitable consummation, and the completion of the book, Musil sustained the timeless moment of the Other Condition in a garden of perfect longing. 

Text Source: http://musilonline.at/musiltext-der-mann-ohne-eigenschaften-6-moe-6-der-spion-1919-1920

The Spy (1919-1920)

1. Alexander Unrod

At the psychiatric clinic of the university, there was a man under observation whom they called Franz. He was a carpenter by trade, came from Styria, had spent four years in insane asylums because of a sex murder and had been released as cured. For two years afterwards, he eked out his existence doing honest work, wandered throughout Europe, read much in his free time, proclaimed himself a theoretical anarchist, and did no one any harm, aside from two bricklayers with whom he “engaged” at a construction site. He himself used this term from the realm of dueling, for ever since the conflict began, he had been reading books about combat and student tracts and harbored a secret enthusiasm for chivalric fellowship, student codes of honor, and freedom, for swords crossed on green fields and on trophy chalices. But when the two men began to fight with him about a petty matter, he was suddenly appalled, as if it were a conspiracy, and beat them senseless with his incredibly strong fists and threw them down two floors, where they remained lying with broken bones. At the trial, he got several months in jail, despite his protestations, and he was never again free of a dull, powerless feeling of having been treated unjustly.

Of the two sex murders of which he was now accused, he denied the one decisively and admitted to the other outright. But he attempted to change the charge to manslaughter. He had been threatened by her and had then finished this “female person” off out of hate. He vigorously denied being mentally ill. He would rather be hanged than go back to the insane asylum. The court-appointed psychiatrist maintained his soundness of mind at the time of the act; but the Defense demanded an academic opinion in light of his earlier hospitalization.

Thus did Franz Moosbrugger come to the clinic to untangle a question of life and death. When he was admitted, he was still quite moved by a few statements the Defense had made about him during the trial. Victim of circumstances, of inadequate education, good capabilities led astray and the like. At the clinic, he comported himself exemplarily, quietly and with military discipline. The sick people—he was placed in the same room with a few paralytics in various early and middle stages—made a strange impression on him. He subjected them to intelligence examinations and, without considering that they were ill, rejoiced in his superior skills in reading and mathematics when the doctors sometimes gave them all little tests. He asked for books and was also allowed to purchase some himself; his parlance was enriched by a number of medical expressions. He would have been happy, had these easier circumstances not awakened in him the desire to live again, and therewith the desire to be declared insane. For he did not want to be sick on the same level with these people with whom they had put him, and jealously guarded the appearance of his intelligence (he did not want to have any defects of intelligence).  He had his own concept of his illness and tried to convince his doctors of it. It was a thoroughly romantic conception of a sort of sick soul in which he believed and which he set forth in conversations with Unrod. The doctors, after having listened to it two or three times, no longer responded to it, which irritated him, and drove him to grouse a little. It also called up an old perception of his, that all doctors and especially psychiatrists are incapable, cut-purses, and in no position to recognize a case that is more than stereotypical. With that, he accepted the aggravation of his situation and submitted himself with the resignation that his life had taught him, inwardly chewing on his wrath.

Seven weeks before his execution, Moosbrugger had his first visit from Alexander Unrod. It gave him a curious pleasure. The large, handsome, young man, who had just stopped by for a moment on his rounds and exchanged a few insignificant friendly words with him, had touched him in his loneliness as if he had been a person from his hometown. Something broke open in him, warmth, admiration; in his head it was moist and soft and comfortable like the air in a laundry room and sometimes something incomprehensibly radiant broke through this gentle undulation. An unending sensation of surrender came over Moosbrugger; he thought of his murders with satisfaction, about these dirty, faithless, female creatures, whom he pushed away in hate once more in his memory, while a great, good clarity from a premonition of spiritual kinship with this man streamed around him. A quiet, beautiful world without battles. 

When Dr. Danner came to Moosbrugger’s room on his last evening inspection, Moosbrugger strode up to him with a military stiffness and asked who the elegant, strange man who had visited him was. Hans v. Danner, the youngest assistant in the clinic, was a friend of Alexander Unrod’s. He was a long, soft man, protégé, son of the astronomer Danner (who had taught with Alexander’s father for several years at the same university), a somewhat vague mind, fashionable, liked to complain about his field, declared the reigning system for psychiatric classification to be miserably inexact and only enthused for cerebral-anatomical experiments. He was a bit ridiculous in this regard, but precisely because he was himself dissatisfied by the scientific activity around him, he was the only one who approached Moosbrugger with some—even if affected—human interest. 

As Moosbrugger stood before him and asked his question, Danner looked at him, astonished at his excessive familiarity, but nevertheless replied to the question and said to him that it was the adjunct professor of philosophy Dr. Alexander Unrod. “Of philosophy?” said Moosbrugger, amazed, “a very elegant gentleman. Perhaps—I mean merely, if I may allow myself a submissive request—will the Herr Doctor come here again?” “What do you want?” asked Danner. Moosbrugger became embarrassed. “I have only allowed myself a submissive request. And if the Herr Doctor would have the goodness, to tell the Herr Doctor, perhaps he will come here again. The gentleman must be a very good, elegant man, the Herr Doctor….”

Dr. Danner let his glance glide over the criminal with the lofty indifference of a busy doctor who does not pause under the eyes of a sick man; then he said casually, “Well, I’ll see if it comes up,” patted a paralytic who stood nearby jokingly on his cheek, and continued his rounds.

But that entire evening, it felt to Moosbrugger, until he fell asleep, as if a candle might be burning somewhere in the dark room. Perhaps it was a memory of his mother’s small hut and his childhood with this poor day-laboring woman. He had not seen her for years before the trial. She had reached her hand out to him. He knew that she wouldn’t make any sort of fuss about the life of a person like himself. Then she declared, to bail him out, that he had fallen on his head as a boy, and the like.  

“There are two schools of thought in the evaluation of such a boundary case. If your hearing and examination had occurred in Würzburg, you would have been let off on grounds of insanity; here you will be convicted. Understand this. The scholarly evaluation is not quite sufficient, but it is the best that we have.” So spoke Unrod to Franz.

Unrod, Alexander. Alexander Unrod is taking on his case, and comes thereby into conflict with the academic authorities and the ministry. He is at that critical point in his career as lecturer, where one is not yet rigid about what one has accomplished and still feels the limitations of the merely scientific. The case will be like Damascus to him. He doesn’t do much. Just sits across from him, looks at his hands, lets him talk, of “Demon—Sin—Woman” and the like.  

2. On the Day Before the Execution

Maybe the real reason he hated women was that he loved them too unconditionally. The expression of every face or body could provoke him. He never felt his higher essence resonating. (Note 1)

Sometimes the picture of the journeyman carpenter stood on his writing desk…bushy walrus mustache, furrowed brow. On the day before the execution, he visited him once more—he sat on the edge of the bed—the large hairy hands—spit on the floor. “The only thing I can say to comfort you is that a few years more or less don’t make much difference.” “If I had only made it before the judges once more,” groaned his immortal soul, tormented by incomprehension.

For the rest of the day and night, he tore himself…away from the imaginings. It was unpleasant for him to think that the prison priest sat nearby now and that the fear of death carried out its destructive work. He tore himself away, friendly and hard, and only the execution remained for him…

3. Execution

Even in the city it was a morning glimmering with dew when Achilles got in a car and drove out to the prison. The sort of early morning time when one could not grasp what either guilt or error was.  When everything has only its own particular force. As they led him out, Achilles saw that his eyes searched for him.  But he didn’t have time, for Moosbrugger was already grabbed by the assistants and restrained. With an involuntary parry of his enormous shoulders, he shook them off, then he seemed to reconsider, spit, held still as they grabbed him again. Achilles felt a mild nausea, a queasy powerless feeling, a disappointment that was neither pleasant nor unpleasant—a purely suspenseful disappointment, as if a slimy medicine, that one found disgusting, had quickly been swallowed. 

In the house of the dead (Note 2) the same feeling, like when one was alone in the house as a child, that one had to do something. 

On the way back, they are stalled before a royal automobile with a prince. Three honks. If one yells at the chauffeur, he barely registers a response with his shoulders. And he’ll get a tip anyway. So powerless is man.

4. Costume Ball

Out from under the impression of the fire department exercise emerges this stronger one of the despondency one feels about the encroachment of the judiciary into the integrity of a human life. Which is why the families of a hanged man seem disgraced. Achilles feels something of this himself. And it flows preveniently into his general agitation.

Agathe is older than Achilles. As old as one is now.

Costume ball. No, we won’t go together. She readies a costume, about which he is not allowed to know anything. He gets there before her. In tails. She comes: in checkered pants, etc. With a reddish wig. On the arm of the Vice Consul Advisor, who is courting her (also in tails).  — It is really outrageous, Achilles feels. At the same time, he feels as utterly cast out as a rejected lover. He observes the gestures of possession in the face, the shoulders, in the patent leather shoes of the other man. The idea of abandonment comes to him, a factor in his future life. — The other idea is the charm of disguise and comes from his sister’s wig and costume. Her face is the same and yet her whole appearance is as if dipped in the atmosphere of dreams. Something cannibal-magical in disguise.

Three in the morning: foyers, steps filled with pairs and groups. Like bees hanging on umbels. He walks through them, irritated about his tails, at the same time possessed by the muted loin-du-bal magic. A student addresses him — Herr Professor — idolizes him; spectacles with a costume, a woman’s bottom, an old woman’s face. His girl, somewhat lugubriously sloshed and reproachful; he doesn’t know what he can add of significance. — You’re all so nasty, so nasty, she says.

5. Achilles out of his Time

Develop Achilles from out of his time, the time before the war. The time that did not know death. Automobile racing, flying, all kinds of sports that contrasted with the most concentrated aliveness. Transgression of pacifists, to say: You met him in the bordello.  While nowadays it’s a betrayal of confidence. And the people continue their existence so idiotically. Sister, insane people, espionage, that was Achilles’ dissatisfaction. He already believed he was a pathological man. He already knew all of the human impossibilities that the war exposed beforehand; that was his abnormality.  Now he recognizes the man who is both hero and racketeer at once, and that again is his abnormality. 

Connect directly to the execution. All people stared at death in those days, when they had the chance. At its banality. For what were the experiences one wanted for oneself? Tennis whites and a brown arm. A car, etc. 

The death of such a person, for whom society is responsible in a certain irresponsible way, can create the decisive shattering for Achilles. He had hardly even begun to know him.

6. Moosbrugger’s Confession

The breasts of a twelve-year-old girl are still only form, volume, they don’t mean anything yet. The body: if one embraces it, one grasps the bones right away. That can’t please anybody. It is nonsense, that I gave in to my lust. What I mean, to take this woman apart, the one I have in my hands here, this one I can undress and dress. He was always too shy; he didn’t know how to act with women; almost a sex murderer out of tenderness.  They had verified this stuff about the little girl afterwards, confession after the conviction. Achilles has to leave, because the priest comes.

7.The Man without Conscience

Achilles loved women in middle age, also older unmarried women—house-wifely faces, blasé lines along their mouths, noses and eyes. Everything broadened a bit by life. Instead of the narrowness of the purely erotic type, these women had something about them of the multifariousness of other things. This was a preliminary stage.

One must, since it is a matter of an abnormal erotic relationship, say something about the normal kind. First of all: Achilles has absolutely no psychological interest in women, nor does he care for the cult of making his experiences into a sophisticated philosophy. He is, like so many sexual men, anerotic. He lives unsatisfied, with the feeling of an inadequate expansion of his true being, and the means of venting some of this occluded spite—is woman. And from puberty on, one always had some sort of love, fantastical longing. 

Achilles. The man without conscience… In fact, he has none. He has no time for it. Isn’t conscience a symptom of indeterminacy? Well, certainly every determinacy possesses a higher indeterminacy. And on this path one can as little say what the last thing is, as one can say whether the highest number is even or odd.

Practically speaking however, very high grades of the one and the other are always connected with the alternative qualities. With a falling down on one’s face or a refusal to move away from a spot. Both are inharmonious. But the harmonious man is not at all recommended in and of himself as the highest. He only creates another link in the problem.

To describe human beings: Achilles: human beings have so many so-called random qualities, auxiliary reactions that can influence their fate, but that have nothing to do with their selves. These qualities hang on him much more loosely; he has never thought about them; why and wherefore he has them; they are really foreign to him and irrelevant, although they often determine his external fate and even participate causally in the creation of his essence. The practical bonhomie of theoretical cold-sharp people—there are even important people, for whom most of what they do is without relation to who they are. On the other hand, good fellows with ridiculous ideals, “moral requirements” and the like, “their passions go beyond them.”

Also, this is one of the preconditions: the individual’s inability to master (intellectually) this time. Friends often wonder somewhat disrespectfully about Achilles: why does he stick to this rather limited experimental psychology. He does so, because it provides a feeling of certainty at least in one respect. And because he—also in the face of many deceptions, to which poets succumb in relationship to the value of emotions—sees that perceptions are the crucial factor for the value of the emotional life.

Thus: one can’t resist the love for this intellectual development that shoots wildly out into so many directions, but one also cannot incorporate it into one’s self. Achilles is therefore broken down out of power. Absolutely not something decadent, for his whole being is strength, seizing, grasping. Only: the object that he sees is precisely greater than his strength. He has no social sense, but only because it seems intellectually suspicious to him; he’d like to have it out of opposition to the grass-eating country squire, idiotic automobiles, etc.

School. Wrote an essay against patriotism, as it is taught, how it disavows Austrian defeats, how it wants to transform one single success in Germany, experienced by even the strongest as a shattering, into a constant state of being. A child understands this sort of nonsense very well. Is expelled. His father sends him to Huyes. Petty mercantile bustling at such institutes! Fills him with an international contempt. He remains abroad for university too, Germany, becomes a psychiatrist (in one personal case—Clarisse—one still doesn’t know what is good, what is ill), doesn’t achieve anything special. His father dissatisfied with him. Writes: Your sister Agathe has gotten married…In your sister Agathe’s marriage—more’s the pity—things are not as they should be…He only has this one sister, hasn’t seen her since childhood. When he sees her again now, she is at first a strange woman. They both are in agreement, however, to make the most of the amusing situation.

8. Achilles Arrives

During these days, Achilles remembered an old Friesian farmer. He had often observed him at the small island beach. He was so strange. At least eighty. With a black peaked cap. Bowlegged. In the evenings he fetched his calf from the grazing field. It pulled him this way and that by its chain; but he steered it patiently into its stall. Once he saw him creep up the ladder to the straw bales. Awkward, but determined. He straightened the linen tarpaulin up there.  And then Achilles happened to speak with him once. There was snuff smeared across this face with its white mustachios. “A typical boor,” thought Achilles. A limping piglet hopped about merrily in the dung heap. “It’s stiff,” said the farmer, and named an illness that Achilles did not understand. “We’ve been caring for it for four months, but it isn’t getting better.” The farmer spoke the way one speaks of a wayward child. How remarkable, this love, Achilles felt, even though it is only being raised to be slaughtered. — Then they talked about the world situation and Achilles was astounded, how finely and tenderly the old farmer spoke, how he said what every educated man said. He thought of the Italian people. Where did he get this from? Is one born with it? A shiver came over him, from the human, from what they had in common; for how small the distance is by which the superior individual rushes ahead.

Achilles thought of these impressions during his time with the delinquent. Also this: how much bon sens! What a good fellow, etc. One small aberration and one has already passed into the realm of the extreme. —

“Do you believe they’ll pardon me?” he asked when saying farewell. “We hope so,” said Achilles. During the train ride, he knows: he is being killed now. He saw that one other time and visualizes it now. Achilles doesn’t get along with his father; that’s why he’s not there during the illness; but Agathe is.

Achilles arrives. The back way. He followed his memories. Entrance from a crooked lane. A crooked house, one floor, stall and servants.

The question immediately arises of whether he wants to go see the corpse right away. Resistance, to do so all tattered from the journey. Feeling that he’d never had before, it would be unsuitable to storm right in. Lets himself be led to his room. Changes clothes. Doesn’t know how his sister will receive him. Suddenly gets the idea of putting on black and white pajamas. Looks like a gigantic Pierrot. Meets his sister like this—she comes into the adjoining room—and they go to the corpse. Half-darkness, odor of flowers. The two tall people stand before the corpse, small and stiff. He has been adorned with all his medals and dressed in tails in accordance with his wishes. The thought enters Achilles’ mind: we have to return the medals; I will certainly forget. “Remind me,” he bids Agathe. He decides to put the miniature medals, the ones that his father rightfully owns, on the dead man. Supper. He presides, where once his father sat. They look for the other medals, and this starts them searching through the house. In the night, adjoining room; one speaks and hears through the doors. They look for the medals even in the night and search through the house. In the morning, he calls to Agathe when he hears her. Agathe left her husband on the occasion of their father’s illness. 

The old man didn’t do any more scholarly work in the end, only collected. The house is a connoisseur’s. When Achilles is called away, he leaves Agathe there. They want to sell the house along with its inventory, if they can find a collector. After a certain time, that idea is abandoned and the sale is relegated to a regular agency; they plan to meet again afterwards.

He is called away by a telegram from Clarisse. Gustl is in a crisis. Adjunct professor. Librarian. Sinks more and more into passivity. This is the crisis, according to Clarisse. He remembers the tension immediately. He feels “called”. Days like those spent in Seis. Finally, Clarisse suggests that they go away together, to compel Gustl to feel something intensely. Achilles has the sense that something is off here. But since he finds himself mixed up in the motive, he remains powerless. 

They travel to Venice. Old Casa Petrarca. Old maître d’hôtel. Separate rooms. Achilles is not in a hurry with the sexuality. Clarisse becomes stranger and stranger; suddenly she gets the idea: I must go to Rome. She leaves Achilles a note and departs. 

Now turn to Clarisse, her journey, etc. She is committed to a hospital in Rome and experiences the events that happened in Munich in Rome. Achilles picks her up and only now are we told that she tells him this. In Venice a recurrence of the madness. Clarisse is fetched from the gondola. Achilles telegraphs Gustl and travels to Vienna. There a meeting with the agents and then, only after everything is settled, Agathe arrives.

9. Clarisse’s Journey to Italy

She is sad that Nietzsche did not love this city. She looks for the house where he lived. In this way she arrives for the first time at the thought that she has her own mission. (Beginning with the north, saving the world; then she travels to Venice.) Also, the feeling that the most wonderful treasures of the world are here. She doesn’t manage to really enter the museums, where this impression would have been degraded by the real materiality; her raptures drive her away earlier so she always keeps this fantastical consciousness.

She feels how her body is breaking apart beneath her. The ceaseless diarrhea—a tooth has a cavity and unsettles her ceaselessly—on her hand a small wart is growing. —Precisely this drives her to increasingly intense emotional tension, just as, just before the goal, one’s legs carry one on only by virtue of will.

The evening sky orange up to its heights; black and feathered in front of the trees. 

The luxury of the lofty gardens; up upon walls that are five to eight meters high. The enormous gates, the high windows of even the tenements. They are in the Via 20. Settembre and in the Ludovici quarter, a wonderful mixture of sea and mountains. Light, ambrosial, strong.

At first glance, this city has nothing petty bourgeois about it. Everything is filled with energy, haste, noise. The automobiles race through the narrow streets, the bicyclists are life-threatening and glad.

Clarisse experiences a city of her own temperament for the first time. In the night she cannot sleep, because the people sing couplets, scream, caterwaul. She is fully electrified by it. She gets diarrhea from the September heat. She tells Achilles all of this. It is a charming condition: one is fully emptied out, light, feathered. Languidly aroused. 

10. Second Journey with Agathe

What is an execution when compared to an operation? He returns with another man, who is horrified. As they come to the paved streets, the car shoots so fast that they don’t speak anymore. Trees are pulled up as they pass, sometimes the speed shoves one’s glance through a hole into sand. Pines…

The trip over. Sea sickness. Erupting awareness of a terrible passion for each other, because one sees the other, cares for the other, in kinship, with open mouth, vomiting. The whole ship an orgy. Ancona. Exhaustion. Taken for a married couple, room with a bed for two; one doesn’t want to refuse it; fear of almost being pursued, the sweetness. The horror only on the way back from Rome. The smoothness, the streets like ravines with green window shutters. That older feeling of being martyred. 

That was the first journey. On the second, with Clarisse, he remembers it. In Venice, where Clarisse was committed on the trip back, meeting with Gustav. Somewhat fat belly, intense solidarity with Clarisse. Driven back to Vienna; meeting with Agathe, beginning of the espionage story. The inner city like a ball of yarn wound round the Stefan’s Dome. Gray-yellow darkness, air like down feathers.

On the journey: they don’t really do anything; they only suffer fear that one could accuse them, and their desire. Somewhere a memory of Esslingen. Museum, first floor. He sits at the window, mirroring nothing, reflection of the room. If one bends closer however, then first the darkness rises up from all sides, then the church, the jagged black houses with their bonnets of snow. The man: go, look around. Achilles feels an inexpressible connection with him. Dostoevsky-like. She laughs and gives in voluntarily. 

First journey: otherwise, it is boring; they travel as man and wife. Nothing else; only in the hesitancy that one must overcome internally. They travel without passports. Mornings in Budapest. Discussion with the lawyer. The square before the parliament: like thin plates of ice, something breaks beneath their feet; wind gusts sweep it clear of people; the requisite exertion makes the difficulty of merely existing palpable. Impatience to get to the train. First ten minutes before leaving, resistance against orderliness. They follow some sort of feeling and purchase second class tickets; some sort of agreeable association with black leather. Gratuity, alone. Everywhere they are taken to be a young married couple. It is dull; Agathe lays down. It was lovely; white expanse like a sea, meter-high snowy woods, thick cushions of snow upon the fir branches. Achilles wakes Agathe up; this white-black landscape, perhaps white and secretly bottle-green, plunges through her eyes—beautiful, she says, presses his hand—and melts back into sleep; he stares at the foreign region, looks in the darkness of the compartment at Agathe, who lays on her side, shoulders and hips like hills, mysterious…

Morning near Fiume. Moist-hot air through the opened window. Mottled flanks of the tunnel into which they plummet. In Fiume, rain, storm.

A person on the train says, the steamer left early this morning; someone else: it will still be there. Path over the harbor square: the storm turns their umbrella inside out. — Laughing on the cobblestones, the rain soaks through their clothes and they wade with wet shoes. Walk in the sunshine, palms, a street laid down in a ribbon of loops.

Moosbrugger is simply embarrassed at his execution. Execution like a fire department exercise. The solemn phrases at the end do not move Achilles. He nods politely and vaguely while leaving: feels that it may be inappropriate. First when he looks in his chauffeur’s face does he notice a difference from brightness and warmth in his surroundings as compared with earlier. The face seems completely hard to him, he sees each single beard hair. A man, who was there for journalistic research, whom he had invited to drive with them and had forgotten, climbs in. He remains sitting on the right out of some vague feeling. Five hours of a rural road, then emerging city streets. Inns, people in black coats and shirtsleeves. Achilles feels an indistinct contemptuous hate for these people.

11. Achilles’ Father

Achilles’ father had left his fortune to the siblings in equal parts. Agathe’s husband would now inherit this, while she had already begun thinking of divorce. What can one do? Agathe can—in expectation of a fictive inheritance from an uncle—agree to waive her legal portion and cede it to Achilles. All this as if before her marriage. During the marriage she only received an annuity and the personal pledge of her father to her groom can be voided. 

They only need the testament and a transfer of rights. The notary who officiated for the genuine former testament is dead. One can have seals made abroad. The conditions are favorable. 

Agathe is the one who thinks it up. She is just unfamiliar with the details of the legal framework. Only out of a fully natural feeling of: not wanting him to get anything. Achilles feels: woman is a stranger in this world (not the ambitious, career woman). As one knows, one doesn’t get anywhere with ethical arguments. The act may be good morally; only socially is it bad. So, he allows the internal preparations to proceed. Practicing writing like his father did at that time. Remarkable discoveries while doing this. Agathe imitates their father’s writing exquisitely.

What attracts both of them, especially Achilles, is: this banishment for ever from the bourgeois world. With one small secret act. For one commits this forgery as if for oneself alone, inside one’s own four walls; it doesn’t hurt anybody as long as one doesn’t make use of it. If one does make use of it, then the criminal part has already happened so long ago that one is not really a participant anymore. That is the difference between theft or murder.

They looked at each other and both felt that they could just as easily do entirely other secret things together. At least Achilles entertained this thought.

12. Inn on the Outskirts

At twelve midnight, no matter what night, the heavy wooden gates of the entrance are closed and two arm-wide iron rods are put in place behind it; until then a sleepy, rustic maid waited for late guests. Fifteen minutes later, a constable, who has watched over the closing time of the inns, makes his slow, expansive rounds. At one a.m., coming from the military barracks, the approaching triad of a patrol emerges out of the mist, echoes by, and becomes fainter again. Then for a long time there was nothing but the cold, damp silence of these November nights; only at three a.m. the first wagons from the countryside start coming. They clang and clatter noisily along the pavement; wrapped in scarves, numb from noise and the morning chill, the corpses of the coachmen sway behind their horses.

That was precisely how it was. And on a night like this, just before closing time, a couple wanted a room. The maid seemed to know the gentleman; first, without rushing at all, she closed the gate, laid the bolt in place, and then led the way without asking any questions. First there was a stone staircase, then a long windowless hallway, whose loose tiles wobbled under one’s soles. At its end, without causing the guests any concern, a ladder with few rungs reached up to a small foyer leading to three rooms; their doors stood low and brown around the hole in the floor.

“Are the others taken?” The old woman shook her head, while she opened one of the rooms and illuminated it with her candle; then she stood with the light raised high and let the guests enter. She didn’t often hear silk petticoats rustle here, and the scurrying of high heels that shied away in fear from every shadow on the tiles seemed dumb to her. Mulishly and bluntly, she looked the lady who had to go past her right in the face. The lady nodded at her with abashed condescension and must have been perhaps forty years old or even a bit older. The maid took the money for the room, put out the last lights in the corridor and laid down in her own chamber.

Afterwards there was no sound in the whole house. The light of the candle had not yet found the time to creep into all of the corners of the miserable room. The strange gentleman stood like a flat shadow at the window and the lady, awaiting uncertainty, set herself down on the edge of the bed. She had to wait for a torturously long time; the strange man did not move from his place. If up until then everything had gone so quickly as to not be remembered, now every movement was stuck in tenacious resistance, letting no limb loose. He felt, this woman awaited something from him. That he open her bodice—: That would be like when one opens the doors of a room. In the middle there stood a table. Around it sat the man, the son. He could have thrown a grenade or torn down the wallpaper in shreds. With the greatest strain he finally managed to wring at least one sentence out of the tenacious resistance: “Did you really notice me right away, when I looked at you?”

Alas, it worked. She couldn’t control her impatience any longer. She had let herself be led astray, but one ought not believe that she was a bad woman. In order to preserve her honor, she had to still find him enchanting. The blood that rose to her throat in fear and indignation plunged headlong to her hips. He felt in this moment that it was utterly impossible to take a bird in the hand. And this naked skin shall press against his own naked and unprotected skin? His breast shall fill with warmth from her breast? He tried to put it off with jokes. They were tortured and fearful: “See this miserable stump of a candle. This bed is filthy. They don’t change the sheets here every time. Perhaps someone with the pox lay here only an hour ago. We aren’t proud; no, we’re not, are we? You’re plump. Stout women lace up their feet. With their shoes. And their flesh spills out over the top a bit and then there’s a faint inimitable odor. A faint odor, that exists nowhere else in the world.”

She said: he must be a poet; now I understand his strange behavior. Later I will impress upon him the effect of a distinguished woman. She began resolutely to undress; she owed it to her honor.

He was afraid; he knew; I can never manage this leap over, to come in contact with this completely unknown person.

Moroseness arose in her; also fear. What if she had fallen into the hands of a shameless rogue? She didn’t know him. The lady, who had not given her name, began to have regrets. She stopped undressing. But a warning told her, it will be better when we are farther along.

The thought: “start it moving!” tormented him. Like a child’s toy. Then another windowless wall of disappointment stood before him, until the whole thing shattered in fury.

And the second torment was: She is pursuing me. How did she coax me here?! What does she keep saying?! What does her skin matter to me?! I stand here like a tree and can’t move and can’t protect myself. I am a tree and she wants to do something with me. His eyes moved this way and that like a dog on a chain.

And she felt that she was being unjust to him; mustn’t he mistrust her, not knowing her? She wanted to tell him that Leopold was a good person. Then Achilles heard the meaningless phrase, “He who loves, is young.”

In the same moment her arms hung around his neck. “Beloved, beloved, let your eyes be; you look so tormented and so noble!”

Then he asked in extreme despair: “Do you want Musil? Musil-musil? Or perhaps you would prefer Walzel…?” She understood this to be technical language from men’s talk. She didn’t want to embarrass herself. She played along. The tip of his tongue touched her lips. This old means of communication between humans; she knew the sorts of brows that spread above such lips. She slowly made her tongue wide and pushed it forward. Then she pulled it back quickly and laughed mischievously. Her mischievous laugh had already been famous when she was a child. And she said, taking a chance, perhaps influenced by some unconscious association of sounds: “…I prefer waltzing…”

But in this moment, he bit her tongue off. It seemed to him to take a very long time until the teeth were all the way through. Then he felt it thick in his mouth. In the meantime, the poor unhappy woman was a pale, bloody struggling mass spinning around a high, hoarse rising tone, whirling around the tumbling torso of a sound. The rungs of the ladder bent magically beneath him; the dark hallway through which he fled had no end; but he was not afraid.

13. The Problem of Criminal Insanity

Achilles cannot find the problem of legal insanity as boundary problem discussed anywhere. In conversation, another professor says to him, “there is a Doctor X, whose specialty this is; perhaps you should go see him.” “Well, one should be able to read something by him; that would give me a better picture.” “No, I think he hasn’t published anything. Perhaps here and there in a journal. I met him in a café. One never finds specialists like that among us; perhaps they make an attempt. Men, who know—you understand—how many feathers, according to the calculations of Scholasticism, the angels have and how many the archangels. Or what the influence of the familiarity with apes has had on European literature and painting. We don’t know of any; but that is quite remarkable, for if we may presume this familiarity also for classical times, sometime—perhaps in the time of the Troubadours—this experience must have been new for northern Europe and that must have made a strong impression and if not, wouldn’t that be stranger still?”

Achilles only half-listened, as soon as he saw that he wouldn’t get any precise information; but there was something in the vague weaselly face that seemed earnest to him and that gave him the impression, a half hour after the discussion, that he had just spoken with an eccentric, who merely was wearing an upstanding bourgeois intellectual disguise.

Nevertheless, it was an indication of the unusual condition in which Achilles found himself, that a few days later he really did go to see Doctor X; his scientific sense of self would otherwise have contemned this contact as impure. One can call it narrowmindedness or perhaps the pride of a perfectly trained young warrior. 

Achilles reasoned that a man like this would certainly still be sitting in the coffee house at two p.m., therefore wouldn’t wake up before eleven o’ clock. Achilles couldn’t imagine what a man whose life’s content is understanding the question of criminal insanity does or how he might spend his day. He knows the older literature on the subject and the little that had recently appeared; perhaps he loiters around the libraries, to be informed by the new articles, and squanders the rest of the day in a sluggish petty bourgeois life shared with small business people and innkeepers of the neighborhood and in apartments with two, three rooms with no baths. Or his field of interests could also be very broad. There are these sorts of persons, who read through whole universities, who demonstrate a sharp critical judgment even in conversation, without achieving more than a few short specialist essays in their whole lives, disproportionally insignificant. — In the face of this indecisiveness, Achilles was satisfied that he was so certain—as remarkable as this seemed—that he would find this man at home at eleven in the morning. He would either already be awake or he would be driven out of bed by the urgent ringing of the doorbell.

While Achilles waited for the effect of his reckless ringing, he felt how high he stood, in a smooth four-cornered prism of a house, five flights up in the air. He balanced on his own will, with his palms held akimbo, and was happy that he had not come by car, but—following a whim—in an old carriage with clattering windows that smelled of damp leather like a fencing hall. As the door opened, without anyone having asked or looked out, he stood in his visiting suit before a small, greasy man in shirtsleeves and trousers. He took him for about forty, forty-two years old and noticed that he had a large, bald skull with a wreath of bushy hair around its lower part. 

Since this was Doctor X and since he was fully unselfconscious, Achilles soon was sitting across from him in vigorous conversation, after Doctor X had put on an old regimental doctor’s jacket and had made some coffee with an old camping stove. Why coffee? The man eats for the whole day, first eels, which he fishes himself into his mouth. The sharp hooks require care of the lips and a prudent chewing. That creates secretion, which is very important for someone who stays up nights.  Sometimes he gnaws on a bone instead. Then comes milk soup with vegetables and bread with drippings that can only be digested in this way, followed by a refined polish of strong, black coffee.

Old codger. Medical doctor. But Achilles had not seen a sign board. Doesn’t practice. Only here and there legal opinions. Is splendidly oriented in all branches of the theory. Speaks for an hour and explains everything to Achilles that he wants to know, complete with citations from the literature. Only then does he ask him why he wants to know all this. Whether he is working on the relationship with… (some logical principle)? Achilles says: to save people. Then Doctor X says: if I had known that I would not have given you any information. That’s nonsense.

Only the individual is strong (despite his miserable existence, he thinks of himself as strong); that’s why he has never practiced medicine; caretaking disgusts him. He doesn’t even help the bohemians in the coffee house. If you are sick, you are isolated, he says. Boasts that he is an expert witness for a mass murderer. Is proud, how much depends on his theory and shows Achilles how one can always successfully argue for responsibility in every case. He is surrounded by photographs of his victims and fetches more from the cabinet. Memories of famous trials. He speaks with particular tenderness about the ones that ended in death sentences. Quasi: that one or this one almost escaped me. With men it is a sort of rivalry, with women a battle of sexual guile. He triumphs as representative of his theory. — Fakers? — not a trace of them. Only recalcitrant borderline cases.

When leaving, Achilles thanks him earnestly: just the same, I will always regret that Moosbrugger doesn’t have you as an expert witness. In response: Society needs strong and healthy individuals (or something like that. The law must be wielded rigorously. Our nation is surrounded by enemies). This banality is pleasant to Achilles, despite himself, as if cold water were poured into the bath before one got out. He visits him once more, before he becomes a spy, in the hopes of winning him over and having him in reserve as an expert witness, in case the whole thing fails.

14. Achilles at this Time

This problem of criminal responsibility: total Dickens! Achilles, in the hope of winning the Doctor over for Moosbrugger, brings him along. The assistant doctor and then also the resident priest form a Dickens-council.

To gain time for this, tell erotic stories. After awhile one can also tell some about the Doctor.

Some author or other in 414667 invokes as punitive cause the exaltation of the value of the laws. First of all: therein lies the connection with the World War! Secondly: then the Doctor can be exposed in his mortal mediocrity, which allows for his convictions. 

He could however also act out of hate for particular intellectual formulations, similar to the conception that rests upon the people’s awareness of the law.

The priest, with his scholastic education, must however triumph in the end, when he hears these unwieldly distinctions.

An essential peculiarity of public thought, thus of the nations, thus also a cause of the War, lies, by the way, in this unwieldiness—especially visible in the Liszt Seminar lecture.

On the other hand, the sexual experiences of Moosbrugger effect Achilles.

Then opposing moral examples are needed. A family man. Describe Achilles’ last beloved as very moral or very immoral and him in the oppositional phase.

Achilles has two lovers. (Like every young man who has money.) A singer, frigid and voracious. She loves him, because he understands her desires to eat. He tolerates her because her frigid cynicism amuses him. Everything sexual is of the least importance to her. This is a character for later. She is thin, dirty (perfumed and lazy). Already filled with longing in her poor childhood circumstances.

The second lover is a respectable lady. Sentimental. Longs for a family. Wants nothing more than to be happy with her own husband. But can’t help herself, because she becomes immediately aroused. Is lustful at every stimulus and melancholy at heart. Often morose. Then once again filled with accusation and mistrust that she is being abused. In this mood, she has a squalling, blaring tone.

15. Seduction

Describe how a seduction like this happens. The maids have the day off. Walther is suddenly called into the city. Achilles feels the signal. Clarisse thinks the same thing. They both know. They will play the piano. Clarisse begins. Achilles waves goodbye to Walther from the window. Clarisse suddenly stops playing, comes to the window. Walther can no longer be seen. She plays some more. Achilles looks out the window. Clarisse stops playing again, comes into the front room; he hears how she puts the chain on the door. He turns around, is silent, hesitates. She plays some more. He goes to her, lays his hand on her shoulder; she pushes it away with her shoulder. “Rotter,” she says, and plays. He knows she wants to be pulled down off the stool. He feels stifled by the thought. Goes into the room. Searches for an occasion. Before he thinks of one, he says, “Clarisse!” It just comes out of his chest. Or he mumbles it. She stands up obediently and is next to him. His legs don’t hold him up; he throws himself upon the sofa. In this moment, she throws herself onto his lap; her arm-lizards slither around his head and neck. She pulls her arms, without being able to separate them. She has tears in her eyes. Hot air comes out of her mouth and burns the phrase: “Master, master, master!” into his chest. Then everything that held is broken. “Walther doesn’t deserve you!” he says; it is not right, is absurd, but before his eyes her veins tremble like a gate, their souls crash together like bulls and they both experience it like a decision of enormous ethical magnitude. Neither Achilles nor Clarisse keep back their words any longer, nor their faces, nor their hands. Their faces press together, moist with tears and sweat, nothing but flesh; all the words that they seek rush beyond each other, as if they were spilling out upside down out of two years of marriage, the lasciviously hardened words only come later, unmediated, almost meaningless and incomprehensible at first, They have stood up, everything is so slippery that gliding together doesn’t make any sound at all.

Clarisse pulls her hat from a nail, storms away; he with her. Wordless. Where is she leading him? (In differentiation from the woman who is broken down after coitus, she is angry, feels demeaned.) Zoo, rococo pleasure house. Once more there.  This time with words and confessions. In which the subsequent visions already are present. This time he is fully cold afterwards and hard with regret. Lets her go back; doesn’t concern himself with how she gets home; runs away. 

When he comes back, he finds her with Walter. She is angry with him, but they belong together. 

Later he remembers the expression in her eyes: frenzied, insane. Then it happens again one more time and then he goes away.

16. Evening at Clarisse’s and Walther’s

Achilles spends the evening with Clarisse and Walther in the small house that they have rented in the Weinbergen. The married couple is making music. Achilles sat in the garden and listened to how the torrents of sound alighted between the trees. Suddenly he asked himself: Why am I not jealous. He saw the open window, felt the masses of sound that pressed into its frames and welled over them, and imagined he could see the two faces stiff with passion and the two bodies moving next to each other in ecstasy. 

He knew that he and Clarisse had succumbed to an occasion. He hated Walther and quickly imagined he stood right behind him, that he could rip his shirt from him and stick a knife in his breast. He saw his jaundiced skin, the sunken shoulders and the filled-out pit of his stomach that he knew so well from swimming. He could have howled at this moment, like a dog at the moonlight.

Afterwards, he found himself in a state of insight. He had heard that the music was over; Walther was writing a letter and Clarisse came to find Achilles. In the garden it was getting dark and the two young people bloomed for each other out of the uncertainty of unsettled hearts.

Achilles stood up and grasped Clarisse’s hands. These hands were hot and still confused, yet practically diffuse when Clarisse pressed them against Achilles so she could sit down. But when she no longer needed his hand, she wrapped her fingers for a half second so tightly around it like a vine and pressed hard; then she gripped his hand in the darkness.
“Do you also have these moments, when you seem to be totally transparent?” Clarisse’s eyes emerged. They gleamed in the night and seemed to illuminate the expanse down to her mouth — the expanse Achilles now knew so well. Her responsiveness electrified Achilles and drove him insane.

“No,” he said, “I have no interest in seeing through myself. What would one see there, Clarisse? If one objectifies oneself, one is no longer oneself. That’s why one can only observe an other I.” 

“Without willing,” added Clarisse. There was this magical word again.

“I’m going to take a long vacation,” answered Achilles.

“And…?”
“I don’t know; I am fully in the mist. But I’m not afraid.” 

They were silently happy and restless. Only after a while, did Achilles return to his original thought. “There must really be a magical root. One beats the stone with it and an indescribable fairy land springs up, one that reaches through the whole earth. I sometimes have moments, where I see everything in utterly unusual connections.”

“The world-air is transparent and dry?

“Transparent and dry. And your connection with the world, a connection that must be built somewhat crudely, implodes, and you see nothing but illuminated clouds towering one on top of the other. An entirely different life. That’s the thing that still makes me hesitate. I have this feeling: if I were to establish myself now, it’s too soon, because I have not yet sifted out the other world.”

“One must find a goal at last!”

“No trace of one! I want to say: it doesn’t matter if one finds what one is looking for, but rather that one finds the landscape where one should walk.”

“And you really believe that such a thing exists?”

“Why not?! Did you ever tremble all over your body when your nanny told you fairy tales? Because that was a world of heroes! One can do that now too; it’s only necessary that everything that you do grips you like in those rare moments when you are really present; and you must get out of the habit of emotional slovenliness, you must keep company with this foolishness at the heart of the world.” 

Achilles could hardly bear to hear himself talk like this anymore. But he felt this slim devil at his side, who ceaseless drove him to keep saying the things he knew she wanted to hear.

They notice that the light is on again in the living room, don’t know how long they have been away, and they go reluctantly into the house. When all three are together, Achilles develops his Moosbrugger problem for Walther. But the conversation with Clarisse already had this as goal. Everything that we do is only a metaphor—what he says to her too. Whatever is not only a metaphor would be the thing he is seeking in the conversation.

17. Achilles was educated in a Catholic Boarding School

It must be mentioned that Achilles was educated in a Catholic boarding school run by priestly monks. It happened as a result of a peculiarity of his father’s—in himself very liberal and fundamentally ruled by a casual enlightenment ethos—who had arrived at this choice for a reason, which, like many other aspects of the man, no one quite understood. One might imagine that it had been done in memory of the boy’s recently deceased mother, to spite her; for she, whose quiet religiosity had greatly irritated the professor, was, like many simple and naturally religious people, consistently mistrustful of the exaggerations of cloistered life. To act as if he were fulfilling her pious wish, but in reality, to insult it by demonstrating the irrationality of her wish would not have been uncharacteristic of her spouse. It might however just have been convenient for the widow to send Achilles into the monastery, and a momentary abandonment of his own principles; once Achilles was given over to this Christian education however, he willingly sacrificed him to the gods, for he could not accuse himself of a rigid one-sidedness and would rather deny this and maintain rather that it was done for a good reason, since a lonely widow makes a bad teacher for a young boy. This secret reverse meaning, sacrificing oneself for one’s duty to another, happens often in life, but naturally no one knows whether it was truly the reason or not. Even I, to whom Achilles explained all of this, know why he was sent to the seminary then just as little as I know why precisely at that moment…the rain had begun to fall.

Achilles claims that he left this institute with that aversion to religion that he himself has sometimes experienced as baleful.

Young people seem to have a clear-eyed presentiment about all secret weaknesses of any teaching, revealed to them as they are by the persons who represent them. The young people who grew up during the war of the adults of the hinterland became pacifists; I would even bet that the youth of today, brought up amid the trounced humanity-preachers and the crooked revolutionaries will turn out either warlike or will be amenable to the dullest utility. In this way, Achilles and his fellow students were filled with little respect for the holy fathers who were responsible for their education.

They wore lovely cowls, whose two colors made up a cross that was supposed to constantly remind one of the highest human thoughts, of the self-sacrifice of the Savior; but instead of thinking of this, the boys called their teachers cross spiders. Indeed, they brought home from their education a remarkable general aptitude for caricaturing all ideals. Later in life, Achilles often found it difficult not to look at something that actually interested him “under the cowl,”—as they called it back then—that is, to connect with it the most repulsive imaginings that were only of use for this purpose, and to examine it in this destructive way.

But the religious education, as it was provided in those days, did have a real weakness. As is well known, the Church stressed none of the demands made on its faithful as relentlessly as the abominations of heresy and unchastity. When it came to gluttony, drunkenness and brutality, it maintained a certain cozy indulgence. Thus, the lads entrusted to the seminary were on the one hand like a neatly mowed lawn, but on the other like wildly rank beds of weeds. They followed strictly all of those rigid religious rules that scarcely required enforcement, since they were under the spell of their sleepy, strict, habitual rhythm. They did not commit any heresies, and learned the creation story and the other distortions of reason by heart, but were as little interested in them as they were in their contradictions (a few scandal mongers excepted). The youthful inquisitive drive can only be inhibited, not diverted, if one does not satisfy it properly.  I don’t mean to say that the holy brothers lied to the pupils, but since they could not impart this kind of moral resignation that leads to the abdication of the intellect, but only resignation itself, it had the same effect. – It was the same thing with chastity. This kind of — one could say: eroto-maniacal — education could eradicate the thought of women to a large extent or could associate it with a fear, but it could not eradicate the brutality that runs rampant in all seminaries, endangering the awakening of youth.  These young men did not tell any filthy sexual stories, but they were doubly scatological in every other way. If one listened to them talk, one would believe that their honorable teachers were drunk every day, that they gorged themselves on food daily and emitted frequent signs of such incontinence. This corresponded with the competition among the students in spitting and other similar skills; and whoever managed to get soused despite the oversight, would be honored with the sort of admiration that usually at that age is reserved for secret romantic trysting. In later life, Achilles rigorously avoided his comrades from this period of his life, and it took a long time until he was mature and self-confidant enough to bear their company with a smile.

Later on, one teacher arrived. He belonged to that new social direction of Catholicism that placed less value on spiritual exercises than the development of a certain Christian, civic-minded stability. But he failed to have any influence on Achilles in the short time he remained there. Later, however, Achilles' thoughts returned to him and he became important for him.

18. Attempt at a Structure 

Inn at the Outskirts. (Told like a strange real story.) There is too much to narrate to fit in these frames. One must spring in during an interruption in the trial. This dream gives Achilles the decisive push; then his actions follow. 

One can already have narrated the events of the trial beforehand.

Then Achilles drives in a car, very early one morning, and one discovers that it was the dream of the night before. Somehow an eerie secret beginning; one doesn’t know yet how it relates with the story. The car (of a friend) has ninety horsepower. Drives to the execution. The age’s pleasure in technical record-breaking vibrates in Achilles. He tries to imagine the motor, using expert knowledge. Thereby a feeling: the more quickly he races, the more he speeds up the execution.

It was the dream of a logician. Achilles feels this. Disgust of the rational, longing for the meaningless-sensual facts of life. Achilles belongs to the bourgeoisie. Father was a professor. But uncle and grandfather were manufacturers, stockholders in large enterprises. But not so rich that he could live a fantastic life of wealth.

It’s a long drive. If death were to come during the ride? How unprepared! I don’t know anymore, was it just the ride there—or also the ride back; consolidated into one. Then explain the Moosbrugger problem. Analyze it.

During this time: meeting with sister after the death of their father. Some love story or other. Meeting with the representatives of various persuasions of the literary world. Each one a center. The central center is the Moosbrugger problem seen from the triadic viewpoints of criminal responsibility, the isolation of the individual, and the difficulty of finding a cross section.

For example, criminal responsibility in canonical law: we still have that today! He had never been so interested in people. It is already an intimation of future journeys and later indecision.

The conflict with his scientific environs is prefigured and prefigures the conflict with the general environment.

Look for the real tension, how this all developed.  Now that he becomes interested in people out of resignation, he comes much closer to Clarisse.

Following the Moosbrugger case, he starts to see the same impossibility of finding a synoptic view in even the most common individual cases. With that his interest in Moosbrugger fades. This accounts for the unease during the quick drive. This must already be just another experience or adventure.

19. Second Line

Achilles has a fight with Margarethe Susman, Ellen Key, or Agnes Harder. (Note 3) One says she is a second Diotima. Nothing so noble has been written since Plato’s Symposium. How beautiful are both content and form, how unified is the poet and the thinker. (When she speaks, for she only writes a little; in the Frankfurter paper or the New Free Press.) As deep as it is vast. Love as religion. Forget not the human in the womanly, nor the womanly in the human. Life and love, one and the same concept.

“Here is a book, in which the contradictory errors and confusions of our times are seen freshly and our problems profoundly grasped.” “The longing of the soul to be released from life and engulfed by Being, which it cannot achieve without succumbing to life and letting life pulse through itself. Here problems are uncovered that extend to the last mysteries of souls.” For example, one quotes from her, “We have nothing in our contemporary life that could form an equivalent to the full, real surrender of body and soul in former times, as it was carried out by the deeds of the martyrs.”—But that is all nonsense, cries Achilles! (See our martyrs.) Un-deified contemporary time. The longing for transformation drives the sexes to union. (Not bad, but what shall one say after that?) Feminine fatal powers in the struggle of personalities of the times. The culture is built by men, borne and filled by women. (Those are nothing but half phrases.) “The belief, not the church.” “We cannot fully love on earth, because the drive to live hinders us. We would dissolve into the moment.”

“In the moment of ripeness, life would have to hang the perfect lover on the cross. Through the sacrifice of his soul, he would sacrifice his body, without any fanfare, and be carried off into death.”

Achilles can’t believe the amount of stupidity in these mixed-up ideas. This woman is the foil for Agathe! (Agathe is the person who cannot expound on such things intellectually but who is much deeper. In general, the person who belongs to him not because of systematic thinking but through the similarity of important reactions of taste!) Achilles believes it is more important to fight against this woman than to advocate for social action. This is the first of his crimes.

At Diotima’s he is supplanted by Franziscus Länglich, who doesn’t like the lady writers, but who holds the society personalities in esteem and knows how to help himself. There we have the two directions together: Achilles is free of Diotima and the literary man is introduced? (Beforehand he takes the side of her husband—Genoveva.) 

Woman whom one may not observe in tranquility or formally (like the little monkeys). She reads to him or speaks and he recognizes with a tremor: that is Huysman or Flaubert. Strange episode with Diotima: I desire your soul! He notices: that is the woman from the dream. (Note 4) And has trouble not biting off her…. This creature whom he conjured up in the past. Supra-individual eroticism. Physical impressions of a soul book. 

In Diotima perhaps present a caricature of all the soulful ambitions of the times. He snubs her for her serving maid. When Länglich is gone, she pursues him erotically. 

But then the serving maid saves him and his sister from an unpleasant situation (class distinction!), even though Achilles has a presentiment of the relationship.

Miss Z.: Free German Youth Movement. Young person. Pan-German. She is the Jewess in the Priest novel. When Achilles turns toward Diotima, her mother makes a terrific jealous scene, in which all her shame and residual resentment breaks out. If Achilles had not had Diotima at that moment, he would have taken this older woman. Has a brother, who is an officer. Future Weiss murderer. Apparently, a young girl of the time, very ambitious, with a faint tendency for social welfare. Young ladies easily become omnibus conductors for charitable purposes.  Very far from our souls. (These determinations have relevance for Clarisse; these figures can therefore be seen as oppositional.) If one wants them to be ultimately somewhat sympathetic, in order to introduce them into the Priest novel, then Achilles proffers her a brutality and she reacts as in the Rilke passage (Note 5) (meaningless brutality of a homosexual sort). Mother perhaps attempts to murder him.

20. Diotima Episode

Everyone told Achilles: “You must meet this woman.”

“Why?” asks Achilles mistrustfully.

He receives no answer. 

“Such charm!” says a young woman. “When one but enters! A spotless house, but also with a certain elegance, something spiritual; You must see it for yourself.”    

Had Achilles been clever—but he was hardly that—he would have already come to the conclusion that the second Diotima was not a woman for men. I, who have become clever, I don’t know when—I believe, on the day when I realized that the most beloved vacation spots were really the most beautiful ones, I lost my soul, that is to say, I lost my resistance against certain general truths that come gliding in and out of me today—I would have immediately considered that women who please other women certainly have something that—even if they are beautiful—leaves men cold.

Nevertheless, Diotima was also praised by the man Achilles. Department Council…said to him: “If you want to get to know our most beautiful and knowledgeable woman, have yourself presented at….”

“How old is she?” asked Achilles.

The Department Council was, to his astonishment, not able to answer this, indeed, he himself seemed disconcerted about it for a moment. She must be more than twenty-five and less than thirty-five years old; he could not estimate any nearer. (Perhaps: Department Council is Giongo or Giongo’s friend, retired lawyer, proprietor, renowned as sophisticated. And only later does Achilles learn of the story with his sister.)

“But you do know how old Frau Y is?” tested Achilles.

“Certainly. Very exactly, due to an indiscretion. She is thirty-nine.”

“And Miss Z.?”

“Despite what has recently been maintained, she is no older than twenty-one.”

“And between these ages, every year has its unmistakable physiognomy, no?” laughed Achilles. “Does this woman have a wafer instead of a face?”

“She has something unearthly about her,” opined the Department Council after reflecting a bit.

Achilles dared to ask whether Frau Diotima had a lover.

“A relationship?” gasped the Department Council; he did not know; no one would imagine such a thing.

“But she lives with her husband? And what is he like?”

To this, the Department Council answered with full, utter conviction: “A horror.” “Then she is also a horror!” decided Achilles, when he departed alone. “For there is no such thing: a worthy woman who lasts with a beast of a man.” In those day, Achilles had little comprehension for complicated situations and compromises. He really had no desire to understand people. He thought of the name Genoveva, but he kicked it away and laughed out of polite cynicism toward himself; naturally he hardly knew what he was about; one thing was just as meaningless as another. 

21. Fräulein Z.

But since a young woman praised Frau…exceedingly, Achilles became curious. That was Miss Z. Achilles knew that she wanted to marry him and that she was dissatisfied with his resistance. Why the devil did she want him to socialize with Frau…? Achilles’ mathematical sense was stimulated and he tried to compose a picture of the unknown woman out of three provisional elements.

Miss Z. was the daughter of a baptized department director of the X-Bank and a Christian mother who descended from academic or higher bureaucratic circles. In those days, idealistic people disregarded the common antisemitic prejudices; thus, her mother had married the Jew. (Mother: ideals. Liberalism. The memories of 1848. Her Jewish second son becomes a Communist. The two brothers almost kill each other later, but can just as easily love each other, for deep down they are not so different.) The raging antisemitic-national furor comes later. Effect on the mother: pained over-emphasized Liberalism in her external reactions; chilling of her otherwise real love for her husband, attentive solicitude for everything Aryan in her daughter, and impatience about her husband’s career. Had Miss Z. been born a few years later, her father would have been one of the primary men of finance (although not one of the leaders) and she would have worn her Judaism with pride and defiance; her mother, who had opened the valve of maternal cares too late, would have presumably fallen into ruin along with her husband and become bitter, and everything would have happened in the same way, since one never knows in human life why things happen as they do. 

But as things turned out, Miss Z. was sensitive to the Aryan sensitivity of her mother and therefore—though ostensibly untroubled by these questions—was blithely a member of the Germanic “Free-German Youth Movement.”  

As he noticed that they were considering him for marriage, he limited his visits to formal ones. (He had earlier become very familiar, strangely). But Miss Z. was vexed and bid him not to alter his ways.

22. Qualities

People with systems of ideas, premonitions of the war before the war, Concordia—Expressionism, France before the war, Germany before the war, national and social as ultimate Idea. Consider the future from out of the experiences of the past! That was the scientific, de-spiritualized Germany. But also, examples (hope, love, belief in life) that can be distorted. There are no human beings in Germany, only careers. Physicists, artists, poets, creative people—uncreative people. National biology. Clerical-feudal. The human being who has become unserious. Labor union, bureaucracy, Prussian church, conservative Germany. They read. Intellectual sects (musicians). Empty frames of the war. The moral simulated props. Egoism (as link and strongest characteristic). Laissez faire, Capitalism, Rathenau, Bank director, half-enlightenment, Nietzsche, architecture, civilization and dream. Old Austria, coitus and war, racial theorists, advocate for women’s rights, merchant. All seen wrong. Coat and tails, desires for office, justices, the ability to stimulate the nerves, intellectual specialists (Doctor M.—philatelist, continue!), national sovereignty (defender-President). Catholic mania, free-religious movement, Stefan George, the Eternal. Intellectual mysticism with insufficient intellect. Spiritual art with bad spiritus. This sort of philosophy denudes the public for art. Problem of the times (two layers, that permeate each other, separated): Logos—psyche, ratio—Human Being (part—whole) purposefully understandable. Apparent problem (to choose between them, to play the one against the other): Science—Religion, Ratio—Intuition, Materialism—Spirit, (Or:) Growing sense for external or extant facts; instead of amendment to knowledge another kind of knowing is sought.

Absurd opposites: Christian land, Nation—at the same time a military nation. Lawyers for whom one must masticate everything ahead of time, but to whom one may only say just enough so that they can pretend to themselves to be bona fide. Private morality of doctors for sexual diseases. Goal: nation without intellectual filthiness. One must summarize that somehow into a powerful (Jubilee) manifesto. Maybe in Germany. And in Austria there will follow a manifesto of dynastic envy. Show the foreign lands through messengers and merchants. A whole Diotima circle must grow out of Diotima. (The soulful ones.) Opposition figure (perhaps sometimes appearing therein) an insurance mathematician or mathematician for a large industry, filled with enthusiasm for the technical, the new, the Emersonian. An employee of the German Bank, average person. 

Achilles appears at the beginning for the first time. He was an engineer and had struggled through philosophy to the graduate level. That was only recently. Now he finds himself (not wholly by coincidence) faced with the Moosbrugger problem and sees that he knows nothing and can do nothing.  The Diotima circle is naturally enthused for the demonstration against Germany. Feeling against reason. Diotima circle episodes run through the whole length of The Spy. It starts in Germany. Then since Austria participates in the war on Germany’s side, a wholly different mechanism of the external and general and of the internal individual life demonstrate: a) the national nature—of the private, b) the practical nature—of the life of ideas (emotional life).

23. Diotima Circle

Diotima: Guratori; she Italianized her given name after her marriage. Hermine, later Ermelinda Tuzzi. (Ermana Prschykril von Prschykryllika).

Figure 1: Only one who takes these questions seriously. Old codger. Shunned in the Diotima circle. Name: Sebastian Krätschmer. Career: open. Intellectual stigmata: nauseating scatterbrain. Thinking without punctuation, effecting the same discontinuity between ideas and material subject matter. Against the spurious translation of quality into quantity.  

2. Mr. Pouffo. Representative of Civilization-Novel Petty-Bourgeoisie. On a student visit to Vienna. Gathers certain cultural information against Germany there. 

3. Herr Tuzzi. Privy Councilor in the Foreign Ministry. Aside from his private person (horror, Genoveva), which must be further determined, he participates with silent approval in the railing against Germany; causes however—excessive power of the machinery—the shoulder to shoulder. 

4. Along with the modern optimistic physicist and mathematician also include the drunken Hani or Benze. Who anticipates Relativity Theory. But no one believes him. A theologian by profession. 

5. Illustrate the state of philosophy, perhaps also of literature, through someone who sticks his little flag in Tristram Shandy. That’s the possibility of narrating the discussion in a bearable form. Achilles doesn’t pay attention at all, instead he is unfriendly, but then orients himself about the state of things by talking with him. Hint for inventor of the plot: show ahead of time the impossibility of war, Bolshevism, the White Terror in nucleo.

6. Take up Diotima’s theories with Rathenau. 

7. Edschmid, Hesse, George: the three writers around Diotima. What kinds of souls do these philosophers, writers have? None at all. Everything is turned inside out. The cerebral growth is so great, or the same magnitude can only deploy itself in different degrees. They have kept their most primitive tendencies rudimentarily. Life decisions, life, battles, travels, comfort follow. For example, they love skinny women; that is determined by their conceit, but they are only truly aroused when a large bottom hangs off of this astral body. The rest they ignore. Or they let their vanity determine their behavior with Achilles. 

24. Diotima: Soulless Civilization

What the Man of Civilization lacks: the ability to hover with spread wings over the world of appearance. (Can it be bought cheaper?) Intellect is conscious form of desire. Soul: new quality of spirit alongside intellectual life above life. (Achilles adds: What about grouping the intellect with the emotions?) Art has become typical, searches for types, says Diotima; that is a sign of its soullessness. She always wants tradition. (Isn’t tradition, according to many authors, a sign of soul-cultivation? Achilles suggests. But he feels that such questions will never be answered today.) Glad freedom of the soulful. Unburdened by desire, the Spirit hovers above appearance and elevates itself to the sovereign Form of Intuition of humor, which is filled with the highest comprehension attainable by creatures.  The transcendental love melts into nature and is not lost, because it beholds the colorful veil of the light of the Absolute. Empathic experience of Nature.

Respect for the oneness and worth of every creature. Submissive hearkening to the voice of one’s own soul. Practically-ethically, one should remain primitive: courage, fidelity, truth. Religions and the like are symbols for the earthly, says Achilles; one has to feed on them through the earthly; according to you, the earthly is a symbol of the spirit. This question cannot be differentiated with mere reason, this thought lacks all religiosity or any cosmic element. 

At first, Diotima is naturally all for saving Moosbrugger. Then she changes her mind (for some sort of half-justified reason)? That can be a reason why Achilles no longer pursues the relationship. 

25. Rathenau (Note 6)

To see the bad in desiring, to propagate humor: that is the Philosophy of the Satisfied. He is here to do some very important business. That he makes use of Diotima’s salon to be introduced in society has actually made her fame.

A young woman (representative of the class of youth) loves him. What can he offer her when he steps out of his book? Banality and brutality. He doesn’t want to marry her, that is a firm life conviction. And besides, the only thing he really wants from people is the satisfaction of his vanity. That he has, so now what? Since he isn’t a rake, he falls undesignedly into an awkward situation. He decides to talk her out of it. But then he entraps himself with vanity.

Since taking the examinations for History of Philosophy, Achilles had not had the spooky feeling that Rathenau gives him; since the terror imprinted on him by Leibniz, Hegel, Spinoza, Descartes, as strangely systematic perverse human beings. He [Rathenau?] assumed that it would have been cozier, brighter, more humanistic, more comfortable to live just after 1870.

On the other side of calculating reason lives a realm of the soul. Modern is that which expresses itself with mathematical symbols. 

Great iron baron of the Rhine region. New romantic popular philosophy. Wording always influenced by Bergson. Insufficient respect for simple ratio. Excessive slippage into intuition. Conception of the contemporary condition as a mere phase of a vast, eternal spiritual evolution that our rational present has more or less spat out. (Very influential on Diotima.) The material is the product of spirit. Ideas from notebooks. Tiptoe feeling of the confraternity of All-Ego. All of this mute gazing and mystifying murmuring and alluding to the All, the occult, the interrelatedness of everything, the solemnity, the sense of a calling. Like children who play king and deliver decrees. 

Primary characteristic is the scorn with which science is rejected, second is the leniency in regard to their own laws. 

Climacteric of the soul. For almost three-hundred years it has been undergoing a process of narrowing, shrinking and alteration; this old soul with God, firm values, and ideals; and it will soon disappear and make room for a new one. Exact science is disparaged to the same extent that its influence in our lives increases.

The sense for facts has increased in philosophy. That is the same thing as increasing technology, science, and commercialization. Although these things won’t be abandoned in philosophy, one feels combative. — There are two positions regarding facts: to orient oneself to them or to be driven by them.

Frivolity in questions that must be decided with patient understanding: is seen as good, is emphasized with the best of conscience, a club badge of higher spirituality. Mere logic. Trivial psychology. In place of the considered thought comes the unconsidered: that is the whole of it. Galileo strikes the rock with his magic wand and the rock gives forth a flood that increases daily. All our spirits live one small stratum deeper in the wilderness. We know too much. Human being, who knows nothing, who wants to be unbroken, who acts in a trance.

The average man can hardly avoid being differentiated by grades of intelligence and skill. He is good and evil, touching and revolting at once and different only depending on perspective and circumstances. His all and nothing consists of career, short-lived pleasures, repetitive conditions and a few residual incalculables. Prestige metaphysics that inflate personal experience into the World-All. These feelings without understanding are carps without pikes (Note 7), feels Achilles. On the history of the sentimental…. “A striving analogous to the power of love.” 

Didn’t Stendhal, Balzac, and Flaubert write odes at first to the mechanized society and emotional life? Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Strindberg uncovered the demonic in the lower classes. An immeasurable confusion of the moral sense: it is a strength and a virtue to hate well. (And Achilles hates.) A people get what they deserve. An individual, who is constantly in shady situations, petty battles, and the like, is bad. 

Rathenau has a small page, a sacristan’s son, pleases him for his Catholic sheen. Confides in him. The little page reads Dumas, Stendhal, etc. All of these small, handsome young men who became great. But Rathenau doesn’t let him learn anything and is really incredibly carelessly cruel to him. This youthful imbecile is the only poetic object that can be un-empirically romantic. Loves a chambermaid à la Stendhal. In the end he hates Rathenau and is used by Achilles against him.

The elder Rathenau: a revolting but wonderful fellow. Main characteristic: to know what is coming; later this becomes a feeling that he cannot fail. That’s where the younger Rathenau gets his concept of intuition, not only for mystical life. Rathenau the younger is suited for diplomacy and organization like myself. Used by his father for this. Leaves in the dark whether he is here to do business with the government or not. Perhaps a secret aim, to develop a bank group.

27. The Jewish Maid and the Page 

What a wise invention, this Italian prohibition on the mingling of the sexes! It merely recognizes that it happens everywhere the prohibition exists. So that one creature will spy on another at the greatest risk, testing her character. Then come the discoveries that one uncovers only by perilous adventures. The person to whom one has never spoken, hardly even seen properly, is suddenly in mortal danger. Finally, they are together, but it is night; they are close, but don’t see each other. That stimulates to the most fantastical acts.

This whole romanticism is then: the fellow is discovered with her. She is a romantic person, one says of her, not without blame. 

She longs for a beautiful young man, brave and strong. As a child she wanted to be good, beautiful, and strong; not rich, out of opposition to her Jewish upbringing. To want to surrender, save, abduct, free, plays for her and for him the same role. The longing for another, for only one particular person. 

On the morning of the first night, Diotima catches her. She says little or nothing, but writes a report. The girl and the page sit together in the sober morning room across from each other. Uncombed hair. Besides themselves with the profound humility of having been caught. The girl knows: she must at least flee to Galizia; the Page is afraid of his master. (He would now have a good cause to abandon him.) Now consider: the appearance of precise, individualized ideas of beauty is a great embarrassment. More or less violently, the young person constructs them for himself, and this richness now culminates in one single person—with all the richness of nuance, to be sure, but that flaming up above the entire inner firmament is over. Everything has become concrete, goal-oriented. –That is how they seem to each other. They can’t bring themselves to cover what they see with the illusion of the previous days. Nevertheless, later, for both her and him, the enormous after-glow like with Valerie (Note 8). Achilles gives her travel money and therewith secures her gratitude, so she will visit him later.

***

1 That one does not always know who “he” is in this draft is eerie, and of course significant as a sign of the identification, if only in dream, of Achilles with Moosbrugger.

2 Reference to his childhood home, which he has returned to since the death of his father.

3 Women writers of the time. Margarete Sussman was a poet, philosopher, literary critic, and essayist. She developed a philosophy of Love that was much praised by Georg Simmel, which Musil seems to be responding to here. As usual, Musil may criticize a writer but also learn something from her and partially sympathize with her. The Swedish writer, Ellen Key, was actually much admired by Musil, who read her essay, “The Development of the Soul Through a Conduct of Life,” with a passion, devoting approximately 20 pages of notes to it in raptures over her discussion of Emerson’s conduct of life, Thoreau’s simplification, Whitman’s life of fullness, Montaigne’s love of life, Schiller’s aesthetic education, Goethe’s self-culture, Nietzsche’s ethical-aesthetic human being, Lessing’s ideal of humanism, Leibniz’s idea of self-perfection, Schleiermacher’s expression of self. “For all of them,” he writes, “the effect of self-culture is a growing development, a more spiritual-intellectual life, a more healthy, grander, truer life…that all the grand possibilities of life are simultaneously liberated and grow, a liberation and a becoming, that simultaneously increases and elevates the fullness of life within thought, feeling, and willing…learning to see the beauty that is everywhere!…letting oneself be gripped by a single great idea!”— until at last there is a sobering critique of Key’s (and his own) excess of feeling—along the same lines as his critique of Romantic philosophy. For Key’s ideal beings are children and fools, an anti-intellectual conclusion that somewhat repels him. Agnes Harder was a writer and educator who espoused German nationalistic ideas about the nature of art. He seems to have originally planned to make Diotima a writer and these “lady authors” were partial models for her caricature.

4 “The Inn at the Outskirts.”

5 Reference unknown, as the only note about Rilke in Musil's notebooks at this time is: "When I read Raskolnikov, Raskolnikov and Dostoevsky grip me; when I read The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, only Rilke grips me" (Tagebücher, 447).

6 Walther Rathenau, the German-Jewish industrialist, writer, and Liberal political statesman who was murdered in 1922 by an antisemitic agitator, is well-known to have been the model for Musil’s character Arnheim in The Man Without Qualities.

7 From the German idiom, “Pikes among Carps.” Since pikes are predatory and carps not, the expression suggests something like cats among mice. Musil has twisted it around, so here we have the non-aggressive, passive fish, but no aggressive, active ones.

8 Reference to Musil’s own “Valerie experience,” a great, probably-unconsummated first love, which initiated a formative mystical experience of longing.

***

Genese Grill is currently writing the first English-language biography of Musil for Yale University Press. A collection of her essays, Portals: Reflections on the Spirit in Matter, was published by Splice in 2023. Four books of her Musil translations have appeared with Contra Mundum Press between 2015 and 2023 and her collaborative translation, led by Samantha Rose Hill, of the poems of Hannah Arendt, will appear in December, 2024 with Liverright.