When
something
moves him, he turns against it.
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v1
Nietzsche, Peter Altenberg, Dostoyevsky or whoever they had just been reading had to resign
themselves to being left lying on the floor or the bed when they had served their purpose and the flood of talk would not suffer the petty interruption of putting a book tidily back in place. The arrogance of the young, who find the greatest minds just good enough to serve their own occasions, now seemed to Ulrich -strangely endearing. He tried to remember these conversations. It was like reaching on awak- ening for the last vanishing, dreamlike thoughts of sleep. And he thought, in mild astonishment: When we were assertive in those days, the point was not to be right-it was to assert ourselves! A young man needs to shine, far more than he needs to see something in the light. He now felt the memory of the feeling of being young, that hovering on rays oflight, as an aching loss.
It seemed to Ulrich that with the beginning of his adult life a gen- eral lull had set in, a gradual running down, in spite of occasional eddies of energy that came and went, to an ever more listless, erratic rhythm. It was very hard to say what this change consisted of. Were there suddenly fewer great men? Far from it! And besides, they don't matter; the greatness of an era does not depend on them. The intel- lectually lackluster 186os and 188os, for instance, could no more pre- vent the rise of a Nietzsche or a Hebbel than either-of these men could raise the intellectual level of his contemporaries. Had life in general reached a standstill? No, it had become more powerful! Were there more paralyzing contradictions than before? There could hardly be morel Had the past not known any absurdities? Heaps! Just between ourselves: people threw their support to the weak and ignored the strong; sometimes blockheads played leading roles while brilliant men played the part of eccentrics; the good Germanic citi- zen, untroubled by history's labor pains, which he dismissed as deca- dent and morbid excrescences, went on reading his family magazines and visited the crystal palaces and academies in vastly greater num- bers than he did the avant-garde exhibitions. Least of all did the po- litical world pay attention to the New Men's views and publications; and the great public institutions resisted everything new as if sur- rounded by a cordon santtatre against the plague. Could one not say, in fact, that things have got better since then? Men who once merely
headed minor sects have become aged celebrities; publishers and art dealers have become rich; new movements are constantly being started; everybody attends both the academic and the avant-garde
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56 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
shows, and even the avant-garde ofthe avant-garde; the family maga- zines have bobbed their hair; politicians like to sound off on the cul- tural arts, and newspapers make literary history. So what has been lost?
Something imponderable. An omen. An illusion. As when a mag- net releases iron filings and they fall in confusion again. As when a ball of string comes undone. As when a tension slackens. As when an orchestra begins to play out of tune. No details could be adduced that would not also have been possible before, but all the relation- ships had shifted a little. Ideas whose currency had once been lean grew fat. Persons who would before never have been taken seriously became famous. Harshness mellowed, separations fus~d, intransi- gents made concessions to popularity, taste$ already formed relapsed into uncertainties. Sharp boundaries everywhere became blurred and some new, indefinable ability to form alliances brought new peo- ple and new ideas to the top. Not that these people and ideas were bad, not at all; it was only that a little too much of the bad was mixed with the good, of error with buth, of accommodation with meaning.
There even seemed to be a privileged proportion of this mixture that got furthest on in the world; just the right pinch of makeshift to bring out the genius in genius and make talent look like a white hope, as a pinch of chicory, according to some people, brings out the right cof- fee flavor in coffee. Suddenly all the prominent and important posi- tions in the intellectual world were filled by such people, and all decisions went their way. There is nothing one can hold responsible for this, nor can one say how it all came about. There are no persons or ideas or specific phenomena that one can fight against. There is no lack of talent or goodwill or even of strong personalities. There is just something missing in everything, though you can't put your finger on it, as if there had been a change in the blood or in the air; a mysteri- ous disease has eaten away the previous period's seeds of genius, but everything sparkles with novelty, and finally one has no way of know- ing whether the world has really grown worse, or oneself merely older. At this point a new era has definitively arrived.
So the times had changed, like a day that begins radiantly blue and then by degrees clouds over, without having the kindness to wait for Ulrich. He evened the score byholding the cause ofthese mysterious changes that made up the disease eating away genius to be simple,
common stupidity. By no means in an insulting sense. For if stupid- it)r, seen from within, did not so much resemble talent as possess the ability to be mistaken for it, and if it did not outwardly resemble progress, genius, hope, and improvement, the chances are that no one would want to be stupid, and so there would be no stupidity. Or fighting it would at least be easy. Unfortunately, stupidity has some- thing uncommonly endearing and natural about it. Ifone finds that a reproduction, for instance, seems more of an artistic feat than a hand-painted original, well, there is a certain truth in that, and it is easier to prove than that van Gogh was a great artist. It is also easy and profitable to be a more powerful playwright than Shakespeare or a less uneven storyteller than Goethe, and a solid commonplace al- ways contains more humanity than a new discovery. There is, in short, no great idea that stupidity could not put to its own uses; it can
move in all directions, and put on all the guises oftruth. The truth, by comparison, has only one appearance and only one path, and is al- ways at a disadvantage.
But after a while Ulrich had a curious notion in this connection. He imagined that the great churchman and thinker Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), after taking infinite pains to put the ideas of his own time in the best possible order, had then continued through history to go even deeper to the bottom ofthings, and had just finished. Now, still young by special dispensation, he stepped out of his arched doorway with many folios under his arm, and an electric trolley shot right past his nose. Ulrich chuckled at the dumbstruck amazement on the face of the doctor untversalis, as the past had called the celebrated Thomas.
A motorcyclist came up the empty street, thundering up the per- spective bow-armed and bow-legged. His face had the solemn self- importance of a howling child. It reminded Ulrich of a photo he had seen a few days ago in a magazine of a famous woman tennis player poised on tiptoe, one leg exposed to above the garter, the other flung up toward her head as she reached for a high ball with her racket, on her face the expression of an English governess. In the same issue there was also a picture of a champion swimmer being massaged after a contest. Two women dressed in street clothes, one at the swimmer's feet, the other at her head, were solemnly looking down at her as she lay on a bed, naked on her back, one knee drawn up in a
A Sort ofIntroduction · 57
sB·THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
posture of sexual abandon, the. masseur standing alongside resting his hands on it. He wore a doctor's gown and gazed out ofthe picture as though this female flesh had been skinned and hung on a meat hook. Such were the things people were beginning to see at the time, and somehow they had to be acknowledged, as one acknowledges the presence of skyscrapers and electricity. A man can't be angry at his own time without suffering some damage, Ulrich felt. Ulrich was also always ready to love all these manifestations oflife. But he could never bring himself to love them wholeheartedly, as one's general sense of social well-being requires. For a long time now a hint of aversion had lain on everything he did and experienced, a shadow of impotence and loneliness, an all-encompassing distaste for which he could not find the complementary inclination. He felt at times as though he had been born with a talent for which there was at present no objective.
EFFECT OF A MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES ON A MAN WITH QUALITIES
While Ulrich and Clarisse were talking. they did not notice that the music in the house behind them broke oH" now and again. At those moments Walter had gone to the Window. He could not see them, but felt that they were just beyond his field of vision. Jealousy tor- mented him. The cheap intoxicant of sluggishly sensual music, was luring him back to the piano. It lay behind him, open like a bed rum- pled by a sleeper resisting consciousness in order to avoid facing re- ality. He was racked by the jealousy of a paralyzed man who can sense how the healthy walk, yet he could not bring himself to join them, for his anguish offered no possibility of defending himself against them.
When Walter got up in the morning and had to rush to the office,
when he talked with people during the day and rode home among them in the afternoon, he felt he was an important person, called upon to do great things. He believed then that he. saw things differ- ently: he was moved where others passed by unresponsively, and where others reached for a thing without thinking, for him the very act of moving his own arm was fraught with spiritual adventure, or else it was paralyzed in loving contemplation of itself. He was sensi- tive, and his feelipgs were constantly agitated by brooding, depres- sions, billowing ups and downs; he was never indifferent, always seeing joy or misery in everything, so he always had something excit- ing to think about. Such people exercise an unusual attraction, be- cause the moral flaw in which they incessantly live communicates itself to others. Everything in their convetsation takes on a personal significance, and one feels free in their company to be constantly preoccupied with oneself, so that they provide a pleasure otherwise obtainable only from an analyst or therapist for a fee, with the further difference that with the psychiatrist one feels \sick, while Walter helped a person to feel very important for reasons that had previ- ously escaped one's attention. With this talent for encouraging self- preoccupation, he had in fact conquered Clarisse and in time driven all his rivals from the field. Since everything became for him an ethi- cal move~ent, he could hold forth convincingly on the immorality of ornament, the hygiene ofsimple forms, and the beery fumes ofWag- ner's music, in accord with the new taste in the arts, terrorizing even
his future father-in-law, whose painter's brain was like a peacock's tail unfurled. So there could be no question that Walter had his suc- cesses to look back on.
And yet, when he got home full of impressions and plans, ripe and new as perhaps n~ver before, a demoralizing change took place in him. Merely putting a cai)vas on the easel or a sheet of paper on the table was the sign of a terrible flight from his heart. His head re- mained clear, and the plan inside it hovered as ifin a very transpar- ent and distinct atmosphere; indeed, the plan split and became two or more plans, all ready to compete for supremacy-but the connec- tion between his head and the first movements needed to carry it out seemed severed. Walter could not even make up his mind to lift a finger. He simply did not get up from where he happened to be sit- ting, and his thoughts slid away from the task he had set himself like
A Sort of Introduction · 59
6o • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
snow evaporating as it falls. He didn't know where the time went, but all of a sudden it was evening, and since after several such experi- ences he had learned to start dreading them on his way home, whole series of weeks began to slip, and passed away like a troubled half- sleep. Slowed down by a sense of hopelessness in all his decisions and movements, he suffered from bitter sadness, and his incapacity solidified into a pain that often sat like a nosebleed behind his fore- head the moment he tried to make up his mind. to do something. Walter was fearful, and the symptoms he recognized in himself not only hampered him in his work but also filled him With anxiety, for they were apparently so far beyond his control that they often gave him the impression of an incipient mental breakdown. '
But as his condition had grown steadily worse in the course of the last year, he found a miraculous refuge in a thought he had never valued enough before. The idea was none other than that the . Europe in which he was forced to live was hopelessly decadent. During ages in which things seerp to be going well outwardly, while inwardly they undergo the kind of regression that may be the fate of all things, in- cluding cultural development-unless special efforts are made to keep them supplied with new ideas-the obvious question was, pre- sumably, what one could do about it. But the tangle of clever, stupid, vulgar, and beautiful is at such times so particularly dense and intri- cate that many people obviously find it easier to believe that there is something occult at the root of things, and proclaim the fated fall of one thing or another that eludes precise definition and is porten- tously vague. It hardly matters whether the doomed thing is the human race, vegetarianism, or the soul; all that a healthy pessimism needs is merely something inescapable to hold on to. Even Walter, who in better days used to be able to laugh at su~h doctrines, soon discovered their advantages once he began to try them out. Instead ofhis feeling bad and unable to work, it was now the times that were sick, while he was fine. His life, which had come to nothing, was now, all at once, tremendously accounted for, justified on a world-histori- cal scale that was worthY. of him, so that picking up a pen or pencil and laying it down again virtually took on the aura of a great sacrifice.
With all this, however, Walter still had to struggle with himself, and Clarisse kept on tormenting him. She turned a deaf ear to his critical discussions of the times; with her it was genius or nothing.
What it was she did not know, but whenever the subject came up her whole body began to tremble and tense up. "You either feel it or you don't" was all the proofshe could offer. For him she always remained the same cruel little fifteen-year-old girl. She had never quite under- stood his way of feeling, nor could he ever control her. But cold and hard as she was, and then again so spirited, with her ethereal, flaming will, she had a mysterious ability to influence him, as though shocks were coming through her from a direction that could not be fitted into the three dimensions of space. This influence sometimes bor- dered- on the uncanny. He felt it most keenly when they played the piano together. Clarisse's playing was hard and colorless, prompted by stirrings in her that he did not share, and that frightened him as they reached him when their bodies glowed till the soul burned through. Something indefinable then tore itself loose inside her and threatened to fly away with her spirit. It came out of some secret hollow in her being that had to be anxiously kept shut up tight. He had no idea what made him feel this, or what it was, but it tortured him with an unutterable fear and the need to do something decisive against it, which he could not do because no one but him noticed anything.
As he stood at the window watching Clarisse coming back alone, he dimly knew that he would again not be able to resist the urge to make disparaging remarks about Ulrich. Ulrich had returned from abroad at a bad time. He was bad for Clarisse. He ruthlessly exacer-
'bated something inside Clarisse that Walter dared not touch: the cavern of disaster, the pitiful, the sick, the fatal genius in her, the secret empty space where something was tearing at chains that might someday give way. Now she had entered and was standing bare- headed before him, sunhat in hand, and he looked at her. Her eyes were mocking, tender, clear-perhaps a little too clear. Sometimes he felt that she simply had a certain strength he lacked. Even when she was a child he had felt her as a thorn that would never let him find peace, and evidently he had never wanted her to be otherwise; perhaps this was the secret of his life, which the other two did not understand.
"How deeply we suffer," he thought. "I don't think it can happen often·that two people love each other as deeply as we must. "
And he began to speak without preamble: "I don't want to know
A Sort ofIntroduction · 61
62 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
what Ulo has been telling you, but I can tell you that the strength you marvel at in him is pure emptiness. " Clarisse looked at the piano and smiled; he had involuntarily sat down again beside the open instru- ment. "It must be easy to feel heroic," he went on, "when one is nat- urally insensitive, and to think in miles when you've no idea what riches can be hidden in an inch! " They sometimes called him Ulo, his boyhood nickname, and he liked them for it, as one may keep a smil- ing respect for one's old nanny. "He's come to a dead end! " Walter added. "You don't see it, but don't imagine that I don't know him. "
Clarisse had her doubts.
Walter said vehemently: "Today it's all decadence! A bottomless pit of intelligence! He is intelligent, I grant you that, but he knows nothing at all about the ·power of a soul in full possession of itself. What Goethe calls personality, what Goethe calls mobile order- those are things he doesn't have a clue about! 'This noble concept of power and restraint, ofchoice and law, offreedom and measure, mo- bile order . . . '"The poet's lines came in waves from his lips. Clarisse regarded these lips in amiable wonder, as though they had just let fly a pretty toy. Then she collected herself and interjected like a good little housewife: 'Would you like a beer? " "Yes. Why not? Don't I always have one? " 'Well, there is none in the house. '' "I wish you hadn't asked," Walter sighed. "I might never have thought of it. ''
And that was that, as far as Clarisse was concerned. But Walter had been thrown off the track and didn't know how to continue.
"Do you remember our conversation about the artist? " he asked tentatively.
'Which one? "
"The one we had a few days ago. I explained to you what a living principle of form in a person means. Don't you remember, I came to the conclusion that in the old days, instead of death and logical mechanization, blood and wisdom reigned? "
"No. " 1
Walter was stymied; he groped, wavered. Suddenly he burst out: "He's a man without qualities! "
'What is that? " Clarisse asked, giggling.
"Nothing. That's just it, it's nothing. ''
But Clarisse found the phrase intriguing.
"There are millions of them nowadays," Walter declared. "It's the
human type produced by our time! " He was pleased with the term he had hit upon so unexpectedly. As if he were starting a poem, he let the expression drive . him on even before its meaning was· clear to him. "Just look at him! What would you take him for? Does he look like a doctor, a businessman, a painter, or a diplomat? "
"He's none of those," Clarisse said dryly.
"Well, does he look like a mathematician? "
"I don't know-how should I know what a mathematician is sup-
posed to look like? "
"You've hit the nail on the head! A mathematician looks like noth-
ing at all-that is, he is likely to look intelligent in such a general way that there isn't a single specific thing to pin him down! Except for the Roman Catholic clergy, no one these days looks the way he should, because we use our heads even more impersonally than our hands. But mathematics is the absolute limit: it already knows as little about itself as future generations, feeding on energy pills instead of bread and meat, will be likely to know about meadows and young calves and chickens! "
Clarisse had meanwhile put their simple supper on the table, and Walter was already digging into it, which may have suggested the analogy to him. Clarisse was watching his lips. They reminded her of his late mot;her's. They were strong feminine lips that ate as if they were getting the housework done, and were topped off by a small clipped mustache. His eyes shone like freshly peeled chestnuts, even when he was merely looking for a piece of cheese on the platter. Al- though he was short, and flabby rather than delicate of build, he was a man of striking appearance, the kind who always seem to be stand- ing in a good light. He now continued:
"His appearance gives no clue to what his profession might be, and yet he doe~n't look like a man without a profession either. Consider what he's like: He always knows what to do. He knows how to gaze into a woman's eyes. He can put his mind to any question at any time. He can box. He is gifted, strong-willed, open-minded, fearless, tena- cious, dashing, circumspect-why quibble, suppose we grant him all those qualities-yet he has none of them! They've made him what he is, they've set his course for him, and yet they don't belong to him. When he is angry, something in him laughs. When he is sad, he is up to something.
When something moves him, he turns against it. He'll
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64 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
always see a good side to every bad action. What he thinks of any- thing will always depend on some possible context-nothing is, to him, what it is; everything is subject to change, in flux, part of a whole, of an infinite number of wholes presumably adding up to a superwhole that, however, he knows nothing about. So every answer he gives is only a partial answer, every feeling only an opinion, and he never cares what something is, only 'how' it is-some extraneous seasoning that somehow goes along with it, that's what interests him. I don't know whether I'm making myself clear-? "
"Quite clear," Clarisse said, "but I think that's all very nice of him. "
Walter had unintentionally spoken with signs of growing dislike; his old boyhood sense of being weaker than his friend increased his jealousy. For although he was convinced that Ulrich-had never really achieved anything beyond a few proofs of naked intellect and capac- ity, he could never shake off a secret sense of always having been Ulrich's physical inferior. The portrait he was sketching freed him, like bringing offa work ofart, as ifit were not his own doing at all but something that had begun as a mysterious inspiration, with word after word coming to him, while inwardly something dissolved with- out his being conscious of it. By the time he finished he had recog- nized that Ulrich stood for nothing but this state of dissolution that all present-day phenomena have.
"So you like it; do you? " he said, painfully surprised. "You can't be serious? "
Clarisse was chewing bread and soft cheese; she could only smile with her eyes.
"Oh well," Walter said, "I suppose we used to think that way our- selves, in the old days. But surely it can't be regarded as anything more than a preliminary phase? Such a man is not really a human being! "
Clarisse had sWallowed her mouthful. "That's what he says him- self! " she affirmed.
"What does he say himself? "
"Oh, I don't know-that today everything is coming apart. Every- thing has come to a standStill, he says, not just him. But he doesn't take it as hard as you do. He once gave me a long talk about it: Ifyou analyze a thousand people, you will find two dozen qualities, emo-
tions, forms of development, types of structure and so on, which are what they all consist of. And if you do a chemical analysis of your body, all you get is water with a few dozen little heaps of matter swimming in it. The water rises inside us just as it does inside trees, and it forms the bodies ofanimals just as it forms the clouds. I think that's neatly put. But it doesn't help you to know what to say about yourself. Or what to do. " Clarisse giggled. "So then I told him that you go fishing for days when you have time off, and lie around by the water. "
"So what? I'd like to know if he could stand that for even ten min- utes. But human beings," Walter said firmly, "have been doing that for ten thousand years, staring up at the sky, feeling the warmth of the earth, without trying to analyze it any more than you'd analyze your own mother. "
Clarisse couldn't help giggling again. "He says things have become more complicated meanwhile. Just as we swim in water, we also swim in a sea of fire, a storm of electricity, a firmament of magnet- ism, a swamp of warmth, and so on. It's just that we can't feel it. All that finally remains is formulas. What they mean in human terms is hard to say; that's all there is. I've forgotten whatever I learned about it at school, but I think that's what it amounts to. Anybody nowadays, says Ulrich, who wants to call the birds 'brothers,' like Saint Francis or you, can't do it so easily but must be prepared to be cast into a furnace, plunge into the earth through the wires of an electric trol- ley, or gurgle down the drain with the dishwater into the sewer. "
"Oh sure, sure," Walter interrupted this report. "First, four ele- ments are turned into several dozen, and finally we're left floating around on relationships, processes, on the dirty dishwater of pro- cesses and formulas, on something we can't even recognize as a thing, a process, a ghost of an idea, of a God-knows-what. Leaving no difference anymore between the sun and a kitchen match, or be- tween your mouth at one end of the digestive tract and its other end either. Every thing has a hundred aspects, every aspect a hundred connections, and different feelings are attached to every one of them. The human brain has happily split things apart, but things have split the human heart too. " He had leapt to his feet but re- mained standing behind the table.
"Clarisse," he said, "the man is a danger for you! Look, Clarisse,
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66 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
what every one of us needs today more than anything else is simplic- ity, closeness to the earth, health-and yes, definitely, say what you like, a child as well, because a child keeps us anchored t~the ground. Everything Ulo tells you is inhuman. I promise you I have the cour- age, when I come home, simply to have a cup of coffee with you, listen to the birds, take a little walk, chat with a neighbor, and let the day fade out quietly: that's human life! "
The tenderness of these sentiments had brought him slowly closer to her. But the moment fatherish feelings could be detected raising their gentle bass voice from afar, Clarisse palked. As he drew near, her face became expressionless and tilted defensively.
When he had reached her side he radiated a gentle glow like a good country stove. In this warm stream Clarisse wavered for a mo- ment. Then she said: "Nothing doing, my dear! " She grabbed a piece of bread and some cheese from the table and kissed him quickly on the forehead. ''I'm going out to see ifthere are any noctur- nal butterflies. "
"But Clarisse," Walter pleaded. "All the butterflies are gone this time of year. "
"Oh, yau never can tell. "
Nothing was left of her in the room but her laughter. With her hread and cheese she roamed the meadows; it was a safe neighbor- hood and she needed no escort. Walter's tenderness collapsed like a souffle taken too soon from the oven. He heaved a deep sigh. Then he hesitantly sat down again at the piano and struck a few keys. Willy- nilly his playing turned into improvisations on themes from Wagner's operas, and in the splashings of this dissolutely tumescent substance he had refused in the days ofhis pride, his fingers cleared a path and gurgled through the fields of sound. Let them hear it, far and wide! The narcotic effect of this music paralyzed his spine and eased his fate.
MOOSBRUGGER
The Moosbrugger case was currently much in the news. Moosbrug- ger was a carpenter, a big man with broad shoulders and no excess fat on him, a head of hair like brown lamb's wool, and good-natured strong paws. His face also expressed a good-natured strength and right-mindedness, qualities one would have smelled (had one not seen them) in the blunt, plain, dry workaday smell that belonged to this thirty-four-year-old man and came from the wood he worked with and a job that called as much for mindfulness as for exertion.
Anyone who came up against this face for the first time, a face blessed by God with every sign of goodness, would stop as if rooted to the spot, because Moosbrugger was usually flanked by two aimed guards, his hands shackled with a small, strong steel chain, its grip held by one of his escorts.
When he noticed anyone staring at him a smile would pass over his broad, good-natured face with the unkempt hair and a mustache and the little chin tuft. He wore a short black jacket with light gray trou- sers, his bearing was military, and he planted his feet wide apart; but it was that smile that most fascinated the reporters in the courtroom. It might be an embarrassed smile or a cunning smile, an ironic, mali- cious, pained, mad, bloodthirsty, or tenifYing smile: they were grop- ing visibly for contradictory expressions and seemed to be searching desperately in that smile for something they obviously could find no- where else in the man's entire upright appearance.
For Moosbrugger had killed a woman, a prostitute of the lowest type, in a horrifying manner. The reporters described in detail a knife wound in the throat from the larynx to the back of the neck, also the two stab wounds in the breast that penetrated the heart, and the two in the back on the left side, and how both breasts were sliced through so that they could almost be lifted off. The reporters had expressed their revulsion at this, but they did not stop until they had counted thirty-five stabs in the belly and explained the deep slash
68 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
that reached from the navel to the sacrum, continuing up the back in numerous lesser cuts, while the throat showed marks of strangula- tion. From such horrors they could not find their way back to Moos- brugger's good-natured face, although they were themselves good-natured men who had nevertheless described what had hap- pened in a factual, expert manner and, evidently, in breathless ex- citement. They hardly availed themselves of even the most obvious explanation, that the man before them was insane-for Moosbrug- ger had already been in various mental hospitals several times for similar crimes-even though a good reporter is very well informed on such questions these days; it looked as though they were still re- luctant to give up the idea of the villain, to banish the incident from their own world into the world of the insane. Their attitude was matched by that of the psychiatrists, who had already declared him normal just as often as they had declared him not accountable for his actions. There was also the amazing fact that no sooner had they
become known than Moosbrugger's pathological excesses were re- g~ded as "finally something interesting for a change" by thousands of people who deplore the sensationalism of the press, from busy of- ficeholders to fourteen-year-old sons to housewives befogged by their domestic cares. While these people of course sighed over such a monstrosity, they were nevertheless more deeply preoccupied with it than with their own life's work. Indeed, it might happen that a punctilious department head or bank manager would say to his sleepy wife at bedtime: "What would you do now if I were a Moosbrugger? "
When Ulrich first laid eyes on that face with its signs of being a child of God above handcuffs, he quickly turned around, slipped a few cigarettes to the sentry at the nearby court building, and asked him about the convoy that had apparently just left the gates; he was told . . . Well, anyway, this is how something of the sort must have happened in earlier times, since it is often reported this way, and Ulrich almost believed it himself; but the contemporary truth was that he had merely read all about it in the newspaper. It was to be a long time before he met Moosbrugger in person, and before. that happe,ned he caught sight of him only once during the trial. The probability of experiencing something unusual through the newspa- pers is much greater than that of experiencing it in person;·in other
words, the more important things take place today in the abstract, and the more trivial ones in real life.
What Ulrich learned of Moosbrugger's story in this fashion was more or less the following:
Moosbrugger had started out in life as a poor devil, an orphan shepherd boy in a hamlet so small that it did not even have a village street, and his poverty was such that he never dared speak to a girl. Girls were something he could always only look at, even later on when he became an apprentice and then when he was a traveling journeyman. One only need imagine what it must mean when some- thing one craves as naturally as bread or water can only be looked at. Aft~r a while one desires it unnaturally. It walks past, skirts swaying around its calves. It climbs over a stile and is visible up to the knees. One looks into its eyes, and they tum opaque. One hears it laugh and turns around quickly, only to look into a face as immovably round as a hole in the ground into which a mouse has just slipped.
So it is understandable that Moosbrugger justified himself even after the first time he killed a girl by saying that he was constantly haunted by spirits calling to him day and night. They threw him out of bed when he slept and bothered him at his work. Then he heard them talking and quarreling with one another day and night. This was no insanity, and Moosbrugger could not bear being called in- sane, although he himself sometimes dressed up his story a little with bits of remembered sermons, or trimmed it in accordance with the advice on malingering one picks up in prison. But the material to work with was always there, even ifit faded a little when his attention wandered.
It had been the same during his years as a journeyman. Work is not easy for a carpenter to fmd in winter, and Moosbrugger often had no roof over his head for weeks on end. He might have trudged along the road all day to reach a village, only to find no shelter. He would have to keep on marching late into the night. With no money for a meal, he drinks schnapps until two candles light up behind his eyes and the body keeps walking on its own. He would rather not ask for a cot at the shelter, regardless of the hot soup, partly because of the bedbugs and partly because of the offensive red tape; better to pick up a few pennies by begging and crawl into some farmer's haystack for the night. Without asking, of course; . what's the point of spending
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70 • THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
a long time asking when you're only going to be insulted? In the morning, of course, there is often an argument and a charge of as- sault, vagrancy, and begging, and finally there is an ever-thickening file of such convictions. Each new magistrate opens this file with much pomposity, as if it explained Moosbrugger.
And who considers what it means to go for days and weeks without a proper bath? The skin gets so stiff that it allows only the clumsiest movements, even when one tries to be delicate; under such a crust the living soul itself hardens. The mind may be less affected, it goes on doing the needful after a fashion, burning like a small light in a huge walking lighthouse full of crushed earthworms and grasshop- pers, with everything personal squashed inside, and only the fer- menting organic matter stalking onward. As he wandered on through the villages, or even on the deserted roads, Moosbrugger would en- counter whole processions ofwomen, one now, and another one half an hour later, but even if they appeared at great intervals and had nothing to do with each other, on the whole they were still proces- sions. They were on their way from one village to another, or had just slipped out of the house; they wore thick shawls or jackets that stood out in stiff, snaky lines around their hips; they stepped into warm rooms or drove their children ahead of them, or were on the road so alone that one could have thrown a stone at them like shying at a crow. Moosbrugger asserted that he could not possibly be a sex mur- derer, because these females had inspired only feelings of aversion in him. This is not implausible-we think we understand a cat, for in-
stance, sitting in front of a cage staring up at a fat, fair canruy hopping up and down, or batting a mouse, letting it go, then batting it again, just to see it run away once more; and what is a dog running after a bicycle, biting at it only in play-man's best friend? There is in this attitude toward the living, moving, silently rolling or flitting fellow creature enjoying its own existence something that suggests a deep innate aversion to it. And then what could one do when she stl'irted screaming? One could only come to one's senses, or else, ifone sim- ply couldn't do that, press her face to the ground and stuff earth into her mouth.
Moosbrugger was only a journeyman carpenter, a man utterly alone, and while he got on well enough with the other men wherever he worked, he never had a friend. Every now and then the most pow-
erful of instincts turned his inner being cruelly outward. But he may have lacked only, as he said, the education and the opportunity to make something different out of this impulse, an angel of mass de- struction or a great anarchist, though not the anarchists who band together in secret societies, whom he contemptuously called fakes. He was clearly ill, but even if his obviously pathological nature pro- vided the basis for his attitude, and this isolated him from other men, it somehow seemed to him a stronger and higher sense of his own self. His whole life was a comically and distressingly clumsy struggle to gain by force a recognition of this sense of himself. Even as an apprentice he had once broken the fingers ofone master who tried to beat him. He ran away from another with the master's money-in simple justice, as he said. He never stayed anywhere for long. As long as he could keep others at arm's length, as he always did at first, working peacefully, with his big shoulders and few words, he stayed. But as soon as they began to treat him familiarly and without respect, as if they had caught on to him, he packed up and left, seized by an uncanny feeling as though he were not frrmly settled inside his skin. Once, he had waited too long. Four bricklayers on a building site had got together to show him who was boss-they would make the scaf- folding around the top story give way under him. He could hear them tittering behind his back as they came closer; he hurled himself at them with all his boundless strength, threw one down two flights of stairs, and cut all the tendons in the arms of two others. To be punished for this, he said, had been a shock to his system. He emi- grated to Turkey but came back again, because the world was in league against him everywhere; no magic word and no kindness could prevail against this conspiracy.
He had eagerly picked up such phrases in the mental wards and prisons, with scraps of French and Latin stuck in the most unsuitable places as he talked, ever since he had discovered that it was the pos- session of these languages that gave those in power the right to de- cide his fate with their "findings. " For the same reason, he also did his utmost during hearings to express himself in an exaggerate. d High German, saying such things as "This must be regarded as the basis for my brutality" or "I had imagined her to be even more vicious than the others of her kind in my usual estimation of them. " But when he saw that this failed to make an impression he could rise to the heights
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72 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
of a grand theatrical pose, declaring disdainfully that he was a "theo- retical anarchist" whom the Social Democrats were ready to rescue at a moment's notice if he chose to accept a favor from those utterly pernicious Jewish exploiters of the ignorant working class. This would show them that he too had a "discipline," a field of his own where the learned presumption of his judges could not follow him.
Usually this kind of talk brought him high marks fqr "remarkable intelligence" in the court's judgment, respectful attention to his words during the proceedings, and tougher sentences; yet deep down, his flattered vanity regarded these hearings as the high points ofhis life. Which is why he hated no one as fervently as he hated the psychiatrists who imagined they could dismiss his whole complex personality with a few foreign words, as if it were for them an every- day affair. As always in such cases, the medical diagnoses of his men- tal condition fluctuated under the pressure of the superior world of juridical concepts, and Moosbrugger never missed a chance to dem- onstrate in open court his own superiority over the psychiatrists, un- masking them as puffed-up dupes and charlatans who knew nothing at all, and w~om he could trick into placing him in a mental institu- tion instead of sending him to prison, where he belonged. For he did not deny what he had done, but simply wanted his deeds understood as the mishaps of an important philosophy of life. It was those snick- ering women who were in the forefront of the conspiracy against him. They all had their skirt-chasers and turned up their noses at a real man's straight talk, ifthey didn't take it as a downright insult. He gave them a wide berth as long as he could, so as not to let them provoke him, but it was not possible all the time. There are days when a man feels confused and can't get hold of anything because his hands are sweating with restlessness. If one then has to give in, he can be sure that at the first step he takes there will be, far up the road like an advance patrol sent out by the others, one ofthose poisons on two feet crossing his path, a cheat who secretly laughs at the man while she saps his strength and puts on her act for him, if she doesn't do something much worse to him in her unscrupulousness!
And so the end of that night had come, a night of listless boozing, with lots of noise to keep down the inner restlessness. The world can be unsteady even when you aren't drunk. The street walls waver like stage sets behind which something is waiting for its cue. It gets qui-
eter at the edge of town, where you come into the open fields lit by the moon. That was where Moosbrugger had to circle back to get home, and it was there, by the iron bridge, that the girl accosted him. She was one of those girls who hire themselves out to men in the fields, a jobless, runaway housemaid, a little thb;lg of whom all you could see were two gleaming little mouse eyes under her kerchief. Moosbrugger turned her down and quickened his step, but she begged him to take her home with him. Moosbrugger walked: straight ahead, then around a corner, finally helplessly, this way and that; he took big strides, and she ran alongside him; he stopped, she stood there like a shadow. It was as if he were drawing her along behind him. He made one more attempt to drive her off: he sud- denly turned around and spat twice in her face. It was no use; she was invulnerable.
This happened in the immense park, which they had to cross at its narrowest part. Moosbrugger beg~ to feel sure that the girl had a protector nearby-how else would she have the neiVe to keep after him despite his exasperation? He reached for the knife in his pants pocket; he wasn't anyone's fool! They might jump him together; be- hind those bitches the other man was always hiding to jeer at you. Come to think of it, didn't she look like a man in disguise? He saw shadows move and heard crackling in the bushes, while this schemer beside him repeated her plea again and again, at regular inteiVals like a gigantic pendulum. But he could see nothing to hurl his giant's strength at, and the uncanny way nothing at all was happening began to frighten him.
By the time they turned into the first, still very dark street, there were beads of sweat on his forehead, and he was trembling. He kept his eyes straight ahead and walked into the first cafe that was still open. He gulped down a black coffee and three brandies and could sit there in peace, for fifteen minutes or so; but when he paid his check the worry was there again: what would he do if she was waiting for him outside? There are such thoughts, like string winding in end- less snares around arms and legs. He had hardly taken a few steps on the dark street when he felt the girl at his side. Now she was no lon- ger humble but cocky and self-confident; nor did she plead anymore but merely kept silent. Then he realized that he would never get rid of her, because it was he himself who was drawing her after him. His
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throat filled up with tearful disgust. He kept walking, and that crea- ture, trailing him, was himself again. It was just the same as when he was always meeting those processions of women in the road. Once, he had cut a big wooden splinter out of his own leg because he was too impatien~to wait for the doctor; in the same way, he now felt his knife lying long and hard in his pocket.
But by a superhuman exertion ofhis moral sense, Moosbrugger hit upon one more way out. Behind the board fence along which the road now led was a playing field; one couldn't be seen. there, and so he went in. He lay down in the cramped ticket booth and pushed his head into the comer where it was darkest; the soft, accursed second self lay down beside him. So he pretended to fall asleep right away, in order to be able to sneak out later on. But when he started to creep out softly, feet first, there ·it was again, winding its arms around his neck. Then he felt something hard, in her pocket or his. He tugged it out. He couldn't say whether it was a scissors or a knife; he stabbed her with it. He had claimed it was only a pair ofscissors, but it was his own knife. She fell with her head inside the booth. He dragged her partway outside, onto the soft ground, and kept on stabbing her until he had completely separated her from himself. Then he stood there beside her for maybe another quarter of an hour, looking down at her, while the night grew calmer again and wonderfully smooth. Now she could never again insult a man and trail after him. He finally carried the corpse across the street and laid it down in front of a bush so that it could be more easily found and buried, as he stated, be- cause now it was no longer her fault.
themselves to being left lying on the floor or the bed when they had served their purpose and the flood of talk would not suffer the petty interruption of putting a book tidily back in place. The arrogance of the young, who find the greatest minds just good enough to serve their own occasions, now seemed to Ulrich -strangely endearing. He tried to remember these conversations. It was like reaching on awak- ening for the last vanishing, dreamlike thoughts of sleep. And he thought, in mild astonishment: When we were assertive in those days, the point was not to be right-it was to assert ourselves! A young man needs to shine, far more than he needs to see something in the light. He now felt the memory of the feeling of being young, that hovering on rays oflight, as an aching loss.
It seemed to Ulrich that with the beginning of his adult life a gen- eral lull had set in, a gradual running down, in spite of occasional eddies of energy that came and went, to an ever more listless, erratic rhythm. It was very hard to say what this change consisted of. Were there suddenly fewer great men? Far from it! And besides, they don't matter; the greatness of an era does not depend on them. The intel- lectually lackluster 186os and 188os, for instance, could no more pre- vent the rise of a Nietzsche or a Hebbel than either-of these men could raise the intellectual level of his contemporaries. Had life in general reached a standstill? No, it had become more powerful! Were there more paralyzing contradictions than before? There could hardly be morel Had the past not known any absurdities? Heaps! Just between ourselves: people threw their support to the weak and ignored the strong; sometimes blockheads played leading roles while brilliant men played the part of eccentrics; the good Germanic citi- zen, untroubled by history's labor pains, which he dismissed as deca- dent and morbid excrescences, went on reading his family magazines and visited the crystal palaces and academies in vastly greater num- bers than he did the avant-garde exhibitions. Least of all did the po- litical world pay attention to the New Men's views and publications; and the great public institutions resisted everything new as if sur- rounded by a cordon santtatre against the plague. Could one not say, in fact, that things have got better since then? Men who once merely
headed minor sects have become aged celebrities; publishers and art dealers have become rich; new movements are constantly being started; everybody attends both the academic and the avant-garde
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56 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
shows, and even the avant-garde ofthe avant-garde; the family maga- zines have bobbed their hair; politicians like to sound off on the cul- tural arts, and newspapers make literary history. So what has been lost?
Something imponderable. An omen. An illusion. As when a mag- net releases iron filings and they fall in confusion again. As when a ball of string comes undone. As when a tension slackens. As when an orchestra begins to play out of tune. No details could be adduced that would not also have been possible before, but all the relation- ships had shifted a little. Ideas whose currency had once been lean grew fat. Persons who would before never have been taken seriously became famous. Harshness mellowed, separations fus~d, intransi- gents made concessions to popularity, taste$ already formed relapsed into uncertainties. Sharp boundaries everywhere became blurred and some new, indefinable ability to form alliances brought new peo- ple and new ideas to the top. Not that these people and ideas were bad, not at all; it was only that a little too much of the bad was mixed with the good, of error with buth, of accommodation with meaning.
There even seemed to be a privileged proportion of this mixture that got furthest on in the world; just the right pinch of makeshift to bring out the genius in genius and make talent look like a white hope, as a pinch of chicory, according to some people, brings out the right cof- fee flavor in coffee. Suddenly all the prominent and important posi- tions in the intellectual world were filled by such people, and all decisions went their way. There is nothing one can hold responsible for this, nor can one say how it all came about. There are no persons or ideas or specific phenomena that one can fight against. There is no lack of talent or goodwill or even of strong personalities. There is just something missing in everything, though you can't put your finger on it, as if there had been a change in the blood or in the air; a mysteri- ous disease has eaten away the previous period's seeds of genius, but everything sparkles with novelty, and finally one has no way of know- ing whether the world has really grown worse, or oneself merely older. At this point a new era has definitively arrived.
So the times had changed, like a day that begins radiantly blue and then by degrees clouds over, without having the kindness to wait for Ulrich. He evened the score byholding the cause ofthese mysterious changes that made up the disease eating away genius to be simple,
common stupidity. By no means in an insulting sense. For if stupid- it)r, seen from within, did not so much resemble talent as possess the ability to be mistaken for it, and if it did not outwardly resemble progress, genius, hope, and improvement, the chances are that no one would want to be stupid, and so there would be no stupidity. Or fighting it would at least be easy. Unfortunately, stupidity has some- thing uncommonly endearing and natural about it. Ifone finds that a reproduction, for instance, seems more of an artistic feat than a hand-painted original, well, there is a certain truth in that, and it is easier to prove than that van Gogh was a great artist. It is also easy and profitable to be a more powerful playwright than Shakespeare or a less uneven storyteller than Goethe, and a solid commonplace al- ways contains more humanity than a new discovery. There is, in short, no great idea that stupidity could not put to its own uses; it can
move in all directions, and put on all the guises oftruth. The truth, by comparison, has only one appearance and only one path, and is al- ways at a disadvantage.
But after a while Ulrich had a curious notion in this connection. He imagined that the great churchman and thinker Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), after taking infinite pains to put the ideas of his own time in the best possible order, had then continued through history to go even deeper to the bottom ofthings, and had just finished. Now, still young by special dispensation, he stepped out of his arched doorway with many folios under his arm, and an electric trolley shot right past his nose. Ulrich chuckled at the dumbstruck amazement on the face of the doctor untversalis, as the past had called the celebrated Thomas.
A motorcyclist came up the empty street, thundering up the per- spective bow-armed and bow-legged. His face had the solemn self- importance of a howling child. It reminded Ulrich of a photo he had seen a few days ago in a magazine of a famous woman tennis player poised on tiptoe, one leg exposed to above the garter, the other flung up toward her head as she reached for a high ball with her racket, on her face the expression of an English governess. In the same issue there was also a picture of a champion swimmer being massaged after a contest. Two women dressed in street clothes, one at the swimmer's feet, the other at her head, were solemnly looking down at her as she lay on a bed, naked on her back, one knee drawn up in a
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sB·THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
posture of sexual abandon, the. masseur standing alongside resting his hands on it. He wore a doctor's gown and gazed out ofthe picture as though this female flesh had been skinned and hung on a meat hook. Such were the things people were beginning to see at the time, and somehow they had to be acknowledged, as one acknowledges the presence of skyscrapers and electricity. A man can't be angry at his own time without suffering some damage, Ulrich felt. Ulrich was also always ready to love all these manifestations oflife. But he could never bring himself to love them wholeheartedly, as one's general sense of social well-being requires. For a long time now a hint of aversion had lain on everything he did and experienced, a shadow of impotence and loneliness, an all-encompassing distaste for which he could not find the complementary inclination. He felt at times as though he had been born with a talent for which there was at present no objective.
EFFECT OF A MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES ON A MAN WITH QUALITIES
While Ulrich and Clarisse were talking. they did not notice that the music in the house behind them broke oH" now and again. At those moments Walter had gone to the Window. He could not see them, but felt that they were just beyond his field of vision. Jealousy tor- mented him. The cheap intoxicant of sluggishly sensual music, was luring him back to the piano. It lay behind him, open like a bed rum- pled by a sleeper resisting consciousness in order to avoid facing re- ality. He was racked by the jealousy of a paralyzed man who can sense how the healthy walk, yet he could not bring himself to join them, for his anguish offered no possibility of defending himself against them.
When Walter got up in the morning and had to rush to the office,
when he talked with people during the day and rode home among them in the afternoon, he felt he was an important person, called upon to do great things. He believed then that he. saw things differ- ently: he was moved where others passed by unresponsively, and where others reached for a thing without thinking, for him the very act of moving his own arm was fraught with spiritual adventure, or else it was paralyzed in loving contemplation of itself. He was sensi- tive, and his feelipgs were constantly agitated by brooding, depres- sions, billowing ups and downs; he was never indifferent, always seeing joy or misery in everything, so he always had something excit- ing to think about. Such people exercise an unusual attraction, be- cause the moral flaw in which they incessantly live communicates itself to others. Everything in their convetsation takes on a personal significance, and one feels free in their company to be constantly preoccupied with oneself, so that they provide a pleasure otherwise obtainable only from an analyst or therapist for a fee, with the further difference that with the psychiatrist one feels \sick, while Walter helped a person to feel very important for reasons that had previ- ously escaped one's attention. With this talent for encouraging self- preoccupation, he had in fact conquered Clarisse and in time driven all his rivals from the field. Since everything became for him an ethi- cal move~ent, he could hold forth convincingly on the immorality of ornament, the hygiene ofsimple forms, and the beery fumes ofWag- ner's music, in accord with the new taste in the arts, terrorizing even
his future father-in-law, whose painter's brain was like a peacock's tail unfurled. So there could be no question that Walter had his suc- cesses to look back on.
And yet, when he got home full of impressions and plans, ripe and new as perhaps n~ver before, a demoralizing change took place in him. Merely putting a cai)vas on the easel or a sheet of paper on the table was the sign of a terrible flight from his heart. His head re- mained clear, and the plan inside it hovered as ifin a very transpar- ent and distinct atmosphere; indeed, the plan split and became two or more plans, all ready to compete for supremacy-but the connec- tion between his head and the first movements needed to carry it out seemed severed. Walter could not even make up his mind to lift a finger. He simply did not get up from where he happened to be sit- ting, and his thoughts slid away from the task he had set himself like
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6o • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
snow evaporating as it falls. He didn't know where the time went, but all of a sudden it was evening, and since after several such experi- ences he had learned to start dreading them on his way home, whole series of weeks began to slip, and passed away like a troubled half- sleep. Slowed down by a sense of hopelessness in all his decisions and movements, he suffered from bitter sadness, and his incapacity solidified into a pain that often sat like a nosebleed behind his fore- head the moment he tried to make up his mind. to do something. Walter was fearful, and the symptoms he recognized in himself not only hampered him in his work but also filled him With anxiety, for they were apparently so far beyond his control that they often gave him the impression of an incipient mental breakdown. '
But as his condition had grown steadily worse in the course of the last year, he found a miraculous refuge in a thought he had never valued enough before. The idea was none other than that the . Europe in which he was forced to live was hopelessly decadent. During ages in which things seerp to be going well outwardly, while inwardly they undergo the kind of regression that may be the fate of all things, in- cluding cultural development-unless special efforts are made to keep them supplied with new ideas-the obvious question was, pre- sumably, what one could do about it. But the tangle of clever, stupid, vulgar, and beautiful is at such times so particularly dense and intri- cate that many people obviously find it easier to believe that there is something occult at the root of things, and proclaim the fated fall of one thing or another that eludes precise definition and is porten- tously vague. It hardly matters whether the doomed thing is the human race, vegetarianism, or the soul; all that a healthy pessimism needs is merely something inescapable to hold on to. Even Walter, who in better days used to be able to laugh at su~h doctrines, soon discovered their advantages once he began to try them out. Instead ofhis feeling bad and unable to work, it was now the times that were sick, while he was fine. His life, which had come to nothing, was now, all at once, tremendously accounted for, justified on a world-histori- cal scale that was worthY. of him, so that picking up a pen or pencil and laying it down again virtually took on the aura of a great sacrifice.
With all this, however, Walter still had to struggle with himself, and Clarisse kept on tormenting him. She turned a deaf ear to his critical discussions of the times; with her it was genius or nothing.
What it was she did not know, but whenever the subject came up her whole body began to tremble and tense up. "You either feel it or you don't" was all the proofshe could offer. For him she always remained the same cruel little fifteen-year-old girl. She had never quite under- stood his way of feeling, nor could he ever control her. But cold and hard as she was, and then again so spirited, with her ethereal, flaming will, she had a mysterious ability to influence him, as though shocks were coming through her from a direction that could not be fitted into the three dimensions of space. This influence sometimes bor- dered- on the uncanny. He felt it most keenly when they played the piano together. Clarisse's playing was hard and colorless, prompted by stirrings in her that he did not share, and that frightened him as they reached him when their bodies glowed till the soul burned through. Something indefinable then tore itself loose inside her and threatened to fly away with her spirit. It came out of some secret hollow in her being that had to be anxiously kept shut up tight. He had no idea what made him feel this, or what it was, but it tortured him with an unutterable fear and the need to do something decisive against it, which he could not do because no one but him noticed anything.
As he stood at the window watching Clarisse coming back alone, he dimly knew that he would again not be able to resist the urge to make disparaging remarks about Ulrich. Ulrich had returned from abroad at a bad time. He was bad for Clarisse. He ruthlessly exacer-
'bated something inside Clarisse that Walter dared not touch: the cavern of disaster, the pitiful, the sick, the fatal genius in her, the secret empty space where something was tearing at chains that might someday give way. Now she had entered and was standing bare- headed before him, sunhat in hand, and he looked at her. Her eyes were mocking, tender, clear-perhaps a little too clear. Sometimes he felt that she simply had a certain strength he lacked. Even when she was a child he had felt her as a thorn that would never let him find peace, and evidently he had never wanted her to be otherwise; perhaps this was the secret of his life, which the other two did not understand.
"How deeply we suffer," he thought. "I don't think it can happen often·that two people love each other as deeply as we must. "
And he began to speak without preamble: "I don't want to know
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62 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
what Ulo has been telling you, but I can tell you that the strength you marvel at in him is pure emptiness. " Clarisse looked at the piano and smiled; he had involuntarily sat down again beside the open instru- ment. "It must be easy to feel heroic," he went on, "when one is nat- urally insensitive, and to think in miles when you've no idea what riches can be hidden in an inch! " They sometimes called him Ulo, his boyhood nickname, and he liked them for it, as one may keep a smil- ing respect for one's old nanny. "He's come to a dead end! " Walter added. "You don't see it, but don't imagine that I don't know him. "
Clarisse had her doubts.
Walter said vehemently: "Today it's all decadence! A bottomless pit of intelligence! He is intelligent, I grant you that, but he knows nothing at all about the ·power of a soul in full possession of itself. What Goethe calls personality, what Goethe calls mobile order- those are things he doesn't have a clue about! 'This noble concept of power and restraint, ofchoice and law, offreedom and measure, mo- bile order . . . '"The poet's lines came in waves from his lips. Clarisse regarded these lips in amiable wonder, as though they had just let fly a pretty toy. Then she collected herself and interjected like a good little housewife: 'Would you like a beer? " "Yes. Why not? Don't I always have one? " 'Well, there is none in the house. '' "I wish you hadn't asked," Walter sighed. "I might never have thought of it. ''
And that was that, as far as Clarisse was concerned. But Walter had been thrown off the track and didn't know how to continue.
"Do you remember our conversation about the artist? " he asked tentatively.
'Which one? "
"The one we had a few days ago. I explained to you what a living principle of form in a person means. Don't you remember, I came to the conclusion that in the old days, instead of death and logical mechanization, blood and wisdom reigned? "
"No. " 1
Walter was stymied; he groped, wavered. Suddenly he burst out: "He's a man without qualities! "
'What is that? " Clarisse asked, giggling.
"Nothing. That's just it, it's nothing. ''
But Clarisse found the phrase intriguing.
"There are millions of them nowadays," Walter declared. "It's the
human type produced by our time! " He was pleased with the term he had hit upon so unexpectedly. As if he were starting a poem, he let the expression drive . him on even before its meaning was· clear to him. "Just look at him! What would you take him for? Does he look like a doctor, a businessman, a painter, or a diplomat? "
"He's none of those," Clarisse said dryly.
"Well, does he look like a mathematician? "
"I don't know-how should I know what a mathematician is sup-
posed to look like? "
"You've hit the nail on the head! A mathematician looks like noth-
ing at all-that is, he is likely to look intelligent in such a general way that there isn't a single specific thing to pin him down! Except for the Roman Catholic clergy, no one these days looks the way he should, because we use our heads even more impersonally than our hands. But mathematics is the absolute limit: it already knows as little about itself as future generations, feeding on energy pills instead of bread and meat, will be likely to know about meadows and young calves and chickens! "
Clarisse had meanwhile put their simple supper on the table, and Walter was already digging into it, which may have suggested the analogy to him. Clarisse was watching his lips. They reminded her of his late mot;her's. They were strong feminine lips that ate as if they were getting the housework done, and were topped off by a small clipped mustache. His eyes shone like freshly peeled chestnuts, even when he was merely looking for a piece of cheese on the platter. Al- though he was short, and flabby rather than delicate of build, he was a man of striking appearance, the kind who always seem to be stand- ing in a good light. He now continued:
"His appearance gives no clue to what his profession might be, and yet he doe~n't look like a man without a profession either. Consider what he's like: He always knows what to do. He knows how to gaze into a woman's eyes. He can put his mind to any question at any time. He can box. He is gifted, strong-willed, open-minded, fearless, tena- cious, dashing, circumspect-why quibble, suppose we grant him all those qualities-yet he has none of them! They've made him what he is, they've set his course for him, and yet they don't belong to him. When he is angry, something in him laughs. When he is sad, he is up to something.
When something moves him, he turns against it. He'll
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always see a good side to every bad action. What he thinks of any- thing will always depend on some possible context-nothing is, to him, what it is; everything is subject to change, in flux, part of a whole, of an infinite number of wholes presumably adding up to a superwhole that, however, he knows nothing about. So every answer he gives is only a partial answer, every feeling only an opinion, and he never cares what something is, only 'how' it is-some extraneous seasoning that somehow goes along with it, that's what interests him. I don't know whether I'm making myself clear-? "
"Quite clear," Clarisse said, "but I think that's all very nice of him. "
Walter had unintentionally spoken with signs of growing dislike; his old boyhood sense of being weaker than his friend increased his jealousy. For although he was convinced that Ulrich-had never really achieved anything beyond a few proofs of naked intellect and capac- ity, he could never shake off a secret sense of always having been Ulrich's physical inferior. The portrait he was sketching freed him, like bringing offa work ofart, as ifit were not his own doing at all but something that had begun as a mysterious inspiration, with word after word coming to him, while inwardly something dissolved with- out his being conscious of it. By the time he finished he had recog- nized that Ulrich stood for nothing but this state of dissolution that all present-day phenomena have.
"So you like it; do you? " he said, painfully surprised. "You can't be serious? "
Clarisse was chewing bread and soft cheese; she could only smile with her eyes.
"Oh well," Walter said, "I suppose we used to think that way our- selves, in the old days. But surely it can't be regarded as anything more than a preliminary phase? Such a man is not really a human being! "
Clarisse had sWallowed her mouthful. "That's what he says him- self! " she affirmed.
"What does he say himself? "
"Oh, I don't know-that today everything is coming apart. Every- thing has come to a standStill, he says, not just him. But he doesn't take it as hard as you do. He once gave me a long talk about it: Ifyou analyze a thousand people, you will find two dozen qualities, emo-
tions, forms of development, types of structure and so on, which are what they all consist of. And if you do a chemical analysis of your body, all you get is water with a few dozen little heaps of matter swimming in it. The water rises inside us just as it does inside trees, and it forms the bodies ofanimals just as it forms the clouds. I think that's neatly put. But it doesn't help you to know what to say about yourself. Or what to do. " Clarisse giggled. "So then I told him that you go fishing for days when you have time off, and lie around by the water. "
"So what? I'd like to know if he could stand that for even ten min- utes. But human beings," Walter said firmly, "have been doing that for ten thousand years, staring up at the sky, feeling the warmth of the earth, without trying to analyze it any more than you'd analyze your own mother. "
Clarisse couldn't help giggling again. "He says things have become more complicated meanwhile. Just as we swim in water, we also swim in a sea of fire, a storm of electricity, a firmament of magnet- ism, a swamp of warmth, and so on. It's just that we can't feel it. All that finally remains is formulas. What they mean in human terms is hard to say; that's all there is. I've forgotten whatever I learned about it at school, but I think that's what it amounts to. Anybody nowadays, says Ulrich, who wants to call the birds 'brothers,' like Saint Francis or you, can't do it so easily but must be prepared to be cast into a furnace, plunge into the earth through the wires of an electric trol- ley, or gurgle down the drain with the dishwater into the sewer. "
"Oh sure, sure," Walter interrupted this report. "First, four ele- ments are turned into several dozen, and finally we're left floating around on relationships, processes, on the dirty dishwater of pro- cesses and formulas, on something we can't even recognize as a thing, a process, a ghost of an idea, of a God-knows-what. Leaving no difference anymore between the sun and a kitchen match, or be- tween your mouth at one end of the digestive tract and its other end either. Every thing has a hundred aspects, every aspect a hundred connections, and different feelings are attached to every one of them. The human brain has happily split things apart, but things have split the human heart too. " He had leapt to his feet but re- mained standing behind the table.
"Clarisse," he said, "the man is a danger for you! Look, Clarisse,
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what every one of us needs today more than anything else is simplic- ity, closeness to the earth, health-and yes, definitely, say what you like, a child as well, because a child keeps us anchored t~the ground. Everything Ulo tells you is inhuman. I promise you I have the cour- age, when I come home, simply to have a cup of coffee with you, listen to the birds, take a little walk, chat with a neighbor, and let the day fade out quietly: that's human life! "
The tenderness of these sentiments had brought him slowly closer to her. But the moment fatherish feelings could be detected raising their gentle bass voice from afar, Clarisse palked. As he drew near, her face became expressionless and tilted defensively.
When he had reached her side he radiated a gentle glow like a good country stove. In this warm stream Clarisse wavered for a mo- ment. Then she said: "Nothing doing, my dear! " She grabbed a piece of bread and some cheese from the table and kissed him quickly on the forehead. ''I'm going out to see ifthere are any noctur- nal butterflies. "
"But Clarisse," Walter pleaded. "All the butterflies are gone this time of year. "
"Oh, yau never can tell. "
Nothing was left of her in the room but her laughter. With her hread and cheese she roamed the meadows; it was a safe neighbor- hood and she needed no escort. Walter's tenderness collapsed like a souffle taken too soon from the oven. He heaved a deep sigh. Then he hesitantly sat down again at the piano and struck a few keys. Willy- nilly his playing turned into improvisations on themes from Wagner's operas, and in the splashings of this dissolutely tumescent substance he had refused in the days ofhis pride, his fingers cleared a path and gurgled through the fields of sound. Let them hear it, far and wide! The narcotic effect of this music paralyzed his spine and eased his fate.
MOOSBRUGGER
The Moosbrugger case was currently much in the news. Moosbrug- ger was a carpenter, a big man with broad shoulders and no excess fat on him, a head of hair like brown lamb's wool, and good-natured strong paws. His face also expressed a good-natured strength and right-mindedness, qualities one would have smelled (had one not seen them) in the blunt, plain, dry workaday smell that belonged to this thirty-four-year-old man and came from the wood he worked with and a job that called as much for mindfulness as for exertion.
Anyone who came up against this face for the first time, a face blessed by God with every sign of goodness, would stop as if rooted to the spot, because Moosbrugger was usually flanked by two aimed guards, his hands shackled with a small, strong steel chain, its grip held by one of his escorts.
When he noticed anyone staring at him a smile would pass over his broad, good-natured face with the unkempt hair and a mustache and the little chin tuft. He wore a short black jacket with light gray trou- sers, his bearing was military, and he planted his feet wide apart; but it was that smile that most fascinated the reporters in the courtroom. It might be an embarrassed smile or a cunning smile, an ironic, mali- cious, pained, mad, bloodthirsty, or tenifYing smile: they were grop- ing visibly for contradictory expressions and seemed to be searching desperately in that smile for something they obviously could find no- where else in the man's entire upright appearance.
For Moosbrugger had killed a woman, a prostitute of the lowest type, in a horrifying manner. The reporters described in detail a knife wound in the throat from the larynx to the back of the neck, also the two stab wounds in the breast that penetrated the heart, and the two in the back on the left side, and how both breasts were sliced through so that they could almost be lifted off. The reporters had expressed their revulsion at this, but they did not stop until they had counted thirty-five stabs in the belly and explained the deep slash
68 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
that reached from the navel to the sacrum, continuing up the back in numerous lesser cuts, while the throat showed marks of strangula- tion. From such horrors they could not find their way back to Moos- brugger's good-natured face, although they were themselves good-natured men who had nevertheless described what had hap- pened in a factual, expert manner and, evidently, in breathless ex- citement. They hardly availed themselves of even the most obvious explanation, that the man before them was insane-for Moosbrug- ger had already been in various mental hospitals several times for similar crimes-even though a good reporter is very well informed on such questions these days; it looked as though they were still re- luctant to give up the idea of the villain, to banish the incident from their own world into the world of the insane. Their attitude was matched by that of the psychiatrists, who had already declared him normal just as often as they had declared him not accountable for his actions. There was also the amazing fact that no sooner had they
become known than Moosbrugger's pathological excesses were re- g~ded as "finally something interesting for a change" by thousands of people who deplore the sensationalism of the press, from busy of- ficeholders to fourteen-year-old sons to housewives befogged by their domestic cares. While these people of course sighed over such a monstrosity, they were nevertheless more deeply preoccupied with it than with their own life's work. Indeed, it might happen that a punctilious department head or bank manager would say to his sleepy wife at bedtime: "What would you do now if I were a Moosbrugger? "
When Ulrich first laid eyes on that face with its signs of being a child of God above handcuffs, he quickly turned around, slipped a few cigarettes to the sentry at the nearby court building, and asked him about the convoy that had apparently just left the gates; he was told . . . Well, anyway, this is how something of the sort must have happened in earlier times, since it is often reported this way, and Ulrich almost believed it himself; but the contemporary truth was that he had merely read all about it in the newspaper. It was to be a long time before he met Moosbrugger in person, and before. that happe,ned he caught sight of him only once during the trial. The probability of experiencing something unusual through the newspa- pers is much greater than that of experiencing it in person;·in other
words, the more important things take place today in the abstract, and the more trivial ones in real life.
What Ulrich learned of Moosbrugger's story in this fashion was more or less the following:
Moosbrugger had started out in life as a poor devil, an orphan shepherd boy in a hamlet so small that it did not even have a village street, and his poverty was such that he never dared speak to a girl. Girls were something he could always only look at, even later on when he became an apprentice and then when he was a traveling journeyman. One only need imagine what it must mean when some- thing one craves as naturally as bread or water can only be looked at. Aft~r a while one desires it unnaturally. It walks past, skirts swaying around its calves. It climbs over a stile and is visible up to the knees. One looks into its eyes, and they tum opaque. One hears it laugh and turns around quickly, only to look into a face as immovably round as a hole in the ground into which a mouse has just slipped.
So it is understandable that Moosbrugger justified himself even after the first time he killed a girl by saying that he was constantly haunted by spirits calling to him day and night. They threw him out of bed when he slept and bothered him at his work. Then he heard them talking and quarreling with one another day and night. This was no insanity, and Moosbrugger could not bear being called in- sane, although he himself sometimes dressed up his story a little with bits of remembered sermons, or trimmed it in accordance with the advice on malingering one picks up in prison. But the material to work with was always there, even ifit faded a little when his attention wandered.
It had been the same during his years as a journeyman. Work is not easy for a carpenter to fmd in winter, and Moosbrugger often had no roof over his head for weeks on end. He might have trudged along the road all day to reach a village, only to find no shelter. He would have to keep on marching late into the night. With no money for a meal, he drinks schnapps until two candles light up behind his eyes and the body keeps walking on its own. He would rather not ask for a cot at the shelter, regardless of the hot soup, partly because of the bedbugs and partly because of the offensive red tape; better to pick up a few pennies by begging and crawl into some farmer's haystack for the night. Without asking, of course; . what's the point of spending
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a long time asking when you're only going to be insulted? In the morning, of course, there is often an argument and a charge of as- sault, vagrancy, and begging, and finally there is an ever-thickening file of such convictions. Each new magistrate opens this file with much pomposity, as if it explained Moosbrugger.
And who considers what it means to go for days and weeks without a proper bath? The skin gets so stiff that it allows only the clumsiest movements, even when one tries to be delicate; under such a crust the living soul itself hardens. The mind may be less affected, it goes on doing the needful after a fashion, burning like a small light in a huge walking lighthouse full of crushed earthworms and grasshop- pers, with everything personal squashed inside, and only the fer- menting organic matter stalking onward. As he wandered on through the villages, or even on the deserted roads, Moosbrugger would en- counter whole processions ofwomen, one now, and another one half an hour later, but even if they appeared at great intervals and had nothing to do with each other, on the whole they were still proces- sions. They were on their way from one village to another, or had just slipped out of the house; they wore thick shawls or jackets that stood out in stiff, snaky lines around their hips; they stepped into warm rooms or drove their children ahead of them, or were on the road so alone that one could have thrown a stone at them like shying at a crow. Moosbrugger asserted that he could not possibly be a sex mur- derer, because these females had inspired only feelings of aversion in him. This is not implausible-we think we understand a cat, for in-
stance, sitting in front of a cage staring up at a fat, fair canruy hopping up and down, or batting a mouse, letting it go, then batting it again, just to see it run away once more; and what is a dog running after a bicycle, biting at it only in play-man's best friend? There is in this attitude toward the living, moving, silently rolling or flitting fellow creature enjoying its own existence something that suggests a deep innate aversion to it. And then what could one do when she stl'irted screaming? One could only come to one's senses, or else, ifone sim- ply couldn't do that, press her face to the ground and stuff earth into her mouth.
Moosbrugger was only a journeyman carpenter, a man utterly alone, and while he got on well enough with the other men wherever he worked, he never had a friend. Every now and then the most pow-
erful of instincts turned his inner being cruelly outward. But he may have lacked only, as he said, the education and the opportunity to make something different out of this impulse, an angel of mass de- struction or a great anarchist, though not the anarchists who band together in secret societies, whom he contemptuously called fakes. He was clearly ill, but even if his obviously pathological nature pro- vided the basis for his attitude, and this isolated him from other men, it somehow seemed to him a stronger and higher sense of his own self. His whole life was a comically and distressingly clumsy struggle to gain by force a recognition of this sense of himself. Even as an apprentice he had once broken the fingers ofone master who tried to beat him. He ran away from another with the master's money-in simple justice, as he said. He never stayed anywhere for long. As long as he could keep others at arm's length, as he always did at first, working peacefully, with his big shoulders and few words, he stayed. But as soon as they began to treat him familiarly and without respect, as if they had caught on to him, he packed up and left, seized by an uncanny feeling as though he were not frrmly settled inside his skin. Once, he had waited too long. Four bricklayers on a building site had got together to show him who was boss-they would make the scaf- folding around the top story give way under him. He could hear them tittering behind his back as they came closer; he hurled himself at them with all his boundless strength, threw one down two flights of stairs, and cut all the tendons in the arms of two others. To be punished for this, he said, had been a shock to his system. He emi- grated to Turkey but came back again, because the world was in league against him everywhere; no magic word and no kindness could prevail against this conspiracy.
He had eagerly picked up such phrases in the mental wards and prisons, with scraps of French and Latin stuck in the most unsuitable places as he talked, ever since he had discovered that it was the pos- session of these languages that gave those in power the right to de- cide his fate with their "findings. " For the same reason, he also did his utmost during hearings to express himself in an exaggerate. d High German, saying such things as "This must be regarded as the basis for my brutality" or "I had imagined her to be even more vicious than the others of her kind in my usual estimation of them. " But when he saw that this failed to make an impression he could rise to the heights
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of a grand theatrical pose, declaring disdainfully that he was a "theo- retical anarchist" whom the Social Democrats were ready to rescue at a moment's notice if he chose to accept a favor from those utterly pernicious Jewish exploiters of the ignorant working class. This would show them that he too had a "discipline," a field of his own where the learned presumption of his judges could not follow him.
Usually this kind of talk brought him high marks fqr "remarkable intelligence" in the court's judgment, respectful attention to his words during the proceedings, and tougher sentences; yet deep down, his flattered vanity regarded these hearings as the high points ofhis life. Which is why he hated no one as fervently as he hated the psychiatrists who imagined they could dismiss his whole complex personality with a few foreign words, as if it were for them an every- day affair. As always in such cases, the medical diagnoses of his men- tal condition fluctuated under the pressure of the superior world of juridical concepts, and Moosbrugger never missed a chance to dem- onstrate in open court his own superiority over the psychiatrists, un- masking them as puffed-up dupes and charlatans who knew nothing at all, and w~om he could trick into placing him in a mental institu- tion instead of sending him to prison, where he belonged. For he did not deny what he had done, but simply wanted his deeds understood as the mishaps of an important philosophy of life. It was those snick- ering women who were in the forefront of the conspiracy against him. They all had their skirt-chasers and turned up their noses at a real man's straight talk, ifthey didn't take it as a downright insult. He gave them a wide berth as long as he could, so as not to let them provoke him, but it was not possible all the time. There are days when a man feels confused and can't get hold of anything because his hands are sweating with restlessness. If one then has to give in, he can be sure that at the first step he takes there will be, far up the road like an advance patrol sent out by the others, one ofthose poisons on two feet crossing his path, a cheat who secretly laughs at the man while she saps his strength and puts on her act for him, if she doesn't do something much worse to him in her unscrupulousness!
And so the end of that night had come, a night of listless boozing, with lots of noise to keep down the inner restlessness. The world can be unsteady even when you aren't drunk. The street walls waver like stage sets behind which something is waiting for its cue. It gets qui-
eter at the edge of town, where you come into the open fields lit by the moon. That was where Moosbrugger had to circle back to get home, and it was there, by the iron bridge, that the girl accosted him. She was one of those girls who hire themselves out to men in the fields, a jobless, runaway housemaid, a little thb;lg of whom all you could see were two gleaming little mouse eyes under her kerchief. Moosbrugger turned her down and quickened his step, but she begged him to take her home with him. Moosbrugger walked: straight ahead, then around a corner, finally helplessly, this way and that; he took big strides, and she ran alongside him; he stopped, she stood there like a shadow. It was as if he were drawing her along behind him. He made one more attempt to drive her off: he sud- denly turned around and spat twice in her face. It was no use; she was invulnerable.
This happened in the immense park, which they had to cross at its narrowest part. Moosbrugger beg~ to feel sure that the girl had a protector nearby-how else would she have the neiVe to keep after him despite his exasperation? He reached for the knife in his pants pocket; he wasn't anyone's fool! They might jump him together; be- hind those bitches the other man was always hiding to jeer at you. Come to think of it, didn't she look like a man in disguise? He saw shadows move and heard crackling in the bushes, while this schemer beside him repeated her plea again and again, at regular inteiVals like a gigantic pendulum. But he could see nothing to hurl his giant's strength at, and the uncanny way nothing at all was happening began to frighten him.
By the time they turned into the first, still very dark street, there were beads of sweat on his forehead, and he was trembling. He kept his eyes straight ahead and walked into the first cafe that was still open. He gulped down a black coffee and three brandies and could sit there in peace, for fifteen minutes or so; but when he paid his check the worry was there again: what would he do if she was waiting for him outside? There are such thoughts, like string winding in end- less snares around arms and legs. He had hardly taken a few steps on the dark street when he felt the girl at his side. Now she was no lon- ger humble but cocky and self-confident; nor did she plead anymore but merely kept silent. Then he realized that he would never get rid of her, because it was he himself who was drawing her after him. His
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throat filled up with tearful disgust. He kept walking, and that crea- ture, trailing him, was himself again. It was just the same as when he was always meeting those processions of women in the road. Once, he had cut a big wooden splinter out of his own leg because he was too impatien~to wait for the doctor; in the same way, he now felt his knife lying long and hard in his pocket.
But by a superhuman exertion ofhis moral sense, Moosbrugger hit upon one more way out. Behind the board fence along which the road now led was a playing field; one couldn't be seen. there, and so he went in. He lay down in the cramped ticket booth and pushed his head into the comer where it was darkest; the soft, accursed second self lay down beside him. So he pretended to fall asleep right away, in order to be able to sneak out later on. But when he started to creep out softly, feet first, there ·it was again, winding its arms around his neck. Then he felt something hard, in her pocket or his. He tugged it out. He couldn't say whether it was a scissors or a knife; he stabbed her with it. He had claimed it was only a pair ofscissors, but it was his own knife. She fell with her head inside the booth. He dragged her partway outside, onto the soft ground, and kept on stabbing her until he had completely separated her from himself. Then he stood there beside her for maybe another quarter of an hour, looking down at her, while the night grew calmer again and wonderfully smooth. Now she could never again insult a man and trail after him. He finally carried the corpse across the street and laid it down in front of a bush so that it could be more easily found and buried, as he stated, be- cause now it was no longer her fault.
