Ulrich noticed the fine black down growing like a con-
tradiction
on Gerda's fair skin; the tiny hairs sprouting from her body seemed to bespeak the variously composite nature of poor modem mankind.
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v1
One had the feeling that going home, outside the gate, one would have to stamp firmly a few times to test the ground.
Still, it was a very pleasant occasion.
Such general undertakings never find a proper content, of course, like all universal and elevated concepts.
One cannot even imagine the concept "dog"; the word is only a reference to particular dogs and canine qualities, and this is even more the case with "patriotism" or the loftiest patriotic ideas.
But even if it has no content, it certainly has a meaning, and it is surely desirable from time to time to bring that meaning to life!
This was what most of those present were communicating to one another, although mostly within the silence of the unconscious.
But Diotima, still standing in the maill reception room and favoring stragglers with her little speeches of welcome, was astonished to hear what ap- peared to be lively conversations starting up on such subjects as the difference between Bohemian and Bavarian beer, or publishers' royalties.
It was too bad that she could not watch her reception from the street. From out there it looked marvelous. The light shone brightly through the curtains of the tall windows along the fa~ade of the house, heightened by the additional glow of authority and distinction emanating from the waiting cars, as well as by the gaping passersby who stopped to look up for a while without quite knowing why. Di- otima would have been pleased by the sight. There were people con- stantly standing in the half-light the festivity cast on the street; behind their backs, the great darkness began that within a short dis- tance quickly became impenetrable.
Pseudoreality Prevails · . '331
332
73
LEO FISCHEL'S DAUGHTER GERDA
In all this hubbub, Ulrich kept putting off fulfilling his promise to Fischel that he would pay the family a visit. He actually never did get around to it until something unexpected happened: Fischel's wife, Clementine, came to see him.
She had phoned to announce her visit, and Ulrich awaited her not without apprehension. It had been three years since he had regularly come to their house, during a stay ofsome months in town; since his return he had been there only once, not wanting to stir up a past flirtation and dreading having to deal with a mother's disappoint- ment. But Clementine Fischel was a woman of "magnanimous spirit," with so little opportunity to exercise it in her daily petty strug- gles with her husband, Leo, that for special occasions, regrettably so rare in her life, she had reserves of truly heroic high-mindedness to draw upon. Even so, this thin woman with her austere, rather care- worn face felt a bit embarrassed when she found herself face-to-face with Ulrich, saying she needed to speak to him privately, even though they were alone as it was. But he was the only person Gerda would still listen to, she said, adding that she hoped he would not misunderstand her request.
Ulrich·was aware of the Fischel family's situation. Not only were the father and mother constantly at war, but their daughter, Gerda, already twenty-three, had surrounded herself with a swarm of odd young people who had somehow co-opted Papa Leo, who ground his teeth, as a most grudging Maecenas and backer of their "new move- ment" because his house was the most convenient for their get- togethers. Gerda was so nervous and anemic, and got so terribly upset every time anyone tried to make her see less of these friends- Clementine reported-who were, after all, just silly boys without
real breeding; still, the way they insisted on parading their mystical anti-Semitism was not only in poor taste, it revealed an inner brutal- ity. Not that she had come to complain about. anti-Semitism~ she added, which was a sign of the times, one simply had to resign one- self to it-she was even prepared to admit that in some respects there might be something in it. Clementine paused and would have dried a tear with her handkerchief had she not worn a veil; but as it was she refrained from dropping the tear, contenting herself with merely pulling her white handkerchief out of her little handbag.
"You know what Gerda's like," she said; "a beautiful and gifted girl but-"
"A bit rebellious. " Ulrich finished it for her.
"Yes, Heaven help us, always going to extremes. "
"So she's still a German Nationalist? "
Clementine spoke of the parents' feelings. "A mother's errand of
mercy" was what she somewhat pathetically called her visit, which had as its secondary'aim to entice Ulrich back as aregular visitor to their family circle, now that he was known to have risen to such emi- nence in the Parallel Campaign. "I hate myself," she went on, "for the way I encouraged Gerda's friendship with these boys in recent years, against Leo's will. I thought nothing ofit; these youngsters are idealists in their way, and an open-minded person can let the occa- sional offensive word pass. . . . But Leo-you know how he is-is upset by anti-Semitism, whether it's merely mystical or symbolic or not. "
"And Gerda, in her free-spirited, Germanic, blond fashion, won't recognize the problem? " Ulrich rounded it out.
"She's the same as I was at her age in this respect. Do you think, by the way, that Hans Sepp has any prospects? "
"Is Gerda engaged to him? " Ulrich asked cautiously.
"That boy has no means whatever ofproviding for her," Clemen- tine sighed. "How can you talk of an engagement? But when Leo ordered him out ofthe house Gerda ate so little for three weeks run- ning that she turned to skin and bone. " All at once, she broke out angrily: "You know, it seems to me like hypnosis, like some sort of spiritual infection! That boy incessantly expounds his philosophy under our roof, and Gerda never notices the continual insult to her parents in it, even though she's always been a good and affectionate
Pseudoreality Prevails · 333
334 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
child otherwise. But whenever I say anything, she answers: 'You're so old-fashioned, Mama. ' So I thought-you're the only man who counts for something with her, arid Leo thinks the world. of you! - couldn't you come over and try to open Gerda's eyes to the callow- ness of Hans and his cronies? "
For such a model of propriety as Clementine to resort to so ag- gressive a tactic could only mean that she was seriously worried. Whatever their conflicts, she was inclined to a certain solidarity with her husband in this situation. Ulrich raised his eyebrows in concern.
''I'm afraid Gerda will canme old-fashioned too. These new young people pay no attention to us elders on such matters of principle. "
"It occurred to me that the easiest way to distract Gerda might be your fmding something for her to do in that patriotic campaign of yours everyone is talking about," Clementine offered, and Ulrich hastened to promise her a visit, even while assuring her that the P~ allel Campaign was far from being ready for such uses.
When Gerda saw him coming through the door a few days after- ward, two circular red spots appeared on her cheeks, but she ener- geticallyshookhishand. Shewasoneofthosecharminglypurposeful young women of our time who would instantly become bus drivers if some higher purpose called for it.
Ulrich had not been mistaken in the assumption that he would find her alone; it was the hour when Mama was out shopping and Papa was still at the office. Ulrich had hardly taken his first steps into the room when he was overcome with a sense of deja vu, everything so reminded him of a particular day during their earlier times to- gether. It had been a few weeks later in the year then, still spring but one ofthose piercingly hot days that sometimes precede the summer like burning embers, hard for the still unseasoned body to bear. Gerda's face had looked haggard and thin. She was dressed in white and smelled white, like linen dried on meadow grass. The blinds were down in all the rooms, and the whole apartment was full of re- bellious half-lights and arrows ofheat whose points were broken off from piercing through the sack-gray barrier. Ulrich felt that Gerda's body was made up entirely of the same fresh~y washed linen hang- ings as her dress. He felt this quite without emotion and could have calmly peeled layer after layer off her, without needing the least erotic ·stimulus to egg him on. He had the very same feeling again
this time. Theirs seemed to be a perfe~tlynatural but pointless inti- macy, and they both feared it.
"Why did it take you so long to come see us? " Gerda asked.
Ulrich told her straight out that her parents would surely not wish them to be so close unless they intended to many.
"Oh, Mama," Gerda said. "Mama's absurd. So we're not supposed to be friends if we don't instantly think about that! But Papa wants you to come often; you're said to be quite somebody in that big affair. "
She came out with this quite openly, this foolishness of the old folk, secure in her assumption that she and Ulrich were naturally in league against it.
"I'll come," Ulrich replied, "but now tell me, Gerda, where does that leave us? " ·
The point was, they did not love each other. They had played a lot of tennis together, met at social functions, gone out together, taken an interest in each other, and thus unawares had crossed the border- line that separates an intimate friend whom we allow to see us in all our inward disorder from those for whom we cultivate our appear- ance. They had unexpectedly become as close as two people who have loved each other for a long time, who in fact almost no longer love each other, without actually going through love. They were al-
. \. vays arguing, so it looked as if they did not care for each other, but it was both an obstacle and a bond between them. They knew that with all this it would only take one spark to start a big fire. Had there been less of a difference in their ages, or had Gerda been a married woman, then "opportunity. would probably have created the thief," and the theft might have led, at least afterward, to passion, since we talk ourselves into love as we talk ourselves into a rage, by making the proper gestures. But just because they knew all this, they did not do it. Gerda had remained a virgin, and furiously resented it.
Instead of answering Ulrich's question, she had busied herself about the room, when suddenly he stood beside her. That was reck- less of him, because one can't stand so close to a girl at such a mo- ment and just start talking about something. They followed the path of least resistance, like a brook that, avoiding obstacles, flows down a meadow, and Ulrich put his arm around Gerda's hip so that his fin- gertips reached the precipitate downward line of the inside elastic
Pseudoreality Prevails · 335
336 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUAL·ITIES
that follows from garter belt to stocking. He turned up Gerda's face, with its confused and slightly sweaty look, and kissed her on the lips. ;rhen they stood still, unable to let go or come together. His finger- tips connected with the broad elastic of her garter belt and let it snap gently against her thigh a few times. Then he tore himself away and with a shrug asked her again:
"Where do we go from here, Gerda? "
Gerda fought down her excitement and said: "Is this how it has to be? ''
She rang for refreshments; she set the household in motion.
"Tell me something about Hans," Ulrich asked her gently, when they had sat down and had to begin the conversation again. Gerda, who had not quite regained her poise, did not answer at first, but after a while she said: "You're so pleased with yourself, you'll never understand younger people like . us. "
"Sticks and stones . . . ,"Ulrich said evasively. "I think, Gerda, that I'm done with science now. Which means that I am niaking common cause with the younger generation. Is it enough to swear to you that knowledge is akin to greed? That it is a shabby form of thriftiness? A supercilious kind of spiritual capitalism? There is more feeling in me than you think. But I want to spare you the kind of talk that amounts to nothing but words. "
"You must get to know Hans bett~r," Gerda replied weakly, then she erupted again: "Anyway, you'd never understand that it's possi- ble to fuse with others into a community, without any thought of yourself! "
"Does Hans still come so often? " Ulrich asked warily. Gerda shrugged her shoulders.
Her shrewd parents had refrained from forbidding Hans Sepp the house altogether; he was allowed to come a few days every month. In tum Hans Sepp, the student who was nothing and had as yet no pros- pect of becoming something, had to promise not to make Gerda do anythingsheshouldn't,andtosuspendhisprop~gandizingforsome . mystical, Germanic action. In this way they hoped to rob him of the charm of forbidden fruit. And Hans'Sepp in his chastity (only the sensual man wants to possess, but then sensuality is a Jewish-capital- istic trait) had calmly given his word as requested, without, however,· taking it to mean that he would give up his frequent secret comings
and goings, making incendiary speeches, hotly pressing Gerda's hands or even kissing her, all of which still comes naturally to soul- mates. but only that he would refrain from advocating sexual union without benefit of clergy or civic authority, which he had been ad- vocating, but on a purely theoretical plane. He had pledged hi_s word all the more readily as he did not feel that he and Gerda were spiritu- ally mature enough as yet to turn his principles into action; setting up a barrier to the temptations of the baser instincts was quite in line with his way of thinking. .
But the two young people naturally suffered under these restraints imposed on them before they had found their own inner discipline. Gerda especially would not have put up with such interference from her parents, had it not been for her own uncertainties; this made her resentment all the greater. She did not really love her young friend all that much; it was more a matter of translating her opposition to her parents into an attachment to him. Had Gerda been born some years later than she was, her papa would have been one of the richest men in town, even if not too highly regarded as a result, and her mother would have admired him again, before Gerda could have been of an age to experience the bickerings of her progenitors as a conflict within herself. She would then probably have taken pride in being of"racially mixed" parentage; but as things stood, she rebelled against her parents and their problems, did not want to be. genetically tainted by them, and was blond, free, Germanic, and forceful, as if she had. nothing at all to do with them. This solution, as good as it looked, had the disadvantage that she had never got around to bring- ing the worm that was gnawing at her inwardly out into the light of day. In her home, nationalism and racism were treated as nonexis- tent, even though they were convulsing half of Europe with hysteri- cal ideas and everything in ·the Fischel household in particular turned on nothing else. Whatever Gerda knew of it had come to her from the outside, in the dark form of rumors, suggestion, and exag- geration. The paradox of her parents-who normally reacted strongly to anything talked about by many people-making so nota- ble an exception in this case had made a deep impression early in her life, and since she attached no definite, objective meaning to this ghostly presence, she tended to connect with it everything disagree- able and peculiar in her home life, especially during her adolescence.
Pseudoreality Prevails · 337
338 · THE MAN WIT·H0 UT QUALITIES
One day she met the Christian-Gennanic circle ofyoung people to which Hans Sepp belonged, and suddenly felt she had found her true home. It wou:ld be hard to say what these young people actually believed in; they fonned one of those innumerable undefined "free- spirited" little sects that have infested Gennan youth ever since the breakdown of the humanistic ideal. They were not racial anti-Sem- ites but opponents of "the Jewish mind," by which they meant capi- talism and socialism, science, reason, parental authority and parental arrogance, calculation, psychology, and skepticism. Their basic doc- trinal device was the "symbol"; as far as Ulrich could make out, and he had, after all, some understanding of such things, what they meant by "symbol" was the great images ofgrace, which made every- thing that is confused and dwarfed in life, as Hans Sepp put it, clear and great, images that suppress the noise of the senses and dip the forehead in streams of transcendence. Such symbols were the Isen- heim Altar, the Egyptian pyramids, and Novalis; Beethoven and Ste- fan George were acceptable approximations. But they did not state, in so many words, what a symbol was: first, because a symbol cannot be expressed in so many words; second, because Aryans do not deal in dry fonnulas, which is why they achieved only approximations of symbols during the last century; and third, because some centuries only rarely produce the transcendent moment of grace in the tran- scendent human being.
Gerda, who was no fool, secretly felt not a little distrust toward these overblown sentiments, but she also distrusted her distrust, in which she thought she detected the legacy of her parents' rational- ism. Behind her fa~ade of independence she was anxiously at pains to disobey her parents, in dread that her bloodlines might hinder her from following Hans's ideas. She felt deeply mutinous against the taboos girding the morals of her so-called good family and against the arrogant parental rights of intrusion that threatened to suffocate ~er personality, while Hans, who had "no family at all," as her mother put it, suffered much less than she did; he had emerged from her circle of companions as Gerda's "spiritual guide," passionately ha- rangued the girl, who was as old as he was, trying to transport her, with his tirades accompanied by kisses, into the "region of the Un- conditional," though in practice he was quite adept at coming to tenns with the conditioned state of the Fischel household, as long as
he was permitted to reject it "on principle," which of course always led to rows with Papa Leo.
"My dear Gerda," Ulrich said after a while, "your friends tor- ment you about your father-they really are the worst kind of blackmailers! "
Gerda turned pale, then red. "You are no longer young yourself," she replied. ''You think differently from us. " She lmew that she had stung Ulrich's vanity, and added in a conciliatory tone: "I don't ex- pect much from love anyway. Maybe I am wasting my time with Hans, as you say; maybe I have to resign myself altogether to the idea that I'll never love anyone enough to open every crevice of my soul to him: my thoughts and feelings, work and dreams; I don't even think that would be so very awful. "
"How wise beyond your years you sound, Gerda, when you talk like your friends," Ulrich broke in.
Gerda was annoyed. "When I talk with my friends," she said, "our thoughts flow from one to the other, and we lmow that we live and speak as one with our people-do you have any idea what this means? We stand with countless others ofour own kind, we feel their presence, in a sensory, physical way I'm sure you've never . . . In fact, you can't even imagine such a thing, can you? Your desire has always been for asingle person; you think like a beast ofprey! "
Why a beast of prey? Her words hung in midair, giving her away; she realized their senselessness and felt ashamed of her eyes, wide with fear, which were staring at Ulrich.
"Let's not go into that," Ulrich said gently. "Let me tell you a story instead. Do you know"-he drew her closer with his hand, inside which her wrist disappeared like a child among high crags-"the sensational story of the capture of the moon? You know, of course, that long ago our earth had several moons. And there's a very popular theory that such moons are not what we take them for, cosmic bodies that have cooled like the earth itself, but great globes of ice rushing through space that have come too close to the earth and are held fast by it. Our moon is said to be the last of them. Come and have a look at it! "
Gerda had followed him to the window and looked for the pale moon in the sunny sky.
"Doesn't it look like a disk ofice? " Ulrich asked. "That's no source
Pseudoreality Prevails · 339
340 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
of light. Have you ever wondered why the man in the moon always faces us the sam~. way? Our last moon is no long~rturning on its axis, that's why; it's already fixed in place! You see, once the moon has come into the earth's po-. yer it doesn't merely revolve around the earth but is drawn steadily closer. We don't notice it because it takes thousands of years or even longer for the screw to tighten. But there's no getting away from it, and there must have been thousands of years in the history of the earth during which the previous moons were drawn very close and went on racing in orbit with incredible speed. And just as our present moon pulls a tide from three to six feet high after it, an earlier one would have dragged in its wake whole mountain ranges of water and mud, tumbling all over the globe. We can hardly imagine the terror in which generation after generation must have lived on such a crazy earth for thousands upon thousands of years. "
"But were there . human beings on earth already? " Gerda asked.
"Certainly. In the end, such an ice moon cracks up, comes crash- ing down like giant hailstones, and the mountainous flood it has been dragging along in its orbit collapses and covers the whole globe with one vast tidal wave before it settles down again: That's nqne other than the great biblical Flood, meaning a great universal inundation! How else could all the myths be iu such agreement, if mankind hadn't experienced it all? And since we have one moon left, such ages are bound to come once more. It's a strange thought. . . . "
Gerda gazed breathlessly out c;>f the window and up at the moon; her hand was still resting in his, the moon was a pale, ugly stain on the sky, and it was precisely this unassuming presence that made this fantastic cosmic adventure-of which she somehow saw herself as the victim-look like an ordinary, everyday reality.
"But there's no truth at all to this story," Ulrich said. "The experts call it a crackpot theory, and the moon isn't really coming any closer to the earth; it is, in fact, thirty-two kilometers farther from us than it should be, according to our calculations, if I remember it right. "
"Then why did you tell me this story? " Gerda asked, and tried to extricate her hand from his. But her defiance had quite run out of steam, as it always did when she spoke with this man, who was cer-. tainly not Hans's intellectual inferior and yet managed to keep from going to extremes in his Views, to keep his fingernails clean and his
hair combed.
Ulrich noticed the fine black down growing like a con- tradiction on Gerda's fair skin; the tiny hairs sprouting from her body seemed to bespeak the variously composite nature of poor modem mankind.
"I don't really know," he replied. "Shall I come and see you again? "
Gerda took out the excitement of her liberated hand on various small objects, which she pushed this way and that, without saying anything.
"See you soon, then," Ulrich promised, although this had not been his intention before he came.
74
THE FOURTH CENTURY B. C. VERSUS THE YEAR 1797· ULRICH RECEIVES ANOTHER LETTER FROM HIS FATHER
The rumor had quickly spread that the meetings at Diotima's were an extraordinary success. And now Ulrich received an unusually long letter from his father, stuffed with enclosed pamphlets and offprints. The letter read more or less like this:
My dear son:
Your extended silence . . .
However, I have had the pleasure ofhearing from another
source that my efforts on your behalf . . . my kind friend Count Stallburg . . . His Grace Count Leinsdorf . . . our kinswoman the wife of Section ChiefTuzzi . . . And now I must ask you, if you
· will, to use all your influence in your new circle in the following matter:
The world would come apart if everything held to be true were indeed to be accepted as such and every will could have its way
Pseudoreality Prevails · 341
342 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
as long as it seems to itself legitimate. All of us are therefore duty-bound to determine the one truth and the proper aim; then, insofar as we have succeeded in so doing, to take care, with an unflinching sense of our duty, that it is set down in the clear form of scientific thought. You may gather from this what it means when I tell you that in lay circles, but also, sad to say, in scientific circles susceptible to the promptings of a confused age, an extremely dangerous movement has been afoot for a long time to bring about certain presumed reforms and ameliorations in the proposed revision of the penal code. To fill you in, a committee of noted experts has been in existence for a number of years, appointed by the Minister of Justice to draw up such a proposed revision, to which committee I have the honor to belong, as does my university colleague Professor Schwung, whom you inay remember from earlier days before I had seen through him, so thatfor many years he could pass as my best friend. As regards the liberalizations mentioned above, a rumor has reached me-unfortunately only too likely to be true! -that in the approaching jubilee year of our revered and merciful sovereign, exploiting, as it were, all inclinations to magnanimity, special efforts are likely to be made to pave the way for just such a disastrous emasculation of our legal system. It goes without saying that Professor Schwung and I are equally resolved to forestall this.
I realize that you are not versed in legal matters, but the chances are you know that the method of breaching our fortifications most favored by the present tendency to legal obfuscation, which falsely dubs itself humanitarianism, consists in the effort to extend the concept of mental impairment, for which punishment is not in order, in the vague form of diminished responsibility, even to those numerous individuals who are neither insane nor morally normal: that army of inferior persons the morally feebleminded, which sadly enough constitutes one of the ever-growing diseases of our civilization. You will see for yourself that this concept of diminished responsibility-if you
can call it a concept, which I contest-is most intimately connected with the manner in which we interpret the concepts of
full responsibility, or irresponsibility, as the case may be, and this brings me to the point of this letter:
Proceeding from already existing formulations of the law, and in view of the circumstances cited, I have proposed to the previously mentioned planning committee the following version of Paragraph 318 of our future penal code:
"No criminal act has been committed if the perpetrator was in a state of unconsciousness or pathological disturbance of his mind at the time he was engaged in the act under consideration, so that-" and Professor Schwung submitted a proposal beginning with exactly the same words.
But then he continued as follows: "so that he could not exercise his free will," while mine was to read: "so that he did not have the capacity to perceive the wrongfulness of his act. " I must admit that I did not at first realize the malicious intent of this contradiction. My personal view has always been this, that as the intellect and reasoning power develops, the will comes to dominate desires or instincts by way of considered thoughts and the decisions springing from them. Any willed act is accordingly always the result of prior thought and not purely instinctive. Man is free insofar as he has the power of choice in the exercise of his will; when under the influence of human cravings, that is to say, cravings prompted by his sensual nature which interfere with his ability to think clearly, then he is not free. Volition is simply not a matter of chance but an act of self-determination arising necessarily from within the person, and so the will is determined by thought, and when the thought process is disturbed, the will is no longer the will, as the man's action is prompted only by his natural cravings. . I am ofcourse aware that the opposite view is also represented in the literature, i. e. , that thought is regarded as being determined by the will. This is a view, however, that has its adherents among modem jurists only since 1797, while the one I hold has stood up to all attacks since the fourth century B. C. But to show that I was willing to meet my colleague halfway, I put forward a formulation that would join both proposals, as follows:
"No criminal act shall have been committed if the offender was at the time of his act in a state of unconsciousness or a
Pseudoreality Prevails · 343
344 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
morbid disturbance ofhis mental activity, so that he did not have the capacity to perceive the wrongfulness of his act and could not exercise his free will. "
But here Professor Schwung revealed himself in his true colors! Showing no appreciation whatsoever of my willingness to meet him halfway, he arrogantly insisted that the "and" in my statement had to be replaced with an "or. " You see the point? What differentiates the thinker from the layman is precisely this fine distinction of an "or" where the layman simply puts an "and," and Schwung was trying to stigmatize me as a superficial thinker by exposing my readiness to find a compromise, using the "and" to unite both formulations, exposing it to the suspicion that I had failed to grasp the full magnitude ofthe difference to be bridged, with all its implications!
It goes without saying that from that moment on I have rigorously opposed him on every point.
I immediately withdrew my compromise proposal and have had to insist on the acceptance of my first version without any compromise whatsoever; since when, however, Schwung has been making trouble for me with a most perfidious ingenuity. He claims, for instance, that under my proposed version, which is based on the capacity to recognize a wrongful act as such, a person who suffers from special delusions but is otherwise normal, as sometimes happens, could be exonerated on grounds of mental illness only if it could be proved that this person had assumed, because of his delusions, the existence of circumstances under which his act would be justified or not punishable under the law, so that he would have been acting correctly, although within a false concept of reality. This objection has no merit at all, however, for while empirical logic recognizes the existence of persons who are partly insane and partly sane, the logic of the law must never admit such a mixture ofjuridical states; before the law, a person is either respons. ible for his actions or not responsible, and we may assume that even in persons suffering from special kinds of delusions, a general capacity to know right from wrong still ~sts. If this is blurred by delusions in a specific instance, it needs only a special effort of the intelligence to bring
it into harmony with the rest of the personality, and there is no reason to see any special problem in that.
And so I immediately pointed out to Professor Schwung that if the state of being responsible and that of not being responsible for one's actions cannot logically exist simultaneously, these states must be assumed to follow each other in rapid alternation, giving rise to the problem, especially where his theory is concerned, from which ofthese alternating states has the act in question resulted? To determine this, you would have to cite all the influences to which the accused has been subjected since his birth, and everything that may have influenced the actions of all his forebears, from whom his good and bad trafts are inherited.
You will hardly believe this, but Schwung actually had the cheek to retort that this was quite so, as the logic of the law must never admit a mixture of two juridical states with respect to one and the same act, so that it is necessary to decide even with regard to each specific act of volition whether it was possible for the accused, in the light of his psychological history, to control his will or not. He chooses to claim that we are far more clearly aware of our free will than of the fact that everything that happens has a cause, and as long as we are basically free, we are also free with respect to specific causes, so that we must assume that in such a case it only requires a special effort of the will to resist the causally determined criminal impulses.
At this point Ulrich desisted from further exploration of his fa- ther's plans and pensively hefted in his hand the many enclosures cited in the letter's margin. Casting one more hasty glance at the let- ter's conclusion, he learned that his father expected him to use his "objective influence" on Counts Leinsdorf and Stallburg, and strongly advised him to warn the appropriate committees of the Par- allel Campaign in good time of the dangers to the spiritual founda- tion of the entire government should so important a problem be wrongly formulated and resolved in the Year of the Jubilee.
Pseudoreality Prevails · 345
75
GENERAL STUMM VON BORDWEHR CONSIDERS VISITS TO DIOTIMA AS A DELIGHTFUL CHANGE FROM HIS USUAL RUN OF DUTY
The tubby little General had paid Diotima another visit. Although the soldier has but a modest part to play in the council chamber, he began by saying, he would take it upon himself to predict that the state is the power to hold one's own in the struggle among nations, and that the military strength displayed in peacetime wards off war. But Diotima had instantly pulled him up short.
"General," she said, quivering with indignation, "all of life de- pends upon the forces of peace; even the life of business, rightly re- garded, is a form of poetry. "
The little General stared at her for a moment, dumbfounded, but soon regained his seat in the saddle.
"Your Excellency . . . ,"he hastened to agree. In order to under- stand this form of address, we must remember that Diotima's hus- band was a ministerial section chief, and that in Kakania a section chief held the same rank as divisional commanders, who alone were entitled to be addressed as Excellency and only when on duty, at that; but since the soldier's profession is a knightly one, no soldier could expect to advance his career without so addressing them even when off duty, and in the spirit of chivalrous striving one also ad- dressed their wives as Excellency, without wasting much thought on the question of when they were on duty. Such intricate considera- tions flashed through the little General's mind and enabled him tq reassure Diotima instantly, with his first words, of his unqualified agreement and humble devotion, as he said, "Your Excellency takes the words out of my mouth. It goes without saying that, for political reasons, the W ar Ministry could not have been considered when the committees were set up, but we heard that the great movement is to be pacifist in it~aims-an international·peace campaign, they say, or
perhaps the donation of Austrian murals to the Peace Palace at The Hague-and I can assure Your Excellency of our entire sympathy with such an aim. People generally tend to have certain misconcep- tions about the military; of course I won't deny that a young lieuten- ant is likely to yearn for a war, but all responsible quarters are most deeply convinced that the sphere of force, which we unfortunately do represent, must be linked with the blessings of the human spirit, precisely as Your Excellency has just put it. "
He now dug a little brush out of his trouser pocket and went over his little mustache with it a number oftimes; it was a bad habit dating back to his time as a cadet, a phase during which the mustache still stands for life's impatiently awaited great hope, and he was totally unaware of it. His big brown eyes were Hxed on Diotima's face, try- ing to read the effect of his words: Diotima seemed mollified, though in his presence she never quite was, and deigned to fill him in on what had been going on since the Hrst meeting. The general showed enthusiasm, especially for the Great Council, expressed his admira- tion for Arnheim, and declared his conviction that such a gathering was bound to bear splendid fruit.
"There are so many people, after all, who don't realize how little order there is in the world of the mind," he explained. "I am even convinced, if Your Excellency will permit me to say so, that most people suppose they are seeing some progress in the order of things every day. They see order everywhere: in the factories, the offices, the railway timetables, the schools-here I may also mention proudly our oWn. barracks, which in their modest way positively recall the discipline of a good orchestra-and no matter where you lo. ok, you will see order of some kind, rules and regulations for pedestri- ans, drivers, taxation, churches, business, social protocol, etiquette, morality, and so on. I'm sure that almost everyone considers our era the best-ordered of all time. Don't you have this feeling too, deep down, Your Excellency? I certainly do. If I'm not very careful, I let myself be overcome by the feeling that the modern spirit rests pre- cisely on such a greater order, and that the great empires of Nineveh and Rome fell only because somehow they let things slide. That's
what I think most people feel; they go on the unspoken assumption that the past is dead and gone as a punishment for something that got out of order. But of course that's a delusion that people who know
Pseudoreality Prevails · 347
348 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES.
their history shouldn't succu~b to. It's why, unfortunateiy, we can't do without power and the soldier's profession. "
It was deeply gratifying to the General to chat like this with this brilliant young woman; what a delightful change from the usual run of his official duties. But Diotima had no idea how to answer him, so she fell back on repeating herself:
'W e really do hope to bring the most distinguished minds to bear on it, though our task even then will be a hard one. You can't imagine what a great variety of suggestions keep pouring in, and we do want to make the best choices. But you were speaking of order, General. We will· never reach our goal through order, by a sober weighing of pros and cons, comparisons and tests. Our solution must come as a flash of lightning, a fire, an intuition, a synthesis! Looking at the his- tory of mankind, we see no logical development; what it does sug- gest, with its sudden flashes of inspiration, the meaning of which emerges only later on, is a great poem! " .
"If I may say so, Your Excellency," the General replied, "a soldier knows very little about poetry; but if anyone can breathe lightning and fire into a movement, it is Your Excellency; that much an old army officer can understand. "
COUNT LEINSDORF HAS HIS DOUBTS
So far the tubby little General had been quite urbane, even though he had come uninvited to see her, and Diotima had confided more to him than she had intended. What made her fear him nonetheless, so that she aftexward regretted again her amiability to him, was not re- ally his doing but, as Diotima told herself, her old friend Count Leinsdorf's. Could His Grace be jealous? And if so, of whom? Al- though he always put in a brief appearance at meetings, Leinsdorf did not seem as favorably inclined to the Council as Diotima had ex-
pected. His Grace was decidedly averse to what he called mere liter- ature. It stood for something he associated with Jews, newspapers, sensation-hungry booksellers, and the liberal, hopelessly garrulous paid hirelings of the bourgeoisie; the expression "mere literature" had positively become his new signature phrase. Every time Ulrich offered to read him the latest proposals that had come in the mail, including all the suggestions for moving the world forward or back- ward, he would cut him off with the words everyone uses when in addition to his own plans he hears about those everyone else has:
"No, no, I'm busy today, and all that is mere literature anyway. "
What he was thinking of, in contrast to mere literature, was fields, the men who worked them, little country churches, and that great order of things which God had bound as firmly together as the sheaves on a mown field, an order at once comely, sound, and re- warding, even if it did sometimes tolerate distilleries on country es- tates because one had to keep pace with the times. Given this tranquil breadth of outlook, gun clubs and dairy cooperatives, no matter how far from the great centers they were to be found, must appear as part and parcel of that solid order and community; and if they should be moved to make a claim on general philosophical prin- ciples, that claim must enjoy the priority of a duly registered spiritual property, as it were, over any spiritual claims put forward by private individuals. This is why, every time Diotima wanted to speak with him seriously about something she had gleaned from her Great Minds, Count Leinsdorf was usually holding in his hand, or pulling out of his pocket, some petition from a club of five simpletons, saying that this paper weighed more in the world of real problems than the bright ideas of some genius. ·
This attitude resembled the one praised by Section ChiefTuzzi, as embodied in his ministerial archives, which withheld their official recognition of the Council's existence while taking every fleabite from the most insignificant provincial news sheet in deadly earnest; and Diotima, when beset by such problems, had no one she could confide in except Amheim. But Arnheim, of all people, Jook His Grace's part in the matter. It was he who explained to her about that grandseigneur's tranquil breadth of outlook, when she complained to him about Count Leinsdorf's predilection for crack shots and co-op- dairies.
Pseudoreality Prevails • 349
350 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
"His Grace believes that we must take our direction from the land and the times," he explained gravely. "Believe me, it comes naturally of owning land. The soil uncomplicates life, just as. it purifies water. Even I feel its effect every time I stay on my own very modest coun- try estate. Real life makes everything simple. " And after a slight hesi- tation he added: "The grand scale on which His Grace's life takes place also makes him extremely tolerant, not to say recklessly indulgent. . . . "
This side of her noble patron was new to Diotima, so she looked up expectantly.
"I wouldn't wish to state as a certainty," Amheim went on with a vague emphasis, "that Count Leinsdorf is aware how very much your cousin, as his secretary, abuses his confidence-in principle only. I hasten to add-by his skepticism toward lofty schemes, by his sar- casm as a form of sabotage. I would be inclined to fear that his influ- ence on His Grace was not a wholesome one, if this true peer were not so firmly entrenched in the great traditional feelings and ideas that support real life, so that he can probably afford to risk this confidence. "
These were strong words, and Ulrich had deserved them. But Di- otima did not pay as much attention to them as she might have, be- cause she was so impressed with the other aspect of Arnheim's outlook, his owning landed estates not as a landowner but rather as a kind of spiritual massage; she thought it was magnificent, and mused o. n what it might be like to find oneselfthe lady ofsuch a manor.
"I sometimes marvel," she said, "at the generosity with which you yourself judge His Grace. All of that is surely part of a vanishing chapter of history? "
"And so it is," Amheim replied, "but the·simple virtues of courage, chivalry, and self-di~cipline, which his caste developed to such an ex- emplary degree, will always keep their value. In a wbrd, the ideal of the Master! I have learned to value the principle of the Master more and more in my business life as well. "
"Then. the ideal of the Masferwould, in the end, amount to almost the same thing as that of the Poem? " Diotima asked pensively.
"That's a wonderful way of putting it! " her friend agreed. "It's the secret of a vigorous life. Reason alone is not enough for a moral or a political life. Reason has its limits; what really matters always takes
place above and beyond it. Great men have always loved music, po- etry, form, discipline, religion, and chivalry. I would go so far as to say, in fact, that they and only they can succeed! Those are the so- called imponderables that make the master, make the man, and there is something, some obscure residue of this, in what the popu- lace admires in the actor. But to return to your cousin: Of course it isn't simply a matter of turning conservative when we begin to prefer our comforts to sowing wild oats. But even if we were all born as revolutionaries, there comes a day when we notice that a simple, good person, regardless of what we think of his intelligence-a de- pendable, cheerful, brave, loyal human being, in other words-is not only a rare delight but also the true soil from which all life springs. Such wisdom is as old as the hills, but it denotes a change in taste, which iri our youth naturally favors the exotic, to that of the mature man. I admire your cousin in many respects, or if this is saying too much, because there is little he says that is defensible, I could almost say that I love him, for something that is extraordinarily free and in- dependent in his nature, together with much that. is inwardly rigid and eccentric; it is just this mixture of freedom and mental rigidity that may account for his special charm, by the way. But he is a dan- gerous man, with his infantile moral exoticism and his highly devel- oped intelligence that is always on the lookout for some adventure
without knowing what, exactly, is egging him on. "
77
ARNHEIM AS THE DARLING OF THE PRESS
Diotima repeatedly had occasion to contemplate the imponderables of Arnheim's attitude.
It was on his advice, for instance, that the representatives of the leading newspapers were sometimes invited to the sessions of the Council (as Section Chief Tuzzi had somewhat sarcastically: dubbed
Pseudoreality Prevails · 351
352 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
the Committee to Draft a Guiding Resolution with Regard to the Seventieth Jubilee of His Majesty's Reign), and Arnheim, who was only a guest without any official status, enjoyed a degree of attention from them that put all other celebrities in the shade. For some rea- son newspapers are not the laboratories and experimental stations of the mind that they could be, to the public's great benefit, but usually only its warehouses and stock exchanges. If he were alive today, Plato-to take him as an example, because along with a dozen others he is regarded as the greatest thinker who ever lived-would cer- tainly be ecstatic about a news industry capable of creating, exchang- ing, refining a new idea every day; where information keeps pouring in from the ends of the earth with a speediness he never knew in his own lifetime, while a staff of demiurges is on hand to check it all out instantaneously for its content of reason and reality. He would have supposed a newspaper office to be that topos uranios, that heavenly realm of ideas, which he has described so impressively that to this day all the better class of people are still idealists when talking to their children or employees. And ofcourse ifPlato were to walk sud- denly into a news editor's office today and prove himselfto be indeed- that great author who died over two thousand years ago, he would be a tremendous sensation and would instantly be showered with the most lucrative offers. If he were then capable of writing a volume of philosophical travel pieces in three weeks, and a few thousand of his well-known short stories, perhaps even tum one or the other of his older works into a fUm, he could undoubtedly do very well for him- self for a considerable period of time. The moment his return had ceased to be news, however, and Mr. Plato tried to put into practice one of his well-known ideas, which had never quite come into their own, the editor in chief would ask him to submit only a nice little column on the subject now and then for the Life and Leisure section (but in the easiest and most lively style possible, not heavy: remem- ber the readers), and the features editor would add that he was sorry, but he could use such a contribution only once a month or so, be- cause there were so many other good writers to be considered. And both of these gentlemen would end up feeling that they had done quite a lot for a man who might indeed be the Nestor of European ,:mblicists but still was a bit outdated, and certainly not in a class for
current newsworthiness with a man like, for instance, Paul Arnheim.
Amheim himselfwould ofcourse never concur in this, because his reverence for all greatness would be offended by it, yet in many re- spects he was bound to find it understandable. These days, with ev- erything in the world being talked about helter-skelter, when prophets and charlatans rely on the same phrases, except for certain subtle differences no busy man has the time to keep track of1 and editors are constantly pestered with alarms that someone or other may be a genius, it is very hard to recognize the tr. ue value of a man or an idea; all one can do is keep an ear cocked for the moment when all the murmurs and whispers and shufflings at the editor's door grow loud enough to be admitted as the voice of the people. From that moment on, however, genius does enter a new state. It ceases to be a windy business of book or drama reViews, with all their contra- dictions, which the paper's ideal reader will take no more seriously than the babble ofchildren, but has achieved the status of a fact, with all the consequences that entails.
Fools who keep inveighing against such realities overlook the des- perate need for idealism. behind all this. The world of those who write and have to write is chockablock with big terms and concepts that have lost their referent. The attributes of great men and great causes tend to outlive whatever it was that gave rise to them, and so a great many attributes are left over. They had once been coined by a distinguished man for another distinguished man, but these men are long dead, and the surviving concepts must be put to some use. Writ- ers are in consequence always searching for the right man for, the words. Shakespeare's "powerful imagination," Goethe's "universal- ity," Dostoyevsky's "psychological depth," and all the other legacies of a long literary history hang like endless laundry in the heads of writers, and the resulting mental overstock reduces these people to calling every tennis player a profound strategist and every fashiona- ble writer a great man ofletters. Obviously they will always be grate- ful for a chance to use up their surplus without reducing its value. But it must always be applied to a man whosfl distinction is already an established fact, so that everyone understands that the words can be pinned on him, and it hardly matters where. And such a man was
Amheim, because Amheim was Amheim, whose very birth as the heir of his father was already an event, and there could be no doubt about the news value of anything he said. All he had to do was to take
Pseudoreality Prevails · 353
354 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
just enough trouble to say something that, with a little goodwill, could be regarded as significant. Arnheim himself formulated it as a principle: "Much ofa man's real importance," he used to say, "lies in his ability to make himself understood by his contemporaries. "
So now once again he got along beautifully, as always, with the papers, which fastened on him. He could afford to smile at those am- bitious financiers or politicians who stand ready to buy up whole for- ests of newspapers. Such an effort to influence public opinion seemed to him as uncouth and timid as offering to pay for a woman's love when it could be had so much more cheaply just by stimulating her imagination. He had told the reporters who asked him about the Council that the very fact of its convocation proved its profound ne- cessity, because nothirig in world history happened without a rational cause; a sentiment that so fully corresponded to their professional outlook that it was quoted appreciatively in several newspapers. It was in fact, on closer scrutiny, a good statement. For the kind ofpeo- ple who take everything that happens seriously would feel nauseated if they could assume that not every event has a good cause; on the other hand, they would also rather bite their tongues, as we know, than take anything too seriously, even significance itself. The pinch of pessimism in Arnheim's statement greatly contributed to the solid dignity of their professional endeavors, and even the fact that he was a foreigner could be read as a sign that the whole world was concern- ing itself with these enormously interesting movements in Austria.
The other celebrities. in attendance did not have the same instinc- tive flair for pleasing the press, but they noticed its e. ffect; and since celebrities in general know little about each other and in that train to immortality in which they are traveling together usually set eyes on each other only in the dining car, the special public recognition Am- heim enjoyed had its unexamined effect on them too; and even though he continued to stay away from all official committee meet- ings, in the Council itselfhe came quite automatically to play the role of a central figure. The further this meeting of minds progressed, the clearer it became that he was the really sensational element in it, al- though he basically did nothing to create that effect other than, pos- sibly, by expressing in conversation with its famous members his judgment, which could be interpreted as an openhearted pessimism, that the Council could hardly be expected to accomplish much of
anything, but that, on the other hand, so noble a task merited all the trustful devotion one could muster. So subtle a pessimism inspires confidence even in great minds, for the idea that the intellect nowa- days cannot really accomplish much is, for some reason, more conge- nial than the possibility that the intellect of some colleague might succeed in accomplishing something, and Arnheim's reserved judg- ment about the Council could be taken as leaning toward the more acceptable negative chance.
DIOTIMA'S METAMORPHOSES
Diotima's feelings did not develop in quite the same straight ascend- ing line as Arnheim's success.
It sometimes happened, in . the midst of a social gathering in her transformed apartment, with its rooms stripped of their usual fur- nishings, that she felt as though she were awakening in some dream- land. She would be standing there, surrounded by space and people, the light of the chandelier flowing over her hair and on down her shoulders and hips so that she seemed to feel its bright flood, and she was all statue, like some figure on a fountain, at the epicenter of the world, drenched in sublime spiritual grace. She saw it as a once-in-a- lifetime chance to bring about everything that she had always held to be most important and supremely great, and she no longer cared par- ticularly that she had no very clear idea what this might be. The whole apartment, the presence of the people in it, the whole eve- ning, enveloped her like a dress lined in yellow silk; she felt it on her skin, though she did not see it. From time to time she turned her gaze to Amheim, who was usually standing somewhere in a group of men, talking; but then she realized that her gaze had been resting on him all along, and it was only her awakening that now followed her eyes. Even when she was not looking at him, the outermost wingtips
Pseudoreality Prevails · 355
356 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
of her soul, so to speak, always rested on his face and told her what was going on in it.
And as long as we're on the subject of feathers, one might add that there was also something dreamlike in his appearance, something of a businessman with golden angel's wings who had descended into the midst ofthis gathering.
It was too bad that she could not watch her reception from the street. From out there it looked marvelous. The light shone brightly through the curtains of the tall windows along the fa~ade of the house, heightened by the additional glow of authority and distinction emanating from the waiting cars, as well as by the gaping passersby who stopped to look up for a while without quite knowing why. Di- otima would have been pleased by the sight. There were people con- stantly standing in the half-light the festivity cast on the street; behind their backs, the great darkness began that within a short dis- tance quickly became impenetrable.
Pseudoreality Prevails · . '331
332
73
LEO FISCHEL'S DAUGHTER GERDA
In all this hubbub, Ulrich kept putting off fulfilling his promise to Fischel that he would pay the family a visit. He actually never did get around to it until something unexpected happened: Fischel's wife, Clementine, came to see him.
She had phoned to announce her visit, and Ulrich awaited her not without apprehension. It had been three years since he had regularly come to their house, during a stay ofsome months in town; since his return he had been there only once, not wanting to stir up a past flirtation and dreading having to deal with a mother's disappoint- ment. But Clementine Fischel was a woman of "magnanimous spirit," with so little opportunity to exercise it in her daily petty strug- gles with her husband, Leo, that for special occasions, regrettably so rare in her life, she had reserves of truly heroic high-mindedness to draw upon. Even so, this thin woman with her austere, rather care- worn face felt a bit embarrassed when she found herself face-to-face with Ulrich, saying she needed to speak to him privately, even though they were alone as it was. But he was the only person Gerda would still listen to, she said, adding that she hoped he would not misunderstand her request.
Ulrich·was aware of the Fischel family's situation. Not only were the father and mother constantly at war, but their daughter, Gerda, already twenty-three, had surrounded herself with a swarm of odd young people who had somehow co-opted Papa Leo, who ground his teeth, as a most grudging Maecenas and backer of their "new move- ment" because his house was the most convenient for their get- togethers. Gerda was so nervous and anemic, and got so terribly upset every time anyone tried to make her see less of these friends- Clementine reported-who were, after all, just silly boys without
real breeding; still, the way they insisted on parading their mystical anti-Semitism was not only in poor taste, it revealed an inner brutal- ity. Not that she had come to complain about. anti-Semitism~ she added, which was a sign of the times, one simply had to resign one- self to it-she was even prepared to admit that in some respects there might be something in it. Clementine paused and would have dried a tear with her handkerchief had she not worn a veil; but as it was she refrained from dropping the tear, contenting herself with merely pulling her white handkerchief out of her little handbag.
"You know what Gerda's like," she said; "a beautiful and gifted girl but-"
"A bit rebellious. " Ulrich finished it for her.
"Yes, Heaven help us, always going to extremes. "
"So she's still a German Nationalist? "
Clementine spoke of the parents' feelings. "A mother's errand of
mercy" was what she somewhat pathetically called her visit, which had as its secondary'aim to entice Ulrich back as aregular visitor to their family circle, now that he was known to have risen to such emi- nence in the Parallel Campaign. "I hate myself," she went on, "for the way I encouraged Gerda's friendship with these boys in recent years, against Leo's will. I thought nothing ofit; these youngsters are idealists in their way, and an open-minded person can let the occa- sional offensive word pass. . . . But Leo-you know how he is-is upset by anti-Semitism, whether it's merely mystical or symbolic or not. "
"And Gerda, in her free-spirited, Germanic, blond fashion, won't recognize the problem? " Ulrich rounded it out.
"She's the same as I was at her age in this respect. Do you think, by the way, that Hans Sepp has any prospects? "
"Is Gerda engaged to him? " Ulrich asked cautiously.
"That boy has no means whatever ofproviding for her," Clemen- tine sighed. "How can you talk of an engagement? But when Leo ordered him out ofthe house Gerda ate so little for three weeks run- ning that she turned to skin and bone. " All at once, she broke out angrily: "You know, it seems to me like hypnosis, like some sort of spiritual infection! That boy incessantly expounds his philosophy under our roof, and Gerda never notices the continual insult to her parents in it, even though she's always been a good and affectionate
Pseudoreality Prevails · 333
334 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
child otherwise. But whenever I say anything, she answers: 'You're so old-fashioned, Mama. ' So I thought-you're the only man who counts for something with her, arid Leo thinks the world. of you! - couldn't you come over and try to open Gerda's eyes to the callow- ness of Hans and his cronies? "
For such a model of propriety as Clementine to resort to so ag- gressive a tactic could only mean that she was seriously worried. Whatever their conflicts, she was inclined to a certain solidarity with her husband in this situation. Ulrich raised his eyebrows in concern.
''I'm afraid Gerda will canme old-fashioned too. These new young people pay no attention to us elders on such matters of principle. "
"It occurred to me that the easiest way to distract Gerda might be your fmding something for her to do in that patriotic campaign of yours everyone is talking about," Clementine offered, and Ulrich hastened to promise her a visit, even while assuring her that the P~ allel Campaign was far from being ready for such uses.
When Gerda saw him coming through the door a few days after- ward, two circular red spots appeared on her cheeks, but she ener- geticallyshookhishand. Shewasoneofthosecharminglypurposeful young women of our time who would instantly become bus drivers if some higher purpose called for it.
Ulrich had not been mistaken in the assumption that he would find her alone; it was the hour when Mama was out shopping and Papa was still at the office. Ulrich had hardly taken his first steps into the room when he was overcome with a sense of deja vu, everything so reminded him of a particular day during their earlier times to- gether. It had been a few weeks later in the year then, still spring but one ofthose piercingly hot days that sometimes precede the summer like burning embers, hard for the still unseasoned body to bear. Gerda's face had looked haggard and thin. She was dressed in white and smelled white, like linen dried on meadow grass. The blinds were down in all the rooms, and the whole apartment was full of re- bellious half-lights and arrows ofheat whose points were broken off from piercing through the sack-gray barrier. Ulrich felt that Gerda's body was made up entirely of the same fresh~y washed linen hang- ings as her dress. He felt this quite without emotion and could have calmly peeled layer after layer off her, without needing the least erotic ·stimulus to egg him on. He had the very same feeling again
this time. Theirs seemed to be a perfe~tlynatural but pointless inti- macy, and they both feared it.
"Why did it take you so long to come see us? " Gerda asked.
Ulrich told her straight out that her parents would surely not wish them to be so close unless they intended to many.
"Oh, Mama," Gerda said. "Mama's absurd. So we're not supposed to be friends if we don't instantly think about that! But Papa wants you to come often; you're said to be quite somebody in that big affair. "
She came out with this quite openly, this foolishness of the old folk, secure in her assumption that she and Ulrich were naturally in league against it.
"I'll come," Ulrich replied, "but now tell me, Gerda, where does that leave us? " ·
The point was, they did not love each other. They had played a lot of tennis together, met at social functions, gone out together, taken an interest in each other, and thus unawares had crossed the border- line that separates an intimate friend whom we allow to see us in all our inward disorder from those for whom we cultivate our appear- ance. They had unexpectedly become as close as two people who have loved each other for a long time, who in fact almost no longer love each other, without actually going through love. They were al-
. \. vays arguing, so it looked as if they did not care for each other, but it was both an obstacle and a bond between them. They knew that with all this it would only take one spark to start a big fire. Had there been less of a difference in their ages, or had Gerda been a married woman, then "opportunity. would probably have created the thief," and the theft might have led, at least afterward, to passion, since we talk ourselves into love as we talk ourselves into a rage, by making the proper gestures. But just because they knew all this, they did not do it. Gerda had remained a virgin, and furiously resented it.
Instead of answering Ulrich's question, she had busied herself about the room, when suddenly he stood beside her. That was reck- less of him, because one can't stand so close to a girl at such a mo- ment and just start talking about something. They followed the path of least resistance, like a brook that, avoiding obstacles, flows down a meadow, and Ulrich put his arm around Gerda's hip so that his fin- gertips reached the precipitate downward line of the inside elastic
Pseudoreality Prevails · 335
336 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUAL·ITIES
that follows from garter belt to stocking. He turned up Gerda's face, with its confused and slightly sweaty look, and kissed her on the lips. ;rhen they stood still, unable to let go or come together. His finger- tips connected with the broad elastic of her garter belt and let it snap gently against her thigh a few times. Then he tore himself away and with a shrug asked her again:
"Where do we go from here, Gerda? "
Gerda fought down her excitement and said: "Is this how it has to be? ''
She rang for refreshments; she set the household in motion.
"Tell me something about Hans," Ulrich asked her gently, when they had sat down and had to begin the conversation again. Gerda, who had not quite regained her poise, did not answer at first, but after a while she said: "You're so pleased with yourself, you'll never understand younger people like . us. "
"Sticks and stones . . . ,"Ulrich said evasively. "I think, Gerda, that I'm done with science now. Which means that I am niaking common cause with the younger generation. Is it enough to swear to you that knowledge is akin to greed? That it is a shabby form of thriftiness? A supercilious kind of spiritual capitalism? There is more feeling in me than you think. But I want to spare you the kind of talk that amounts to nothing but words. "
"You must get to know Hans bett~r," Gerda replied weakly, then she erupted again: "Anyway, you'd never understand that it's possi- ble to fuse with others into a community, without any thought of yourself! "
"Does Hans still come so often? " Ulrich asked warily. Gerda shrugged her shoulders.
Her shrewd parents had refrained from forbidding Hans Sepp the house altogether; he was allowed to come a few days every month. In tum Hans Sepp, the student who was nothing and had as yet no pros- pect of becoming something, had to promise not to make Gerda do anythingsheshouldn't,andtosuspendhisprop~gandizingforsome . mystical, Germanic action. In this way they hoped to rob him of the charm of forbidden fruit. And Hans'Sepp in his chastity (only the sensual man wants to possess, but then sensuality is a Jewish-capital- istic trait) had calmly given his word as requested, without, however,· taking it to mean that he would give up his frequent secret comings
and goings, making incendiary speeches, hotly pressing Gerda's hands or even kissing her, all of which still comes naturally to soul- mates. but only that he would refrain from advocating sexual union without benefit of clergy or civic authority, which he had been ad- vocating, but on a purely theoretical plane. He had pledged hi_s word all the more readily as he did not feel that he and Gerda were spiritu- ally mature enough as yet to turn his principles into action; setting up a barrier to the temptations of the baser instincts was quite in line with his way of thinking. .
But the two young people naturally suffered under these restraints imposed on them before they had found their own inner discipline. Gerda especially would not have put up with such interference from her parents, had it not been for her own uncertainties; this made her resentment all the greater. She did not really love her young friend all that much; it was more a matter of translating her opposition to her parents into an attachment to him. Had Gerda been born some years later than she was, her papa would have been one of the richest men in town, even if not too highly regarded as a result, and her mother would have admired him again, before Gerda could have been of an age to experience the bickerings of her progenitors as a conflict within herself. She would then probably have taken pride in being of"racially mixed" parentage; but as things stood, she rebelled against her parents and their problems, did not want to be. genetically tainted by them, and was blond, free, Germanic, and forceful, as if she had. nothing at all to do with them. This solution, as good as it looked, had the disadvantage that she had never got around to bring- ing the worm that was gnawing at her inwardly out into the light of day. In her home, nationalism and racism were treated as nonexis- tent, even though they were convulsing half of Europe with hysteri- cal ideas and everything in ·the Fischel household in particular turned on nothing else. Whatever Gerda knew of it had come to her from the outside, in the dark form of rumors, suggestion, and exag- geration. The paradox of her parents-who normally reacted strongly to anything talked about by many people-making so nota- ble an exception in this case had made a deep impression early in her life, and since she attached no definite, objective meaning to this ghostly presence, she tended to connect with it everything disagree- able and peculiar in her home life, especially during her adolescence.
Pseudoreality Prevails · 337
338 · THE MAN WIT·H0 UT QUALITIES
One day she met the Christian-Gennanic circle ofyoung people to which Hans Sepp belonged, and suddenly felt she had found her true home. It wou:ld be hard to say what these young people actually believed in; they fonned one of those innumerable undefined "free- spirited" little sects that have infested Gennan youth ever since the breakdown of the humanistic ideal. They were not racial anti-Sem- ites but opponents of "the Jewish mind," by which they meant capi- talism and socialism, science, reason, parental authority and parental arrogance, calculation, psychology, and skepticism. Their basic doc- trinal device was the "symbol"; as far as Ulrich could make out, and he had, after all, some understanding of such things, what they meant by "symbol" was the great images ofgrace, which made every- thing that is confused and dwarfed in life, as Hans Sepp put it, clear and great, images that suppress the noise of the senses and dip the forehead in streams of transcendence. Such symbols were the Isen- heim Altar, the Egyptian pyramids, and Novalis; Beethoven and Ste- fan George were acceptable approximations. But they did not state, in so many words, what a symbol was: first, because a symbol cannot be expressed in so many words; second, because Aryans do not deal in dry fonnulas, which is why they achieved only approximations of symbols during the last century; and third, because some centuries only rarely produce the transcendent moment of grace in the tran- scendent human being.
Gerda, who was no fool, secretly felt not a little distrust toward these overblown sentiments, but she also distrusted her distrust, in which she thought she detected the legacy of her parents' rational- ism. Behind her fa~ade of independence she was anxiously at pains to disobey her parents, in dread that her bloodlines might hinder her from following Hans's ideas. She felt deeply mutinous against the taboos girding the morals of her so-called good family and against the arrogant parental rights of intrusion that threatened to suffocate ~er personality, while Hans, who had "no family at all," as her mother put it, suffered much less than she did; he had emerged from her circle of companions as Gerda's "spiritual guide," passionately ha- rangued the girl, who was as old as he was, trying to transport her, with his tirades accompanied by kisses, into the "region of the Un- conditional," though in practice he was quite adept at coming to tenns with the conditioned state of the Fischel household, as long as
he was permitted to reject it "on principle," which of course always led to rows with Papa Leo.
"My dear Gerda," Ulrich said after a while, "your friends tor- ment you about your father-they really are the worst kind of blackmailers! "
Gerda turned pale, then red. "You are no longer young yourself," she replied. ''You think differently from us. " She lmew that she had stung Ulrich's vanity, and added in a conciliatory tone: "I don't ex- pect much from love anyway. Maybe I am wasting my time with Hans, as you say; maybe I have to resign myself altogether to the idea that I'll never love anyone enough to open every crevice of my soul to him: my thoughts and feelings, work and dreams; I don't even think that would be so very awful. "
"How wise beyond your years you sound, Gerda, when you talk like your friends," Ulrich broke in.
Gerda was annoyed. "When I talk with my friends," she said, "our thoughts flow from one to the other, and we lmow that we live and speak as one with our people-do you have any idea what this means? We stand with countless others ofour own kind, we feel their presence, in a sensory, physical way I'm sure you've never . . . In fact, you can't even imagine such a thing, can you? Your desire has always been for asingle person; you think like a beast ofprey! "
Why a beast of prey? Her words hung in midair, giving her away; she realized their senselessness and felt ashamed of her eyes, wide with fear, which were staring at Ulrich.
"Let's not go into that," Ulrich said gently. "Let me tell you a story instead. Do you know"-he drew her closer with his hand, inside which her wrist disappeared like a child among high crags-"the sensational story of the capture of the moon? You know, of course, that long ago our earth had several moons. And there's a very popular theory that such moons are not what we take them for, cosmic bodies that have cooled like the earth itself, but great globes of ice rushing through space that have come too close to the earth and are held fast by it. Our moon is said to be the last of them. Come and have a look at it! "
Gerda had followed him to the window and looked for the pale moon in the sunny sky.
"Doesn't it look like a disk ofice? " Ulrich asked. "That's no source
Pseudoreality Prevails · 339
340 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
of light. Have you ever wondered why the man in the moon always faces us the sam~. way? Our last moon is no long~rturning on its axis, that's why; it's already fixed in place! You see, once the moon has come into the earth's po-. yer it doesn't merely revolve around the earth but is drawn steadily closer. We don't notice it because it takes thousands of years or even longer for the screw to tighten. But there's no getting away from it, and there must have been thousands of years in the history of the earth during which the previous moons were drawn very close and went on racing in orbit with incredible speed. And just as our present moon pulls a tide from three to six feet high after it, an earlier one would have dragged in its wake whole mountain ranges of water and mud, tumbling all over the globe. We can hardly imagine the terror in which generation after generation must have lived on such a crazy earth for thousands upon thousands of years. "
"But were there . human beings on earth already? " Gerda asked.
"Certainly. In the end, such an ice moon cracks up, comes crash- ing down like giant hailstones, and the mountainous flood it has been dragging along in its orbit collapses and covers the whole globe with one vast tidal wave before it settles down again: That's nqne other than the great biblical Flood, meaning a great universal inundation! How else could all the myths be iu such agreement, if mankind hadn't experienced it all? And since we have one moon left, such ages are bound to come once more. It's a strange thought. . . . "
Gerda gazed breathlessly out c;>f the window and up at the moon; her hand was still resting in his, the moon was a pale, ugly stain on the sky, and it was precisely this unassuming presence that made this fantastic cosmic adventure-of which she somehow saw herself as the victim-look like an ordinary, everyday reality.
"But there's no truth at all to this story," Ulrich said. "The experts call it a crackpot theory, and the moon isn't really coming any closer to the earth; it is, in fact, thirty-two kilometers farther from us than it should be, according to our calculations, if I remember it right. "
"Then why did you tell me this story? " Gerda asked, and tried to extricate her hand from his. But her defiance had quite run out of steam, as it always did when she spoke with this man, who was cer-. tainly not Hans's intellectual inferior and yet managed to keep from going to extremes in his Views, to keep his fingernails clean and his
hair combed.
Ulrich noticed the fine black down growing like a con- tradiction on Gerda's fair skin; the tiny hairs sprouting from her body seemed to bespeak the variously composite nature of poor modem mankind.
"I don't really know," he replied. "Shall I come and see you again? "
Gerda took out the excitement of her liberated hand on various small objects, which she pushed this way and that, without saying anything.
"See you soon, then," Ulrich promised, although this had not been his intention before he came.
74
THE FOURTH CENTURY B. C. VERSUS THE YEAR 1797· ULRICH RECEIVES ANOTHER LETTER FROM HIS FATHER
The rumor had quickly spread that the meetings at Diotima's were an extraordinary success. And now Ulrich received an unusually long letter from his father, stuffed with enclosed pamphlets and offprints. The letter read more or less like this:
My dear son:
Your extended silence . . .
However, I have had the pleasure ofhearing from another
source that my efforts on your behalf . . . my kind friend Count Stallburg . . . His Grace Count Leinsdorf . . . our kinswoman the wife of Section ChiefTuzzi . . . And now I must ask you, if you
· will, to use all your influence in your new circle in the following matter:
The world would come apart if everything held to be true were indeed to be accepted as such and every will could have its way
Pseudoreality Prevails · 341
342 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
as long as it seems to itself legitimate. All of us are therefore duty-bound to determine the one truth and the proper aim; then, insofar as we have succeeded in so doing, to take care, with an unflinching sense of our duty, that it is set down in the clear form of scientific thought. You may gather from this what it means when I tell you that in lay circles, but also, sad to say, in scientific circles susceptible to the promptings of a confused age, an extremely dangerous movement has been afoot for a long time to bring about certain presumed reforms and ameliorations in the proposed revision of the penal code. To fill you in, a committee of noted experts has been in existence for a number of years, appointed by the Minister of Justice to draw up such a proposed revision, to which committee I have the honor to belong, as does my university colleague Professor Schwung, whom you inay remember from earlier days before I had seen through him, so thatfor many years he could pass as my best friend. As regards the liberalizations mentioned above, a rumor has reached me-unfortunately only too likely to be true! -that in the approaching jubilee year of our revered and merciful sovereign, exploiting, as it were, all inclinations to magnanimity, special efforts are likely to be made to pave the way for just such a disastrous emasculation of our legal system. It goes without saying that Professor Schwung and I are equally resolved to forestall this.
I realize that you are not versed in legal matters, but the chances are you know that the method of breaching our fortifications most favored by the present tendency to legal obfuscation, which falsely dubs itself humanitarianism, consists in the effort to extend the concept of mental impairment, for which punishment is not in order, in the vague form of diminished responsibility, even to those numerous individuals who are neither insane nor morally normal: that army of inferior persons the morally feebleminded, which sadly enough constitutes one of the ever-growing diseases of our civilization. You will see for yourself that this concept of diminished responsibility-if you
can call it a concept, which I contest-is most intimately connected with the manner in which we interpret the concepts of
full responsibility, or irresponsibility, as the case may be, and this brings me to the point of this letter:
Proceeding from already existing formulations of the law, and in view of the circumstances cited, I have proposed to the previously mentioned planning committee the following version of Paragraph 318 of our future penal code:
"No criminal act has been committed if the perpetrator was in a state of unconsciousness or pathological disturbance of his mind at the time he was engaged in the act under consideration, so that-" and Professor Schwung submitted a proposal beginning with exactly the same words.
But then he continued as follows: "so that he could not exercise his free will," while mine was to read: "so that he did not have the capacity to perceive the wrongfulness of his act. " I must admit that I did not at first realize the malicious intent of this contradiction. My personal view has always been this, that as the intellect and reasoning power develops, the will comes to dominate desires or instincts by way of considered thoughts and the decisions springing from them. Any willed act is accordingly always the result of prior thought and not purely instinctive. Man is free insofar as he has the power of choice in the exercise of his will; when under the influence of human cravings, that is to say, cravings prompted by his sensual nature which interfere with his ability to think clearly, then he is not free. Volition is simply not a matter of chance but an act of self-determination arising necessarily from within the person, and so the will is determined by thought, and when the thought process is disturbed, the will is no longer the will, as the man's action is prompted only by his natural cravings. . I am ofcourse aware that the opposite view is also represented in the literature, i. e. , that thought is regarded as being determined by the will. This is a view, however, that has its adherents among modem jurists only since 1797, while the one I hold has stood up to all attacks since the fourth century B. C. But to show that I was willing to meet my colleague halfway, I put forward a formulation that would join both proposals, as follows:
"No criminal act shall have been committed if the offender was at the time of his act in a state of unconsciousness or a
Pseudoreality Prevails · 343
344 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
morbid disturbance ofhis mental activity, so that he did not have the capacity to perceive the wrongfulness of his act and could not exercise his free will. "
But here Professor Schwung revealed himself in his true colors! Showing no appreciation whatsoever of my willingness to meet him halfway, he arrogantly insisted that the "and" in my statement had to be replaced with an "or. " You see the point? What differentiates the thinker from the layman is precisely this fine distinction of an "or" where the layman simply puts an "and," and Schwung was trying to stigmatize me as a superficial thinker by exposing my readiness to find a compromise, using the "and" to unite both formulations, exposing it to the suspicion that I had failed to grasp the full magnitude ofthe difference to be bridged, with all its implications!
It goes without saying that from that moment on I have rigorously opposed him on every point.
I immediately withdrew my compromise proposal and have had to insist on the acceptance of my first version without any compromise whatsoever; since when, however, Schwung has been making trouble for me with a most perfidious ingenuity. He claims, for instance, that under my proposed version, which is based on the capacity to recognize a wrongful act as such, a person who suffers from special delusions but is otherwise normal, as sometimes happens, could be exonerated on grounds of mental illness only if it could be proved that this person had assumed, because of his delusions, the existence of circumstances under which his act would be justified or not punishable under the law, so that he would have been acting correctly, although within a false concept of reality. This objection has no merit at all, however, for while empirical logic recognizes the existence of persons who are partly insane and partly sane, the logic of the law must never admit such a mixture ofjuridical states; before the law, a person is either respons. ible for his actions or not responsible, and we may assume that even in persons suffering from special kinds of delusions, a general capacity to know right from wrong still ~sts. If this is blurred by delusions in a specific instance, it needs only a special effort of the intelligence to bring
it into harmony with the rest of the personality, and there is no reason to see any special problem in that.
And so I immediately pointed out to Professor Schwung that if the state of being responsible and that of not being responsible for one's actions cannot logically exist simultaneously, these states must be assumed to follow each other in rapid alternation, giving rise to the problem, especially where his theory is concerned, from which ofthese alternating states has the act in question resulted? To determine this, you would have to cite all the influences to which the accused has been subjected since his birth, and everything that may have influenced the actions of all his forebears, from whom his good and bad trafts are inherited.
You will hardly believe this, but Schwung actually had the cheek to retort that this was quite so, as the logic of the law must never admit a mixture of two juridical states with respect to one and the same act, so that it is necessary to decide even with regard to each specific act of volition whether it was possible for the accused, in the light of his psychological history, to control his will or not. He chooses to claim that we are far more clearly aware of our free will than of the fact that everything that happens has a cause, and as long as we are basically free, we are also free with respect to specific causes, so that we must assume that in such a case it only requires a special effort of the will to resist the causally determined criminal impulses.
At this point Ulrich desisted from further exploration of his fa- ther's plans and pensively hefted in his hand the many enclosures cited in the letter's margin. Casting one more hasty glance at the let- ter's conclusion, he learned that his father expected him to use his "objective influence" on Counts Leinsdorf and Stallburg, and strongly advised him to warn the appropriate committees of the Par- allel Campaign in good time of the dangers to the spiritual founda- tion of the entire government should so important a problem be wrongly formulated and resolved in the Year of the Jubilee.
Pseudoreality Prevails · 345
75
GENERAL STUMM VON BORDWEHR CONSIDERS VISITS TO DIOTIMA AS A DELIGHTFUL CHANGE FROM HIS USUAL RUN OF DUTY
The tubby little General had paid Diotima another visit. Although the soldier has but a modest part to play in the council chamber, he began by saying, he would take it upon himself to predict that the state is the power to hold one's own in the struggle among nations, and that the military strength displayed in peacetime wards off war. But Diotima had instantly pulled him up short.
"General," she said, quivering with indignation, "all of life de- pends upon the forces of peace; even the life of business, rightly re- garded, is a form of poetry. "
The little General stared at her for a moment, dumbfounded, but soon regained his seat in the saddle.
"Your Excellency . . . ,"he hastened to agree. In order to under- stand this form of address, we must remember that Diotima's hus- band was a ministerial section chief, and that in Kakania a section chief held the same rank as divisional commanders, who alone were entitled to be addressed as Excellency and only when on duty, at that; but since the soldier's profession is a knightly one, no soldier could expect to advance his career without so addressing them even when off duty, and in the spirit of chivalrous striving one also ad- dressed their wives as Excellency, without wasting much thought on the question of when they were on duty. Such intricate considera- tions flashed through the little General's mind and enabled him tq reassure Diotima instantly, with his first words, of his unqualified agreement and humble devotion, as he said, "Your Excellency takes the words out of my mouth. It goes without saying that, for political reasons, the W ar Ministry could not have been considered when the committees were set up, but we heard that the great movement is to be pacifist in it~aims-an international·peace campaign, they say, or
perhaps the donation of Austrian murals to the Peace Palace at The Hague-and I can assure Your Excellency of our entire sympathy with such an aim. People generally tend to have certain misconcep- tions about the military; of course I won't deny that a young lieuten- ant is likely to yearn for a war, but all responsible quarters are most deeply convinced that the sphere of force, which we unfortunately do represent, must be linked with the blessings of the human spirit, precisely as Your Excellency has just put it. "
He now dug a little brush out of his trouser pocket and went over his little mustache with it a number oftimes; it was a bad habit dating back to his time as a cadet, a phase during which the mustache still stands for life's impatiently awaited great hope, and he was totally unaware of it. His big brown eyes were Hxed on Diotima's face, try- ing to read the effect of his words: Diotima seemed mollified, though in his presence she never quite was, and deigned to fill him in on what had been going on since the Hrst meeting. The general showed enthusiasm, especially for the Great Council, expressed his admira- tion for Arnheim, and declared his conviction that such a gathering was bound to bear splendid fruit.
"There are so many people, after all, who don't realize how little order there is in the world of the mind," he explained. "I am even convinced, if Your Excellency will permit me to say so, that most people suppose they are seeing some progress in the order of things every day. They see order everywhere: in the factories, the offices, the railway timetables, the schools-here I may also mention proudly our oWn. barracks, which in their modest way positively recall the discipline of a good orchestra-and no matter where you lo. ok, you will see order of some kind, rules and regulations for pedestri- ans, drivers, taxation, churches, business, social protocol, etiquette, morality, and so on. I'm sure that almost everyone considers our era the best-ordered of all time. Don't you have this feeling too, deep down, Your Excellency? I certainly do. If I'm not very careful, I let myself be overcome by the feeling that the modern spirit rests pre- cisely on such a greater order, and that the great empires of Nineveh and Rome fell only because somehow they let things slide. That's
what I think most people feel; they go on the unspoken assumption that the past is dead and gone as a punishment for something that got out of order. But of course that's a delusion that people who know
Pseudoreality Prevails · 347
348 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES.
their history shouldn't succu~b to. It's why, unfortunateiy, we can't do without power and the soldier's profession. "
It was deeply gratifying to the General to chat like this with this brilliant young woman; what a delightful change from the usual run of his official duties. But Diotima had no idea how to answer him, so she fell back on repeating herself:
'W e really do hope to bring the most distinguished minds to bear on it, though our task even then will be a hard one. You can't imagine what a great variety of suggestions keep pouring in, and we do want to make the best choices. But you were speaking of order, General. We will· never reach our goal through order, by a sober weighing of pros and cons, comparisons and tests. Our solution must come as a flash of lightning, a fire, an intuition, a synthesis! Looking at the his- tory of mankind, we see no logical development; what it does sug- gest, with its sudden flashes of inspiration, the meaning of which emerges only later on, is a great poem! " .
"If I may say so, Your Excellency," the General replied, "a soldier knows very little about poetry; but if anyone can breathe lightning and fire into a movement, it is Your Excellency; that much an old army officer can understand. "
COUNT LEINSDORF HAS HIS DOUBTS
So far the tubby little General had been quite urbane, even though he had come uninvited to see her, and Diotima had confided more to him than she had intended. What made her fear him nonetheless, so that she aftexward regretted again her amiability to him, was not re- ally his doing but, as Diotima told herself, her old friend Count Leinsdorf's. Could His Grace be jealous? And if so, of whom? Al- though he always put in a brief appearance at meetings, Leinsdorf did not seem as favorably inclined to the Council as Diotima had ex-
pected. His Grace was decidedly averse to what he called mere liter- ature. It stood for something he associated with Jews, newspapers, sensation-hungry booksellers, and the liberal, hopelessly garrulous paid hirelings of the bourgeoisie; the expression "mere literature" had positively become his new signature phrase. Every time Ulrich offered to read him the latest proposals that had come in the mail, including all the suggestions for moving the world forward or back- ward, he would cut him off with the words everyone uses when in addition to his own plans he hears about those everyone else has:
"No, no, I'm busy today, and all that is mere literature anyway. "
What he was thinking of, in contrast to mere literature, was fields, the men who worked them, little country churches, and that great order of things which God had bound as firmly together as the sheaves on a mown field, an order at once comely, sound, and re- warding, even if it did sometimes tolerate distilleries on country es- tates because one had to keep pace with the times. Given this tranquil breadth of outlook, gun clubs and dairy cooperatives, no matter how far from the great centers they were to be found, must appear as part and parcel of that solid order and community; and if they should be moved to make a claim on general philosophical prin- ciples, that claim must enjoy the priority of a duly registered spiritual property, as it were, over any spiritual claims put forward by private individuals. This is why, every time Diotima wanted to speak with him seriously about something she had gleaned from her Great Minds, Count Leinsdorf was usually holding in his hand, or pulling out of his pocket, some petition from a club of five simpletons, saying that this paper weighed more in the world of real problems than the bright ideas of some genius. ·
This attitude resembled the one praised by Section ChiefTuzzi, as embodied in his ministerial archives, which withheld their official recognition of the Council's existence while taking every fleabite from the most insignificant provincial news sheet in deadly earnest; and Diotima, when beset by such problems, had no one she could confide in except Amheim. But Arnheim, of all people, Jook His Grace's part in the matter. It was he who explained to her about that grandseigneur's tranquil breadth of outlook, when she complained to him about Count Leinsdorf's predilection for crack shots and co-op- dairies.
Pseudoreality Prevails • 349
350 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
"His Grace believes that we must take our direction from the land and the times," he explained gravely. "Believe me, it comes naturally of owning land. The soil uncomplicates life, just as. it purifies water. Even I feel its effect every time I stay on my own very modest coun- try estate. Real life makes everything simple. " And after a slight hesi- tation he added: "The grand scale on which His Grace's life takes place also makes him extremely tolerant, not to say recklessly indulgent. . . . "
This side of her noble patron was new to Diotima, so she looked up expectantly.
"I wouldn't wish to state as a certainty," Amheim went on with a vague emphasis, "that Count Leinsdorf is aware how very much your cousin, as his secretary, abuses his confidence-in principle only. I hasten to add-by his skepticism toward lofty schemes, by his sar- casm as a form of sabotage. I would be inclined to fear that his influ- ence on His Grace was not a wholesome one, if this true peer were not so firmly entrenched in the great traditional feelings and ideas that support real life, so that he can probably afford to risk this confidence. "
These were strong words, and Ulrich had deserved them. But Di- otima did not pay as much attention to them as she might have, be- cause she was so impressed with the other aspect of Arnheim's outlook, his owning landed estates not as a landowner but rather as a kind of spiritual massage; she thought it was magnificent, and mused o. n what it might be like to find oneselfthe lady ofsuch a manor.
"I sometimes marvel," she said, "at the generosity with which you yourself judge His Grace. All of that is surely part of a vanishing chapter of history? "
"And so it is," Amheim replied, "but the·simple virtues of courage, chivalry, and self-di~cipline, which his caste developed to such an ex- emplary degree, will always keep their value. In a wbrd, the ideal of the Master! I have learned to value the principle of the Master more and more in my business life as well. "
"Then. the ideal of the Masferwould, in the end, amount to almost the same thing as that of the Poem? " Diotima asked pensively.
"That's a wonderful way of putting it! " her friend agreed. "It's the secret of a vigorous life. Reason alone is not enough for a moral or a political life. Reason has its limits; what really matters always takes
place above and beyond it. Great men have always loved music, po- etry, form, discipline, religion, and chivalry. I would go so far as to say, in fact, that they and only they can succeed! Those are the so- called imponderables that make the master, make the man, and there is something, some obscure residue of this, in what the popu- lace admires in the actor. But to return to your cousin: Of course it isn't simply a matter of turning conservative when we begin to prefer our comforts to sowing wild oats. But even if we were all born as revolutionaries, there comes a day when we notice that a simple, good person, regardless of what we think of his intelligence-a de- pendable, cheerful, brave, loyal human being, in other words-is not only a rare delight but also the true soil from which all life springs. Such wisdom is as old as the hills, but it denotes a change in taste, which iri our youth naturally favors the exotic, to that of the mature man. I admire your cousin in many respects, or if this is saying too much, because there is little he says that is defensible, I could almost say that I love him, for something that is extraordinarily free and in- dependent in his nature, together with much that. is inwardly rigid and eccentric; it is just this mixture of freedom and mental rigidity that may account for his special charm, by the way. But he is a dan- gerous man, with his infantile moral exoticism and his highly devel- oped intelligence that is always on the lookout for some adventure
without knowing what, exactly, is egging him on. "
77
ARNHEIM AS THE DARLING OF THE PRESS
Diotima repeatedly had occasion to contemplate the imponderables of Arnheim's attitude.
It was on his advice, for instance, that the representatives of the leading newspapers were sometimes invited to the sessions of the Council (as Section Chief Tuzzi had somewhat sarcastically: dubbed
Pseudoreality Prevails · 351
352 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
the Committee to Draft a Guiding Resolution with Regard to the Seventieth Jubilee of His Majesty's Reign), and Arnheim, who was only a guest without any official status, enjoyed a degree of attention from them that put all other celebrities in the shade. For some rea- son newspapers are not the laboratories and experimental stations of the mind that they could be, to the public's great benefit, but usually only its warehouses and stock exchanges. If he were alive today, Plato-to take him as an example, because along with a dozen others he is regarded as the greatest thinker who ever lived-would cer- tainly be ecstatic about a news industry capable of creating, exchang- ing, refining a new idea every day; where information keeps pouring in from the ends of the earth with a speediness he never knew in his own lifetime, while a staff of demiurges is on hand to check it all out instantaneously for its content of reason and reality. He would have supposed a newspaper office to be that topos uranios, that heavenly realm of ideas, which he has described so impressively that to this day all the better class of people are still idealists when talking to their children or employees. And ofcourse ifPlato were to walk sud- denly into a news editor's office today and prove himselfto be indeed- that great author who died over two thousand years ago, he would be a tremendous sensation and would instantly be showered with the most lucrative offers. If he were then capable of writing a volume of philosophical travel pieces in three weeks, and a few thousand of his well-known short stories, perhaps even tum one or the other of his older works into a fUm, he could undoubtedly do very well for him- self for a considerable period of time. The moment his return had ceased to be news, however, and Mr. Plato tried to put into practice one of his well-known ideas, which had never quite come into their own, the editor in chief would ask him to submit only a nice little column on the subject now and then for the Life and Leisure section (but in the easiest and most lively style possible, not heavy: remem- ber the readers), and the features editor would add that he was sorry, but he could use such a contribution only once a month or so, be- cause there were so many other good writers to be considered. And both of these gentlemen would end up feeling that they had done quite a lot for a man who might indeed be the Nestor of European ,:mblicists but still was a bit outdated, and certainly not in a class for
current newsworthiness with a man like, for instance, Paul Arnheim.
Amheim himselfwould ofcourse never concur in this, because his reverence for all greatness would be offended by it, yet in many re- spects he was bound to find it understandable. These days, with ev- erything in the world being talked about helter-skelter, when prophets and charlatans rely on the same phrases, except for certain subtle differences no busy man has the time to keep track of1 and editors are constantly pestered with alarms that someone or other may be a genius, it is very hard to recognize the tr. ue value of a man or an idea; all one can do is keep an ear cocked for the moment when all the murmurs and whispers and shufflings at the editor's door grow loud enough to be admitted as the voice of the people. From that moment on, however, genius does enter a new state. It ceases to be a windy business of book or drama reViews, with all their contra- dictions, which the paper's ideal reader will take no more seriously than the babble ofchildren, but has achieved the status of a fact, with all the consequences that entails.
Fools who keep inveighing against such realities overlook the des- perate need for idealism. behind all this. The world of those who write and have to write is chockablock with big terms and concepts that have lost their referent. The attributes of great men and great causes tend to outlive whatever it was that gave rise to them, and so a great many attributes are left over. They had once been coined by a distinguished man for another distinguished man, but these men are long dead, and the surviving concepts must be put to some use. Writ- ers are in consequence always searching for the right man for, the words. Shakespeare's "powerful imagination," Goethe's "universal- ity," Dostoyevsky's "psychological depth," and all the other legacies of a long literary history hang like endless laundry in the heads of writers, and the resulting mental overstock reduces these people to calling every tennis player a profound strategist and every fashiona- ble writer a great man ofletters. Obviously they will always be grate- ful for a chance to use up their surplus without reducing its value. But it must always be applied to a man whosfl distinction is already an established fact, so that everyone understands that the words can be pinned on him, and it hardly matters where. And such a man was
Amheim, because Amheim was Amheim, whose very birth as the heir of his father was already an event, and there could be no doubt about the news value of anything he said. All he had to do was to take
Pseudoreality Prevails · 353
354 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
just enough trouble to say something that, with a little goodwill, could be regarded as significant. Arnheim himself formulated it as a principle: "Much ofa man's real importance," he used to say, "lies in his ability to make himself understood by his contemporaries. "
So now once again he got along beautifully, as always, with the papers, which fastened on him. He could afford to smile at those am- bitious financiers or politicians who stand ready to buy up whole for- ests of newspapers. Such an effort to influence public opinion seemed to him as uncouth and timid as offering to pay for a woman's love when it could be had so much more cheaply just by stimulating her imagination. He had told the reporters who asked him about the Council that the very fact of its convocation proved its profound ne- cessity, because nothirig in world history happened without a rational cause; a sentiment that so fully corresponded to their professional outlook that it was quoted appreciatively in several newspapers. It was in fact, on closer scrutiny, a good statement. For the kind ofpeo- ple who take everything that happens seriously would feel nauseated if they could assume that not every event has a good cause; on the other hand, they would also rather bite their tongues, as we know, than take anything too seriously, even significance itself. The pinch of pessimism in Arnheim's statement greatly contributed to the solid dignity of their professional endeavors, and even the fact that he was a foreigner could be read as a sign that the whole world was concern- ing itself with these enormously interesting movements in Austria.
The other celebrities. in attendance did not have the same instinc- tive flair for pleasing the press, but they noticed its e. ffect; and since celebrities in general know little about each other and in that train to immortality in which they are traveling together usually set eyes on each other only in the dining car, the special public recognition Am- heim enjoyed had its unexamined effect on them too; and even though he continued to stay away from all official committee meet- ings, in the Council itselfhe came quite automatically to play the role of a central figure. The further this meeting of minds progressed, the clearer it became that he was the really sensational element in it, al- though he basically did nothing to create that effect other than, pos- sibly, by expressing in conversation with its famous members his judgment, which could be interpreted as an openhearted pessimism, that the Council could hardly be expected to accomplish much of
anything, but that, on the other hand, so noble a task merited all the trustful devotion one could muster. So subtle a pessimism inspires confidence even in great minds, for the idea that the intellect nowa- days cannot really accomplish much is, for some reason, more conge- nial than the possibility that the intellect of some colleague might succeed in accomplishing something, and Arnheim's reserved judg- ment about the Council could be taken as leaning toward the more acceptable negative chance.
DIOTIMA'S METAMORPHOSES
Diotima's feelings did not develop in quite the same straight ascend- ing line as Arnheim's success.
It sometimes happened, in . the midst of a social gathering in her transformed apartment, with its rooms stripped of their usual fur- nishings, that she felt as though she were awakening in some dream- land. She would be standing there, surrounded by space and people, the light of the chandelier flowing over her hair and on down her shoulders and hips so that she seemed to feel its bright flood, and she was all statue, like some figure on a fountain, at the epicenter of the world, drenched in sublime spiritual grace. She saw it as a once-in-a- lifetime chance to bring about everything that she had always held to be most important and supremely great, and she no longer cared par- ticularly that she had no very clear idea what this might be. The whole apartment, the presence of the people in it, the whole eve- ning, enveloped her like a dress lined in yellow silk; she felt it on her skin, though she did not see it. From time to time she turned her gaze to Amheim, who was usually standing somewhere in a group of men, talking; but then she realized that her gaze had been resting on him all along, and it was only her awakening that now followed her eyes. Even when she was not looking at him, the outermost wingtips
Pseudoreality Prevails · 355
356 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
of her soul, so to speak, always rested on his face and told her what was going on in it.
And as long as we're on the subject of feathers, one might add that there was also something dreamlike in his appearance, something of a businessman with golden angel's wings who had descended into the midst ofthis gathering.
