No More Learning

9
THE FIRST OF THREE ATTEMPTS TO BECOME A GREA T MAN
This man who had returned could not remember any time in his life when he had not been fired with the will to become a great man; it was a desire Ulrich seemed to have been born with. Such a dream may of course betray vanity and stupidity, but it is no less true that it is a fine and proper ambition without which there probably would not be very many great men in the world.
The trouble was that he knew neither how to become one nor what a great man is. In his school days his model had been Napoleon, partly because of a boy's natural admiration for the criminal and partly because his teachers had made a point of calling this tyrant, who had tried to tum Europe upside down, the greatest evildoer in history. This led di~ectlyto Ulrich's joining the cavalry as an ensign as soon as he was able to escape from school. The chances are that even then, had anyone asked him why he chose this profession, he would
A Sort ofIntroduction · 31
32 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
no longer have replied: "In order to become a tyrant. " But such wishes are Jesuits: Napoleon's genius began to develop only after he became a general. But how could Ulrich, as an ensign, have con- vinced his colonel that becoming a general was the necessary next step for him? Even at squadron drill it seemed often enough that he and the colonel did not see eye-to-eye. Even so, Ulrich would not have cursed the parade ground-that peaceful common on which pretensions are indistinguishable from vocations-had he not been so ambitious. Pacifist euphemisms such as "educating the people to bear arms" meant nothing to him in those days; instead, he surren- dered himself to an impassioned nostalgia for heroic conditions of lordliness, power, and pride. He rode in steeplechases, fought duels, and recognized only three kinds of people: officers, women, and civilians, the last-named a physically underdeveloped and spiritually contemptible class of humanity whose wives and daughters were the legitimate prey of army officers. He indulged in a splendid pessi- mism: it seemed to him that because the soldier's profession was a sharp, white-hot instrument, this instrument must be used to sear and cut the world for its salvation.
As luck would have it he came to no harm, but one day he made a discovery. At a social gathering he P,ad a slight misunderstanding with a noted financier, which Ulrich was going to clear up in his usual dashing style; but it turned out that there are men in civilian clothes also who know how to protect their women. The financier had a word with the War Minister, whom he knew personally, and soon thereaf- ter Ulrich had a lengthy interview with his colonel, in which the dif- ference between an archduke and a simple army officer was made clear to him. From then on the profession of warrior lost its charm for him. He had expected to find himselfon a stage ofworld-shaking adventures with himself as hero, but now saw nothing but a drunken young man shouting on a wide, empty square, answered only by the paving stones. When he realized this, he took his leave of this thank- less career, in which he had just been made lieutenant, and quit the service.
10
THE SECOND A TTEMPT. NOTES TOW ARD A MORALITY FOR THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
But when Ulrich switched from the cavalry to civil engineering, he was merely swapping horses. The new horse had steel legs and ran ten times faster.
In Goethe's world the clattering of looms was still considered a disturbing noise. In Ulrich's time people were just beginning to dis- cover the music of machine shops, steam hammers, and factory si- rens. One must not believe that people were quick to notice that a skyscraper is bigger than a man on a horse. On the contrary, even today those who want to make an impression will mount not a sky- scraper but a high horse; they are swift like the wind and sharp- sighted, not like a giant refractor but like an eagle. Their feelings have not yet learned to make use oftheir intellect; the difference in devel- opment between these two faculties is almost as great as that between the vermiform appendix and the cerebral cortex. So it was no slight advantage to realize, as Ulrich did when barely out ofhis teens, that a man's conduct with respect to what seem to him the Higher Things in life is far more old-fashioned than his machines are.
From the moment Ulrich set foot in engineering school, he was feverishly partisan. Who still needed the Apollo Belvedere when he had the new forms of a turbodynamo or the rhythmic movements of a steam engine's pistons before his eyes! Who could still be cap- tivated by the thousand years of chatter about the meaning of good and evil when it turns out that they are not constants at all but func- tional values, so that the goodness ofworks depends on historical cir- cumstances, while human goodness depends on the psychotechnical skills with which people's qualities are exploited? Looked at from a technical point ofview, the world is simply ridiculous: impractical in all that concerns human relations, and extremely uneconomic and imprecise in its methods; anyone accustomed to solving his problems with a slide rule cannot take seriously a good half of the assertions
33
34 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
people make. The slide rule is two systems of,numbers and lines combined with incredible ingenuity; the slide rule is two white- enameled sticks of flat trapezoidal cross section that glide past each other, with whose help the most complex problems can be solved in an instant without needlessly losing a thought; the slide rule is a small symbol carried in one's breast pocket and sensed as a hard white line over one's heart. Ifyou own a slide rule and someone comes along with big statements or great emotions, you say: "Just a moment, please-let's first work out the margin for error, and the most- probable values. "
This was without doubt a powerful view ofwhat it meant to be an engineer. It could serve as the frame for a charming future self- portrait, showing a man with resolute features, a shag pipe clenched between his teeth, a tweed cap on his head, traveling in superb riding boots between Cape Town and Canada on daring missio~s for his business. Between trips there would always be time to draw on his technical knowledge for advice on world organization and manage- ment, or time to formulate aphorisms like the one by Emerson that ought to hang over every workbench: "Mankind walks the earth as a prophecy of the future, and all its deeds are tests and experiments, for every deed can be surpassed by the next. " Actually, Ulrich had written· this himself, putting together several of Emerson's pronouncements.
It is hard to say why engineers don't quite live up to this Vision. Why, for instance, do theyso often wear a watch chain slung on a steep, lopsided curve from the vest pocket to a button higher up, or across the stomach in one high and two low loops, as if it were a met- rical foot in a poem? Why do they fav~r tiepins topped with stag's teeth or tiny horseshoes? Why do they wear suits constructed like the early stages o f the automobile? And why, fmally, do they never speak of anything but their profession, or if they do speak of something else, why do they have that peculiar, stiff, remote, superficial manner that never goes deeper inside than the' epiglottis? Of course this is not true of all of them, far from it, but it is true of many, and it was true ofall those Ulrich met the first time he went to work in a factory office, and it was true of those he met the second time. They all- turned out to be men fmnly tied to their drawing boards, who loved their profession and were wonderfully efficient at it. But any sugges-
tion that they might apply their daring ideas to themselves instead of to their machines would have taken them aback, much as if they had been asked to use a hammer for the unnatural purpose of killing a man.
And so Ulrich's second and more mature attempt to become a man of stature, by ~y of technology, came quickly to an end.
11
THE MOST IMPORTANT ATTEMPT OF ALL
Thinking over his time up to that point today, Ulrich might shake his head in wonder, as if someone were to tell him about his previous incarnations; but his third effort was different. An engineer may un- derstandably become absorbed in his specialty instead of giving him- self up to the freedom and vastness of the world of thought, even though his machines are delivered to the ends of the earth, for he is no more called upon to adapt the daring and innovative soul of his technology to his private soul than a machine can be expected to apply to itselfthe differential calculus upon which it is based. But the same cannot be said of mathematics, which is the new method of thought itself, the mind itself, the very wellspring of the times and the primal source of an in9redible transformation.
If it is the fulfillment of man's primordial dreams to be able to fly, travel with the fish, drill our way beneath the bodies of towering mountains, send messages with godlike speed, see the invisible and hear the distant speak, hear the voices of the dead, be miraculously cured while asleep; see with our own eyes how we will look twenty years after our death, learn in flickering nights. thousands of things above and below this earth no one ever knew before; if ,light, warmth, power, pleasure, comforts, are man's primordial dreams, then present-day research is not only science but sorcery, spells woven from the highest powers of heart and brain, forcing God to
A Sort ofIntroduction · 35
36 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
open one fold after another of his c:loak; a religion whose dogma is permeated and sustained by the hard, courageous, flexible, razor- cold, razor-keen logic of mathematics.
Of course there is no denying that all these primordial dreams ap- pear, in the opinion of nonmathematicians, to have been suddenly realized in a form quite different from the original fantasy. Baron Miinchhausen's post hom was more beautiful than our canned music, the Seven-League Boots more beautiful than a car, Oberon's kingdom lovelier than a railway tunnel, the magic root of the man- drake better than a telegraphed image, eating ofone's mother's heart and then understanding birds more beautiful than an ethologic study of a bird's vocalizing. We have gained reality and lost dream. No more lounging under a tree and peering at the sky between one's big and second toes; there's work to be done. To be efficient, one cannot be hungry and dreamy but must eat steak and keep moving. It is ex- actly as though the old, inefficient breed of humanity had fallen asleep on an anthill and found, when the new breed awoke, that the ants had crept into its bloodstream, making it move frantically ever since, unable to shake off that rotten feeling of antlike industry. There is really no need to belabor the point, since it is obvious to most of us these days that mathematics has taken possession, like a demon, of every aspect of our lives. Most of us may not believe in the story of a Devil to whom one can sell one's soul, but those who must know something about the soul (considering that as clergymen, his- torians, and artists they draw a good income from it) all testify that
the soul has been destroyed by mathematics and that mathematics is the source of an evil intelligence that while making man the lord of the earth has also made him the slave of his machines. The inner drought, the dreadful blend of acuity in matters of detail and indif- ference toward the whole, man's monstrous abandonment in a desert of details, his restlessness, malice, unsurpassed callousness, money- grubbing, coldness, and violence, all so characteristic of our times, are by these accounts solely the consequence of damage done to the soul by keen logical thinking! Even back when Ulrich ftrst turned to mathematics there were already those who predicted the collapse of European civilization because no human faith, no love, no simplicity, no goodness, dwelt any longer in man. These people had all, typi- cally, been poor mathematicians as young people and at school. This
later put them in a position to prove that mathematics, the mother of natural science and grandmother oftechnology, was also the primor- dial mother of the spirit that eventually gave rise to poison gas and warplanes.
The only people who actually lived in ignorance of these dangers were the mathematicians themselves and their disciples the scien- tists, whose souls were as unaffected by all this as if they were racing cyclists pedaling away for dear life, blind to everything in the world except the back wheel of the rider ahead of them. But one thing, on the other hand, could safely be said about Ulrich: he loved mathe- matics because of the kind of people who could not endure it. He was in love with science not so much on scientific as on human grounds. He saw that in all the problems that come within its orbit, science thinks differently from the laity. If we translate "scientific outlook" into "view oflife," "hypothesis" into "attempt," and "truth" into "action," then there would be no notable scientist or mathemati- cian whose life's work, in courage and revolutionary impact, did not far outmatch the greatest deeds in history. The man has not yet been born who could say to his followers: ''Xou may steal, kill, fornicate- our teaching is so strong that it will transform the cesspool of your sins into clear, sparkling mountain streams. " But in science it hap- pens every few years that something till then held to be in error sud- denly revolutionizes the field, or that some dim and disdained idea ' becomes the ruler of a new realm of thought. Such events are not merely upheavals but lead us upward like a Jacob's ladder. The life of science is as strong and carefree and glorious as a fairy tale. And Ul- rich felt: People simply don't realize it, they have no idea how much thinking can be done already; if they could be taught to think a new way, they would change their lives.
Now, it is a question whether the world is so topsy-turvy that it always needs turning around. The world itself has always had a two- fold answer to this question. From the beginning of the world most people, in their youth, have been in favor of turning the world around. They have always felt it was ridiculous the way their elders clung to convention and thought with the heart-a lump of flesh- instead of with the brain. To the young, the moral stupidity of their elders has always looked like the same inability to make new connec- tions that constitutes ordinary intellectual stupidity, and their own
A Sort of Introduction · 37
38 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
natural morality has always been one of achievement, heroism, and change. But they have no sooner reached their years of accomplish- ment than they no longer remember this, and even·less do they want to be reminded of it. Which is why many of those for whom mathe- matics or science is a true profession are bound to disapprove of any- one taking up science for reasons such as Ulrich's.
Nevertheless, experts judged his achievements in this third profes- sion, in the few years since he had taken it up, to have been not in- considerable.
1. 2
THE LADY WHOSE LOVE ULRICH WON AFTER A CONVERSA TION ABOUT SPORTS AND MYSTICISM
It turned out that Bonadea, too, yearned for great ideas.
Bonadea was the lady who had rescued Ulrich on the night of his ill-fated boxing match and who had visited him the next morning shrouded in veils. He had baptized her Bonadea, "the Good God- dess," for th'e way she had entered his life and also after that goddess of chastity whose ancient temple in Rome had become, by an odd reversal of fate, a center for all the vices. She did not know that story. She was pleased at the euphonious nickname Ulrich had conferred
on her, and wore it on her visits to him as if it were a sumptuously embroidered housedress. "Am I really your good goddess," she asked, "your own bona dea? " And the correct pronunciation of these two words demanded that she throw her arms around his neck and lift her face up to his with a gaze full of feeling.
She was the wife of a prominent man and the fond mother of two handsome boys. Her favorite phrase was "highly respectable," ap- plied to people, messengers, shops, and feelings, when she wanted to
praise them. She could utter the words "truth, goodness, and beauty" as often and as casually as someone else might say "Thurs- day. " Her intellectual needs were most deeply satisfied by her con- cept of a peaceful, idyllic life in the bosom of her family, its radiant happiness toned down to a gentle lamplight by the hovering pres- ence far beneath of the dark realm of "Lead me not into tempta- tion. " She had only one fault: she could become inordinately aroused at the mere sight of a man. She was not lustful; she was sensual, as other people have other afflictions, for instance suffering from sweaty hands or blushing too readily. It was something she had ap- parently been born with and could never do anything to curb. Meet- ing Ulrich in circumstances so like a novel, so firing to the imagination, she had been· destined from the first moment to fall prey to a passion that began as sympathy, then led, after a brief though intense inner struggle, to forbidden intimacies, and con- tinued as a seesaw between pangs of sinful desire and pangs of remorse.
But Ulrich was only the most recent of God knows how many men in her life. Once they have caught on, men tend to treat such nym- phomaniac women no better than morons for whom the cheapest tricks are good enough and who can be tripped up in the same way time and again. The tenderer feelings of male passion are something like the snarling of a jaguar over fresh meat-he doesn't like to be disturbed. Consequently, Bonadea often led a double life, like any other respectable citizen who, in the dark interstices of his con- sciousness, is a train robber. Whenever no one was holding her in his arms, this quiet, regal woman was oppressed by self-hatred for the lies and humiliations she had to risk in order to be held in someone's arms. When her senses were aroused she was subdued and gentle; her blend of rapture and tears, crude directness shadowed by pre- dictable remorse, mania bolting in panic from the lurking depression that threatened, heightened her attraction, arousing excitement much like a ceaseless tattoo on a drum hung with black crepe. But between lapses, in her intervals of calm, in the remorse that made her aware of her helplessness, she was full of the claims of respecta- bility, and this made life with her far from simple. A man was ex- pected to be truthful and kind, sympathetic toward every misfortune,
A Sort ofIntroduction · 39
40 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
devoted to the Imperial House, respectful toward everything re- spected, and, morally, to conduct himself with all the delicacy of a visitor at a sickbed. -
Not that it made any difference if these expectations were disap- pointed. To justify her conduct, she had made up a tale of how her husband had caused her unfortunate condition in the innocent early years of their marriage. This husband, considerably older and physi- cally bigger than she, was cast as a ruthless monster in the sad, porten- tous account she gave to Ulrich during the very first hours oftheir new love. It was only sometime afterward that he discovered that the man was a well-known and respected judge, of high professional compe- tence, who was also given to the form of hunting that consists in the harmless gunning down of wild game; a welcome figure at various pubs and clubs frequented by hunters and lawyers, where male topics rather than art or love were the subject of conversation. The only failing of this rather unaffected, good-natured, and jovial man was that he was married to his wife, so that he found himself more often than other men engaged with her in what is referred to in the lan- guage of the law courts as a casual encounter. The psychological ef- fect of submitting for years to a man she had married from motives of the head rather than the heart had fostered in Bonadea the illusion that she was physically overexcitable, and fantasy made it almost inde- pendent of her consciousness. She was chained to this man, so fa- vored by circumstance, by some compulsion she could not fathom; she despised him for her own spinelessness and felt spineless in order to despise him; she was unfaithful to him as a means of escape but always chose the most awkward moments to speak of him or of their children; and she was never able to let go of him completely. Like many unhappy wives, she ended up with an attitude-in an otherwise rather unstable personal environment-determined by resentment
of her solidly rooted husband, and she carried her conflict with him into every new experience that was supposed to free her from him.
What could a man do to stlence her lamentations but transport her with all possible speed from the depressive to the manic state? She would p~omptly charge the doer of this deed with taking advantage of her weakness and with being devoid of all finer sensibilities, but her affliction laid a veU of moist tenderness over her eyes when she, as she put it with scientific detachment, "inclined" to this man.
13
A RACEHORSE OF GENIUS CRYSTALLIZES THE RECOGNITION OF BEING A MAN WITl:IOUT QUALITIES
It is not immaterial that Ulrich could say to himself that he had ac- complished something in his field. His work had in fact brought him recognition. Admiration would have been too much to ask, for even in the realm of truth, admiration is reserved for older scholars on whom it depends whether or not one gets that professorship or pro- fessorial chair. Strictly speaking, he had remained "promising," which is what, in the Republic of Learning, they call the republicans, that is, those who imagine that they should give all their energies to their work rather than reserve a large part of them for getting ahead. They forget that individual achievement is limited: while on the other hand everybody wants to get ahead, and they neglect the social duty of climbing, which means beginning as a climber so as to become in tum a prop and stay to other climbers on the way up.
And one day Ulrich stopped wanting to be promising. The time had come when people were starting to speak of genius on the soccer field or in the boxing ring, although there would still be at most only one genius of a halfback or great tennis-court tactician for every ten or so explorers, tenors, or writers of genius who cropped up in the papers. The new spirit was not yet quite sure of itself. But just then Ulrich suddenly read somewhere, like a premonitory breath of-ripen- ing summer, the expression "the racehorse of genius. " It stood in the report of a sensational racing success, and the author was proba- bly not aware ofthe full magnitude ofthe inspiration his pen owed to the communal spirit. But Ulrich instantly grasped the fateful connec- tion between his entire career and this genius among racehorses. For the horse has, of course, always been sacred to the cavalry, and as a youth Ulrich had hardly ever heard talk in barracks of anything but horses and women. He had fled from this to become a great man,
41
42 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
only to find that when as the result of his varied exertions he per- haps could have felt within reach of his goal, the horse had beaten him to it. ·
No doubt this has a certain temporal justification, since it is not so very long ago that our idea of an admirable masculine spirit was ex- emplified by a person whose courage was moral courage, whose strength was the strength of a conviction, whose steadfastness was of the heart and of virtue, and who regarded speed as childish, feinting as not permissible, and agility and verve as contrary to dignity. Ulti- mately no such person could be found alive, except on the faculty of prep schools and in all sorts of literary pronouncements; he had become an ideological phantasm, and life had to seek a new image of manliness. As it looked around, it found that the tricks and dodges of an inventive mind working on logical calculations do not really differ all that much from the fighting moves of a well-trained body. There is a general fighting ability that is made cold and· calculating by obsta- cles and openings, whether one is trained to search out the vulnera- ble spot in a problem or in a bodily opponent. A psychotechnical analysis of a great thinker and a champion boxer would probably show their cunning, courage, precision and technique, and the speed oftheir reactions in their respective fields to be the same. It is proba- bly a safe assumption that the qualities and skills by which they suc- ceed do not differ from those of a famous steeplechaser~for one should never underestimate how many major qualities are bought into play in clearing a hedge. But on top of this, a horse and a boxer have an advantage over a great mind in that their performance and rank can be objectively measured, so that the best of them is really acknowledged as the best. This is why sports and strictly objective criteria have deservedly come to the forefront, displacing such obso- lete concepts as genius and human greatness.
As for Ulrich, he must even be credited with being a few years ahead ofhis time on this point. He hadconducted his scientific work in precisely this spirit of improving the record by a victory, an inch or a pound. He meant his mind to prove itself keen and strong, and it had performed the work of the strong. This pleasure in the power of the mind was a state of expectancy, a warlike game, a kind of vague masterful claim on the future. What this power would enable him to accomplish was an open question; he could do everything with it or
nothing, become a savior of mankind or a criminal. This is probably the nature of the mind that provides the world of machines and dis- coveries its constant flow of new supplies. Ulrich had regarded sci- ence as a preparation, a toughening, and a kind of training. If it turned out that this way of thinking was too dry, hard, narrow, and blinkered, it would have to be accepted, like the grimace of extreme exertion and tension that show on the face when the body and the will are being pushed to great accomplishments. He had for years gladly endured spiritual hardship. He despised those who could not follow Nietzsche's dictum to "let the soul starve for the truth's sake," those who tum back, the fainthearted, the softheaded who comfort their souls with spiritual nonsense and feed it-because reason al- legedly gives it stones instead of bread-on religious, metaphysical, and fictitious pap, like rolls soaked in milk. It was his opinion that in this century, together with everything human, one was on an expedi- tion, which required as a matter of pride that one cut off all useless questions with a "not yet," and that life be conducted on a provi- sional basis, but with awareness of the goal to be reached by those who will come after. The fact is, science has developed a concept of hard, sober intelligence that makes the old metaphysical and moral ideas of the human race simply intolerable, even though all it has to put in their place is the hope that a distant day will come when a race of intellectual conquerors will descend into the valleys of spiritual fruitfulness.
But this works only so long as the eye is not forced to abandon visionary distance for present nearness, or made to read a statement that in the meantime a racehorse has become a genius. The next morning Ulrich got out of bed on his left foot and fished halfheart- edly for his slipper with his right. That had been in another city and street from where he was now, qut only a few weeks ago. On the brown, gleaming asphalt under his windows cars were already speed- ing past. The pure morning air was filling up with the sourness of the day, and as the milky light filtered through the curtains it seemed to him unspeakably absurd to start bending his naked body forward and backward as usual, to strain his abdominal muscles to push it up off the ground and lower it again, and finally batter away at a punching bag with his fists, as so many people do at this hour before going to the office. One hour daily is a twelfth of a day's conscious life,
A Sorl ofIntroduction · 43
44 • T H E M A N W I T H 0 U T Q U A L I T I E S
enough to keep a trained body in the condition ofa panther alert for any adventure; but this hour is sacrificed for a senseless expectation, because the adventures worthy of such preparation never come along. "The same is true oflove, for which people get prepared in the most monstrous fashion. Finally, Ulrich realized that even in science hew~ like a man who has climbed one mountain range after another without ever seeing a goal. He had now acquired bits and pieces of a ~ew way to think and feel, but the glimpse of the New, so vivid at first, had been lost amid the ever-proliferating details, and if he had once thought that he was drinking from the fountain of life, he had now drained almost all his expectations to the last drop. At this point he quit, right in the middle of an important and promising piece ofwork. He now saw his colleagues partly as relentless, obses- sive public prosecutors and security chiefs of logic, and partly as opium eaters, addicts of some strange pale drug that filled their
world with visions of numbers and abstract relations. "God help me," he thought, ·"surely I never could have meant to spend all my life as a mathematician? "
But what had he really meant to do? At this point he could have turned only to philosophy. But the condition philosophy found itself in at the time reminded him of the oxhide being cut into strips in the story of Dido, even as it remained highly doubtful that these strips would ever measure out a kingdom, and what was new in philosophy resembled what he had been doing himself and held no attraction for him. All he could say was that he now felt further removed from what he had really wanted to be than he had in his youth, if indeed he had ever known what it was. With wonderful clarity he saw in himself all the abilities and'qualities favored by his time-except for the ability to earn his living, which was not necessary-but he had lost the ca- pacity to apply them. And since, now that genius is attributed to soc- cer players and horses, a man can save himself only by the use he makes of genius, he resolved to take a year's leave of absence from his life in order to seek an appropriate application for his abilities.
BOYHOOD FRIENDS
Since his return, Ulrich had already been a few times to see his frJends Walter and Clarisse, for these two had not left town, although it was summer, and he had not seen them for a number of years. Whenever he got there, they were playing the piano tog~ther. It was understood that they would take no notice of him until they had fin- ished the piece; this time it was Beethoven's jubilant "Ode to Joy. " The millions sank, as Nietzsche describes it, awestruck in the dust; hostile boundaries shattered, the gospel of world harmony recon- ciled and unified the sundered; they had unlearned walking and talk- ing and were about to fly off, dancing, into the air. Faces flushed, bodies hunched, their heads jerked up and down while splayed claws banged away at the mass of sound rearing up under them. Something unfathomable was going on: a balloon, wavering in outline as it filled up with hot emotion, was swelling to the bursting point, and from the excited fmgertips, the nervously wrinkling·foreheads, the twitching bodies, again and again surges of fresh feeling poured into this awe- some private tumult. How often they had been through this!
Ulrich could never stand this piano, always open and savagely bar- ing its teeth, this fat-lipped, short-legged idol, a cross between a dachshund and a bulldog, that had taken over his friends' lives even as far as the pictures on their walls and the spindly design of their arty reproduction furniture; even the fact that there was no live-in maid, but only a woman who came in daily to cook and clean, was part of it. Beyond the windows of this household the slopes of vine- yards with clumps of old trees and crooked shacks rose as far as the sweeping forests beyond; but close in, everything was untidy, bare, scattered, and corroded, as it is wherever the edges of big cities push forward into the countryside. The arc that spanned such afore- ground and the lovely distance was created by the instrument; gleaming black, it sent fiery pillars of tenderness and heroism out through the walls, even if these pillars, pulverized into a fine ash of
45
46 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
sound, collapsed only a hundred yards away without ever reaching the hillside with the flr trees where the tavern stood halfway up the path leading to the forest. ' But the house was able to make the piano resound, forming one of those megaphones through which the soul cries into the cosmos li~e a rutting stag, answered only by the same, competing cries of thousands of other lonely souls roaring into the cosmos. Ulrich's strong position in this household rested on his insis- tence that music represented a failure of the will and a confusion of the mind; he spoke of it with less respect than he actually felt. Since at that time music was, for Walter and Clarisse, the source of their keenest hope and anxiety, they partly despised him for his attitude and partly revered him as an evil spirit.
When they had flnished this time, Walter did not move but sat there, drooping, drained and forlorn on his half-turned piano stool, but Clarisse got up and gave the intruder a lively greeting. Her hands and face were still twitching with the electric charge of the music, and her smile forced its way through a tension between ecstasy and disgust.
"Frog Prince! " she said, ·with a nod backward at the music or Wal- ter. Ulrich felt the elastic bond between himself and Clarisse tense again. On his last visit she had told him of a terrible dream in which a slippery creature, big-belly soft, tender and gruesome, had tried to overpower her in her sleep, and this huge frog symbolized Walter's music. The two of them had few secrets from Ulrich. Now, having barely said hello to Ulrich, Clarisse turned away from him and quickly back to Walter, again uttered her war cry-"Frog Princel"- which Walter evidently did not understand, and, her hands still trem- bling from the music, gave a pained and painfully wild pull at her husband's hair. He made an amiably puzzled face and came back one step closer out of the slippery void of the music.
Then Clarisse and Ulrich took a walk through the slanting arrows ofthe evening sun, without Walter; he remainedbehind at the piano. Clarisse said:
"The ability to fend off harm is the test of vitality. The spent is drawn to its own destruction. What do }'ou think? Nietzsche· main- tains it's a sign ofweakness for an artist to be overly concerned about the morality of his art. " She had sat down on a little hummock.
Ulrich shrugged. When Clarisse married his boyhood friend three
years ago she was twenty:. . two, and it was he himself who had given her Nietzsche's works as a wedding present. He smiled, saying:
"If!
were Walter, I'd challenge Nietzsche to a duel. "
Clarisse's slender, hovering back, in delicate lines under her dress, stretched like a bow; her face, too, was tense with violent emotion; she kept it anxiously averted from her friend.
''You are still both maidenly and heroic at the same time," Ulrich added. It might or might not have been a question, a bit of a joke, but there was also a touch of affectionate admiration in his words. Cla- risse did not quite understand what he meant, but the two words, which she had heard from him before, bored into her like a flaming arrow into a thatched roof.
Intermittent waves of random churning sounds reached them. Ul. :. rich knew that Clarisse refused her body to Walter for weeks at a time when he played Wagner. He played Wagner anyway, with a bad conscience; like a boyhood vice.
Clarisse would have liked to ask Ulrich how much he knew of this: Walter could never keep anything to himself. But she was ashamed to ask. So she finally said something quite different to Ulrich, who had sat down on a small nearby mound.
''You don't care about Walter," she said. ''You're not really his friend. " It sounded like a challenge, though she said it with a laugh.
Ulrich gave her an unexpected answer. 'We're just boyhood friends. You were still a child, Clarisse, when the two of us were al- ready showing the unmistakable signs of a fading schoolboy friend- ship. Countless years ago we admired each· other, and now we mistrust each other with intimate understanding. Each of us would
·like to shake off the painful sense of having once mis_taken himself for the other, so now we perform the mutual service of a pitilessly honest distorting mirror. "
"So you don't think he will ever amount to anything? " Clarisse asked.
"There is no second such example of inevitability as that offered by a gifted young man narrowing himself down into an ordinary young man, not as the result ofany blow offate but through a kind of preordained shrinkage. "
Clarisse closed her lips firmly. The old youthful pact between them, that conviction should come before consideration, made her
A Sort o f Introduction · 4 7
1
heart beat high, but the truth still hurt. Music! The sounds continued to chum toward them. She listened. Now, in their silence, the seeth- ing ofthe piano was distinctly audible; ifthey listened without paying attention, the sound might seem to be boiling upward out of the grassy hummocks, like Briinnhilde's flickering flames.
It would have been hard to saywhat Walter really was. Even today he was an engaging person with richly expressive eyes, no doubt about it, although he was already over thirty-four and had been for some time holding down a government job vaguely concerned with the fine arts. His father had got him this berth in the civil service, threatening to stop his allow~ce if he did not accept it. Walter was actually a painter. While studying the history of art at the university, he had worked in a painting class at the academy; afterward he had lived for a time in a studio. He had still been a painter when he moved with Clarisse into this house under the open sky, shortly after they were married. But now he seemed to be a musician again, and in the course ofhis ten years ! 11love he had sometimes been the one, sometimes the other, and a poet as well, during a period when he had edited a literary publication with marriage in mind; he had then taken a job with a theatrical concern but had dropped it after a few weeks; sometime later, again in order to be able to marry, he became the conductor of a theater orchestra, saw the impossibility of this, too, after six months, and became a drawing master, a music critic, a recluse, and many other things until his father and his future father- in-law, broad-minded as they were, could no longer take it. Such older people were accustomed to say that he simply lacked will- power, but it would have been equally valid to call him a lifelong, many-sided dilettante, and it was quite remarkable that there were always authorities in the worlds of music, painting, and literature who expressed enthusiastic views about Walter's future. In Ulrich's
life, by contrast, even though he had a few undeniably noteworthy achievements to his credit, it had never happened that . someone came up to him and said: ''You are the man I have always been look- ing for, the man my friends are waiting for. " In Walter's life this had happened every three months. Even though these were not neces- sarily the most authoritative people in the field, they all had some influence, a promising idea, projects under way, jobs open, friend- ships, connections, which they placed at the service of the Walter
48 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
they had discovered, whose life as a result took such a colorful zigzag course. He had an air about him that seemed to matter more than any specific achievement. Perhaps he had a particular genius for passing as a genius. Ifthis is dilettantism, then the intel). ectuallife of the German-speaking world rests largely upon dilettantism, for this is a talent found in every degree up to the level of those who really are highly gifted, in whom it usually seef! lS, to all appearances, to be missing.
Walter even had the gift of seeing through all this. While he was, naturally, as ready as the next person to take credit for his successes, his knack for being home upward with such ease by every lucky chance had always troubled him. as a terrifying sign that he was a lightweight. As often as he moved on to new activities and new peo- ple, he did it not simply from instability but in great inner turmoil, driven by anxiety that he had to move on to safeguard his spiritual integrity before he took root where the ground was already threaten~ ing to give way under him. His life had been a series of convulsive experiences from which emerged the heroic struggle of a soul resist- ing all compromise, never suspecting that in this way it was only creating its own dividedness. For all the time he was suffering and struggling for his intellectual integrity, as befits a genius, and invest- ing all he had in his talent, which was not quite a great talent, his fate had silently led him in an inward full circle back to nothing. He had at long last reached the point where no further obstacles stood in his way. The quiet, secluded, semi-scholarlyjob that sheltered him from the corruptions of the art market gave him all the time and indepen- dence he needed to listen exclusively to his inner call. The woman he loved was his, so there were no thorns in his heart. The house "on the brink of solitude" they had taken after they married could not have been more suitable for creative work. But now that there was no lon- ger anything left to be overcome, the unexpected happened: the works promised for so long by the greatness ofhis mind failed to ma- terialize. Walter seemed no longer able to work. He hid things and destroyed things; he locked himself in every morning. and every af- ternoon when he came home; he went for long walks, with his sketchbook shut; but the little that came of all this he never showed to anyone, or else tore it up. He had a hundred different reasons for this. His views also underwent a conspicuous change at this time. He
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50 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
no longer spoke of "art of our time" and "the art of the future"- concepts Clarisse had associated with him since she was fifteen, but drew a line somewhere-in music it might be with Bach, in literature with Stifter, in painting with Ingres-and declared that whatever came ll;lter was bombastic, degenerate, oversubtle, or dissolute. With mounting vehemence he insisted that in a time so poisoned in its in- tellectual roots as the pres~nt, a pure talent must abstain from cre- ation altogether. But although such. stringent pronouncements came from his mouth, he was betrayed by the sounds of Wagner, which began to penetrate the walls of his room more and more often as soon as he shut himselfin-the music he had once taught Clarisse to despise as the epitome ofa philistine, bombastic, degenerate era but to which he was now addicted as to a thickly brewed, hot, benumbing drug.
Clarisse fought against this. She hated Wagner, iffor nothing else for his velvet jacket and beret. She was the daughter of a painter world-famous for his stage designs. She had spent her childhood in the realm o£stage sets and greasepaint; amid three different kinds of art jargon-of the theater, the opera, and the painter's studio; sur- rounded by velvets, carpets, genius, panther skins, knickknacks, pea- cock feathers, chests, and lutes. She had come to loathe from the depths of her soul everything voluptuary in art, and was drawn to everything lean and austere, whether it was the metageometry of the new atonal music or the clarified will of classic fonn, stripped of its skin, like a muscle about to be dissected. It was Walter who had first brought this new gospel into her virginal captivity. She called him "my prince of light," and even when she was still a child, she and Walter had vowed to each other not to marry until he had become a king. The story of his various met~orphoses and projects was also a chronicle ofinfinite sufferings and raptures, for all ofwhich she was to be the trophy. Clarisse was not as gifted as Walter; she had always felt it. But she saw genius as a question ofwillpower. With ferocious energy she set out to make the study of music her own. It was not impossible that she was completely unmusical, but she had ten sinewy fingers and resolution; she ·practiced for ·days on end and drove her ten fingers like ten scrawny oxen trying to tear some over- whelming weight out of the ground. She attacked painting in the
same fa8hion. She had considered Walter a genius since she was fif- teen, because she had always intended to marry only a genius. She would not let him fail her in this, and when she realized that he was failing she put up a frantic struggle against the suffocating, slow change in the atmosphere of their life. It was at just this point that Walter could have used some human warmth, and when his helpless- ness tormented him he would clutch at her like a baby wanting milk and sleep; but Clarisse's small, nervous body was not maternal. She felt abused by a parasite trying to ensconce itselfin her flesh, and she refused herself to him. She scoffed at the steamy laundry warmth in which he sought to be comforted. It is possible that ~at was cruel, but she wanted to be the wife of a great man and was wrestling with destiny. '
Ulrich had offered Clarisse a cigarette. What more could he have said, after so brusquely telling her what he thought? The smoke from their cigarettes drifted up the rays of the evening sun and mingled some distance away from them.
How much does Ulrich know about this? Clarisse wondered on her hummock. Anyway, what can he possibly know about such strug- gles? She remembered how Walter's face fell apart with pain, almost to extinction, when the agonies of music and lust beset him and her resistance left him no way out. No, she decided, Ulrich couldn't know anything of their monstrous love-game on the Himalayas of love, contempt, fear, and the obligations of the heights. She had no great opinion of mathematics and had never considered Ulrich to be as talented as Walter. He was clever, he was logical, he knew a l o t - but was that any better than barbarism? She had to admit that his tennis used to be incomparably better than Walter's, and she could remember sometimes watching his ruthless drives with a passionate feeling of "he'll get what he wants" such as she had never felt about
Walter's painting, music, or ideas. Now she thought: "What if he knows all about us and just isn't saying anything? " Only a moment ago he had, after all, distinctly alluded to her heroism. The silence between them had now become strangely exciting.
But Ulrich was thinking: "How nice Clarisse was ten years ago- half a child, blazing with faith in the future of the three of us. " She had been actually unpleaslmt to him only once, when she and Walter
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52 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
had just got married and she had displayed that unattractive selfish- ness-for-two that so often makes young women who are ambitiously in love with their husbands so insufferable to other men. "That's got a lot better since," he thought.
CULTURAL REVOLUTION
Walter and he had been young in that now-forgotten era just after the turn of the last century, when many people imagined that the century was young too.
The just-buried century in Austria could not be said to have cov- ered itself with glory during its second half. It had been clever in technology, business, and science, but beyond these foeal points of its energy it was stagnant and treacherous as a swamp. It had painted like the Old Masters, written like Goethe and Schiller, and built its houses in the style of the Gothic and the Renaissance. The demands of the ideal ruled like a police headquarters over all expressions of life. But thanks to the unwritten law that allows mankind no imita- tion without tying it to an exaggeration, everything was produced with a degree of craftsmanship the admired prototypes could never have achieved, traces of which can still be seen today in our streets and museums; and-relevant or not-the women ofthe period, who were as chaste as they were shy, had to wear dresses that covered them from the ears down to the ground while showing off a billowing bosom and a voluptuous behind. For the rest, there is no part of the past we know so little about, for all sorts of reasons, as the three to five decades between our own twentieth year and the twentieth year of our fathers. So it may be useful to be reminded that in bad periods the most appalling buildings and poems are constructed on princi: ples just as fine as in good periods; that ! ill the people involved in destroying the achievements of a preceding good epoch feel they are
improving on them; and that the bloodless youth of such inferior periods take just as much pride in their young blood as do the new generations of all other eras.
And each time it is like a miracle when after such a shallow, fading period all at once there comes a small upward surge. Suddenly, out of the becalmed mentality of the nineteenth century's last two decades, an invigorating fever rose all over Europe. No one knew exactly what was in the making; nobody could have said whether it was to be a new art, a new humanity, a new morality, or perhaps a reshuffling of society. So everyone said what he pleased about it. But everywhere people were suddenly standing up to struggle against the old order. Everywhere the right man suddenly appeared in the right place and-this is so important! -enterprising men of action joined forces with enterprising men of intellect. Talents of a kind that had previously been stifled or had never taken part in public life suddenly came to the fore. They were as different from each other as could be, and could not have been more contradictory in their aims. There were those who loved the overman and those who loved the under- man; there were health cults and sun cults and the cults ofconsump- tive maidens; there was enthusiasm for the hero worshipers and for the believers in the Common Man; people were devout and skepti- cal, naturalistic and mannered, robust and morbid; they dreamed of old tree-lined avenues in palace parks, autumnal gardens, glassy ponds, gems, hashish, disease, and demonism, but also of prairies, immense horizons, forges and rolling mills, naked wrestlers, slave uprisings, early man, and the smashing of society. These were cer- tainly opposing and widely varying battle cries, but uttered in the same breath. An analysis of that epoch might produce some such nonsense as a square circle trying to consist of wooden iron, but in reality it all blended into shimmering sense. This illusion, embodied in the magical date ofthe tum ofthe century, was so powerful that it made some people hurl themselves with zeal at the new, still-unused century, while others chose one last quick fling in the old one, as'one runs riot in a house one absolutely has to move out of, without any- one feeling much of a difference between these two attitudes.
If one does not want to, there is no need to make too much of this bygone "movement. " It really affected only that thin, unstable layer of humanity, the intellectuals, who are unanimously despised by all
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54 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
those who rejoice in impregnable views, no matter how divergent from one another (the kind of people who are back in the saddle today, thank God); the general population was not involved. Still, even though it did not become a historical event, it was an eventlet, and the two fritmds, Walter and Ulrich, in their early youth had just caught its afterglow. Something went through the thicket of beliefs in those days like a single wind bending many trees-a spirit of her- esy and reform, the blessed sense of an arising and going forth, a mini-renaissance and -reformation, such as only the best oftimes ex- perience; whoever entered the world then felt, at the first comer, the
breath of this spirit on his cheek.
A MYSTERIOUS MALADY OF THE TIMES
So th:ey had actually been two young men, not so long ago-Ulrich thought when he was alone again-who, oddly enough, not only had the most profound insights before anyone else did, but even had them simultaneously, for one of them had only to open his mouth to say something new to f'md that the other had been making the same tremendous discovery. There is something special about youthful friendships: they are like an egg that senses in its yolk its glorious future as a bird, even while it presents to the world only a rather expressionless egg shape indistinguishable from any other. He viv- idly remembered the boy's and student's room where they had met whenever he returned for a few weeks from his first outings into the world: Walter's desk, covered with drawings, ·notes, and sheets of music, like the early rays of the glory of a famous man's future; facing it, the narrow bookcase where Walter sometimes stood in his ardor like Sebastian at the stake, the lamplight on his beautiful hair, which Ulrich had always secretly admired. Nietzsche, Peter Altenberg, Dostoyevsky or whoever they had just been reading had to resign
themselves to being left lying on the floor or the bed when they had served their purpose and the flood of talk would not suffer the petty interruption of putting a book tidily back in place. The arrogance of the young, who find the greatest minds just good enough to serve their own occasions, now seemed to Ulrich -strangely endearing. He tried to remember these conversations. It was like reaching on awak- ening for the last vanishing, dreamlike thoughts of sleep. And he thought, in mild astonishment: When we were assertive in those days, the point was not to be right-it was to assert ourselves! A young man needs to shine, far more than he needs to see something in the light. He now felt the memory of the feeling of being young, that hovering on rays oflight, as an aching loss.
It seemed to Ulrich that with the beginning of his adult life a gen- eral lull had set in, a gradual running down, in spite of occasional eddies of energy that came and went, to an ever more listless, erratic rhythm. It was very hard to say what this change consisted of. Were there suddenly fewer great men? Far from it! And besides, they don't matter; the greatness of an era does not depend on them. The intel- lectually lackluster 186os and 188os, for instance, could no more pre- vent the rise of a Nietzsche or a Hebbel than either-of these men could raise the intellectual level of his contemporaries. Had life in general reached a standstill? No, it had become more powerful! Were there more paralyzing contradictions than before? There could hardly be morel Had the past not known any absurdities? Heaps! Just between ourselves: people threw their support to the weak and ignored the strong; sometimes blockheads played leading roles while brilliant men played the part of eccentrics; the good Germanic citi- zen, untroubled by history's labor pains, which he dismissed as deca- dent and morbid excrescences, went on reading his family magazines and visited the crystal palaces and academies in vastly greater num- bers than he did the avant-garde exhibitions. Least of all did the po- litical world pay attention to the New Men's views and publications; and the great public institutions resisted everything new as if sur- rounded by a cordon santtatre against the plague. Could one not say, in fact, that things have got better since then? Men who once merely
headed minor sects have become aged celebrities; publishers and art dealers have become rich; new movements are constantly being started; everybody attends both the academic and the avant-garde
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56 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
shows, and even the avant-garde ofthe avant-garde; the family maga- zines have bobbed their hair; politicians like to sound off on the cul- tural arts, and newspapers make literary history. So what has been lost?
Something imponderable. An omen. An illusion. As when a mag- net releases iron filings and they fall in confusion again. As when a ball of string comes undone. As when a tension slackens. As when an orchestra begins to play out of tune. No details could be adduced that would not also have been possible before, but all the relation- ships had shifted a little. Ideas whose currency had once been lean grew fat. Persons who would before never have been taken seriously became famous. Harshness mellowed, separations fus~d, intransi- gents made concessions to popularity, taste$ already formed relapsed into uncertainties. Sharp boundaries everywhere became blurred and some new, indefinable ability to form alliances brought new peo- ple and new ideas to the top. Not that these people and ideas were bad, not at all; it was only that a little too much of the bad was mixed with the good, of error with buth, of accommodation with meaning.
There even seemed to be a privileged proportion of this mixture that got furthest on in the world; just the right pinch of makeshift to bring out the genius in genius and make talent look like a white hope, as a pinch of chicory, according to some people, brings out the right cof- fee flavor in coffee. Suddenly all the prominent and important posi- tions in the intellectual world were filled by such people, and all decisions went their way. There is nothing one can hold responsible for this, nor can one say how it all came about. There are no persons or ideas or specific phenomena that one can fight against. There is no lack of talent or goodwill or even of strong personalities. There is just something missing in everything, though you can't put your finger on it, as if there had been a change in the blood or in the air; a mysteri- ous disease has eaten away the previous period's seeds of genius, but everything sparkles with novelty, and finally one has no way of know- ing whether the world has really grown worse, or oneself merely older. At this point a new era has definitively arrived.
So the times had changed, like a day that begins radiantly blue and then by degrees clouds over, without having the kindness to wait for Ulrich. He evened the score byholding the cause ofthese mysterious changes that made up the disease eating away genius to be simple,
common stupidity. By no means in an insulting sense. For if stupid- it)r, seen from within, did not so much resemble talent as possess the ability to be mistaken for it, and if it did not outwardly resemble progress, genius, hope, and improvement, the chances are that no one would want to be stupid, and so there would be no stupidity. Or fighting it would at least be easy. Unfortunately, stupidity has some- thing uncommonly endearing and natural about it. Ifone finds that a reproduction, for instance, seems more of an artistic feat than a hand-painted original, well, there is a certain truth in that, and it is easier to prove than that van Gogh was a great artist. It is also easy and profitable to be a more powerful playwright than Shakespeare or a less uneven storyteller than Goethe, and a solid commonplace al- ways contains more humanity than a new discovery. There is, in short, no great idea that stupidity could not put to its own uses; it can
move in all directions, and put on all the guises oftruth. The truth, by comparison, has only one appearance and only one path, and is al- ways at a disadvantage.
But after a while Ulrich had a curious notion in this connection. He imagined that the great churchman and thinker Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), after taking infinite pains to put the ideas of his own time in the best possible order, had then continued through history to go even deeper to the bottom ofthings, and had just finished. Now, still young by special dispensation, he stepped out of his arched doorway with many folios under his arm, and an electric trolley shot right past his nose. Ulrich chuckled at the dumbstruck amazement on the face of the doctor untversalis, as the past had called the celebrated Thomas.
A motorcyclist came up the empty street, thundering up the per- spective bow-armed and bow-legged. His face had the solemn self- importance of a howling child. It reminded Ulrich of a photo he had seen a few days ago in a magazine of a famous woman tennis player poised on tiptoe, one leg exposed to above the garter, the other flung up toward her head as she reached for a high ball with her racket, on her face the expression of an English governess. In the same issue there was also a picture of a champion swimmer being massaged after a contest. Two women dressed in street clothes, one at the swimmer's feet, the other at her head, were solemnly looking down at her as she lay on a bed, naked on her back, one knee drawn up in a
A Sort ofIntroduction · 57
sB·THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
posture of sexual abandon, the. masseur standing alongside resting his hands on it. He wore a doctor's gown and gazed out ofthe picture as though this female flesh had been skinned and hung on a meat hook. Such were the things people were beginning to see at the time, and somehow they had to be acknowledged, as one acknowledges the presence of skyscrapers and electricity. A man can't be angry at his own time without suffering some damage, Ulrich felt. Ulrich was also always ready to love all these manifestations oflife.