No More Learning

Ulrich was happy to drop what he was doing and agreed to come, although it was a disproportionately long way to go for the sake of talking with Clarisse for a mere fifteen minutes; for Clarisse had been invited for supper at her parents', along with Walter and Sieg- mund. On the way, Ulrich had time to wonder at his not having given a thought to Moosbrugger in so long and always having to be re- minded of him by Clarisse, though the man had been almost con- stantly on his mind before. Even in the darkness of late evening through which Ulrich had to walk from the last trolley stop to his friends' house, there was no room for such a haunting apparition; a void in which he had occurred had closed. Ulrich noted this with sat- isfaction and also with that faint self-questioning which is a conse- quence of changes whose extent is clearer than their cause. He was enjoying the sensation of cutting through the permeable darkness with the solider black of his own body, when Walter came uncer- tainly toward him, nervous at night in this lonely vicinity but anxious to say a few words to Ulrich before they joined the others. He eagerly took up his explanations from the point where he had broken off. He appeared to be trying to defend himself, and Clarisse as well, from being misunderstood. Even when her notions seemed to be incoher- ent, he said, one could always detect behind them an element ofpa- thology that was part of the ferment of the times; it was her most curious faculty. She was like a dowsing rod pointing to hidden springs-in this case, the necessity of replacing modem man's pas- sive, merely intellectual, rational attitude with "values. " The form of
910 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
intelligence of the time had destroyed all finn ground, so it was only the will-indeed, if it couldn't be done otheiWise, then it was only violence--that could create a new hierarchy ofvalues in which a per- son could find beginning and end for his inner life. . . . He was re- peating, reluctantly and yet with enthusiasm, what he had heard from Meingast.
Guessing this, Ulrich asked him impatiently: "Why are you talking so pompously? Is it that prophet ofyours? It used to be you couldn't have enough simplicity and naturalness! "
Walter put up with this for Clarisse's sake, lest his friend decline to help, but had there been just one ray oflight in that moonless gloom, the flash of his teeth would have been visible as he bared them in frustration. He said nothing, but his suppressed rage made him weak, and the presence of his muscular friend shielding him from the eerie loneliness of the place made him soft. Suddenly he said: "Imagine loving a woman and then meeting a man you admire and realizing that your wife admires and loves him, too, and that both of you feel, in love, jealousy, and admiration, this man's hopeless supe- riority-"
"''d rather not imagine it! " Ulrich should have heard him out, but he squared his shoulders with a laugh and interrupted him.
Walter shot him a venomous glance. He had meant to ask: 'What would you do in such a case? '' But it was the same game they had been playing since their school days. As they entered the dimly lit hall he said:
"Drop that act ofyours! You're not as conceited and thick-skinned as all that! " Then he had to run to catch up with Ulrich on the stairs, where he hastily whispered the rest ofwhat Ulrich needed to know.
'What has Walter been telling you? " Clarisse asked when they got upstairs.
"I can do it, all right," Ulrich said, going straight to the point, "but I don't think it would be sensible. "
"Did you hear that? His very first word was 'sensible,' " Clarisse called out to Meingast, laughing. She was rushing back and forth be- tween the clothes closet, the washstand, the mirror, and the half- open door between her room and the one where the men were. They could catch glimpses of her now and then: with a wet face and her hair hanging down; with her hair brushed up; still bare-legged; in
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 9 1 1
stocking feet; in her long-skirted dinner dress below with a dressing jacket above that looked like a white institutional uniform. She en- joyed this appearing and disappearing. Since she had got her way, all her feelings were submerged in an easy sensuality. 'Tm dancing on light-ropes! " she shouted into the room. The men smiled, but Sieg- mund glanced at his watch and dryly asked her to hurry up. He was treating the whole thing as a gymnastic exercise.
Then Clarisse glided on a "light-rope" to the far comer of her room, for a pin, and shut the drawer of her night table with a bang.
"I can change faster than a man," she called back to Siegmund in the other room, but suddenly paused over the double meaning of "change," which right now could mean for her both "dressing for dinner" and "being transformed by mysterious destinies. " She quickly finished dressing, stuck her head through the door, and gravely regarded her friends one after the other. Anyone who did not think of it as a game might have been alarmed that something in this solemn countenance had been extinguished that should have been part of a natural, healthy face. She bowed to her friends and said ceremonially: "So now I have put on my destiny! " But when she straightened up again she looked quite normal, even rather charm- ing, and her brother Siegmund cried: "Forward-march! Papa doesn't like people to be late for dinner! "
When the four ofthem walked to the streetcar-Meingast had dis- appeared before they left the house-Ulrich fell back a few steps with Siegmund and asked him whether he had not been a bit worried about his sister oflate. The glow of Siegmund's cigarette sketched a flatly rising arc in the darkness.
"No doubt she's abnormal," he replied. "But is Meingast normal? Or even Walter? Is playing the piano normal? It's an unusual state of excitement associated with tremors in the wrists and ankles. For a physician, there's no such thing as normal. Still, ifyou want my seri- ous opinion, my sister is somewhat overwrought, and I think it will pass once the great panjandrum has left. What do you make of him? " There was a hint of malice in "the great panjandrum. "
"He's a gasbag," Ulrich said.
"Isn't he, though! " Siegmund was delighted. "Repulsive, repulsive. "But his ideas are interesting, I wouldn't deny that altogether," he
added after a pause.
912
20
COUNT LEINSDORF HAS QUALMS ABOUT "CAPITAL AND CULTURE"
And so it happened that Ulrich again appeared before Count Leins- dorf.
He found His Grace, enveloped in tranquillity, dedication, solem- nity, and beauty, at his desk, reading a newspaper that was lying spread out over a high pile of documents. The Imperial Uege-Count sadly shook his head after once more expressing his condolences to Ulrich.
"Your father was one ofthe last true representatives ofcapital and culture," he said. "How well I remember the days when we both sat in the Bohemian Diet. He well deserved the confidence we always placed in him! "
Ulrich inquired out of politeness how the Parallel Campaign had fared in his absence.
'Well, because of that hullabaloo in the street outside my house that afternoon, which you observed, we've set up a Commission to Ascertain the Desires of the Concerned Sections of the Population in Reference to Administrative Reform," Count Leinsdorf told him. "The Prime Minister himself asked us to take this off his shoulders for the time being, because as a patriotic enterprise we enjoy, so to speak, the public's confidence. "
With a straight face Ulrich assured him that at any rate the Com- mission's name had been well chosen and was likely to have a certain effect.
"Yes, a good deal depends on finding the right words," His Grace said pensively, and suddenly asked: 'What do you make of this busi- ness of the municipal employees in Trieste? I should think it would be high time for the government to pull itself together and take a firm stand. " He made as if to hand over the paper he had folded up when Ulrich came in, but at the last moment chose to open it again and read aloud to his visitor, with vivid feeling, from a long-winded
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 913
article. "Can you imagine this sort of thing happening in any other country in the world? " he asked, when he had finished. "For years the Austrian city of Trieste has been hiring only Italians, subjects of the King of Italy, in its civil seiVice, to make a point that their alle- giance is to Italy, not to us. I was there once on His Majesty's birth- day: not a single flag in all Trieste except on the administration building, the tax office, the prison, and the roofs of a few barracks! But if you should have any business in some municipal office in Trieste on the King ofltaly's birthday, you wouldn't find a clerk any- where without a flower in his buttonhole! "
"But why has this been tolerated till now? " Ulrich inquired.
''Why shouldn't it be tolerated? " Count Leinsdorf said in a dis- gruntled tone. "Ifour government forces the city to discharge its for- eign staff, we will immediately be accused of Germanizing. That is just the reproach every government fears. Even His Majesty doesn't like it. After all, we're not Prussians! "
Ulrich seemed to remember that the coastal and port city of Trieste had been founded on Slavic soil by the imperialistic Venetian Republic and today embraced a large Slavic population, so that even if one were to view it as merely the private concern of its inhabi- tants-without regard to its also being the gateway to the Empire's eastern trade and in every way dependent on the Empire for its pros- perity-there was no getting around the fact that its large Slavic lower middle class passionately contested the favored Italian upper class's right to consider the city as its own property. Ulrich said as much to the Count.
"True enough," Count Leinsdorf instructed him, "but once the word is out that we're Germanizing, the Slovenes immediately side with the Italians, even though they have to take time off from tearing each other's hair out, and all the other minorities rally to support them as well! We've been through this often enough. In terms of practical politics, it's the Germans we have to regard as a threat to peace within the Empire, whether we want to or not. " This conclu- sion left Count Leinsdorf deep in thought for a while, for he had touched on the great political scheme that weighed on his mind, though it had not come clearly into focus for him until this moment. But suddenly he livened up again, and continued cheerfully: "Any- way, the others have been told offproperly this time. " With a tremor
914 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
of impatience, he replaced his pince-nez and again read aloud to Ul- rich with relish all those satisfying passages in the edict issued by His Imperial and Royal Majesty's Governor in Trieste.
" 'Repeated warnings issued by the governmental institutions of public safety to no avail . . . harm done to our people . . . In view of this obstinate resistance to the prescribed official orders, the Gover- nor of Trieste finds himself obliged to take steps toward enforcing the observance of the existing lawful regulations . . . ' " He inter- rupted himself to ask: "Spoken with dignity, don't you think? " He raised his head but immediately lowered it again, eager to get to the final bit, whose official urbane authority underlined his voice with great aesthetic satisfaction:
" 'Furthermore,' " he read, " 'it is reserved to the administration at any time to give careful and sympathetic consideration to each indi- vidual case of application for citizenship made by such public func- tionaries, insofar as these are officially deemed worthy ofexceptional regard through long years of public service and an unblemished rec- ord, and in such cases the Imperial and Royal Administration is in- clined to avoid immediate enforcement of these regulations, while reserving its right to enforce them at such time and in such circum- stances as it may think fit. ' Now, that's the tone our government should have taken all along! " Count Leinsdorfexclaimed.
"Don't you think, sir, on the basis of this last point, that in the last analysis this leaves things pretty much where they have always been? " Ulrich asked a little later, when the tail end ofthis long snake of an official sentence had finally vanished inside his ear.
"Yes, that's just it! " His Grace replied, twiddling his thumbs for a while, as he always did when some hard thinking was going on inside. Then he gave Ulrich a searching look and opened his heart to him.
"Do you remember how, when we were at the police exhibition, the Interior Minister announced that there was a new spirit of 'mu- tual support and strictness' in the offing? Well, I wouldn't expect them to immediately lock up all the troublemakers who were raising such a rumpus on my doorstep, but the Minister could at least have said a few dignified words of repudiation in Parliament! " His feelings were hurt.
"I assumed it was done during my absence," Ulrich cried with
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 915
feigned astonishment, aware that a genuine distress was roiling the mind of his benevolent friend.
"Not a thing was done! " His Grace said. Again he fixed his wor- ried, protuberant eyes on Ulrich's face with a searching look, and he opened his heart further: "But something will be done! " He straight- ened up and leaned back in his chair, shutting his eyes as he lapsed into silence.
When he opened them again he began to explain in a calmer tone: "You see, my dear fellow, our Constitution of 1861 entrusted the un- disputed leadership in the new experimental governmental scheme to the German element in the population, and in particular to those within that element who represented capital and culture. That was a munificent gift ofHis Majesty's, a proofofhis generosity and his con- fidence, perhaps not quite in keeping with the times; for what has become of capital and culture since then? " Count Leinsdorf raised one hand and then dropped it in resignation on the other. "When His Majesty ascended the throne in 1848, at Olmiitz, that is to say, practi- cally in exile . . . ," he went on slowly, but suddenly becoming impa- tient or uncertain, he fished a fe~ notes out of his pocket with trembling fingers, struggled in some agitation to set his pince-nez firmly on his nose, and read aloud, his voice sometimes quavering with emotion, as he strained to decipher his own handwriting:
" '. . . he was surrounded by the uproar of the nationalities' wild urge for freedom. He succeeded in quenching the extreme manifes- tations of this upsurge. Finally, even if after granting some conces- sions to the demands of his peoples, he stood triumphant as the victor, and a gracious and magnanimous victor, moreover, who for- gave his subjects the errors of their ways and held out his hand to them with the offer of a peace honorable for them as well. Although the Constitution and the other liberties had been granted by him under the press of circumstances, it was nevertheless an act of His Majesty's free will, the fruit of his wisdom and compassion, and of hope in the progressive civilization ofhis peoples. But in recent years this model relationship between the Emperor and his peoples has been tarnished by the work of agitators, demagogues-' " Here Count Leinsdorf broke off reading his exposition of political history, in which evexy word had been scrupulously weighed and polished,
916 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
and gazed pensively at the portrait of his ancestor the Grand Marshal and Knight of the Order of Maria Theresa, hanging on the wall fac- ing him. When Ulrich's expectant gaze finally drew his attention, he said: "That's as far as I've come.
"But you can see that I have been giving these problems a great deal of thought lately," he went on. "What I have just read to you is the beginning of the response which the Minister should have pre- sented to Parliament in the matter of the demonstration against me, if he had been doing his job! I've gradually worked it out for myself, and I don't mind telling you that I shall have occasion to present it to His Majesty as soon as I have finished it. You see, it was not without purpose that the Constitution of 1861 entrusted the leadership of our country to capital and culture. It was meant to secure our future. But where are capital and culture today? "
He seemed really put out with the Minister of the Interior, and to divert him Ulrich remarked innocently that one could at least say about capital that it was nowadays not only in the hands of the bank- ers but also in the time-tested hands ofthe landed aristocracy.
"I've nothing at all against thE: Jews," Count Leinsdorf assured Ul- rich out of the blue, as though Ulrich had said something that re- quired such a disclaimer. "They are intelligent, hardworking, and reliable. But it was a great mistake to give them those unsuitable names. Rosenberg and Rosenthal, for instance, are aristocratic names; Baer and W olf and all such creatures are originally heraldic beasts; Meyer derives from landed property; Silver and Gold are ar- morial colors. All those Jewish names," His Grace disclosed, to Ul- rich's surprise, "are nothing but the insolence of our bureaucrats aimed at our nobility. It was the noble families, not the Jews, who were the butt of these officials, which is why the Jews were given other names as well, like Abrahams, Jewison, or Schmucker. You can not infrequently observe this animus of our bureaucracy against the old nobility surfacing even today, ifyou know how to look for it," he said oracularly, with a gloomy, obstinate air, as though the struggle of the central administration against feudalism had not long since been overtaken by history and vanished completely from sight. In fact, there was nothing His Grace could resent so pureheartedly as the social privileges enjoyed by important bureaucrats by virtue of their position even when their names might be plain Fuchsenbauer or
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · gz 7
Schlosser. Count Leinsdorf was no diehard country Junker; he wanted to move with the times, and did not mind such a name when it was that of a Member of Parliament or even a cabinet minister or an influential private citizen, nor did he at all object to the political or economic influence of the middle class; what provoked him, with a passion that was the last vestige ofvenerable traditions, was the social status of high-ranking administrative officials with middle-class names. Ulrich wondered whether Leinsdorf's remarks might have been prompted by his own cousin's husband. It was not out of the question, but Count Leinsdorf continued talking and was, as always happened, soon lifted above all personal concerns by an idea that had apparently been working inside him for a long time.
"The whole so-called Jewish Question would disappear without a trace if the Jews would only make up their minds to speak Hebrew, go back to their old names, and wear Eastern dress," he explained. "Frankly, a Galician Jew who has just recently made his fortune in Vienna doesn't look right on the Esplanade at Ischl, wearing Tyro- lean costume with a chamois tuft on his hat. But put him in a long, flowing robe, as rich as you like so long as it covers his legs, and you'll see how admirably his face and his grand sweeping gestures go with his costume! All those things people tend to joke about would then be in their proper place-even the showy rings they like to wear. I am against assimilation the way the English nobility practice it; it's a tedious and uncertain process. But give the Jews back their true character and watch them become a veritable ornament, a genuine aristocracy of a rare and special kind among the nations gratefully thronging around His Majesty's throne-or, ifyou'd prefer to see it in everyday terms, imagine them strolling along on our Ringstrasse, the only place in the world where you can see, in the midst of West- ern European elegance at its fmest, a Mohammedan with his red fez, a Slovak in sheepskins, or a bare-legged Tyrolean! "
At this point Ulrich could not do otherwise than express his admi- ration for His Grace's acumen, which had now also enabled him to uncover the "real Jew. "
'Well, you know, the true Catholic faith teaches us to see things as they really are," Count Leinsdorf explained benevolently. "But you would never guess what it was that put me on the right track. It wasn't Arnheim-I'm not speaking ofthe Prussians right now. But I
gz8 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
have a banker, a man ofthe Mosaic faith, ofcourse, whom I've had to see regularly for years now, and at first his intonation always used to bother me a bit, so that I couldn't keep my mind on the business at hand. He speaks exactly as if he wanted me to think he was my uncle-I mean, as if he'd just got out of the saddle, or back from a day's grouse shooting; exactly the way our own kind of people talk, I must say. Well and good; but then, when he gets carried away, he can't keep it up and, to make no bones about it, slips into a kind of Yiddish singsong. It used to bother me considerably, as I believe I've told you already, because it always happened when some important business matter was at stake, so that I was always unconsciously primed for it, and it got so that I couldn't pay, attention to what he was talking about, or else I imagined I was listening to something important the whole time. But then I found a way around it: Every time he began to talk like that I imagined he was speaking Hebrew, and you ought to have heard how attractive it sounded then! Posi- tively enchanting-it is, after all, a liturgical language; such a melodi- ous chanting: I'm very musical, I should add. In short, from then on he had me lapping up the most complicated calculations of com- pound interest or discount positively as if he were at the piano! " As he said this, Count Leinsdorf had for some reason a melancholy smile.
Ulrich took the liberty of pointing out that the people so favored by His Grace's sympathetic interest would be more than likely to turn down his suggestion.
"Oh, of course they won't want to! " the Count said. "But they would have to be forced to for their own good. It would amount to a world mission for the Empire, and it's not a question ofwhether they want to or not. You see, many people at the beginning have had to be made to do what's best for them. But think, too, what it would mean if we ended up allied with a grateful Jewish State instead of with the Germans and Prussia! Seeing that our Trieste happens to be the Hamburg of the Mediterranean, as it were, apart from the fact that it would make us diplomatically invincible to have not only the Pope on our side but the Jews as well! "
Abruptly, he added: "You must remember that I have to concern myselfwith problems ofthe currency, too, these days. " And again he smiled in that strangely sad, absentminded way.
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 919
It was astonishing that His Grace, who had repeatedly sent out ur- gent calls for Ulrich, did not discuss the problems of the day now that he had finally come, but lavished his ideas on him. Apparently ideas had come to him in abundance while he had had to do without his confidant, ideas as restless as bees that stream out for miles but are sure to return in their own good time, laden with honey.
"You might perhaps object," Count Leinsdorf resumed, although Ulrich had not said anything, "that I have on earlier occasions often expressed a decidedly low opinion of the financial world. I don't deny it: too much is too much, and we have too much finance in modern life. But that's precisely why we must deal with it! Look, culture has not been pulling its weight alongside capital-there you have the whole secret of developments since 1861. And that's why we must concern ourselves with capital. "
His Grace made an almost imperceptible pause, just long enough to let his listener know that now he was coming to the secret of capi- tal, but then went on in his gloomily confidential tone:
"You see, what's most important in a culture is what it forbids peo- ple: whatever doesn't belong is out. For instance, a well-bred man will never eat gravy with his knife, only God knows why; they don't teach you these things in school. That's so-called tact, it's based on a privileged class for culture to look up to, a cultural model; in short, if I may say so, an aristocracy. Granted that our aristocracy has notal- ways lived up to that ideal. That's exactly the point, the downright revolutionary experiment, of our 1861 Constitution: Capital and cul- ture were meant to make common cause with the aristocracy. Have they done so? Were they up to taking advantage ofthe great opportu- nity His Majesty had so graciously made available to them? I'm sure you'd never claim that the results of your cousin's great efforts that we see every week are in keeping with such hopes. " His voice grew more animated as he exclaimed: "You know, it's really most interest- ing, what sorts of things claim to be 'mind' these days!
I was telling His Eminence the Cardinal about it recently, when we were out hunting in Miirzsteg-no, it was Miirzbruck, at the Hostnitz girl's wedding-and he laughed and clapped his hands together: 'Some- thing new every year,' he said. 'Now you can see how modest we are; we've been telling people the same old thing for almost two thousand years. ' And that's so true. The main thing about faith is that it keeps
920 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
believing the same old thing, even ifit's heresy to say so. 'You know,' he said, 'I always go out hunting because my predecessor in the days of Leopold von Babanberg did too. But I never kill,' he said-he happens to be known for never firing a shot on the hunt-'because it goes against my grain, something tells me it's not in keeping with my cloth. I can talk about this to you, old friend, because we were boys in dancing class together. But I'd never stand up in public and say: ''You shall not shoot while hunting! " Good Lord, who knows whether that would be true, and besides, it's no part of the Church's teaching. But the people who meet at your friend's house make a public issue of things like that the minute it occurs to them! There you have what's called "intelligence" nowadays! ' It's easy for him to laugh," Count Leinsdorf went on, speaking for himself again. "He holds that job in perpetuity, but we laymen have the hard task of finding the right path amid perpetual change. I told him as much. I asked him: 'Why did God let literature and painting and all that come into the world anyway, when they're really such a bore? ' And he came up with a very interesting explanation. 'You've heard about psychoanalysis, haven't you? ' he asked me. I didn't know quite what I was supposed to say. Well,' he said, 'you'll probably say it's just a lot of filth. We won't argue about it, it's what everyone says; and yet they all run to these newfangled doctors more than to our Catholic confessional. Take it from me, they rush to them in droves because the flesh is weak! They let their secret sins be discussed because they enjoy it, and if they disparage it, take it from me, we always pick holes in the things we mean to buy! But I could also prove to you that what their atheistic doctors imagine they invented is nothing but what the Church has been doing from the beginning: exorcising the Devil and healing the possessed. It's identical step for step with the ritual of exorcism, for instance, when they try with their own methods to make the person who's possessed talk about what's inside him; ac- cording to Church teaching, that's precisely the turning point, where the Devil is getting ready to break out! We merely missed adapting ourselves in time to changing conditions by talking of psychosis, the unconscious, and all that current claptrap instead of filth and the Devil. ' Isn't that interesting? " Count Leinsdorf asked. "But what comes next may be even more so. 'Never mind the weakness of the flesh,' the Cardinal said. 'What we need to talk about is that the spirit
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 9 2 1
is weak too. And that's where the Church has kept its wits and not let anything slip by. People aren't nearly so scared of the Devil in the flesh, even if they make a great show of fighting him, as they are of the illumination that comes from the spirit. You never studied theol- ogy,' he said to me, 'but at least you respect it, and that's more than a secular philosopher in his blindness ever does. Let me tell you, theol- ogy is so difficult that a man can devote himself to studying it and nothing else for fifteen years before he realizes that he hasn't really understood a word of it! If people knew how difficult it is, none of them would have any faith at all; they'd only run us down! They'd run us down exactly the way they run people down-you understand? ' he said slyly, '-who are writing their books and painting their pictures and trotting out their theories. And today we're only too glad to let them have plenty of rope to hang themselves with, because, let me tell you, the more earnestly one of those fellows sets about it, the less he's a mere entertainer, or working for his own pocket; the more, in other words, he serves God in his mistaken way, the more he bores people, and the more they run him down. "That's not what life is like! " they say. But we know very well what it's like, and we'll show them too, and because we can also wait, you may yet live to see them come running back to us, full of fury about the time they wasted on all that clever talk. You can see it happening in our own families, even now. And in our fathers' day, God knows, they thought they were going to turn heaven itself into a university. '
"I wouldn't go so far," Count Leinsdorf rounded out this part of his discourse to start on a new topic, "as to say he meant all that liter- ally. The Hostnitzes in Miirzbruck happen to have a celebrated Rhine wine that General Marmont left behind and forgot in 1805 because he had to march on Vienna in such a hurry, and they brought some ofit out for the wedding. But in the main I'm sure the Cardinal was right on target. So ifI ask myselfnow what to make ofit, all I can say is, I'm sure it's true, but it doesn't work. I mean, there can be no doubt that the people we brought in because we were told they rep- resent the spirit of the times have nothing to do with real life, and the Church can well afford to wait them out. But we civilian politicians can't wait; we must squeeze what good we can out oflife as we find it. After all, man doesn't live by bread alone, but by the soul as well. The soul is that which enables him to digest his bread, so to speak. And
922 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
that's why it's necessary . . . "Count Leinsdorfwas ofthe opinion that politics should be a spur to the soul. "In short, something has to hap- pen," he said, "that's what the times demand. Everyone has that feel- ing, as it were, not just the politically minded. The times have a sort of interim character that nobody can stand indefinitely. " He had the idea that the trembling balance ofideas upon which the no less trem- bling balance of power in Europe rested must be given a push.
"It hardly matters what kind of push," he assured Ulrich, who made a show of being stunned by His Grace's having turned, in the period since they had last seen each other, into a veritable revolu- tionary.
'Well, why not? '' Count Leinsdorf retorted, flattered. "His Emi- nence ofcourse also thought that it might be a small step in the right direction if His Majesty could be persuaded to replace the present Minister of the Interior, but such petty reforms don't do the trick in the long run, however necessary they may be. Do you know that as I mull this over I actually find my thoughts turning to the Socialists? '' He gave his interlocutor time to recover from the amazement he as- sumed this was bound to cause, and then continued firmly: "You can take it from me, real socialism wouldn't be nearly as terrible as peo- ple seem to think. You may perhaps object that the Socialists are republicans; that's true, you simply can't listen when they're talking, but ifyou consider them in terms ofpractical politics, you might well reach the conclusion that a social-democratic republic with a strong ruler at the helm would not be an impossible solution at all. For my own part, I'm convinced that ifwe were to go just a little way to meet them, they'd be glad to give up the idea of using brute force and they'd recoil from the rest of their objectionable principles. As it is, they're already inclined to modify their notion of the class struggle and their hostility to private property. And there really are people among them who still place country before party, as compared with the middle-class parties who've gone radical since the last elections in putting their conflicting national-minority interests above every- thing else. Which brings us to the Emperor. " He lowered his voice confidentially. "As I've said already, we must learn to think in eco- nomic terms. The one-sided policy of encouraging national minori- ties has led the Empire into the desert. Now, to the Emperor, all this Czech-Polish-German-Italian ranting about autonomy . . . I don't
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 923
know how to put it: let's just say His Majesty couldn't care less. What His Majesty does care about, deeply, is our getting the defense bud- get through without any cuts so that the Empire may be strong, and apart from that he feels a hearty distaste for all the pretensions ofthe middle-class idea-mongers, a distaste he probably acquired in 1848. But these two priorities simply make His Majesty the First Socialist in the land, as it were. You can now see, I think, the magnificent vista I was speaking of? Which leaves only the problem of religiosity, in which there is still an unbridgeable gap between opposing camps, and that's something I'd have to talk over with His Eminence again. "
His Grace fell silent, absorbed in his conviction that history, in particular that of his own country, bogged down as it was in fruitless nationalist dissensions, would shortly be called upon to take a step into the future-whereby he perceived the spirit of history as being more or less two-legged, but otherwise a philosophical necessity. Hence it was understandable that he surfaced suddenly with sore eyes, like a diver who had gone too far down. "In any case, we must get ready to do our duty! " he said.
"But where does our duty lie, Your Grace? "
''Why, in doing our duty, of course! It's the only thing we canal- ways do! But to change the subject . . . " It was only now that Count Leinsdorf seemed to remember the pile of newspapers and files on which his fist rested. "Look here, what the people want today is a strong hand. But today a strong hand needs fine words, or the people won't put up with it. And you, and I mean you personally, are emi- nently qualified in this respect. What you said, for instance, the last time we all met at your cousin's before you left town, was that what we actually need-if you recall-is a central committee for eternal happiness, to bring it in step with our earthly precision in ratiocina- tion. . . . Well, it wouldn't work out quite so easily, but His Eminence laughed heartily when I told him about it; actually, I rubbed it in a bit, as they say, and even though he's always making fun of every- thing, I can tell pretty well whether his laugh comes from the spleen or from the heart. The fact is, my dear man, we simply can't do with- outyou. . . . " ·
While all of Count Leinsdorf's other pronouncements that day had had the character of complicated dreams, the wish he now ex- pressed-that Ulrich should give up "definitively, at least for now,"
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any idea of resigning his post as Honorary Secretary of the Parallel Campaign-was so definite and so pointedly fledged, and his hand had come down on Ulrich's arm with such an effect of a surprise ma- neuver, that Ulrich almost had the not entirely pleasing impression that all the elaborate harangues he had been listening to had only been calculated, far more slyly than he had anticipated, to put him off'his guard. At this moment he was quite annoyed with Clarisse, who had got him into this fix. But since he had appealed on her be- half to Count Leinsdorf's kindness the very first time there had been an opening in the conversation, and the request had been granted instantly by the obliging high official, who wanted only to go on talk- ing without interruption, he had no choice now but reluctantly to square the account.
"I've heard from Tuzzi," Count Leinsdorf said, pleased with his success, "that you might decide on a man from his office to take the routine business off your hands. 'Splendid,' I told him, 'if he stays on. ' After all, his man has taken his oath of office, which we'll give you too, and my own secretary, whom I'd gladly have put at your disposal, is unfortunately an idiot. All you perhaps shouldn't let him see is the strictly confidential stuff, because he's Tuzzi's man, and that has certain drawbacks; but otherwise, do arrange matters to suit your own convenience," His Grace said, concluding this successful interview with the utmost cordiality.
21
CAST ALL THOU HAST INTO THE FIRE, EVEN UNTO THY SHOES
During this time and from the moment she had stayed behind alone, Agathe had been living in a state of utter release from all ties to the world, in a sweetly wistful suspension ofwill; a condition that was like a great height, where only the wide blue sky is to b~ seen. Once a day
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 925
she treated herself to a short stroll in town; at home, she read, at- tended to her affairs, and experienced this mild, trivial business of living with grateful enjoyment. Nothing troubled her state: no cling- ing to the past, no straining for the future; if her eye lit upon some nearby object, it was like coaxing a baby lamb to her: either it came gently closer or it took no notice ofher at all-but at no time did her mind deliberately take hold of it with that motion of inner grasping which gives to every act of cold understanding a certain violence as well as a certain futility, for it drives away the joy that is in things. In this fashion everything around her seemed far more intelligible to Agathe than ordinarily, but in the main she was still preoccupied with her conversations with her brother. In keeping with the pecu- liarity of her unusually exact memory, which did not distort its mate- rial with any bias or prejudice, there rose up in her mind more or less at random the living words, the subtle surprises of cadence and ges- tures, in these conversations, much as they were before she had quite understood them and realized where they were tending. Neverthe- less, it all held the utmost significance for her; her memory, so often dominated by remorse, was now suffused with a quiet devotion, and the time just past clung like a caress to the warmth of her body, in- stead of drifting off as it usually did into the frost and darkness that awaits life lived in vain.
And so, veiled in an invisible light, Agathe also dealt with the lawyers, notaries, brokers, and agents she now had to see. No one refused her; everyone was glad to oblige the attractive young woman-whose father's name was sufficient recommendation-in every way. She conducted herself with as much self-assurance as de- tachment; she was sure ofwhat she wanted, but it was detached from herself, as it were, and the experience she had acquired in life-also something that can be seen as detached from the personality-went on working in pursuit of that purpose like a shrewd laborer calmly taking advantage for his commission of whatever opportunities pre- sented themselves. That she was engaged in preparing a felony-the significance ofher action that would have been strikingly apparent to an outsider-simply did not enter her state of mind during this time. The unity of her conscience excluded it. The pure light of this con- science outshone this dark point, which nevertheless, like the core of a flame, formed its center. Agathe herself did not know how to ex-
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press it; by virtue ofher intention she found herselfin a state that was a world away from this same ugly intention.
On the morning after her brother had left, Agathe was already considering her appearance with great care: it had begun by accident with her face, when her gaze had landed on it and not come back out of the mirror. She was held fast, much as one who sometimes has absolutely no desire to walk keeps walking a hundred steps, and then another hundred, all the way toward something one catches sight of only at the end, at which point one definitely intends to tum back and yet does not. In this way she was held captive, without vanity, by this landscape ofher self, which confronted her behind the shimmer ofglass. She looked at her hair, still like bright velvet; she opened the collar of her reflection's dress and slipped the dress off its shoulders; then she undressed the image altogether and studied it down to the rosy nails, to where the body tapers off into fingers and toes and hardly belongs to itself anymore. Everything was still like the spar- kling day approaching its zenith: ascendant, pure, exact, and infused with that forenoon growth that manifests itselfin a human being or a young animal as ineffably as in a bouncing ball that has not yet reached its highest point in the air, but is just about to. "Perhaps it is passing through that point this very moment," Agathe thought. The idea frightened her. Still, she was only twenty-seven; it might take a while yet. Her body, as untouched by athletic coaches and masseurs as it was by childbearing and maternal toil, had been formed by noth- ing but its own growth. Ifit could have been set down naked in one of those grand and lonely landscapes that mountain ranges form on the side turned toward the sky, the vast, infertile, billowing swell of such heights would have borne it upward like some pagan goddess. In a nature ofthis kind, noon does not pour down exhalations oflight and heat; it merely seems for a while longer to rise above its zenith and then to pass imperceptiblyinto the sinking, floating beautyofthe afternoon. From the mirror came the eerie sense ofthat undefinable hour.
It occurred to her at this moment that Ulrich, too, was letting his life go by as though it would last forever. "Perhaps it is a mistake that we didn't first meet when we were old," she said to herself, conjuring up the melancholy image of two banks of fog drifting earthward in the evening. "They're not as fine as the blaze of noon, but what do
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 927
those formless gray shapes care what people make of them? Their hour has come, and it is just as tender as the most glowing hour! "
She had now almost turned her back on the mirror, but was pro- voked by a certain extravagance in her mood to turn around again before she knew it, and had to laugh at the memory of two fat people taking the waters at Marienbad years ago; she had watched them as they sat on one of those green benches, doting on each other with the sweetest and tenderest feelings. "Their beating hearts are slim under all that fat, and being lost in their vision of each other, they have no idea how funny they look to the world," Agathe reminded herself, and made an ecstatic face while trying to puff up her body with imag- inary rolls offat. When this fit ofexuberance had passed, it looked as if some tiny tears of rage had risen to her eyes, and pulling herself together, she coolly resumed the point-by-point scrutiny of her ap- pearance. Although she was considered slender, she observed in her body with some concern a possibility that she could become heavy. Perhaps she was too broad-chested. In her face, its very white skin dimmed by her golden hair as if by candles burning in the daytime, the nose was a bit too wide, and its almost classical line a bit dented on one side at the tip. It could be that everywhere inside her flame- like given form a second was lurking, broader and more melancholy, like a linden leaf that has fallen among twigs of laurel. Agathe felt a curiosity about herself, as though she were really seeing herself for the first time. This was how she might well have been perceived by the men she had become involved with, without her having known anything about it. It was a rather uncanny feeling. But by some trick ofthe imagination, before she could call her memories to account for it, she kept hearing behind everything she had experienced the ar- dent, long-drawn-out mating cry of donkeys, which had always curi- ously aroused her: a hopelessly foolish and ugly sound, which for that very reason makes no other heroism of love seem so desperately sweet as theirs. She shrugged her shoulders at her life and resolutely turned back to her image to discover a place where her appearance might already be yielding to age. There were those small areas near the eyes and ears that are the first to change, beginning by looking as though something had slept on them, or the inner curve under the breasts, which so easily loses its definition. At this moment it would have been a satisfaction to her and a promise of peace to come had
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she seen such a change, but there was none yet to be seen, and the loveliness of her body floated almost eerily in the depths of the mirror.
It now seemed odd to her that she was actually Frau Hagauer, and the difference between the clear and close relationship that implied and the vagueness with which the fact reached deep into her being was so great that she seemed to herself to be standing there without a body while the body in the mirror belonged to Frau Hagauer, who was the one who would have to learn to cope with its having commit- ted itself to a situation beneath its dignity. Even in this there was some of that elusive pleasure in living that sometimes startles, and it made Agathe, once she had hastily dressed again, go straight to her bedroom to look for a capsule that must be in her luggage. This small airtight capsule, which had been in her possession almost as long as she had been married to Hagauer, and which she always kept within reach, contained a tiny quantity of a drab powder she had been as- sured was a deadly poison. Agathe recalled certain sacrifices it had cost her to obtain this forbidden stuff, about which she knew only what she had been told of its effect and one of those chemical names the uninitiated must memorize, like a magic formula, without know- ing what they mean. But evidently all those means by which the end may be brought a little closer, such as poison or guns, or seeking out survivable dangers, are part ofthe romantic love oflife; and it may be that most people's lives are so oppressed, so fluctuating, with so much darkness in their brightness, and altogether so perverse, that life's inherent joy can be released only by the distant possibility of putting an end to it. Agathe felt better when her eyes lit on the tiny metal object, which she regarded, amid the uncertainty that lay ahead of her, as a bringer ofluck, a talisman.
So this did not at all mean that Agathe at this time already in- tended to kill herself. On the contrary, she feared death just as every young person does to whom, for instance, before falling asleep in bed at night, after a well-spent day, it suddenly occurs that "It's inevita- ble: sometime, on another fine day just like this, I'll be dead. " Nor does one acquire an appetite for dying by having to watch someone else die; her father's death had tormented her with impressions whose horrors had returned since she had been left alone in the house after her brother's departure. But ''I'm sort of dead, in a way"
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · gzg
was something Agathe felt often; and especially in moments like this, when she had just been conscious of her young body's shapeliness and good health, its taut beauty, equally unfathomable in the mystery of what held it together and what made its elements decompose in death, she tended to fall from her condition ofhappy confidence into one of anxiety, amazement, and silence: it was like stepping from a noisy, crowded room and suddenly standing under the shimmering stars. Regardless of her awakening intentions and her satisfaction at having extricated herself from a bungled life, she now felt rather de- tached from herself and only obscurely linked to her own existence. Coolly she thought of death as a state in which one is released from all efforts and illusions, imagined it as a tender inward rocking to sleep: one lies in God's hand, and this hand is like a cradle or a ham- mock slung between two tall trees swaying faintly in the wind. She thought of death as a great tranquillity and fatigue, the end of all wanting and striving, ofall paying attention and having to think, like the pleasant slackening ofthe fingers one feels when sleep cautiously loosens their hold on whatever last thing ofthis world they have still been clutching. No doubt she was indulging herself in a rather easy and casual notion ofdeath, typical ofsomeone disinclined to take on the exertions of living; and in the end she was amused to think how this was all of a piece with her moving the couch into her father's austere drawing room to lounge on, reading-the only change she had made in the house on her own initiative.
Still, the thought of giving up life was anything but a game for Agathe. It seemed profoundly believable to her that all this frustrat- ing tunnoil must be followed by a state ofblissful repose, which she could not help imagining in physical terms. She felt it this way be- cause she had no need of the suspenseful illusion that the world could be improved, and she was always ready to surrender her share in it completely, as long as it could be done in a pleasant fashion. Besides, she had already had a special encounter with death in that extraordinary illness that had befallen her on the borderline between childhood and girlhood. That was when-in an almost imperceptibly gradual loss of energy that seemed to infiltrate each tiniest particle of time, though as a whole it happened with an irresistible rush-more and more parts ofher body seemed to dissolve away from her day by day and be destroyed; yet, keeping pace with this decline and this
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slipping away from life there was an unforgettable fresh striving to- ward a goal that banished all the unrest and anxiety of her illness, a curiously substantive state that even enabled her to exert a certain domination over the adults around her, who were becoming more and more unsure of themselves. It is not out of the question that this sense ofpower, gained under such impressive circumstances, could later have been at the heart of her spiritual readiness to withdraw in similar fashion from a life whose allurements for some reason fell short of her expectations. But more probably it was the other way around: that that illness, which enabled her to escape the demands of school and home, was the first manifestation of her attitude to the world, an attitude that was transparent and permeated by the light of an emotion unknown to her. For Agathe felt herself to be a person of a spontaneous, simple temperament, warm, lively, even gay and easy to please; she had in fact adapted herself good-naturedly to a great variety of circumstances, nor had she ever suffered that collapse into indifference that befalls women who can no longer bear their disillu- sionment. But in the midst of her laughter or the tumult of some sensual adventure that continued nonetheless, there lived a disen- chantment that made every fiber of her body tired and nostalgic for something else, something best described as nothingness.
This nothingness had a definite, ifindefinable, content. For a long time she had been in the habit of repeating to herself, on all sorts of occasions, words of Novalis: "What then can I do for my soul, that lives within me like an unsolved riddle, even while it grants the visi- ble man the utmost license, because there is no way it can control him? '' But the flickering light ofthis utterance always went out again, like a flash of lightning that only left her in darkness, for she did not believe in a soul, as it was something too presumptuous and in any case much too definite for her own person. On the other hand, she could not believe in the earthly here and now either. To understand this rightly, one need only realize that this turning away from an earthly order when there is no faith in a supernatural order is a pro- foundly natural response, because in every head, alongside the pro- cess of logical thought, with its austere and simple orderliness reflecting the conditions of our external world, there is an affective world, whose logic, insofar as it can be spoken of at all, corresponds to feelings, passions, moods. The laws governing these two bear
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 931
roughly the same relation to each other as those of a lumberyard, where chunks of wood are hewn into rectangular shapes and stacked ready for transport, bear to the dark tangled laws of the forest, with its mysterious workings and rustlings. And since the objects of our thought are in no way quite independent of its conditions, these two modes of thinking not only mingle in each person but can, to a cer- tain extent, even present him with two worlds, at least immediately before and after that "first mysterious and indescribable moment" of which a famous religious thinker has said that it occurs in every sen- sory perception before vision and feeling separate and fall into the places in which one is accustomed to find them: one of them an ob- ject in space and the other a mental process enclosed within the observer.
And so, whatever the relationship may be between objects and feeling in the civilized person's mature view of the world, everyone surely knows those ecstatic moments in which a split has not yet oc- curred, as though water and land had not yet been divided and the waves of feeling still shared the same horizon as the hills and valleys that form the shape of things. There is even no need to assume that Agathe experienced such moments unusually often or with unusual intensity; she merely perceived them more vividly or, if you like, more superstitiously, for she was always willing to trust the world and then again not really trust it, just as she had done ever since her school days, and she had not unlearned it even later, when she had come in closer contact with masculine logic. In this sense, which is not to be confused with whim and willfulness, Agathe could have claimed-given more self-confidence than she had-to be the most illogical of women. But it had never occurred to her to regard the alienated feelings she experienced as more than a personal eccen- tricity. It was only through the encounter with her brother that a transformation occurred within her. In these empty rooms, all hol- lowed out in the shadows of solitude, rooms so recently filled with talk and a fellowship that reached to the innermost soul, the distinc- tion between physical separation and mental presence unwittingly lost itself; and as the days glided by without a trace, Agathe felt with a hitherto unknown intensity the curious charm of that sense of omni- presence and omnipotence which occurs when the felt world makes the transition to perceptions. Her attention now seemed to be not
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with the senses but already opened wide deep inside her emotions, where no light could enter that did not already glow like the light in her heart, and it seemed to her, remembering her brother's words, that regardless of the ignorance she normally complained of she could understand everything that mattered without having to reflect on it. And as in this way her spirit was so filled with itself that even the liveliest idea had something of the soundless floating quality of a memory about it, everything that came her way spread out into a lim- itless present. Even when she did something, only a dividing line melted between herself, the doer, and the thing done, and her move- ments seemed to be the path by which things came to her when she stretched out her arms to them. This gentle power, this knowledge, and the world's speaking presence were, however, whenever she wondered with a smile what she was doing after all, hardly distin- guishable from absence, helplessness, and a profound muteness of the spirit. With only a slight exaggeration of what she was feeling, Agathe could have said that she no longer knew where she was. On all sides she was in a state of suspension in which she felt both lifted up and lost to sight. She might have said: I am in love, but I don't know with whom. She was filled with a clear will, something she had always felt the lack of, but she did not know what she should under- take in its clarity, since all that her life had ever held of good and evil was now meaningless.
So it was not only when she looked at the poison capsule but every day that Agathe thought she would like to die, or that the happiness of death must be like the happiness in which she was spending her days while she was waiting to go and join her brother, meanwhile doing exactly what he had pleaded with her to stop doing. She could not imagine what would happen after she was with her brother in the capital.