Ulrich was searching for
expressions
o f enthusiasm, etc.
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v2
What am I then?
My heart is at once full oflove and emptied oflove .
.
.
," she whispered.
The horror ofa noon- time silence seemed to have clutched her heart.
Over and over the great test was the sea. Time and again, when they had climbed down the narrow slope with its many paths, its quantity of laurel, its broom, its figs, and its many bees, and stepped out onto the powerful surface spread out above the ocean, it was like the first great chord sounding after the tuning up ofan orchestra. How would one have to be to endure this constantly? Ulrich propos. ed that they tty setting up a tent here. But he did not mean it seriously; it would have frightened him. There were no longer any opponents around, up here they were alone; the rebuffs one receives as long as one must contradict the de- mands ofothers and the habits ofone's own conscience were used up; in this final battle it was a matter of their resolve. The sea was like a merci- less beloved and rival; every minute was an annihilating exploration of conscience. They were afraid of collapsing unconscious before this ex- panse that swallowed up every resistance.
This monstrously extended sight was not to be borne without its becoming somewhat boring. This being responsible for every slightest motion was-they had to confess-rather empty, if one compared it with the cheerfulness of those hours when they made no such claims on themselves and their bodies played with the soul like a beautiful young animal rolling a ball back and forth.
One day Ulrich said: It's broad and pastoral; there's something of a pastor about it! They laughed. Then they were startled by the scorn that they had inflicted upon themselves.
The hotel had a little bell tower; in the middle ofits roof. Around one o'clock this bell rang for lunch. Since they were still almost the only guests, they did not need to respond right away, but the cook was in- dicating that he was ready. The bright sounds sliced into the stillness like a sharp knife contacting skin, which had shuddered beforehand but at this moment becomes calm. "How lovely it is, really," Ulrich said, as they climbed down on one of these days, "to be driven by necessity. The way one drives geese from behind with a stick, or entices hens from in front with feed. And where evetything doesn't happen mysteriously-" The blue-white trembling air really shuddered like goose pimples ifone
From the Posthumous Papers · 1465
stared into it for a long time. At that time memories were beginning to torture Ulrich vividly; he suddenly saw before him every statue and every architectural detail of one of those cities overloaded with such things that he had visited years ago; Niimberg was before him, and Amiens, although they had never captivated him; some large red book or other that he must have seen years earlier in an exhibit would not go away from before his eyes; a slender tanned boy, perhaps only the counter his imagination had conjured up to Agathe, but in such a way as if he had once really met him but did not know where, preoccupied his mind; ideas that he had had at some time and long forgotten; soundless, shadowy things, things properly forgotten, eddied up in this south of stillness and seized possession of the desolate expanse.
The impatience that from the beginning had been mingled with all this beauty began to rage in Ulrich.
He could be sitting before a stone, lost to the world, sunk in contem- plation, and be tortured by this raging impatience. He had come to the end, had assimilated everything into himself and ran the danger of be- ginning, all alone, to speak aloud in order to recite everything to himself once again. "Yes, you're sitting here," his thoughts said, "and you could tell yourself once again what you're looking at. " The stones are of a quite peculiar stone-green, and their image is mirrored in the water. Quite right. Exactly as one says. And the stones are shaped like boxes. . . . But it's all no use, and I'd like to leave. It is so beautiful!
And he remembered: at home, sometimes only years later, and some- times purely by accident, if one no longer has any idea how everything was, suddenly a light falls from behind, from such past things, and the heart does everything as if in a dream. He longed for the past.
"It's quite simple," he said to Agathe, "and everyone knows it, we're the only ones who don't: the imagination is stimulated only by what one does not yet possess or no longer has; the body wants to have, but the soul does not want to have. Now I understand the tremendous efforts people make to this end. How stupid it is for this ordinary fellow, this art traveler, to compare this flower to a jewel, or that stone over there to a flower: as if the truly intelligent thing to do wouldn't be to transform them for a brief moment into something else. And how stupid all our ideals would be, since every ideal, if one takes it seriously, contradicts some other ideal; thou shalt not kill, therefore perish? Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's goods, so live in poverty? As i f their sense did not lie precisely in the impossibility of carrying them out, which ignites the soul! And how good it is for religion that one can neither see nor com- prehend God! But which world? A cold, dark strip between the two fires of the Not-yet and the No-longer! "
1466 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
"A world to be afraid of oneself in," Agathe said. "You're right. " She said this quite seriously, and there was real bitterness in her eyes.
- A n d if it is so! Ulrich laughed. - I t occurs to me for the first time in my life that we would have to be terribly afraid of being tricked if Heaven were not to dangle before us an end of the world that does not exist. Evidently everything absolute, hundred-percent, true, is com- pletely monstrous.
-Between two people as well; you mean between us?
- I now understand so well what visionaries are: food without salt is unbearable, but salt without food is a poison; visionaries are people who want to live from salt alone. Is that right?
Agathe shrugged her shoulders.
- Look at our chambermaid, a cheerful stupid creature smelling of cheap soap. A short time ago I was watching her as she made up the room; she seemed to me as pretty as a freshly washed sky.
It comforted Ulrich to confess this, and a small worm of disgust crawled across Agathe's mouth. Ulrich repeated it; he did not want to drown out this small disharmony with the great peal of the dark bell. "It is a disharmony, isn't it? And any trick will do for the soul to keep itself fruitful. Sometimes it dies from love several times in succession. B u t " - and now he said something he believed to be a consolation, indeed a new love-"if everything is so sad and a deception, and one can no lon- ger believe in anything: isn't that just when we really need one another? The folk song about the little sister"-he smiled-"quiet, pensive music that nothing can drown out; an accompanying music; a love of loveless- ness that softly reaches out its hands . . . ? "
Time is the greatest cynic.
Here sexuality and camaraderie!
A cool, quiet, gray aneroticism?
Agathe was silent. Something had been extinguished. She was inordi- nately tired. Her heart had suddenly been snatched away from her, and she was tortured by an unbearable fear of a vacuum within, of her un- worthiness and her regressive transformation. This is the way ecstatics
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1467
feel when God withdraws from them and nothing responds any longer to their zealous appeals.
The art traveler, as they called him, was a professor returning from Italian cities, who had the butterfly-net skin and botanizing drum-beat- ing mind of the aspiring art historian. He had stopped over here for a few days to rest before his return and to order his notes. As they were the only guests, he had already introduced himself to the pair on the first day. They chatted briefly after meals, or when they met in the vicinity of the hotel, and there was no denying that although Ulrich made fun of him, at certain moments this man brought them welcome relaxation.
He was strongly convinced of his significance as man and scholar, and from their first encounter, after finding that the couple were not on their honeymoon, he had courted Agathe with great determination. He said to her: You resemble the beautiful--- in the painting b y ---, and all the women who have this expression, which repeats itselfin their hair and in the folds of their gowns, have the quality o f - - : As she was telling this to Ulrich Agathe had already forgotten the names, but for a stranger to know what one was was as pleasant as the firm pressure of a masseur, while one knew oneself to be so diffuse that one could barely distinguish oneself from the noontime silence.
This art traveler said: Women's function is to make us dream; they are a stratagem of nature for the fertilization of the masculine mind. He gleamed with self-satisfaction at his paradox, which inverted the sense of fertilization. Ulrich replied: But there are still distinctions in kind among these dreams!
This man asserted that in embracing a "really great female" one must be able to think of Michelangelo's Creation. "You pull the blanket of the Sistine ceiling over yourself and underneath it you're naked except for the blue stockings," Ulrich ridiculed. No. He admits that canying this out calls for tact, but in principle such people could be "twice as big" as others. "In . the last analysis, the goal of all ethical life is to unite our ac- tions with the highest that we bear within us! " It was not so easy to con- tradict this theoretically, although practically speaking it was ridiculous.
- I have discovered-the art historian said-that there are, and in the course of history always have been, two sorts of people. I call them the static and the dynamic. Or, ifyou prefer, the Imperial and the Faustian. People who are static can feel happiness as something present. They are somehow characterized by balance, equilibrium. What they have done and what they will do blends into what they are doing at the moment, is harmonized, and has a shape like a painting or a melody; has, so to speak, a second dimension, shines in every moment as surface. The Pope, for
1468 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
example, or the Dalai Lama; it is simply unimaginable that they would do something that was not stretched on the frame of their significance. On the other hand, the dynamic people: always tearing themselves loose, merely glancing backward and forward, rolling out of themselves, insensitive people with missions, insatiable, pushy, luckless-whom the static ones conquer over and over in order to keep world history going: in a word, he hinted that he was capable of carrying both strains within himself.
-T ell m e-Ulrich asked, as ifhe were quite serious-are not the dy- namic people also those who in love seem not to feel anything because they have either already loved in their imagination or will only love what has slipped away from them again? Couldn't one say that too?
-Quite right! the professor said.
- T h e y are immoral and dreamers, these people, who can never find the right point between future and past-
It's enough to make them throw up.
- W e l l , I d o n ' t think I ' d claim t h a t -
-Y es, but you do. They would be capable of committing crazy good or bad deeds because the present means nothing to them.
He really ought to say: they could commit crazy deeds out ofimpatience.
The art historian did not quite know how to answer this, and found that Ulrich did not understand him.
The restlessness grew. The summer heat increased. The sun burned like a fire to the edge of the earth. The elements filled existence com- pletely, so that there was hardly anyplace left for anything human.
It happened that toward evening, when the burning air already cast light, cooling folds, they went strolling on the steep banks. Yellow bushes of broom sprang up from the embers of the stones and stood there directly before the soul; the mountains gray as donkeys' backs with the washed-out green that the grass growing on the white limestone cast over them; the laurel's hot dark green. The parched glance resting on the laurel sank into cooler and cooler depths. Countless bees hummed;
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1 4 6 9
it fused into a deep metallic tone that shot off little arrows whenever, in a sudden turn, they flew by one's ear. Heroic, tremendous, the ap- proaching line of mountains, in three waves one behind the other, smoothly canted, breaking off steeply.
-Heroic? Ulrich asked. -O r is it only what we have always hated because it was supposed to be heroic? Endlessly portrayed, this painted and engraved, this Greek, this Roman, this Nazarene, classicistic land- scape-this virtuous, professorial, idealistic landscape? And ultimately it impresses us only because we've now encountered it in reality? The way one despises an influential man and is nevertheless flattered because one knows him?
But the few things here to which the space belonged respected each other; they kept their distance from each other and did not saturate na- ture with impressions, as they do in Germany. No mocking helped; as only high in the mountains, where everything earthly keeps diminishing, this landscape was no longer a place of human habitation but a piece of the sky, to whose folds a few species of insects still clung.
And on the other side (of this humility) lay the sea. The great beloved, adorned with the peacock's tail. The beloved with the oval mirror. The opened eye of the beloved. The beloved become God. The pitiless chal- lenge. The eyes still hurt and had to look away, pierced by the shattering spears of light speeding back from the sea. But soon the sun will be lower. It will only be a circumscribed sea of liquid silver, with violets floating on it. And then one must look out over the seal Then one has to look at it. Agathe and Ulrich feared this moment. What can one do to prevail against this monstrous, observing, stimulating, jealous rival? How should they love each other? Sink to their knees? As they had done at first? Spread out their arms? Scream? Can they embrace each other? It is all so ridiculous, as if one were trying to shout angrily at someone while nearby all the bells of a cathedral are pealing! The fearful empti- ness again closed in on them from all sides.
So it ends the way it begins!
But at such a moment one can shoot the other, or stab him, since his death cry will be muffled.
Ulrich shook his head. -One must be somewhat limited to find na- ture beautiful. To be someone like that fellow down there, who would
1470 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
rather talk himself than listen to someone better. One is forcibly re- minded by nature ofschool exercises and bad poems, and one has to be capable of transforming it at the moment of observation into an anoint- ing. Otherwise one collapses. One must always be stupider than nature in order to stand up to it, and must gossip in order not to lose the language.
Fortunately, their skin could not stand the heat. Sweat broke out. It created a diversion and an excuse; they felt themselves relieved of their mission.
But as they were walking back Agathe noticed that she was looking forward to the certainty ofmeeting the traveling stranger down below in front of the hotel. Ulrich was certainly right, but there was a great conso- lation in the babbling, insistently pushy company ofthis person.
Afternoons, in the room, there were fearful moments. Between the extended red-striped awning and the stone railing of the balcony lay a blue, burning band the width of one's hand. The smooth warmth, the severely attenuated brightness, had dislodged everything from the room that was not fixed. Ulrich and Agathe had not brought along anything to read; that had been their plan; they had left behind ideas, normal cir- cumstances, everything having any connection-no matter how saga- cious-with the ordinary human way of living: now their souls lay there like two hard-baked bricks from which every drop ofwater has escaped. This contemplative natural existence had made them unexpectedly de- pendent on the most primitive elements.
Finally, a day of rain came. The wind lashed. Time became long in a cool way. They straightened up like plants. They kissed each other. The words they exchanged refreshed them. They were happy again. To al- ways be waiting every moment for the next moment is only a habit; dam it up, and time comes forth like a lake. The hours still flow, but they are broader than they are long. Evening falls, but no time has passed.
But then a second rainy day followed; a third. What had seemed a new intensity glided downward as a conclusion. The smallest help, the belief that this weather was a personal dispensation, an extraordinary fate, and the room is full of the strange light from the water, or hollowed out like a die of dark silver. But if no help comes: what can one talk about? One can still smile at the other from far apart-embrace- weaken the other to the point of that fatigue which resembles death, which separates the exhausted like an endless plain; one can call across: I love you, or: You are beautiful, or: I would rather die with you than live without you, or:
From the Posthumous Papers · 1471
What a miracle that you and I, two such separate beings, have been blown together. And one can weep from neJVousness when, quite softly, one begins to fall prey to boredom . . .
Fearful violence of repetition, fearful godhead! Attraction of empti- ness, always sucking in like the funnel of a whirlpool whose walls yield. Kiss me, and I will bite gently and harder and harder and wilder and wilder, ever more drunken, more greedy for blood, listening into your lips for the plea for mercy, climbing down the ravine of pain until at the end we are hanging in the vertical wall and are afraid of ourselves. Then the deep pantings of breath come to our aid, threatening to abandon the body; the gleam in the eye breaks, the glance rolls from side to side, the grimace of dying begins. Astonishment and a thousandfold ecstasy in each other eddy in this rapture. Within a few minutes concentrated flight through bliss and death, ending, renewed, bodies swinging like howling bells. But at the end one knows: it was only a profound Fall into a world in which it drifts downward on a hundred steps of repetition. Agathe moaned: You will leave me! - N o ! Darling! Conspirator!
Ulrich was searching for expressions o f enthusiasm, etc. - N o - A g a t h e softly fended him off-I can't feel anything anymore . . . ! Since it had now been spoken, Ulrich became cold and gave up the effort.
-Ifwe had believed in God-Agathe went on-we would have un- derstood what the mountains and flowers were saying.
-Are you thinking ofLindner? Ulrich probedI What? Lindner . . . ! Ulrich immediately interjected jealously.
It ends in excrement and vomiting like the first time!
-No. I was thinking of the art historian. His thread never breaks. Agathe gave a pained and wan smile. She was lying on the bed; Ulrich had torn open the door to the balcony, the wind flung water in. "What difference does it make," he said harshly. "Think ofwhomever you want. We have to look around for a third person. Who'll obseiVe us, envy us, or reproach us. " He remained standing before her and said slowly: "There is no such thing as love between two people alone! " Agathe propped herself on an elbow and lay there, wide-eyed, as if she were expecting death. -W e have yielded to an impulse against order, Ulrich repeated. - A love can grow out of defiance, but it can't consist of defiance. On the contrary, it can only exist when it is integrated into a society. It's not the content of life. But a negation of, an exception to, all life's contents.
1472 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
But an exception needs whatever it is the exception to. One can't live from a negation alone. -Close the door, Agathe asked. Then she stood up and arranged her dress. - S o shall we leave?
Ulrich shrugged his shoulders. - W e l l , it's all over.
-Don't you remember any more our proviso when we came here? Ashamed, Ulrich answered: We wanted to find the entrance to para-
dise!
-And killourselves-Agathesaid-ifwe didn't!
Ulrich looked at her calmly. - D o you want to?
Agathe might perhaps have said yes. She did not know why it seemed
more honest to slowly shake her head and say no.
-W e've lost that resolve too, Ulrich stated.
She stood up in despair. Spoke with her hands on her temples, listen-
ing to her own words: I was waiting. ~ . I was almost decadent and ridicu- lous . . . Because in spite ofthe life I've led I was still waiting. I could not name it or describe it. It was like a melody without notes, a picture with- out form. I knew that one day it will come up to me from outside and will be what treats me tenderly and what will hold no harm for me anymore, either in life or in death. . . .
Ulrich, who had turned violently toward her, cut in, parodying her with a spitefulness that was a torture to himself: -It's a longing, some- thing that's missing: the form is there, only the matter is missing. Then some bank official or professor comes along, and this little beastie slowly fills up the emptiness that was stretched out like an evening sky.
- M y love, all movement in life comes from the evil and brutal; good- ness dozes off. Is a drop of some fragrance; but every hour is the same hole and yawning child of death, which has to be filled up with heavy ballast. You said before: If we could believe in God! But a game of pa- tience will do as well, a game ofchess, a book. Today man has discovered that he can console himselfwith these things just as well. It just has to be something where board is joined to board in order to span the empty depths.
- B u t don't we love each other any longer, then? Agathe exclaimed.
Now they are again talking as they had earlier. It is very lovely.
-Y ou can't overlook-Ulrich answered-how much this feeling de- pends on its surroundings. How it derives its content from imagining a life together, that is, a line between and through other people. From
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 4 7 3
good conscience, because everyone else is so pleased at the way these two love each other, or from bad conscience as well. . . .
-W hat is it then that we experienced? We mustn't pretend to some- thing untrue: I wasn't a fool for wanting to seek paradise. I could deter- mine it the way one can deduce an invisible planet from certain effects. And what happened? It dissolved into a spiritual and optical illusion and into a physiological mechanism that is repeatable. As with all people!
-It's true, Agathe said. -For the longest time we've been living from what you call evil; from restlessness, small distractions, the hunger and satiety of the body.
-And yet-Ulrich answered, as in an extremely painful vision- when it's forgotten, you'll be waiting again. Days will come where be- hind many doors someone will beat on a drum. Muffied and insistently: beat, beat. Days, as if you were waiting in a brothel for the creaking of the stairs; it will be some corporal or bank official. Whom fate has sent you. To keep your life in motion. And yet you remain my sister.
- B u t what is to become of us? Agathe saw nothing before her. -Y ou must marry or find a lover-! said that before.
- B u t are we no longer one person? she asked sadly.
- O n e person also has both within himself.
-But ifI love you? Agathe shouted.
-W e must live. Without each other-for each other. Do you want the art historian? Ulrich said this with the coldness of great effort. Agathe dismissed it with a small shrug of her shoulder. -Thank you, Ulrich said. He tried to grasp her slack hand and stroke it. -I'm not so-so firmly convinced either. . . .
Once again, almost the great union. But it seems to Agathe that Ulrich does not have sufficient courage.
They were silent for a while. Agathe opened and closed drawers and began to pack. The storm shook at the doors. Then Agathe turned around and asked her brother calmly and in a different voice:
- B u t can you imagine that tomorrow or the next day we'll get home and find the rooms the way we left them, and begin to make visits? . . .
Ulrich did not notice with what enormous resistance Agathe struggled against this idea. He could not imagine all that either. But he felt some new kind of tension, even if it was a melancholy task. At this moment he was not paying enough attention to Agathe.
1474 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
Continuation: The day after this dismal conversation Clarisse arrived.
WORKED-OUT SKETCHES FROM THE 1920S NEW SKETCHES, 1930l31-1933l34
On Kakania
A digression on Kakania. The crucible ofthe World War is also the birthplace ofthe poet Feuermaul
It may be assumed that the expression "Crucible of the World War" has, since this object existed, been used often enough, yet always with a cer- tain imprecision as to the question of where it is located. Older people who still have personal memories of those times will probably think of Sarajevo, yet they themselves will feel that this small Bosnian city can only have been the oven vent through which the wind blew in. Educated people will direct their thoughts to political nodal points and world capi- tals. Those even more highly educated will, moreover, have the names of Essen, Creuzot, Pilsen, and the other centers of the armaments industry confidently in mind. And the most highly educated will add to these something from the geography of oil, potash, and other raw materials, for that's the way one often reads about it. But what follows from all this is merely that the crucible of the World War was no ordinruy crucible,
for it was located in several places simultaneously.
Perhaps one might say to this that the expression is to be understood
only metaphorically. But this is to be assented to so completely that it immediately gives rise to even greater difficulties. For, granting that "crucible" is intended to mean metaphorically approximately the same thing that "origin" or "cause" means nonmetaphorically, while on the one hand one knows that the origin of all things and events is God, on the other it leaves one empty-handed. For "origins" and "causes" are like a person who goes searching for his parents: in the first instance he has two, that is indisputable; but with grandparents it's the square of two, with great-grandparents two to the third, and so on in a powerfully unfolding series, which is totally unassailable but which yields the re- markable result that at the beginning of time there must have been an almost infinite number ofpeople whose purpose was merely to produce a single one of today's individuals. However flattering this may be, and
From the Posthumous Papers · 1475
however it may correspond to the significance that the individual feels within himself, today one calculates too precisely for anyone to believe it. Therefore, with heavy heart, one must give up a personal series of ancestors and assume that "starting from someplace" one must have a common descent as a group. And this has a variety of consequences. Such as that people consider themselves in part "brothers," in part "from alien tribes," without a person knowing how to determine where the boundary is, for what is called "nation" and "race" is results and not causes. Another consequence, no less influential even if not as obvious, is that Mr. What's-his-name no longer knows where he has his cause. He consequently feels himself like a snipped thread that the busy needle of life incessantly pulls back and forth because making a button for it was somehow overlooked. A third consequence, just now dawning, is for in- stance that it has not yet been calculated whether and to what extent there might be two or multiple other Mr. What's-his-names; in the realm of what is hereditarily possible it is entirely conceivable, only one does not know how great the probability is that it could actually happen with oneself; but a dim oppressiveness of the idea that given man's na- ture today this cannot be entirely excluded lies, as it were, in the air.
And surely it would not even be the worst thing. Count Leinsdorf, speaking with Ulrich for a moment, held forth on the aristocratic institu- tion of chamberlains. "A chamberlain needs to have sixteen noble fore- bears, and people are upset at that being the height of snobbery; but what, I ask you, do people do themselves? Imitate us with their theories of race, that's what they do," he explained, "and immediately exaggerate it in a fashion that has nothing at all to do with nobility. As far as I'm concerned we can all be descended from the same Adam, a Leinsdorf would still be a Leinsdorf, for it's a damn sight more a matter of educa- tion and training than a matter of blood! " His Grace was irritated by the intrusion of populist elements into the Parallel Campaign, which for a variety of reasons had to be countenanced up to a certain point. At that time nationalism was nearly ready to put forth its first bloody blossoms, but no one knew it, for despite its imminent fulfillment it did not seem terrible but only seemed ridiculous: its intellectual aspect consisting for the most part of books pasted together with the well-read busyness of a scholar and the total incoherence of untrained thinking by compilers who lived in some rural backwater as elementary-school teachers or petty customs officials.
1476 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
I Preliminary sketch: continuation after first paragraph above I
Therefore the obvious reservation will probably be put forward that the expression "crucible of the World War" is to be understood merely metaphorically, and this is to be subscribed to so wholeheartedly that it will immediately lead to new difficulties; if on the other hand one main- tains that "crucible" signifies the same as causation complex, and such a thing is complicated and extensive in all human endeavors, then it must be contradicted straightaway. For if one pursues causes back in a straight line they lead right back to God as the Prima Causa of every- thing that happens; this is one of the few problems about which centu- ries of theology have left no doubt. But on the other hand it's like a person going from his father to his father's father, from his father's fa- ther to his father and father's father of the father's father, and so on in this series: he will never arrive at a complete notion of his descent. In other words: the causal chain is a warp on a loom; the moment a woof is put in, the causes disappear into a woven texture. In science, research into causes was abandoned long ago, or at least greatly reduced, to be replaced by a functional mode that called for observing relationships. The search for causes belongs to household usage, where the cook's being in love is the cause of the soup's being oversalted. Applied to the World War, this search for a cause and a causer has had the extremely positive negative result that the cause was everywhere and in everyone.
This demonstrates that one can truly say "crucible" just as well as "cause of" or "guilt for" the war; but then one would have to supple- ment this entire mode of observation with another. For this purpose, let us proceed experimentally from the problem ofwhy the poet Feuermaul should suddenly pop up in the Parallel Campaign, and even why-leav- ing behind a decisive but merely trivial contribution to its history-he will immediately and permanently drop out of it again. The answer is that this was apparently necessary, that there was absolutely no way of avoiding it-for everything that happens has, as we know, a sufficient cause-but that the reasons for this necessity are themselves, however, completely meaningless or, more properly, were important only for Feuermaul himself, his girlfriend, Professor Drangsal, and her envier, Diotima, and only for a brief period. It would be sheer extravagance were one to relate this. I f Feuermaul had not striven to play a role in the Parallel Campaign, someone else would have done so in his place, or if this other person had not shown up, something else would have; in the interweavings of events there is a narrow insert where this or that influ- ences its success with the differences they make; but in the long run, the
From the Posthumous Papers · 1477
things represent each other completely, indeed they somehow also rep- resent the characters, with very few exceptions. Arnheim, too, could have been replaced in the same way; perhaps not for Diotima, but prob- ably as the cause of the changes she underwent and, further, the effects that these led to. This view, which today might almost be called a natural one, seems fatalistic but is so only so long as one accepts it as a destiny. But the laws of nature were also a destiny before they were investigated; after that happened, it was even possible to subordinate them to a tech- nology.
/Belongs here: Feuermaul, like all the characters in the story except for Ulrich (and perhaps Leo Fischel), denies the value of technical proj- ects, among others/
As long as this has not happened, one can also say that B. , the birth- place of the poet Feuermaul, was also the original crucible of the World War. And that is why it is by no means capricious; what it amounts to, really, is that certain phenomena, which were to be found everywhere in the world and belonged to the crucible that, stretching over the entire planet, was everywhere and nowhere, condensed in B. in a fashion that prematurely brought out its meaning. Instead of B. one could say the whole of Kakania, but B. was one of the special points within it. These phenomena were that in B. the people could not stand each other at all, and on the other hand that the poet Feuermaul, born in their midst, chose as the basic principle of his work the assertion that Man Is Good and one need only tum directly to the goodness that dwells within him. Both signify the same thing.
It would have been a lie had one tried to maintain that even the small- est part of what has been described was present in Feuermaul at the time in any real way, or that it was present at any time in such detail. But life is always more detailed than its results: creating, as it were, a vege- tarian diet, mountains ofleaves, around a tiny pile of . . . The results are a few dispositions of individual conduct.
1478 ·THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
1930-1934
While Agathe and Ulrich were living behind closed crystal panels- by no means abstractly and without looking at the world, but looking at it in an unusual, unambiguous light, this world bathed every morning in the hundredfold light of a new day. Every morning cities and villages awaken, and wherever they do it happens, God knows, in more or less the same way; on the other hand, people are conceived and slain in an instant, and small birds fly from one branch to another with the same right to existence that a giant ocean liner expresses as it swims straight between Europe and America. Somehow everything in the world hap- pens uniformly and with statutory monotony, but varied in countless ways, which, depending on the mood in which one observes them, is as much blissful abundance as ridiculous superfluity. And perhaps even the expression "law of nature"-this exalted regency of mechanical laws, which we worship shivering-is still a much too personal expression; laws have something of the personal relationship an accused has with his judge or a subject with his king; there is in them something of the con- trat social and the beginnings of liberalism too. Nietzsche already noted the more modem view of nature when he wrote: "Nature has a calcula- ble course not because it is ruled by laws but because they are lacking, and every power draws its ultimate consequences at every moment. " That is a statement which fits in with the ideas of contemporary physics but was really coined from biological events, and an intimation of such emotions lies over contemporary life. Once, "You can do what you like" meant following your drives; but one was not supposed to do what one liked, and moral laws conceived in sublimity interfered with it. Today everyone feels in some way that these moral laws are a heap of contra- dictions, and that to follow them would amount to being able to pander to every one of his drives, and he feels a wild, extraordinary freedom. This freedom permits him a path that only leads forward: that, like the orbits of atoms, this chaos must somehow finally yield a specific value, and that with more precise knowledge of how things cohere one would again be able to give life a meaning.
That is more or less the sense of the transition from individualism to the collective view of the world I mission of the world (there is in this no supposition that the value of the individual should cease, only that it be more precisely evaluated).
From the Posthumous Papers · 1479
One day, the General was sitting before the two of them and said in astonishment to Ulrich: "What, you don't read the newspapers? "
Brother and sister blushed as deeply as ifthe good Stumm had discov- ered them in flagrante, for even though in their condition everything might have been possible, that they might have been able to read the newspapers was not.
"But one must read the newspapers! " said I admonished the General in embarrassment, for he had stumbled upon an incomprehensible fact, and it was discretion that caused him to add reproachfully: There have been big demonstrations against the Parallel Campaign in B. !
Truly, while Ulrich and Agathe had been living behind closed crystal panels-by no means abstractly and without looking at the world, but looking at it in an unusual, unambiguous light-this same world bathed every morning in the hundredfold light of a new day. Every morning cities and villages awaken, and wherever they do it happens, God knows, in more or less the same way; but with the same right to existence that a giant ocean liner expresses when it is under way between two conti- nents, small birds fly from one branch to another, and thus everything happens simultaneously, in a fashion as uniform and simplified as it is uselessly varied in innumerable ways, and in a helpless and blessed abundance reminiscent of the glorious but limited picture books of childhood. Ulrich and Agathe also both felt their book of the world open before them, for the city of B.
Over and over the great test was the sea. Time and again, when they had climbed down the narrow slope with its many paths, its quantity of laurel, its broom, its figs, and its many bees, and stepped out onto the powerful surface spread out above the ocean, it was like the first great chord sounding after the tuning up ofan orchestra. How would one have to be to endure this constantly? Ulrich propos. ed that they tty setting up a tent here. But he did not mean it seriously; it would have frightened him. There were no longer any opponents around, up here they were alone; the rebuffs one receives as long as one must contradict the de- mands ofothers and the habits ofone's own conscience were used up; in this final battle it was a matter of their resolve. The sea was like a merci- less beloved and rival; every minute was an annihilating exploration of conscience. They were afraid of collapsing unconscious before this ex- panse that swallowed up every resistance.
This monstrously extended sight was not to be borne without its becoming somewhat boring. This being responsible for every slightest motion was-they had to confess-rather empty, if one compared it with the cheerfulness of those hours when they made no such claims on themselves and their bodies played with the soul like a beautiful young animal rolling a ball back and forth.
One day Ulrich said: It's broad and pastoral; there's something of a pastor about it! They laughed. Then they were startled by the scorn that they had inflicted upon themselves.
The hotel had a little bell tower; in the middle ofits roof. Around one o'clock this bell rang for lunch. Since they were still almost the only guests, they did not need to respond right away, but the cook was in- dicating that he was ready. The bright sounds sliced into the stillness like a sharp knife contacting skin, which had shuddered beforehand but at this moment becomes calm. "How lovely it is, really," Ulrich said, as they climbed down on one of these days, "to be driven by necessity. The way one drives geese from behind with a stick, or entices hens from in front with feed. And where evetything doesn't happen mysteriously-" The blue-white trembling air really shuddered like goose pimples ifone
From the Posthumous Papers · 1465
stared into it for a long time. At that time memories were beginning to torture Ulrich vividly; he suddenly saw before him every statue and every architectural detail of one of those cities overloaded with such things that he had visited years ago; Niimberg was before him, and Amiens, although they had never captivated him; some large red book or other that he must have seen years earlier in an exhibit would not go away from before his eyes; a slender tanned boy, perhaps only the counter his imagination had conjured up to Agathe, but in such a way as if he had once really met him but did not know where, preoccupied his mind; ideas that he had had at some time and long forgotten; soundless, shadowy things, things properly forgotten, eddied up in this south of stillness and seized possession of the desolate expanse.
The impatience that from the beginning had been mingled with all this beauty began to rage in Ulrich.
He could be sitting before a stone, lost to the world, sunk in contem- plation, and be tortured by this raging impatience. He had come to the end, had assimilated everything into himself and ran the danger of be- ginning, all alone, to speak aloud in order to recite everything to himself once again. "Yes, you're sitting here," his thoughts said, "and you could tell yourself once again what you're looking at. " The stones are of a quite peculiar stone-green, and their image is mirrored in the water. Quite right. Exactly as one says. And the stones are shaped like boxes. . . . But it's all no use, and I'd like to leave. It is so beautiful!
And he remembered: at home, sometimes only years later, and some- times purely by accident, if one no longer has any idea how everything was, suddenly a light falls from behind, from such past things, and the heart does everything as if in a dream. He longed for the past.
"It's quite simple," he said to Agathe, "and everyone knows it, we're the only ones who don't: the imagination is stimulated only by what one does not yet possess or no longer has; the body wants to have, but the soul does not want to have. Now I understand the tremendous efforts people make to this end. How stupid it is for this ordinary fellow, this art traveler, to compare this flower to a jewel, or that stone over there to a flower: as if the truly intelligent thing to do wouldn't be to transform them for a brief moment into something else. And how stupid all our ideals would be, since every ideal, if one takes it seriously, contradicts some other ideal; thou shalt not kill, therefore perish? Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's goods, so live in poverty? As i f their sense did not lie precisely in the impossibility of carrying them out, which ignites the soul! And how good it is for religion that one can neither see nor com- prehend God! But which world? A cold, dark strip between the two fires of the Not-yet and the No-longer! "
1466 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
"A world to be afraid of oneself in," Agathe said. "You're right. " She said this quite seriously, and there was real bitterness in her eyes.
- A n d if it is so! Ulrich laughed. - I t occurs to me for the first time in my life that we would have to be terribly afraid of being tricked if Heaven were not to dangle before us an end of the world that does not exist. Evidently everything absolute, hundred-percent, true, is com- pletely monstrous.
-Between two people as well; you mean between us?
- I now understand so well what visionaries are: food without salt is unbearable, but salt without food is a poison; visionaries are people who want to live from salt alone. Is that right?
Agathe shrugged her shoulders.
- Look at our chambermaid, a cheerful stupid creature smelling of cheap soap. A short time ago I was watching her as she made up the room; she seemed to me as pretty as a freshly washed sky.
It comforted Ulrich to confess this, and a small worm of disgust crawled across Agathe's mouth. Ulrich repeated it; he did not want to drown out this small disharmony with the great peal of the dark bell. "It is a disharmony, isn't it? And any trick will do for the soul to keep itself fruitful. Sometimes it dies from love several times in succession. B u t " - and now he said something he believed to be a consolation, indeed a new love-"if everything is so sad and a deception, and one can no lon- ger believe in anything: isn't that just when we really need one another? The folk song about the little sister"-he smiled-"quiet, pensive music that nothing can drown out; an accompanying music; a love of loveless- ness that softly reaches out its hands . . . ? "
Time is the greatest cynic.
Here sexuality and camaraderie!
A cool, quiet, gray aneroticism?
Agathe was silent. Something had been extinguished. She was inordi- nately tired. Her heart had suddenly been snatched away from her, and she was tortured by an unbearable fear of a vacuum within, of her un- worthiness and her regressive transformation. This is the way ecstatics
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1467
feel when God withdraws from them and nothing responds any longer to their zealous appeals.
The art traveler, as they called him, was a professor returning from Italian cities, who had the butterfly-net skin and botanizing drum-beat- ing mind of the aspiring art historian. He had stopped over here for a few days to rest before his return and to order his notes. As they were the only guests, he had already introduced himself to the pair on the first day. They chatted briefly after meals, or when they met in the vicinity of the hotel, and there was no denying that although Ulrich made fun of him, at certain moments this man brought them welcome relaxation.
He was strongly convinced of his significance as man and scholar, and from their first encounter, after finding that the couple were not on their honeymoon, he had courted Agathe with great determination. He said to her: You resemble the beautiful--- in the painting b y ---, and all the women who have this expression, which repeats itselfin their hair and in the folds of their gowns, have the quality o f - - : As she was telling this to Ulrich Agathe had already forgotten the names, but for a stranger to know what one was was as pleasant as the firm pressure of a masseur, while one knew oneself to be so diffuse that one could barely distinguish oneself from the noontime silence.
This art traveler said: Women's function is to make us dream; they are a stratagem of nature for the fertilization of the masculine mind. He gleamed with self-satisfaction at his paradox, which inverted the sense of fertilization. Ulrich replied: But there are still distinctions in kind among these dreams!
This man asserted that in embracing a "really great female" one must be able to think of Michelangelo's Creation. "You pull the blanket of the Sistine ceiling over yourself and underneath it you're naked except for the blue stockings," Ulrich ridiculed. No. He admits that canying this out calls for tact, but in principle such people could be "twice as big" as others. "In . the last analysis, the goal of all ethical life is to unite our ac- tions with the highest that we bear within us! " It was not so easy to con- tradict this theoretically, although practically speaking it was ridiculous.
- I have discovered-the art historian said-that there are, and in the course of history always have been, two sorts of people. I call them the static and the dynamic. Or, ifyou prefer, the Imperial and the Faustian. People who are static can feel happiness as something present. They are somehow characterized by balance, equilibrium. What they have done and what they will do blends into what they are doing at the moment, is harmonized, and has a shape like a painting or a melody; has, so to speak, a second dimension, shines in every moment as surface. The Pope, for
1468 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
example, or the Dalai Lama; it is simply unimaginable that they would do something that was not stretched on the frame of their significance. On the other hand, the dynamic people: always tearing themselves loose, merely glancing backward and forward, rolling out of themselves, insensitive people with missions, insatiable, pushy, luckless-whom the static ones conquer over and over in order to keep world history going: in a word, he hinted that he was capable of carrying both strains within himself.
-T ell m e-Ulrich asked, as ifhe were quite serious-are not the dy- namic people also those who in love seem not to feel anything because they have either already loved in their imagination or will only love what has slipped away from them again? Couldn't one say that too?
-Quite right! the professor said.
- T h e y are immoral and dreamers, these people, who can never find the right point between future and past-
It's enough to make them throw up.
- W e l l , I d o n ' t think I ' d claim t h a t -
-Y es, but you do. They would be capable of committing crazy good or bad deeds because the present means nothing to them.
He really ought to say: they could commit crazy deeds out ofimpatience.
The art historian did not quite know how to answer this, and found that Ulrich did not understand him.
The restlessness grew. The summer heat increased. The sun burned like a fire to the edge of the earth. The elements filled existence com- pletely, so that there was hardly anyplace left for anything human.
It happened that toward evening, when the burning air already cast light, cooling folds, they went strolling on the steep banks. Yellow bushes of broom sprang up from the embers of the stones and stood there directly before the soul; the mountains gray as donkeys' backs with the washed-out green that the grass growing on the white limestone cast over them; the laurel's hot dark green. The parched glance resting on the laurel sank into cooler and cooler depths. Countless bees hummed;
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1 4 6 9
it fused into a deep metallic tone that shot off little arrows whenever, in a sudden turn, they flew by one's ear. Heroic, tremendous, the ap- proaching line of mountains, in three waves one behind the other, smoothly canted, breaking off steeply.
-Heroic? Ulrich asked. -O r is it only what we have always hated because it was supposed to be heroic? Endlessly portrayed, this painted and engraved, this Greek, this Roman, this Nazarene, classicistic land- scape-this virtuous, professorial, idealistic landscape? And ultimately it impresses us only because we've now encountered it in reality? The way one despises an influential man and is nevertheless flattered because one knows him?
But the few things here to which the space belonged respected each other; they kept their distance from each other and did not saturate na- ture with impressions, as they do in Germany. No mocking helped; as only high in the mountains, where everything earthly keeps diminishing, this landscape was no longer a place of human habitation but a piece of the sky, to whose folds a few species of insects still clung.
And on the other side (of this humility) lay the sea. The great beloved, adorned with the peacock's tail. The beloved with the oval mirror. The opened eye of the beloved. The beloved become God. The pitiless chal- lenge. The eyes still hurt and had to look away, pierced by the shattering spears of light speeding back from the sea. But soon the sun will be lower. It will only be a circumscribed sea of liquid silver, with violets floating on it. And then one must look out over the seal Then one has to look at it. Agathe and Ulrich feared this moment. What can one do to prevail against this monstrous, observing, stimulating, jealous rival? How should they love each other? Sink to their knees? As they had done at first? Spread out their arms? Scream? Can they embrace each other? It is all so ridiculous, as if one were trying to shout angrily at someone while nearby all the bells of a cathedral are pealing! The fearful empti- ness again closed in on them from all sides.
So it ends the way it begins!
But at such a moment one can shoot the other, or stab him, since his death cry will be muffled.
Ulrich shook his head. -One must be somewhat limited to find na- ture beautiful. To be someone like that fellow down there, who would
1470 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
rather talk himself than listen to someone better. One is forcibly re- minded by nature ofschool exercises and bad poems, and one has to be capable of transforming it at the moment of observation into an anoint- ing. Otherwise one collapses. One must always be stupider than nature in order to stand up to it, and must gossip in order not to lose the language.
Fortunately, their skin could not stand the heat. Sweat broke out. It created a diversion and an excuse; they felt themselves relieved of their mission.
But as they were walking back Agathe noticed that she was looking forward to the certainty ofmeeting the traveling stranger down below in front of the hotel. Ulrich was certainly right, but there was a great conso- lation in the babbling, insistently pushy company ofthis person.
Afternoons, in the room, there were fearful moments. Between the extended red-striped awning and the stone railing of the balcony lay a blue, burning band the width of one's hand. The smooth warmth, the severely attenuated brightness, had dislodged everything from the room that was not fixed. Ulrich and Agathe had not brought along anything to read; that had been their plan; they had left behind ideas, normal cir- cumstances, everything having any connection-no matter how saga- cious-with the ordinary human way of living: now their souls lay there like two hard-baked bricks from which every drop ofwater has escaped. This contemplative natural existence had made them unexpectedly de- pendent on the most primitive elements.
Finally, a day of rain came. The wind lashed. Time became long in a cool way. They straightened up like plants. They kissed each other. The words they exchanged refreshed them. They were happy again. To al- ways be waiting every moment for the next moment is only a habit; dam it up, and time comes forth like a lake. The hours still flow, but they are broader than they are long. Evening falls, but no time has passed.
But then a second rainy day followed; a third. What had seemed a new intensity glided downward as a conclusion. The smallest help, the belief that this weather was a personal dispensation, an extraordinary fate, and the room is full of the strange light from the water, or hollowed out like a die of dark silver. But if no help comes: what can one talk about? One can still smile at the other from far apart-embrace- weaken the other to the point of that fatigue which resembles death, which separates the exhausted like an endless plain; one can call across: I love you, or: You are beautiful, or: I would rather die with you than live without you, or:
From the Posthumous Papers · 1471
What a miracle that you and I, two such separate beings, have been blown together. And one can weep from neJVousness when, quite softly, one begins to fall prey to boredom . . .
Fearful violence of repetition, fearful godhead! Attraction of empti- ness, always sucking in like the funnel of a whirlpool whose walls yield. Kiss me, and I will bite gently and harder and harder and wilder and wilder, ever more drunken, more greedy for blood, listening into your lips for the plea for mercy, climbing down the ravine of pain until at the end we are hanging in the vertical wall and are afraid of ourselves. Then the deep pantings of breath come to our aid, threatening to abandon the body; the gleam in the eye breaks, the glance rolls from side to side, the grimace of dying begins. Astonishment and a thousandfold ecstasy in each other eddy in this rapture. Within a few minutes concentrated flight through bliss and death, ending, renewed, bodies swinging like howling bells. But at the end one knows: it was only a profound Fall into a world in which it drifts downward on a hundred steps of repetition. Agathe moaned: You will leave me! - N o ! Darling! Conspirator!
Ulrich was searching for expressions o f enthusiasm, etc. - N o - A g a t h e softly fended him off-I can't feel anything anymore . . . ! Since it had now been spoken, Ulrich became cold and gave up the effort.
-Ifwe had believed in God-Agathe went on-we would have un- derstood what the mountains and flowers were saying.
-Are you thinking ofLindner? Ulrich probedI What? Lindner . . . ! Ulrich immediately interjected jealously.
It ends in excrement and vomiting like the first time!
-No. I was thinking of the art historian. His thread never breaks. Agathe gave a pained and wan smile. She was lying on the bed; Ulrich had torn open the door to the balcony, the wind flung water in. "What difference does it make," he said harshly. "Think ofwhomever you want. We have to look around for a third person. Who'll obseiVe us, envy us, or reproach us. " He remained standing before her and said slowly: "There is no such thing as love between two people alone! " Agathe propped herself on an elbow and lay there, wide-eyed, as if she were expecting death. -W e have yielded to an impulse against order, Ulrich repeated. - A love can grow out of defiance, but it can't consist of defiance. On the contrary, it can only exist when it is integrated into a society. It's not the content of life. But a negation of, an exception to, all life's contents.
1472 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
But an exception needs whatever it is the exception to. One can't live from a negation alone. -Close the door, Agathe asked. Then she stood up and arranged her dress. - S o shall we leave?
Ulrich shrugged his shoulders. - W e l l , it's all over.
-Don't you remember any more our proviso when we came here? Ashamed, Ulrich answered: We wanted to find the entrance to para-
dise!
-And killourselves-Agathesaid-ifwe didn't!
Ulrich looked at her calmly. - D o you want to?
Agathe might perhaps have said yes. She did not know why it seemed
more honest to slowly shake her head and say no.
-W e've lost that resolve too, Ulrich stated.
She stood up in despair. Spoke with her hands on her temples, listen-
ing to her own words: I was waiting. ~ . I was almost decadent and ridicu- lous . . . Because in spite ofthe life I've led I was still waiting. I could not name it or describe it. It was like a melody without notes, a picture with- out form. I knew that one day it will come up to me from outside and will be what treats me tenderly and what will hold no harm for me anymore, either in life or in death. . . .
Ulrich, who had turned violently toward her, cut in, parodying her with a spitefulness that was a torture to himself: -It's a longing, some- thing that's missing: the form is there, only the matter is missing. Then some bank official or professor comes along, and this little beastie slowly fills up the emptiness that was stretched out like an evening sky.
- M y love, all movement in life comes from the evil and brutal; good- ness dozes off. Is a drop of some fragrance; but every hour is the same hole and yawning child of death, which has to be filled up with heavy ballast. You said before: If we could believe in God! But a game of pa- tience will do as well, a game ofchess, a book. Today man has discovered that he can console himselfwith these things just as well. It just has to be something where board is joined to board in order to span the empty depths.
- B u t don't we love each other any longer, then? Agathe exclaimed.
Now they are again talking as they had earlier. It is very lovely.
-Y ou can't overlook-Ulrich answered-how much this feeling de- pends on its surroundings. How it derives its content from imagining a life together, that is, a line between and through other people. From
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 4 7 3
good conscience, because everyone else is so pleased at the way these two love each other, or from bad conscience as well. . . .
-W hat is it then that we experienced? We mustn't pretend to some- thing untrue: I wasn't a fool for wanting to seek paradise. I could deter- mine it the way one can deduce an invisible planet from certain effects. And what happened? It dissolved into a spiritual and optical illusion and into a physiological mechanism that is repeatable. As with all people!
-It's true, Agathe said. -For the longest time we've been living from what you call evil; from restlessness, small distractions, the hunger and satiety of the body.
-And yet-Ulrich answered, as in an extremely painful vision- when it's forgotten, you'll be waiting again. Days will come where be- hind many doors someone will beat on a drum. Muffied and insistently: beat, beat. Days, as if you were waiting in a brothel for the creaking of the stairs; it will be some corporal or bank official. Whom fate has sent you. To keep your life in motion. And yet you remain my sister.
- B u t what is to become of us? Agathe saw nothing before her. -Y ou must marry or find a lover-! said that before.
- B u t are we no longer one person? she asked sadly.
- O n e person also has both within himself.
-But ifI love you? Agathe shouted.
-W e must live. Without each other-for each other. Do you want the art historian? Ulrich said this with the coldness of great effort. Agathe dismissed it with a small shrug of her shoulder. -Thank you, Ulrich said. He tried to grasp her slack hand and stroke it. -I'm not so-so firmly convinced either. . . .
Once again, almost the great union. But it seems to Agathe that Ulrich does not have sufficient courage.
They were silent for a while. Agathe opened and closed drawers and began to pack. The storm shook at the doors. Then Agathe turned around and asked her brother calmly and in a different voice:
- B u t can you imagine that tomorrow or the next day we'll get home and find the rooms the way we left them, and begin to make visits? . . .
Ulrich did not notice with what enormous resistance Agathe struggled against this idea. He could not imagine all that either. But he felt some new kind of tension, even if it was a melancholy task. At this moment he was not paying enough attention to Agathe.
1474 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
Continuation: The day after this dismal conversation Clarisse arrived.
WORKED-OUT SKETCHES FROM THE 1920S NEW SKETCHES, 1930l31-1933l34
On Kakania
A digression on Kakania. The crucible ofthe World War is also the birthplace ofthe poet Feuermaul
It may be assumed that the expression "Crucible of the World War" has, since this object existed, been used often enough, yet always with a cer- tain imprecision as to the question of where it is located. Older people who still have personal memories of those times will probably think of Sarajevo, yet they themselves will feel that this small Bosnian city can only have been the oven vent through which the wind blew in. Educated people will direct their thoughts to political nodal points and world capi- tals. Those even more highly educated will, moreover, have the names of Essen, Creuzot, Pilsen, and the other centers of the armaments industry confidently in mind. And the most highly educated will add to these something from the geography of oil, potash, and other raw materials, for that's the way one often reads about it. But what follows from all this is merely that the crucible of the World War was no ordinruy crucible,
for it was located in several places simultaneously.
Perhaps one might say to this that the expression is to be understood
only metaphorically. But this is to be assented to so completely that it immediately gives rise to even greater difficulties. For, granting that "crucible" is intended to mean metaphorically approximately the same thing that "origin" or "cause" means nonmetaphorically, while on the one hand one knows that the origin of all things and events is God, on the other it leaves one empty-handed. For "origins" and "causes" are like a person who goes searching for his parents: in the first instance he has two, that is indisputable; but with grandparents it's the square of two, with great-grandparents two to the third, and so on in a powerfully unfolding series, which is totally unassailable but which yields the re- markable result that at the beginning of time there must have been an almost infinite number ofpeople whose purpose was merely to produce a single one of today's individuals. However flattering this may be, and
From the Posthumous Papers · 1475
however it may correspond to the significance that the individual feels within himself, today one calculates too precisely for anyone to believe it. Therefore, with heavy heart, one must give up a personal series of ancestors and assume that "starting from someplace" one must have a common descent as a group. And this has a variety of consequences. Such as that people consider themselves in part "brothers," in part "from alien tribes," without a person knowing how to determine where the boundary is, for what is called "nation" and "race" is results and not causes. Another consequence, no less influential even if not as obvious, is that Mr. What's-his-name no longer knows where he has his cause. He consequently feels himself like a snipped thread that the busy needle of life incessantly pulls back and forth because making a button for it was somehow overlooked. A third consequence, just now dawning, is for in- stance that it has not yet been calculated whether and to what extent there might be two or multiple other Mr. What's-his-names; in the realm of what is hereditarily possible it is entirely conceivable, only one does not know how great the probability is that it could actually happen with oneself; but a dim oppressiveness of the idea that given man's na- ture today this cannot be entirely excluded lies, as it were, in the air.
And surely it would not even be the worst thing. Count Leinsdorf, speaking with Ulrich for a moment, held forth on the aristocratic institu- tion of chamberlains. "A chamberlain needs to have sixteen noble fore- bears, and people are upset at that being the height of snobbery; but what, I ask you, do people do themselves? Imitate us with their theories of race, that's what they do," he explained, "and immediately exaggerate it in a fashion that has nothing at all to do with nobility. As far as I'm concerned we can all be descended from the same Adam, a Leinsdorf would still be a Leinsdorf, for it's a damn sight more a matter of educa- tion and training than a matter of blood! " His Grace was irritated by the intrusion of populist elements into the Parallel Campaign, which for a variety of reasons had to be countenanced up to a certain point. At that time nationalism was nearly ready to put forth its first bloody blossoms, but no one knew it, for despite its imminent fulfillment it did not seem terrible but only seemed ridiculous: its intellectual aspect consisting for the most part of books pasted together with the well-read busyness of a scholar and the total incoherence of untrained thinking by compilers who lived in some rural backwater as elementary-school teachers or petty customs officials.
1476 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
I Preliminary sketch: continuation after first paragraph above I
Therefore the obvious reservation will probably be put forward that the expression "crucible of the World War" is to be understood merely metaphorically, and this is to be subscribed to so wholeheartedly that it will immediately lead to new difficulties; if on the other hand one main- tains that "crucible" signifies the same as causation complex, and such a thing is complicated and extensive in all human endeavors, then it must be contradicted straightaway. For if one pursues causes back in a straight line they lead right back to God as the Prima Causa of every- thing that happens; this is one of the few problems about which centu- ries of theology have left no doubt. But on the other hand it's like a person going from his father to his father's father, from his father's fa- ther to his father and father's father of the father's father, and so on in this series: he will never arrive at a complete notion of his descent. In other words: the causal chain is a warp on a loom; the moment a woof is put in, the causes disappear into a woven texture. In science, research into causes was abandoned long ago, or at least greatly reduced, to be replaced by a functional mode that called for observing relationships. The search for causes belongs to household usage, where the cook's being in love is the cause of the soup's being oversalted. Applied to the World War, this search for a cause and a causer has had the extremely positive negative result that the cause was everywhere and in everyone.
This demonstrates that one can truly say "crucible" just as well as "cause of" or "guilt for" the war; but then one would have to supple- ment this entire mode of observation with another. For this purpose, let us proceed experimentally from the problem ofwhy the poet Feuermaul should suddenly pop up in the Parallel Campaign, and even why-leav- ing behind a decisive but merely trivial contribution to its history-he will immediately and permanently drop out of it again. The answer is that this was apparently necessary, that there was absolutely no way of avoiding it-for everything that happens has, as we know, a sufficient cause-but that the reasons for this necessity are themselves, however, completely meaningless or, more properly, were important only for Feuermaul himself, his girlfriend, Professor Drangsal, and her envier, Diotima, and only for a brief period. It would be sheer extravagance were one to relate this. I f Feuermaul had not striven to play a role in the Parallel Campaign, someone else would have done so in his place, or if this other person had not shown up, something else would have; in the interweavings of events there is a narrow insert where this or that influ- ences its success with the differences they make; but in the long run, the
From the Posthumous Papers · 1477
things represent each other completely, indeed they somehow also rep- resent the characters, with very few exceptions. Arnheim, too, could have been replaced in the same way; perhaps not for Diotima, but prob- ably as the cause of the changes she underwent and, further, the effects that these led to. This view, which today might almost be called a natural one, seems fatalistic but is so only so long as one accepts it as a destiny. But the laws of nature were also a destiny before they were investigated; after that happened, it was even possible to subordinate them to a tech- nology.
/Belongs here: Feuermaul, like all the characters in the story except for Ulrich (and perhaps Leo Fischel), denies the value of technical proj- ects, among others/
As long as this has not happened, one can also say that B. , the birth- place of the poet Feuermaul, was also the original crucible of the World War. And that is why it is by no means capricious; what it amounts to, really, is that certain phenomena, which were to be found everywhere in the world and belonged to the crucible that, stretching over the entire planet, was everywhere and nowhere, condensed in B. in a fashion that prematurely brought out its meaning. Instead of B. one could say the whole of Kakania, but B. was one of the special points within it. These phenomena were that in B. the people could not stand each other at all, and on the other hand that the poet Feuermaul, born in their midst, chose as the basic principle of his work the assertion that Man Is Good and one need only tum directly to the goodness that dwells within him. Both signify the same thing.
It would have been a lie had one tried to maintain that even the small- est part of what has been described was present in Feuermaul at the time in any real way, or that it was present at any time in such detail. But life is always more detailed than its results: creating, as it were, a vege- tarian diet, mountains ofleaves, around a tiny pile of . . . The results are a few dispositions of individual conduct.
1478 ·THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
1930-1934
While Agathe and Ulrich were living behind closed crystal panels- by no means abstractly and without looking at the world, but looking at it in an unusual, unambiguous light, this world bathed every morning in the hundredfold light of a new day. Every morning cities and villages awaken, and wherever they do it happens, God knows, in more or less the same way; on the other hand, people are conceived and slain in an instant, and small birds fly from one branch to another with the same right to existence that a giant ocean liner expresses as it swims straight between Europe and America. Somehow everything in the world hap- pens uniformly and with statutory monotony, but varied in countless ways, which, depending on the mood in which one observes them, is as much blissful abundance as ridiculous superfluity. And perhaps even the expression "law of nature"-this exalted regency of mechanical laws, which we worship shivering-is still a much too personal expression; laws have something of the personal relationship an accused has with his judge or a subject with his king; there is in them something of the con- trat social and the beginnings of liberalism too. Nietzsche already noted the more modem view of nature when he wrote: "Nature has a calcula- ble course not because it is ruled by laws but because they are lacking, and every power draws its ultimate consequences at every moment. " That is a statement which fits in with the ideas of contemporary physics but was really coined from biological events, and an intimation of such emotions lies over contemporary life. Once, "You can do what you like" meant following your drives; but one was not supposed to do what one liked, and moral laws conceived in sublimity interfered with it. Today everyone feels in some way that these moral laws are a heap of contra- dictions, and that to follow them would amount to being able to pander to every one of his drives, and he feels a wild, extraordinary freedom. This freedom permits him a path that only leads forward: that, like the orbits of atoms, this chaos must somehow finally yield a specific value, and that with more precise knowledge of how things cohere one would again be able to give life a meaning.
That is more or less the sense of the transition from individualism to the collective view of the world I mission of the world (there is in this no supposition that the value of the individual should cease, only that it be more precisely evaluated).
From the Posthumous Papers · 1479
One day, the General was sitting before the two of them and said in astonishment to Ulrich: "What, you don't read the newspapers? "
Brother and sister blushed as deeply as ifthe good Stumm had discov- ered them in flagrante, for even though in their condition everything might have been possible, that they might have been able to read the newspapers was not.
"But one must read the newspapers! " said I admonished the General in embarrassment, for he had stumbled upon an incomprehensible fact, and it was discretion that caused him to add reproachfully: There have been big demonstrations against the Parallel Campaign in B. !
Truly, while Ulrich and Agathe had been living behind closed crystal panels-by no means abstractly and without looking at the world, but looking at it in an unusual, unambiguous light-this same world bathed every morning in the hundredfold light of a new day. Every morning cities and villages awaken, and wherever they do it happens, God knows, in more or less the same way; but with the same right to existence that a giant ocean liner expresses when it is under way between two conti- nents, small birds fly from one branch to another, and thus everything happens simultaneously, in a fashion as uniform and simplified as it is uselessly varied in innumerable ways, and in a helpless and blessed abundance reminiscent of the glorious but limited picture books of childhood. Ulrich and Agathe also both felt their book of the world open before them, for the city of B.
