No More Learning

This thought pleased him.
But it must be added that it did not please him because he liked a solid middle-class life; on the contrary, he was merely taking a per- verse pleasure in thwarting his own inclinations, which had once taken him in quite another direction. What ifit is precisely the philis- tine who is alive with intimations of a colossally new, collective, ant- like heroism? It will be called a rationalized heroism, and greatly admired. At this point, who can tell? There were at that time hun- dreds of such open questions of the greatest importance, hovering in the air and burning underfoot. Time was on the move. People not yet hom in those days will find it hard to believe, but even then time was racing along like a cavalry, camel, just like today. But nobody knew where time was headed. And it was not always clear what was up or down, whatwas going forward or backward.
"No matter what you do," the man without qualities thought with a shrug, "within this mare's nest offorces at work, it doesn't make the slightest difference! " He turned away like a man who has learned to resign himself-indeed, almost like a sick man who shrinks from
A Sort of Introduction · 7
8 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
every strong physical contact; yet in crossing the adjacent dressing room he hit a punching bag that was hanging there a hard, sudden blow that seemed not exactly in keeping with moods of resignation or conditions of weakness.
3
EVEN A MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES HAS A FATHER WITH QUALITIES
When the man without qualities had returned from abroad some- time before, it was a certain exuberance as well as his loathing for the usual kind of apartment that led him to rent the little chateau, a for- mer summer house outside the city gates that had lost its vocation when it was engulfed by the spreading city and had finally become no more than a run-down, untenanted piece of real estate waiting for its value to go up. The rent was correspondingly low, but to get every- thing repaired and brought up to modem standards had cost an unexpectedly large sum. It had become an adventure that resulted in driving him to ask his father for help-by no m~ans pleasant for a man who cherishes his independenc;e. He was thirty-two, his father sixty-nine.
The old gentleman was aghast. N<,>t really on account of the sur- prise attack, though that entered into it because he detested rash conduct; nor did he mind the contribution levied on him, as he basi- cally approved of his son's announcing an interest in domesticity and putting his life in order. But to take on a house that had to be called a chateau, even if only in the diminutive, affronted his sense of propri- ety and worried him as a baleful tempting of fate.
He himself had started out as a tutor in the houses of the high aristocracy while still working for his degree, and he had continued tutoring even as a young law clerk-not really from necessity, for his father was quite well off. But those carefully nurtured connections
paid off later on when he became a university lecturer and law pro- fessor, and they led to his gradually rising to become the legal adviser . to almost all the feudal nobility in the country, although by this time he had no need of a professional sideline at all. Even long after the fortune he had made could stand comparison with the dowry brought him by his wife-the daughter of a powerful indushial fam- ily in the Rhineland, his son's mother, who had died all too soon--:-he never allowed these connections, formed in his youth and strength- ened in his prime, to lapse. Even after retiring from his practice, ex- cept for the occasional special consultation at a high fee, the old scholar who had achieved distinction made a careful catalog of every event concerning his circle of former patrons, extended with great precision from fathers to sons to grandsons. No honor, wedding, birthday, or name day passed without a letter of congratulation from him, always a subtle blend of perfectly measured deference and shared reminiscence. He received just as promptly in return brief letters of acknowledgment, which thanked the dear friend and es- teemed scholar. So his son was aware, from boyhood on, of the aris- tocratic knack for meting out almost unconsciously and with unfailing condescension the exact degree of affability called for, and Ulrich had always been irritated by the subservience of a man who was, after all, a member of the intellectual aristocracy toward the owners of horses, fields, and traditions. If his father was insensitive on this point, it was not because ofany calculation; it had been a nat- ural instinct for him to build a great career in this way, so that he became not only a professor and a member of academies and many learned and official committees but was also made a Knight, and then a Commander, the recipient of the Grand Cross of various high orders. His Majesty finally raised him to the hereditary nobility, hav- ing already previously named him to membership in the House of Lords. There the distinguished man joined the liberal wing, which sometimes opposed the leading peers; yet none of his noble patrons seemed to mind or even to wonder at this; they had never regarded him as anything but the personified spirit of the rising middle class. The old gentleman participated keenly in the technical work of legis- lation, and even if a controversial issue had him voting on the liberal side the other side bore him no grudge; their sense of the matter was, rather, that he had not been invited to join them. What he did in
A Sort ofIntroduction · 9
10 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
politics was no different from what he had always done: combine his . superior knowledge-which sometimes entailed working toward a gentle improvement of conditions-with the demonstration that his personal loyalty was always to be relied upon; and so he had risen quite unchanged, as his son maintained, from the role of tutor to the
upper class to that of tutor to the Upper House.
When he learned about his son's acquisition of the chateau it
struck him as a transgression against limits . all the more sacred for not being legally defmed, and he rebuked his son even more bitterly than on the many previous occasions he had found it necessary to do so, almost in terms ofprophesying a bad end ofwhich this purchase was the beginning. The basic premise of his life was affronted. As with many men who achieve distinction, this feeling was far from self- serving but consisted in a deep love of the general good above per- sonal advantage-in other words, he sincerely venerated the state of affairs that had served him so well, not because it was to his advan- tage, but because he was in harmony and coexistent with it, and on general principles. This is a point of great importance: even a pedi- greed dog searches out his place under the dining table, regardless of kicks, not because of canine abjection but out of loyalty and faith; and even coldly cal~ulatingpeople do not succeed half so well in life as those with properly blended temperaments who are capable of deep feeling for those persons and conditions that happen tQ serve their own interests.
4
IF THERE IS A SENSE OF REALITY' THERE MUST ALSO BE A SENSE OF POSSIBILITY
To pass freely through open doors, it is necessary to respect the fact that they have solid frames. This principle, by which the old profes- sor had always lived, is simply a requisite of the sense of reality. But if
there is a sense of reality, and no one will doubt that it has its justifi- cation for existing, then there must also be something we can call a sense of possibility.
Whoever ·has it does not say, for instance: Here this or that has happened, will happen, must happen; but he invents: Here this or that might, could, or ought to happen. If he is told that something is the way it is, he will think: Well, it could probably just as well be otherwise. So the sense ofpossibility could be defined outright as the ability to conceive of everything there might be just as well, and to attach no more importance to what is than to what is not. The conse- quences ofso creative a disposition can be remarkable, and may, re- grettably, often make what people admire seem wrong, and what is taboo permissible, or, also, make both a matter of indifference. Such possibilists are said to inhabit a more delicate medium, a hazy me- dium of mist, fantasy, daydreams, and the subjunctive mood. Children who show this tendency are dealt with firmly and warned that such persons are cranks, dreamers, weaklings, know-it-ails, or troublemakers.
Such fools are also called idealists by those who wish to praise them. But all this clearly applies only to their weak subspecies, those who cannot comprehend reality or who, in their melancholic condi- tion, avoid it. These are people in whom the lack of a sense of reality is a real deficiency. But the possible includes not only the fantasies of people with weak nerves but also the as yet unawakened intentions of God. A possible experience or truth is not the same as an actual experience or truth minus its "reality value" but has-according to its partisans, at least-something quite divine about it, a fire, a soar- ing, a readiness to build and a conscious utopianism that does not shrink from reality but sees it as a project, something yet to be in- vented. After all, the earth is not that old, and was apparently never so ready as now to give birth to its full potential.
To try to readily distinguish the realists from the possibilists, just think of a specific sum of money. Whatever possibilities inhere in, say, a thousand dollars are surely there independently of their be- longing or not belonging to someone; that the money belongs to a Mr. MeoraMr. Theeaddsnomoretoitthanitwouldtoaroseora woman. But a fool will tuck the money away in his sack, say the real- ists, while a capable man will make it work for him. Even the beauty
A Sort o f Introduction · 1 1
12 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
of a woman is undeniably enhanced or diminished by the man who possesses her. It is reality that awakens possibilities, and nothing would be more perverse than to deny it. Even so, it will always be the same possibilities, in sum or on the average, that go on repeating themselves until a man comes along who does not value the. actuality above the idea. It is he who first gives the new possibilities their meaning,' their direction, and he awakens them.
But such a man is far from being a simple proposition. Since his ideas, to the extent that they are not idle fantasies, are nothing but realities as yet unborn, he, too, naturally has a sense of reality; but it is a sense ofpossible reality, and arrives at its goal much more slowly than most people's sense oftheir real possibilities. He wants the for- est, as it were, and the others the trees, and forest is hard to define, while trees represent so many cords of wood of a definable quality. Putting it another and perh,aps better way, the man with an ordinary sense of reality is like a fish that nibbles at the hook but is unaware of the line, while the man with that sense of reality which can also be called a sense ofpossibility trawls a line through the water and has no idea whether there's any bait on it. His extraordinary indifference to the life snapping at the bait is matched by the risk he runs of doing utterly eccentric things. An impractical man-which he not only seems to be, but really is-will always be unreliable and unpredict- able in his dealings with others. He will engage in actions that mean something else to him than to others, but he is at peace with himself about everything as long as he can make it all come together in a fine idea. Today he is still far from being consistent. He is quite capa'Qle of regarding a crime that brings harm to another person merely as a lapse to be blamed not on the criminal but on the society that pro- duced the criminal. But it remains doubtful whether he would ac- cept a slap in the face with the same detachment, or take it impersonally as one takes the bite of a dog. The chances are that he would first hit back and then on reflection decide that he shouldn't have. Moreover, if someone were to take away his beloved, it is most unlikely that he would today be quite ready to discount the reality of his loss and find compensation in some surprising new reaction. At present this development still has some way to go and affects the in- dividual person as a ~eakness as much as a strength.
And since the possession of qualities assumes a certain pleasure in their reality, we can see how a man who cannot summon up a sense of reality even in relation to himself may suddenly, one day, come to see himself as a man without qualities.
5
ULRICH
The man without qualities whose story is being told here was called Ulrich, and Ulrich~his family name must be suppressed out of con- sideration for his father-had already given proof of his disposition while still on the borderline between childhood and adolescence, in a class paper on a patriotic theme. Patriotism in Austria was quite a special subject. Germ~ children simply learned to despise the wars sacred to Austrian children, and were taught to believe that French children, whose forebears were all decadent lechers, would tum tail by the thousands at the approach of a German soldier with a big beard. Exactly the same ideas, with roles reversed and other desir- able adjustments, were taught to French, English, and Russian chil- dren, who also had often been on the winning side. Children are, of course, show-offs, love to play cops and robbers, and are naturally inclined to regard the X family on Y Street as the greatest family in the world ifit happens to be their own. So patriotism comes easily to children. But in Austria, the situation was slightly more complicated. For although the Austrians had of course also won all the wars in their history, after most of them they had had to give something up.
This was food for thought, and Ulrich wrote in his essay on love of country that anyone who really loved his country must never regard it as the best country in the world. Then, in a flash ofinspiration that seemed to him especially fine, although he was more dazzled by its splendor than he was clear about its implications, he added to this
A Sort ofIntroduction · 1 3
14 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
dubious statement asecond, that God Himself probably preferred to speak of His world in the subjunctive of possibility (hie dtxerit quis- piam-"here someone might object that . . . "),for God creates the world and thinks while He is at it that it could just as well be done differently. Ulrich gloried in this sentence, but he must not have ex- pressed himselfclearly enough, because it caused a great uproar and nearly got him expelled from school, although nothing happened be- cause the authorities could not make up their minds whether to re- gard his brazen remark as calumny against the Fatherland or as blasphemy against God. At the time, he was attending the Theresia- num, that select school for the sons ofthe aristocracy and gentry that supplied the noblest pillars ofthe state. His father, furious at the hu- miliation brought upon him by this unrecognizable chip off the old block, pa~ked him off abroad to a Belgian town nobody had ever heard of, where a small, inexpensive private school run on shrewd and efficient business lines did a roaring trade in black sheep. There Ulrich learned to give his disdain for other people's ideals interna- tional scope.
Since that time sixteen or seventeen years had passed, as the clouds drift across the sky. Ulrich neither r~gretted them nor was proud of them; he simply looked back at them in his thirty-second year with astonishment. He had me3J1while been here and there, in- cluding brief spells at home, and engaged in this or that worthwhile or futile endeavor. It has already been mentioned that he was a mathematician, and nothing more need be said of that. for the mo- ment; in every profession followed not for money but for love there comes a moment when the advancing years seem to lead to a void. After this moment had lasted for some time, Ulrich remembered that a man's native country is supposed to have the mysterious power of making the mind take root and thrive in its true soil, and so he settled there with the feeling of a hiker who sits down on a bench for eternity, but with the thought that he will be getting up again immediately.
When he set about putting his house in order, as the Bible has it, it turned out to be the experience he had actually been waiting for. He had got himself into the pleasant position of having to restore his run-down little property from scratch. He was free to follow any principle, from the stylistically pure to total recklessness, free to
choose any style from the Assyrians to cubism. What should he choose? Modern man is born in a hospital and dies in a hospital, so he should make his home like a clinic. So claimed a leading architect of the moment; ·and another reformer of interior decoration ad- vocated movable partitions in homes instead of fixed walls so that people would learn to trust their housemates instead of shutting themselves off from one another. Time was making a fresh start just then (it does so all the time), and a new time needs a new style. Luck- ily for Ulrich, the little chateau already had three styles superim- posed on one another, setting limits on what he could do to meet a11 these new demands. Yet he felt quite shaken by the responsibility of having the opportunity to renovate a house, what with the threat hov- ering over his head of "Show me how you live and I will tell you who you arel"-which he had read repeatedly in art magazines. After in- tensive study of these periodicals he decided that he had best take the extension of his personality into his own hands, and began to de- sign his future furniture himself. But no sooner had he come up with an impressively massive form than it occurred to him that something spare, and strictly functional, could just as easily be put in its place; and when he had sketched a form of reinforced concrete that looked emaciated by its own strength, he was reminded of the thin, vernal lines of a thirteen-year-old girl's body and drifted off into a reverie instead of making up his mind.
He was in that familiar state-not that the occasion mattered too seriously to h i m - o f incoherent ideas spreading outward without a center, so characteristicofthe present, and whose strange arithmetic adds up to a random proliferation of numbers without forming a unit. Finally he dreamed up only impracticable rooms, revolving rooms, kaleidoscopic interiors, adjustable scenery for the soul, and his ideas grew steadily more devoid of content. He had now finally reached the point to which he had been drawn all along. His father would have put it something like this: "Give a fellow a totally free hand and he will soon run his head into a wall out of sheer confu- sion. " Or this: "A man who can have anything he wants will soon be at a loss as to what to wish for. " Ulrich repeated these sayings to him- selfwith great enjoyment. Their hoary wisdom appeared to him as an extraordinary new thought. For a man's possibilities, plans, and feel- ings must first be hedged in by prejudices, traditions, obstacles, and
A Sort ofIntroduction · 15
16 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
barriers of all sorts, like a lunatic in his straitjacket, and only then can whatever he is capable ofdoing have perhaps some value, substance, and staying power. Here, in fact, was an idea with incalculable impli- cations. Now the man without qualities, who had come back to his own country, took the second step toward letting himself be shaped by the outward circumstances oflife: at this point"in his deliberations he simply left the furnishing of his house to the genius of his suppli- ers, secure in the knowledge that he could safely leave'the traditions, prejudices, and limitations to them. All he did himself was to touch up the earlier lines, the dark antlers under the white vaultings of the little hall, the formal ceiling in the salon, and whatever else that seemed to him useful and convenient. ·
When it was all done he could shake his head and wonder: "Is this the life that is going to be mine? " What he possessed was a charming little palace; ~me must almost call it that because it was exactly the way one imagines such places, a tasteful residence for a resident as conceived by furniture dealers, carpet sellers, and interior decorators who were leaders in their fields. All that was missing was for this· chamiing clockwork to be wound up, for then carriages bringing high dignitaries and noble ladies would come rolling up the driveway, and footmen would leap from their running boards to ask, looking Ulrich over dubiously: "Where is your master, my good man? "
He had returned from the moon and had promptly installed him- self on the moon again.
6
LEONA, OR A CHANGE IN VIEWPOINT
Once a man has put his house in order it is time to go courting. Ul- rich's girlfriend in those days was a chanteuse in a small cabaret who went by the name of Leontine. She was tall, curvaceously slender, provocatively lifeless, and he called her Leona.
He had been struck by the moist darkness of her eyes, the dole- fully passionate expression on her handsome, regular, long face, and the songs full offeeling that she sang instead ofrisque ones. All these old-fashioned little songs were about love, sorrow, abandonment, faithfulness, forest murmurs, and shining trout. She stood tall and lonely to the marrow on the tiny st-age and patiently sang at the pub- lic with a housewife's voice, and even if something suggestive did slip in now and then, the effect was all the more ghostlike because she spelled out all the feelings ofthe heart, the tragic as. well as the teas- ing, with the same wooden gestures. Ulrich was immediately re- minded of old photographs or engravings of dated beauties in ancient issues of forgotten women's magazines. A! ; he thought him- self into this woman's face he saw in it a large number of small traits that simply could not be real, yet they made the face what it was. There are, ofcourse, in all periods all kinds ofcountenances, but only one type will be singled out by a period's taste as its ideal image of happiness and beauty while all the other faces do their best to copy it, and with the help of fashioh and hairdressers even the ugly ones manage to approximate the ideal. But there are some faces that never succeed, faces born to a strange distinction of their own, unyieldingly expressing the regal and banished ideal beauty of an earlier period. Such faces wander about like corpses ofpast desires in the great void oflove's traffic, and the men who gaped into the vast tedium of Leontine's singing, unaware of what was happening to them, felt their nostrils twitch with feelings quite different from those aroused by brazen petite chanteuses with tango spit curls. So Ulrich decided to call her Leona and desired to possess her, as he might have wanted to possess a luxurious lion-skin rug.
But after their acquaintance had begun, Leona developed another anachronistic quality: she was an incredible glutton, and this is a vice whose heyday had passed a very long time ago. Its origin was in the craving she had suffered as a poor child for rich, costly delicacies; now, finally liberated, it had the force of an ideal that has broken out of its cage and seized power. Her father had apparently been a re- spectable little man who beat her every time she went out with ad- mirers, but she did it only because there was nothing she liked better than to sit at one of those sidewalk tables in front of a little pastry shop, spooning up her sherbet while genteelly watching the passing
A Sort ofIntroduction · 1 7
z8 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
parade. It could not be maintained that she took no interest in sex, but it could be said that she was, in this respect as in every other, downright lazy and hated to work. In her ample body every stimulus took an astonishingly long time to reach the brain, and it happened that her eyes began to glaze over for no apparent reason in midafter- noon, although the night before they had been fixed on a point on the ceiling as though she were observing a fly. Or else in the midst of a complete silence she might begin to laugh at a joke she just now understood, having listened to it days ago without any sign of under- standing it. When she had no particular reason to be otherwis~, she was completely ladylike. She could never be made to tell how she had got into her line ofwork in the first place. She apparently did not quite remember this herself. But it was clear that she regarded the work of a cabaret singer as a necessary part of life, bound up with everything she had ever heard about greatness in art and artists, so that it seemed to her altogether right, uplifting, and refined to step out every evening onto a tiny stage enveloped in billowing cigar haze to sing songs known for their heartrending appeal. Ifthings needed livening up a bit she did not, of course, shrink from slipping in some- thing gamy now and then, but she was quite sure that the prima donna at the Imperial Opera did exactly the same.
Of course, if the art of trading for money not the entire person, as usual, but only the body must be called prostitution, then Leona oc- casionally engaged in prostitution. But if you have lived for nine years, as she had from the age of sixteen, on the miserable pay of the lowest dives, with your head full ofthe prices ofcostumes and under- wear, the deductions, greediness, and caprices of the owners, the commissions on the food and drink of the patrons warming up to their fun, and the price of a room in the nearby hotel, day after day, including the fights and the business calculations, then everything the layman enjoys as a night on the town adds up to a profession full ofits own l9gic, objectivity, and class codes. Prostitution especially is a matter in which it makes all the difference whether you see it from above or from below.
But even though Leona's attitude toward sexual questions was completely businesslike, she had her romantic side as well. Only with her, everything high-flown, vain, and extravagant, all her feelings of pride, envy, lust, ambition, and self-abandonment, in short, the driv-
ing forces of her personality and upward social mobility, were an- chored by some freak of nature not in the so-called heart but in the gut, the eating processes-which in fact were regularly associated in earlier times and still are today, as can be seen among primitives and the carousing peasantry, who manage to express social standing and all sorts of other human distinctions at their ritual feasts by overeat- ing, with all the side effects. At the tables in the honky-tonk where she worked, Leona did her job; but what she dreamed of was a cava- lier who would sweep her away from all this by means of an affair as long as one of her engagements and allow her to sit grandly in a grand restaurant studying a grand menu. She would then have pre- ferred to eat everything on the menu at once, yet the pain of having to choose was sweetened by the satisfaction of having a chance to show that she knew how one had to choose, how one put together an exquisite repast. Only in the choice of desserts could she let herself go, so that reversing the . usual order she ended up turning dessert into an extensive second supper. With black coffee and stimulating quantities of drink Leona restored her capacities, then egged herself on through a sequence of special treats until her passion was finally quenched. Her body was now so stuffed with choice concoctions that it was ready to split at the seams. She then looked around in indolent triumph and, though never talkative, enjoyed reminiscing about the expensive delights she had consumed. She would speak of Polmone a la Torlogna or Pommes ala Melville with the studied casualness with which some people affectedly let drop the name of a prince or a lord of the same name they have met.
Because public appearances with Leona were not exactly to Ul- rich's taste, he usually moved her feedings to his house, with the ant- lers and the stylish furniture for an audi. ence. Here, however, she felt cheated of her social satisfaction, and whenever the man without qualities tempted her to these private excesses with the choicest fare ever supplied by a restaurant chef she felt ill-used, exactly like a woman who realizes she is not being loved for her soul. She was a beauty, she was a singer, she had no reason to hide, as several dozen men she aroused every evening would have testified. Yet this man, although he wanted to be alone with her, would not even give her the satisfaction of moaning "Leona, you devil, your ass is driving me crazy! " and licking his mustache with desire when he so much as
A Sort ofIntroduction · 19
20 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
looked at her, as she wru; accustomed to expect from her gallants. Although she stuck to him faithfully Le~>na despised him a little, and Ulrich knew it. He also knew well what was expected of him, but the days when he could have brought himself to say such things and still had a mustache were too long gone. To be no longer able to do some- thing one used to be able to do, no matter how foolish it was, is ex- actly as ifapoplexy has struck an arm and a leg. His eyeballs twitched when he looked at her after food and drink had gone to her head. Her beauty could be gently lifted off her. It was the beauty of that duchess whom Scheffel's Saint Ekkehard had carried over the con- vent's threshold, the beauty of the great lady with the falcon on her glove, the beauty of the legendary Empress Elizabeth of Austria, with her heavy crown of braids, a delight for people who were all dead. An~ to put itprecisely, she also brought to mind the divine Juno-not the eternal and imperishable goddess herself, but the quality that a vanished or vanishing era called "Junoesque. " Thus was the dream of life only loosely draped over its substance.
But Leona knew that such elegant entertainment entitled the'host to something more than a guest who was. merely there to be gaped at, even when he asked for nothing more; so she rose to her feet as soon as she was able and serenely broke into full-throated song. Her friend regarded such an evening as a ripped-out page, alive with all sorts of suggestions and ideas b':lt mummified, like everything tom from its context, full of the tyranny of that eternally fixed stance that accounts for the uncanny fascination of tableaux vivants, as though life had suddenly been given a sleeping pill and was now standing there stiff, full of inner meaning, sharply outlined, and yet, in sum, making absolutely no sense at all.
7
IN A WEAK MOMENT ULRICH ACQUIRES A NEW MISTRESS
One morning Ulrich came home looking a mess. His clothes hung in shreds, he had to wrap his bruised head in a cold towel, his watch and wallet were gone. He had no idea whether he had been robbed by the three men with whom he had got into a fight or whether a passing Samaritan had quietly lifted them while he lay unconscious on the pavement. He went to bed, and while his battered limbs, tenderly borne up and enveloped, were restored to being, he mulled over his adventure once more. ·
The three heads had suddenly loomed up in front of him; perhaps he had brushed up against one of the men at that late, lonely hour, for his thoughts had been wandering. But these faces were already set in anger and moved scowling into the circle of the lamplight. At that point he made a mistake. He should have instantly recoiled as if in fear, backing hard into the fellow who had stepped into him, or jabbing an elbow into his stomach, and tried. to escape; he could not take on three strong men single-handed. He resisted the idea that the three faces suddenly glaring at him out ofthe night with rage and scorn were simply after his money, but chose to see them as a spon- taneous materialization of free-floating hostility. Even as the hooli- gans were cursing at him he toyed with the notion that they might not perhaps be hooligans at all but citizens like himself, only slightly tipsy and freed of their inhibitions, whose attention had fastened on his passing form and who now discharged on him the hatred that is always ready and waiting for him or for any stranger, like a thunder- storm in the atmosphere. There were times when he felt something of the sort himself. Regrettably, a great many people nowadays feel antagonistic toward a great many other people. It is a basic trait of civilization that man deeply mistrusts those who are outside his own circle, so it is not only the Teuton who looks down on the Jew but also the soccer player who regards the pianist as an incomprehensible
21
22 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
and inferior creature. Ultimately a thing exists only by virtue of its boundaries, which means by a more or less hostile act against its sur- roundings: without the Pope there would have been no Luther, and without the pagans no Pope, so there is no getting away from the fact that man's deepest social instinct is his antisocial instinct. Not that Ulrich thought this out in such detail, but he knew this condition of vague atmospheric hostility with which the air of our era is charged, and when it suddenly comes to a head in the form of three strangers who lash out like thunder and lightning and then afterward vanish again forever, it is almost a relief.
In any case, facing three such louts, he apparently indulged in too much thinking. For although the first one who jumped him, antici- pated by Ulrich with a blow on the chin, went flying back, the sec- ond, who should have been felled in a flash immediately afterward, was only grazed by Ulrich's fist because a blow from behind with a heavy object had nearly cracked Ulrich's skull. Ulrich's knees buck- led, and he felt a hand grabbing at him; recovering with that almost unnatural lucidity of the body that usually follows an initial collapse, he struck out at the tangle of strange bodies but was hammered down by fists growing larger all the time.
Satisfied with his analysis of what had gone wrong a5 primarily an athlete's slipup-anyone can jump too short on occasion-Ulrich, whose nerves were s~ in excellent shape, quietly fell asleep, with precisely the same delight in the descending spirals of fading con- sciousness that he had dimly felt·during his defeat.
When he woke up again he checked to make sure he had not been seriously hurt, and considered his experience once again. A brawl al- ways leaves a bad taste in the mouth, that ofan overhasty intimacy, as it were, and leaving aside the fact that he had been the one attacked, Ulrich somehow felt that he had behaved improperly. But in what way? Close by those streets where there is a policeman every three hundred paces to avenge the slightest offense against law and order lie other streets that call for the same strength of body and mind as a jungle. Mankind produces Bibles and guns, tuberculosis and tuber- culin. It is democratic, with kings and nobles; builds churches and, against the churches, universities; turns cloisters into barracks, but assigns field chaplains to the barracks. It naturally arms hoodlums with lead-filled rubber truncheons to beat a fellow man within an
inch of his life and then provides featherbeds for the lonely, mis- treated body, like the one now holding Ulrich as if filled with respect and consideration. It is the old story ofthe contradictions, the incon- sistency, and the imperfection of life. It makes us smile or sigh. But not Ulrich. He hated this mixture of resignation and infatuation in regard to life that makes most people put up with its inconsistencies and inadequacies as a doting maiden aunt puts up with a young nephew's boorishness. Still, he did not immediately leap out of bed when it looked as though he were profiting from the disorderliness of human affairs by lingering there, because in many ways it is only a premature compromise with one's conscience at the expense of the general cause, a short circuit, an evasion into the private sphere, when one avoids doing wrong and does the right thing for one's own person instead of working to restore order in the whole scheme of things. In fact, after his involuntary experience Ulrich saw desper- ately little value even in doing away with guns here, with monarchs there, in making some lesser or greater progress in cutting down on stupidity and viciousness, since the measure of all that is nasty and bad instantly fills up again, as if one leg of the world always slips back when the other pushes forward. One had to find the cause of this, the secret mechanism behind it! How incomparably more important that would be than merely being a good person in accordance with ob- solescent moral principles, and so in matters of morality Ulrich was attracted more to service on the general staff than to the everyday heroism of doing good.
At this point he went back in his mind to the sequel of last night's . adventure. As he regained his senses from the beating he had suf- fered, a cab stopped at the curb; the driver tried to lift up the wounded stranger by the shoulders, and a lady was bending over him with an angelic expression on her face. This child's picture-bo. ok vi- sion, natural to moments of consciousness rising from the depths, soon gave way to reality: the presence of a woman busying herself with him had the effect on Ulrich of a whiff of cologne, superficial and quickening, so that he also instantly knew that he had not been too badly damaged, and tried to rise to his feet with good grace. In this he did not succeed as smoothly as he would have liked, and the lady anxiqusly offered to drive him somewhere to get help. Ulrich asked to be taken home, and as he really still looked dazed and help-
A Sort ofIntroduction · 23
24 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
less, she granted his request. Once inside the cab, he quickly recov- ered his poise. He felt something maternally sensuous beside him, a fine cloud of solicitous idealism, in the warmth of which tiny crystals of doubt were already hatching, filling the air like softly falling snow and generating the fear of some impulsive act as he felt himself becoming a man again. He told his story, and the beautiful woman, only slightly younger than himself, around thirty, perhaps, lamented what brutes people were and felt terribly sorry for him.
Ofcourse he now launched into a lively defense ofhis experience, which was not, as he explained to the surprised motherly beauty, to be judged solely by its outcome. The fascination of such a fight, he said, was the rare chance it offered in civilian life to perform so many · varied, vigorous, yet precisely coordinated movements in response to barely perceptible signals at a speed that made conscious control quite impossible. Which is why, as every athlete knows, training must stop several days before a contest, for no other reason than that the muscles and nerves must be given time to work out the final coordi- nation among themselves, leaving the will, purpose, and conscious- ness out ofit and without anysayin the matter. Then, at the moment of. action, Ulrich went on, muscles and nerves leap and fence with the "I"; but this "1"-the whole body, the soul, the will, the central and entire person as legally distinguished from all others-is swept along by his muscles and nerves like Europa riding the Bull. When- ever it does not work out this way, if by some unlucky chance the merest ray of reflection hits this darkness, the whole effort is invari- ably doomed.
Ulrich had talked himself into a state of excitement. Basically, he now maintained, this experience of almost total ecstasy or transcen- dence of the conscious mind is akin to experiences now lost but known in the past to the mystics ofall religions, which makes it a kind o f c o n t e m p o r a r y s u b s t i t u t i o n f o r a n e t e r n a l h u m a n n e e d . E v e n i f i t is not a very good substitute it is better than nothing, and boxing or similar kinds of sport that organize this principle into a rational· sys- tem are therefore a species of theology, although one cannot expect this to be generally understood as yet.
Ulrich's lively speech to his companion was probably inspired, in part, by vanity, to make her forget the sorry state in which she had found him. Under these circumstances it was hard for her to tell
whether he was being serious or sardonic. In any case it might have seemed quite natural, perhaps even interesting, to her that he should tzy to explain theology in terms of sport, since sport is a timely topic while nobody really knows anything about theology, although there were undeniably still a great many churches around. All in all, she decided that by some lucky chance she had come to the rescue of a brilliant man, even though she did wonder, betweenwhiles, whether he might have suffered a concussion.
Ulrich, who now wanted to say something comprehensible, took the opportunity to point out in passing that even love must be re- garded as one of the religious and dangerous experiences, because it lifts people out of the arms of reason and sets them afloat with no ground under their feet.
True enough, the lady said, but sports are so rough.
So they are, Ulrich hastened to concur, sports are rough. One could say they are the precipitations of a most finely dispersed gen- eral hostility, which is deflected into athletic games. Of course, one could also say the opposite: sports bring people together, promote the team spirit and all that-which basically proves only that brutal- ity and love are no farther apart than one wing of a big, colorful, si- lent bird is from the other.
He had put the emphasis on the wings and on that bright, mute bird-a notion that did not make much sense but was charged with some of that vast sensuality with which life simultaneously satisfies all the rival contradictions in its measureless body. He now noticed that his neighbor had no idea what he was talking about, and that the soft snowfall she was diffusing inside the cab had grown thicker. So he turned to face her completely and asked whether she was perhaps repelled by such talk ofphysical matters? The doings ofthe body, he went on, were really too much in fashion, and they included a feeling of horror: because a body in perfect training has the upper hand, it responds automatically in its finely tuned way to every stimulus, so surely that its owner is left with an uncanny sensation of having to watch helplessly as his character runs off with some part of his anat- omy, as it were.
It indeed seemed that this question touched the young woman deeply; she appeared excited by his words, was breathing hard, and cautiously moved away a little. A mechanism similar to the one he
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26 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
had just described-heavy breathing, a flushed skin, a stronger beat- ing ofthe heart, and perhaps some other symptoms as well-seemed to have been set off inside her. B~t just then the cab stopped at Ul- rich's gate, and there was only time for him to ask with a smile for his rescuer's address so that he could thank her properly. To his aston- ishment, this favor was not granted. And so the black wrought-iron gate banged shut behind a baffied stranger. What she presumably saw were the trees of an old park rising tall and dark in the light of electric streetlights and lamps· going on in windows, and the low wings of a boudoir-like, dainty little chateau spreading out on a well- shorn emerald lawn, and a glimpse of an interior hung with pictures and lined with colorful bookshelves, as her erstwhile companion dis- appeared into an unexpectedly delightful setting.
So concluded the events oflast night, and as Ulrich was still think- ing how unpleasant it would have been if he had had to spend more time on yet another of those love affairs he had long since grown tired of, a lady was announced who would not give her name and who now entered his room heavily veiled. It was she herself, who had not wanted to give him her name and address, but had now come in per- son to cany on the adventure in her own romantically charitable fashion, on the pretext of being concerned about his health.
Two weeks later Bonadea had been his mistress for fourteen days.
8
KAKANIA
At the age when one still attaches great importance to everything connected with tailors and barbers and enjoys looking in th~·mirror, one also imagines a place where one would like to spend one's life, or at least where it would be smart to stay even if one did not care for it too much personally. For some time now such an obsessive day- dream has been a kind of super-American city where everyone
rushes about, or stands still, with a stopwatch in hand. Air and earth form an anthill traversed, level upon level, by roads live with traffic. Air trains, ground trains, underground trains, people mailed through tubes special-delivery, and chains of cars race along horizontally, while express elevators pump masses of people vertically from one traffic level to another; at the junctions, people leap from one vehicle to the next, instantly sucked in and snatched away by the rhythm of it, which makes a syncope, a pause, a little gap of twenty seconds during which a word might be hastily exchanged with someone else. Questions and answers synchronize like meshing gears; everyone has only certain fixed tasks to do; professions are located in special areas and organized by group; meals are taken on the run. Other parts of the city are centers of entertainment, while still others contain the towers where one finds wife, family, phonograph, and soul. Tension and relaxation; activity and love, are precisely timed and weighed on the basis of exhaustive laboratory studies. If anything goes wrong in any of these activities the whole thing is simply dropped; something else or sometimes a better way will be found or someone else will find the way one has missed; there's nothing wrong with that, while on the other hand nothing is so wasteful of the social energies as the presumption that an individual is called upon to cling for all he is worth to some specific personal goal. In a community coursed through by energies every road leads to a worthwhile goal, provided one doesn't hesitate or reflect too long. Targets are short-term, but since life is short too, results are maximized, which is all people need to be happy, because the soul is formed by what you accomplish, whereas what you desire without achieving it merely warps the soul. Happiness depends very little on what we want, but only on achiev- ing whatever it is. Besides, zoology teaches that a number of flawed individuals can often add up to a brilliant social unit.
It is by no means certain that this is the way it has to be, but such ideas belong to those travel fantasies reflecting our sense ofincessant movement that carries us along. These fantasies are superficial, rest- less, and brief. God knows what will really happen. Presumably it is up to us to make a new start at any given moment and come up with a plan for us all. If all that high-speed business doesn't suit us, let's do something else! For instance, something quite slow-moving, with a veiled, billowing, sea-slug-like, mysterious happiness and the deep,
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28 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
cow-eyed gaze the ancient Greeks admired. But that is not how it really is; we are at the mercy ofour condition. We travel in it day and night, doing whatever else we do, shaving, eating, making love, read- ing books, working at our jobs, as though those four walls around us were standing still; but the uncanny fact is that those walls are mov- ing along without our noticing it, casting their rails ahead like long, groping, twisted antennae, going we don't know where. Besides, we would like to think of ourselves as having a hand in making our time what it is. It is a very uncertain part to play, and sometimes, looking out the window after a fairly long pause, we find that the landscape has changed. What flies past flies past, it can't be helped, but with all our devotion to our role an uneasy feeling grows on us that we have traveled past our goal or got on a wrong track. Then one day the vio- lent need is there: Get off the train! Jump clear! A homesickness, a longing to be stopped, to cease evolving, to stay put, to return to the
point before the thrown switch put us on the wrong track. And in the good old da~ when the Austrian Empire still existed, one could in such a case get off the train of time, get on an ordinary train of an ordinary railroad, and travel back to one's home.
There, in Kakania, that state since vanished that no one under~ stood, in many ways an exemplary state, though unappreciated, there was a tempo too, but not too much tempo. Whenever one thought of that country from someplace abroad, the memory that hovered before one's eyes was of white, wide, prosperous-looking roads dat- ing from the era of foot marches and mail coaches, roads that criss- crossed the country in every direction like rivers of order, like ribbons of bright military twill, the paper-white arm of the adminis- tration holding all the provinces in its embrace. And what provinces they were! Glaciers and sea, Karst limestone and Bohemian fields of grain, nights on the Adriatic chirping with restless cicadas, and Slovakian villages where the smoke rose from chimneys as from up- turned nostrils while the village cowered between tw~ small hills as if the earth had parted its lips to warm itS child between them. Of course cars rolled on these roads too, but not too many! The con- quest of the air was being prepared here too, but not too intensively. A ship would now and then be sent off to South America or East Asia, but not too often. There was no ambition for world markets or world power. Here at the very center of Europe, where the world's
old axes crossed, words such as "colony" and "overseas" sounded like something quite untried and remot~. There was some show of lux- ury, but by no means as in such overrefmed ways as the French. Peo- ple went in for sports, but not as fanatically as the English. Ruinous sums of money were spent on the army, but only just enough to se- cure its position as the second-weakest among the great powers. The capital, too, was somewhat smaller than all the other biggest cities of the world, but considerably bigger than a mere big city. And the country's administration was conducted in an enlightened, unobtru- sive manner, with all sharp edges cautiously smoothed over, by the best bureaucracy in Europe, which could be faulted only in that it regarded genius, and any brilliant individual initiative not backed by noble birth or official status, as insolent and presumptuous. But then, who welcomes interference from unqualified outsiders? And in Ka- kania, at least, it would only happen that a genius would be regarded as a lout, but never was a mere lout taken-as happens elsewhere- for a genius. ·
All in all, how many amazing things might be said about this van- ished Kakania! Everything and every person in it, for instance, bore the label of kaiserlich-koniglich (Imperial-Royal) or kaiserlich und koniglich (Imperial and Royal), abbreviated as "k. k. " or "k. &k. ," but to be sure which institutions and which persons were to be desig- nated by "k. k. " and which by "k. &k. " reqUired the mastery of a secret science. On paper it was called the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, but in conversation it was called Austria, a name solemnly abjured offi- cially while stubbornly retained emotionally, just to show that feel- ings are quite as important as constitutional law and that regulations are one thing but real life is something else entirely. Liberal in its constitution, it was administered clerically. The government was clerical, but everyday life was liberal. All citizens were equal before the law, but not everyon_e was a citizen. There was a Parliament, which asserted its freedom so forcefully that it was usually kept shut; there was also an Emergency Powers Act that enabled the govern- ment to get along without Parliament, but then, when everyone had happily settled for absolutism, the Crown decreed that it was time to go back to parliamentary rule. The country was full of such goings- on, among them the sort of nationalist movements that rightly at- tracted so much attention in Europe and are so thoroughly
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30 · T-HE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
misunderstood today. They were so violent that they jammed the machinery of government and brought it to a dead stop several times a year, but in the intervals and during the deadlocks people got along perfectly well and acted as if nothing had happened. And in fact, nothing really had happened. It was only that everyone's natural re- sentment of everyone else's efforts to get ahead, a resentment we all feel nowadays, had crystallized earlier in Kakania, where it can be said to have assumed the form of a sublimated ceremonial rite, which could have had a great future had its development not been cut prematurely short by a catastrophe.
For it was not only the resentment of one's fellow citizens that had become intensified there into a strong sense of community; even the lack of faith in oneself and one's own fate took on the character of a deep self-certainty. In this country one acted-sometimes to the highest degree of passion and its consequences--differently from the way one thought, or one thought differently from the way one acted. Uninitiated observers have mistaken this for charm, or even for a weakness ofwhat they thought to be the Austrian character. But they were wrong; it is always wrong to explain what happens in a country by the character of its inhabitants. For the inhabitant of a country has at least nine characters: a professional, a national, a civic, a class, a geographic, a sexual, a conscious, an unconscious, and pos- sibly even a private character to bo~t. He unites them in himself, but they dissolve him, so that he is really nothing more than a small basin hollowed out by these many streamlets that trickle into it and drain out of it again, to join other such rills in filling some other basin. Which is why every inhabitant ofthe earth also has a tenth character that is nothing else than the passive fantasy of spaces yet unfilled. This permits a person all but one thing: to take seriously what his at
least nine other characters do and what happens to them; in other words, it prevents precisely what should be his true fulfillment. This interior spac~admittedly hard to describe-is of a different shade and shape in Italy from what it is in England, because everything that stands out in relief against it is of a different shade and shape; and yet it is in both places the same: an e~pty, invisible space, with reality standing inside it like a child's toy town deserted by the imagination.
Insofar as this can become visible to all eyes it had happened in Kakania, making Kakania, unbeknownst to the world, the most pro-
gressive state of all; a state just barely able to go along with itself. One enjoyed a negative freedom there, always with the sense of insuffi- cient grounds for one's own existence, and lapped around by the great fantasy of all that had not happened or at least not yet hap- pened irrevocably as by the breath of those oceans from which man- kind had once emerged.
. Events that might be regarded as momentous elsewhere were here introduced with a casual "Es ist passiert . . . " - a peculiar form of "it happened" unknown elsewhere in German or any other lan- guage, whose breath could transform facts and blows of fate into something as light as thistledown or thought. Perhaps, despite so much that can be said against it, Kakania was, after all, a country for geniuses; which is probably what brought it to its ruin.
9
THE FIRST OF THREE ATTEMPTS TO BECOME A GREA T MAN
This man who had returned could not remember any time in his life when he had not been fired with the will to become a great man; it was a desire Ulrich seemed to have been born with. Such a dream may of course betray vanity and stupidity, but it is no less true that it is a fine and proper ambition without which there probably would not be very many great men in the world.
The trouble was that he knew neither how to become one nor what a great man is. In his school days his model had been Napoleon, partly because of a boy's natural admiration for the criminal and partly because his teachers had made a point of calling this tyrant, who had tried to tum Europe upside down, the greatest evildoer in history. This led di~ectlyto Ulrich's joining the cavalry as an ensign as soon as he was able to escape from school. The chances are that even then, had anyone asked him why he chose this profession, he would
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32 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
no longer have replied: "In order to become a tyrant. " But such wishes are Jesuits: Napoleon's genius began to develop only after he became a general. But how could Ulrich, as an ensign, have con- vinced his colonel that becoming a general was the necessary next step for him? Even at squadron drill it seemed often enough that he and the colonel did not see eye-to-eye. Even so, Ulrich would not have cursed the parade ground-that peaceful common on which pretensions are indistinguishable from vocations-had he not been so ambitious. Pacifist euphemisms such as "educating the people to bear arms" meant nothing to him in those days; instead, he surren- dered himself to an impassioned nostalgia for heroic conditions of lordliness, power, and pride. He rode in steeplechases, fought duels, and recognized only three kinds of people: officers, women, and civilians, the last-named a physically underdeveloped and spiritually contemptible class of humanity whose wives and daughters were the legitimate prey of army officers. He indulged in a splendid pessi- mism: it seemed to him that because the soldier's profession was a sharp, white-hot instrument, this instrument must be used to sear and cut the world for its salvation.
As luck would have it he came to no harm, but one day he made a discovery. At a social gathering he P,ad a slight misunderstanding with a noted financier, which Ulrich was going to clear up in his usual dashing style; but it turned out that there are men in civilian clothes also who know how to protect their women. The financier had a word with the War Minister, whom he knew personally, and soon thereaf- ter Ulrich had a lengthy interview with his colonel, in which the dif- ference between an archduke and a simple army officer was made clear to him. From then on the profession of warrior lost its charm for him. He had expected to find himselfon a stage ofworld-shaking adventures with himself as hero, but now saw nothing but a drunken young man shouting on a wide, empty square, answered only by the paving stones. When he realized this, he took his leave of this thank- less career, in which he had just been made lieutenant, and quit the service.
10
THE SECOND A TTEMPT. NOTES TOW ARD A MORALITY FOR THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
But when Ulrich switched from the cavalry to civil engineering, he was merely swapping horses. The new horse had steel legs and ran ten times faster.
In Goethe's world the clattering of looms was still considered a disturbing noise. In Ulrich's time people were just beginning to dis- cover the music of machine shops, steam hammers, and factory si- rens. One must not believe that people were quick to notice that a skyscraper is bigger than a man on a horse. On the contrary, even today those who want to make an impression will mount not a sky- scraper but a high horse; they are swift like the wind and sharp- sighted, not like a giant refractor but like an eagle. Their feelings have not yet learned to make use oftheir intellect; the difference in devel- opment between these two faculties is almost as great as that between the vermiform appendix and the cerebral cortex. So it was no slight advantage to realize, as Ulrich did when barely out ofhis teens, that a man's conduct with respect to what seem to him the Higher Things in life is far more old-fashioned than his machines are.
From the moment Ulrich set foot in engineering school, he was feverishly partisan. Who still needed the Apollo Belvedere when he had the new forms of a turbodynamo or the rhythmic movements of a steam engine's pistons before his eyes! Who could still be cap- tivated by the thousand years of chatter about the meaning of good and evil when it turns out that they are not constants at all but func- tional values, so that the goodness ofworks depends on historical cir- cumstances, while human goodness depends on the psychotechnical skills with which people's qualities are exploited? Looked at from a technical point ofview, the world is simply ridiculous: impractical in all that concerns human relations, and extremely uneconomic and imprecise in its methods; anyone accustomed to solving his problems with a slide rule cannot take seriously a good half of the assertions
33
34 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
people make. The slide rule is two systems of,numbers and lines combined with incredible ingenuity; the slide rule is two white- enameled sticks of flat trapezoidal cross section that glide past each other, with whose help the most complex problems can be solved in an instant without needlessly losing a thought; the slide rule is a small symbol carried in one's breast pocket and sensed as a hard white line over one's heart. Ifyou own a slide rule and someone comes along with big statements or great emotions, you say: "Just a moment, please-let's first work out the margin for error, and the most- probable values. "
This was without doubt a powerful view ofwhat it meant to be an engineer. It could serve as the frame for a charming future self- portrait, showing a man with resolute features, a shag pipe clenched between his teeth, a tweed cap on his head, traveling in superb riding boots between Cape Town and Canada on daring missio~s for his business. Between trips there would always be time to draw on his technical knowledge for advice on world organization and manage- ment, or time to formulate aphorisms like the one by Emerson that ought to hang over every workbench: "Mankind walks the earth as a prophecy of the future, and all its deeds are tests and experiments, for every deed can be surpassed by the next. " Actually, Ulrich had written· this himself, putting together several of Emerson's pronouncements.
It is hard to say why engineers don't quite live up to this Vision. Why, for instance, do theyso often wear a watch chain slung on a steep, lopsided curve from the vest pocket to a button higher up, or across the stomach in one high and two low loops, as if it were a met- rical foot in a poem? Why do they fav~r tiepins topped with stag's teeth or tiny horseshoes? Why do they wear suits constructed like the early stages o f the automobile? And why, fmally, do they never speak of anything but their profession, or if they do speak of something else, why do they have that peculiar, stiff, remote, superficial manner that never goes deeper inside than the' epiglottis? Of course this is not true of all of them, far from it, but it is true of many, and it was true ofall those Ulrich met the first time he went to work in a factory office, and it was true of those he met the second time. They all- turned out to be men fmnly tied to their drawing boards, who loved their profession and were wonderfully efficient at it. But any sugges-
tion that they might apply their daring ideas to themselves instead of to their machines would have taken them aback, much as if they had been asked to use a hammer for the unnatural purpose of killing a man.
And so Ulrich's second and more mature attempt to become a man of stature, by ~y of technology, came quickly to an end.
11
THE MOST IMPORTANT ATTEMPT OF ALL
Thinking over his time up to that point today, Ulrich might shake his head in wonder, as if someone were to tell him about his previous incarnations; but his third effort was different. An engineer may un- derstandably become absorbed in his specialty instead of giving him- self up to the freedom and vastness of the world of thought, even though his machines are delivered to the ends of the earth, for he is no more called upon to adapt the daring and innovative soul of his technology to his private soul than a machine can be expected to apply to itselfthe differential calculus upon which it is based. But the same cannot be said of mathematics, which is the new method of thought itself, the mind itself, the very wellspring of the times and the primal source of an in9redible transformation.
If it is the fulfillment of man's primordial dreams to be able to fly, travel with the fish, drill our way beneath the bodies of towering mountains, send messages with godlike speed, see the invisible and hear the distant speak, hear the voices of the dead, be miraculously cured while asleep; see with our own eyes how we will look twenty years after our death, learn in flickering nights. thousands of things above and below this earth no one ever knew before; if ,light, warmth, power, pleasure, comforts, are man's primordial dreams, then present-day research is not only science but sorcery, spells woven from the highest powers of heart and brain, forcing God to
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36 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
open one fold after another of his c:loak; a religion whose dogma is permeated and sustained by the hard, courageous, flexible, razor- cold, razor-keen logic of mathematics.
Of course there is no denying that all these primordial dreams ap- pear, in the opinion of nonmathematicians, to have been suddenly realized in a form quite different from the original fantasy. Baron Miinchhausen's post hom was more beautiful than our canned music, the Seven-League Boots more beautiful than a car, Oberon's kingdom lovelier than a railway tunnel, the magic root of the man- drake better than a telegraphed image, eating ofone's mother's heart and then understanding birds more beautiful than an ethologic study of a bird's vocalizing. We have gained reality and lost dream. No more lounging under a tree and peering at the sky between one's big and second toes; there's work to be done. To be efficient, one cannot be hungry and dreamy but must eat steak and keep moving. It is ex- actly as though the old, inefficient breed of humanity had fallen asleep on an anthill and found, when the new breed awoke, that the ants had crept into its bloodstream, making it move frantically ever since, unable to shake off that rotten feeling of antlike industry. There is really no need to belabor the point, since it is obvious to most of us these days that mathematics has taken possession, like a demon, of every aspect of our lives. Most of us may not believe in the story of a Devil to whom one can sell one's soul, but those who must know something about the soul (considering that as clergymen, his- torians, and artists they draw a good income from it) all testify that
the soul has been destroyed by mathematics and that mathematics is the source of an evil intelligence that while making man the lord of the earth has also made him the slave of his machines. The inner drought, the dreadful blend of acuity in matters of detail and indif- ference toward the whole, man's monstrous abandonment in a desert of details, his restlessness, malice, unsurpassed callousness, money- grubbing, coldness, and violence, all so characteristic of our times, are by these accounts solely the consequence of damage done to the soul by keen logical thinking! Even back when Ulrich ftrst turned to mathematics there were already those who predicted the collapse of European civilization because no human faith, no love, no simplicity, no goodness, dwelt any longer in man. These people had all, typi- cally, been poor mathematicians as young people and at school. This
later put them in a position to prove that mathematics, the mother of natural science and grandmother oftechnology, was also the primor- dial mother of the spirit that eventually gave rise to poison gas and warplanes.
The only people who actually lived in ignorance of these dangers were the mathematicians themselves and their disciples the scien- tists, whose souls were as unaffected by all this as if they were racing cyclists pedaling away for dear life, blind to everything in the world except the back wheel of the rider ahead of them.