No More Learning

Let's just start with me and Lucy: that was complicated in an exciting way. I was naturally worried . about Papa, whose infatuation was on the point of ruining the whole family. But I was also curious about ho_w this kind of thing happens. They were both out of their minds. Lucy's friendship for me was ofcourse mixed up with the feeling that she had a man for a lover whom I still obediently called 'Papa. ' She was more than a little. proud, but at the same time it made her terribly ashamed to face me. I don't think the old castle had sheltered such complications under its roofsince it was built All day long Lucy hung around Papa when- ever she could, and then at night she came to me in the tower to confess. I slept in the tower, and we had the lights on almost all night long. ''
"I:Iow far did Lucy actually go with your father? ''
"That was the only thing I could never find out. But just think of those summer nights! The owls whimpering, the night moaning, and when it all got too spooky we both got into my bed so we could go on talking. We couldn't see how a man in the grip of so fatal a passion could do anything but shoot himself. We were really waiting for it to happen from one day to the next-" ,
"It strikes me," UlriCh interrupted, "that nothing muCh had really happened between them. "
"That's what I think too-not everything. Yet tillngs did happen. You'll see in a minute. All of a sudden, Lucy had to leave because her father arrived unexpectedly and took her off on a trip to Spain. You should have seen Papa then, when he was left on his own. I think there were times he came aWfully close to strangling Mama. He was off on horseback from dawn to dusk, with a folding easel strapped behind his saddle, but he never painted a stroke, and he never touChed a brush at home either. The point is, he usually paints like a robot, but in those days rd find him sitting in one of those huge, empty rooms with a book he hadn't even opened. He would some- times brood like this for hours, then he'd get up and do the same thing in some other room or in the garden, sometimes all day long. Well, he was an old man, and youth had left him in the lurch; it's understandable, isn't it? And I suppose the image of Lucy and me, seeing us all the time as two girlfriends with their arms around each other's waists, chatting confidentially, must have sprouted in him then-like some wild seed. Perhaps he knew that Lucy always used to join me in the tower. So one night, around eleven, all the lights in the castle were. out, and there he was. That was quite something! " Clarisse was carried away with the import of her own story. "You hear this tapping and scraping on the stairs, and don't know what to make of it; then you hear the clumsy fiddling with the door handle, and the door opening spookily-"
"Why didn't you call out for help? "
"That's what was so peculiar about it. I knew from the first sound who it was. He must have stood still in the doorway, because I didn't hear anything for quite a while. He was probably frightened too. Then he slowly, carefully shut the door and whispered my name. I was absolutely stunned. I had no intention ofanswering him, but this weird thing happened: from somewhere deep inside me, as though I
Pseudoreality Prevails · 31 7
318 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
were a deep space, came a sound like a whimper. Have you ever heard of such a thing? ''
"No. Go on! " ·
"Well, that's all; the next instant he was clutching at me with infi- nite despair; he almost fell on my bed, and his head was lying on the pillow beside mine. "
"Tears? "
"Dry spasms. An old body, abandoned. I understood that at once. Oh, I tell you, ifit were possible to tell afterward all one felt at such a moment, it would be something really enormous. I think he was be- side himself with fury against the whole world of propriety, because of what it had made him miss. Suddenly I sense that he is himself again, and I know right away, although it's pitch-dark, that he's abso- lutely convulsed with a ruthless hunger for me. I know there is not going to be any mercy or consideration for me; there hasn't been a sound since that moan of mine; my body was blazing dry and his was like a piece ofpaper one sets at the edge ofa fire. He became incred- ibly light. I felt his arm snaking down my body, away from my shoulder. And now there's something I want to ask you. It's why I came. . . . "
Clarisse broke off.
"What? You haven't asked anything! " Ulrich prompted her after a short pause.
"No. There's something else I have to say first: The idea that he must be taking my keeping so still as a sign of consent made me loathe myself. Yet I lay there, my mind a blank, petrified with fear. What do you make of that? "
"I don't know what to say. "
"With one hand he kept stroking my face; the other wandered around. Trembling, pretending it wasn't up to anything, passing over my breast like a kiss, then, as if waiting, listening for some response. Then finally it moved-well, you know, and at the same time his. face sought mine. But at that point I pulled myself away with all my strength and turned on my side; and again that sound came "out of my chest, a sound I didn't know, something halfway between pleading and moaning. You see, I have a birthmark, a black medallion-"
"And what did your father do? " Ulrieh interrupted coolly.
But Clarisse refused to be interrupted. "Right here," she said with
a tense smile, pointing through her dress to a spot inward from her hip. "This is how far he got, to the medallion. This medallion has a magic power, or anyway, there's something special about it. "
Suddenly the blood rushed to her face. Ulrich's silence had so- bered her and dissipated the idea that had kept her under its spell. With an embarrassed smile she quickly finished:
"My father? He instantly sat up. I couldn't see what was going on in his face; embarrassment, I suppose. Maybe gratitude. After all, I had saved him at the last moment. You must understand: an old man, and a young girl has the strength to do that! He must have thought I was st_range somehow, because he pressed my hand quite tenderly, and stroked my head twice with Qis other hand. Then he went away, without a word. So I hope you'll do what you can for him? After all, I had to tell you, so you'd understand. "
Trim and correct, in a tailored dress she wore only when she came into town, she stood there, ready to leave, and held out her hand to say good-bye.
THE COMMITTEE TO DRAFT GUIDELINES FOR HIS MAJESTY's SEVENTIETH JUBILEE CELEBRA TION OPENS ITS FIRST SESSION
About her letter to Count Leinsdorf and her request that Ulrich save Moosbrugger, Clarisse had not said a word; she seemed to have for- gotten all that. But for Ulrich, too, some time had to pass before he remembered it. For Diotima had at last come to the point in her preparations where, within the framework of the "Enquiry to Draft Guidelines and Ascertain the Wishes of All Sectors of the Population in Connection with His Majesty's Seventieth Jubilee Celebration," a meeting of the special "Committee to Draft Guidelines in Connec- tion with His Maj~sty's Seventieth Jubilee Celebration" could be
Pseudoreality Prevails · 319
320 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES \-
·called, whose leadership Diotima had personally reseiVed for her- self. His Grace had composed the invitation himself, Tuzzi had ed- ited it, and Arnheim had been shown Tuzzi's suggestions before it Was finally approved. ln spite of all that, it contained everything that weighed on His Grace's mind.
"What brings us together in this meeting," it read, "is our mutual understanding that a powerful demonstration arising from the midst of the people must not be left to chance, but calls for a· farsighted influence from a quarter commanding a broad, panoramic view, that is, an influence from above. " This was followed by "the extremely rare occasion of this seventieth anniversary of an accession to the throne so richly blessed," the "grateful throng of peoples," the Em- peror of Peace, the lack of political maturity, the Glob~ Year of Austria, and finally the appeal to "Property and Culture" ~o fashion all this into a glorious manifestation of the True Austrian spirit, but only after giving it the most painstaking consideration.
From Diotima's lists, the groups for Art, Literature, and Science were chosen and with great care and effort augmented, while, on the other hand, of those who might be allowed to attend although not expected to take an active part, only a very small number had re- mained after the most thorough sifting. But the number of invited guests was still so large that there could be no question of a regular sit-down dinner at the green baize table; the only alternative was an informal evening reception with a cold buffet. The guests sat or stood however it could be arranged, and. Diotima's tooms resembled the encampment of a spiritual army, supplied with sandwiches, pastries, wines, liqueurs, and tea in such quantities as could only have been made possible by special budgeting concessions Tuzzi granted to his wife-with, it must be added, not a word of protest, from which it may be inferred that he proposed to make use of new, intellectual methods of diplomacy.
The handling of such a throng made great demands on Diotima as a hostess, and she might perhaps have taken exception to many things had her head not resembled a superb fruit bowl with words constantly falling over the edge of its superabundance; words with which the lady of the house welcomed each arriving guest, enchant- ing him with detailed knowledge ofhis latest work. Her preparations for this had been extraordinary and could only have been accom-
plished with Arnheim's help; he had placed his private secretary at her disposal to arrange the material and make extracts of the most important texts. The splendid slag left behind by this volcanic en- deavor was a large library bought with funds Count Leinsdorf had provided to start the Parallel Campaign, and together with Diotima's own books they had been set up as the only decoration in the last of the emptied rooms. The flowered wallpaper, or what could still be seen of it, betrayed the boudoir, a stimulus to flattering reflections about its occupant. This library turned out to h~ve other advantages as well: evexy one of the invitees, after having been graciously greeted by Diotima, wandered aimlessly through the rooms and was drawn without fail to the wall of books at the far end as soon as he caught sight of it. A cluster of scrutinizing backs constantly rose and sank before it, like bees in front of a flowering hedge, and even if the cause was only the noble curiosity evexy creative person feels for book collections, delicious contentment seeped into the marrow of his bones when the viewer finally discovered his own works, and the patriotic campaign benefited from it.
Diotima at first allowed the assembly to drift, intellectually, at its own sweet will, though she made a point of assuring the poets in par- ticular that all life, even the world of business, rested on an inner poetxy if one "regarded it magnanimously. " This surprised no one, but it turned out that most of those singled out for such confidences had come on the assumption that they were expected to launch the Parallel Campaign with some briefwords ofadvice-somewhere be- tween five and forty-five minutes' worth-which, if heeded, would guarantee its success, even if supsequent speakers squandered time with pointless and misguided suggestions. This almost drove Di- otima to tears at first, and it was only with great effort that she kept her unruffied look, for she realized that each one of them was saying something different and she would never be able to pull it all to- gether. She was still inexperienced in coping with such high concen- trations ofsuperior minds, and since so universal a gathering ofgreat men would not come about again so easily, it could only be assimi- lated laboriously and methodically, step by step. There are many things in the world, incidentally, that taken singly mean something quite different to people from what they mean in the mass. Water, for instance, is less of a pleasure in excessive than in small doses, by
Pseudoreality Prevails · 321
3. 2~ • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
exactly the difference between drowning and drinking, and the same can be said of poisons, amusements, leisure, piano playing, ideals, indeed probably everything, so that what something is depends on its degree ofdensity and other circumstances. It is only necessary to add that even genius is no exception, lest the following impressions ap- pear to suggest some sort of denigration of the eminent personages who had placed themselves so selflessly at Oiotima's disposal.
For even at this flrst gathering one could receive the impression that every great mind feels extremely insecure as soon as it leaves the refuge of its treetop aerie and has to make itself understood on com- mon ground. The extraordinary language that passed over Diotima's head like some movement in the skies as long as she conversed alone with one of the powerful turned, as soon as they were joined by a third or a fourth person and several lines of discourse got entangled in contradiction, into a distressing inability to arrive at any kind of order. Whoever does not shrink from such similes might try to visual- ize a swan that, after its proud flight, waddles along on the ground. But on longer acquaintance this, too, becomes quite understandable. The lives of great minds today are founded on a certain "no one knows what for. " They enjoy great veneration, expressed on their fif- tieth to their hundredth birthdays, or on the tenth anniversary of some agricultural college that garlands itself with honorary doctor- ates, or on various other occasions when speeches must be made about the country's cultUral treasures. We have a history of great men, and we regard it as an institution that belongs to us, just like prisons or the army; having it·means we have to have people to put into it. And so, with a certain automatism inherent in such social needs, we always pick the next in line and shower him with the hon- ors ripe to be handed out. But this veneration is not quite sincere; at its base lies the gaping, generally accepted conviction that there is really not a single person who deserves it, and it is hard to tell whether the mouth opens to acclaim someone or to yawn. To call a man a genius nowadays, with the unspoken gloss that there is really no longer any such thing, smacks of some cult of the dead, something like hysterical love making a great to-do for no other reason than that there is no real feeling present.
Fpr sensitive people this is of course not a pleasant situation, and they try 'to get rid of it in various ways. Some are driven in their de-
spair to get rich by learning to. exploit the demand not only for great minds but also for wild men, profound novelists, puffed-up lovers, and leaders of the new generation; others wear an invisible royal crown on their heads that they will not remove under any circum- stances, prepared with embittered modesty not to expect the value of their creation to he seen in its true light before two to ten centuries have passed. They all feel that it is a terrible tragedy for the nation that its truly great men can never become a part of its living culture because they are too far ahead of it.
It must be emphasized, however, that the minds under considera- tion so far have been those of an aesthetic bent, since there is a con- siderable difference in the ways the mind relates to the world. While the aesthetic mind wants the same sort of admiration accorded to Goethe and . Michelangelo, Napoleon and Luther, hardly anyone today knows the name of the man who gave humanity the untold blessing of anesthesia; nobody searches the lives of Gauss, Euler, or Maxwell for an Immortal Beloved, and hardly anyone cares where Lavoisier ~d Cardanus were born and died. Instead, we learn how their ideas and inventions were further developed by the ideas and inventions of other, equally uninteresting people, and continually concentrate on their achievements, which live on through others long after the brief flame of the individual has burned out. One is amazed at first to see how sharp the distinction is between two kinds of human endeavor, but soon enough counterexamples come to mind, and it begins to look like the most natural of differentiations. Familiar custom assures us it is the difference between person and
work, between the greatness of a human being and that of a cause, between culture and knowledge, humanity and nature: Work and outstanding productivity do not increase moral stature, nor being a man in the eyes ofheaven, nor those unanalyzable lessons oflife that are handed down only by the example of statesmen, heroes, saints, singers, and, one must admit, movie actors-in short, that great irra- tional power in which the poet, too, feels he has a part, as long as he believes in what he says and holds fast to his belief that whatever his circumstances, his voice is the voice of the inner life, the blood, the heart, the nation, Europe, or all mankind. It is the mysterious whole of which he feels himself to be the medium, while the others are merely rummaging around in the comprehensible-and this is a mis-
Pseudoreality Prevails · 32 3
324 • THE·MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
Si(')n one must believe in before one can learn to see it! What assures us of this is a voice of truth, certainly, but isn't there something odd about this truth? For where one looks less at the person than at the cause, there is, remarkably, always a fresh person to carry on the cause, while on the other hand, wherever the emphasis is on the per- son, there is always the feeling after a certain level has been reached that there is no longer anyone who measures up anymore, and that true greatness lies in the past.
Each and every one of the men gathered at Diotima's that night was a vessel of the whole, and that was a lot all at once. Writing and thinking, activities as natural to man as swimming is to a duckling, was something they practiced as a profession, and they were, in fact, really better at it than most. But what was it all for? What they did was beautiful, it was great, it was unique, but so much uniqueness bore the collective breath of mortality and the graveyard, having no evident meaning or purpose, ancestors or progeny. Countless re- membered experiences, myriads of crisscrossing vibrations of the spirit, were gathered in these heads, which were stuck ! p<:e a carpet weaver's needles in a carpet extending without seams or edges all around them in every direction and somewhere, at some random place, creating a pattern that seemed to repeat itself elsewhere but was actually a little different. But is this the proper use of oneself, to set such a little patch on eternity?
It would probably be saying far too much to say that Diotima had grasped all this, but she felt ~e wind ofthe grave over the fields of the spirit, and the nearer this first day drew to its close, the deeper she slipped into discouragement. Luckily, it brought to her mind a certain hopelessness Arnheim had expressed on another occasion, when they had spoken of such things, though at the time she had not quite grasped his meaning; now her friend ·was away on a trip, but she remembered how he had warned her not to place too great hopes in this gathering. So it was actually Arnheim's melancholy into which she was drifting, which made it ultimately an almost sensu- ously pensive and flattering pleasure. Musing on his prophetic words, she wondered: "Isn't it, deep down, the pessimism people of action are always bound to feel when they come in contact with those who traffic in words? "
. SCIENCE SMILING INTO ITS BEARD, OR A FIRST FULL-:DRESS ENCOUNTER WITH EVIL
Now for a few necessary words about a smile, specifically a man's smile, and about a beard, created for the male act of smiling into one's beard; the smile of the scholars who had accepted Diotima's invitation and were listening to the famous artists. Although they were smiling, they were absolutely not to be suspected of doing so ironically. On the ~ontrary, it was their way of expressing deference and incompetence, as has already been· explained. But this, too, should fool no one. They were sincere in this, consciously; but sub- consciously, to use a fashionable term, or, better still, in the sum of their being, they were people in whom a. propensity for Evil crackled like a fire under a caldron.
This has a paradoxical ring, of course, and any of our university professors in whose presence one attempted to assert it. would proba- bly counter that he was a humble servant of truth and progress and otherwise knew nothing about anything. That is his professional ide- ology. But high-mindedness is the mark of every professional ideol- ogy. Hunters, for instance, would never dream of calling themselves the butchers of wild game; they prefer to call themselves the duly licensed friends of nature and animals; just as businessmen uphold the principle of an honorable profit, while the businessman's god, Mercury, that distinguished promoter of international relations, is also the god of thieves. So the image of a profession in the minds of its practitioners is not too reliable.
Ifwe ask ourselves dispassionately how science has arrived at its present state-an important question in itself, considering how en- tirely we are in its power and how not even an illiterate is safe from its domination, since he has to learn to live with countless things born of science-we get a different picture. Credible received wisdom in- dicates that it all began in the sixteenth century, a time of the great- est spiritual turbulence, when people ceased trying to penetrate the
326 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
deep mysteries of nature as they had done through two millennia of religious and philosophical speculation, but were instead satisfied with exploring the surface of nature in a manner that can only be called superficial. For instance the great Galileo Galilei, always the first to· be mentioned in this connection, eliminated the question. of what were nature's deep intrinsic reasons for abhorring a vacuum and consequently letting a falling body penetrate space after space unql it finally comes to rest on solid ground, and settled for some- thing more common: he simply established how quickly such a body falls, the course it takes, the time it takes, and what is its rate of downward acceleration. The Catholic Church made a grave error in threatening this man with death and forcing him to recant instead of summarily executing him without much ceremony, since it was from his way oflooking at things, and that ofothers oflike mind, that after- ward-in next to no time, in the scale ofhistory-there arose railway timetables, industrial machines, physiological psychology, and our era's moral decay against which the Church no longer stands a chance. The Church probably erred in being overprudent, because Galileo was not only the discoverer of the law of falling bodies and the motion of the earth, but also an inventor in whom, as we would say today, major capital took an interest; besides, he was not the only one in his time who was seized by the new spirit. On the contrary, historical accounts show that the matter-of-factness that inspired him raged and spread like an infection. However disconcerting it may sound nowadays to speak of someone as inspired by matter-of-
factness, believing as we cJo that we have far too much of it, in Galileo's day the awakening from metaphysics to the hard observa- tion of reality must have been, judging by all sorts of evidence, a veri- table orgy and conflagration of matter-of-factness! But should one ask what mankind was thinking of when it made this change, the an- swer is that it did no more than what every sensible child does after trying to walk too soon; it sat. down on the ground, contacting the earth with a most dependable ifnot very noble part ofits anatomy, in short, that part on which one sits. The amazing thing is that the earth showed itself to be uncommonly receptive, and ever since that mo- ment ofcontact has allowed men to entice inventions, conveniences, and discoveries out ofit in quantities bordering on the miraculous.
Such preliminaries might lead one to think, with some justice, that
it is the miracle of the Antichrist we now find ourselves in the midst of; for the metaphor of "contact" used here is to be interpreted not only in the sense of dependability, but also just as much in the sense of the unseemly and disreputable. And in truth, before intellectuals discovered their pleasure in "facts," facts were the sole preserve of soldiers, hunters, and traders-people by nature full of violence and. cunning. The struggle for existence makes no allowance for senti- mental considerations; it knows only the desire to kill one's opponent in the quickest, most factual way; here everyone is a positivist. Nor is it a virtue in business to let oneself ~e taken in instead of going for the solid facts, since a profit is ultimately a psychological overpower- ing ofyour opponent arising from the circumstances. If, on the other hand, one looks at the qualities that lead to the making of discoveries, one finds freedom from traditional considerations and inhibitions, courage, as much initiative as ruthlessness, the exclusion of moral considerations, patience in haggling for the smallest advantage, dog- ged endurance on the way to the goal, if necessary, and a veneration for meas~re and number that expresses the keenest mistrust of all uncertainty. In other words, we find just those ancient vices of sol- diers, hunters, and traders, here merely translated into intellectual terms and interpreted as virtues. This raises them above the pursuit of personal and relatively vulgar advantage, but even in this transfor- mation the element of primal evil is not lost; ·it is seemingly inde- structible and everlasting, at least as everlasting as everything humanly sublime, since it consists of nothing less and nothing else than the urge to trip up that sublimity and watch it fall on its face. Who has never felt a nasty itch, looking at a beautifully glazed, luxuri- antly curved vase, at the thought of smashing it to bits with a single blow of one's stick? This temptation, raised to its full heroic bitter- ness-that nothing in life can be relied on unless it is firmly nailed down-is a basic feeling embedded in the sobriety of science; aqd though we are too respectable to call it the Devil, a whiff of burned horsehair still clings to it.
We can begin at once with the peculiar predilection of scientific thinking for mechanical, statistical, and physical explanations that have, as it were, the heart cut out of them. The scientific mind sees kindness only as a special form of egotism; brings emotions into line with glandular secretions; notes that eight or nine tenths of a human
Pseudoreality Prevails · 32 7
328 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
being consists ofwater; explains our celebrated moral freedom as an automatic mental by-product of free trade; reduces beauty to good digestion and the proper distribution of fatty tissue; graphs the an- nual statistical curves of births and suicides to show that our most intimate personal decisions are programmed behavior; sees a con- nection between ecstasy and mental disease; equates the anus and the mouth as the rectal and the oral openings at either end of the same tube-such ideas, which expose the trick, as it were, behind the magic of human il~usions, can always count on a kind of prejudice in their favor as being impeccably scientific. Certainly they demon- strate the love of truth. But surrounding this clear, shining love is a predilection for disillusionment, compulsiveness, ruthlessness, cold intimidation, and dry rebuke, a spiteful predilection, or at least an involuntary emanation ofsuch a kind.
To put it differently, the voice of truth is accompanied by a suspi- cious static noise to which those most closely involved turn a deaf ear. Well, contemporary psychology knows many such repressed phenomena and is ready with advice to haul them out and make them as clear as possible to oneself, to prevent their having harmful effects. How about putting it to the test, then, and trying to make an open display of that ambiguous taste for the truth, with its malicious undertones ofhuman spitefulness, its hound-of-hell attitude, letting it take its chances in'life, as it were? What might come ofthis is, more or less, that lack ofidealism already discussed under the heading ofa utopia of exact living, an attitude of experiment and revocation, but subject to the iron laws of warfare involved in all intellectual con- quests. This approach to shaping life is of course in no way nurturing or appeasing. It would regard everything worthy of life not with sim- ple veneration but rather as a line of demarcation being constantly redrawn in the battle for inner truth. It would question the sanctity of the world's momentary condition, not from skepticism but rather in the conviction of the climber that the foot with the firmer hold is always the lower one. In the fire of sl,lch a Church Militant, which hates doctrine for the sake of revelation yet to come and sets aside law and values in the name of an exacting love for their imminent new configurations, the Devil would find his way back to God or, more simply, truth would again be the sister of virtue and would no
longer have to play tricks on goodness behind its back, like a young niece with an old maiden aunt.
All that sort of thing is absorbed more or less consciously by a young man in the lecture halls of learning, along with the basics of a great, constructive way of thinking capable of bringing together with ease such disparate phenomena as a falling stone and an orbiting star, and of analyzing something as seemingly whole and indivisible as the origin of a simple act within the depths of consciousness into currents whose inner sources lie thousands ofyears apart. But should anyone presume to use such an approach outside the limits of spe- cific professional problems, he would quickly be given to understand that the needs of life are different from the requirements of thought. What happens in life is more or less the opposite of whatever the trained mind is accustomed to.
Life places a very high value on natu- ral distinctions and congenialities; whatever exists, no matter what it is, is regarded up to a point as the natural thing, and not to be lightly tampered with; changes that become necessary proceed reluctantly and in a kind of two-steps-forward, one-step-back rhythm. If some- one of purely vegetarian convictions, say, were to address a cow as "Ma'am"- o n the perfectly reasonable assumption that one is likely to behave more brutally toward someone addressed with "Hey there! "-he would be called a conceited ass or even a crackpot, but not because of his vegetarian convictions or his respect for animals, which are regarded as most humane, but because he was acting them out directly in the real world. In short, what we think and what we do coexist in an intricate compromise whereby the claims of the intel- lect are paid offat the rate ofno more than so percent ofevery thou- sand, while to make up for the rest it is adorned with the title of honorary creditor.
But if the human mind, in the imposing shape that is its most re- cent manifestation, is indeed, as we have suggested, a very masculine saint with warlike and hunterlike ancillary vices, one might conclude from the circumstances described above that the mind's inherent tendency toward depravity, grandiose as it is, can neither reveal itself nor find any occasion to purge itself through contact with reality, with the result that it is likely to tum up on all sorts of quite strange, unsupervised paths by which it evades its sterile captivity. Whether
Pseudorealtty Prevails · 329
330 • THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
everything up to this point has been merely a play of conceits is an open question, but there is no denying that this last surmise has its own peculiar confirmation. There is a nameless mood abroad in the world today, a feeling in the blood of more than a few people, an expectation ofworse things to come, a readiness to riot, a mistrust of everything one reveres. There are those who deplore the lack of ide- alism in the young but who, the moment they must act themselves, automatically behave no diff~rently from someone with a healthy mistrust of ideas who backs up his gentle persuasiveness with the ef- fect of some kind of blackjack. Is there, in other words, any pious intent that does not have to equip itselfwith a little bit ofcorruption and reliance on the lower human qualities in order to be taken in this world as serious and seriously meant? Terms like "bind," "force," ''put the screws on," "don't be afraid to smash windows," "take strong measures," all have the pleasant ring of dependability. Propo- sitions of the kind that the greatest philosopher, after a week in bar- racks, will learn to spring to attention at the drill sergeant's voice, or that a lieutenant ~d eight men are enough to arrest any parliament in the world, achieved their classic form only somewhat later, in the discovery that a few spoonfuls ofcastor oil poured down the throat of an idealist can make the sternest convictions look ridiculous; but long before that, and although they were disclaimed with indignation, such ideas had the savage buoyancy of sinister dreams.
It just so happens that the second thought, at the very least, of every person today confronted by an overwhelming phenomenon, even if it should be its beauty that so overwhelms him, is "You can't fool me! I'll cut you down to size! " And this mania for cutting things down to size, typical of an era that not only flees with the fox but also pursues with the hounds, has hardly anything to do any longer with life's natural separation of the raw from the sublime; it is, rather, much more a self-tormenting bent of mind, an inadmissible lust at the spectacle of the good being humiliated and too easily destroyed altogether. It is not dissimilar from some passionate desire to give the lie to oneself, and perhaps there are bleaker prospects than believing in a time that has come into the world coccyx-first and merely needs the Creator's hands to turn it around.
Much ofthis sort ofthing may be expressed by a man's smile, even when the man is not himself aware of it or it has never even gone
through his consciousness at all, and this was the sort of smile with which most of the invited celebrated experts lent themselves to Di- otlma's praiseworthy efforts. It began as a prickling sensation moving up the legs, which did not quite know in which direction they should tum, and finally landed as a look of benevolent amazement on the face. With relief one spotted an acquaintance or a colleague one could speak to. One had the feeling that going home, outside the gate, one would have to stamp firmly a few times to test the ground. Still, it was a very pleasant occasion. Such general undertakings never find a proper content, of course, like all universal and elevated concepts. One cannot even imagine the concept "dog"; the word is only a reference to particular dogs and canine qualities, and this is even more the case with "patriotism" or the loftiest patriotic ideas. But even if it has no content, it certainly has a meaning, and it is surely desirable from time to time to bring that meaning to life! This was what most of those present were communicating to one another, although mostly within the silence of the unconscious. But Diotima, still standing in the maill reception room and favoring stragglers with her little speeches of welcome, was astonished to hear what ap- peared to be lively conversations starting up on such subjects as the difference between Bohemian and Bavarian beer, or publishers' royalties.
It was too bad that she could not watch her reception from the street. From out there it looked marvelous. The light shone brightly through the curtains of the tall windows along the fa~ade of the house, heightened by the additional glow of authority and distinction emanating from the waiting cars, as well as by the gaping passersby who stopped to look up for a while without quite knowing why. Di- otima would have been pleased by the sight. There were people con- stantly standing in the half-light the festivity cast on the street; behind their backs, the great darkness began that within a short dis- tance quickly became impenetrable.
Pseudoreality Prevails · . '331
332
73
LEO FISCHEL'S DAUGHTER GERDA
In all this hubbub, Ulrich kept putting off fulfilling his promise to Fischel that he would pay the family a visit. He actually never did get around to it until something unexpected happened: Fischel's wife, Clementine, came to see him.
She had phoned to announce her visit, and Ulrich awaited her not without apprehension. It had been three years since he had regularly come to their house, during a stay ofsome months in town; since his return he had been there only once, not wanting to stir up a past flirtation and dreading having to deal with a mother's disappoint- ment. But Clementine Fischel was a woman of "magnanimous spirit," with so little opportunity to exercise it in her daily petty strug- gles with her husband, Leo, that for special occasions, regrettably so rare in her life, she had reserves of truly heroic high-mindedness to draw upon. Even so, this thin woman with her austere, rather care- worn face felt a bit embarrassed when she found herself face-to-face with Ulrich, saying she needed to speak to him privately, even though they were alone as it was. But he was the only person Gerda would still listen to, she said, adding that she hoped he would not misunderstand her request.
Ulrich·was aware of the Fischel family's situation. Not only were the father and mother constantly at war, but their daughter, Gerda, already twenty-three, had surrounded herself with a swarm of odd young people who had somehow co-opted Papa Leo, who ground his teeth, as a most grudging Maecenas and backer of their "new move- ment" because his house was the most convenient for their get- togethers. Gerda was so nervous and anemic, and got so terribly upset every time anyone tried to make her see less of these friends- Clementine reported-who were, after all, just silly boys without
real breeding; still, the way they insisted on parading their mystical anti-Semitism was not only in poor taste, it revealed an inner brutal- ity. Not that she had come to complain about. anti-Semitism~ she added, which was a sign of the times, one simply had to resign one- self to it-she was even prepared to admit that in some respects there might be something in it. Clementine paused and would have dried a tear with her handkerchief had she not worn a veil; but as it was she refrained from dropping the tear, contenting herself with merely pulling her white handkerchief out of her little handbag.
"You know what Gerda's like," she said; "a beautiful and gifted girl but-"
"A bit rebellious. " Ulrich finished it for her.
"Yes, Heaven help us, always going to extremes. "
"So she's still a German Nationalist? "
Clementine spoke of the parents' feelings. "A mother's errand of
mercy" was what she somewhat pathetically called her visit, which had as its secondary'aim to entice Ulrich back as aregular visitor to their family circle, now that he was known to have risen to such emi- nence in the Parallel Campaign. "I hate myself," she went on, "for the way I encouraged Gerda's friendship with these boys in recent years, against Leo's will. I thought nothing ofit; these youngsters are idealists in their way, and an open-minded person can let the occa- sional offensive word pass. . . . But Leo-you know how he is-is upset by anti-Semitism, whether it's merely mystical or symbolic or not. "
"And Gerda, in her free-spirited, Germanic, blond fashion, won't recognize the problem? " Ulrich rounded it out.
"She's the same as I was at her age in this respect. Do you think, by the way, that Hans Sepp has any prospects? "
"Is Gerda engaged to him? " Ulrich asked cautiously.
"That boy has no means whatever ofproviding for her," Clemen- tine sighed. "How can you talk of an engagement? But when Leo ordered him out ofthe house Gerda ate so little for three weeks run- ning that she turned to skin and bone. " All at once, she broke out angrily: "You know, it seems to me like hypnosis, like some sort of spiritual infection! That boy incessantly expounds his philosophy under our roof, and Gerda never notices the continual insult to her parents in it, even though she's always been a good and affectionate
Pseudoreality Prevails · 333
334 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
child otherwise. But whenever I say anything, she answers: 'You're so old-fashioned, Mama. ' So I thought-you're the only man who counts for something with her, arid Leo thinks the world. of you! - couldn't you come over and try to open Gerda's eyes to the callow- ness of Hans and his cronies? "
For such a model of propriety as Clementine to resort to so ag- gressive a tactic could only mean that she was seriously worried. Whatever their conflicts, she was inclined to a certain solidarity with her husband in this situation. Ulrich raised his eyebrows in concern.
''I'm afraid Gerda will canme old-fashioned too. These new young people pay no attention to us elders on such matters of principle. "
"It occurred to me that the easiest way to distract Gerda might be your fmding something for her to do in that patriotic campaign of yours everyone is talking about," Clementine offered, and Ulrich hastened to promise her a visit, even while assuring her that the P~­ allel Campaign was far from being ready for such uses.
When Gerda saw him coming through the door a few days after- ward, two circular red spots appeared on her cheeks, but she ener- geticallyshookhishand. Shewasoneofthosecharminglypurposeful young women of our time who would instantly become bus drivers if some higher purpose called for it.
Ulrich had not been mistaken in the assumption that he would find her alone; it was the hour when Mama was out shopping and Papa was still at the office. Ulrich had hardly taken his first steps into the room when he was overcome with a sense of deja vu, everything so reminded him of a particular day during their earlier times to- gether. It had been a few weeks later in the year then, still spring but one ofthose piercingly hot days that sometimes precede the summer like burning embers, hard for the still unseasoned body to bear. Gerda's face had looked haggard and thin. She was dressed in white and smelled white, like linen dried on meadow grass. The blinds were down in all the rooms, and the whole apartment was full of re- bellious half-lights and arrows ofheat whose points were broken off from piercing through the sack-gray barrier. Ulrich felt that Gerda's body was made up entirely of the same fresh~y washed linen hang- ings as her dress. He felt this quite without emotion and could have calmly peeled layer after layer off her, without needing the least erotic ·stimulus to egg him on. He had the very same feeling again
this time. Theirs seemed to be a perfe~tlynatural but pointless inti- macy, and they both feared it.
"Why did it take you so long to come see us? " Gerda asked.
Ulrich told her straight out that her parents would surely not wish them to be so close unless they intended to many.
"Oh, Mama," Gerda said. "Mama's absurd. So we're not supposed to be friends if we don't instantly think about that! But Papa wants you to come often; you're said to be quite somebody in that big affair. "
She came out with this quite openly, this foolishness of the old folk, secure in her assumption that she and Ulrich were naturally in league against it.
"I'll come," Ulrich replied, "but now tell me, Gerda, where does that leave us? " ·
The point was, they did not love each other. They had played a lot of tennis together, met at social functions, gone out together, taken an interest in each other, and thus unawares had crossed the border- line that separates an intimate friend whom we allow to see us in all our inward disorder from those for whom we cultivate our appear- ance. They had unexpectedly become as close as two people who have loved each other for a long time, who in fact almost no longer love each other, without actually going through love. They were al-
. \. vays arguing, so it looked as if they did not care for each other, but it was both an obstacle and a bond between them. They knew that with all this it would only take one spark to start a big fire. Had there been less of a difference in their ages, or had Gerda been a married woman, then "opportunity. would probably have created the thief," and the theft might have led, at least afterward, to passion, since we talk ourselves into love as we talk ourselves into a rage, by making the proper gestures. But just because they knew all this, they did not do it. Gerda had remained a virgin, and furiously resented it.
Instead of answering Ulrich's question, she had busied herself about the room, when suddenly he stood beside her. That was reck- less of him, because one can't stand so close to a girl at such a mo- ment and just start talking about something. They followed the path of least resistance, like a brook that, avoiding obstacles, flows down a meadow, and Ulrich put his arm around Gerda's hip so that his fin- gertips reached the precipitate downward line of the inside elastic
Pseudoreality Prevails · 335
336 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUAL·ITIES
that follows from garter belt to stocking. He turned up Gerda's face, with its confused and slightly sweaty look, and kissed her on the lips. ;rhen they stood still, unable to let go or come together. His finger- tips connected with the broad elastic of her garter belt and let it snap gently against her thigh a few times. Then he tore himself away and with a shrug asked her again:
"Where do we go from here, Gerda? "
Gerda fought down her excitement and said: "Is this how it has to be? ''
She rang for refreshments; she set the household in motion.
"Tell me something about Hans," Ulrich asked her gently, when they had sat down and had to begin the conversation again. Gerda, who had not quite regained her poise, did not answer at first, but after a while she said: "You're so pleased with yourself, you'll never understand younger people like . us. "
"Sticks and stones . . . ,"Ulrich said evasively. "I think, Gerda, that I'm done with science now. Which means that I am niaking common cause with the younger generation. Is it enough to swear to you that knowledge is akin to greed? That it is a shabby form of thriftiness? A supercilious kind of spiritual capitalism? There is more feeling in me than you think. But I want to spare you the kind of talk that amounts to nothing but words. "
"You must get to know Hans bett~r," Gerda replied weakly, then she erupted again: "Anyway, you'd never understand that it's possi- ble to fuse with others into a community, without any thought of yourself! "
"Does Hans still come so often? " Ulrich asked warily. Gerda shrugged her shoulders.
Her shrewd parents had refrained from forbidding Hans Sepp the house altogether; he was allowed to come a few days every month. In tum Hans Sepp, the student who was nothing and had as yet no pros- pect of becoming something, had to promise not to make Gerda do anythingsheshouldn't,andtosuspendhisprop~gandizingforsome . mystical, Germanic action. In this way they hoped to rob him of the charm of forbidden fruit. And Hans'Sepp in his chastity (only the sensual man wants to possess, but then sensuality is a Jewish-capital- istic trait) had calmly given his word as requested, without, however,· taking it to mean that he would give up his frequent secret comings
and goings, making incendiary speeches, hotly pressing Gerda's hands or even kissing her, all of which still comes naturally to soul- mates. but only that he would refrain from advocating sexual union without benefit of clergy or civic authority, which he had been ad- vocating, but on a purely theoretical plane. He had pledged hi_s word all the more readily as he did not feel that he and Gerda were spiritu- ally mature enough as yet to turn his principles into action; setting up a barrier to the temptations of the baser instincts was quite in line with his way of thinking. .
But the two young people naturally suffered under these restraints imposed on them before they had found their own inner discipline. Gerda especially would not have put up with such interference from her parents, had it not been for her own uncertainties; this made her resentment all the greater. She did not really love her young friend all that much; it was more a matter of translating her opposition to her parents into an attachment to him. Had Gerda been born some years later than she was, her papa would have been one of the richest men in town, even if not too highly regarded as a result, and her mother would have admired him again, before Gerda could have been of an age to experience the bickerings of her progenitors as a conflict within herself. She would then probably have taken pride in being of"racially mixed" parentage; but as things stood, she rebelled against her parents and their problems, did not want to be. genetically tainted by them, and was blond, free, Germanic, and forceful, as if she had. nothing at all to do with them. This solution, as good as it looked, had the disadvantage that she had never got around to bring- ing the worm that was gnawing at her inwardly out into the light of day. In her home, nationalism and racism were treated as nonexis- tent, even though they were convulsing half of Europe with hysteri- cal ideas and everything in ·the Fischel household in particular turned on nothing else. Whatever Gerda knew of it had come to her from the outside, in the dark form of rumors, suggestion, and exag- geration. The paradox of her parents-who normally reacted strongly to anything talked about by many people-making so nota- ble an exception in this case had made a deep impression early in her life, and since she attached no definite, objective meaning to this ghostly presence, she tended to connect with it everything disagree- able and peculiar in her home life, especially during her adolescence.
Pseudoreality Prevails · 337
338 · THE MAN WIT·H0 UT QUALITIES
One day she met the Christian-Gennanic circle ofyoung people to which Hans Sepp belonged, and suddenly felt she had found her true home. It wou:ld be hard to say what these young people actually believed in; they fonned one of those innumerable undefined "free- spirited" little sects that have infested Gennan youth ever since the breakdown of the humanistic ideal. They were not racial anti-Sem- ites but opponents of "the Jewish mind," by which they meant capi- talism and socialism, science, reason, parental authority and parental arrogance, calculation, psychology, and skepticism. Their basic doc- trinal device was the "symbol"; as far as Ulrich could make out, and he had, after all, some understanding of such things, what they meant by "symbol" was the great images ofgrace, which made every- thing that is confused and dwarfed in life, as Hans Sepp put it, clear and great, images that suppress the noise of the senses and dip the forehead in streams of transcendence. Such symbols were the Isen- heim Altar, the Egyptian pyramids, and Novalis; Beethoven and Ste- fan George were acceptable approximations. But they did not state, in so many words, what a symbol was: first, because a symbol cannot be expressed in so many words; second, because Aryans do not deal in dry fonnulas, which is why they achieved only approximations of symbols during the last century; and third, because some centuries only rarely produce the transcendent moment of grace in the tran- scendent human being.
Gerda, who was no fool, secretly felt not a little distrust toward these overblown sentiments, but she also distrusted her distrust, in which she thought she detected the legacy of her parents' rational- ism. Behind her fa~ade of independence she was anxiously at pains to disobey her parents, in dread that her bloodlines might hinder her from following Hans's ideas. She felt deeply mutinous against the taboos girding the morals of her so-called good family and against the arrogant parental rights of intrusion that threatened to suffocate ~er personality, while Hans, who had "no family at all," as her mother put it, suffered much less than she did; he had emerged from her circle of companions as Gerda's "spiritual guide," passionately ha- rangued the girl, who was as old as he was, trying to transport her, with his tirades accompanied by kisses, into the "region of the Un- conditional," though in practice he was quite adept at coming to tenns with the conditioned state of the Fischel household, as long as
he was permitted to reject it "on principle," which of course always led to rows with Papa Leo.
"My dear Gerda," Ulrich said after a while, "your friends tor- ment you about your father-they really are the worst kind of blackmailers! "
Gerda turned pale, then red. "You are no longer young yourself," she replied. ''You think differently from us. " She lmew that she had stung Ulrich's vanity, and added in a conciliatory tone: "I don't ex- pect much from love anyway. Maybe I am wasting my time with Hans, as you say; maybe I have to resign myself altogether to the idea that I'll never love anyone enough to open every crevice of my soul to him: my thoughts and feelings, work and dreams; I don't even think that would be so very awful. "
"How wise beyond your years you sound, Gerda, when you talk like your friends," Ulrich broke in.
Gerda was annoyed. "When I talk with my friends," she said, "our thoughts flow from one to the other, and we lmow that we live and speak as one with our people-do you have any idea what this means? We stand with countless others ofour own kind, we feel their presence, in a sensory, physical way I'm sure you've never . . . In fact, you can't even imagine such a thing, can you? Your desire has always been for asingle person; you think like a beast ofprey! "
Why a beast of prey? Her words hung in midair, giving her away; she realized their senselessness and felt ashamed of her eyes, wide with fear, which were staring at Ulrich.
"Let's not go into that," Ulrich said gently. "Let me tell you a story instead. Do you know"-he drew her closer with his hand, inside which her wrist disappeared like a child among high crags-"the sensational story of the capture of the moon? You know, of course, that long ago our earth had several moons. And there's a very popular theory that such moons are not what we take them for, cosmic bodies that have cooled like the earth itself, but great globes of ice rushing through space that have come too close to the earth and are held fast by it. Our moon is said to be the last of them. Come and have a look at it! "
Gerda had followed him to the window and looked for the pale moon in the sunny sky.
"Doesn't it look like a disk ofice? " Ulrich asked. "That's no source
Pseudoreality Prevails · 339
340 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
of light. Have you ever wondered why the man in the moon always faces us the sam~. way? Our last moon is no long~rturning on its axis, that's why; it's already fixed in place! You see, once the moon has come into the earth's po-. yer it doesn't merely revolve around the earth but is drawn steadily closer. We don't notice it because it takes thousands of years or even longer for the screw to tighten. But there's no getting away from it, and there must have been thousands of years in the history of the earth during which the previous moons were drawn very close and went on racing in orbit with incredible speed. And just as our present moon pulls a tide from three to six feet high after it, an earlier one would have dragged in its wake whole mountain ranges of water and mud, tumbling all over the globe. We can hardly imagine the terror in which generation after generation must have lived on such a crazy earth for thousands upon thousands of years. "
"But were there .