No More Learning

While this instant in the hall, among the hanging overcoats of in- fluential personages, faded slowly like a bugle call, a resolution was being passed in the conference room after Count Leinsdorf had thanked the General for his important and valuable suggestions, though the time had not yet come for examining proposals on their merits, as the organizational groundwork must be laid first. To this end, all that was needed now-apart from suiting the plan to the realities as represented by the ministries-was a final resolution to the effect that those present had unanimously agreed to submit the
Pseudoreality Prevails · 193
194 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
wishes of the people, as soon as these could be determined by the Parallel Campaign, to His Majesty, with the most humble petition to be allowed to dispose freely of the means for their material fulfill- ment (which would have to be raised by then) if such were His Maj- esty's most gracious pleasure.
This had the advantage that the people would be placed in the po- sition of setting the worthiest possible aim for themselves, but through the agency of the Sovereign's most gracious will. The resolu- tion was passed at His Grace's special request; for although it was only a matter of form, he considered it important that the people not take action on their own and without the consent of constitutional authority-not even to honor it.
The other participants would not have made such a point of this, but by the same token they had no objection to it. And it was in order, too, that the meeting should end. with the passing of a resolu- tion. For whether one set~ a final period to a brawl with a knife, or ends a musical piece by crashing all ten fingers simultaneously down on the keyboard a few times, or whether the dancer bows to his lady, or whether one passes a resolution, it would be an uncanny world if events simply slunk off, if there were not a final ceremony to assure that they had indeed taken place. And that is why it is done.
45
SILENT ENCOUNTER OF TWO MOUNTAIN PEAKS
When the session was over, Arnheim had quietly maneuvered, at a hint from Diotima, to be left behind, alone. Section ChiefTuzzi was observing a respectful margin of time to be sure of not retUrning home before the end of the session.
In these minutes between the departure of the guests and the set- tling down ofthe house, as her passage from room to room was inter-
rupted by brief, sometimes conflicting, orders, considerations, and the general unrest that a fading great event leaves behind, Arnheim smiled as his eyes followed Diotima's movements. She felt that her domicile was in a state of tremulous movement; all the things that had had to abandon their customary places because of the great event returned piece by piece, like a big wave ebbing from the sand in countless little hollowS and runnels. While Arnheim waited in ur- bane silence until she and the commotion around her settled down again, it struck Diotima that no matter how many people had gone in and out ofher house, no man-other than Section ChiefTuzzi-had ever been so domestically ·alone with her that one palpably felt the mute life of the empty apartment. And suddenly her chaste mind was troubled by a bizarre notion: her empty apartment, in the absence of even her husband, seemed like a pair of trousers Arnheim had just slipped into. There are such moments, when chastity itself may be visited by such abortive flashes from the pit of darkness, and so the wonderful dream of a love in which body and soul are entirely one bloomed in Diotima.
Arnheim had no inkling of this. His trousers made an impeccably perpendicular line to the gleaming parquet; his momingcoat, his cra- vat, his serenely smilirig patrician head, said nothing, so perfect were they. Actually, he had intended to complain to Diotima ·about the incident on his arrival, to make sure that no such thing happened in future. But there was at this moment something that made this man, who hobnobbed with American money magnates as an equal, who had been received by emperors and k;ings, this nabob who could offer any woman her weight in platinum, something that made him, instead ofcomplaining, stare entranced at Diotima, whose name was really Ermelinda, or actually only Hermine Tuzzi, the mere wife of a ranking official. For this something it is here once again necessary to resort to the word "soul. "
The word has already turned up more than once, though not in the clearest contexts; as, for instance, something lost in our time, or in- compatible with civilization; as something at odds with physical urges and connubial habits; something that is moved, and not only to re- pugnance, by a murderer; something that was to be liberated by the Parallel Campaign; as a subject for religious meditations and contem- platio in caligtne divina by Count Leinsdorf; as, with many people, a
Pseudoreality Prevails · 195
196 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
love ofmetaphor; and so'on. The most peculiarofall the peculiarities of the word "soul," however, is that young people cannot pronounce it without laughing. Even Diotima and Amheim were shy of using it without a modifier, for it is still possible to speak of having a great, noble, craven, daring, or debased soul, but to come right out with "my soul" is something one simply cannot bring eneself to do. It is distinctly an older person's word, and this can only be understood by assuming that in the course of life people become more and more aware of something for which they urgently need a name they cannot find until they finally resort, reluctantly, to the name they had origi- nally despised.
How to describe it, then? Whether one is ~trest or in motion, what matters is not what lies ahead, what one sees, hears, wants, takes, masters. It forms a horizon, a semicircle before one, but the ends of this semicircle are joined by a string, and the plane of this string goes right through·the middle of the world. In front, the face and hands look out of it; sensations and strivings run ahead of it, and no one doubts that whatever one does·is always reasonable, or at least pas- sionate. In other words, outer circumstances call for us to act in a way everyone can understand; and if, in the toils of passion, we do some- thing incomprehensible, that too is, in its oWii way, understandable. Yet however understandable and self~contained everything seems, this is accompanied by an obscure feeling that it is only half the story. Something is not quite in balance, and a person presses forward, lik-e a tightrope walker, in order not to sway and fall. And as he presses on through life and leaves lived life behind, the life ahead and the life already lived form a wall, and his path in the end resembles the path
of a woodworm: no matter how it corkscrews forward or even back- ward, it always leaves an empty space behind it. And this horrible feeling of a blind, cutoff space . behind the fullness of everything, this half that is . always missing even when everything is a whole, this is what eventually makes one perceive what one calls the soul.
We always include it, of course, in our thoughts, intuitions, feel- ings, in all sorts of surrogate ways and according to our individual temperament. In youth it manifests itself as a distinct feeling of in- security about whether everything one does is really the right thing, after all; in old age as a sense ofwonder at how little one has done of
all one had really meant to do. In between, one takes comfort in the thought that one is a hell ofa good, capable fellow, even ifevery little thing can't be justified; or that the world is not the way it ought to'be either, so that one's failures come to represent a fair enough compro- mise. Then there are always sorrie people who think beyond all this of a God who has their missing piece in His pocket. Only love has a special position in this; in this exceptional case the missing halfgrows back: the beloved seems to stand where ordinarily something was al- ways missing. The souls unite "dos-a-dos," as it were, making them- selves superfluous in the process. This is why most people, after the one great love in their youth is over, no longer feel the absence of their soul, so that this so-called foolishness fulfills a useful social function.
Neither Diotima nor Amheim had ever loved. We already know this about Diotima, but the great financier also had, in a wider sense, a chaste soul. He had always been afraid that the feelings he aroused in women might not be for himself but for his money, and so he lived only with women to whom he also gave, not love, but money. He had never had a friend for fear of being used; he had only business friends, even if the business happened to be an intel- lectual exchange. This shrewd man, although imbued with experi- ence of life, was still untouched and in danger of being permanently alone when he met Diotima, whom destiny· had in- tended for him. The mysterious forces within them converged. It could be compared only with the movement of the trade winds, the Gulf Stream, the volcanic tremors of the earth's crust; forces vastly superior to those of man, akin to the stars, were set in motion from one to the other, overriding such barriers as hours and days, meas- ureless currents. At such moments the actual words spoken are su- premely unimportant. Rising from the vertical creases of his trousers, Amheim's body seemed to stand there in the godlike soli- tude of a towering mountain. United with him through the valley between them, Diotima rose on its other side, luminous with soli- tude, in her fashionable dress of the period with its puffed sleeves on the upper arms, the artful pleats over the bosom widening
above the stomach, the skirt narrowing agairi below the knees to cling to her calves. The·glass-bead curtains at the doors cast mov-
Pseudorealtty Prevails · 1 97
198 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
ing reflections like ponds, the javelins and arrows on the walls trembled with their feathered and deadly passions, and the yellow volumes of Caiman-Levy on the tables were as silent as lemon groves. We will reverently pass over the first words spoken.
IDEALS AND MORALITY ARE THE BEST MEANS FOR FILLING THAT BIG HOLE CALLED SOUL
Amheim was the frrst to shake off the spell. To linger in such a state was, to his way of thinking, impossible, without either sinking into a dull, vacuous, lethargic brooding or else foisting on one's devotion a solid framework ofideas and convictions that could not but distort its nature.
This method, which admittedly kills the soul but then, so to speak, preserves it for general consumption by canning it in small quanti- ties, has always been its bridge to rational thought, convictions, and practical action, in their successful conduct ofall moralities, philoso- phies, and religions. God knows, as we have already said, what a soul is anyway. There can be no doubt whatsoever that the burning desire to obey only the call of one's soul leaves infinite scope for action, a true state of anarchy, and there are cases of chemically pure souls actually committing crimes. But the minute a soul has morals, reli- gion, philosophy, a well-grounded middle-class education, ideals in the spheres of duty and beauty, it has been equipped With a system of rules, conditions, and directives that it must obey before it can think ofbeing a respectable soul, and its heat, like that ofa blast furnace, is directed into orderly rectangles ofsand. All that remains are only log- ical problems ofinterpretation, such as whether an action falls under this or that commandment, and the soul presents the tranquil pano- rama of a battlefield after the fact, where the dead lie still and one can see at once where a scrap oflife still moves or groans. Which is
why we cross that bridge as quickly as we can. Ifa person is plagued by religious doubts, as many are in their youth, he takes to persecut- ing unbelievers; if troubled by love, he turns it intq marriage; and when overcome by some other enthusiasm, he takes refuge from the impossibility of living constantly in its frre by beginning to live for that fire. That is, he fills the many moments ofhis day, each ofwhich needs a content and an impetus, not with his ideal state but with the many ways of achieving it by overcoming obsblcles and incidents- which guarantees that he will never need to attain it. For only fools, fanatics, and mental cases can stand living at the highest pitch of soul; a sane person must be content with declaring that life would not be worth living without a spark of that mysterious fire.
Amheim's life was filled to the brim with activity. He was a realist and had listened with an indulgent smile and not without apprecia- tion for the good form shown by these representatives ofthe old Aus- trian tradition in the session . he witnessed as they spoke of an Imperial Franz-Josef Soup Kitchen and the link between duty and military marches. He was far from making fun of it, as Ulrich had done, for he was convinced that it took far less courage and superior- ity to pursue great ideas than to recognize the touching kernel of ide- alism in such average, slightly absurd people of good appearance.
But when in the midst of all this, Diotima, this classical beauty with a Viennese plus, uttered her term "Global Austria," a phraSe as hot and almost as incomprehensible to the human mind as a flame, something had seized his heart.
There was a story told about him that he had in his Berlin house a splendid room full of Baroque and Gothic sculptures. As it happens, the Catholic Church (for which Arnheim had a great love) depicts its saints and standard-bearers ofGoodness mostly in poses ofjoy, ev~n ecstasy. Here were saints dying in all kinds of postures, with the soul wringing out the body as if it were squeezing water out of a piece of laundry. All those gestures of arms crossed like sabers, of twisted necks, taken from their original surroundings and brought together in an alien space, gave the impression of a catatonics' ward in a luna- tic asylum.
This collection was highly esteemed and brought many art histori- ans to Amheim, with whom he conversed knowledgeably; but often he sat alone and lonely in his gallery, with a quite different feeling, a
Pseudoreality Prevails · 199
200 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
kind of horrified amazement, as though he were looking at a half- demented world. He felt how morality had once glowed with an inef- fable fire, but now even a mind like his own could do no more than stare into the burned-out clinkers. This dark vision of what all reli- gions and myths express in the tale of commandments given origi- nally to men by the gods, this intuition of a pristine state of the soul, somewhat uncanny and yet presumably pleasing to the gods, formed a strange fringe of uneasiness around the otherwise complacent ex- panse of his thoughts. Amheim also had an assistant gardener, a sim- ple but deep man, as Amheim put it, with whom he often talked about the life of the flowers because one can learn more from such a man than from the experts. Until one day Amheim discovered that· this gardener's helper was stealing from him. It seems that he made off with everything he could lay his hands on, in a kind of despera- tion, saving the proceeds to set up on his own; this was the one idea that obsessed him day and night. But one day a small sculpture disap- peared, and the police who were called in exposed the whole opera- tion. The evening Arnheim was infoimed ofthis, he sent for the man and reproached him all night long for having allowed his passionate acquisitiveness to lead him astray. · It was said that he was extremely upset himself and at times carne close to weeping in a dark adjoining room. For he envied this man, for reasons he could not explain to himself. The next morning, he had the police take him away.
This story was confirmed by close friends of Amheim's. Now, standing alone with Diotima in this room, he felt rather as he had felt then, sensing something like the soundless flames of the world leap- ing all around them along its four walls.
47
WHAT ALL OTHERS ARE SEPARATELY, ARNHEIM IS ROLLED INTO ONE
In the following weeks Diotima's salon experienced a tremendous upsurge. People came to hear the latest news of the Parallel Cam- paign and to see the new man Diotima Was reported to have pre- scribed for herself: variously, a German nabob, a rich Jew, and an eccentric who wrote poetry, dictated the price of coal, and was the German Kaiser's personal friend. It was not only the highborn ladies and gentlemen from Count Leinsdorf's world and diplomatic circles who came; the upper-middle-class figures who controlled the econ- omy and led the world of culture seemed also increasingly attracted. And so specialists in the Ewe language and composers who had never heard a note of one another's music ran into one another here, shooting box met confessional box, and people to whom the word "course" meant the race course, the course of the stock exchange, or a university course.
And now something unheard of came to pass: there was a man who could speak with everyone in their own language, and that man wasAmheim.
Mter the embarrassment he had suffered at the beginning of the first meeting he held himself aloof from the official sessions, nor did he attend all the social gatherings, as he was often out oftown. There was, of course, no further mention of the secretarial post; he had himself explained to Diotima that this idea could not be acceptable to the other side, and she yielded to Amheim's judgment, although she could never look at Ulrich without regarding him as a usurper. Amheim came and went. Three or five days would pass in a flash, he would be back from Paris, Rome, Berlin; what was going on at Di- otima's was only a small slice of his life. But he favored it, and took part in it with all his energy.
That he could discuss industry with industrial giants and the econ- omy with bankers was to be expected, but he could also chat just as
201
202 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
freely about molecular physics, mysticism, and pigeon shooting. He was an extraordinary talker; once he was off, he never stopped, like a book one cannot close until everything in it demanding utterance has been said. But he had a quietly dignified, fluent manner of speaking, with a touch of sadness about it like a stream overhung by dark bushes, and this gave the flow of his words an air of necessity. His reading and his memory were of truly extraordinary compass; he could give experts the subtlest cues in their own fields, but he also knew every person of note in the English, French, and Japanese no- bility, and was at home at racetracks and golf links not only in Europe but in Australia and America as well. So even the chamois hunters, champion horsemen, and holders of boxes at the Imperial Theater, who had come to see a crazy rich Jew (something a little different, as they put it), left Diotima's house shaking their heads with respect.
His Grace once took Ulrich aside and said to him:
"You know, our ducal houses have had bad luck with their tutors these last hundred years. They used to get the kind of people many of whom would later get into the encyclopedia, and these tutors would bring along music masters and drawing masters who showed their appreciation by creating things we now refer to as our old culture. But ever since we have had the new, universal education, and people from my own circles-forgive me-go in for academic degrees, our tutors have somehow fallen off. Our sons are quite right, of course, to shoot pheasant and boar, ride, and chase pretty girls-there's little to be said against that if one is young. But in the old days, it was the tutors who channeled part of that youthful energy into the necessity of cultivating the mind and the arts as well as the pheasants, and this no longer happens. "
It was only an idea that just crossed His Grace's mind, as such things did from time to time; suddenly. he turned to face Ulrich and concluded: "You see, it was that fateful year 1848 that drove a wedge between the middle class and the aristocracy, to the loss of both sides. " He looked at the assembled company with concern. He was irked every time the opposition speakers in Parliament boasted of culture as middle class; he would have liked true middle-class culture to be found in the aristocracy, but the poor aristocracy could see nothing in it; it was a weapon invisible to them with which they were being trounced, and since they had been increasingly losing power
all along, there was finally nothing left for them to do but come to Diotima's and see the thing for themselves. Count Leinsdorf some- times felt this way with a heavy heart as he observed the hubbub, wishing that the high office this house had been given the opportu- nity to serve were taken more seriously.
"Excellency, the middle class is having exactly the same experi- ence with the intellectuals now as the high nobility had with its tutors then," Ulrich tried to comfort him. "They don't know what to make of them. Just look at all these people gaping at Dr. Amheim. "
But all along Count Leinsdorf had only been looking at Arnheim anyway.
"That's no longer intellect," Ulrich said, explaining the general amazement, "it is a phenomenon like a rainbow with a foot you can take hold of and actually feel. He talks about love and economics, chemistry and trips in kayaks; he is a scholar, a landowner, and a stockbroker; in short, what the rest of us are separately, he is rolled into one; of course we're amazed. You shake your head, Excellency? But I'm convinced the cloud of so-called temporal progress, into which no one of us can see, has set him down on the parquet in our midst. ':
"I was not shaking my head over you," His Grace elucidated. "I was thinking of Dr. Arnheim. All in all, one has to admit he's an inter- esting figure. "
THE THREE CAUSES OF ARNHEIM'S FAME AND THE MYSTERY OF THE WHOLE
But that was simply the way Arnheim usually affected people.
He was a man of stature.
His activity spread over terrestrial continents and continents of
knowledge. He knew everything: philosophers, economics, music,
Pseudorealtty Prevails · 2 0 3
204 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
the world, sports. He expressed himself fluently in five languages. The world's most famous artists were his friends, and he bought the art of tomorrow when it was still green on the vine, at prices that were not yet inflated. He was received at the Imperial Court and knew how to talk with worke~. He owned a villa in the latest style, which appeared in photographs in all the publications on contempo- rary architecture, and also, somewhere in the sandiest wastes of Prussia, a ramshackle old castle that actually looked like the decom- posed cradle of Prussian chauvinism.
Such expansiveness and receptivity are seldom accompanied by personal achievement; but in this respect, too, Arnheim was an ex- ception. Once or twice a year he secluded himself on his country es- tate and there wrote down the experiences of his intellectual life. The~e books and articles, by now quite an imposing number of them, were widely read, enjoyed large printings, and were translated into many languages. A sick physician inspires no confidence, but when a man who has known how to do so well for himself speaks, there must be something in it. This was the first source of Arnheim's fame.
The second had its origin in the nature of science and scholarship. We hold knowledge in high esteem, and rightly so. But though a man's life may be completely filled by research into the functioning of the kidneys, there will be moments, humanistic moments, so to speak, when he may ponder the relationship between the kidneys and his country. This is why Goethe is so widely quoted in Germany. But when a scholar wants to show expressly that he is not only a man of learning but also possesses a lively mind with an interest in the future, he will do well to show himself acquainted with works it not only does him credifto know but promises to bring even more credit in the future-like a stock appreciating in value with time-and in such cases quotations from Paul Arnheim were enjoying increasing popularity. His excursions into scientific areas for support of his gen- eral views did not, it is true, always satisfy the strictest criteria; while they showed an easy command of the literature, the specialist would invariably fmd in them those little slips and misconceptions that be- tray the dilettante, just as surely as the stitching of a single seam be- trays the homemade dress as compared with the product of the couturier's studio. But one should by no means think that this pre- vented the specialists from admiring Arnheim. They smiled compla-
cently; he impressed them as a true product of the new age, a man whose name was in all the newspapers, an economic king, a man whose intellectual achievements, at least compared with those of earlier kings, were astonishing; and if they might be allowed to note that in their own sphere they represented something considerably different from him, they nevertheless showed their appreciation by calling him a brilliant man, a man of genius, or, quite simply, a uni- versal man, which among specialists amounts to the same thing as when men say to each other of a woman that she is a woman's idea of a beauty.
The third source of Amheim's fame was economics. He managed not at all badly with the old salts, the seasoned captains of industry; in a big deal, he could outsmart the craftiest of them. They did not re- gard him as much of a businessman, in any case, and called him the "Crown Prince," to distinguish him from his father, whose short, thick tongue was not so adroit in conversation but made up for it by picking up the flavor of a good business deal at whatever distance and by the subtlest chemistry. Him they feared, and revered, but when they heard of the philosophical demands the Crown Prince made on the business class, which he would weave even into the most matter-of-fact discussions, they smiled. He was notorious for quoting poets at board meetings, and for insisting that the economy could not be separated from other human activities and could be dealt with only within the larger context of all vital problems, na- tional, intellectual, and even spiritual.
But even while they smiled at this sort of thing, they could not quite overlook that precisely by adding such frills to business, Arn- heim junior was cutting an increasingly important figure in public opinion. News of him would tum up now in the financial, now in the political, now in the literary and art columns of leading newspapers throughout the world, whether it was a review of a work from his pen, the report of a notable speech he had given somewhere, or no- tice of his reception by some ruler or art association, until there was no man in the circle of industrial movers and shakers, who operate in silence and behind double-locked doors, as much talked about out- side that circle as' he was. All these presidents, board chairmen, di- rectors, top managers, heads of banks, corporations, mine works, shipping companies, are by no means, in their hearts, the e. vil
Pseudoreality Prevails · 2 0 5
206 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
manipulators they are often represented to be. Apart from their highly developed sense of family, the inner rationale of their lives is that of money, and that is a rationale with very sound teeth and a healthy appetite. They were all convinced that the world would be much better off if left to the free play of supply and demand rather than to annored warships, bayonets, potentates, and diplomats igno- rant of economics. But the world being what it is, with its ingrained prejudice against a life dedicated primarily to its own self-interest and only secondarily to the public good, and its preference for chiv- alry, public-spiritedness, and public missions above private enter- prise, these magnates were the last people in the world to leave this out of their calculations, and they energetically made use of the ad- vantages offered to the public good through customs negotiations backed by anned force, or the use of the military against strikers. On this road, however, business leads directly to philosophy, for nowa- days only criminals dare to hann others without philosophy, and so they accustomed themselves to regarding Arnheim junior as a kind of papal legate for their affairs. Despite the irony with which they were always ready to regard his tendencies, they were pleased to have in him a man who could take their case as readily before a conclave of bishops as to a sociological conference; ultimately he won influence over them like a beautiful and cultivated wife who regards her hus- band's everlasting office work as a bore but is useful to the business because everyone admires her. Now, beyond this one need only imagine the effect of Maeterlinckian or Bergsonian philosophy ap- plied to questions about the price of coal or to cartel politics, to esti- mate how depressing Arnheim junior's presence could be to industrialists' conferences and directors' meetings in Paris or St. P~­ tersburg or Cape Town when he turned up as his father's ambassa- dor and had to be heard out from beginning to end. His resulting successes in business were as impressive as they were mysterious, and out of all this grew the well-known report of the man's towering stature and his lucky hand. ·
A good deal more could be said about Arnheim's successes. With diplomats, for instance, who handled the important but alien field of economics with the circumspection of men charge'd with the care of an unpredictable elephant, while Amheim treated it with the non-
chalance of a native keeper. With artists, for whom he hardly ever did anything, which did not prevent them. from seeing him as a Mae- cenas. And lastly with journalists, who should in all fairness have been the first to be mentioned, because it was they who through their admiration had first created Arnheim's image as a great man, though they did not realize how much he was their own creation; for someone had whispered in the~r ear and they consequently believed they could hear the grass of history growing. The basic pattern of his success was everywhere the same: Surrounded by the magic aura of his wealth and the legend of his importance, he always had to deal with people who towered over him in their own fields but who liked him as an outsider with a surprising knowledge of their subject and were daunted by his personally representing a link between their world and other worlds of which they had no idea. So it had come to seem quite natural for him to appear in a world of specialists as a whole man, and to have the effect ofa harmonious entity. At times he dreamed of a new Weimar or Florentine renaissance of industry and trade, a new prosperity under the leadership of strong personalities, each of whom would have to be capable of combining individual achievements in technology, science, and the arts, and able to guide them from the highest standpoint. He felt he had this capacity. He possessed the gift of never being superior in any specific, provable respect but, owing to some fluid, perpetually self-renewing equilib- rium, of still coming out on top in every situation. It was probably the fundamental talent of a politician, but Arnheim was also convinced that it was a profound mystery. He called it "the Mystery of the Whole. " For even the beauty of a person consists of almost nothing demonstrable, or any specific feature, but rather that ~agical some- thing that makes, even small defects useful, just as the profound goodness and love, the dignity and greatness, of a person are almost independent ofwhat he does, are indeed capable ofennobling every- thing he does. In this life, in some mysterious fashion, the whole al- ways takes precedence over its parts. While ordinary people may indeed be the sum oftheir virtues and faults, the great man is he who first bestows rank on his qualities. And if the secret of his success is that it cannot quite be explained as the result of his achievements and his qualities, then the presence of a force greater than its mani-
Pseudoreality Prevails · 2 0 7
208 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
festations is the mystery upon which all greatness in life rests. This is how Arnheim had phrased it in one ofhis books, and as he set down these words he ahnost felt that he had touched the hem of the super- natural, and this, too, he allowed to shine through in the text.
49
ANTAGONISM SPROUTS BETWEEN THE OLD AND THE NEW DIPLOMACY
His association with persons whose specialty was to have been born to the hereditary nobility constituted no exception. Arnheim so muted his own high distinction, so modestly laid claim only to a cer- tain intellectual nobility, which knows its own merits and limits, that beside him the bearers of the most venerable noble names seemed after a while to be bowed down under their burden like gnarled la- borers. It was Diotima who appreciated this most keenly. She recog- nized the Mystery of the Whole with th~eye of an artist who sees the dream ofhis life realized in an unswpassable way.
She was now wholly reconciled to her salon again. Arnheim warned her against putting too much emphasis on formal organiza- tion; crude material interests would take over, stifling the original pure intention; he preferred keeping the salon as it was.
Section Chief Tuzzi, on the other hand, expressed his misgivings that this would never get them beyond endless floods of talk.
He had crossed one leg over the other and clasped one knee with his heavily veined, lean, dark hands. Next to Amheim, who sat up- right in a flawlessly cut suit of some soft fabric, Tuzzi, with his trim little beard and southern eyes, looked like a Levantine pickpocket beside a Hanseatic merchant prince. It was an encounter between two kinds of distinction, and the Austrian, a mosaic of highly cul- tivated cosmopolitanism, with its casual dash, certainly did not re- gard itself as the lesser. Section ChiefTuzzi had an engaging manner
of asking how the Parallel Campaign was ·coming along, as though he was not supposed to know at first hand what was going on in his own house.
'W e would love to know as soon as possible what your plans are," he said with an amiable smile at his wife and Arnheim, as if to say that he was of course only an outsider in this matter. Then he explained that this joint enterprise of his wife's and Count Leinsdorf's was al- ready causing grave concern in official quarters. At his most recent briefing session with His Majesty, the Minister of Foreign Affairs had taken soundings as to what kind of public demonstrations in honor of the jubilee might be acceptable to His Majesty, namely, up to what point His Majesty might be graciously willing to countenance a plan anticipating the trend of the times by taking a lead in an inter- national peace program. Which was the only way, Tuzzi pointed out, to translate into political terms the idea of a Global Austria that had come up in His Grace's speech. But His Gracious Majesty, with his world-famous punctiliousness and reserve, Tuzzi went on, had in- stantly waved the suggestion aside, saying firmly: "Oh, I don't like being pushed into the limelight," and·now no one could say whether this meant His Majesty was definitely opposed to the idea or not.
Such was Tuzzi's discreet way of being indiscreet about the little secrets of his profession, as only a man who knows how to keep the big secrets can be. He ended by saying that it was now up to the various embassies to sound out their respeGtive courts abroad, as we were not sure of our own ground but had to fmd some solid point of departure somewhere. Technically, after all, there were all sorts of given possibilities, from calling a general peace conference, to a sum- mit meeting for twenty sovereigns, all the way down to decorating the Peace Palace at The Hague with frescoes by Austrian artists, or a foundation for the benefit of the children and orphans of The Hague's domestic staff.
At this point he asked Amheim what they were thinking about the jubilee year at the Prussian court. Amheim disclaimed having any information in this regard. He was repelled by this Austrian cynicism. He, who knew how to chat so elegantly, froze up in Tuzzi's company like a man who wants it clearly understood that affairs of state must be discussed with the utmost gravity and coolness. In this fashion two contrasting kinds of urbanity, two na- tional- and two life-styles, not without a touch of sexual rivairy, pre-
Pseudoreality Prevails · . 209
210 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
sented themselves to Diotima. But place a greyhound beside a pug, a willow beside a poplar, a glass of Wine on a freshly plowed field, a portrait in a saill;loat instead of in an art gallery-in short, place side by side two highbred and distinct forms of life, and a void will come into being between them; they will cancel each other out, with the effect of a quite malicious, bottomless absurdity. Diotima felt this with her eyes and ears without understanding it, but she was suffi- ciently alarmed to give a tum to the conversation by telling her hus- band firmly that she intended to achieve something spiritually great with the Parallel Campaign, and would allow only the needs of truly modem minds to influence its leadership;
Arnheim was grateful to her fo:r restoring the dignity of the con- cept, especially because he had to be on his guard, at times, against going under; he could no more afford to be facetious about the events that so nobly justified his being with Diotima than a drowning man can be about his life jacket. Yet he surprised himself by asking Diotima, his voice betraying some uncertainty, whom she would include, in that case, in the intellectual spearhead of the ParaUel
1
Campaign.
Diotima was of course quite unprepared to give a clear answer to
this question. The days she spent with Arnheim had given her such an abundance of suggestions and ideas that she had not yet got around to sorting them out, and while he had repeated to her more than once that the democracy of the eommittees mattered far less than strong personalities with a comprehensive view of things, all it meant to her was simply "You and 1"-though she was still far from deciding anything, or even from having the necessary insight. It was probably just this of which she was reminded by the pessimism in Arnheim's voice, because she answered: "Do we have anything at all nowadays that we can regard as truly important and great, something worth working for with all our might? "
"It is the mark of a time that has lost the inner certainty of health- ier times," Arnheim responded, "that it is hard for something to crys- tallize as the greatest and most important thing of all. "
Section ChiefTuzzi had lowered his eyes to a speck of dust on his trousers, so that one might interpret his smile as a sign of agreement. "And indeed, what should it be? " Arnheim went on tentatively.
"Religion? "
Section ChiefTuzzi now directed his smile upward; Arnheim had pronounced the word this time not quite so emphatically and on- skeptically as before in His Grace's presence, but with sonorous gravity nonetheless.
Diotima, defending herself against her husband's smile, threw in: 'Why not? Religion too! "
"Of course. But since we must come to a practical decision: Have you ever thought of appointing a bishop to the committee, who should come up with a modem goal for the campaign? God is pro- foundly unmodem: we simply cannot imagine him in tails, clean-
shaven, with neatly parted hair; our image of him is still patriarchal. And what is there apart from religion? The nation? The state? "
Diotima was pleased at this, because Tuzzi regarded the state as a masculine subject one did not discuss with women. But now he was silent, only his eyes still hinting that there might be something fur- ther to be said on that score.
"Science? '' Arnheim went on. "Culture? That leaves art. Truly, it is art that should first reflect the unity of existence and its inner order. But we know the picture art presents today. Fragmentation everywhere; extremes without connections. Stendhal, Balzac, and Flaubert have already created the epic of the new mechanized social and inner life, while the demonic substrata ofour lives have been laid bare by Dostoyevsky, Strindberg, and Freud. W e who live today have a deep sense that there is nothing left for us to do. "
Here Section ChiefTuzzi interjected that when he wanted to read something solid, he took down his Homer, or Peter Rosegger.
Arnheim took up the suggestion: "You should include the Bible. With the Bible, Homer, and Rosegger or Reuter, one can manage. And this takes us right to the heart of the problem. What if a new Homer should come along, would we, frankly, be at all capable of listening to him? I believe the answer is no. We don't ha~e him be- cause we don't need him! " Arnheim was now in the saddle and riding high. "If we needed him, we would have him! For in the final analy- sis, nothing· negative happens. in world history. What can it mean that we place everything that is truly great and essential in the past? Homer and Christ have never again been equaled, to say nothing of being surpassed; there is nothing more beautiful than the Song of Songs. The Gothic age and the Renaissance stand before modem
Pseudoreality Prevails · 2 1 1
212 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
times like mountain ranges at the entrance to a great plain, and where, today, are the great rulers? How short-winded even the deeds of Napoleon look beside those of the pharaohs, the work of Kant be- side that of the Buddha, that of Goethe beside Homer! But here we are, and we must li"ve for something. What does it all add up to? Nothing but-" But here Arnheim broke off and confessed that he was reluctant to put it into words, because he was forced to conclude that all we regard as great and important in life has nothing to dd' with the innermost force of our lives.
"And that would be? " Tuzzi inquired. He had hardly any objection to the implication that most things were taken far too seriously. ·
"No one today knows the answer," Arnheim replied. "The prob- lem of civilization can be solved only by the heart. By the appearance ofanewtypeofman. Byaninnervisionandapurewill. Theintellect has achieved nothing but watering down the great past into liberal- ism. But perhaps we do not see far enough, perhaps we reckon on too small a scale; every moment may be that of a great historic turn- ing point! "
Diotima had been on the point of objecting that this would leave nothing for the Parallel Campaign to do. But in some peculiar way she found herself enthralled by Arnheim's somber visions. Perhaps there was a residue of "too much homework" in her that burdened her when she always had to read the newest books and talk about the newest pictures; pessimism toward art liberated her from all sorts of beauty she had not really liked at all, just as a pessimistic view of science eased her anxiety in the face of culture, the overabundance ofthe knowable and the influential. Thus Arnheim's despairingjudg- ment of the times came, as she suddenly realized, as a release. . And the thought flitted pleasantly through her heart that Arnheim's mel- ancholy somehow had something to do with herself. ·
so
FURTHER DEVELOPMENTS. SECTION CHIEF TUZZI DECIDES TO INFORM HIMSELF ABOUT ARNHEIM
Diotima had guessed right. From the moment Amheim had noticed that the bosom of this enchanting woman who had read his books on the soul was lifted and moved by a force of an unmistakable kind, he had suffered a loss of nerve otherwise foreign to him. Putting it briefly and in his own terms, it was the faintheartedness ofthe moral- ist who suddenly and unexpectedly meets heaven on earth. To empa- thize with him, one need only imagine how it would be if we were surrounded by nothing but this quiet blue puddle with soft white wads of feathers floating in it.
The moral person as such is ridiculous and unpleasant, as we know by the odor of those poor, resigned people who have nothing they can call their own but their morality. Morality needs great tasks from which to derive its significance, which is why Amheim had always striven to complement his nature, which inclined to moralizing, by drawing on world events and history, and saturating his activities with ideology. That was his favorite concept: carrying ideas·into the spheres of p. ower and talking business only in connection with cul- tural questions. He liked to draw analogies from history in order to fill it with new life; the role of present-day finance seemed to him similar to that of the Catholic Church: a great influence b. ehind the scenes; unyielding yet yielding 'in its dealings with the ruling powers; and he sometimes saw himself functioning like a cardinal.
But on this occasion he had come to Austria more on a whim, and even though he never traveled wholly without a purpose, even on a whim, he could not quite remember how the. plan-incidentally, a plan of some scope-had originally entered his mind. The inspira- tion for this trip seemed to have come out of the blue; an instant resolve, and it may have been this small circumstance of freedom
213
214 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
about it that a trip to Bombay would hardly have made a less exotic impression on him than this out-of-the-way German-language me- tropolis in which he had landed. The thought, inconceivable in Prussia, of playing a leading role in the Parallel Campaign had done the rest and made him feel illogically fantastic, like a dream, whose absu;dity his practical good sense recognized but whose spell he was powerless to break. He could probably have accomplished the busi- ness purpose ofhis trip far more simply and directly, but he regarded it as a holiday from reason to keep coming back here, and for these excursions into fairyland he was punished by his business sense in that he smudged the black good-conduct mark he should have given himself into a gray blur over everything.
There was no repetition, at least, of that far-reaching contempla- tion in the dark as had happened in Tuzzi's presence, ifonly because Section Chief Tuzzi turned up only in passing, and Arnheim had to parcel out his words to all sorts of persons whom he found amazingly receptive in this beautiful country. In His Grace's presence he called criticism sterile and the present age godless, once more letting it be understood that redemption from so negative an existence could come only through the heart; for Diotima's sake he added that the German spirit, and perhaps the world as well, could be freed from the excesses of rationalism and petty bookkeeping only by the rich culture of its southern lands. Encircled by ladies, he spoke of the need to organize the inner resources of human tenderness, in order to save mankind from arms races and soullessness. To a circle of ac- tive professionals he expounded Holderlin's saying that there were no longer human beings in Germany but only professio~als, winding up with: "And no one can achieve anything in his profession without a sense of some overarching purpose, least of all the financier! "
People'listened to him gladly because it was so nice ~at a man with so many ideas also had money, and the circumstance that all those who spoke with him came away with the impression that an undertaking like the Parallel Campaign was a most dubious affair, riddled with the most explosive intellectual contradictions, also rein- forced in everyone the notion that no one else was as obviously cut out as he was for taking the helm in this adventure.
However, Section Chief Tuzzi would not have been, in his quiet way, one of his country's leading diplomats had he noticed nothing of
Arnheim's pervasive presence in his house; he simply could not make head or tail of it. He did not let on, because a diplomat never shows what he is thinking. Personally, and also in principle, so to speak, he found this outsider most irritating, and that he had blatandy chosen the salon of Tuzzi's wife as the scene of operations for some secret objective Tuzzi regarded as a challenge. Not for an instant did he believe Diotima's assurances that the nabob visited the Imperial City on the Danube so often because his mind felt most at home in its ancient culture. Tuzzi's problem was that he had no clue to help him solve this mystery, because in all his official experience he had never come across a person like Arnheim.
And since Diotima had announced ~at she intended to give Arn- heim a leading position in the Parallel Campaign, and had com- plained about His Grace's resistance to this idea, Tuzzi was seriously concerned. He did not think much of either the Parallel Campaign or Count Leinsdorf, but he regarded his wife's idea as politically so amazingly tactless that he was overcome with the feeling that all these years of patient husbandly training such as he flattered himself to have given her had collapsed like a house of cards. He had in fact used exacdy this figure of speech in thinking about it, even though Section Chief Tuzzi never indulged himself in figures of speech be- cause they are too literary and, socially, smell of poor taste; but this time he felt quite shaken by it.
Hqwever, Diotima strengthened her position again as things went on by her stubbornness, She had become gently aggressive and spoke of a new kind of person who could no longer passively leave the spiritual responsibility for the course of world events to the pro- fessional leaders. Then she spoke of feminine tact that could some- times be a visionary gift perhaps capable of penetrating distances beyond the daily routine of professionals. Finally, she said that Arn- heim was a European, a thinker known throughout Europe, that the conduct of affairs of state in Europe Was not sufficiendy European, not spiritual enough, and that the world would find no peace until it was as permeated by a universally Austrian spirit as the ancient Aus- trian culture that embraced all the peoples, with their different lan- guages, within the borders of the monarchy.
She had never before dared to stand up so resolutely against her husband's authority, but Section Chief Tuzzi was temporarily reas-
Pseudoreality Prevails · 2 I 5
216 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
sured by it, because he had never regarded his wife's strivings as higher in significance than problems with her dressmaker, was de- lighted when she was admired by others, and could now take a less alarming view of her current goings-on, much as if a woman who loved color had for once chosen too gaudy a ribbon. So he confined himself to going over again, with grave courtesy, all the reasons why in a man's world decisions on Austrian affairs could not be publicly entrusted to a Prussian, even though he could see that there might be some advantage in being on friendly terms with a man in so unique a position. He assured Diotima that she would be misunder- standing his scruples if she inferred from them that he was not pleased to see Arnheim in her company as often as possible. Privately he hoped that this would give him the opportunity, sooner or later, to set a trap for the outsider.
Only when Tuzzi had to stand by and see Arnheim sweeping from success to success everywhere did he come back to the idea that she seemed overinvolved with this man-only to fmd again that she did not respect his wishes as of old but argued with him and declared his misgivings chimerical. He decided as a man not to struggle against the dialectics of a woman but to bide his time and wait for circum- stances to prove him right in the end. But then something happened to give him a powerful incentive.
One night, something like the sound of very distant weeping aroused him from his sleep. It barely disturbed him at first; he si. mply did not understand what it was. But from time to time the spiritual distance lessened by a jump, until suddenly the menacing distur- bance was quite close to his ears, and he started so violently out ofhis sleep that he sat bolt upright in bed. Diotima lay on her side facing away from him and gave no sign ofbeing awake, but something made him feel that she was. He whispered her name once, then again, and tenderly tried to tum her white shoulder to him. But as he turned her around and her face rose above her shoulder in the dark, it looked at him angrily, expressed defiance, and had been crying. Un- fortunately, Tuzzi's sound sleep was reclaiming him and dragging him relentlessly back into his pillows, while Diotima's face hovered above him as a painfully bright distortion he could make no sense of. "Whatsamatter? " he muttered in the soft bass of returning uncon- sciousness, and received a clear, irritable, unwelcome answer that
stamped itself on his ear, fell into his drowsiness, and lay there like a sparkling coin in the water.
"You toss about so much in your sleep, no one can sleep next to you! " Diotima had said harshly and distinctly; his ear had taken it in, but he,had already slipped back into sleep without being able to utter a word in his own defense.
He merely felt that he was the victim of a grave injustice. Quiet, restful sleep was in his opinion one ofa diplomat's chiefvirtues, for it was a condition ofall success. It was a point on which he was acutely sensitive, and Diotima's remark was a serious challenge to his very existence. He realized that something in her had changed. While it never occurred to him even in his sleep to suspect his wife of any tangible infidelity, he never doubted for a moment that the personal discomfort inflicted on him must be connected with Arnheim. He slept on angrily, as it were, till morning and awakened with the finn resolve to find out all he could about this disturbing person.
THE HOUSE OF FISCHEL
Director Fischel ofthe Lloyd Bank was that bank director, or, more properly, managerwith the title ofdirector, who had somehow unac- countably forgotten to acknowledge Count Leinsdorf's invitation and had thereafter not been invited again. And even that first invita- tion he had owed only to the connections of his wife, Clementine. Clementine Fischel's family were old civil service. Her father had been Accountant General, her grandfather had been a senior official in the finance department, and three of her brothers held high posi- tions in various ministries. Twenty-four years ago she had married Leo Fischel, for two reasons: first, because families high in the civil service sometimes have more children than means; but second, for a romantic reason, because compared with the relentlessly thrifty
Pseudoreality Prevails · 2 1 7
218 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
tightness of her parental home, banking seemed a liberal-minded, modem profession, and in the nineteenth century a cultivated per- son did not judge another person's value according to. whether he was a Jew or a Catholic; indeed, as matters stood then, she almost felt there was something particularly refined in rising above the crude anti-Semitic prejudice of the common people.
Later the poor woman was destined to see a nationalist spirit well- ing up all over Europe, and with it a surge ofJew-baiting, transform- ing her husband in her very arms, as it were, from a respected free spirit into a corrosive spawn of an alien race. In the beginning she had resisted this transformation with all the indignation of a "mag- nanimous heart," but as the years passed she was worn down by the naively cruel and steadily growing hostility and intimidated by the general prejudice. In time, as 'the differences between herself and her husband gradually became acrimonious-when, for reasons he · would never quite go into, he never rose above the rank of manager and lost all prospects of ever being appointed a bank director-she came to justify to herself, with a shrug, many things that wounded her by remembering that Leo's character was; after all, alien to her own, though toward outsiders she never abandoned the principles of her youth.
Their differences, however, were basically nothing more than a lack of understanding; as in many marriages, a natural misfortune, as it were, surfaced as soon as the couple ceased to be rapturously happy. Ever since Leo's career had hesitantly ground to a halt at what was in effect a stockbroker's desk, Clementine was no longer able to excuse certain of his peculiarities by taking into account that he was not ensconced in the glassy calm of a ministerial office but was sitting at the "roaring loom of time"-and who knows whether she had not married him just on account of this quotation from Goe- · the? His side-whiskers, which, with the pince-nez riding the middle of his nose, had once reminded her of an English lord with mutton- chops, now suggested a stockbroker, and some of his mannerisms of gesture and turns of phrase became positively insufferable to her. At first Clementine tried to improve her husband, but she ran into terri- ble snags as it became apparent that nowhere in the world was there a standard by which to judge whether muttonchop whiskers rightly
suggested a lord or a broker, or at what point on the nose a pince- nez, combined with a wave of the hand, expressed enthusiasm o·r cynicism. Besides, Leo Fischel was simply not the man to let himself be improved. He dismissed as social tomfoolery the faultfinding that tried to tum him into the Christian-Teutonic beau ideal of a high ministry official, and rejected her ~guments as unworthy of a rea- sonable man; for the more his wife took offense at certain details, the more he stressed the great guidelines of reason. And so the Fischel household was gradually transformed into the battleground of two contending philosophies of life.
Director Fischel of the Uoyd Bank enjoyed philosophizing, but only for ten minutes a day. He enjoyed thinking that human life had a solid rational basis and that it paid off intellectually; he imagined this on the pattern ofthe harmonious hierarchy ofa great bank and noted with satisfaction the daily signs of progress he read about in the papers.
This faith in the immutable guidelines of reason and progress had for a long time· enabled him to dismiss his wife's carpings with a shrug or a cutting retort. But since misfortune had decreed that in the course of this marriage the mood of the times would shift away from the old principles ofliberalism that had favored Leo Fischel- the great guiding ideals of tolerance, the dignity of man, and free trade-and reason and progress in the Western world would be dis- placed by racial theories and street slogans, he eould not remain un- touched by it either. He started by flatly denying the existence of these changes, just as Count Leinsdorf was accustomed to deny the existence of certain "unpleasant political manifestations" and waited for them to disappear of their own accord. Such waiting is the first, almost imperceptible degree of the torture of exasperation that life inflicts on men of principle. The second degree is usually called, and was therefore also called by Fischel, "poison. " This poison is the ap- pearance, drop by drop, of new views on morals, art, politics, the family, newspapers, books, and social life, already accompanied by the helpless feeling that there is no turning back and by indignant denials, which cannot avoid a certain acknowledgment of the thing denied. Nor was Director Fischel spared the third and final degree, when the isolated showers and sprinklings of the New tum into a
Pseudoreality PreVails · 2 1 9
220 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
steady, drenching rain. In time this becomes one ofthe most horrible torments that a man who has only ten minutes a day to spare for phi- losophy can experience.
Leo came to know on how many points people can have differ- ences of opinion. The. drive to be right, a need almost synonymous with human dignity, began to. celebrate excesses in the Fischel household. For millennia this drive has produced thousands of admi- rable philosophies, works ofart, books, deeds, and partisan alliances, and when this admirable, but also fanatical and monstrous, innate human drive has to make do with ten minutes on practical philoso- phy or a debate on the basic principles of the household, it cannot fail to burst, like a drop of molten lead, into innumerable sharp splin- ters that inflict the most painful wounds. It burst over the question of whether a maid was to be given notice or not, and whether tooth- picks belonged on the table or not; but whatever made it burst, it had the capacity to reconstitute itself immediately into two infinitely de- tailed opposing vi·ews of the world.
This was all very well by day, since Director Fischel was in his of- fice then, but at night he was only human, and this gravely worsened the relations between him and Clementine. Things today are so com- plicated that a person can really keep fully informed only in one field, basically, which in . his case was stocks and bonds, and so he was in- clined at night to be of a generally yielding disposition. Clementine, on the contrary, remained sharp and unyielding, raised as she had been in a strict civil-service household with its constant emphasis on duty. Besides, her class consciousness would not permit them sepa- rate bedrooms, "-'hich would have made their already inadequate apartment even smaller: But a shared bedroom, with the lights out, puts a man in the situation of an actor having to play before an invisi- ble house the rewarding but by now worn-out role of a hero imper- sonating a growling lion. For years now, Leo's dark auditorium had not let slip the faintest hint of applause, nor yet the smallest sign of disapproval, and this was surely enough to shatter the strongest nerves. In the morning at breakfast, which the couple took together in accordance with time-honored tradition, Clementine was stiff as a frozen corpse and Leo twitchy with nerves. Even their daughter, Gerda, noticed something of this every time and had come to imag-
ine married life with dread and bitter loathing, as a catfight in the dark of night.
Gerda was twenty-three, and the favorite bone of contention of both her progenitors. Leo Fischel thought it was time to start think- ing of a good match for her. But Gerda said, "You're old-fashioned, Papa," and had chosen her friends in a swarm of Christian national- ists her own age, none of whom offered the slightest prospect of being able to support a wife; instead, they despised capitalism and maintained that no Jew had yet proved capable of serving as a great symbol of humanity. Leo Fischel called them anti-Semitic louts and would have forbidden them the house, but Gerda said, "You don't understand, Papa, they only mean it symbolically"; and nervous and anemic as she was, Gerda immediately got upset if she was not han- dled with care. So Fischel suffered her friends: society, as once Odysseus had had to suffer Penelope's suitors in his house, for Gerda was the ray of sunshine in his life. But he did not suffer in silence, because that was not in his nature. He thought he knew all about morality and great ideas himself, and held forth on them at every opportunity in order to exert a good influence on Gerda. Every time he did so Gerda answered: "Yes, Papa, you would be absolutely right if the whole thing did not have to be looked at from a wholly different point of view from the one you still cling to! "
What did Clementine do when Gerda talked like this? Not a thing. She made a resigned face and kept her own counsel, but Leo could be sure that behind his back she would be on Gerda's side-as if she knew what symbols wereJ Leo Fischel had always had every reason to assume that his good Jewish head was superior to his wife's, and noth- ing outraged him so much as to observe that she was using Gerda's craziness to her own advantage. Why should he, of all people, sud- denly no longer be capable of keeping up with the times? They were in this together! Then he remembered last night. This was no longer sniping at a man's self-esteem, it was digging it up by the roots! At night a man has only his nightshirt on, and right underneath that is his character. No expertise, no professional shrewdness, can protect him. Here a man stakes his whole life, nothing less. So what did it mean that Clementine, whenever the conversation turned to Christian- Germanic ideaS, made a face as if he were fresh from the jungle?
Pseudoreality Prevails · 2 2 1
222 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
Now, man is a being who can stand mistrust as little as tissue paper can the rain. Since Clementine had ceased to find Leo attractive she found him unbearable, and since Leo began to feel that Clementine doubted him he saw at every tum a conspiracy in his own house. At the same time Clementine and Leo deluded themselves, like every- one whose mind has been formed by the prevailing customs and lit- erature, that their passions, . characters, destinies, and actions made them dependent on each other. In truth, ofcourse, more than halfof life consists not of actions but of formulas, of opinions we make our own, of on-the-one-hands and on-the-other-hands, and of all the piled-up impersonality of everything one has heard and knowS. The fate of this husband and wife depended mostly on a murky, persist- ent, confused structuring of ideas that were not even their own but belonged to public opinion and shifted with it, without their being able to defend themselves against it. Compared with this depen- dence their personal dependence on each other represented only a tiny fraction, a wildly overestimated residue. And while they deluded themselves that they had their own private lives, and questioned each other's character and will, the agonizing difficulty lay in the unreality of their conflict, which they covered with every possible peevishness.
It was Leo Fischel's bad luck that he neither played cards nor found pleasure in taking out pretty girls, but, worn out by his work, suffered from a marked craving for family life, whereas his wife, who had nothing to do day or night but be the bosom ofthe family, was no longer subject to any 'romantic illusions about that. There were times when Leo Fischel felt he was suffocating, attacked by nothing he could put his finger ~nfrom all sides at once. He was a hardworking small cell in the body politic, doing its duty with a will, but receiving from all sides poisoned juices. And so, though it far exceeded his need for philosophy, the aging man, left in the lurch by his life-part- ner and seeing no grounds for abandoning the rational fashion of his youth, began to sense the profound emptiness of emotional life, its formlessness which is eternally changing its forms, its slow but re- lentless overturning that pulls everything with it.
It was on one such morning, his head occupied with family prob- lems, that Fischel had forgotten to answer His Grace's invitation, and on many subsequent mornings he had to listen to accounts of what
was going on in Section Chief Tuzzi's wife's circle, which made it appear most regrettable not to have seized such a chance for Gerda to enter the best society. Fischel's conscience was none too clear, since his own general manager and the chief executive of the Na- tional Bank attended those gatherings, but as everyone knows, a man will defend himself most violently against reproaches the more strongly he is tom between guilt and innocence. But every time Fischel tried, with all the superiority of a practical man, to make fun of these patriotic goings-on, he was advised that a financier who was abreast of the times, such as Paul Amheim, evidently thought other- wise.