" she asked in a maliciously
caressing
tone.
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v2
Hans Sepp was standing at her other side, with an uneasy, defiant look.
Since her last miserable encounter with Ulrich, Gerda had grown even thinner, looking more barren offeminine charms the closer he came, and yet, by the same measure, more banefully attractive, her head on those slack shoulders standing out against the room.
When she caught sight of Ulrich her face flushed scarlet, only to tum paler than ever, and she made an involuntary movement with her upper body like someone with a sharp pain in the heart who is somehow unable to press a hand to the spot.
He had a fleeting vision of the scene when, wildly intent on his animal advantage in having aroused her physi- cally, he had abused her confusion.
There that body was sitting, visi- ble to him beneath her dress, receiving orders from her humiliated will to hold itself proudly high, but trembling the while.
Gerda was not angry at him, he could see, but she wanted to be done with him at all costs.
He unobtrusively slowed down, trying to savor this to the full, and this sensuous tarrying seemed in keeping with the relation- ship between these two people, who could never quite come to- gether.
When Ulrich was very close to her, aware of nothing now but the quivering in the uplifted face awaiting him, he felt in passing something weightless, like a shadow or a gust ofwarmth; and he per- ceived Bonadea, who had passed by him in silence but hardly with- out intent, and in all probability had been following him.
He bowed to her.
The world is beautiful ifone takes it as it is: For a second the
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 1 1 0 1
naive contrast between the voluptuous and the meager, as expressed in these two women, loomed as large to him as that between pasture and rock at the timberline, and he felt himself stepping down from the Parallel Campaign, even though with a guilty smile. When Gerda saw this smile slowly sinking down toward her outstretched hand, her eyelids quivered.
At this moment Diotima noticed that Arnheim was taking young Feuermaul to meet His Grace and the War Minister, and, skilled tac- tician that she was, she thwarted all encounters by ordering the ser- vants in with trays of refreshments.
37
A COMP ARISON
Such conversations as those just reported went on by the dozen, and they all had something in common, which is not easy to describe but that cannot be passed over if one lacks Privy Councillor Mese- ritscher's flair for giving a dazzling account of a party just by making lists: who was there, wearing what, and saying this and that-all those things that are, in fact, considered by many to be the truest narrative art. So Friedel Feuermaul was not really being a miserable toady, which he never was, but merely flnding the right word for the time and place when he said of Meseritscher, while standing in front of him: "He's really the Homer of our era! No, I mean it," he added, when Meseritscher tried to brush it off. "That epic, imperturbable 'and' with which you link all persons and events strikes me as having real greatness! " He had got hold of Meseritscher because the editor of the Parliamentary and Social Gazette had been reluctant to leave without paying his respects to Arnheim; but this still did not get Feuermaul's name into print "among those present. "
Without going into the flner distinctions between idiots and cre- tins, suffice it to say that an idiot ofa certain degree is not up to form-
1102 • THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
ing the concept "parents," even though he has no trouble with the idea of "father and mother. " This same simple additive, "and," was Meseritscher's device for relating social phenomena to one another. Another point about idiots is that in the basic concreteness of their thinking they have something that is generally agreed to appeal to the emotions in a mysterious way; and poets appeal directly to the emotions in very much the same way, insofar as their minds run to palpable realities. And so, when Friedel Feuermaul addressed Mese- ritscher as a poet, he could just as well-that is, out of the same ob- scure, hovering feeling, which, in his case, was also tantamount to a sudden illumination-have called him an idiot, in a way that would have had considerable significance for all mankind. For the element common to both is a mental condition that cannot be spanned by far-reaching concepts, or refined by distinctions and abstractions, a mental state of the crudest pattern, expressed most clearly in the way it limits itself to the simplest of coordinating conjunctions, the help- lessly additive "and," which for those of meager mental capacity re- places more intricate relationships; and it may be said that our world, regardless of all its intellectual riches, is in a mental condition akin to idiocy; indeed, there is no avoiding this conclusion if one tries to grasp as a totality what is going on in the world.
Not that those who are the first to propound or who come to share such a view have a monopoly on intelligence! It simply doesn't de- pend in the least on the individual, or on the pursuits he is engaged in-and which were indeed being engaged in, with more or with less shrewdness, by all those who had come to Diotima's on this evening. For when General Stumm von Bordwehr, for instance, during the pause caused by the arrival of refreshments, got into a conversation with His Grace in the course of which he argued in a genially obsti- nate and respectfully daring tone: 'With all due respect, Your Grace, permit me to disagree most strongly; there is more than mere pre- sumption in people who are proud of their race; there is also some- thing appealingly aristocratic! " he knew precisely what he meant by these words, but not so precisely what he conveyed by them, for such civilities are wrapped in an extra something that is like a pair of thick gloves in which one must struggle to pick up a single match out of a full box. And Leo Fischel, who had not budged from Stumm's side
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · I I 0 3
after he noticed that the General was moving impatiently toward His Grace, added:
"People must be judged not by their race but on their merit! "
What His Grace replied was logical; disregarding Director Fischel, who had only just been introduced to him, he answered Stumm:
"What does the middle class need race for? They've always been up in arms about a court chamberlain needing sixteen noble ances- tors, and now what are they doing themselves? Trying to ape it, and exaggerating it to boot! More than sixteen ancestors is sheer snob- bery! " For His Grace was upset, and therefore it was quite logical for him to express himself in this fashion. Man is indisputably endowed with reason; the problem is only how he uses his reason in the com- pany of others.
His Grace was vexed by the intrusion of "national" elements into the Parallel Campaign, although he himself had brought it about. Various political and social considerations had driven him to it; he himself recognized only "the national populace. " His political friends had advised him: "There's no harm in listening to what they have to say about race and purity and blood-who takes what anyone says seriously anyway? "
"But they're talking about human beings as if they were beasts! " Count Leinsdorfhad objected; he had a Catholic view of human dig- nity, which prevented him from seeing that the principles of the chicken farm and of horse breeding could be equally well applied to God's children, even though he was a great landowner. To this his friends had replied: "Come now, you've no need to brood about it. And anyhow it's probably better than their talking about the good of mankind and all that revolutionary drivel from abroad, as they've been doing. " His Grace had finally seen the light on this point. But His Grace was also vexed because this fellow Feuermaul, whom he had forced Diotima to invite, was merely bringing fresh confusion into the Parallel Campaign and was a disappointment to him. Baron- ess Wayden had praised Feuermaul to the skies, and he had finally yielded to her insistence. "You're quite right," Leinsdorf had conceded. "The way things are going just now, we can easily be ac- cused of Germanizing. And there may be no harm, as you say, in in-
II04 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
viting a poet who says that we have to love all mankind. But don't you see, I can't really spring that on Frau Tuzzi! " But the Baroness would not give an inch and must have found new and effective arguments, for at the end of their conversation Leinsdorf had promised to make Diotima invite Feuermaul. "Not that I like doing it," he had said, "but a strong hand does need the right word to get its message across; I must agree with you there. And it's also true that things have been moving too slowly recently; we haven't had the right spirit! "
But now he was dissatisfied. His Grace was far from thinking that other people were stupid, even if he did think himself more intelli- gent than they were, and he could not comprehend why all these intelligent people taken together made such a poor impression on him. Indeed, life as a whole made this impression on him, as though all the intelligence in individuals and in official institutions-among which he was known to count religion and science-somehow added up to a state of total unaccountability. New ideas that one had not heard of before kept popping up, aroused passions, and then van- ished again after running their course; people were always chasing after some leader or another, and stumbling from one superstition to the next, cheering His Majesty one day and giving the most disgust- ing incendiary speeches in Parliament the next, and none of it ever amounted to anything in the end! If this could be miniaturized by a factor of a million and reduced, as it were, to the dimensions of a single head, the result would be precisely the image of the unac- countable, forgetful, ignorant conduct and the demented hopping around that had always been Count Leinsdorf's image of a lunatic, although he had hitherto had little occasion to think about it. Glumly he stood here now, in the midst of the men surrounding him, and reflected that the whole idea of the Parallel Campaign had been to bring out the truth behind all this, and he found himself unable to formulate some vague idea about faith that was there in his mind; all he could feel was something as pleasantly soothing as the shade of a high wall-a church wall, presumably.
"Funny," he said to Ulrich, giving up his thought after a while. "If you look at all this with some detachment, it somehow reminds you of starlings-you know, the way they flock together in autumn in the fruit trees. "
Ulrich had come back after seeing Gerda. Their conversation had
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 1 1 0 5
not lived up to its promising beginning; Gerda had not managed to utter more than brief, laborious answers hacked off from something that stuck like a hard wedge in her breast, while Hans Sepp talked all the more; he had set himself up as her watchdog and let it be known at once that he was not to be intimidated by his decadent surround- ings.
"You don't know the great racial theorist Bremshuber? " he had asked Ulrich.
''Where does he live? " Ulrich had asked.
"In Scharding on the Laa," Hans Sepp had told him.
''What does he do? " Ulrich had asked.
''What difference does that make? " Hans had said. "New people
are coming to the top! He's a druggist. "
Ulrich had said to Gerda: "I hear you're now formally engaged. " And Gerda had replied: "Bremshuber demands the ruthless sup-
pression of all alien races; that's surely less cruel than toleration and contempt! " Her lip had trembled again as she forced out this sen- tence that was so badly patched together from broken bits of thought.
Ulrich had merely looked at her and shaken his head. "I don't un- derstand that," he had said, holding out his hand to say good-bye, and now, standing beside Leinsdorf, he felt as innocent as a star in the infinity of space.
"But if you don't regard it with detachment"-Count Leinsdorf slowly continued his new thought, after a pause-"then it keeps cir- cling around in your head like a dog trying to catch its tail! Now I've let my friends have their way with me," he added, "and I've let the Baroness Wayden have her way, and if you go around listening to what we're saying here, each separate bit sounds quite sensible, but in the nobler spiritual context we're looking for, it sounds really ram- bling and incoherent! "
Around the War Minister and Feuermaul, whom Arnheim had brought over, a group had formed in which Feuermaul was holding forth, loving all mankind, while a second, more distant group was col- lecting around Arnheim, who had moved away; in it Ulrich saw Hans Sepp and Gerda some while later. Feuermaul could be heard pro- claiming: "We don't learn about life by studying it in books, but through kindness. We must believe in life! " Frau Professor Drangsal
1106 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
stood ramrod straight behind him and pressed his point home by saying:
"After all, Goethe was no Ph. D. ! "
In her eyes, Feuermaul bore a strong resemblance to Goethe. The War Minister also held himselfvery straight and smiled tenaciously, as he was accustomed to doing when graciously acknowledging the salute of parading troops.
Count Leinsdorf asked Ulrich: "Tell me, who is this Feuermaul? "
"His father owns some factories in Hungary," Ulrich answered. "I think it has something to do with phosphorus, since none of the workers lives past forty. Occupational disease: necrosis of the bone. "
"Hmm, I see, but the son? " Leinsdorfwas unmoved by the factory workers' fate.
"He was slated to go to the university; law, I believe. The father is a self-made man, and he took it hard that his son was not interested in studying. "
'Why wasn't he interested in studying? " Count Leinsdorf per- sisted; he was being very thorough today.
'Who knows? " Ulrich shrugged. "Probably Fathers and Sons. When the father is poor, the sons love money; when Papa has money, the sons love mankind. Hasn't Your Grace heard about the father- son problem in our day? "
"Yes, I've heard about it. But why is Arnheim playing the patron to this young man? Has it anything to do with those oil fields? "
"Your Grace knows about that? " Ulrich exclaimed.
"Of course; I know everything," Leinsdorf said patiently. "But what I still don't understand is this: That people should love each other, and that it takes a firm hand in government to make them do it, is nothing new. So why should it suddenly be a case of either/or? "
Ulrich answered: "Your Grace has always wanted a spontaneous rallying cry arising from the entire nation; this is the form it's bound to take! "
"Oh, that's not true! " Count Leinsdorf disagreed spiritedly, but before he could go on they were interrupted by Stumm von Bard- wehr, coming from the Arnheim group with a burning question for Ulrich.
"Excuse me for interrupting, Your Grace," he said. "But tell me,"
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 1 1 0 7
he turned to Ulrich, "can one really claim that people are motivated entirely by their feelings and never by their reason? "
Ulrich stared at him blankly.
"There's one of those Marxists over there," Stumm explained, "who seems to be claiming that a person's economic substructure entirely determines his ideological superstructure. And there's a psychoanalyst denying it and insisting that the ideological super- structure is entirely the product of man's instinctual substructure. "
"It's not that simple," Ulrich said, hoping to wriggle out of it.
"That's just what I always say! It didn't do me a bit of good, though," the General answered promptly, keeping his eyes fixed on Ulrich. But now Leinsdorf entered the discussion.
"Now there, you see," he said to Ulrich, "is something rather like the question I was about to raise myself. No matter whether the sub- structure is economic or sexual, well, what I wanted to say before is: Why are people so unreliable in their superstructure? You know the common saying that the world is crazy; it is getting all too easy to believe it's true! "
"That's the psychology of the masses, Your Grace," the learned General interposed again. "So far as it applies to the masses it makes sense to me. The masses are moved only by their instincts, and of course that means by those instincts most individuals have in common; that's logical. That's to say, it's illogical, of course. The masses are illogical; they only use logic for window dressing. What they really let themselves be guided by is simply and solely sugges- tion! Give me the newspapers, the radio, the film industry, and maybe a few other avenues of cultural communication, and within a few years-as my friend Ulrich once said-I promise I'll turn people into cannibals! That's precisely why mankind needs strong leadership, as Your Grace knows far better than I do. But that even highly cultivated individuals are not motivated by logic in some cir- cumstances is something I find it hard to believe, though Amheim says so. "
What on earth could Ulrich have offered his friend by way of support in this scattered debate? Like a bunch of weeds an angler catches on his hook instead of a fish, the General's question was baited with a tangled bunch of theories. Does a man follow only his
IIo8 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
feelings, doing, feeling, even thinking only that to which he is moved by unconscious currents of desire, or even by the milder breeze of pleasure, as we now assume? Or does he not rather act on the basis of reasoned thought and will, as we also widely as- sume? Does he primarily follow certain instincts, such as the sexual instinct, as we assume? Or is it above all not the sexual instinct that dominates, but rather the psychological effect of economic condi- tions, as we also assume today? A creature as complicated as man can be seen from many different angles, and whatever one chooses as the axis in the theoretical picture one gets only partial truths, from whose interpretation the level oftruth slowly rises higher-or does it? Whenever a partial truth has been regarded as the only valid one, there has been a high price to pay. On the other hand, this partial truth would hardly have been discovered if it had not been overestimated. In this fashion the history of truth and the his- tory of feeling are variously linked, but that of feeling remains ob- scure. Indeed, to Ulrich's way of thinking it was no history at all, but a wild jumble. Funny, for instance, that the religious ideas, meaning the passionate ideas, of the Middle Ages about the nature of man were based on a strong faith in man's reason and his will, while today many scholars, whose only passion is smoking too much, consider the emotions as the basis for all human activity. Such were the thoughts going through Ulrich's head, and he natu- rally did not feel like saying anything in response to the oratory of Stumm, who was in any case not waiting for an answer but only cooling off a bit before returning to Arnheim's group.
"Count Leinsdorf," Ulrich said mildly. "Do you remember my old suggestion to establish a General Secretariat for all those problems that need the soul as much as the mind for a solution? "
"Indeed I do," Leinsdorf replied. "I remember telling His Emi- nence about it, and his hearty laugh. But he did say that you had come too late! "
"And yet it's the very thing you were feeling the lack of, Your Grace," Ulrich continued. "You notice that the world no longer remembers today what it wanted yesterday, that its mood keeps changing for no perceptible reason, that it's in a constant uproar and never resolves anything, and ifwe imagined all this chaos of human- ity brought together in a single head, we'd have a really unmistakable
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 1 1 0 9
case of recognizable pathological symptoms that one would count as mental insufficiency. . . . "
"Absolutely right! " cried Stumm von Bordwehr, whose pride in everything he had learned that afternoon had welled up again. "That's precisely the configuration of . . . well, I can't think of the name of that mental disease at the moment, but that's it exactly! "
"No," Ulrich said with a smile. "It's surely not the description of any specific disease; the difference between a normal person and an insane one is precisely that the normal person has all the diseases of the mind, while the madman has only one! "
"Brilliantly put! " Stumm and Leinsdorf cried as with one voice, though in slightly different words, and then added in the same way: "But what does that mean exactly? "
"It means this," Ulrich stated. "If I understand by morality the or- dering of all those interrelations that include feeling, imagination, and the like, each of these takes its relative position from the others and in that way attains some sort of stability; but all of them together, in moral terms, don't get beyond the state of delusion! "
"Come, that's going too far," Count Leinsdorf said good- naturedly. And the General said: "But surely every man has to have his own morals; you can't order anyone to prefer a cat tQ a dog . . . ? "
"Can one prescribe it, Your Grace? " Ulrich asked intently.
'Well, in the old days," Count Leinsdorf said diplomatically, al- though he had been challenged in his religious conviction that "the truth" existed in every sphere. "It was easier in the old days. But today . . . ? "
"Then that leaves us in a permanent state of religious war," Ulrich pointed out.
"You call that a religious war? "
'What else? "
"Hmm . . . not bad. Quite a good characterization of modem life.
Incidentally, I always knew that there's not such a bad Catholic se- cretly tucked away inside you. "
'Tm a very bad one," Ulrich said. "I don't believe that God has been here yet, but that He is still to come. But only if we pave the way for Him more than we have so far! "
His Grace rejected this with the dignified words: "That's over my head. "
1110
A GREAT EVENT IS IN THE MAKING. BUT NO ONE HAS NOTICED
The General, however, cried: ''I'm afraid I must get back to His Ex- cellency the Minister at once, but you absolutely will have to explain all that to m e - l won't let you off! I'll join you gentlemen again soon, ifI may. "
Leinsdorf gave the impression of wanting to say something-his mind was clearly hard at work-but he and Ulrich had hardly been left alone for a moment when they found themselves surrounded by people borne toward them by the constant circulation ~fthe guests and the charisma of His Grace. There could, of course, be no more talk about what Ulrich had just said, and no one besides him was giving it a thought, when an arm slipped into his from behind; it was Agathe.
"Have you found grounds for my defense yet?
" she asked in a maliciously caressing tone.
Ulrich took a grip on her arm and drew her aside from the crowd around them.
"Can't we go home? " Agathe asked.
"No," Ulrich said. "I can't leave yet. "
"I suppose," she teased him, "that times to come, for whose sake
you're keeping yourself pure here, won't let you go? "
Ulrich pressed her arm.
"Isn't it greatly in my favor that I don't belong here but in jail? "
she whispered in his ear.
They looked for a place where they could be alone. The party had
reached the boiling point and was impelling the guests to constantly circulate. On the whole, however, the twofold grouping was still dis- tinguishable: around the Minister of War the talk was of peace and love, and around Amheim, at the moment, about how the German love of peace flourished best in the shadow of German power.
Amheim lent a benevolent ear to this, because he never snubbed
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 1 1 1 1
an honest opinion and was especially interested in new ones. He was worried that the deal for the oil fields might run into opposition in Parliament. He was certain of the unavoidable opposition of the Slavic contingent, and hoped he could count on the pro-German fac- tion to support him. On the Ministry level all seemed to be going well, except for a certain antagonism in the Ministry of Foreign Af- fairs, but he did not regard this as particularly significant. Tomorrow he was going to Budapest.
There were plenty of hostile "observers" around him and other leading personages. They were easily spotted in that they always said yes to everything and were unfailingly polite, while the others tended to have different opinions.
Tuzzi was trying to win one of them over by asserting: "What they're saying doesn't mean a thing. It never means anything! " His listener, a member of Parliament, believed him. But this did not change his mind, made up before he had come, that something fishy was going on here.
His Grace, on the other hand, spoke up on behalf of the evening's seriousness by saying to another skeptic: "My dear sir, ever since 1848 even the revolutions have been brought about by nothing more than a lot of talk! "
It would be wrong to regard such differences as no more than ac- ceptable variants on the otherwise usual monotony of life; and yet this error, with all its grave consequences, occurs almost as fre- quently as the expression "It's a matter of feeling," without which our mental economy would be unthinkable. This indispensable phrase divides what must be in life from what can be.
"It sets apart," Ulrich said to Agathe, "the given order of things from a private, personal preserve. It separates what has been ratio- nalized from what is held to be irrational. As commonly used, it is an admission that we are forced to be humane on major counts, but being humane on minor counts is suspiciously arbitrary. We think life would be a prison ifwe were not free to choose between wine or water, religion or atheism, but nobody believes in the least that we have any real option in matters of feeling; on the contrary, we draw a line, ambiguous though it may be, between legitimate and illegiti- mate feelings. "
The feelings between Ulrich and Agathe were of the illegitimate
1112 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
kind, although they did no more than talk about the party as, still arm in arm, they looked in vain for a private comer, while experiencing a wild and unacknowledged joy in being reunited after their estrange- ment. By contrast, the choice between loving all one's fellow human beings, or first annihilating some of them, obviously involved doubly legitimate feelings, or it would not have been so eagerly debated in Diotima's house and in the presence of His Grace, even though it also split the company into two spiteful parties. Ulrich maintained that invention of "a matter of feeling" had rendered the worst possi- ble service to the cause offeeling, and as he undertook to describe to his sister the curious impression this evening's affair had awakened in him, he soon found himself saying things that unintentionally took up where their talk of the morning had broken off and were appar- ently intended to justify it.
"I hardly know where to start," he said, "without boring you. May I tell you what I understand by 'morality'? "
"Please do," Agathe said.
"Morality is regulation of conduct within a society, beginning with regulation of its inner impulses, that is, feelings and thoughts. "
"That's a lot ofprogress in a few hours! " Agathe replied with a laugh. "This morning you were still saying you didn't know what mo- rality was! "
"Of course I don't. That doesn't stop me from giving you a dozen explanations. The oldest reason for it is that God revealed the order oflife to us in all its details. . . . "
"That would be the best," Agathe said.
"But the most probable," Ulrich said emphatically, "is that moral- ity, like every other form of order, arises through force and violence! A group of people that has seized power simply imposes on the rest those rules and principles that will secure their power. Morality thereby tends to favor those who brought it to power. At the same time, it sets an example in so doing. And at the same time reactions set in that cause it to change-this is of course too complicated to be described briefly, and while it by no means happens without thought, but then again not by means of thought, either, but rather empiri- cally, what you get in the end is an infinite network that seems to span everything as independently as God's firmament. Now, every- thing relates to this self-contained circle, but this circle relates to
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · I I I3
nothing. In other words: Everything is moral, but morality itself is not! "
"How charming of morality," Agathe said. "But do you know that I encountered a good person today? "
The change of subject took Ulrich by surprise, but when Agathe began telling him ofher meetingwith lindner, he first tried to find a place for it in his train ofthought. "You can find good people here by the dozen too," he said, "but I'll tell you why the bad people are here as well, ifyou'll let me go on. "
As they talked they gradually edged their way out of the throng and reached the anteroom, and Ulrich had to think where they might tum for refuge: Diotima's bedroom occurred to him, and also Ra- chel's little room, but he did not want to set foot in either of them again, so he and Agathe remained for the time being among the un- peopled coats that were hanging there. Ulrich could not find a way to pick up the thread. "I really ought to start again from the beginning," he said, with an impatient, helpless gesture. Then suddenly he said:
''You don't want to know whether you've done something good or bad; you're uneasy because you do both without a solid reason! "
Agathe nodded.
He had taken both her hands in his.
The matte sheen of his sister's skin, with its fragrance of plants
unknown to him, rising before his eyes from the low neckline of her gown, lost for a moment all earthly connection. The motion of the blood pulsed from one hand into the other. A deep moat from some other world seemed to enclose them both in a nowhere world of their own.
He suddenly could not find the ideas to characterize it; he could not even get hold of those that had often served him before: "Let's not act on the impulse of the moment but act out of the condition that lasts to the end. " "In such a way that it takes us to the center from which one cannot return to take anything back" "Not from the periphery and its constantly changing conditions, but out of the one, immutable happiness. " Such phrases did come to mind, and he might well have used them ifit had only been as conversation. But in the direct immediacy with which they were to be applied to this very moment between him and his sister, it was suddenly impossible. It left him helplessly agitated. But Agathe understood him clearly. And
1114 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
she should have been happy that for the first time the shell encasing her "hard brother" had cracked, exposing what was inside, like an egg that has fallen to the floor. To her surprise, however, her feelings this time were not quite ready to fall into step with his. Between morning and evening lay her curious encounter with Lindner, and although this man had merely aroused her wonder and curiosity, even this tiny grain sufficed to keep the unending mirroring of reclu- sive love from coming into play.
Ulrich felt it in her hands even before she said anything-and Agathe made no answer.
He guessed that this unexpected self-denial had something to do with the experience he had just had to listen to her describing. Abashed and confused by the rejection of his unanswered feelings, he said, shaking his head:
"It's annoying how much you seem to expect from the goodness of such a man! "
"I suppose it is," Agathe admitted.
He looked at her. He realized that this encounter meant more to his sister than the attentions paid to her by other men since she had been under his protection. He even knew this man slightly. Lindner was a public figure of sorts; he was the man who, at the very first session of the Parallel Campaign, had made the brief speech, re- ceived with embarrassing silence, hailing the "historical moment" or something similar: awkward, sincere, and pointless. . . . On impulse Ulrich glanced around, but he did not recall seeing the man tonight, for he had not been asked again, as Ulrich knew. He must have come across him elsewhere from time to time, probably at some learned society, and have read one or another of his publications, for as he concentrated his memory, ultramicroscopic traces of images from the past condensed like a repulsive viscous drop into his verdict: "That dreary ass! The more anyone wants to be taken seriously, the less one can take such a man seriously, any more than Professor Hagauer! " So he said to Agathe.
Agathe met it with silence. She even pressed his hand.
He felt: There is something quite contradictory here, but there's no stopping it.
At this point people came into the anteroom, and the siblings drew slightly apart.
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · I I I 5
"Shall I take you back in? " Ulrich asked.
Agathe said no and looked around for an escape.
It suddenly occurred to Ulrich that the only way they could get
away from the other guests was by retreating to the kitchen. Three batteries of glasses were being filled and trays loaded with cakes. The cook was bustling about with great zeal; Rachel and Soliman were waiting to be loaded up, standing apart and motionless and not whis- pering to each other as they used to do on such occasions. Little Ra- chel dropped a curtsy as they came in, Soliman merely saluted with his dark eyes, and Ulrich said: "It's too stuffy in there; can we get something to drink here? "
He sat down with Agathe on the window seat and put a glass and a plate down for show so that in case anyone should see them it would look as if two old friends of the family were having a private chat. When they were seated, he said with a little sigh: "So it's merely a matter offeeling whether one finds such a Professor Lindner good or insufferable? ''
Agathe was concentrating on unwrapping a piece of candy.
"Which is to say," Ulrich went on, "that the feeling is neither true nor false. Feeling has remained a private matter! It remains at the mercy of suggestion, fantasy, or persuasion. You and I are no differ- ent from those people in there. Do you know what these people want? ''
"No. But does it matter? "
"Perhaps it does. They are forming two parties, each ofwhich is as right or as wrong as the other. "
Agathe said she could not help thinking that it was better to be- lieve in human goodness than only in guns and politics, even if the manner ofthe beliefwas absurd.
"What's he like, this man you met? "
"Oh, that's impossible to say. He's good! " his sister answered with a laugh.
"You can no more depend on what looks good to you than on what looks good to Leinsdorf,'' Ulrich responded testily.
Both their faces were tense with excitement and laughter; the easy flow of humorous civility blocked deeper countercurrents. Rachel sensed it at the roots of her hair, under her little cap, but she was feeling so miserable herself that her perception was much dimmer
III6 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
than it used to be, like a memory of better days. The lovely curve of her cheeks was a shade hollow, the black blaze of her eyes dulled with discouragement. Had Ulrich been in a mood to compare her beauty with that of his sister, he would have been bound to notice that Rachel's former dark brilliance had crumbled like a piece of coal that had been run over by a heavy truck. But he had no eyes for her now. She was pregnant, and no one knew it except Soliman, who showed no understanding of the disastrous reality and responded with nothing but childish romantic schemes.
"For centuries now," Ulrich went on, "the world has known truth in thinking and accordingly, to a certain degree, rational freedom of thought. But during this same time the emotional life has had neither the strict discipline oftruth nor any freedom ofmovement. For every moral system has, in its time, regulated the feelings, and rigidly too, but only insofar as certain basic principles and feelings were needed for whatever action it favored; the rest was left to individual whim, to the private play of emotions, to the random efforts of art, and to aca- demic debate. So morality has adapted our feelings to the needs of moral systems and meanwhile neglected to develop them, even though it depends on feelings: morality is, after all, the order and integrity of the emotional life. " Here he broke off. He felt Rachel's fascinated stare on his animated face, even if she could no longer quite muster her former enthusiasm for the concerns of important people.
"I suppose it's funny how I go on talking about morality even here in the kitchen," he said in embarrassment.
Agathe was gazing at him intently and thoughtfully. He leaned over closer to his sister and added softly, with a flickering smile: "But it's only another way of expressing an impassioned state that takes up arms against the whole world! "
Without intending to, he was reenacting their confrontation ofthe morning, in which he had played the unpleasant role of the lecturing schoolmaster. He could not help it. For him morality was neither conformism nor philosophic wisdom, but living the infinite fullness of possibilities. He believed in morality's capacity for intensification, in stages of moral experience, and not merely, as most people do, in stages of moral understanding, as if it were something cut-and-dried for which people were just not pure enough. He believed in morality
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 1 1 1 7
without believing in any specific moral system. Morality is generally understood to be a sort ofpolice regulations for keeping life in order, and since life does not obey even these, they come to look as if they were really impossible to live up to and accordingly, in this sorry way, not really an ideal either. But morality must not be reduced to this level. Morality is imagination. This was what he wanted to make Agathe see. And his second point was: Imagination is not arbitrary. Once the imagination is left to caprice, there is a price to pay.
The words twitched in his mouth. He was on the verge ofbringing up the neglected difference between the way in which various histor- ical periods have developed the rational mind in their own fashion and the way they have kept the moral imagination static and closed off, also in their own fashion. He was on the verge of talking about this because it results in a line that rises, despite all skepticism, more or less steadily through all of history's transformations, representing the rational mind and its patterns, and contrasting with a mound of broken shards of feelings, ideas, and potentials of life that were heaped up in layers just the way they were when they came into being, as eternal side issues, and that were always discarded. And also because a further result is that this finally adds up to any number of possibilities for forming an opinion one way or another, as soon as they are extended into the realm ofprinciples; but that there is never a possibility of bringing them together. And because it follows that the various opinions lash out at each other since they have no way of communicating. And because it follows, finally, that the emotional life of mankind slops back and forth like water in an unsteady tub. Ulrich had an idea that had been haunting him all evening, an old idea of his, incidentally, but everything that had happened this eve- ning had somehow simply confirmed it, and he wanted to show Agathe where her error lay and how it could be put right, if everyone agreed. Actually, it was only his painful intention to prove that one could not, on the whole, even trust the discoveries of one's own imagination.
Agathe now said, with a little sigh, as a hard-pressed woman gets in one last, quick defensive move before surrendering:
"So one has to do everything 'on principle,' is that it? " And she looked at him, responding to his smile.
But he answered: "Yes, but only on one principle! "
1118 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
This was something quite different from what he had meant to say. It again came from the realm of the Siamese twins and the Millen- nium, where life grows in magical stillness like a flower, and even ifit were not a mere flight of fancy, it pointed to the frontiers of thought, which are solitary and treacherous. Agathe's eyes were like split agate. If at this instant he had said only a little more, or touched her with his hand, something would have happened-something that was gone a moment later, before she even knew what it was. For Ulrich did not want to say any more. He took a knife and a piece of fruit and began to peel. He was happy because the distance that had separated him from his sister shortly before had melted into an im- measurable closeness; but he was also glad that at this moment they were interrupted.
It was the General, who came peering into the kitchen with the sly glance of a patrol leader surprising the enemy encampment. "Please forgive the intrusion," he called out as he entered, "but as it's only a tete-a-tete with your brother, dear lady, it can't be too great a crime! " And turning to Ulrich, he said: "They're looking for you high and low. "
And Ulrich told the General what he had meant to say to Agathe. But first he asked: 'Who are they? "
"I was supposed to bring you to the Minister! " Stumm said re- proachfully.
Ulrich waved that aside.
'Well, it's too late anyway," the good-natured General said. "The old boy just left. But on my own account, as soon as Madame has chosen some better company than yours, I shall have to interrogate you about what you meant with that 'religious war'-if you'll be so kind as to remember your own words. "
'W e were just talking about that," Ulrich said.
"How very interesting! " the General exclaimed. "Your sister is also interested in moral systems? "
"It's all my brother talks about," Agathe corrected him, smiling.
"That was virtually the whole agenda this evening! " Stumm sighed. "Leinsdorf, for instance, said only a few minutes ago that mo- rality is just as important as eating. I can't see it myself. " So saying, he bent with relish over the candies Agathe handed him. It was sup- posed to be a joke. Agathe said, to comfort him: "Neither can I. "
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 1 1 1 9
"An officer and a woman must have morals, but they don't like to talk about it," the General went on improvising. "Don't you agree, dear lady? "
Rachel had brought him a kitchen chair, which she was zealously dusting offwith her apron when these words ofhis stabbed her to the heart; she nearly broke into tears.
Stumm was prompting Ulrich again: "Now then, what's this about the religious war? " But before Ulrich could say anything, he fore- stalled him, saying: "Actually, I have the feeling that your cousin is also prowling around looking for you, and I have my military training to thank for finding you first. So I must make the most of my time. Things are not going well in there! It's supposed to be our fault. And your cousin-how shall I put it? She's simply let go of the reins. Do you know what they've decided? "
"Who decided? "
"A lot of people have already left.
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 1 1 0 1
naive contrast between the voluptuous and the meager, as expressed in these two women, loomed as large to him as that between pasture and rock at the timberline, and he felt himself stepping down from the Parallel Campaign, even though with a guilty smile. When Gerda saw this smile slowly sinking down toward her outstretched hand, her eyelids quivered.
At this moment Diotima noticed that Arnheim was taking young Feuermaul to meet His Grace and the War Minister, and, skilled tac- tician that she was, she thwarted all encounters by ordering the ser- vants in with trays of refreshments.
37
A COMP ARISON
Such conversations as those just reported went on by the dozen, and they all had something in common, which is not easy to describe but that cannot be passed over if one lacks Privy Councillor Mese- ritscher's flair for giving a dazzling account of a party just by making lists: who was there, wearing what, and saying this and that-all those things that are, in fact, considered by many to be the truest narrative art. So Friedel Feuermaul was not really being a miserable toady, which he never was, but merely flnding the right word for the time and place when he said of Meseritscher, while standing in front of him: "He's really the Homer of our era! No, I mean it," he added, when Meseritscher tried to brush it off. "That epic, imperturbable 'and' with which you link all persons and events strikes me as having real greatness! " He had got hold of Meseritscher because the editor of the Parliamentary and Social Gazette had been reluctant to leave without paying his respects to Arnheim; but this still did not get Feuermaul's name into print "among those present. "
Without going into the flner distinctions between idiots and cre- tins, suffice it to say that an idiot ofa certain degree is not up to form-
1102 • THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
ing the concept "parents," even though he has no trouble with the idea of "father and mother. " This same simple additive, "and," was Meseritscher's device for relating social phenomena to one another. Another point about idiots is that in the basic concreteness of their thinking they have something that is generally agreed to appeal to the emotions in a mysterious way; and poets appeal directly to the emotions in very much the same way, insofar as their minds run to palpable realities. And so, when Friedel Feuermaul addressed Mese- ritscher as a poet, he could just as well-that is, out of the same ob- scure, hovering feeling, which, in his case, was also tantamount to a sudden illumination-have called him an idiot, in a way that would have had considerable significance for all mankind. For the element common to both is a mental condition that cannot be spanned by far-reaching concepts, or refined by distinctions and abstractions, a mental state of the crudest pattern, expressed most clearly in the way it limits itself to the simplest of coordinating conjunctions, the help- lessly additive "and," which for those of meager mental capacity re- places more intricate relationships; and it may be said that our world, regardless of all its intellectual riches, is in a mental condition akin to idiocy; indeed, there is no avoiding this conclusion if one tries to grasp as a totality what is going on in the world.
Not that those who are the first to propound or who come to share such a view have a monopoly on intelligence! It simply doesn't de- pend in the least on the individual, or on the pursuits he is engaged in-and which were indeed being engaged in, with more or with less shrewdness, by all those who had come to Diotima's on this evening. For when General Stumm von Bordwehr, for instance, during the pause caused by the arrival of refreshments, got into a conversation with His Grace in the course of which he argued in a genially obsti- nate and respectfully daring tone: 'With all due respect, Your Grace, permit me to disagree most strongly; there is more than mere pre- sumption in people who are proud of their race; there is also some- thing appealingly aristocratic! " he knew precisely what he meant by these words, but not so precisely what he conveyed by them, for such civilities are wrapped in an extra something that is like a pair of thick gloves in which one must struggle to pick up a single match out of a full box. And Leo Fischel, who had not budged from Stumm's side
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · I I 0 3
after he noticed that the General was moving impatiently toward His Grace, added:
"People must be judged not by their race but on their merit! "
What His Grace replied was logical; disregarding Director Fischel, who had only just been introduced to him, he answered Stumm:
"What does the middle class need race for? They've always been up in arms about a court chamberlain needing sixteen noble ances- tors, and now what are they doing themselves? Trying to ape it, and exaggerating it to boot! More than sixteen ancestors is sheer snob- bery! " For His Grace was upset, and therefore it was quite logical for him to express himself in this fashion. Man is indisputably endowed with reason; the problem is only how he uses his reason in the com- pany of others.
His Grace was vexed by the intrusion of "national" elements into the Parallel Campaign, although he himself had brought it about. Various political and social considerations had driven him to it; he himself recognized only "the national populace. " His political friends had advised him: "There's no harm in listening to what they have to say about race and purity and blood-who takes what anyone says seriously anyway? "
"But they're talking about human beings as if they were beasts! " Count Leinsdorfhad objected; he had a Catholic view of human dig- nity, which prevented him from seeing that the principles of the chicken farm and of horse breeding could be equally well applied to God's children, even though he was a great landowner. To this his friends had replied: "Come now, you've no need to brood about it. And anyhow it's probably better than their talking about the good of mankind and all that revolutionary drivel from abroad, as they've been doing. " His Grace had finally seen the light on this point. But His Grace was also vexed because this fellow Feuermaul, whom he had forced Diotima to invite, was merely bringing fresh confusion into the Parallel Campaign and was a disappointment to him. Baron- ess Wayden had praised Feuermaul to the skies, and he had finally yielded to her insistence. "You're quite right," Leinsdorf had conceded. "The way things are going just now, we can easily be ac- cused of Germanizing. And there may be no harm, as you say, in in-
II04 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
viting a poet who says that we have to love all mankind. But don't you see, I can't really spring that on Frau Tuzzi! " But the Baroness would not give an inch and must have found new and effective arguments, for at the end of their conversation Leinsdorf had promised to make Diotima invite Feuermaul. "Not that I like doing it," he had said, "but a strong hand does need the right word to get its message across; I must agree with you there. And it's also true that things have been moving too slowly recently; we haven't had the right spirit! "
But now he was dissatisfied. His Grace was far from thinking that other people were stupid, even if he did think himself more intelli- gent than they were, and he could not comprehend why all these intelligent people taken together made such a poor impression on him. Indeed, life as a whole made this impression on him, as though all the intelligence in individuals and in official institutions-among which he was known to count religion and science-somehow added up to a state of total unaccountability. New ideas that one had not heard of before kept popping up, aroused passions, and then van- ished again after running their course; people were always chasing after some leader or another, and stumbling from one superstition to the next, cheering His Majesty one day and giving the most disgust- ing incendiary speeches in Parliament the next, and none of it ever amounted to anything in the end! If this could be miniaturized by a factor of a million and reduced, as it were, to the dimensions of a single head, the result would be precisely the image of the unac- countable, forgetful, ignorant conduct and the demented hopping around that had always been Count Leinsdorf's image of a lunatic, although he had hitherto had little occasion to think about it. Glumly he stood here now, in the midst of the men surrounding him, and reflected that the whole idea of the Parallel Campaign had been to bring out the truth behind all this, and he found himself unable to formulate some vague idea about faith that was there in his mind; all he could feel was something as pleasantly soothing as the shade of a high wall-a church wall, presumably.
"Funny," he said to Ulrich, giving up his thought after a while. "If you look at all this with some detachment, it somehow reminds you of starlings-you know, the way they flock together in autumn in the fruit trees. "
Ulrich had come back after seeing Gerda. Their conversation had
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 1 1 0 5
not lived up to its promising beginning; Gerda had not managed to utter more than brief, laborious answers hacked off from something that stuck like a hard wedge in her breast, while Hans Sepp talked all the more; he had set himself up as her watchdog and let it be known at once that he was not to be intimidated by his decadent surround- ings.
"You don't know the great racial theorist Bremshuber? " he had asked Ulrich.
''Where does he live? " Ulrich had asked.
"In Scharding on the Laa," Hans Sepp had told him.
''What does he do? " Ulrich had asked.
''What difference does that make? " Hans had said. "New people
are coming to the top! He's a druggist. "
Ulrich had said to Gerda: "I hear you're now formally engaged. " And Gerda had replied: "Bremshuber demands the ruthless sup-
pression of all alien races; that's surely less cruel than toleration and contempt! " Her lip had trembled again as she forced out this sen- tence that was so badly patched together from broken bits of thought.
Ulrich had merely looked at her and shaken his head. "I don't un- derstand that," he had said, holding out his hand to say good-bye, and now, standing beside Leinsdorf, he felt as innocent as a star in the infinity of space.
"But if you don't regard it with detachment"-Count Leinsdorf slowly continued his new thought, after a pause-"then it keeps cir- cling around in your head like a dog trying to catch its tail! Now I've let my friends have their way with me," he added, "and I've let the Baroness Wayden have her way, and if you go around listening to what we're saying here, each separate bit sounds quite sensible, but in the nobler spiritual context we're looking for, it sounds really ram- bling and incoherent! "
Around the War Minister and Feuermaul, whom Arnheim had brought over, a group had formed in which Feuermaul was holding forth, loving all mankind, while a second, more distant group was col- lecting around Arnheim, who had moved away; in it Ulrich saw Hans Sepp and Gerda some while later. Feuermaul could be heard pro- claiming: "We don't learn about life by studying it in books, but through kindness. We must believe in life! " Frau Professor Drangsal
1106 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
stood ramrod straight behind him and pressed his point home by saying:
"After all, Goethe was no Ph. D. ! "
In her eyes, Feuermaul bore a strong resemblance to Goethe. The War Minister also held himselfvery straight and smiled tenaciously, as he was accustomed to doing when graciously acknowledging the salute of parading troops.
Count Leinsdorf asked Ulrich: "Tell me, who is this Feuermaul? "
"His father owns some factories in Hungary," Ulrich answered. "I think it has something to do with phosphorus, since none of the workers lives past forty. Occupational disease: necrosis of the bone. "
"Hmm, I see, but the son? " Leinsdorfwas unmoved by the factory workers' fate.
"He was slated to go to the university; law, I believe. The father is a self-made man, and he took it hard that his son was not interested in studying. "
'Why wasn't he interested in studying? " Count Leinsdorf per- sisted; he was being very thorough today.
'Who knows? " Ulrich shrugged. "Probably Fathers and Sons. When the father is poor, the sons love money; when Papa has money, the sons love mankind. Hasn't Your Grace heard about the father- son problem in our day? "
"Yes, I've heard about it. But why is Arnheim playing the patron to this young man? Has it anything to do with those oil fields? "
"Your Grace knows about that? " Ulrich exclaimed.
"Of course; I know everything," Leinsdorf said patiently. "But what I still don't understand is this: That people should love each other, and that it takes a firm hand in government to make them do it, is nothing new. So why should it suddenly be a case of either/or? "
Ulrich answered: "Your Grace has always wanted a spontaneous rallying cry arising from the entire nation; this is the form it's bound to take! "
"Oh, that's not true! " Count Leinsdorf disagreed spiritedly, but before he could go on they were interrupted by Stumm von Bard- wehr, coming from the Arnheim group with a burning question for Ulrich.
"Excuse me for interrupting, Your Grace," he said. "But tell me,"
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 1 1 0 7
he turned to Ulrich, "can one really claim that people are motivated entirely by their feelings and never by their reason? "
Ulrich stared at him blankly.
"There's one of those Marxists over there," Stumm explained, "who seems to be claiming that a person's economic substructure entirely determines his ideological superstructure. And there's a psychoanalyst denying it and insisting that the ideological super- structure is entirely the product of man's instinctual substructure. "
"It's not that simple," Ulrich said, hoping to wriggle out of it.
"That's just what I always say! It didn't do me a bit of good, though," the General answered promptly, keeping his eyes fixed on Ulrich. But now Leinsdorf entered the discussion.
"Now there, you see," he said to Ulrich, "is something rather like the question I was about to raise myself. No matter whether the sub- structure is economic or sexual, well, what I wanted to say before is: Why are people so unreliable in their superstructure? You know the common saying that the world is crazy; it is getting all too easy to believe it's true! "
"That's the psychology of the masses, Your Grace," the learned General interposed again. "So far as it applies to the masses it makes sense to me. The masses are moved only by their instincts, and of course that means by those instincts most individuals have in common; that's logical. That's to say, it's illogical, of course. The masses are illogical; they only use logic for window dressing. What they really let themselves be guided by is simply and solely sugges- tion! Give me the newspapers, the radio, the film industry, and maybe a few other avenues of cultural communication, and within a few years-as my friend Ulrich once said-I promise I'll turn people into cannibals! That's precisely why mankind needs strong leadership, as Your Grace knows far better than I do. But that even highly cultivated individuals are not motivated by logic in some cir- cumstances is something I find it hard to believe, though Amheim says so. "
What on earth could Ulrich have offered his friend by way of support in this scattered debate? Like a bunch of weeds an angler catches on his hook instead of a fish, the General's question was baited with a tangled bunch of theories. Does a man follow only his
IIo8 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
feelings, doing, feeling, even thinking only that to which he is moved by unconscious currents of desire, or even by the milder breeze of pleasure, as we now assume? Or does he not rather act on the basis of reasoned thought and will, as we also widely as- sume? Does he primarily follow certain instincts, such as the sexual instinct, as we assume? Or is it above all not the sexual instinct that dominates, but rather the psychological effect of economic condi- tions, as we also assume today? A creature as complicated as man can be seen from many different angles, and whatever one chooses as the axis in the theoretical picture one gets only partial truths, from whose interpretation the level oftruth slowly rises higher-or does it? Whenever a partial truth has been regarded as the only valid one, there has been a high price to pay. On the other hand, this partial truth would hardly have been discovered if it had not been overestimated. In this fashion the history of truth and the his- tory of feeling are variously linked, but that of feeling remains ob- scure. Indeed, to Ulrich's way of thinking it was no history at all, but a wild jumble. Funny, for instance, that the religious ideas, meaning the passionate ideas, of the Middle Ages about the nature of man were based on a strong faith in man's reason and his will, while today many scholars, whose only passion is smoking too much, consider the emotions as the basis for all human activity. Such were the thoughts going through Ulrich's head, and he natu- rally did not feel like saying anything in response to the oratory of Stumm, who was in any case not waiting for an answer but only cooling off a bit before returning to Arnheim's group.
"Count Leinsdorf," Ulrich said mildly. "Do you remember my old suggestion to establish a General Secretariat for all those problems that need the soul as much as the mind for a solution? "
"Indeed I do," Leinsdorf replied. "I remember telling His Emi- nence about it, and his hearty laugh. But he did say that you had come too late! "
"And yet it's the very thing you were feeling the lack of, Your Grace," Ulrich continued. "You notice that the world no longer remembers today what it wanted yesterday, that its mood keeps changing for no perceptible reason, that it's in a constant uproar and never resolves anything, and ifwe imagined all this chaos of human- ity brought together in a single head, we'd have a really unmistakable
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 1 1 0 9
case of recognizable pathological symptoms that one would count as mental insufficiency. . . . "
"Absolutely right! " cried Stumm von Bordwehr, whose pride in everything he had learned that afternoon had welled up again. "That's precisely the configuration of . . . well, I can't think of the name of that mental disease at the moment, but that's it exactly! "
"No," Ulrich said with a smile. "It's surely not the description of any specific disease; the difference between a normal person and an insane one is precisely that the normal person has all the diseases of the mind, while the madman has only one! "
"Brilliantly put! " Stumm and Leinsdorf cried as with one voice, though in slightly different words, and then added in the same way: "But what does that mean exactly? "
"It means this," Ulrich stated. "If I understand by morality the or- dering of all those interrelations that include feeling, imagination, and the like, each of these takes its relative position from the others and in that way attains some sort of stability; but all of them together, in moral terms, don't get beyond the state of delusion! "
"Come, that's going too far," Count Leinsdorf said good- naturedly. And the General said: "But surely every man has to have his own morals; you can't order anyone to prefer a cat tQ a dog . . . ? "
"Can one prescribe it, Your Grace? " Ulrich asked intently.
'Well, in the old days," Count Leinsdorf said diplomatically, al- though he had been challenged in his religious conviction that "the truth" existed in every sphere. "It was easier in the old days. But today . . . ? "
"Then that leaves us in a permanent state of religious war," Ulrich pointed out.
"You call that a religious war? "
'What else? "
"Hmm . . . not bad. Quite a good characterization of modem life.
Incidentally, I always knew that there's not such a bad Catholic se- cretly tucked away inside you. "
'Tm a very bad one," Ulrich said. "I don't believe that God has been here yet, but that He is still to come. But only if we pave the way for Him more than we have so far! "
His Grace rejected this with the dignified words: "That's over my head. "
1110
A GREAT EVENT IS IN THE MAKING. BUT NO ONE HAS NOTICED
The General, however, cried: ''I'm afraid I must get back to His Ex- cellency the Minister at once, but you absolutely will have to explain all that to m e - l won't let you off! I'll join you gentlemen again soon, ifI may. "
Leinsdorf gave the impression of wanting to say something-his mind was clearly hard at work-but he and Ulrich had hardly been left alone for a moment when they found themselves surrounded by people borne toward them by the constant circulation ~fthe guests and the charisma of His Grace. There could, of course, be no more talk about what Ulrich had just said, and no one besides him was giving it a thought, when an arm slipped into his from behind; it was Agathe.
"Have you found grounds for my defense yet?
" she asked in a maliciously caressing tone.
Ulrich took a grip on her arm and drew her aside from the crowd around them.
"Can't we go home? " Agathe asked.
"No," Ulrich said. "I can't leave yet. "
"I suppose," she teased him, "that times to come, for whose sake
you're keeping yourself pure here, won't let you go? "
Ulrich pressed her arm.
"Isn't it greatly in my favor that I don't belong here but in jail? "
she whispered in his ear.
They looked for a place where they could be alone. The party had
reached the boiling point and was impelling the guests to constantly circulate. On the whole, however, the twofold grouping was still dis- tinguishable: around the Minister of War the talk was of peace and love, and around Amheim, at the moment, about how the German love of peace flourished best in the shadow of German power.
Amheim lent a benevolent ear to this, because he never snubbed
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 1 1 1 1
an honest opinion and was especially interested in new ones. He was worried that the deal for the oil fields might run into opposition in Parliament. He was certain of the unavoidable opposition of the Slavic contingent, and hoped he could count on the pro-German fac- tion to support him. On the Ministry level all seemed to be going well, except for a certain antagonism in the Ministry of Foreign Af- fairs, but he did not regard this as particularly significant. Tomorrow he was going to Budapest.
There were plenty of hostile "observers" around him and other leading personages. They were easily spotted in that they always said yes to everything and were unfailingly polite, while the others tended to have different opinions.
Tuzzi was trying to win one of them over by asserting: "What they're saying doesn't mean a thing. It never means anything! " His listener, a member of Parliament, believed him. But this did not change his mind, made up before he had come, that something fishy was going on here.
His Grace, on the other hand, spoke up on behalf of the evening's seriousness by saying to another skeptic: "My dear sir, ever since 1848 even the revolutions have been brought about by nothing more than a lot of talk! "
It would be wrong to regard such differences as no more than ac- ceptable variants on the otherwise usual monotony of life; and yet this error, with all its grave consequences, occurs almost as fre- quently as the expression "It's a matter of feeling," without which our mental economy would be unthinkable. This indispensable phrase divides what must be in life from what can be.
"It sets apart," Ulrich said to Agathe, "the given order of things from a private, personal preserve. It separates what has been ratio- nalized from what is held to be irrational. As commonly used, it is an admission that we are forced to be humane on major counts, but being humane on minor counts is suspiciously arbitrary. We think life would be a prison ifwe were not free to choose between wine or water, religion or atheism, but nobody believes in the least that we have any real option in matters of feeling; on the contrary, we draw a line, ambiguous though it may be, between legitimate and illegiti- mate feelings. "
The feelings between Ulrich and Agathe were of the illegitimate
1112 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
kind, although they did no more than talk about the party as, still arm in arm, they looked in vain for a private comer, while experiencing a wild and unacknowledged joy in being reunited after their estrange- ment. By contrast, the choice between loving all one's fellow human beings, or first annihilating some of them, obviously involved doubly legitimate feelings, or it would not have been so eagerly debated in Diotima's house and in the presence of His Grace, even though it also split the company into two spiteful parties. Ulrich maintained that invention of "a matter of feeling" had rendered the worst possi- ble service to the cause offeeling, and as he undertook to describe to his sister the curious impression this evening's affair had awakened in him, he soon found himself saying things that unintentionally took up where their talk of the morning had broken off and were appar- ently intended to justify it.
"I hardly know where to start," he said, "without boring you. May I tell you what I understand by 'morality'? "
"Please do," Agathe said.
"Morality is regulation of conduct within a society, beginning with regulation of its inner impulses, that is, feelings and thoughts. "
"That's a lot ofprogress in a few hours! " Agathe replied with a laugh. "This morning you were still saying you didn't know what mo- rality was! "
"Of course I don't. That doesn't stop me from giving you a dozen explanations. The oldest reason for it is that God revealed the order oflife to us in all its details. . . . "
"That would be the best," Agathe said.
"But the most probable," Ulrich said emphatically, "is that moral- ity, like every other form of order, arises through force and violence! A group of people that has seized power simply imposes on the rest those rules and principles that will secure their power. Morality thereby tends to favor those who brought it to power. At the same time, it sets an example in so doing. And at the same time reactions set in that cause it to change-this is of course too complicated to be described briefly, and while it by no means happens without thought, but then again not by means of thought, either, but rather empiri- cally, what you get in the end is an infinite network that seems to span everything as independently as God's firmament. Now, every- thing relates to this self-contained circle, but this circle relates to
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · I I I3
nothing. In other words: Everything is moral, but morality itself is not! "
"How charming of morality," Agathe said. "But do you know that I encountered a good person today? "
The change of subject took Ulrich by surprise, but when Agathe began telling him ofher meetingwith lindner, he first tried to find a place for it in his train ofthought. "You can find good people here by the dozen too," he said, "but I'll tell you why the bad people are here as well, ifyou'll let me go on. "
As they talked they gradually edged their way out of the throng and reached the anteroom, and Ulrich had to think where they might tum for refuge: Diotima's bedroom occurred to him, and also Ra- chel's little room, but he did not want to set foot in either of them again, so he and Agathe remained for the time being among the un- peopled coats that were hanging there. Ulrich could not find a way to pick up the thread. "I really ought to start again from the beginning," he said, with an impatient, helpless gesture. Then suddenly he said:
''You don't want to know whether you've done something good or bad; you're uneasy because you do both without a solid reason! "
Agathe nodded.
He had taken both her hands in his.
The matte sheen of his sister's skin, with its fragrance of plants
unknown to him, rising before his eyes from the low neckline of her gown, lost for a moment all earthly connection. The motion of the blood pulsed from one hand into the other. A deep moat from some other world seemed to enclose them both in a nowhere world of their own.
He suddenly could not find the ideas to characterize it; he could not even get hold of those that had often served him before: "Let's not act on the impulse of the moment but act out of the condition that lasts to the end. " "In such a way that it takes us to the center from which one cannot return to take anything back" "Not from the periphery and its constantly changing conditions, but out of the one, immutable happiness. " Such phrases did come to mind, and he might well have used them ifit had only been as conversation. But in the direct immediacy with which they were to be applied to this very moment between him and his sister, it was suddenly impossible. It left him helplessly agitated. But Agathe understood him clearly. And
1114 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
she should have been happy that for the first time the shell encasing her "hard brother" had cracked, exposing what was inside, like an egg that has fallen to the floor. To her surprise, however, her feelings this time were not quite ready to fall into step with his. Between morning and evening lay her curious encounter with Lindner, and although this man had merely aroused her wonder and curiosity, even this tiny grain sufficed to keep the unending mirroring of reclu- sive love from coming into play.
Ulrich felt it in her hands even before she said anything-and Agathe made no answer.
He guessed that this unexpected self-denial had something to do with the experience he had just had to listen to her describing. Abashed and confused by the rejection of his unanswered feelings, he said, shaking his head:
"It's annoying how much you seem to expect from the goodness of such a man! "
"I suppose it is," Agathe admitted.
He looked at her. He realized that this encounter meant more to his sister than the attentions paid to her by other men since she had been under his protection. He even knew this man slightly. Lindner was a public figure of sorts; he was the man who, at the very first session of the Parallel Campaign, had made the brief speech, re- ceived with embarrassing silence, hailing the "historical moment" or something similar: awkward, sincere, and pointless. . . . On impulse Ulrich glanced around, but he did not recall seeing the man tonight, for he had not been asked again, as Ulrich knew. He must have come across him elsewhere from time to time, probably at some learned society, and have read one or another of his publications, for as he concentrated his memory, ultramicroscopic traces of images from the past condensed like a repulsive viscous drop into his verdict: "That dreary ass! The more anyone wants to be taken seriously, the less one can take such a man seriously, any more than Professor Hagauer! " So he said to Agathe.
Agathe met it with silence. She even pressed his hand.
He felt: There is something quite contradictory here, but there's no stopping it.
At this point people came into the anteroom, and the siblings drew slightly apart.
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · I I I 5
"Shall I take you back in? " Ulrich asked.
Agathe said no and looked around for an escape.
It suddenly occurred to Ulrich that the only way they could get
away from the other guests was by retreating to the kitchen. Three batteries of glasses were being filled and trays loaded with cakes. The cook was bustling about with great zeal; Rachel and Soliman were waiting to be loaded up, standing apart and motionless and not whis- pering to each other as they used to do on such occasions. Little Ra- chel dropped a curtsy as they came in, Soliman merely saluted with his dark eyes, and Ulrich said: "It's too stuffy in there; can we get something to drink here? "
He sat down with Agathe on the window seat and put a glass and a plate down for show so that in case anyone should see them it would look as if two old friends of the family were having a private chat. When they were seated, he said with a little sigh: "So it's merely a matter offeeling whether one finds such a Professor Lindner good or insufferable? ''
Agathe was concentrating on unwrapping a piece of candy.
"Which is to say," Ulrich went on, "that the feeling is neither true nor false. Feeling has remained a private matter! It remains at the mercy of suggestion, fantasy, or persuasion. You and I are no differ- ent from those people in there. Do you know what these people want? ''
"No. But does it matter? "
"Perhaps it does. They are forming two parties, each ofwhich is as right or as wrong as the other. "
Agathe said she could not help thinking that it was better to be- lieve in human goodness than only in guns and politics, even if the manner ofthe beliefwas absurd.
"What's he like, this man you met? "
"Oh, that's impossible to say. He's good! " his sister answered with a laugh.
"You can no more depend on what looks good to you than on what looks good to Leinsdorf,'' Ulrich responded testily.
Both their faces were tense with excitement and laughter; the easy flow of humorous civility blocked deeper countercurrents. Rachel sensed it at the roots of her hair, under her little cap, but she was feeling so miserable herself that her perception was much dimmer
III6 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
than it used to be, like a memory of better days. The lovely curve of her cheeks was a shade hollow, the black blaze of her eyes dulled with discouragement. Had Ulrich been in a mood to compare her beauty with that of his sister, he would have been bound to notice that Rachel's former dark brilliance had crumbled like a piece of coal that had been run over by a heavy truck. But he had no eyes for her now. She was pregnant, and no one knew it except Soliman, who showed no understanding of the disastrous reality and responded with nothing but childish romantic schemes.
"For centuries now," Ulrich went on, "the world has known truth in thinking and accordingly, to a certain degree, rational freedom of thought. But during this same time the emotional life has had neither the strict discipline oftruth nor any freedom ofmovement. For every moral system has, in its time, regulated the feelings, and rigidly too, but only insofar as certain basic principles and feelings were needed for whatever action it favored; the rest was left to individual whim, to the private play of emotions, to the random efforts of art, and to aca- demic debate. So morality has adapted our feelings to the needs of moral systems and meanwhile neglected to develop them, even though it depends on feelings: morality is, after all, the order and integrity of the emotional life. " Here he broke off. He felt Rachel's fascinated stare on his animated face, even if she could no longer quite muster her former enthusiasm for the concerns of important people.
"I suppose it's funny how I go on talking about morality even here in the kitchen," he said in embarrassment.
Agathe was gazing at him intently and thoughtfully. He leaned over closer to his sister and added softly, with a flickering smile: "But it's only another way of expressing an impassioned state that takes up arms against the whole world! "
Without intending to, he was reenacting their confrontation ofthe morning, in which he had played the unpleasant role of the lecturing schoolmaster. He could not help it. For him morality was neither conformism nor philosophic wisdom, but living the infinite fullness of possibilities. He believed in morality's capacity for intensification, in stages of moral experience, and not merely, as most people do, in stages of moral understanding, as if it were something cut-and-dried for which people were just not pure enough. He believed in morality
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 1 1 1 7
without believing in any specific moral system. Morality is generally understood to be a sort ofpolice regulations for keeping life in order, and since life does not obey even these, they come to look as if they were really impossible to live up to and accordingly, in this sorry way, not really an ideal either. But morality must not be reduced to this level. Morality is imagination. This was what he wanted to make Agathe see. And his second point was: Imagination is not arbitrary. Once the imagination is left to caprice, there is a price to pay.
The words twitched in his mouth. He was on the verge ofbringing up the neglected difference between the way in which various histor- ical periods have developed the rational mind in their own fashion and the way they have kept the moral imagination static and closed off, also in their own fashion. He was on the verge of talking about this because it results in a line that rises, despite all skepticism, more or less steadily through all of history's transformations, representing the rational mind and its patterns, and contrasting with a mound of broken shards of feelings, ideas, and potentials of life that were heaped up in layers just the way they were when they came into being, as eternal side issues, and that were always discarded. And also because a further result is that this finally adds up to any number of possibilities for forming an opinion one way or another, as soon as they are extended into the realm ofprinciples; but that there is never a possibility of bringing them together. And because it follows that the various opinions lash out at each other since they have no way of communicating. And because it follows, finally, that the emotional life of mankind slops back and forth like water in an unsteady tub. Ulrich had an idea that had been haunting him all evening, an old idea of his, incidentally, but everything that had happened this eve- ning had somehow simply confirmed it, and he wanted to show Agathe where her error lay and how it could be put right, if everyone agreed. Actually, it was only his painful intention to prove that one could not, on the whole, even trust the discoveries of one's own imagination.
Agathe now said, with a little sigh, as a hard-pressed woman gets in one last, quick defensive move before surrendering:
"So one has to do everything 'on principle,' is that it? " And she looked at him, responding to his smile.
But he answered: "Yes, but only on one principle! "
1118 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
This was something quite different from what he had meant to say. It again came from the realm of the Siamese twins and the Millen- nium, where life grows in magical stillness like a flower, and even ifit were not a mere flight of fancy, it pointed to the frontiers of thought, which are solitary and treacherous. Agathe's eyes were like split agate. If at this instant he had said only a little more, or touched her with his hand, something would have happened-something that was gone a moment later, before she even knew what it was. For Ulrich did not want to say any more. He took a knife and a piece of fruit and began to peel. He was happy because the distance that had separated him from his sister shortly before had melted into an im- measurable closeness; but he was also glad that at this moment they were interrupted.
It was the General, who came peering into the kitchen with the sly glance of a patrol leader surprising the enemy encampment. "Please forgive the intrusion," he called out as he entered, "but as it's only a tete-a-tete with your brother, dear lady, it can't be too great a crime! " And turning to Ulrich, he said: "They're looking for you high and low. "
And Ulrich told the General what he had meant to say to Agathe. But first he asked: 'Who are they? "
"I was supposed to bring you to the Minister! " Stumm said re- proachfully.
Ulrich waved that aside.
'Well, it's too late anyway," the good-natured General said. "The old boy just left. But on my own account, as soon as Madame has chosen some better company than yours, I shall have to interrogate you about what you meant with that 'religious war'-if you'll be so kind as to remember your own words. "
'W e were just talking about that," Ulrich said.
"How very interesting! " the General exclaimed. "Your sister is also interested in moral systems? "
"It's all my brother talks about," Agathe corrected him, smiling.
"That was virtually the whole agenda this evening! " Stumm sighed. "Leinsdorf, for instance, said only a few minutes ago that mo- rality is just as important as eating. I can't see it myself. " So saying, he bent with relish over the candies Agathe handed him. It was sup- posed to be a joke. Agathe said, to comfort him: "Neither can I. "
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 1 1 1 9
"An officer and a woman must have morals, but they don't like to talk about it," the General went on improvising. "Don't you agree, dear lady? "
Rachel had brought him a kitchen chair, which she was zealously dusting offwith her apron when these words ofhis stabbed her to the heart; she nearly broke into tears.
Stumm was prompting Ulrich again: "Now then, what's this about the religious war? " But before Ulrich could say anything, he fore- stalled him, saying: "Actually, I have the feeling that your cousin is also prowling around looking for you, and I have my military training to thank for finding you first. So I must make the most of my time. Things are not going well in there! It's supposed to be our fault. And your cousin-how shall I put it? She's simply let go of the reins. Do you know what they've decided? "
"Who decided? "
"A lot of people have already left.
