No More Learning

Educated people will direct their thoughts to political nodal points and world capi- tals. Those even more highly educated will, moreover, have the names of Essen, Creuzot, Pilsen, and the other centers of the armaments industry confidently in mind. And the most highly educated will add to these something from the geography of oil, potash, and other raw materials, for that's the way one often reads about it. But what follows from all this is merely that the crucible of the World War was no ordinruy crucible,
for it was located in several places simultaneously.
Perhaps one might say to this that the expression is to be understood
only metaphorically. But this is to be assented to so completely that it immediately gives rise to even greater difficulties. For, granting that "crucible" is intended to mean metaphorically approximately the same thing that "origin" or "cause" means nonmetaphorically, while on the one hand one knows that the origin of all things and events is God, on the other it leaves one empty-handed. For "origins" and "causes" are like a person who goes searching for his parents: in the first instance he has two, that is indisputable; but with grandparents it's the square of two, with great-grandparents two to the third, and so on in a powerfully unfolding series, which is totally unassailable but which yields the re- markable result that at the beginning of time there must have been an almost infinite number ofpeople whose purpose was merely to produce a single one of today's individuals. However flattering this may be, and
From the Posthumous Papers · 1475
however it may correspond to the significance that the individual feels within himself, today one calculates too precisely for anyone to believe it. Therefore, with heavy heart, one must give up a personal series of ancestors and assume that "starting from someplace" one must have a common descent as a group. And this has a variety of consequences. Such as that people consider themselves in part "brothers," in part "from alien tribes," without a person knowing how to determine where the boundary is, for what is called "nation" and "race" is results and not causes. Another consequence, no less influential even if not as obvious, is that Mr. What's-his-name no longer knows where he has his cause. He consequently feels himself like a snipped thread that the busy needle of life incessantly pulls back and forth because making a button for it was somehow overlooked. A third consequence, just now dawning, is for in- stance that it has not yet been calculated whether and to what extent there might be two or multiple other Mr. What's-his-names; in the realm of what is hereditarily possible it is entirely conceivable, only one does not know how great the probability is that it could actually happen with oneself; but a dim oppressiveness of the idea that given man's na- ture today this cannot be entirely excluded lies, as it were, in the air.
And surely it would not even be the worst thing. Count Leinsdorf, speaking with Ulrich for a moment, held forth on the aristocratic institu- tion of chamberlains. "A chamberlain needs to have sixteen noble fore- bears, and people are upset at that being the height of snobbery; but what, I ask you, do people do themselves? Imitate us with their theories of race, that's what they do," he explained, "and immediately exaggerate it in a fashion that has nothing at all to do with nobility. As far as I'm concerned we can all be descended from the same Adam, a Leinsdorf would still be a Leinsdorf, for it's a damn sight more a matter of educa- tion and training than a matter of blood! " His Grace was irritated by the intrusion of populist elements into the Parallel Campaign, which for a variety of reasons had to be countenanced up to a certain point. At that time nationalism was nearly ready to put forth its first bloody blossoms, but no one knew it, for despite its imminent fulfillment it did not seem terrible but only seemed ridiculous: its intellectual aspect consisting for the most part of books pasted together with the well-read busyness of a scholar and the total incoherence of untrained thinking by compilers who lived in some rural backwater as elementary-school teachers or petty customs officials.
1476 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
I Preliminary sketch: continuation after first paragraph above I
Therefore the obvious reservation will probably be put forward that the expression "crucible of the World War" is to be understood merely metaphorically, and this is to be subscribed to so wholeheartedly that it will immediately lead to new difficulties; if on the other hand one main- tains that "crucible" signifies the same as causation complex, and such a thing is complicated and extensive in all human endeavors, then it must be contradicted straightaway. For if one pursues causes back in a straight line they lead right back to God as the Prima Causa of every- thing that happens; this is one of the few problems about which centu- ries of theology have left no doubt. But on the other hand it's like a person going from his father to his father's father, from his father's fa- ther to his father and father's father of the father's father, and so on in this series: he will never arrive at a complete notion of his descent. In other words: the causal chain is a warp on a loom; the moment a woof is put in, the causes disappear into a woven texture. In science, research into causes was abandoned long ago, or at least greatly reduced, to be replaced by a functional mode that called for observing relationships. The search for causes belongs to household usage, where the cook's being in love is the cause of the soup's being oversalted. Applied to the World War, this search for a cause and a causer has had the extremely positive negative result that the cause was everywhere and in everyone.
This demonstrates that one can truly say "crucible" just as well as "cause of" or "guilt for" the war; but then one would have to supple- ment this entire mode of observation with another. For this purpose, let us proceed experimentally from the problem ofwhy the poet Feuermaul should suddenly pop up in the Parallel Campaign, and even why-leav- ing behind a decisive but merely trivial contribution to its history-he will immediately and permanently drop out of it again. The answer is that this was apparently necessary, that there was absolutely no way of avoiding it-for everything that happens has, as we know, a sufficient cause-but that the reasons for this necessity are themselves, however, completely meaningless or, more properly, were important only for Feuermaul himself, his girlfriend, Professor Drangsal, and her envier, Diotima, and only for a brief period. It would be sheer extravagance were one to relate this. I f Feuermaul had not striven to play a role in the Parallel Campaign, someone else would have done so in his place, or if this other person had not shown up, something else would have; in the interweavings of events there is a narrow insert where this or that influ- ences its success with the differences they make; but in the long run, the
From the Posthumous Papers · 1477
things represent each other completely, indeed they somehow also rep- resent the characters, with very few exceptions. Arnheim, too, could have been replaced in the same way; perhaps not for Diotima, but prob- ably as the cause of the changes she underwent and, further, the effects that these led to. This view, which today might almost be called a natural one, seems fatalistic but is so only so long as one accepts it as a destiny. But the laws of nature were also a destiny before they were investigated; after that happened, it was even possible to subordinate them to a tech- nology.
/Belongs here: Feuermaul, like all the characters in the story except for Ulrich (and perhaps Leo Fischel), denies the value of technical proj- ects, among others/
As long as this has not happened, one can also say that B. , the birth- place of the poet Feuermaul, was also the original crucible of the World War. And that is why it is by no means capricious; what it amounts to, really, is that certain phenomena, which were to be found everywhere in the world and belonged to the crucible that, stretching over the entire planet, was everywhere and nowhere, condensed in B. in a fashion that prematurely brought out its meaning. Instead of B. one could say the whole of Kakania, but B. was one of the special points within it. These phenomena were that in B. the people could not stand each other at all, and on the other hand that the poet Feuermaul, born in their midst, chose as the basic principle of his work the assertion that Man Is Good and one need only tum directly to the goodness that dwells within him. Both signify the same thing.
It would have been a lie had one tried to maintain that even the small- est part of what has been described was present in Feuermaul at the time in any real way, or that it was present at any time in such detail. But life is always more detailed than its results: creating, as it were, a vege- tarian diet, mountains ofleaves, around a tiny pile of . . . The results are a few dispositions of individual conduct.
1478 ·THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
1930-1934
While Agathe and Ulrich were living behind closed crystal panels- by no means abstractly and without looking at the world, but looking at it in an unusual, unambiguous light, this world bathed every morning in the hundredfold light of a new day. Every morning cities and villages awaken, and wherever they do it happens, God knows, in more or less the same way; on the other hand, people are conceived and slain in an instant, and small birds fly from one branch to another with the same right to existence that a giant ocean liner expresses as it swims straight between Europe and America. Somehow everything in the world hap- pens uniformly and with statutory monotony, but varied in countless ways, which, depending on the mood in which one observes them, is as much blissful abundance as ridiculous superfluity. And perhaps even the expression "law of nature"-this exalted regency of mechanical laws, which we worship shivering-is still a much too personal expression; laws have something of the personal relationship an accused has with his judge or a subject with his king; there is in them something of the con- trat social and the beginnings of liberalism too. Nietzsche already noted the more modem view of nature when he wrote: "Nature has a calcula- ble course not because it is ruled by laws but because they are lacking, and every power draws its ultimate consequences at every moment. " That is a statement which fits in with the ideas of contemporary physics but was really coined from biological events, and an intimation of such emotions lies over contemporary life. Once, "You can do what you like" meant following your drives; but one was not supposed to do what one liked, and moral laws conceived in sublimity interfered with it. Today everyone feels in some way that these moral laws are a heap of contra- dictions, and that to follow them would amount to being able to pander to every one of his drives, and he feels a wild, extraordinary freedom. This freedom permits him a path that only leads forward: that, like the orbits of atoms, this chaos must somehow finally yield a specific value, and that with more precise knowledge of how things cohere one would again be able to give life a meaning.
That is more or less the sense of the transition from individualism to the collective view of the world I mission of the world (there is in this no supposition that the value of the individual should cease, only that it be more precisely evaluated).
From the Posthumous Papers · 1479
One day, the General was sitting before the two of them and said in astonishment to Ulrich: "What, you don't read the newspapers? "
Brother and sister blushed as deeply as ifthe good Stumm had discov- ered them in flagrante, for even though in their condition everything might have been possible, that they might have been able to read the newspapers was not.
"But one must read the newspapers! " said I admonished the General in embarrassment, for he had stumbled upon an incomprehensible fact, and it was discretion that caused him to add reproachfully: There have been big demonstrations against the Parallel Campaign in B. !
Truly, while Ulrich and Agathe had been living behind closed crystal panels-by no means abstractly and without looking at the world, but looking at it in an unusual, unambiguous light-this same world bathed every morning in the hundredfold light of a new day. Every morning cities and villages awaken, and wherever they do it happens, God knows, in more or less the same way; but with the same right to existence that a giant ocean liner expresses when it is under way between two conti- nents, small birds fly from one branch to another, and thus everything happens simultaneously, in a fashion as uniform and simplified as it is uselessly varied in innumerable ways, and in a helpless and blessed abundance reminiscent of the glorious but limited picture books of childhood. Ulrich and Agathe also both felt their book of the world open before them, for the city of B. was none other than the one where they had found each other again after their father had lived and died there.
"And it had to happen precisely in B. ! " the General repeated mean- ingfully.
"You were once stationed in the garrison there," Ulrich affinned. "And that's where the poet Feuermaul was born," Stumm added. "Right! " Ulrich exclaimed. "Behind the theater! That's apparently
what gave him his ambition to be a poet. Do you remember that theater? In the '8o's or 'gos there must have been an architect who plunked down such theatrical jewel boxes in most of the bigger cities, with every availa- ble nook and cranny plastered with decoration and ornamental statues. And it was right that Feuermaul came into the world in this spinning- and-weaving city: as the son of a prosperous agent in textiles. I remem- ber that these middlemen, for reasons I don't understand, earned more than the factory owners themselves; and the Feuermauls were already one of the wealthiest families in B. before the father began an even grander life in Hungary with saltpeter or God knows what murderous products. So you've come to ask me about Feuermaul? " Ulrich asked.
q8o · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
"Not really," his friend responded. 'Tve found out that his father is a great supplier of powder to the Royal Navy. That's a restraint on human goodness that was laid on his son from the beginning. The Resolution will remain an isolated episode, I can guarantee you that! "
But Ulrich was not listening. He had long been deprived of the enjoy- ment of hearing someone talk in a casual, everyday fashion, and Agathe seemed to feel the same way. "Besides, this old B. is a rotten city," he began to gossip. "On a hill in the middle there's an ugly old fortress whose barbettes served as a prison from the middle of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century and were quite notorious, and the whole city is proud of them! "
"Marymount," the General affirmed politely.
"What a very merry mount! " Agathe exclaimed, becoming irritated at her need for the ordinary when Stumm found the wordplay witty and assured her that he had been garrisoned at B. for two years without hav- ing made this connection.
"The true B. , of course, is the ring of the factory quarter, the textile and yarn city! " Ulrich went on, and turned to Agathe. "And what big, narrow, dirty boxes of houses with countless window holes, tiny alleys consisting only of yard walls and iron gates, a spreading tangle of bleak, rutted streets! " After the death of his father he had wandered through this area several times. He again saw the high chimneys hung with dirty banners of smoke, and the streets /roadways covered with a film of oil. Then his memory wandered without transition to the farmland, which in fact began right behind the factory walls, with heavy, charged, fruitful loam that in spring the plow turned over black-brown; wandered to the low, long villages lying along their single street, and houses that were painted in not only screaming colors but colors that screamed in an ugly, incomprehensible voice. It was humble and yet alien-mysterious farm- land, from which the factories sucked their male and female workers because it lay squeezed between extensive sugar-beet plantations be- longing to the great landed estates, which had not left it even the scant- est room to thrive. Every morning the factory sirens summoned hordes ofpeasants from these villages into the city, and in the evening scattered them again over the countryside; but as the years went by, more and more of these Czech country people, fingers and hands turned dark from the oily cotton dust of the factories, stayed behind in the city and caused the Slavic petite bourgeoisie that was already there to grow mightily.
This led to strained relations, for the city was German. It even lay in a German-language enclave, if at its outermost tip, and was proud of its involvement since the thirteenth century in the annals of German his-
From the Posthumous Papers · 1481
tory. In the city's German schools one could learn that in the vicinity the Turk Kapistran had preached against the Hussites, at a time when good Austrians could still be born in Naples; that the hereditary bond be- tween the houses of Habsburg and Hungary, which in 1364 laid the groundwork for the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, was forged nowhere else but here; that in the Thirty Years' W ar the Swedes had besieged this brave town for an entire summer without being able to take it, the Prus- sians in the Seven Years' War even less so. Of course this made the city just as much part of the proud Hussite memories of the Czechs and the independent historical memories of the Hungarians, and possibly, too, even part of the memories of the Neapolitans, Swedes, and Prussians; and in the non-German schools there was no lack of indications that the city was not German and that the Germans were a pack of thieves who steal even other people's pasts. It was astonishing that nothing was done to stop it, but this was part of Kakania's wise tolerance. There were many such cities, and they all resembled one another. At the highest point they were lorded over by a prison, at the next highest by an episcopal residence, and scattered around in them were some ten cloisters and barracks. If one ranked what were indeed called "the necessities of state," one would not, for the rest, encompass its homogeneity and unity, for Kakania was inspired by a hereditary mistrust, acquired from great historical experiences, of every Either/Or, and always had some glimmering that there were in the world many more contradictions than the one which ultimately led to its demise, and that a contradiction must be decisively resolved. The principle ofits government was This-as-well- as-that, or even better, with wisest moderation, Neither/Nor. One was therefore also of the opinion in Kakania that it was not prudent for sim- ple people who have no need of it to learn too much, and they did not regard it as important that economically these people should be immod- estly prosperous. One preferred to give to those who already had a great deal, because this no longer carried any risks, and one assumed that if among those other people there was some skill or capacity, it would find a way of making itself known, for resistance is well suited to developing real men.
And so it turned out too: men did develop from among the opponents, and the Germans, because property and culture in B. were German, were helped by the state to receive more and more capital and culture. If one walked through the streets of B. , one could recognize this in the fact that the beautiful architectural witnesses of the past that had been preserved, of which there were several, stood as a point of pride for the prosperous citizens among many witnesses to the modem period, which did not content themselves with being merely Gothic, Renaissance, or
1482 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
Baroque but availed themselves of the possibility of being all these things at once. Among the large cities of Kakania, B. was one of the wealthiest, and also displayed this in its architecture, so that even the surroundings, where they were wooded and romantic, got some of the little red turrets, the crenallated slate-blue roofs, and the rings of em- brasured-like walls that the prosperous villas had. "And what surround- ings! " Ulrich thought and said, hostile to but settled in his home region. This B. lay in a fork between two rivers, but it was a quite broad and imprecise fork, and the rivers were not quite proper rivers either but in many places broad, slow brooks, and in still otherS standing water that was nevertheless secretly flowing. Nor was the landscape simple, but it consisted, leaving aside the farmland considered above, ofthree further parts. On one side a broad, yearningly opening plain, which on many evenings was delicately tinged in tender shades of orange and silver; on the second side shaggy, good old German wooded hills with waving tree- tops (although it happened not to be the German side), leading from nearby green to distant blue; on the third side a heroic landscape of Naz- arene bareness and almost splendid monotony, with gray-green knolls on which sheep grazed, and plowed brown fields over which hovered something of the murmured singing of peasants' grace at table as it pours out of humble windows.
So while one might boast that this cozy Kakanian region in the middle ofwhich B. lay was hilly as well as flat, no less wooded than sunny, and as heroic as it was humble, there was nevertheless everywhere a. little something missing, so that on the whole it was neither tl_Us way nor that way. Nor could it ever be decided whether the inhabitants of this town found it beautiful or ugly. If one were to say to one of them that B. was ugly, he would be sure to answer: "But look how pretty Red Mountain is, and Yellow Mountain too . . . and the black fields . . . I" and as he toted up these names, which were so sensual, one had to concede that it was indeed a quite respectable landscape. But if one called it beautiful, an educated B. 'er would laugh and say that he was just back from Switzer- land or Singapore, and that B. was a lousy hole that couldn't even stand comparison with Bucharest. But this, too, was merely Kakanian, this twi- light of the emotions in which they took up their existence, this restless sense of having been all too prematurely laid to rest, in which they felt themselves sheltered and buried. Ifone puts it this way: for these people everything was simultaneously lack of pleasure and pleasure, one will notice how anticipatorily contemporary it was, for in many respects this most gentle ofall states was secretly raging ahead ofits time. The people who inhabited B. lived from the production of textiles and yarn, from the sale of textiles and yarn, from the production of and trade in all those
From the Posthumous Papers · 1483
things people use who produce or sell textile and yarn, including the production and management of legal disputes, diseases, acquired skills, diversions, and such other things as belong to the needs of a big city. And all the well-off people among them had the quality that there was no beautiful or famous place in the whole world where someone who was from this city would not meet someone else who was also from this city, and when they were home again the consequence of this was that they all bore within themselves as much of the wide world as they did the amazing conviction that everything great ultimately led only to B.
Such a condition, which derives from the production of textiles and yarn, from industriousness, thrift, a civic theater, the concerts of touring celebrities, and from balls and invitations, is not to be conquered with these same means. That might have succeeded in the struggle for politi- cal power against a refractory working class, or the struggle against an upper class, or an imperialistic struggle for the world market of the kind other states conducted-in short, being rewarded not according to merit but by a remnant of the animalistic pouncing on prey, a process in which the warmth oflife keeps itselfalert. But in Kakania, while it was true that a great deal of money was unlawfully earned, there could be no pounc- ing, and in that country, even if crimes had been permitted, it would have been with strict attention to their being committed only by offi- cially certified criminals. This gave all cities like B. the appearance of a great hall with a low ceiling. A ring of powder arsenals in which the army kept its guns surrounded every fairly large town; big enough, if struck by lightning, to reduce an entire quarter of the city to rubble: but at every powder arsenal provision had been made by means of a sentry and a yellow-and-black sentry pole that no disaster should befall the citizenry. And the police were furnished with sabers as tall as the officers and reaching to the ground, no one knew why anymore, unless it was from moderation, for it was only with their right hand that the police were the instruments ofjustice; with their left they had to hang on to their swords. Nor did anyone know why on promising building sites in growing cities the state, peering far into the future, constructed military hospitals, warehouses for uniforms, and garrison bakeries, whose giant unwalled rectangles later interfered with development. That is in no way to be taken for militarism, of which old Kakania was thoughtlessly accused; it was only common sense and prudence: for order cannot be otherwise than in order I more properly: it is, so to speak, already by its very nature in order I while, with every other kind of conduct the state engages in, this remains eternally uncertain. This order had become second nature in Kakania in the Franzisco-Josephenian era, indeed it had almost become landscape, and it is quite certain that ifthe quiet times ofpeace
1484 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
had lasted longer, the priests, too, would have got swords just as long, as the university professors had got them after the finance authorities and the postal officials, and if a world upheaval with entirely different views had not intervened, the sword would perhaps have developed in Ka- kania into a spiritual weapon.
When the conversation had proceeded to this point, partly in an ex- change of views, partly in the reminiscences that were their silent ac- companiment, General Stumm put in: "That, by the way, is something Leinsdorf said already, that the priests really must receive their swords at the next concordat, as a sign that they, too, are performing a function in the state. He then hedged this with the less paradoxical remark that even small daggers might suffice, with mother-of-pearl and a gold han- dle, of the kind officials used to wear. "
"Are you serious? ''
"He was," the General replied. "He pointed out to me that in Bohe- mia during the Thirty Years' War priests rode around in mass-robes of gilt that were leather below-in other words, proper mass-dragoons. He is simply exasperated at the general hostility directed against the state, and recalled that in one of his castle chapels he still has such a garment preserved. Look, you know how he's always talking about the constitu- tion of '61 having given capital and culture the lead here, and that this has led to a big disappointment-"
"How did you actually happen to meet Leinsdorf? " Ulrich inter- rupted him with a smile.
"Oh, that came about when he was on his way back from one of his estates in Bohemia," Stumm said, without going into greater detail. "Moreover, he has asked you to come see him three times, and you haven't gone. In B. on the way back, his car blundered into the riots and was stopped. On one side of the street stood the Czechs, shouting: 'Down with the Germans! ' on the other side the Germans shouted: 'Down with the Czechs! ' But when they recognized him they stopped that and asked in chorus in both German and Czech: 'What's going on with the Commission to Ascertain the Desires of the Concerned Sec- tions of the Population, Count? ' and some screamed 'Phooey! ' at him and others 'Shame! ' This stupid Resolution, that one should let oneself be killed for one's own ideas but not other people's, appears to have spread by word of mouth, and because we suppressed it we're now sus- pected of wanting to be the murderer of nationalities! That's why Leins- dorf said to me: 'You're his friend; why doesn't he come when I call him? ' And all I could do was offer: 'Ifyou wish to entrust me with some- thing, I will inform him! ' "
Stumm paused.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1485
"And what . . . ? " Ulrich asked.
"Well, you know it's never really easy to understand what he means. First he talked to me about the French Revolution. As is well known, the French Revolution lopped off the heads of many of the nobility, and astonishingly he finds that quite proper, although stones had almost been thrown at him in B. For he says that the ancien regime had its mistakes, and the French Revolution its true ideas. But what ultimately resulted from all the effort? That's what he was asking himself. And then he said the following: Today, for example, the mail is better and quicker; but earlier, while the mail was slow, people wrote better letters. Or: Today clothing is more practical and less ridiculous; but earlier, when it was like a masquerade, far better materials were used. And he concedes that for longer trips he himself uses an automobile because it's faster and more comfortable than a horse-drawn coach, but he maintains that this box with springs on four wheels has deprived traveling of its true nobil- ity. All that's funny, I think, but it's true.
Didn't you yourself once say that as mankind progresses one leg always slides backward whenever the other slides forward? Involuntarily, each of us today has something against progress. And Leinsdorf said to me: 'General, earlier our young people spoke of horses and dogs, but today the sons of factory owners talk of horsepower and chassis. So since the constitution of '61, liberal- ism has shoved the nobility aside, but everything is full of new corrup- tion, and if against expectations the social revolution should ever happen, it will lop the heads off the sons of factory owners, but things won't get any better either! ' Isn't that something? You get the impres- sion that something is boiling over in him. With someone else, one might perhaps think that he doesn't know what he wants! "
But in the meantime we've only got as far as the national revolution?
"Do you know what he wants? " Ulrich asked.
"After the business in B. , Drangsal tried to have him informed that now one would really have to let oneself be unconditionally swept up in the Ideal of Man, and Feuermaul is supposed to have expressed himself to the effect that it's better as an Austrian not to master the resistance of the nationalities than it is as a German to transform one's country into a field for army maneuvers. To this Leinsdorf's only response was that that wasn't realpolitik. He wants a proclamation of power; which is to say, of course it should also be a proclamation of love; that, after all, had been the original idea of the Parallel Campaign. W e must, General'-
1486 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
these were his words-'proclaim our unity; that is less contradictory than it seems, but also not as easy! ' "
Hearing this, Ulrich forgot himself and gave a rather more serious re- sponse. "Tell me," he asked, "doesn't all the talk about the Parallel Cam- paign ever seem rather childish to you? "
Stumm looked at him with astonishment. "Well, yes," he replied hesi- tantly. "When I'm talking this way with you, or with Leinsdorf, it does sometimes seem to me that I'm talking like an adolescent, or that you're philosophizing about the immortality of cockchafers; but doesn't that come with the subject? Where it's a question of sublime missions, one never has the feeling of being able I allowed to talk the way one really is.
Agathe laughed.
Stumm laughed along with her. ''I'm laughing too, dear lady! " he af- firmed in a worldly-wise way, but then seriousness returned to his face and he went on: "But strictly speaking, what the Count means is by no means so wrong. For instance, what do you understand by liberalism? " With these words he again turned to Ulrich, but without waiting for a reply he went on again: "What I mean is that people ought to be left to themselves. And it will also have struck you that that's now going out of fashion. It's given rise to a lot ofnonsense. But is that all it is? It seems to me people want something more. They aren't content with themselves. I'm not either; I used to be an amiable person. You didn't really do any- thing, but you were satisfied with yourself. Work wasn't bad, and after work you played cards or went hunting, and there was in all of that a certain kind of culture. A certain wholeness. Doesn't it seem so to you too? And why isn't it like that anymore today? As far as I can judge from myself, I believe that people feel too clever. Ifyou want to eat a schnit- zel, it occurs to you that there are people without one. If someone is after a pretty girl, it suddenly goes through his mind that he really ought to be thinking about settling some conflict or other. That's this insuffer- able intellectualism that you can't ever shake off today, and that's why there's no going forward anywhere. And without knowing it themselves, people again want something. That means they no longer want a compli- cated intellect, they don't want a thousand possibilities for living; they want to be satisfied with what they're doing anyway, and for this all they need is to get back some belief or conviction or-well, how to describe what they need to do that? I'd like to hear your opinion about all this! "
But that was only self-satisfaction on the part of the animated and ex- cited Stumm, for before Ulrich could even pull a face, he sprang his surprise: "Of course one can just as well call it belief as conviction, but I've thought a lot about it and prefer to call it single-mindedness! "
Stumm paused, with the idea of garnering applause before he un-
From the Posthumous Papers · 1487
veiled further insights into the workshop of his mind, and then there mingled with the weighty expression on his face another, which was as superior as it was tired of enjoyment. "We used to talk a lot about the problems of order," he reminded his friend, "and so we don't have to stop over them today. So order is to a certain extent a paradoxical notion. Every decent person has a yearning for internal and external order, but on the other hand, you can't bear too much ofit; indeed, a perfect order would be, so to speak, the ruination ofall progress and pleasure. That is (already) inherent, as it were, in the concept oforder. And so you have to ask yourself: what is order after all? And how does it happen that we imagine we're not able to exist without it? And what kind of order is it that we're looking for? A logical, a practical, an individual, a general order, an order of the emotions, of the mind, or of actions? De facto, there's a heap oforders all mixed up: taxes and customs duties are one, religion another, military regulations a third; there's no end of searching them out and enumerating them. I've been preoccupied with this, as you know, and I don't believe that there are many generals in the world who take their profession as seriously as I've had to do this past year. I've helped after my fashion in the search for an encompassing idea, but you yourself ended up proclaiming that to order the spirit one would need an entire global secretariat, and even you'll have to admit that we can't wait for such an ordering. But on the other hand, one can't use that to let everyone do whatever he wants! "
Stumm leaned back and drew breath. The most difficult part had now been said, and he felt the need to excuse himself to Agathe for the gloomy dryness ofhis behavior, which he did with the words: "You must excuse me, but your brother and I had an old and difficult account to settle; but from now on it will also be more suitable for ladies, for I'm again back to where I was, that people don't have any use for compli- cated intellect, but would like to believe and be convinced. For if you analyze this, you'll find that the least important thing about the order to which man aspires is whether reason will approve of it or not; there are also totally ungrounded kinds of orders: for instance, the one that's al- ways asserted in the military about one's superior always being right, meaning, o f course, so long as his superior isn't around. How I puzzled over this as a desecration of the world of ideas when I was a young offi- cer! And what do I see today? Today it's called the principle of the leader-"
''Where did you get that? '' Ulrich asked, interrupting the lecture, for he had the distinct suspicion that these ideas were not just taken from a conversation with Leinsdorf.
"Everyone Wl'. 'lts strong leadership! And partly from Nietzsche, of
1488 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
course, and his interpreters," Stumm replied nimbly and learnedly. "What's already being called for is a double philosophy and morality: for leader and for led! But as long as we're talking about the military, I must say that the military excels not only in and for itself, as an element of order, but also in always making itself available when all other order fails! "
"The decisive things are happening above and beyond reason, and the greatness of life is rooted in the irrational! " Ulrich brought up, imitating his cousin Diotima from memory.
The General grasped this immediately but did not take offense. "Yes, that's the way she used to talk, your cousin, before she started investigat- ing the proclamations of love in, as it were, too great detail. " With this explanation he turned to Agathe.
Agathe was silent, but smiled.
Stumm again turned to Ulrich. "I don't know whether Leinsdorfhas perhaps said it to you too; at any rate, it's marvelously right: he maintains that the most important thing about a belief is that one always believe the same thing. That's something like what I'm calling single-minded- ness. 'But can civilians do that? ' I asked him. 'No,' I said. 'Civilians wear different suits every year, and every few years there are parliamentary elections so they can choose differently every time; the spirit of single- mindedness is much rather to be found in the military! ' "
"So you convinced Leinsdorf that a strengthened militarism is the true fulfillment of his aims? "
"God forbid, I didn't say a word! We merely agreed that in the future we would do without Feuermaul because his views are too unusable. And for the rest, Leinsdorf has given me a whole series of assignments for you-"
"That's superfluous! "
"You should quickly get him access to socialist circles-"
"My gardener's son is a zealous member of the party-that I can do! " "That's just fine! He's only doing it out of conscientiousness, because
he once got the idea in his head. The second thing is that you should go see him as soon as possible-"
"But I'm leaving in a few days! "
"Then as soon as you get back-"
"It doesn't look as if I'm ever coming back! "
Stumm von Bordwehr looked at Agathe; Agathe smiled, which en-
couraged him. "Crazy? " he asked.
Agathe shrugged her shoulders indecisively.
"Well, let me summarize once more-'' Stumm said.
"Our friend has had enough philosophy! " Ulrich interrupted him.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1489
"You certainly can't say that about me! " Stumm angrily defended himself. "It's just that we can't wait for philosophy. And I don't want to lie to you: ofcourse whenever I visit LeinsdorfI have orders to influence him in a certain way if it's possible, that you can imagine. And when he says that the most important thing about a belief is that one always be- lieve the same thing, he's thinking above all of religion; but I'm already thinking of single-mindedness, for that's more comprehensive. I don't hesitate to assert that a truly powerful philosophy of life can't wait around for reason; on the contrary, a true philosophy of life must be absolutely directed against reason, otherwise it would not get into the position of being able to force its submission. And the civilian world seeks such a single-mindedness in constant change, but the military has, so to speak, an enduring single-mindedness! Madame," Stumm inter- rupted his ardor, "you should not believe that I'm a militarist; quite the contrary, the military has always been even a little on the raw side for my taste: but the way the logic ofthese ideas grabs hold ofyou is like playing with a large dog: first he bites for fun, and then he gets carried away and goes wild. And I would like to grant your brother, as it were, one last opportunity-"
"And how do you connect that with the proclamation of power and love? " Ulrich asked.
"God, in the meantime I've forgotten," Stumm replied. "But of course these eruptions ofnationalism that we're now experiencing in our fatherland are somehow eruptions of the energy of an unhappy love. And also in this area, in the synthesis ofpower and love, the military is, in a certain sense, exemplary. A person has to have some kind of love for his fatherland, and ifhe doesn't have it for his fatherland, then he has it for something else. So you just need to grab hold of that something else. As an example that just occurs to me, take the term conscript-volunteer. Who would ever think that a conscript is a volunteer? That's the last thing he is. And yet he was and is, according to the sense of the law. In some such sense people have to be made volunteers again! "
ON THE YOUNG SOCIALIST SCHMEISSER
Conversations with Schmeisser
It was not the first time that Count Leinsdorf had expressed the opinion that a practitioner of realpolitik had to make use even of socialism in its search for allies against progress as well as nationalism, for he had re- peatedly begged Ulrich to cultivate this connection, since out of political considerations he did not just now wish to be caught doing it himself. He advised starting by approaching not the leaders but the young up-and- comers, those who were not completely corrupted and whose vitality permitted the hope that through them one might acquire a patriotically rejuvenating influence over the party. Then Ulrich remembered cheer- fully that there lived in his house a young man who never greeted him but looked away disdainfully whenever they met, which happened rarely enough. This was Schmeisser, a doctoral student in technical sciences; his father was a gardener, who had already been living on the property when Ulrich took it over and who had since, in exchange for free lodging and occasional gifts, kept the small old grounds in order partly with his own hands and partly by indicating and supervising any work that be- came necessary. Ulrich appreciated the fact that this young man, who lived with his father and earned the money for his studies by tutoring and doing a little writing, regarded him as one of the idle rich, who was to be treated with contempt; the experiment of inaction to which he was subject sometimes made him regard himself in this fashion, and he found pleasure in challenging his faultfinder when, one day, he stopped to talk with Schmeisser. It turned out that the student, who, moreover, seen from closer up, might already be twenty-six years old, had also been waiting for this moment, and immediately discharged the tension of the encounter in violent attacks, which ended between an attempt at con- version and the proffering of personal contempt. Ulrich told him about the Parallel Campaign, and thought he was doing the right thing by mak- ing his assignment out to be as ridiculous as it was while at the same time indicating the advantages a determined person might be able to draw from it. He was expecting Schmeisser to fall in with this scheme, which then with God's help might develop in rather strange directions; this
•schmeisser (the name means "flinger" or "hurler. . ) is the left-wing counterpart to the proto-Fascistic Hans Sepp. Peter Lindner seems to represent apolitical, amoral youth. - TRANs.
0
From the Posthumous Papers · 1491
young man, however, was no bourgeois romantic and adventurer, but listened with a crafty look around the mouth until Ulrich ran out of things to say. His chest was narrow between broad-boned shoulders, and he wore thick glasses. These really thick glasses were the beautiful part of his face, which had a sallow, fatty, blotchy skin; these thick glasses, made necessary by hard nights over his books and assignments and made stronger by poverty, which had not permitted him to consult a doctor at the first sign that he needed them, had become for Schmeisser's simple emotions an image ofself-liberation: when he spied them in the mirror, shining over his pimpled countenance with its sad- dle nose and sharp proletarian cheeks, it seemed to him like Poverty crowned by Intellect, and this had happened especially often since, against his will, he had come to admire Agathe from afar. Since then he had also hated Ulrich, to whom he had previously paid scant attention, for his athletic build, and Ulrich now read his damnation in these glasses and had the impression ofchattering away like a child playing in front of the barrels of two cannons. When he had finished, Schmeisser answered him with lips that could barely separate themselves for satisfaction at what they were saying: "The party has no need ofsuch adventures; we'll arrive at the goal in our own way! "
That was really giving it to the bourgeois!
After this rebuffit was hard for Ulrich to find more to say, but he went straight at his attacker and finally said with a laugh: "If I were the person you take me for, you ought to pour poison in my water pipes, or saw down the trees under which I stroll: why don't you want to do something of that sort in a case where it might really be called for? "
"You have no idea what politics is all about," Schmeisser retorted, "for you are a social-romantic member of the middle class, at most an indi- vidual anarchist! Serious revolutionaries aren't interested in bloody revolutions! "
After that, Ulrich often had briefconversations with this revolutionary who didn't want to start revolutions. "I already knew when I was a cav- alry lieutenant," he told him, "that in the short or long run mankind is going to be organized according to socialist principles in some form; it is, as it were, the final chance that God has left to it. For the fact that mil- lions of people are oppressed in the most brutal way, in order for thou- sands of others to fail to do anything worthwhile with the power that derives from this oppression, is not only unjust and criminal but also stu- pid, inappropriate, and suicidal! "
Schmeisser responded sarcastically: "But you've always settled for knowing that! Haven't you? There's the bourgeois intellectual for you! You've spoken to me a few times about a bank director who's a friend of
1492 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
yours: I assure you, this bank director is my enemy, I'll fight him, I'll show him that his convictions are only pretexts for his profits; but at least he has convictions! He says yes where I say no! But you? In you every- thing has already dissolved, in you the bourgeois lie has already begun to decompose! "
Ulrich objected peaceably: "It may be that my way ofthinking is bour- geois in origin; to some extent it's even probable. But: Inter faeces et urinam nascimur-why not our opinions as well? What does that prove against their correctness? "
Every time Ulrich spoke this way, reasoning politely, Schmeisser could not contain himself and exploded anew. "Everything you're saying springs from the moral corruption of bourgeois society! " he would then proclaim, or something similar, for there was nothing he hated more than that form ofgoodness opposed to reason which is found in amiabil- ity; indeed, all form, even that of beauty, was for him an object of suspi- cion. For this reason he never accepted even one of Ulrich's invitations, but at most let himself be treated to tea and cigarettes, as if in Russian novels. Ulrich loved to provoke him, although these conversations were completely meaningless. Since the year of liberation in '48 and the founding of the German Empire, events that only a minority now per- sonally remembered, politics probably seemed to the majority of edu- cated people more an atavism than an important subject. There was next to no sign that behind these external processes that plodded along out of habit, intellectual processes were already preparing for that deforma- tion, for that propensity for decline, and for the suicidal willingness aris- ing from self-loathing, which undermine a state of affairs and apparently always form the passive precondition to periods of violent political change. Thus his whole life long Ulrich, too, had been accustomed to expect that politics would bring about not what needed to happen but at best what ought to have happened long since. The image it presented to him was mostly that of criminal neglect. The social question too, which formed the whole of Schmeisser's universe, appeared to him not as a question but merely as an omitted answer, though he could list a hun- dred other such "questions" on which the mental files had been closed and which, as one might say, were waiting in vain for manipulative treat- ment in the Office of Dispatch. And when he did that, and Schmeisser was in a gentle mood, the latter said: "Just let us first come to power! "
But then Ulrich said: "You're too kind to me, for what I'm asserting isn't true at all. Almost all intellectual people have this prejudice that the practical questions they understand nothing about would be easy to solve, but when they try, of course it turns out that they just haven't thought of everything. On the other hand-here I agree with you-if
From the Posthunwus Papers · 1493
the politician were to think of everything, he would never get around to acting. Perhaps that's why politics contains as much ofthe wealth ofreal- ity as of the poverty of spirit (lack of ideas)-"
This gave Schmeisser the opportunity for a jubilant interruption, with the words: "People like you never get around to acting because they don't want the truth! The bourgeois so-called mind is in all its works only a procrastination and an excuse! "
"But why don't people like me want? " Ulrich asked. "Why couldn't they want? Wealth, for example, is certainly not what they really desire. I hardly know a prosperous man who doesn't have a small weakness for it, myself included, but I also don't know a single one who loves money for its own sake, except for misers, and greed is a disturbance of personal conduct which is also found in love, in power, and in honor: the patho- logical nature of greed really proves that giving is more blessed than re- ceiving. By the way, do you believe that giving is more blessed than receiving? " he asked.
"You can raise that question in some aesthete's salon! " was Schmeisser's response.
"But I fear," Ulrich maintained, "that all your efforts will remain pointless as long as you don't know whether giving or receiving is more blessed or how they complement each other! "
Schmeisser crowed: "You no doubt intend to talk mankind into being good? Besides, in the socially organized state, the proper relationship of giving and receiving will be a foregone conclusion! "
"Then I will maintain"-Ulrich completed his sentence with a smile-"that you will just come to grief on something else, for instance that we are capable ofcursing someone as a dog even when we love our dog more than our fellowmen! "
A mirror calmed Schmeisser by showing him the image of a young man wearing thick glasses under a stubborn forehead. He gave no answer.
Ulrich had picked out this young man for the General and proposed that they go with the General to visit Meingast, for Schmeisser knew about this prophet, and even ifhe was a false one, still it was nothing new for Schmeisser to visit the gatherings of opponents; but Ulrich had cor- rectly guessed about his friend Stumm that at various times he was se- cretly gathering impressions from Clarisse, and through her had also made the acquaintance ofthe Master, who had made no small impres- sion. But when Ulrich told Agathe about his plan, she didn't want to hear about it.
1494 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
Ulrich began to jest. - 1 bet that this Schmeisser is really in love with you-he maintained-and it's no secret that Lindner is. Both are for- men. Meingast, too, is afor-man. You'll end up winning him over too.
Agathe naturally wanted to knowwhatfor-men were.
-Lindner is a good person, isn't he? Ulrich asked.
Agathe confinned it, although for a long time she had not been as
enthusiastic on this count as she had been at the beginning.
-But he lives morefor religion than in a religious state?
Agathe didn't contest this at all.
- T h a t ' s j u s t w h a t a f o r - m a n is, U l r i c h e x p l a i n e d . - T h e e x t e n s i v e a c -
tivity he bestows upon his faith is perhaps the most important example, but it's just one example of the technique that's always used to make ideals tenable and available for everyday use. So he explained to her in detail his spontaneously invented notion oflivingfor and in something.