Then he felt
something
hard, in her pocket or his.
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v1
Consider what he's like: He always knows what to do.
He knows how to gaze into a woman's eyes.
He can put his mind to any question at any time.
He can box.
He is gifted, strong-willed, open-minded, fearless, tena- cious, dashing, circumspect-why quibble, suppose we grant him all those qualities-yet he has none of them!
They've made him what he is, they've set his course for him, and yet they don't belong to him.
When he is angry, something in him laughs.
When he is sad, he is up to something.
When something moves him, he turns against it.
He'll
A Sort of Introduction · 63
64 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
always see a good side to every bad action. What he thinks of any- thing will always depend on some possible context-nothing is, to him, what it is; everything is subject to change, in flux, part of a whole, of an infinite number of wholes presumably adding up to a superwhole that, however, he knows nothing about. So every answer he gives is only a partial answer, every feeling only an opinion, and he never cares what something is, only 'how' it is-some extraneous seasoning that somehow goes along with it, that's what interests him. I don't know whether I'm making myself clear-? "
"Quite clear," Clarisse said, "but I think that's all very nice of him. "
Walter had unintentionally spoken with signs of growing dislike; his old boyhood sense of being weaker than his friend increased his jealousy. For although he was convinced that Ulrich-had never really achieved anything beyond a few proofs of naked intellect and capac- ity, he could never shake off a secret sense of always having been Ulrich's physical inferior. The portrait he was sketching freed him, like bringing offa work ofart, as ifit were not his own doing at all but something that had begun as a mysterious inspiration, with word after word coming to him, while inwardly something dissolved with- out his being conscious of it. By the time he finished he had recog- nized that Ulrich stood for nothing but this state of dissolution that all present-day phenomena have.
"So you like it; do you? " he said, painfully surprised. "You can't be serious? "
Clarisse was chewing bread and soft cheese; she could only smile with her eyes.
"Oh well," Walter said, "I suppose we used to think that way our- selves, in the old days. But surely it can't be regarded as anything more than a preliminary phase? Such a man is not really a human being! "
Clarisse had sWallowed her mouthful. "That's what he says him- self! " she affirmed.
"What does he say himself? "
"Oh, I don't know-that today everything is coming apart. Every- thing has come to a standStill, he says, not just him. But he doesn't take it as hard as you do. He once gave me a long talk about it: Ifyou analyze a thousand people, you will find two dozen qualities, emo-
tions, forms of development, types of structure and so on, which are what they all consist of. And if you do a chemical analysis of your body, all you get is water with a few dozen little heaps of matter swimming in it. The water rises inside us just as it does inside trees, and it forms the bodies ofanimals just as it forms the clouds. I think that's neatly put. But it doesn't help you to know what to say about yourself. Or what to do. " Clarisse giggled. "So then I told him that you go fishing for days when you have time off, and lie around by the water. "
"So what? I'd like to know if he could stand that for even ten min- utes. But human beings," Walter said firmly, "have been doing that for ten thousand years, staring up at the sky, feeling the warmth of the earth, without trying to analyze it any more than you'd analyze your own mother. "
Clarisse couldn't help giggling again. "He says things have become more complicated meanwhile. Just as we swim in water, we also swim in a sea of fire, a storm of electricity, a firmament of magnet- ism, a swamp of warmth, and so on. It's just that we can't feel it. All that finally remains is formulas. What they mean in human terms is hard to say; that's all there is. I've forgotten whatever I learned about it at school, but I think that's what it amounts to. Anybody nowadays, says Ulrich, who wants to call the birds 'brothers,' like Saint Francis or you, can't do it so easily but must be prepared to be cast into a furnace, plunge into the earth through the wires of an electric trol- ley, or gurgle down the drain with the dishwater into the sewer. "
"Oh sure, sure," Walter interrupted this report. "First, four ele- ments are turned into several dozen, and finally we're left floating around on relationships, processes, on the dirty dishwater of pro- cesses and formulas, on something we can't even recognize as a thing, a process, a ghost of an idea, of a God-knows-what. Leaving no difference anymore between the sun and a kitchen match, or be- tween your mouth at one end of the digestive tract and its other end either. Every thing has a hundred aspects, every aspect a hundred connections, and different feelings are attached to every one of them. The human brain has happily split things apart, but things have split the human heart too. " He had leapt to his feet but re- mained standing behind the table.
"Clarisse," he said, "the man is a danger for you! Look, Clarisse,
A Sort of Introduction · 6s
66 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
what every one of us needs today more than anything else is simplic- ity, closeness to the earth, health-and yes, definitely, say what you like, a child as well, because a child keeps us anchored t~the ground. Everything Ulo tells you is inhuman. I promise you I have the cour- age, when I come home, simply to have a cup of coffee with you, listen to the birds, take a little walk, chat with a neighbor, and let the day fade out quietly: that's human life! "
The tenderness of these sentiments had brought him slowly closer to her. But the moment fatherish feelings could be detected raising their gentle bass voice from afar, Clarisse palked. As he drew near, her face became expressionless and tilted defensively.
When he had reached her side he radiated a gentle glow like a good country stove. In this warm stream Clarisse wavered for a mo- ment. Then she said: "Nothing doing, my dear! " She grabbed a piece of bread and some cheese from the table and kissed him quickly on the forehead. ''I'm going out to see ifthere are any noctur- nal butterflies. "
"But Clarisse," Walter pleaded. "All the butterflies are gone this time of year. "
"Oh, yau never can tell. "
Nothing was left of her in the room but her laughter. With her hread and cheese she roamed the meadows; it was a safe neighbor- hood and she needed no escort. Walter's tenderness collapsed like a souffle taken too soon from the oven. He heaved a deep sigh. Then he hesitantly sat down again at the piano and struck a few keys. Willy- nilly his playing turned into improvisations on themes from Wagner's operas, and in the splashings of this dissolutely tumescent substance he had refused in the days ofhis pride, his fingers cleared a path and gurgled through the fields of sound. Let them hear it, far and wide! The narcotic effect of this music paralyzed his spine and eased his fate.
MOOSBRUGGER
The Moosbrugger case was currently much in the news. Moosbrug- ger was a carpenter, a big man with broad shoulders and no excess fat on him, a head of hair like brown lamb's wool, and good-natured strong paws. His face also expressed a good-natured strength and right-mindedness, qualities one would have smelled (had one not seen them) in the blunt, plain, dry workaday smell that belonged to this thirty-four-year-old man and came from the wood he worked with and a job that called as much for mindfulness as for exertion.
Anyone who came up against this face for the first time, a face blessed by God with every sign of goodness, would stop as if rooted to the spot, because Moosbrugger was usually flanked by two aimed guards, his hands shackled with a small, strong steel chain, its grip held by one of his escorts.
When he noticed anyone staring at him a smile would pass over his broad, good-natured face with the unkempt hair and a mustache and the little chin tuft. He wore a short black jacket with light gray trou- sers, his bearing was military, and he planted his feet wide apart; but it was that smile that most fascinated the reporters in the courtroom. It might be an embarrassed smile or a cunning smile, an ironic, mali- cious, pained, mad, bloodthirsty, or tenifYing smile: they were grop- ing visibly for contradictory expressions and seemed to be searching desperately in that smile for something they obviously could find no- where else in the man's entire upright appearance.
For Moosbrugger had killed a woman, a prostitute of the lowest type, in a horrifying manner. The reporters described in detail a knife wound in the throat from the larynx to the back of the neck, also the two stab wounds in the breast that penetrated the heart, and the two in the back on the left side, and how both breasts were sliced through so that they could almost be lifted off. The reporters had expressed their revulsion at this, but they did not stop until they had counted thirty-five stabs in the belly and explained the deep slash
68 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
that reached from the navel to the sacrum, continuing up the back in numerous lesser cuts, while the throat showed marks of strangula- tion. From such horrors they could not find their way back to Moos- brugger's good-natured face, although they were themselves good-natured men who had nevertheless described what had hap- pened in a factual, expert manner and, evidently, in breathless ex- citement. They hardly availed themselves of even the most obvious explanation, that the man before them was insane-for Moosbrug- ger had already been in various mental hospitals several times for similar crimes-even though a good reporter is very well informed on such questions these days; it looked as though they were still re- luctant to give up the idea of the villain, to banish the incident from their own world into the world of the insane. Their attitude was matched by that of the psychiatrists, who had already declared him normal just as often as they had declared him not accountable for his actions. There was also the amazing fact that no sooner had they
become known than Moosbrugger's pathological excesses were re- g~ded as "finally something interesting for a change" by thousands of people who deplore the sensationalism of the press, from busy of- ficeholders to fourteen-year-old sons to housewives befogged by their domestic cares. While these people of course sighed over such a monstrosity, they were nevertheless more deeply preoccupied with it than with their own life's work. Indeed, it might happen that a punctilious department head or bank manager would say to his sleepy wife at bedtime: "What would you do now if I were a Moosbrugger? "
When Ulrich first laid eyes on that face with its signs of being a child of God above handcuffs, he quickly turned around, slipped a few cigarettes to the sentry at the nearby court building, and asked him about the convoy that had apparently just left the gates; he was told . . . Well, anyway, this is how something of the sort must have happened in earlier times, since it is often reported this way, and Ulrich almost believed it himself; but the contemporary truth was that he had merely read all about it in the newspaper. It was to be a long time before he met Moosbrugger in person, and before. that happe,ned he caught sight of him only once during the trial. The probability of experiencing something unusual through the newspa- pers is much greater than that of experiencing it in person;·in other
words, the more important things take place today in the abstract, and the more trivial ones in real life.
What Ulrich learned of Moosbrugger's story in this fashion was more or less the following:
Moosbrugger had started out in life as a poor devil, an orphan shepherd boy in a hamlet so small that it did not even have a village street, and his poverty was such that he never dared speak to a girl. Girls were something he could always only look at, even later on when he became an apprentice and then when he was a traveling journeyman. One only need imagine what it must mean when some- thing one craves as naturally as bread or water can only be looked at. Aft~r a while one desires it unnaturally. It walks past, skirts swaying around its calves. It climbs over a stile and is visible up to the knees. One looks into its eyes, and they tum opaque. One hears it laugh and turns around quickly, only to look into a face as immovably round as a hole in the ground into which a mouse has just slipped.
So it is understandable that Moosbrugger justified himself even after the first time he killed a girl by saying that he was constantly haunted by spirits calling to him day and night. They threw him out of bed when he slept and bothered him at his work. Then he heard them talking and quarreling with one another day and night. This was no insanity, and Moosbrugger could not bear being called in- sane, although he himself sometimes dressed up his story a little with bits of remembered sermons, or trimmed it in accordance with the advice on malingering one picks up in prison. But the material to work with was always there, even ifit faded a little when his attention wandered.
It had been the same during his years as a journeyman. Work is not easy for a carpenter to fmd in winter, and Moosbrugger often had no roof over his head for weeks on end. He might have trudged along the road all day to reach a village, only to find no shelter. He would have to keep on marching late into the night. With no money for a meal, he drinks schnapps until two candles light up behind his eyes and the body keeps walking on its own. He would rather not ask for a cot at the shelter, regardless of the hot soup, partly because of the bedbugs and partly because of the offensive red tape; better to pick up a few pennies by begging and crawl into some farmer's haystack for the night. Without asking, of course; . what's the point of spending
A Sort ofintroduction · 6g
70 • THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
a long time asking when you're only going to be insulted? In the morning, of course, there is often an argument and a charge of as- sault, vagrancy, and begging, and finally there is an ever-thickening file of such convictions. Each new magistrate opens this file with much pomposity, as if it explained Moosbrugger.
And who considers what it means to go for days and weeks without a proper bath? The skin gets so stiff that it allows only the clumsiest movements, even when one tries to be delicate; under such a crust the living soul itself hardens. The mind may be less affected, it goes on doing the needful after a fashion, burning like a small light in a huge walking lighthouse full of crushed earthworms and grasshop- pers, with everything personal squashed inside, and only the fer- menting organic matter stalking onward. As he wandered on through the villages, or even on the deserted roads, Moosbrugger would en- counter whole processions ofwomen, one now, and another one half an hour later, but even if they appeared at great intervals and had nothing to do with each other, on the whole they were still proces- sions. They were on their way from one village to another, or had just slipped out of the house; they wore thick shawls or jackets that stood out in stiff, snaky lines around their hips; they stepped into warm rooms or drove their children ahead of them, or were on the road so alone that one could have thrown a stone at them like shying at a crow. Moosbrugger asserted that he could not possibly be a sex mur- derer, because these females had inspired only feelings of aversion in him. This is not implausible-we think we understand a cat, for in-
stance, sitting in front of a cage staring up at a fat, fair canruy hopping up and down, or batting a mouse, letting it go, then batting it again, just to see it run away once more; and what is a dog running after a bicycle, biting at it only in play-man's best friend? There is in this attitude toward the living, moving, silently rolling or flitting fellow creature enjoying its own existence something that suggests a deep innate aversion to it. And then what could one do when she stl'irted screaming? One could only come to one's senses, or else, ifone sim- ply couldn't do that, press her face to the ground and stuff earth into her mouth.
Moosbrugger was only a journeyman carpenter, a man utterly alone, and while he got on well enough with the other men wherever he worked, he never had a friend. Every now and then the most pow-
erful of instincts turned his inner being cruelly outward. But he may have lacked only, as he said, the education and the opportunity to make something different out of this impulse, an angel of mass de- struction or a great anarchist, though not the anarchists who band together in secret societies, whom he contemptuously called fakes. He was clearly ill, but even if his obviously pathological nature pro- vided the basis for his attitude, and this isolated him from other men, it somehow seemed to him a stronger and higher sense of his own self. His whole life was a comically and distressingly clumsy struggle to gain by force a recognition of this sense of himself. Even as an apprentice he had once broken the fingers ofone master who tried to beat him. He ran away from another with the master's money-in simple justice, as he said. He never stayed anywhere for long. As long as he could keep others at arm's length, as he always did at first, working peacefully, with his big shoulders and few words, he stayed. But as soon as they began to treat him familiarly and without respect, as if they had caught on to him, he packed up and left, seized by an uncanny feeling as though he were not frrmly settled inside his skin. Once, he had waited too long. Four bricklayers on a building site had got together to show him who was boss-they would make the scaf- folding around the top story give way under him. He could hear them tittering behind his back as they came closer; he hurled himself at them with all his boundless strength, threw one down two flights of stairs, and cut all the tendons in the arms of two others. To be punished for this, he said, had been a shock to his system. He emi- grated to Turkey but came back again, because the world was in league against him everywhere; no magic word and no kindness could prevail against this conspiracy.
He had eagerly picked up such phrases in the mental wards and prisons, with scraps of French and Latin stuck in the most unsuitable places as he talked, ever since he had discovered that it was the pos- session of these languages that gave those in power the right to de- cide his fate with their "findings. " For the same reason, he also did his utmost during hearings to express himself in an exaggerate. d High German, saying such things as "This must be regarded as the basis for my brutality" or "I had imagined her to be even more vicious than the others of her kind in my usual estimation of them. " But when he saw that this failed to make an impression he could rise to the heights
A Sort ofIntroduction · 71
72 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
of a grand theatrical pose, declaring disdainfully that he was a "theo- retical anarchist" whom the Social Democrats were ready to rescue at a moment's notice if he chose to accept a favor from those utterly pernicious Jewish exploiters of the ignorant working class. This would show them that he too had a "discipline," a field of his own where the learned presumption of his judges could not follow him.
Usually this kind of talk brought him high marks fqr "remarkable intelligence" in the court's judgment, respectful attention to his words during the proceedings, and tougher sentences; yet deep down, his flattered vanity regarded these hearings as the high points ofhis life. Which is why he hated no one as fervently as he hated the psychiatrists who imagined they could dismiss his whole complex personality with a few foreign words, as if it were for them an every- day affair. As always in such cases, the medical diagnoses of his men- tal condition fluctuated under the pressure of the superior world of juridical concepts, and Moosbrugger never missed a chance to dem- onstrate in open court his own superiority over the psychiatrists, un- masking them as puffed-up dupes and charlatans who knew nothing at all, and w~om he could trick into placing him in a mental institu- tion instead of sending him to prison, where he belonged. For he did not deny what he had done, but simply wanted his deeds understood as the mishaps of an important philosophy of life. It was those snick- ering women who were in the forefront of the conspiracy against him. They all had their skirt-chasers and turned up their noses at a real man's straight talk, ifthey didn't take it as a downright insult. He gave them a wide berth as long as he could, so as not to let them provoke him, but it was not possible all the time. There are days when a man feels confused and can't get hold of anything because his hands are sweating with restlessness. If one then has to give in, he can be sure that at the first step he takes there will be, far up the road like an advance patrol sent out by the others, one ofthose poisons on two feet crossing his path, a cheat who secretly laughs at the man while she saps his strength and puts on her act for him, if she doesn't do something much worse to him in her unscrupulousness!
And so the end of that night had come, a night of listless boozing, with lots of noise to keep down the inner restlessness. The world can be unsteady even when you aren't drunk. The street walls waver like stage sets behind which something is waiting for its cue. It gets qui-
eter at the edge of town, where you come into the open fields lit by the moon. That was where Moosbrugger had to circle back to get home, and it was there, by the iron bridge, that the girl accosted him. She was one of those girls who hire themselves out to men in the fields, a jobless, runaway housemaid, a little thb;lg of whom all you could see were two gleaming little mouse eyes under her kerchief. Moosbrugger turned her down and quickened his step, but she begged him to take her home with him. Moosbrugger walked: straight ahead, then around a corner, finally helplessly, this way and that; he took big strides, and she ran alongside him; he stopped, she stood there like a shadow. It was as if he were drawing her along behind him. He made one more attempt to drive her off: he sud- denly turned around and spat twice in her face. It was no use; she was invulnerable.
This happened in the immense park, which they had to cross at its narrowest part. Moosbrugger beg~ to feel sure that the girl had a protector nearby-how else would she have the neiVe to keep after him despite his exasperation? He reached for the knife in his pants pocket; he wasn't anyone's fool! They might jump him together; be- hind those bitches the other man was always hiding to jeer at you. Come to think of it, didn't she look like a man in disguise? He saw shadows move and heard crackling in the bushes, while this schemer beside him repeated her plea again and again, at regular inteiVals like a gigantic pendulum. But he could see nothing to hurl his giant's strength at, and the uncanny way nothing at all was happening began to frighten him.
By the time they turned into the first, still very dark street, there were beads of sweat on his forehead, and he was trembling. He kept his eyes straight ahead and walked into the first cafe that was still open. He gulped down a black coffee and three brandies and could sit there in peace, for fifteen minutes or so; but when he paid his check the worry was there again: what would he do if she was waiting for him outside? There are such thoughts, like string winding in end- less snares around arms and legs. He had hardly taken a few steps on the dark street when he felt the girl at his side. Now she was no lon- ger humble but cocky and self-confident; nor did she plead anymore but merely kept silent. Then he realized that he would never get rid of her, because it was he himself who was drawing her after him. His
A Sort ofIntroduction · 73
74 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
throat filled up with tearful disgust. He kept walking, and that crea- ture, trailing him, was himself again. It was just the same as when he was always meeting those processions of women in the road. Once, he had cut a big wooden splinter out of his own leg because he was too impatien~to wait for the doctor; in the same way, he now felt his knife lying long and hard in his pocket.
But by a superhuman exertion ofhis moral sense, Moosbrugger hit upon one more way out. Behind the board fence along which the road now led was a playing field; one couldn't be seen. there, and so he went in. He lay down in the cramped ticket booth and pushed his head into the comer where it was darkest; the soft, accursed second self lay down beside him. So he pretended to fall asleep right away, in order to be able to sneak out later on. But when he started to creep out softly, feet first, there ·it was again, winding its arms around his neck.
Then he felt something hard, in her pocket or his. He tugged it out. He couldn't say whether it was a scissors or a knife; he stabbed her with it. He had claimed it was only a pair ofscissors, but it was his own knife. She fell with her head inside the booth. He dragged her partway outside, onto the soft ground, and kept on stabbing her until he had completely separated her from himself. Then he stood there beside her for maybe another quarter of an hour, looking down at her, while the night grew calmer again and wonderfully smooth. Now she could never again insult a man and trail after him. He finally carried the corpse across the street and laid it down in front of a bush so that it could be more easily found and buried, as he stated, be- cause now it was no longer her fault.
During his trial Moosbrugger created the most unpredictable problems for his lawyer. He sat relaxed on his bench, like a spectator, and called out "Bravo! " every time the prosecutor made a point of what a public menace the defendant was, which Moosbrugger re- gru:ded ~ worthy of him, and gave out good marks to witnesses who declared that they had never noticed anything about him to indicate that he could not be held responsible for his actions.
"You're quite a character," the presiding judge flattered him"from time to time, humoring him along as he conscientiously tightened the noose the accused had put around his own neck. At such mo- ments Moosbrugger looked astonished, like a harried bull in the arena, let his eyes wander, and noticed in the faces around him,
though he could not understand it, that he had again worked himself one level deeper into his guilt.
Ulrich was especially taken with the fact that Moosbrugger's de- fense was evidently based on some dimly discernible principle. He had not gone out with int~nt to kill, nor did his dignity permit him to plead insanity. There could be no question of lust as a motive-he had felt only disgust and contempt. The act could accordingly only be called manslaughter, to which he had been induced by the suspi- cious conduct of "this caricature of a woman," as he put it. If one understood him rightly, he even wanted the killing to be regarded as a political crime, and he sometimes gave the impression that he was fighting not for himself but for this view of the legal issue. The judge's tactics against him were based on the usual assumption that he was dealing with a murderer's obvious, cunning efforts to evade responsibility.
"Why did you wipe the blood off your hands? Why did you throw the knife away? Why did you change into fresh underwear and clean clothes afterward? Because it was Sunday? Not because you were covered with blood? Why did you go out looking for entertainment? So the crime didn't prevent you from doing so? Did you feel any re- morse at all? " Ulrich well understood the deep resignation with which Moosbrugger at such moments lamented his lack of an educa- tion, which left him helpless to undo the knots in this net woven of incomprehension. The judge translated this into an emphatic re- proof: "You always find a way to shift the blame to others! "
This judge added it all up, starting with the police record and the vagrancy, and presented it as Moosbrugger's guilt, while to Moos- brugger it was a series of completely separate incidents having noth- ing to do with one another, each ofwhich had a different cause that lay outside Moosbrugger somewhere in the world as a whole. In the judge's eyes, Moosbrugger was the source of his acts; in Moosbrug- ger's eyes they had perched on him like birds that had flown in from somewhere or other. To the judge, Moosbrugger was a special case; for himself he was a universe, and it was very hard to say something convincing about a universe. Two strategies were here locked in combat, two integral positions, two sets of logical consistency. But Moosbrugger had the less favorable position; even a much cleverer man could not have expressed the strange, shadowy reasonings of his
A Sort ofIntroduction · 75
76 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
mind. They rose directly out of the confused isolation of his life, and while all other lives . exist in hundreds of ways-perceived the same way by those who lead them and by all others, who confinn them- his own true life existed only for him. It was a vapor, always losing and changing shape. He might, of course, have asked his judges whether their lives were essentially different. But he thought no such
thing. Standing before the court: everything that had happened so
I
naturally in sequence was now senselessly jumbled up inside him, and he made the greatest efforts to make such sense of it as would be no less worthy than the arguments of his distinguished opponents. The judge seemed almost kindly as he lent support to this effort, of- fering a helpful word or idea, even if these turned out later to have the most terrible consequences for Moosbrugger.
It was like the struggle of a shadow with a wall, and in the end Moosbrugger's shadow was reduced to a lurid flickering. Ulrich was present on the last day of the trial. When the presiding judge read out the psychiatrists' findings that the accused was responsible for his actions, Moosbrugger rose to his feet and announced to the court: "I am satisfied with this opinion and have achieved my purpose. " The response of scornful incredulity in the eyes-around him made him add angrily: "Since it is I who forced the indictment, I declare myself satisfied with the conduct of the case. " The presidingjudge, who had now become all strictness and retribution, reprimanded him with the remark that the court was not concerned with giving him satisfaction. Then he read him the death sentence, exactly as if it were now time to answer seriously the nonsense Moosbrugger had been spouting throughout the ~rial, to the amusement of the spectators. Moosbrug- ger said nothing to this, so that he would not appear to be frightened. Then the proceedings were concluded and it was all over. His mind reeled; he fell back, helpless against the arrogance of those who failed to understand. Even as the guards were leading him out,. he turned around, struggling for words, raised his hands in the air, and cried out, in a voice that shook him free of his guards' grip: "I am satisfied, even though I must confess to you that you have con- demned a madman. "
That was a non sequitur, but Ulrich sat there breathless. This was clearly madness, and just as clearly it was no more than a distortion of our own elements of being. Cracked and obscure it was; it somehow
occurred to Ulrich that if mankind could dream as a whole, that dream would be Moosbrugger. Ulrich came back to reality. only when "that miserable clown of a lawyer," as Moosbrugger ungrate- fully referred to him during the trial, announced that he would ap- peal to have the verdict set aside on grounds of some detail or other, while his towering client was led away.
19
A LETTER OF ADMONITION AND A CHANCE TO ACQUIRE QUALITIES. RIV ALRY OF TWO ACCESSIONS TO THE THRONE
So the time passed, until one day Ulrich received a letter from his father. ·
"My dear son, once again several months have gone by without my being able to deduce from your scanty communications that you have taken the slightest step forward in your career or have made any preparations to do so.
"I will joyfully acknowledge that in the course of the last few years the satisfaction has been vouchsafed me of hearing your achieve- ments praised in various esteemed quarters, with predictions on that basis of a promising future for you. But on the one hand, the tend- ency you have inherited, though not from me, to make enthusiastic first strides in some new endeavor that attracts you, only to forget soon afterward, so to speak, what you owe yourself and those who have rested their hopes on you, and on the other hand, my inability to detect in your communications the slightest sign of a plan for your future, fill me with grave concern.
"it is not only that at your age other men have already secured a solid position in life, but also that I may die at any time, and the prop- erty I shall bequeath in equal shares to you and your sister, though not negligible, is not sufficiently ample, under present circum-
A Sort ofIntroduction · 77
78 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
stances, to secure unaided that social position which you will now, at last, have to establish for yourself. What fills me with grave concern is the thought that ever since you took your degree, you have only vaguely talked ofplans to be realized in various fields, and which you, in your usual way, may considerably overestimate, but that you never write of taking any interest in a university appointment, nor of any preliminary approach to one or another university with regard to such plans, nor of making· any other contact with influential circles. No one can possibly suspect me of denigrating a scholar's need for independence, considering that it was I who was the first, forty-seven years ago, to break with the other schools of crim~al jurisprudence on that point in my book on Samuel Pufendorf's Theory ofthe Re- sponsibility for Moral Actions and Its Relation to Modem Jurispru- dence, which you know and which is now going into its twelfth edition, where I brought the true. context of the problem to light. Just as little can I accept, after the experiences of a hardworking life, that a man rely on himself alone and neglect the academic and social con- nections that provide the support by means of which alone the indi- vidual's work prospers as part of a fruitful and beneficial whole.
"I therefore hope and trust that I shall be hearing from you at your earliest convenience, and that the expenditures I have made on be- half of your advancement will be rewarded by your taking up such connections, now that you have returned home, and by your ceasing to neglect them. I have also written in this vein to myoid and trusted friend and patron, the former President of the Treasury and present Chairman ofthe Imperial Family Court Division, 9ffice ofthe Court Chamberlain, His Excellency Count Stallburg, asking him to give his beneficent attention to the request you will in due course soon pre- sent to him. My highly placed friend has already been so kind as to reply by return mail. It is your good fortune that he will not only see you but expresses a warm interest in your personal progress as de- picted by myself. This means that your future is assured, insofar as it is in my power and estimation to do so, assuming that you under- stand how to make a favorable impression on His Excellency, while also strengthening the esteem in which you are held by the leading academic circles.
"As regards the request I am certain you will be glad to lay before
His Excellency, as soon as you lmow what it is about, its object is th~ following:
"There will take place in Germany in 1918, specifically on or about the 15th ofJune, a great celebration marking the jubilee of Emperor Wilhelm II's thirtieth year upon the throne, to impress upon the world Germany's greatness and power. Although that is still several years away, a reliable source informs us that preparations are already being made, though for the time being quite unofficially, of course. Now you are certainly aware that in the same year our own revered Emperor Franz Josefwill be celebrating the seventieth jubilee of his accession and that this date falls on December znd. Given the mod- esty which we Austrians display far too much in all questions con- cerning our own fatherland, there is reason to fear, I must say, that we will experience another Sadowa, meaning that the Germans, with their trained methodical aim for effect, will anticipate us, just as they did in that campaign, when they introduced the needle gun and took us by surprise.
"Fortunately, the anxiety I have just expressed has already been anticipated by other patriotic personages with good connections, and I can tell you confidentially that there is a campaign under way in Vienna to forestall the eventuality of such a coup and to bring to bear the full weight of a seventy-year reign, so rich in blessings and sor- rows, against a jubilee of a mere thirty years. Inasmuch as December znd cannot of course possibly be moved ahead of June 15th, some- one came up with the splendid idea of declaring the entire year of 1918 as a jubilee year for our Emperor of Peace. I am, however, only insofar apprised of this as the institutions of which I am a member have had occasion to express their views on this proposal. You will learn the details as soon as you present yourself to Count Stallburg, who intends to place you on the Planning Committee in a position of considerable distil)ction for so young a man as yourself.
"Let me also prevail upon you not to continue neglecting-as, to my acute embarrassment, you have-the relations I have so long rec- ommended to you with Section ChiefTuzzi of the Imperial Foreign Office, but to call at once upon his wife, who, as you lmow, is the daughter of a cousin of my late brother's widow, and hence your cousin. I am told she occupies a prominent position in the project I
A Sort ofIntroduction · 79
Bo • THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
have just described. My revered friend Count Stallburg has already had the extraordinary kindness to infonn her ofyour intended visit to her, which is why you must not delay. it a moment longer.
"& regards myself, there is nothing much to report; other than my lectures, work on the new edition o£ my aforementioned book takes up all of my time, as well as the remainder of energy one still has at one's disposal in old age. One has to make good use of one's time, for it is short.
"From your sister I hear only that she is in good health. She has a fine, capable husband, although she will never admit that she is satis- fied with her lot and feels happy in it.
'W ith my blessing, your loving
Father. "
PART-II PSE. U00REALITY PREVAILS
20
A TOUCH OF REALITY. IN SPITE OF THE ABSENCE OF QUALITIES, ULRICH TAKES RESOLUTE AND SPIRITED ACTION
That Ulrich ac~ally decided to call on Count Stallburg was prompted not least, though not only, by curiosity.
Count Stallburg had his office in that lmp! 'lrial and Royal citadel the Hofburg, and the Emperor and King of Kakania was a legendary old gentleman. A great many books have of course been written about him since, and exactly what he did, prevented, or left undone is now known, but then, in the last decade of his and Kakania's life, the younger people who kept abreast of the arts and sciences some- times wondered whether he actually existed. The number of his por- traits one saw was almost as large as the number of his kingdom's inhabitants; on his birthday as much food and drink was consumed as on that of the Savior, bonfires blazed on the mountains, and the voices ofmillions vowed that they loved him as a father; an anthem in his honor was the only work of poetry or music of which every Kakanian knew at least a line. But this popularity and publicity was so superconvincing that believing in his existence was rather like believ- ing in stars that one sees though they ceased to exist thousands of years ago. .
The first thing that happened when Ulrich arrived in his cab at the Imperial Hofburg was that the cabbie stopped in the outer courtyard and asked to be paid, claiming that although he was allowed to drive through the inner courtyard, he was not permitted to stop there. . Ul- rich was annoyed at the cabbie, whom he took for a cheat or a cow- ard, but his protests were powerless against the man's timid refusal, which suddenly made him sense the aura of a power mightier than he. When he walked into the inner courtyard he was much im- pressed with the numerous red, blue, white, and yellow coats, trou- sers, and helmet plumes that stood there stiffly in the sun like birds
84 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
on a sandbank. Up to that moment he had considered "His Majesty" one of those meaningless terms which had stayed in use, as one may be an atheist and still say "Thank God. " But now his gaze wandered up high walls and he saw an island-gray, self-contained, and armed-lying there while the city's speed rusped blindly past it.
After he had presented himself he was led up stairways and along corridors, through rooms large and small. Although he waS very well dressed, he felt that his exact measure was being taken by every eye he encountered. It would apparently occur to no one here to confuse intellectual aristocracy with the real thing, and against this Ulrich had no recourse but ironic protest and bourgeois criticism. He ascer- tained that he ~aswalking through a vast shell with little content; the great public rooms were almost unfurnished, but this empty taste lacked the bitterness of a great style. He passed a casual sequence of individual guardsmen and servants, who formed a guard more hap- hazard than magnificent; a half dozen well-trained and well-paid pri- vate detectives might have served far more effectively. One kind of servant, in a gray uniform and cap like a bank messenger's, shuttling between the lackeys and the guardsmen, made him think of a lawyer or dentist who does not keep his office and his living quarters suffi- ciently separate. "One feels clearly through all this how it must have awed the Biedermeier generation with its splendor," Ulrich thought, "but today it can't even compete with the attractiveness and comfort of a hotel, so it continues to fall back on being all noble restraint and stiffness. "
But when he entered Count Stallburg's presence, Ulrich was re- ceived by His Excellency inside a great hollow prism of the best pro- portions, in the center of which this unpretentious, bald-headed, somewhat stooped man, his knees bent like an orangutan's, stood facing Ulrich in a manner that could not possibly be the way an emi- nent Imperial Court functionary of noble birth would naturally look-it had to be an imitation ofsomething. His Excellency's shoul- ders were bowed, his underlip drooped, he resembled an aged bea- gle or a worthy accountant. Suddenly there could be no doubt as to whom he reminded one of; Count Stallburg became transparent, and Ulrich realized that a man who has been for seventy years the All- Highest Center of supreme power must find a certain satisfaction in retreating behind himself and looking like the most subservient of
his subjects. Consequently it simply became good manners and a natural form of discretion for those in the vicinity of this All-Highest personage not to look more personal than he did. This seems to be why kings so often like to call themselves the first servants of their country, and a quick glance confirmed for Ulrich that His Excellency indeed wore those short, ice-gray muttonchop whiskers framing a clean-shaven chin that were sported by every clerk and railway por- ter in Kakania. The beliefwas that they were emulating the appear- ance of their Emperor and King. but the deeper need in such cases is reciprocity.
Ulrich had time for such reflections because he had to wait awhile for His Excellency to speak. The theatrical instinct for disguise and transformation, one of life's pleasures, could here be seen in all its purity, without the least taint or awareness of a performance; so strongly did it manifest itself here in this unconscious, perennial art of self-representation that by comparison the middle-class custom of building theaters and staging plays as an art that can be rented by the hour struck him as something quite unnatural, decadent, and schiz- oid. And when His Excellency finally parted his lips and said to him: "Your dear father . . . ,"only to come to a halt, there was something in his voice that made one notice his remarkably beautiful yellowish hands and something like an aura of finely tuned morality surround- ing the whole figure, which charmed Ulrich into forgetting himself, as intellectuals are apt to do. For His Excellency now asked him what he did, and when Ulrich said "Mathematics" responded with "In- deed, how interesting, at which school? " When Ulrich assured him that he had nothing to do with schools, His Excellency said, "Indeed, how interesting, I see, research, university. " This seemed to Ulrich so natural and precise, just the way one imagines a fine piece of con-
versation, that he inadvertently took to behaving as though he were at home here and followed his thoughts instead of the protocol de- manded by the situation. He suddenly thought of Moosbrugger. Here was the Power of Clemency close at hand; nothing seemed to him simpler than to make a stab at using it.
"Your Excellency," he said, "may I take this favorable opportunity to appeal to you on behalf of a man who has been unjustly con- demned to death? " ·
The question made Count Stallburg's eyes open wide.
Pseudoreality Prevails · 8s
86 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
"A sex murderer, to be sure," Ulrich conceded, though he realized at once that he was entirely out of order. "The man's insane, of course," he hastily added to save the situation, and was about to add "Your Excellency must be aware that our penal code, dating from the middle of the la5t century, is outdated on this point," but he had to swallow and got stuck. It was a blunder to impose on this man a dis- cussion of a kind that people used to intellectual activity engage in, often quite without purpose. Just a few words, adroitly planted, can be as fruitful as rich garden loam, but in this place their effect was closer to that of a little clump of dirt one has inadvertently brought into the room on the sole of one's shoe. But now Count Stallburg, noticing Ulrich's embarrassment, showed him his truly great benevolence.
"Yes, yes, I remember," he said with a slight effort after Ulrich had given him the man's name, "and so you say he is insane, and you would like to help him? "
"He can't be held responsible for what he does. "
"Quite so, those are always especially unpleasant cases. "
Count Stallburg seemed much distressed by the difficulties in-
volved. Looking bleakly at Ulrich, he asked, as if nothing else were to be expected, whether Moosbrugger's sentence was final. Ulrich had to admit that it was not.
"Ah, in that case," he went on, sounding relieved, "there's still time," and he began to speak of Ulrich's "papa," leaving th. e ~oos brugger case in amiable ambiguity.
Ulrich's slip had momentarily made him lose his presence of mind, but oddly enough his mistake seemed not to have made a bad im- pression on Count Stallburg. His Excellency had been nearly speechless at first, as though someone had taken off his jacket in his presence, but then such spontaneity from a man so well recom- mended carne to seem to him refreshingly resolute and high-spir- ited. He was pleased to have found these two words, intent as he was on forming a favorable impression. He wrote them immediately ('We hope that we have found a resolute and high-spirited helper") in his letter of introduction to the chairman of the great patriotic campaign. When Ulrich received this document a few moments later, he felt like a child who is dismissed with a piece of chocolate pressed into its little hand. He now held something between his fin-
gers and received instructions to come again, in a manner that left him uncertain whether it was an order or an invitation, but without giving him an opportunity to protest. "There must be some misun- derstanding-! really had no intention whatever . . . ,"he would have liked to say, but by this time he was already on his way out, back along the great corridors and through the vast salons. He suddenly came to a stop, thinking, "That picked me up like a cork and set me down somewhere I never meant to go! " He scrutinized the insidious simplicity of the decor with curiosity, and felt quite certain in decid- ing that even now he was still unimpressed by it. This was simply a world that had not yet been cleared away. But still, what was that strong, peculiar quality it had made him feel? Damn it all, there was hardly any other way to put it: it was simply amazingly real.
. 21
THE REAL INVENTION OF THE PARALLEL CAMP AIGN BY COUNT LEINSDORF
The real driving force behind the great patriotic campaign-to be known henceforth as the Parallel Campaign, both for the sake of ab- breviation and because it was supposed to "bring to bear the full weight of a seventy-year reign, so rich in blessings and sorrows, against a jubilee of a mere thirty years"-was not, however, Count Stallburg, but his friend His Grace the Imperial Liege,. . Count Leinsdorf.
At the· time Ulrich was making his visit in the Hofburg, Count Leinsdorf's secretary was standing in that great nobleman's beauti- ful, tall-windowed study, amid multiple layers of tranquillity, devo- tion, gold braid, and the solemnity of fame, with a book in his hand from which he was reading aloud to His Grace a passage he had been directed to find. This time it was something out of Johann Gottlieb Fichte that he had dug up in the Addresses to the German Nation and considered most appropriate:
Pseudoreality Prevails · 87
88 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
To be freed from the original sin ofsloth [he read] and the cowardice and duplicity that follow in its wake, men need models, such as the founders of the great religions actually were, to prefigure for them the enigma of freedom: The necessary teaching of moral conviction is the task of the Church, whose symbols must be regarded not as homilies but only as the means of instruction for the proclamation of the eternal verities.
He stressed the words "sloth," "prefigure," and "Church. " His Grace listened benevolently, had the book shown to him, but then shook his head.
"No," said the Imperial Count, "the book may be all right, but this Protestant bit about the Church won't do. " ·
The secretary looked frustrated, like a minor official whose fifth draft of a memo has been returned to him by the head of his depart- ment, and cautiously demurred: "But wouldn't Fichte make an ex- cellent impression on nationalistic circles? ''
"I think," His Grace replied, "we had better do without him for the present. " As he clapped the book shut his face clapped shut too, and at this wordless command the secretary clapped shut with a deep bow and took back his Fichte, as if removing a dish from the table, which he would file away again on the shelf with all the other philo- sophic systems of the world. One does not do one's own cooking but has it taken care of by the servants.
"So, for the time being," Count Leinsdorf said, "we keep to our four points: Emperor of Peace, European Milestone, True Austria, Property and Culture. You will draw up the circular letter along those lines. "
Just then a political thought had struck His Grace, which trans- lated into words came to, more or less, "They'll come along of their own accord. " He meant those sectors ofhis Fatherland who felt they belonged less to· Austria than to the greater German nation. He re- garded them with disfavor. Had his secretary found a more accept- able quotation with which to flatter their sensibilities-hence the choice ofJ. G. Fichte-he might have let him write it down. But the moment that offensive note about the Church gave him a pretext to drop it, he did so with a sigh of relief.
His Grace was the originator of the great patriotic campaign. When the disturbing news reached him from Germany, it was he who had come up with the slogan "Emperor of Peace. " This phrase instantly evoked the image of an eighty-eight-year-old sovereign-a true father of his people-and an uninterrupted reign of seventy years. The image naturally bore the faJlliliar features of his Imperial Master, but its halo was not that of majesty but of the proud fact that his Fatherland possessed the oldest sovereign with the longest reign in the world. Foolish people might be tempted to see in this ·merely his pleasure in a rarity-as if Count Leinsdorf, had, for instance, rated the possession of the far rarer horizontally striped "Sahara" stamp with watermark and one missing perforation over the posses- sion of an El Greco, as in fact he did, even though he owned both and was not unmindful ofhis family's celebrated collection ofpaintings- but this is simply because these people don't understand what en- riching power a symbol has, even beyond that of the great~stwealth.
For Count Leinsdorf, his allegory of the aged ruler held the thought both of his Fatherland, which he loved, and of the world to which it should be a model. Count Leinsdorfwas stirred by great and aching hopes. He could not have said what moved him more, grief at not seeing his country established in quite·the place of honor among the family of nations which was her due, or jealousy of Prussia, which had thrust Austria down from that place of eminence (in 1866, by a stab in the back! ), or else whether he was simply filled with pride in the nobility of a venerable state and the desire to show the world just how exemplary it was. In his view, the nations of Europe were help- lessly adrift in the whirlpool of materialistic democracy. What hov- ered before him was an inspiring symbol that would serve both as a warning and as a sign to return to the fold. It was clear to him that something had to be done to put Austria in the vanguard, so that this "splendorous rally of the Austrian spirit" would prove a "milestone" for the whole world arid enable it to find its own true being again; and all of this was connected with the possession of an eighty-eight- year-old Emperor of Peace.
Anything more, or more specific, Count Leinsdorf did not yet know. But he was certain that he was in the grip of a great idea. Not only did it kindle his passion-which should have put him on his guard, as a Christian of strict and responsible upbringing-but with
Pseudoreality Prevails · B9
go •THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
dazzling conclusiveness this idea flowed directly into such sublime and radiant conceptions as that ofthe Sovereign, the Fatherland, and the Happiness of Mankind. Whatever obscurity still clung to his vi- sion could not upset His Grace. He was well acquainted with the the- ological doctrine of the contemplatio in caligine divina, the contemplation in divine darkness, which is infinitely clear in itself but a dazzling darkness to the human intellect. Besides, he had al- ways believed that a man who does something truly great usually doesn't know why.
A Sort of Introduction · 63
64 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
always see a good side to every bad action. What he thinks of any- thing will always depend on some possible context-nothing is, to him, what it is; everything is subject to change, in flux, part of a whole, of an infinite number of wholes presumably adding up to a superwhole that, however, he knows nothing about. So every answer he gives is only a partial answer, every feeling only an opinion, and he never cares what something is, only 'how' it is-some extraneous seasoning that somehow goes along with it, that's what interests him. I don't know whether I'm making myself clear-? "
"Quite clear," Clarisse said, "but I think that's all very nice of him. "
Walter had unintentionally spoken with signs of growing dislike; his old boyhood sense of being weaker than his friend increased his jealousy. For although he was convinced that Ulrich-had never really achieved anything beyond a few proofs of naked intellect and capac- ity, he could never shake off a secret sense of always having been Ulrich's physical inferior. The portrait he was sketching freed him, like bringing offa work ofart, as ifit were not his own doing at all but something that had begun as a mysterious inspiration, with word after word coming to him, while inwardly something dissolved with- out his being conscious of it. By the time he finished he had recog- nized that Ulrich stood for nothing but this state of dissolution that all present-day phenomena have.
"So you like it; do you? " he said, painfully surprised. "You can't be serious? "
Clarisse was chewing bread and soft cheese; she could only smile with her eyes.
"Oh well," Walter said, "I suppose we used to think that way our- selves, in the old days. But surely it can't be regarded as anything more than a preliminary phase? Such a man is not really a human being! "
Clarisse had sWallowed her mouthful. "That's what he says him- self! " she affirmed.
"What does he say himself? "
"Oh, I don't know-that today everything is coming apart. Every- thing has come to a standStill, he says, not just him. But he doesn't take it as hard as you do. He once gave me a long talk about it: Ifyou analyze a thousand people, you will find two dozen qualities, emo-
tions, forms of development, types of structure and so on, which are what they all consist of. And if you do a chemical analysis of your body, all you get is water with a few dozen little heaps of matter swimming in it. The water rises inside us just as it does inside trees, and it forms the bodies ofanimals just as it forms the clouds. I think that's neatly put. But it doesn't help you to know what to say about yourself. Or what to do. " Clarisse giggled. "So then I told him that you go fishing for days when you have time off, and lie around by the water. "
"So what? I'd like to know if he could stand that for even ten min- utes. But human beings," Walter said firmly, "have been doing that for ten thousand years, staring up at the sky, feeling the warmth of the earth, without trying to analyze it any more than you'd analyze your own mother. "
Clarisse couldn't help giggling again. "He says things have become more complicated meanwhile. Just as we swim in water, we also swim in a sea of fire, a storm of electricity, a firmament of magnet- ism, a swamp of warmth, and so on. It's just that we can't feel it. All that finally remains is formulas. What they mean in human terms is hard to say; that's all there is. I've forgotten whatever I learned about it at school, but I think that's what it amounts to. Anybody nowadays, says Ulrich, who wants to call the birds 'brothers,' like Saint Francis or you, can't do it so easily but must be prepared to be cast into a furnace, plunge into the earth through the wires of an electric trol- ley, or gurgle down the drain with the dishwater into the sewer. "
"Oh sure, sure," Walter interrupted this report. "First, four ele- ments are turned into several dozen, and finally we're left floating around on relationships, processes, on the dirty dishwater of pro- cesses and formulas, on something we can't even recognize as a thing, a process, a ghost of an idea, of a God-knows-what. Leaving no difference anymore between the sun and a kitchen match, or be- tween your mouth at one end of the digestive tract and its other end either. Every thing has a hundred aspects, every aspect a hundred connections, and different feelings are attached to every one of them. The human brain has happily split things apart, but things have split the human heart too. " He had leapt to his feet but re- mained standing behind the table.
"Clarisse," he said, "the man is a danger for you! Look, Clarisse,
A Sort of Introduction · 6s
66 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
what every one of us needs today more than anything else is simplic- ity, closeness to the earth, health-and yes, definitely, say what you like, a child as well, because a child keeps us anchored t~the ground. Everything Ulo tells you is inhuman. I promise you I have the cour- age, when I come home, simply to have a cup of coffee with you, listen to the birds, take a little walk, chat with a neighbor, and let the day fade out quietly: that's human life! "
The tenderness of these sentiments had brought him slowly closer to her. But the moment fatherish feelings could be detected raising their gentle bass voice from afar, Clarisse palked. As he drew near, her face became expressionless and tilted defensively.
When he had reached her side he radiated a gentle glow like a good country stove. In this warm stream Clarisse wavered for a mo- ment. Then she said: "Nothing doing, my dear! " She grabbed a piece of bread and some cheese from the table and kissed him quickly on the forehead. ''I'm going out to see ifthere are any noctur- nal butterflies. "
"But Clarisse," Walter pleaded. "All the butterflies are gone this time of year. "
"Oh, yau never can tell. "
Nothing was left of her in the room but her laughter. With her hread and cheese she roamed the meadows; it was a safe neighbor- hood and she needed no escort. Walter's tenderness collapsed like a souffle taken too soon from the oven. He heaved a deep sigh. Then he hesitantly sat down again at the piano and struck a few keys. Willy- nilly his playing turned into improvisations on themes from Wagner's operas, and in the splashings of this dissolutely tumescent substance he had refused in the days ofhis pride, his fingers cleared a path and gurgled through the fields of sound. Let them hear it, far and wide! The narcotic effect of this music paralyzed his spine and eased his fate.
MOOSBRUGGER
The Moosbrugger case was currently much in the news. Moosbrug- ger was a carpenter, a big man with broad shoulders and no excess fat on him, a head of hair like brown lamb's wool, and good-natured strong paws. His face also expressed a good-natured strength and right-mindedness, qualities one would have smelled (had one not seen them) in the blunt, plain, dry workaday smell that belonged to this thirty-four-year-old man and came from the wood he worked with and a job that called as much for mindfulness as for exertion.
Anyone who came up against this face for the first time, a face blessed by God with every sign of goodness, would stop as if rooted to the spot, because Moosbrugger was usually flanked by two aimed guards, his hands shackled with a small, strong steel chain, its grip held by one of his escorts.
When he noticed anyone staring at him a smile would pass over his broad, good-natured face with the unkempt hair and a mustache and the little chin tuft. He wore a short black jacket with light gray trou- sers, his bearing was military, and he planted his feet wide apart; but it was that smile that most fascinated the reporters in the courtroom. It might be an embarrassed smile or a cunning smile, an ironic, mali- cious, pained, mad, bloodthirsty, or tenifYing smile: they were grop- ing visibly for contradictory expressions and seemed to be searching desperately in that smile for something they obviously could find no- where else in the man's entire upright appearance.
For Moosbrugger had killed a woman, a prostitute of the lowest type, in a horrifying manner. The reporters described in detail a knife wound in the throat from the larynx to the back of the neck, also the two stab wounds in the breast that penetrated the heart, and the two in the back on the left side, and how both breasts were sliced through so that they could almost be lifted off. The reporters had expressed their revulsion at this, but they did not stop until they had counted thirty-five stabs in the belly and explained the deep slash
68 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
that reached from the navel to the sacrum, continuing up the back in numerous lesser cuts, while the throat showed marks of strangula- tion. From such horrors they could not find their way back to Moos- brugger's good-natured face, although they were themselves good-natured men who had nevertheless described what had hap- pened in a factual, expert manner and, evidently, in breathless ex- citement. They hardly availed themselves of even the most obvious explanation, that the man before them was insane-for Moosbrug- ger had already been in various mental hospitals several times for similar crimes-even though a good reporter is very well informed on such questions these days; it looked as though they were still re- luctant to give up the idea of the villain, to banish the incident from their own world into the world of the insane. Their attitude was matched by that of the psychiatrists, who had already declared him normal just as often as they had declared him not accountable for his actions. There was also the amazing fact that no sooner had they
become known than Moosbrugger's pathological excesses were re- g~ded as "finally something interesting for a change" by thousands of people who deplore the sensationalism of the press, from busy of- ficeholders to fourteen-year-old sons to housewives befogged by their domestic cares. While these people of course sighed over such a monstrosity, they were nevertheless more deeply preoccupied with it than with their own life's work. Indeed, it might happen that a punctilious department head or bank manager would say to his sleepy wife at bedtime: "What would you do now if I were a Moosbrugger? "
When Ulrich first laid eyes on that face with its signs of being a child of God above handcuffs, he quickly turned around, slipped a few cigarettes to the sentry at the nearby court building, and asked him about the convoy that had apparently just left the gates; he was told . . . Well, anyway, this is how something of the sort must have happened in earlier times, since it is often reported this way, and Ulrich almost believed it himself; but the contemporary truth was that he had merely read all about it in the newspaper. It was to be a long time before he met Moosbrugger in person, and before. that happe,ned he caught sight of him only once during the trial. The probability of experiencing something unusual through the newspa- pers is much greater than that of experiencing it in person;·in other
words, the more important things take place today in the abstract, and the more trivial ones in real life.
What Ulrich learned of Moosbrugger's story in this fashion was more or less the following:
Moosbrugger had started out in life as a poor devil, an orphan shepherd boy in a hamlet so small that it did not even have a village street, and his poverty was such that he never dared speak to a girl. Girls were something he could always only look at, even later on when he became an apprentice and then when he was a traveling journeyman. One only need imagine what it must mean when some- thing one craves as naturally as bread or water can only be looked at. Aft~r a while one desires it unnaturally. It walks past, skirts swaying around its calves. It climbs over a stile and is visible up to the knees. One looks into its eyes, and they tum opaque. One hears it laugh and turns around quickly, only to look into a face as immovably round as a hole in the ground into which a mouse has just slipped.
So it is understandable that Moosbrugger justified himself even after the first time he killed a girl by saying that he was constantly haunted by spirits calling to him day and night. They threw him out of bed when he slept and bothered him at his work. Then he heard them talking and quarreling with one another day and night. This was no insanity, and Moosbrugger could not bear being called in- sane, although he himself sometimes dressed up his story a little with bits of remembered sermons, or trimmed it in accordance with the advice on malingering one picks up in prison. But the material to work with was always there, even ifit faded a little when his attention wandered.
It had been the same during his years as a journeyman. Work is not easy for a carpenter to fmd in winter, and Moosbrugger often had no roof over his head for weeks on end. He might have trudged along the road all day to reach a village, only to find no shelter. He would have to keep on marching late into the night. With no money for a meal, he drinks schnapps until two candles light up behind his eyes and the body keeps walking on its own. He would rather not ask for a cot at the shelter, regardless of the hot soup, partly because of the bedbugs and partly because of the offensive red tape; better to pick up a few pennies by begging and crawl into some farmer's haystack for the night. Without asking, of course; . what's the point of spending
A Sort ofintroduction · 6g
70 • THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
a long time asking when you're only going to be insulted? In the morning, of course, there is often an argument and a charge of as- sault, vagrancy, and begging, and finally there is an ever-thickening file of such convictions. Each new magistrate opens this file with much pomposity, as if it explained Moosbrugger.
And who considers what it means to go for days and weeks without a proper bath? The skin gets so stiff that it allows only the clumsiest movements, even when one tries to be delicate; under such a crust the living soul itself hardens. The mind may be less affected, it goes on doing the needful after a fashion, burning like a small light in a huge walking lighthouse full of crushed earthworms and grasshop- pers, with everything personal squashed inside, and only the fer- menting organic matter stalking onward. As he wandered on through the villages, or even on the deserted roads, Moosbrugger would en- counter whole processions ofwomen, one now, and another one half an hour later, but even if they appeared at great intervals and had nothing to do with each other, on the whole they were still proces- sions. They were on their way from one village to another, or had just slipped out of the house; they wore thick shawls or jackets that stood out in stiff, snaky lines around their hips; they stepped into warm rooms or drove their children ahead of them, or were on the road so alone that one could have thrown a stone at them like shying at a crow. Moosbrugger asserted that he could not possibly be a sex mur- derer, because these females had inspired only feelings of aversion in him. This is not implausible-we think we understand a cat, for in-
stance, sitting in front of a cage staring up at a fat, fair canruy hopping up and down, or batting a mouse, letting it go, then batting it again, just to see it run away once more; and what is a dog running after a bicycle, biting at it only in play-man's best friend? There is in this attitude toward the living, moving, silently rolling or flitting fellow creature enjoying its own existence something that suggests a deep innate aversion to it. And then what could one do when she stl'irted screaming? One could only come to one's senses, or else, ifone sim- ply couldn't do that, press her face to the ground and stuff earth into her mouth.
Moosbrugger was only a journeyman carpenter, a man utterly alone, and while he got on well enough with the other men wherever he worked, he never had a friend. Every now and then the most pow-
erful of instincts turned his inner being cruelly outward. But he may have lacked only, as he said, the education and the opportunity to make something different out of this impulse, an angel of mass de- struction or a great anarchist, though not the anarchists who band together in secret societies, whom he contemptuously called fakes. He was clearly ill, but even if his obviously pathological nature pro- vided the basis for his attitude, and this isolated him from other men, it somehow seemed to him a stronger and higher sense of his own self. His whole life was a comically and distressingly clumsy struggle to gain by force a recognition of this sense of himself. Even as an apprentice he had once broken the fingers ofone master who tried to beat him. He ran away from another with the master's money-in simple justice, as he said. He never stayed anywhere for long. As long as he could keep others at arm's length, as he always did at first, working peacefully, with his big shoulders and few words, he stayed. But as soon as they began to treat him familiarly and without respect, as if they had caught on to him, he packed up and left, seized by an uncanny feeling as though he were not frrmly settled inside his skin. Once, he had waited too long. Four bricklayers on a building site had got together to show him who was boss-they would make the scaf- folding around the top story give way under him. He could hear them tittering behind his back as they came closer; he hurled himself at them with all his boundless strength, threw one down two flights of stairs, and cut all the tendons in the arms of two others. To be punished for this, he said, had been a shock to his system. He emi- grated to Turkey but came back again, because the world was in league against him everywhere; no magic word and no kindness could prevail against this conspiracy.
He had eagerly picked up such phrases in the mental wards and prisons, with scraps of French and Latin stuck in the most unsuitable places as he talked, ever since he had discovered that it was the pos- session of these languages that gave those in power the right to de- cide his fate with their "findings. " For the same reason, he also did his utmost during hearings to express himself in an exaggerate. d High German, saying such things as "This must be regarded as the basis for my brutality" or "I had imagined her to be even more vicious than the others of her kind in my usual estimation of them. " But when he saw that this failed to make an impression he could rise to the heights
A Sort ofIntroduction · 71
72 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
of a grand theatrical pose, declaring disdainfully that he was a "theo- retical anarchist" whom the Social Democrats were ready to rescue at a moment's notice if he chose to accept a favor from those utterly pernicious Jewish exploiters of the ignorant working class. This would show them that he too had a "discipline," a field of his own where the learned presumption of his judges could not follow him.
Usually this kind of talk brought him high marks fqr "remarkable intelligence" in the court's judgment, respectful attention to his words during the proceedings, and tougher sentences; yet deep down, his flattered vanity regarded these hearings as the high points ofhis life. Which is why he hated no one as fervently as he hated the psychiatrists who imagined they could dismiss his whole complex personality with a few foreign words, as if it were for them an every- day affair. As always in such cases, the medical diagnoses of his men- tal condition fluctuated under the pressure of the superior world of juridical concepts, and Moosbrugger never missed a chance to dem- onstrate in open court his own superiority over the psychiatrists, un- masking them as puffed-up dupes and charlatans who knew nothing at all, and w~om he could trick into placing him in a mental institu- tion instead of sending him to prison, where he belonged. For he did not deny what he had done, but simply wanted his deeds understood as the mishaps of an important philosophy of life. It was those snick- ering women who were in the forefront of the conspiracy against him. They all had their skirt-chasers and turned up their noses at a real man's straight talk, ifthey didn't take it as a downright insult. He gave them a wide berth as long as he could, so as not to let them provoke him, but it was not possible all the time. There are days when a man feels confused and can't get hold of anything because his hands are sweating with restlessness. If one then has to give in, he can be sure that at the first step he takes there will be, far up the road like an advance patrol sent out by the others, one ofthose poisons on two feet crossing his path, a cheat who secretly laughs at the man while she saps his strength and puts on her act for him, if she doesn't do something much worse to him in her unscrupulousness!
And so the end of that night had come, a night of listless boozing, with lots of noise to keep down the inner restlessness. The world can be unsteady even when you aren't drunk. The street walls waver like stage sets behind which something is waiting for its cue. It gets qui-
eter at the edge of town, where you come into the open fields lit by the moon. That was where Moosbrugger had to circle back to get home, and it was there, by the iron bridge, that the girl accosted him. She was one of those girls who hire themselves out to men in the fields, a jobless, runaway housemaid, a little thb;lg of whom all you could see were two gleaming little mouse eyes under her kerchief. Moosbrugger turned her down and quickened his step, but she begged him to take her home with him. Moosbrugger walked: straight ahead, then around a corner, finally helplessly, this way and that; he took big strides, and she ran alongside him; he stopped, she stood there like a shadow. It was as if he were drawing her along behind him. He made one more attempt to drive her off: he sud- denly turned around and spat twice in her face. It was no use; she was invulnerable.
This happened in the immense park, which they had to cross at its narrowest part. Moosbrugger beg~ to feel sure that the girl had a protector nearby-how else would she have the neiVe to keep after him despite his exasperation? He reached for the knife in his pants pocket; he wasn't anyone's fool! They might jump him together; be- hind those bitches the other man was always hiding to jeer at you. Come to think of it, didn't she look like a man in disguise? He saw shadows move and heard crackling in the bushes, while this schemer beside him repeated her plea again and again, at regular inteiVals like a gigantic pendulum. But he could see nothing to hurl his giant's strength at, and the uncanny way nothing at all was happening began to frighten him.
By the time they turned into the first, still very dark street, there were beads of sweat on his forehead, and he was trembling. He kept his eyes straight ahead and walked into the first cafe that was still open. He gulped down a black coffee and three brandies and could sit there in peace, for fifteen minutes or so; but when he paid his check the worry was there again: what would he do if she was waiting for him outside? There are such thoughts, like string winding in end- less snares around arms and legs. He had hardly taken a few steps on the dark street when he felt the girl at his side. Now she was no lon- ger humble but cocky and self-confident; nor did she plead anymore but merely kept silent. Then he realized that he would never get rid of her, because it was he himself who was drawing her after him. His
A Sort ofIntroduction · 73
74 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
throat filled up with tearful disgust. He kept walking, and that crea- ture, trailing him, was himself again. It was just the same as when he was always meeting those processions of women in the road. Once, he had cut a big wooden splinter out of his own leg because he was too impatien~to wait for the doctor; in the same way, he now felt his knife lying long and hard in his pocket.
But by a superhuman exertion ofhis moral sense, Moosbrugger hit upon one more way out. Behind the board fence along which the road now led was a playing field; one couldn't be seen. there, and so he went in. He lay down in the cramped ticket booth and pushed his head into the comer where it was darkest; the soft, accursed second self lay down beside him. So he pretended to fall asleep right away, in order to be able to sneak out later on. But when he started to creep out softly, feet first, there ·it was again, winding its arms around his neck.
Then he felt something hard, in her pocket or his. He tugged it out. He couldn't say whether it was a scissors or a knife; he stabbed her with it. He had claimed it was only a pair ofscissors, but it was his own knife. She fell with her head inside the booth. He dragged her partway outside, onto the soft ground, and kept on stabbing her until he had completely separated her from himself. Then he stood there beside her for maybe another quarter of an hour, looking down at her, while the night grew calmer again and wonderfully smooth. Now she could never again insult a man and trail after him. He finally carried the corpse across the street and laid it down in front of a bush so that it could be more easily found and buried, as he stated, be- cause now it was no longer her fault.
During his trial Moosbrugger created the most unpredictable problems for his lawyer. He sat relaxed on his bench, like a spectator, and called out "Bravo! " every time the prosecutor made a point of what a public menace the defendant was, which Moosbrugger re- gru:ded ~ worthy of him, and gave out good marks to witnesses who declared that they had never noticed anything about him to indicate that he could not be held responsible for his actions.
"You're quite a character," the presiding judge flattered him"from time to time, humoring him along as he conscientiously tightened the noose the accused had put around his own neck. At such mo- ments Moosbrugger looked astonished, like a harried bull in the arena, let his eyes wander, and noticed in the faces around him,
though he could not understand it, that he had again worked himself one level deeper into his guilt.
Ulrich was especially taken with the fact that Moosbrugger's de- fense was evidently based on some dimly discernible principle. He had not gone out with int~nt to kill, nor did his dignity permit him to plead insanity. There could be no question of lust as a motive-he had felt only disgust and contempt. The act could accordingly only be called manslaughter, to which he had been induced by the suspi- cious conduct of "this caricature of a woman," as he put it. If one understood him rightly, he even wanted the killing to be regarded as a political crime, and he sometimes gave the impression that he was fighting not for himself but for this view of the legal issue. The judge's tactics against him were based on the usual assumption that he was dealing with a murderer's obvious, cunning efforts to evade responsibility.
"Why did you wipe the blood off your hands? Why did you throw the knife away? Why did you change into fresh underwear and clean clothes afterward? Because it was Sunday? Not because you were covered with blood? Why did you go out looking for entertainment? So the crime didn't prevent you from doing so? Did you feel any re- morse at all? " Ulrich well understood the deep resignation with which Moosbrugger at such moments lamented his lack of an educa- tion, which left him helpless to undo the knots in this net woven of incomprehension. The judge translated this into an emphatic re- proof: "You always find a way to shift the blame to others! "
This judge added it all up, starting with the police record and the vagrancy, and presented it as Moosbrugger's guilt, while to Moos- brugger it was a series of completely separate incidents having noth- ing to do with one another, each ofwhich had a different cause that lay outside Moosbrugger somewhere in the world as a whole. In the judge's eyes, Moosbrugger was the source of his acts; in Moosbrug- ger's eyes they had perched on him like birds that had flown in from somewhere or other. To the judge, Moosbrugger was a special case; for himself he was a universe, and it was very hard to say something convincing about a universe. Two strategies were here locked in combat, two integral positions, two sets of logical consistency. But Moosbrugger had the less favorable position; even a much cleverer man could not have expressed the strange, shadowy reasonings of his
A Sort ofIntroduction · 75
76 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
mind. They rose directly out of the confused isolation of his life, and while all other lives . exist in hundreds of ways-perceived the same way by those who lead them and by all others, who confinn them- his own true life existed only for him. It was a vapor, always losing and changing shape. He might, of course, have asked his judges whether their lives were essentially different. But he thought no such
thing. Standing before the court: everything that had happened so
I
naturally in sequence was now senselessly jumbled up inside him, and he made the greatest efforts to make such sense of it as would be no less worthy than the arguments of his distinguished opponents. The judge seemed almost kindly as he lent support to this effort, of- fering a helpful word or idea, even if these turned out later to have the most terrible consequences for Moosbrugger.
It was like the struggle of a shadow with a wall, and in the end Moosbrugger's shadow was reduced to a lurid flickering. Ulrich was present on the last day of the trial. When the presiding judge read out the psychiatrists' findings that the accused was responsible for his actions, Moosbrugger rose to his feet and announced to the court: "I am satisfied with this opinion and have achieved my purpose. " The response of scornful incredulity in the eyes-around him made him add angrily: "Since it is I who forced the indictment, I declare myself satisfied with the conduct of the case. " The presidingjudge, who had now become all strictness and retribution, reprimanded him with the remark that the court was not concerned with giving him satisfaction. Then he read him the death sentence, exactly as if it were now time to answer seriously the nonsense Moosbrugger had been spouting throughout the ~rial, to the amusement of the spectators. Moosbrug- ger said nothing to this, so that he would not appear to be frightened. Then the proceedings were concluded and it was all over. His mind reeled; he fell back, helpless against the arrogance of those who failed to understand. Even as the guards were leading him out,. he turned around, struggling for words, raised his hands in the air, and cried out, in a voice that shook him free of his guards' grip: "I am satisfied, even though I must confess to you that you have con- demned a madman. "
That was a non sequitur, but Ulrich sat there breathless. This was clearly madness, and just as clearly it was no more than a distortion of our own elements of being. Cracked and obscure it was; it somehow
occurred to Ulrich that if mankind could dream as a whole, that dream would be Moosbrugger. Ulrich came back to reality. only when "that miserable clown of a lawyer," as Moosbrugger ungrate- fully referred to him during the trial, announced that he would ap- peal to have the verdict set aside on grounds of some detail or other, while his towering client was led away.
19
A LETTER OF ADMONITION AND A CHANCE TO ACQUIRE QUALITIES. RIV ALRY OF TWO ACCESSIONS TO THE THRONE
So the time passed, until one day Ulrich received a letter from his father. ·
"My dear son, once again several months have gone by without my being able to deduce from your scanty communications that you have taken the slightest step forward in your career or have made any preparations to do so.
"I will joyfully acknowledge that in the course of the last few years the satisfaction has been vouchsafed me of hearing your achieve- ments praised in various esteemed quarters, with predictions on that basis of a promising future for you. But on the one hand, the tend- ency you have inherited, though not from me, to make enthusiastic first strides in some new endeavor that attracts you, only to forget soon afterward, so to speak, what you owe yourself and those who have rested their hopes on you, and on the other hand, my inability to detect in your communications the slightest sign of a plan for your future, fill me with grave concern.
"it is not only that at your age other men have already secured a solid position in life, but also that I may die at any time, and the prop- erty I shall bequeath in equal shares to you and your sister, though not negligible, is not sufficiently ample, under present circum-
A Sort ofIntroduction · 77
78 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
stances, to secure unaided that social position which you will now, at last, have to establish for yourself. What fills me with grave concern is the thought that ever since you took your degree, you have only vaguely talked ofplans to be realized in various fields, and which you, in your usual way, may considerably overestimate, but that you never write of taking any interest in a university appointment, nor of any preliminary approach to one or another university with regard to such plans, nor of making· any other contact with influential circles. No one can possibly suspect me of denigrating a scholar's need for independence, considering that it was I who was the first, forty-seven years ago, to break with the other schools of crim~al jurisprudence on that point in my book on Samuel Pufendorf's Theory ofthe Re- sponsibility for Moral Actions and Its Relation to Modem Jurispru- dence, which you know and which is now going into its twelfth edition, where I brought the true. context of the problem to light. Just as little can I accept, after the experiences of a hardworking life, that a man rely on himself alone and neglect the academic and social con- nections that provide the support by means of which alone the indi- vidual's work prospers as part of a fruitful and beneficial whole.
"I therefore hope and trust that I shall be hearing from you at your earliest convenience, and that the expenditures I have made on be- half of your advancement will be rewarded by your taking up such connections, now that you have returned home, and by your ceasing to neglect them. I have also written in this vein to myoid and trusted friend and patron, the former President of the Treasury and present Chairman ofthe Imperial Family Court Division, 9ffice ofthe Court Chamberlain, His Excellency Count Stallburg, asking him to give his beneficent attention to the request you will in due course soon pre- sent to him. My highly placed friend has already been so kind as to reply by return mail. It is your good fortune that he will not only see you but expresses a warm interest in your personal progress as de- picted by myself. This means that your future is assured, insofar as it is in my power and estimation to do so, assuming that you under- stand how to make a favorable impression on His Excellency, while also strengthening the esteem in which you are held by the leading academic circles.
"As regards the request I am certain you will be glad to lay before
His Excellency, as soon as you lmow what it is about, its object is th~ following:
"There will take place in Germany in 1918, specifically on or about the 15th ofJune, a great celebration marking the jubilee of Emperor Wilhelm II's thirtieth year upon the throne, to impress upon the world Germany's greatness and power. Although that is still several years away, a reliable source informs us that preparations are already being made, though for the time being quite unofficially, of course. Now you are certainly aware that in the same year our own revered Emperor Franz Josefwill be celebrating the seventieth jubilee of his accession and that this date falls on December znd. Given the mod- esty which we Austrians display far too much in all questions con- cerning our own fatherland, there is reason to fear, I must say, that we will experience another Sadowa, meaning that the Germans, with their trained methodical aim for effect, will anticipate us, just as they did in that campaign, when they introduced the needle gun and took us by surprise.
"Fortunately, the anxiety I have just expressed has already been anticipated by other patriotic personages with good connections, and I can tell you confidentially that there is a campaign under way in Vienna to forestall the eventuality of such a coup and to bring to bear the full weight of a seventy-year reign, so rich in blessings and sor- rows, against a jubilee of a mere thirty years. Inasmuch as December znd cannot of course possibly be moved ahead of June 15th, some- one came up with the splendid idea of declaring the entire year of 1918 as a jubilee year for our Emperor of Peace. I am, however, only insofar apprised of this as the institutions of which I am a member have had occasion to express their views on this proposal. You will learn the details as soon as you present yourself to Count Stallburg, who intends to place you on the Planning Committee in a position of considerable distil)ction for so young a man as yourself.
"Let me also prevail upon you not to continue neglecting-as, to my acute embarrassment, you have-the relations I have so long rec- ommended to you with Section ChiefTuzzi of the Imperial Foreign Office, but to call at once upon his wife, who, as you lmow, is the daughter of a cousin of my late brother's widow, and hence your cousin. I am told she occupies a prominent position in the project I
A Sort ofIntroduction · 79
Bo • THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
have just described. My revered friend Count Stallburg has already had the extraordinary kindness to infonn her ofyour intended visit to her, which is why you must not delay. it a moment longer.
"& regards myself, there is nothing much to report; other than my lectures, work on the new edition o£ my aforementioned book takes up all of my time, as well as the remainder of energy one still has at one's disposal in old age. One has to make good use of one's time, for it is short.
"From your sister I hear only that she is in good health. She has a fine, capable husband, although she will never admit that she is satis- fied with her lot and feels happy in it.
'W ith my blessing, your loving
Father. "
PART-II PSE. U00REALITY PREVAILS
20
A TOUCH OF REALITY. IN SPITE OF THE ABSENCE OF QUALITIES, ULRICH TAKES RESOLUTE AND SPIRITED ACTION
That Ulrich ac~ally decided to call on Count Stallburg was prompted not least, though not only, by curiosity.
Count Stallburg had his office in that lmp! 'lrial and Royal citadel the Hofburg, and the Emperor and King of Kakania was a legendary old gentleman. A great many books have of course been written about him since, and exactly what he did, prevented, or left undone is now known, but then, in the last decade of his and Kakania's life, the younger people who kept abreast of the arts and sciences some- times wondered whether he actually existed. The number of his por- traits one saw was almost as large as the number of his kingdom's inhabitants; on his birthday as much food and drink was consumed as on that of the Savior, bonfires blazed on the mountains, and the voices ofmillions vowed that they loved him as a father; an anthem in his honor was the only work of poetry or music of which every Kakanian knew at least a line. But this popularity and publicity was so superconvincing that believing in his existence was rather like believ- ing in stars that one sees though they ceased to exist thousands of years ago. .
The first thing that happened when Ulrich arrived in his cab at the Imperial Hofburg was that the cabbie stopped in the outer courtyard and asked to be paid, claiming that although he was allowed to drive through the inner courtyard, he was not permitted to stop there. . Ul- rich was annoyed at the cabbie, whom he took for a cheat or a cow- ard, but his protests were powerless against the man's timid refusal, which suddenly made him sense the aura of a power mightier than he. When he walked into the inner courtyard he was much im- pressed with the numerous red, blue, white, and yellow coats, trou- sers, and helmet plumes that stood there stiffly in the sun like birds
84 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
on a sandbank. Up to that moment he had considered "His Majesty" one of those meaningless terms which had stayed in use, as one may be an atheist and still say "Thank God. " But now his gaze wandered up high walls and he saw an island-gray, self-contained, and armed-lying there while the city's speed rusped blindly past it.
After he had presented himself he was led up stairways and along corridors, through rooms large and small. Although he waS very well dressed, he felt that his exact measure was being taken by every eye he encountered. It would apparently occur to no one here to confuse intellectual aristocracy with the real thing, and against this Ulrich had no recourse but ironic protest and bourgeois criticism. He ascer- tained that he ~aswalking through a vast shell with little content; the great public rooms were almost unfurnished, but this empty taste lacked the bitterness of a great style. He passed a casual sequence of individual guardsmen and servants, who formed a guard more hap- hazard than magnificent; a half dozen well-trained and well-paid pri- vate detectives might have served far more effectively. One kind of servant, in a gray uniform and cap like a bank messenger's, shuttling between the lackeys and the guardsmen, made him think of a lawyer or dentist who does not keep his office and his living quarters suffi- ciently separate. "One feels clearly through all this how it must have awed the Biedermeier generation with its splendor," Ulrich thought, "but today it can't even compete with the attractiveness and comfort of a hotel, so it continues to fall back on being all noble restraint and stiffness. "
But when he entered Count Stallburg's presence, Ulrich was re- ceived by His Excellency inside a great hollow prism of the best pro- portions, in the center of which this unpretentious, bald-headed, somewhat stooped man, his knees bent like an orangutan's, stood facing Ulrich in a manner that could not possibly be the way an emi- nent Imperial Court functionary of noble birth would naturally look-it had to be an imitation ofsomething. His Excellency's shoul- ders were bowed, his underlip drooped, he resembled an aged bea- gle or a worthy accountant. Suddenly there could be no doubt as to whom he reminded one of; Count Stallburg became transparent, and Ulrich realized that a man who has been for seventy years the All- Highest Center of supreme power must find a certain satisfaction in retreating behind himself and looking like the most subservient of
his subjects. Consequently it simply became good manners and a natural form of discretion for those in the vicinity of this All-Highest personage not to look more personal than he did. This seems to be why kings so often like to call themselves the first servants of their country, and a quick glance confirmed for Ulrich that His Excellency indeed wore those short, ice-gray muttonchop whiskers framing a clean-shaven chin that were sported by every clerk and railway por- ter in Kakania. The beliefwas that they were emulating the appear- ance of their Emperor and King. but the deeper need in such cases is reciprocity.
Ulrich had time for such reflections because he had to wait awhile for His Excellency to speak. The theatrical instinct for disguise and transformation, one of life's pleasures, could here be seen in all its purity, without the least taint or awareness of a performance; so strongly did it manifest itself here in this unconscious, perennial art of self-representation that by comparison the middle-class custom of building theaters and staging plays as an art that can be rented by the hour struck him as something quite unnatural, decadent, and schiz- oid. And when His Excellency finally parted his lips and said to him: "Your dear father . . . ,"only to come to a halt, there was something in his voice that made one notice his remarkably beautiful yellowish hands and something like an aura of finely tuned morality surround- ing the whole figure, which charmed Ulrich into forgetting himself, as intellectuals are apt to do. For His Excellency now asked him what he did, and when Ulrich said "Mathematics" responded with "In- deed, how interesting, at which school? " When Ulrich assured him that he had nothing to do with schools, His Excellency said, "Indeed, how interesting, I see, research, university. " This seemed to Ulrich so natural and precise, just the way one imagines a fine piece of con-
versation, that he inadvertently took to behaving as though he were at home here and followed his thoughts instead of the protocol de- manded by the situation. He suddenly thought of Moosbrugger. Here was the Power of Clemency close at hand; nothing seemed to him simpler than to make a stab at using it.
"Your Excellency," he said, "may I take this favorable opportunity to appeal to you on behalf of a man who has been unjustly con- demned to death? " ·
The question made Count Stallburg's eyes open wide.
Pseudoreality Prevails · 8s
86 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
"A sex murderer, to be sure," Ulrich conceded, though he realized at once that he was entirely out of order. "The man's insane, of course," he hastily added to save the situation, and was about to add "Your Excellency must be aware that our penal code, dating from the middle of the la5t century, is outdated on this point," but he had to swallow and got stuck. It was a blunder to impose on this man a dis- cussion of a kind that people used to intellectual activity engage in, often quite without purpose. Just a few words, adroitly planted, can be as fruitful as rich garden loam, but in this place their effect was closer to that of a little clump of dirt one has inadvertently brought into the room on the sole of one's shoe. But now Count Stallburg, noticing Ulrich's embarrassment, showed him his truly great benevolence.
"Yes, yes, I remember," he said with a slight effort after Ulrich had given him the man's name, "and so you say he is insane, and you would like to help him? "
"He can't be held responsible for what he does. "
"Quite so, those are always especially unpleasant cases. "
Count Stallburg seemed much distressed by the difficulties in-
volved. Looking bleakly at Ulrich, he asked, as if nothing else were to be expected, whether Moosbrugger's sentence was final. Ulrich had to admit that it was not.
"Ah, in that case," he went on, sounding relieved, "there's still time," and he began to speak of Ulrich's "papa," leaving th. e ~oos brugger case in amiable ambiguity.
Ulrich's slip had momentarily made him lose his presence of mind, but oddly enough his mistake seemed not to have made a bad im- pression on Count Stallburg. His Excellency had been nearly speechless at first, as though someone had taken off his jacket in his presence, but then such spontaneity from a man so well recom- mended carne to seem to him refreshingly resolute and high-spir- ited. He was pleased to have found these two words, intent as he was on forming a favorable impression. He wrote them immediately ('We hope that we have found a resolute and high-spirited helper") in his letter of introduction to the chairman of the great patriotic campaign. When Ulrich received this document a few moments later, he felt like a child who is dismissed with a piece of chocolate pressed into its little hand. He now held something between his fin-
gers and received instructions to come again, in a manner that left him uncertain whether it was an order or an invitation, but without giving him an opportunity to protest. "There must be some misun- derstanding-! really had no intention whatever . . . ,"he would have liked to say, but by this time he was already on his way out, back along the great corridors and through the vast salons. He suddenly came to a stop, thinking, "That picked me up like a cork and set me down somewhere I never meant to go! " He scrutinized the insidious simplicity of the decor with curiosity, and felt quite certain in decid- ing that even now he was still unimpressed by it. This was simply a world that had not yet been cleared away. But still, what was that strong, peculiar quality it had made him feel? Damn it all, there was hardly any other way to put it: it was simply amazingly real.
. 21
THE REAL INVENTION OF THE PARALLEL CAMP AIGN BY COUNT LEINSDORF
The real driving force behind the great patriotic campaign-to be known henceforth as the Parallel Campaign, both for the sake of ab- breviation and because it was supposed to "bring to bear the full weight of a seventy-year reign, so rich in blessings and sorrows, against a jubilee of a mere thirty years"-was not, however, Count Stallburg, but his friend His Grace the Imperial Liege,. . Count Leinsdorf.
At the· time Ulrich was making his visit in the Hofburg, Count Leinsdorf's secretary was standing in that great nobleman's beauti- ful, tall-windowed study, amid multiple layers of tranquillity, devo- tion, gold braid, and the solemnity of fame, with a book in his hand from which he was reading aloud to His Grace a passage he had been directed to find. This time it was something out of Johann Gottlieb Fichte that he had dug up in the Addresses to the German Nation and considered most appropriate:
Pseudoreality Prevails · 87
88 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
To be freed from the original sin ofsloth [he read] and the cowardice and duplicity that follow in its wake, men need models, such as the founders of the great religions actually were, to prefigure for them the enigma of freedom: The necessary teaching of moral conviction is the task of the Church, whose symbols must be regarded not as homilies but only as the means of instruction for the proclamation of the eternal verities.
He stressed the words "sloth," "prefigure," and "Church. " His Grace listened benevolently, had the book shown to him, but then shook his head.
"No," said the Imperial Count, "the book may be all right, but this Protestant bit about the Church won't do. " ·
The secretary looked frustrated, like a minor official whose fifth draft of a memo has been returned to him by the head of his depart- ment, and cautiously demurred: "But wouldn't Fichte make an ex- cellent impression on nationalistic circles? ''
"I think," His Grace replied, "we had better do without him for the present. " As he clapped the book shut his face clapped shut too, and at this wordless command the secretary clapped shut with a deep bow and took back his Fichte, as if removing a dish from the table, which he would file away again on the shelf with all the other philo- sophic systems of the world. One does not do one's own cooking but has it taken care of by the servants.
"So, for the time being," Count Leinsdorf said, "we keep to our four points: Emperor of Peace, European Milestone, True Austria, Property and Culture. You will draw up the circular letter along those lines. "
Just then a political thought had struck His Grace, which trans- lated into words came to, more or less, "They'll come along of their own accord. " He meant those sectors ofhis Fatherland who felt they belonged less to· Austria than to the greater German nation. He re- garded them with disfavor. Had his secretary found a more accept- able quotation with which to flatter their sensibilities-hence the choice ofJ. G. Fichte-he might have let him write it down. But the moment that offensive note about the Church gave him a pretext to drop it, he did so with a sigh of relief.
His Grace was the originator of the great patriotic campaign. When the disturbing news reached him from Germany, it was he who had come up with the slogan "Emperor of Peace. " This phrase instantly evoked the image of an eighty-eight-year-old sovereign-a true father of his people-and an uninterrupted reign of seventy years. The image naturally bore the faJlliliar features of his Imperial Master, but its halo was not that of majesty but of the proud fact that his Fatherland possessed the oldest sovereign with the longest reign in the world. Foolish people might be tempted to see in this ·merely his pleasure in a rarity-as if Count Leinsdorf, had, for instance, rated the possession of the far rarer horizontally striped "Sahara" stamp with watermark and one missing perforation over the posses- sion of an El Greco, as in fact he did, even though he owned both and was not unmindful ofhis family's celebrated collection ofpaintings- but this is simply because these people don't understand what en- riching power a symbol has, even beyond that of the great~stwealth.
For Count Leinsdorf, his allegory of the aged ruler held the thought both of his Fatherland, which he loved, and of the world to which it should be a model. Count Leinsdorfwas stirred by great and aching hopes. He could not have said what moved him more, grief at not seeing his country established in quite·the place of honor among the family of nations which was her due, or jealousy of Prussia, which had thrust Austria down from that place of eminence (in 1866, by a stab in the back! ), or else whether he was simply filled with pride in the nobility of a venerable state and the desire to show the world just how exemplary it was. In his view, the nations of Europe were help- lessly adrift in the whirlpool of materialistic democracy. What hov- ered before him was an inspiring symbol that would serve both as a warning and as a sign to return to the fold. It was clear to him that something had to be done to put Austria in the vanguard, so that this "splendorous rally of the Austrian spirit" would prove a "milestone" for the whole world arid enable it to find its own true being again; and all of this was connected with the possession of an eighty-eight- year-old Emperor of Peace.
Anything more, or more specific, Count Leinsdorf did not yet know. But he was certain that he was in the grip of a great idea. Not only did it kindle his passion-which should have put him on his guard, as a Christian of strict and responsible upbringing-but with
Pseudoreality Prevails · B9
go •THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
dazzling conclusiveness this idea flowed directly into such sublime and radiant conceptions as that ofthe Sovereign, the Fatherland, and the Happiness of Mankind. Whatever obscurity still clung to his vi- sion could not upset His Grace. He was well acquainted with the the- ological doctrine of the contemplatio in caligine divina, the contemplation in divine darkness, which is infinitely clear in itself but a dazzling darkness to the human intellect. Besides, he had al- ways believed that a man who does something truly great usually doesn't know why.
