In
conversation
with this child Fischel had achieved some clarity about himself.
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v2
To cut his veins he needed a bathtub.
On this path of eliminating other pos- sibilities, he pursued methodically the same course he had taken in blind determination with a single step: it satisfied him; his instincts had not yet been affected.
To be sure, he had left out death by shooting; he thought of it now for the first time.
But Hans did not own a pistol, nor did he lmow what to do with one, and he did not want to share his last moment with his army rifle.
He had to be free of small misfortunes when he ex- ited this life.
This reminded him that he had to prepare himself in- wardly.
He had sinned and contaminated himself: he had to hold on to that.
Someone else in his situation might perhaps have hoped for the prospect of recovery; but while recovery might be possible, salvation was irrevocably lost.
Involuntarily, Hans pulled out of his coat his little note- book and a pencil; but before he could jot down his idea, he remem- bered that this was now quite pointless.
He idly held notebook and pencil in his hands.
His whole mind was directed at the phrase that he had become impure and godless.
There was a lot to be said about that.
For instance, that Christianity, influenced by Judaism, permitted sin to be redeemed through remorse and penitence, while the pure, Teutonic idea of being healthy and whole permitted of no bargaining or trading.
Wholeness is lost once and for all, like virginity; and of course that is precisely where the greatness and challenge of the idea lies.
Where today does one find such greatness?
Nowhere.
Hans was convinced that the world would suffer a great loss from his having to eliminate himself.
The size and force of a train was really almost the only possible way of
From the Posthumous Papers · 1675
expressing the size and force of such a case. Another one went past. This technological marvel was small and tiny if one compared it to the astro- nomical construction techniques of the Egyptians and Assyrians, but at all events a train almost succeeded in enabling the present to express itself gothically, yearning outward beyond the limitations of matter. Hans raised his hand and almost irresolutely waved at people, who waved back and shoved their heads out the window in bunches, like the people-grapes on ancient naive sculptures. This made him feel better, but feeling good, grief, and everything he could think of was simply like smoke, and when it had drifted away the sentence that Hans Sepp had become impure and was not to be saved lay there again, undisturbed;
nothing lasting was connected with it, the idea no longer wished to grow.
1
If Hans had been sitting at home before a table with pen and paper, it
perhaps might have turned out otherwise; it was just this that gave him the feeling that he was here for no other purpose than to put an end to his existence.
He snapped the pencil in two and tore the notebook into little pieces. That was a major step. Then he climbed down the slope, sat in the grass at the edge of the gravel ballast, and threw the shreds of his intellectual world in front of the next train. The train scattered them. Nothing was to be found of the pencil; the bright paper butterflies, broken on the wheels and sucked up, covered the right-of-way on both sides for five hundred paces. Hans calculated that he was approximately twelve times larger than the notebook. Then he seized his head in both hands and began his final farewell. This pulling everything together was to be de- voted to Gerda. He wanted to forgive her and, without leaving her a written word, to die with the all-embracing thought of her on his lips. But even though all kinds of thoughts appeared and disappeared in his mind, his body remained quite empty. It seemed down here in the nar- row cut that he could not feel anything and needed to go and sit up above again in order to embrace Gerda once more in his mind. But it seemed silly, it annoyed him to have to crawl up the slope. Gradually the emptiness in his body increased and became hunger. -That's my mind beginning to disintegrate, he told himself. Since his illness, he had lived in constant fear of going insane. He had let train after train go by and had sat down here in the narrow, stupid world of the railway cut without thinking of anything at all. It might already be late afternoon. Then Hans Sepp became aware, as if someone suddenly turned something around in him, that this was his final state, to be succeeded only by its execution. He had the nauseating feeling of an imaginary skin eruption over his whole body. He pulled out his pocket knife and cleaned his nails with it; this was an ill-bred habit he had, which he considered very tidy and ele-
1676 • THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
gant; it made him want to cry. Hesitantly he stood up. Everything inside him had receded from him. He was afraid, but he was no longer master ofhimself; the sole master was the irrevocable resolve that ruled alone in a dark vacuum. Hans looked left and right. One might say that he had already died as he looked in both directions for a train, for this looking was all that was alive in him, this and isolated feelings that drifted past like clumps of grass in a flood. For he no longer knew what to do with himself. He still noticed that his head commanded his legs to leap before the train approached; but his legs were no longer paying attention, they sprang when they wanted to, at the last minute, and Hans's body was struck in the air. He still felt himself plunging down, falling on great sharp knives. Then his world burst into fragments.
Gerda had come back. After Hans's death she had, for the moment, nothing to live for. But if Fischel had expected to find his daughter crushed, he was mistaken. A young lady who obviously had far-reaching plans walked in, wearing the insignia of a Red Cross nurse.
- I ' m going to go as a nurse, Papa, Gerda said.
- N o t right away, not right away, my child! General Director Fischel answered submissively. - W e have to wait and see. No one has any idea what this is going to turn into-
-What should it turn into! I've already seen the young men at the mobilization stations. They're singing. Their wives and fiancees are with them. No one knows how he is going to come back. But if you walk through the city and look in people's eyes, including the people who aren't going to the front yet, it's like a big wedding.
Fischel, concerned, looked at his daughter over his glasses. - 1 would wish another kind of wedding for you, may God preserve us. A Dutch firm has offered me a shipful of margarine, available at the port of Rot- terdam--do you know what that means? Five crowns difference per ton since yesterday! If I don't telegraph right away, tomorrow it will proba- bly be seven crowns. That means prices are going up. Ifthey come back from the campaign with both eyes, the-young men will need them both to look out for their money!
-Well-Gerda said-people are talking about increases, but there have always been increases at the beginning. Mama is quite wild too.
- O h ? Fischel asked. - H a v e you already talked with Mama? What's she up to?
- A t the moment, she's in the kitchen-Gerda motioned with her
From the Posthumous Papers · 1677
head toward the wall, behind which a hall led to the kitchen-and laying in canned goods like mad. Before that, she cashed in her change, like everyone else. And she fired the kitchen maid; since the manservant has to go in the army anyway, she wants to really cut down on the servants.
Fischel nodded with satisfaction. -She's in favor of the war. She hopes the brutality will cease and people will be purified. But she is also a clever woman and is being prudent. Fischel said this a little mockingly and a little tenderly.
- O h , Papa. Gerda flared up. - I f I had wanted to be the way you are, I would have married a knight in shining armor. You keep misunder- standing me. I'm not letting myself be left by the wayside because my first romantic experience wasn't a good one! You'll manage to get me into a field hospital. When the patients come in from the front they should find real, up-to-date people as nurses, not praying nuns! You have no idea how much love and emotion of a sort we've never experi- enced before are (to be seen) in the streets today! We've been living like animals, brought down one day by death; it's different now! It's tremen- dous, I tell you: everyone is a brother; even death isn't an enemy; a per- son loves his own death for the sake of others; today, for the first time, we understand life!
Fischel had been staring at his daughter with pride and concern. Gerda had got even thinner. Sharp, spinsterish lines cut up her face into an eye segment, a nose-mouth part, and a chin-and-neck section, all of which, whenever Gerda was trying to say something, pulled like horses dragging a load that was too heavy: now one part, now another, never all together, giving the face an overstrained and deeply moving quality. -Now she has a new craze-Fischel thought-and will manage once again not to lead a settled life! In his mind he ran down a list of a dozen men who, now that Hans Sepp was fortunately dead, could be regarded as qualified suitors; but in view of the damned uncertainty that had bro- ken out, there was no predicting what was going to happen to any of them tomorrow. Gerda's blond hair seemed to have become shaggier; she had been neglecting her appearance, but this made her hair look more like Fischel's, and it had lost the presumptuous soft, dark-blond smoothness characteristic of her mother's family. Memories of a brave, unkempt fox terrier and of himself, who had fought his way up and at the moment was standing again before something as yet unseen by man, over which he would go on climbing, mingled in his heart with the brave stupidity of his daughter into a warm togetherness. Leo Fischel straight- ened up in his chair and laid his hand on the desktop with emphasis. -M y child! -he said-I have a strange feeling when I hear you talk this way, while people are shouting hurrah and prices are rising. You say I
1678 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
don't have any idea, but I do, except that I can't say myself what it is. Don't believe that I'm not caught up in this too. Sit down, my child!
Gerda did not want to, she was too impatient; but Fischel repeated his wish more strongly, and she obeyed, sitting hesitantly on the extreme edge of an annchair. -This is the first day you're back; listen to me! Fischel said. - Y o u say I understand nothing about love and killing and such things; that may be. But if nothing happens to you in the hospital, which God forbid, you ought to understand me a little before we part again. I was seven years old when we had the war with Prussia. Then too, for two weeks, all the bells pealed and in the synagogue we prayed to God to annihilate the Prussians, who today are our allies. What do you say to that? What should anyone say to that?
Gerda did not want to answer. She had the prejudice that what was going on now belonged to the enthusiastic young, not the cautious old. And only reluctantly, because her father was looking at her so penetrat- ingly, did she murmur some sort ofresponse. -Over the course oftime, people simply learn to understand each other better-was what her an- swer about the Prussians amounted to. But Leo Fischel snatched up her words spiritedly: -No! People don't learn to understand each other better in the course of time; it's just the opposite, I tell you! When you get to know a person and you like him, it may be that you think you understand him; but after you've been around him for twenty-five years you don't understand a word he says! You think, let's say, that he ought to be grateful to you; but no, just at that moment he curses you. Always when you think he has to say yes, he'll say no; and when you think no, he thinks yes. So he can be wann or cold, hard or soft, as it suits him; and do you believe that for your sake he'll be the way you want him to be? It suited your mother as little as it suits this annchair to be a horse, because you're already impatient and want to be off!
Gerda smiled weakly at her father. Since she had come back and seen the new situation, he had made a strong impression on her; she could not help herself. And he loved her, there was no doubting that, and it comforted her.
- B u t what are we going to do with the things that won't let us under- stand them? Fischel asked prophetically. -We measure them, we weigh them, we analyze them mentally, and we direct all our keenness to finding in them something that remains constant, something by which we could get hold of them, on which we can rely and which we can count. Those are the laws of nature, my child, and where we have dis- covered them we can mass-produce things and buy and sell to our heart's content. And now I ask you, how can people relate to one another when they don't understand one another? I tell you, there's only one
From the Posthumous Papers · 1679
way! Only when you stimulate or inhibit his desire can you get a person exactly where you want him. Whoever wants to build solidly must make use of force and basic desires. Then a person suddenly becomes unam- biguous, predictable, dependable, and your experience with him is re- peated everywhere in the same fashion. You can't rely on goodness. You can rely on bad qualities. God is wonderful, my child; he has given us our bad qualities so that we can achieve some semblance of order.
- B u t in that case the order of the world would be nothing but base- ness jumping through hoops! Gerda flared up.
-Y ou're clever! Perhaps so. But who can know? At any rate, I don't point a bayonet at a person's chest to have him do what he thinks is right. Are you following the newspapers? I'm still getting foreign papers, al- though it's beginning to be difficult. Here and abroad they're saying the same things. Get the screws on them. Tighten the screws on them. Cold- bloodedly continue the tight-screw policy. Don't hesitate to apply the "strong method" of breaking windows. That's the way they're talking here, and abroad it's not much different. I believe they've already intro- duced martial law, and ifwe should get into the war zone we'll be threat- ened with the gallows. That's the strong method. I can understand that it makes an impression on you. It's clean, precise, and abhors chatter. It qualifies the nation for great things by treating each individual person who is part of it like a dog! Leo Fischel smiled.
Gerda shook her tousled head decisively, but in a slow, friendly way.
- Y o u must be clear about this, Fischel added. - W h e n the industri- alists' association supplied a bourgeois workers' opposition party with an election fund, or when my former bank made money available for some- thing, they weren't doing anything different. And a deal only comes about at all if I either force another person to meet me halfway, because otherwise it will hurt him, or if I give him the impression that there's a good deal to be made; then I mostly outsmart him, and that's also a form of my power over him. But how delicate and adaptable this power is! It's creative and flexible. Money gives measure to a man. It's ordered selfish- ness. It's the most splendid organization ofselfishness, a creative super- organization, constructed on a real notion of bearish speculation!
Gerda had been listening to her father, but her own thoughts buzzed in her mind. She answered: -Papa, I didn't understand everything, but you're surely right. Of course, you're looking at things as a rationalist, and for me it's precisely the irrational (what goes beyond all calculation) in what's going on now that's fascinating!
-What does irrational mean? General Director Fischel protested. -By that you mean illogical and incalculable and wild, the way one sometimes is in dreams? To that I can only say that buying and selling is
168o • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
like war; you have to calculate and you can calculate, but even there what is decisive in the last analysis is will, courage, the individual, or, as you call it, the irrational. No, my child-he concluded-money is self- ishness brought into relation with enterprise and efficiency. All of you are trying another way to regulate selfishness. It's not new, I acknowl- edge it, it's related. But wait and see how it works! For centuries capital- ism has been a proven way oforganizing human powers according to the ability to make money; where its influence is suppressed, you will find that arbitrariness, backroom deals, kowtowing for advantage, and adven- turism will spring up. As far as I'm concerned, you can do away with money if you like, but you won't abolish the superior power of whoever is holding the advantages in his hand. Except that you'll put someone who doesn't know what to do with them in the place of someone who did! For you're mistaken if you believe that money is the cause of our selfishness; it's the consequence.
-But I don't believe that at all, Papa, Gerda said modestly. -I'm only telling you that's what's going on n o w -
-And furthermore-Fischel interrupted her-it's the most reason- able consequence!
-What's going on now-Gerda went on with her sentence-rises above reason. The way a poem or love rises above the commerce of the world.
-Y ou're a deep girl! Fischel embraced her and released her. He liked Gerda's youthful ardor. -M y fortune! he called her mentally, and fol- lowed her with a tender glance. A discussion with a person one loves and understands is bracing. He had not philosophized this way for a long time; it was a remarkable period.
In conversation with this child Fischel had achieved some clarity about himself. He wanted to buy. Not a ship; at least five ships. He summoned his secretary. -W e can't do this our- selves-he told him-it wouldn't look good, but let's do it through an intermediary. But for Leo Fischel this was not the main thing. The main thing was that he had gained a feeling ofconnection with events and yet a feeling ofisolation, too. In spite ofthe ups and downs going on around him, he had created order within himself.
To THE COMPLEX: LEO FISCHEL-GERDA-HANS SEPP Note: Development of a Man of Action (Leo Fischel)
Title: Return to an abandoned world I Leo Fischel as messenger from the world I Encounter with a messenger from an abandoned world I News from a lost world
Walking through the train, Ulrich saw a familiar face, stopped, and realized that it was Leo Fischel, who was sitting in a compartment by himself, leafing through a stack of flimsy papers he held in his hand. With his pince-nez far down on his nose, and his reddish-blond mutton- chop sideburns, he looked like an English lord of the 186os. Ulrich was so in need of contact with everyday life that he greeted his old acquaint- ance, whom he had not seen for months, almost joyfully.
Fischel asked him where he was coming from.
"From the south," Ulrich responded vaguely.
'We haven't seen you for quite a while," Fischel said with concern.
"You've been having trouble, haven't you? ''
"How so? ''
"I just mean in general. In your position with the campaign, I'm think-
ing. "
"I never had a connection with the campaign that could be called a
position," Ulrich objected with some heat.
"You just disappeared one day," Fischel said. "Nobody knew where
you were. That led me to think that you were having problems. " "Except for that error, you're very well informed: how come? '' Ulrich
laughed.
"I was looking for you like a needle in a haystack. Hard times, bad
stories, my friend," Fischel replied with a sigh. "The General didn't know where you were, your cousin didn't know where you were, and you weren't having your mail forwarded, I was told. Did you get a letter from Gerda? ''
"Get it? No. Perhaps I'll find it waiting for me at home. Has some- thing happened to Gerda? ''
Director Fischel did not answer; the conductor was passing by, and he
z68z
1682 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
motioned him in to give him some telegrams, requesting that he send them off at the next stop.
Ulrich now first noticed that Fischel was traveling first class, which he would not have expected of him.
"Since when are you seeing my cousin and the General? '' he asked.
Fischel looked at him reflectively. Obviously he did not understand the question right away. "Oh," he then said, "I think you hadn't even left yet. Your cousin consulted me on a matter of business, and through her I met the General, whom I wanted at that time to request somethingofon account of Hans Sepp. You know, don't you, that Hans shot and killed himself? ''
Ulrich gave an involuntary start.
"It even got into some of the newspapers," Fischel confirmed. "He was called up for his military service and a few weeks later shot himself. "
"But why? ''
"God knows! Frankly speaking, he could just as well have done it sooner. He could always have shot himself. He was a fool. But in the final analysis, I liked him. You won't believe it, but I even liked his anti- Semitism and his diatribes against bank directors. "
"Was there anything between him and Gerda? "
"Bitter quarrels," Fischel confirmed. "But it wasn't that alone. Listen: I've missed you. I searched for you. When I'm talking with you I have the feeling I'm talking not with a reasonable person but with a philoso- pher. Whatever you say-please permit an old friend to say this-is never to the point, never has hands and feet, but it has head and heart! So what do you say about Hans Sepp's having shot himself? ''
"Is that why yOu. . ___were searching for me? "
"No, not because of that. On account of business and the General and Arnheim, who are friends ofyours. The man before you is no longer with Lloyd's Bank but has gone into business for himself. It's a handful, let me tell you! I've had a lot oftrouble, but now, thank goodness, things are going splendidly-"
"If I'm not mistaken, what you call trouble is losing your job? "
"Yes; thank goodness I lost my job at Lloyd's; otherwise today I would still be a head clerk with the title of Director and would remain one until I was put out to pasture. When I was forced to give that up, my wife began divorce proceedings against m e - "
"Honestly! You really do have a lot of news to telll"
"Hmphl" Fischel went. 'We no longer live in the old apartment. While the divorce is going on, my wife has moved in with her brother"- he took out a business card-"and this is my address. I hope you'll pay me a visit soon. " On the card Ulrich read several ambiguous titles, such
From the Posthumous Papers · z683
as "Import/Export" and "Trans-European Goods and Currency Ex- change Company," and a prestigious address. "You have no idea how one rises all by oneself," Fischel explained to him, "once all those weights like family and job responsibilities, the wife's fancy relations, and responsibility for the leading minds of humanity are taken off one's shoulders! In a few weeks I became an influential man. And a well-off man, to boot. Perhaps the day after tomorrow I'll have nothing again, but I may have even more! "
"What are you now, actually? "
"It's not easy to explain casually to an outsider. I conduct transactions. Transactions of goods, transactions of currency, political transactions, art transactions. In every case the important thing is to get out at the right moment; then you can never lose. " As in the old days, it seemed to give Leo Fischel pleasure to accompany his activity with "philosophy," and Ulrich listened to him with curiosity.
-Philosophy of money
ofthe free man, among others-
Then Ulrich: "But with all that, it's also important for me to know
what Gerda said about Hans's suicide. "
"She claims I murdered him! But they had broken up definitively well
before! "
RACHEL
And while Ulrich was letting the notion of remorse surface in his re- flections, in order to dissolve it immediately again in the deep play of thought, his little friend Rachel was suffering this word in all its tor- tures, dissolved by nothing but the palliative effect of tears and the cautious return of temptation after the remorse had gone on for a while. One will recall that Diotima's intense little maid, ejected from her parents' house because of a misstep, who had landed in the golden aura of virtue surrounding her mistress, had, in the weakest of a series of increasingly weak moments, submitted to the attacks of the black Moorish boy. It happened and made her very unhappy. But this un- happiness aspired to repeat itself as often as the scanty opportunities that Diotima's house offered would allow. On the second or third day after every unhappiness a remarkable change occurred, which can be compared to a flower that, bent over by the rain, raises its little head again. Can be compared to fine weather that, way up above, peeks from a remote corner of the sky through a rainy day; finds friendly lit- tle spots of blue; forms a blue lake; becomes a blue sky; is veiled by a light haze of the overwhelming brightness of a day of happiness; is tinged with brown; lets down one hot veil of haze after another and fi- nally towers, torrid and trembling, from earth to sky, filled with the zigzags and cries of birds, filled with the listless droop of tree and leaf, filled with the craziness of not-yet-discharged tensions that cause man and beast to roam madly about.
On the last day before the remorse, the head of the Moor always twitched through the house like a rolling head of cabbage, and little Ra- chel would have loved to creep on it like a caterpillar with a sweet tooth. But then remorse set in. As if a pistol had been fired and a shimmering glass ball been turned into a powder of glassy sand. Rachel felt sand be- tween her teeth, in her nose, her heart; nothing but sand. The world was dark; not dark like a Moor, but nauseatingly dark, like a pigsty. Rachel, having disappointed the confidence placed in her, seemed to herself be- smirched through and through. Grief placed a deep drill in the vicinity of her navel. A raging fear of being pregnant blinded her thoughts. One
From the Posthumous Papers · 1685
could go on in this fashion-every limb in Rachel ached individually with remorse-but the main thing was not in these details but seized hold ofthe whole person, driving her before the wind like a cloud ofdust raised by a broom. The knowledge that a misstep that has happened can- not be rectified by anything in the world made the world something of a hurricane in which one can find no support to stand up. The peaceful- ness of death seemed to Rachel like a dark feather bed, which it must be delightful to roll on. She had been torn out ofher world, abandoned to a feeling whose intensity was unlike anything in Diotima's house. She could not get at this feeling with an idea, any more than comfortings can get at a toothache, while it actually seemed to her, on the other hand, that there was only one remedy, to pull little Rachel entirely out of the world like a bad tooth.
Had she been cleverer, she would have been able to assert that re- morse is a basic disturbance of equilibrium, which one can restore in the most various ways. But God helped her out with his old, proven home remedy by again giving her, after a few days, the desire to sin.
We, however, cannot of course be as indulgent as the great Lord, to whom earthly matters offer little that is new or important. We must ask whether in a condition in which there is no sin there can be any remorse. And since this question has already been answered in the negative, ex- cept for a few borderline cases, a second question immediately arises: from which ocean did the little drop of hell's fire fall into Rachel's heart, ifit may not be said to have originated in the ocean whose clouds Ulrich had discovered? Every such question was suited to plunge Ulrich out of the sky on which he wanted to set foot purely theoretically. There are so many lovelythings on earth that have nothing to do with divine, seraphic love, and most decidedly there are among them things that forbid any- thing and everything to be expected from their rediscovery. This ques- tion was later to be of the greatest significance for Ulrich and Agathe.
LATE 1920S
The weeks since Rachel had left Diotima's house had passed with an improbability that a different person would hardly have accepted calmly. But Rachel had been shown the door of her parents' house as a sinner, and at the conclusion ofthat fall had landed, straight as an arrow, in paradise, at Diotima's; now Diotima had thrown her out, but such an enchantingly refined man as Ulrich had been standing there and had
1686 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
caught her: how could she not believe that life is the way it is described in the novels she loved to read? Whoever is destined to be a hero fate throws into the air in daredevil ways over and over, but it always catches him again in its strong arms. Rachel placed blind confidence in fate, and during this entire time had really done nothing but wait for its next inter- vention, when it might perhaps unveil its intentions. She had not become pregnant; so the experience with Soliman seemed to have been only a passing incident. She ate in a small pub, together with coachmen, out-of-work servant girls, workers who had business in the neighbor- hood, and those undefinable transients who flood a large city. The place she had chosen for herself, at a specific table, was reserved for her every day; she wore better clothes than the other women who frequented the pub; the way she used her knife and fork was different from what one was accustomed to seeing here; in this place Rachel enjoyed a secret respect, which she was acutely aware of even though not many people wanted to show it, and she assumed that she was taken for a countess or the mistress of a prince, who for some reason was compelled for a time to conceal her class. It happened that men with dubious diamonds on their fingers and with slicked-down hair, who sometimes turned up among the respectable guests, arranged to sit at Rachel's table and di- rected seductively sinuous compliments to her; but Rachel knew how to refuse these with dignity and without unfriendliness, for although the compliments pleased her as much as the buzzing and creeping ofinsects and caterpillars and snakes on a luxuriant summer day, she still sensed that she could not let herselfgo in this direction without running the risk of losing her freedom. She most liked to converse with older people, who knew something of life and told stories of its dangers, disappoint- ments, and events. In this way she picked up knowledge that, broken into crumbs, came to her the way food sinks down to a fish lying quietly at the bottom ofits tank. Adventurous things were going on in the world. People were now said to be flying faster than birds. Building houses en- tirelywithout bricks. The anarchists wanted to assassinate the Emperor. A great revolution was imminent, and then the coachmen would sit in- side the coaches and the rich people would be in harness, instead of the horses. In a tenement block in the vicinity, a woman had, in the night, poured petroleum on her husband and lit him; it was unimaginable! In America, blind people were given glass eyes with which they could really see again, but it still cost lots of money and was only for billionaires. These were the gripping things Rachel heard, of course not all at once, as she sat and ate. When afterward she stepped out into the street, noth- ing of such monstrosities was to be seen: everything flowed on in its well-ordered way or stood there exactly as it had the day before; but was
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1687
not the air boiling in these summer days, was not the asphalt secretly yielding underfoot, without Rachel having to picture clearly that the sun had softened it? On the church roofs the saints stretched out their arms and lifted their eyes in a way that made one think that everywhere there must be something special to be seen. The policemen wiped away the sweat of their exertions in the midst of the commotion that roared around them. Vehicles going at high speed braked violently as an old lady crossing the street was almost run over because she was not paying attention to anything. When Rachel got back to her little room, she felt her curiosity sated by this light nourishment; she took out her undergar- ments to mend them, or altered a dress or read a novel-for with aston- ishment at the way the world was run, she had discovered the institution of the lending library-her landlady came in and chatted with her defer- entially, because Rachel had money without having to work and without one's being able to discern any misconduct; and so the day passed, with no time to miss anything in the least, and poured its contents, filled to the brim with exciting things, into the dreams of the night.
To be sure, Ulrich had forgotten to send money promptly, or to ask Rachel to come to him, and she had already begun to use up the small savings from her work. But she was not concerned, for Ulrich had prom- ised to protect her for the present, and to go to him to remind him seemed to her quite improper. In all the fairy tales she knew, there was something one was forbidden to say or do; and it would have been ex- actly that had she gone to Ulrich and told him she was out of money. This is not in any way to imply that she expressly thought that her man- ner oflife seemed like a fairy tale, or that she believed in fairy tales at all. On the contrary, that was the way the reality that she had never known differently was constituted, even if it had never been as beautiful as it was now. There are people to whom this is permitted, and people to whom it is forbidden; the ones sink from step to step and end in utter misery, while the others become rich and happy-and leave behind lots of children. Rachel had never been told to which of the two groups she belonged; she had never revealed to the two people who might have ex- plained the difference to her that she was dreaming, but had worked industriously, except for the two unintentional missteps that had had such serious consequences. And one day her landlady actually reported that while she was out to eat, a fine lady had asked for her and an- nounced that she would return in an hour. Anxiously, Rachel gave a de- scription of Diotima; but the lady who was looking for her was most decidedly not tall, the landlady asserted, and not stout either, not even if by stout one did not mean fat. The lady who was looking for Rachel was most decidedly, rather, to be called small and skinny.
1688 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
And indeed the lady was slender and small, and returned within a half hour. She said "Dear Fraulein" to Rachel, mentioned Ulrich's name, and pulled from her purse a tightly folded, rather considerable sum of money, which she gave to Rachel on behalf of their friend. Then she began to tell an involved and exciting story, and Rachel had never in her life been so enthralled by a conversation. There was a man, the lady said, who was being pursued by his enemies because he had nobly sacrificed himself for them. Really not nobly; for he had to do it, it was his inner law, every person has an animal which he inwardly resembles. -You, for example, Fraulein-the lady said-have either a gazelle or a queen snake in you-it can't always be determined at first glance.
If it had been the cook in Diotima's kitchen who had said that, it would have made either no impression on Rachel or an unfavorable one; but it was said by someone who with every word radiated the certainty of a well-bred lady, the gift: ofcommand that would make any doubt appear to be an offense against respect. It was therefore firmly established in Rachel's mind that there was some link between herself and a gazelle or a queen snake, a link that at the moment was over her head, but that could doubtless be explained in some fashion, for one sometimes does hear such things. Rachel felt herself ch_arged with this piece of news like a candy box one can't get open.
The man who had sacrificed himself, the lady continued, had within himself a bear, that is to say, the soul of a murderer, and that meant that he had taken murder upon himself, all murder: the murder of unborn and handicapped children, the cowardly murder that people commit against their talents, and murder on the street by vehicles, bicyclists, and trams. Clarisse asked Rachel-for of course it was Clarisse who was speaking-whether she had ever heard the name Moosbrugger. Now, Rachel had, although she later forgot him again, loved and feared Moos- brugger like a robber captain, at the time when he had horrified all the newspapers, and he had often been the topic of conversation at Di- otima's; so she asked right away whether it concerned him.
Clarisse nodded. - H e is innocent!
For the first time Rachel heard from an authority what she had earlier often thought herself.
- W e have freed him, Clarisse went on. - W e , the responsible peo- ple, who know more than the others do. But now we must hide him. Clarisse smiled, and so peculiarly and yet with such rapturous friendli- ness that Rachel's heart, intending to fall into her panties, got stuck on the way, somewhere in the neighborhood of her stomach. -Hide where? she stammered, pale.
- T h e police will be looking for him---Clarisse declared-so it has to
From the Posthumous Papers · 1689
be where no one would think of looking for him. The best thing would be ifyou would pretend he was your husband. He would have to wear a wooden leg, that's easy to pretend, or something, and you would get a little shop with living quarters attached, so it would look as ifyou were supporting your invalid husband who can't leave the house. The whole thing would be for only a few weeks, and I could offer you more money than you need.
- B u t why don't you take him in yourself? Rachel dared to counter.
-My husband isn't in on it and would never allow it, Clarisse an- swered, adding the lie that the proposal she had made came from Ul- rich.
-But I'm afraid ofhim! Rachel exclaimed.
-That's as it should be, Clarisse said. -But, my dear Fraulein, ev- erything great is terrible. Many great men have been in the insane asy- lum. It is uncanny to put oneself on a level with someone who is a murderer; but to put oneself on a level with the uncanny is to resolve to be great! '
-But does he want to? Rachel asked. -Does he know me? He won't do anything to me?
- H e knows that we want to save him. Look, his whole life he's known only substitute women; you understand what I mean. He'll be happy at having a real woman to protect him and take him in; and he won't lay a finger on you ifyou don't let him. I'll back you up on that all the way! He knows that I have the power to compel him, ifI want!
- N o , no! was all Rachel could get out; from everything Clarisse was saying she could hear only the shape of the voice and language, a friend- liness and a sisterly equality that she could not resist. A lady had never spoken to her this way, and yet there was nothing artificial or false in it; Clarisse's face was on a level with hers and not up in the air like Di- otima's; she saw her features working, especially two long furrows that constantly formed by the nose and ran down by the mouth; Clarisse was visibly struggling together with her for the solution.
-Consider, Fraulein- Clarisse went on to say-that he who recog- nizes must sacrifice himself. You recognized right away that Moosbrug- ger only appears to be a murderer. Therefore you must sacrifice yourself. You must draw what is murderous out of him, and then what's behind it, which corresponds to your own nature, will come out. For like is attracted only by like; that's the merciless law of greatness!
- B u t when will it be?
-Tomorrow. I'll come in the late afternoon and get you.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1675
expressing the size and force of such a case. Another one went past. This technological marvel was small and tiny if one compared it to the astro- nomical construction techniques of the Egyptians and Assyrians, but at all events a train almost succeeded in enabling the present to express itself gothically, yearning outward beyond the limitations of matter. Hans raised his hand and almost irresolutely waved at people, who waved back and shoved their heads out the window in bunches, like the people-grapes on ancient naive sculptures. This made him feel better, but feeling good, grief, and everything he could think of was simply like smoke, and when it had drifted away the sentence that Hans Sepp had become impure and was not to be saved lay there again, undisturbed;
nothing lasting was connected with it, the idea no longer wished to grow.
1
If Hans had been sitting at home before a table with pen and paper, it
perhaps might have turned out otherwise; it was just this that gave him the feeling that he was here for no other purpose than to put an end to his existence.
He snapped the pencil in two and tore the notebook into little pieces. That was a major step. Then he climbed down the slope, sat in the grass at the edge of the gravel ballast, and threw the shreds of his intellectual world in front of the next train. The train scattered them. Nothing was to be found of the pencil; the bright paper butterflies, broken on the wheels and sucked up, covered the right-of-way on both sides for five hundred paces. Hans calculated that he was approximately twelve times larger than the notebook. Then he seized his head in both hands and began his final farewell. This pulling everything together was to be de- voted to Gerda. He wanted to forgive her and, without leaving her a written word, to die with the all-embracing thought of her on his lips. But even though all kinds of thoughts appeared and disappeared in his mind, his body remained quite empty. It seemed down here in the nar- row cut that he could not feel anything and needed to go and sit up above again in order to embrace Gerda once more in his mind. But it seemed silly, it annoyed him to have to crawl up the slope. Gradually the emptiness in his body increased and became hunger. -That's my mind beginning to disintegrate, he told himself. Since his illness, he had lived in constant fear of going insane. He had let train after train go by and had sat down here in the narrow, stupid world of the railway cut without thinking of anything at all. It might already be late afternoon. Then Hans Sepp became aware, as if someone suddenly turned something around in him, that this was his final state, to be succeeded only by its execution. He had the nauseating feeling of an imaginary skin eruption over his whole body. He pulled out his pocket knife and cleaned his nails with it; this was an ill-bred habit he had, which he considered very tidy and ele-
1676 • THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
gant; it made him want to cry. Hesitantly he stood up. Everything inside him had receded from him. He was afraid, but he was no longer master ofhimself; the sole master was the irrevocable resolve that ruled alone in a dark vacuum. Hans looked left and right. One might say that he had already died as he looked in both directions for a train, for this looking was all that was alive in him, this and isolated feelings that drifted past like clumps of grass in a flood. For he no longer knew what to do with himself. He still noticed that his head commanded his legs to leap before the train approached; but his legs were no longer paying attention, they sprang when they wanted to, at the last minute, and Hans's body was struck in the air. He still felt himself plunging down, falling on great sharp knives. Then his world burst into fragments.
Gerda had come back. After Hans's death she had, for the moment, nothing to live for. But if Fischel had expected to find his daughter crushed, he was mistaken. A young lady who obviously had far-reaching plans walked in, wearing the insignia of a Red Cross nurse.
- I ' m going to go as a nurse, Papa, Gerda said.
- N o t right away, not right away, my child! General Director Fischel answered submissively. - W e have to wait and see. No one has any idea what this is going to turn into-
-What should it turn into! I've already seen the young men at the mobilization stations. They're singing. Their wives and fiancees are with them. No one knows how he is going to come back. But if you walk through the city and look in people's eyes, including the people who aren't going to the front yet, it's like a big wedding.
Fischel, concerned, looked at his daughter over his glasses. - 1 would wish another kind of wedding for you, may God preserve us. A Dutch firm has offered me a shipful of margarine, available at the port of Rot- terdam--do you know what that means? Five crowns difference per ton since yesterday! If I don't telegraph right away, tomorrow it will proba- bly be seven crowns. That means prices are going up. Ifthey come back from the campaign with both eyes, the-young men will need them both to look out for their money!
-Well-Gerda said-people are talking about increases, but there have always been increases at the beginning. Mama is quite wild too.
- O h ? Fischel asked. - H a v e you already talked with Mama? What's she up to?
- A t the moment, she's in the kitchen-Gerda motioned with her
From the Posthumous Papers · 1677
head toward the wall, behind which a hall led to the kitchen-and laying in canned goods like mad. Before that, she cashed in her change, like everyone else. And she fired the kitchen maid; since the manservant has to go in the army anyway, she wants to really cut down on the servants.
Fischel nodded with satisfaction. -She's in favor of the war. She hopes the brutality will cease and people will be purified. But she is also a clever woman and is being prudent. Fischel said this a little mockingly and a little tenderly.
- O h , Papa. Gerda flared up. - I f I had wanted to be the way you are, I would have married a knight in shining armor. You keep misunder- standing me. I'm not letting myself be left by the wayside because my first romantic experience wasn't a good one! You'll manage to get me into a field hospital. When the patients come in from the front they should find real, up-to-date people as nurses, not praying nuns! You have no idea how much love and emotion of a sort we've never experi- enced before are (to be seen) in the streets today! We've been living like animals, brought down one day by death; it's different now! It's tremen- dous, I tell you: everyone is a brother; even death isn't an enemy; a per- son loves his own death for the sake of others; today, for the first time, we understand life!
Fischel had been staring at his daughter with pride and concern. Gerda had got even thinner. Sharp, spinsterish lines cut up her face into an eye segment, a nose-mouth part, and a chin-and-neck section, all of which, whenever Gerda was trying to say something, pulled like horses dragging a load that was too heavy: now one part, now another, never all together, giving the face an overstrained and deeply moving quality. -Now she has a new craze-Fischel thought-and will manage once again not to lead a settled life! In his mind he ran down a list of a dozen men who, now that Hans Sepp was fortunately dead, could be regarded as qualified suitors; but in view of the damned uncertainty that had bro- ken out, there was no predicting what was going to happen to any of them tomorrow. Gerda's blond hair seemed to have become shaggier; she had been neglecting her appearance, but this made her hair look more like Fischel's, and it had lost the presumptuous soft, dark-blond smoothness characteristic of her mother's family. Memories of a brave, unkempt fox terrier and of himself, who had fought his way up and at the moment was standing again before something as yet unseen by man, over which he would go on climbing, mingled in his heart with the brave stupidity of his daughter into a warm togetherness. Leo Fischel straight- ened up in his chair and laid his hand on the desktop with emphasis. -M y child! -he said-I have a strange feeling when I hear you talk this way, while people are shouting hurrah and prices are rising. You say I
1678 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
don't have any idea, but I do, except that I can't say myself what it is. Don't believe that I'm not caught up in this too. Sit down, my child!
Gerda did not want to, she was too impatient; but Fischel repeated his wish more strongly, and she obeyed, sitting hesitantly on the extreme edge of an annchair. -This is the first day you're back; listen to me! Fischel said. - Y o u say I understand nothing about love and killing and such things; that may be. But if nothing happens to you in the hospital, which God forbid, you ought to understand me a little before we part again. I was seven years old when we had the war with Prussia. Then too, for two weeks, all the bells pealed and in the synagogue we prayed to God to annihilate the Prussians, who today are our allies. What do you say to that? What should anyone say to that?
Gerda did not want to answer. She had the prejudice that what was going on now belonged to the enthusiastic young, not the cautious old. And only reluctantly, because her father was looking at her so penetrat- ingly, did she murmur some sort ofresponse. -Over the course oftime, people simply learn to understand each other better-was what her an- swer about the Prussians amounted to. But Leo Fischel snatched up her words spiritedly: -No! People don't learn to understand each other better in the course of time; it's just the opposite, I tell you! When you get to know a person and you like him, it may be that you think you understand him; but after you've been around him for twenty-five years you don't understand a word he says! You think, let's say, that he ought to be grateful to you; but no, just at that moment he curses you. Always when you think he has to say yes, he'll say no; and when you think no, he thinks yes. So he can be wann or cold, hard or soft, as it suits him; and do you believe that for your sake he'll be the way you want him to be? It suited your mother as little as it suits this annchair to be a horse, because you're already impatient and want to be off!
Gerda smiled weakly at her father. Since she had come back and seen the new situation, he had made a strong impression on her; she could not help herself. And he loved her, there was no doubting that, and it comforted her.
- B u t what are we going to do with the things that won't let us under- stand them? Fischel asked prophetically. -We measure them, we weigh them, we analyze them mentally, and we direct all our keenness to finding in them something that remains constant, something by which we could get hold of them, on which we can rely and which we can count. Those are the laws of nature, my child, and where we have dis- covered them we can mass-produce things and buy and sell to our heart's content. And now I ask you, how can people relate to one another when they don't understand one another? I tell you, there's only one
From the Posthumous Papers · 1679
way! Only when you stimulate or inhibit his desire can you get a person exactly where you want him. Whoever wants to build solidly must make use of force and basic desires. Then a person suddenly becomes unam- biguous, predictable, dependable, and your experience with him is re- peated everywhere in the same fashion. You can't rely on goodness. You can rely on bad qualities. God is wonderful, my child; he has given us our bad qualities so that we can achieve some semblance of order.
- B u t in that case the order of the world would be nothing but base- ness jumping through hoops! Gerda flared up.
-Y ou're clever! Perhaps so. But who can know? At any rate, I don't point a bayonet at a person's chest to have him do what he thinks is right. Are you following the newspapers? I'm still getting foreign papers, al- though it's beginning to be difficult. Here and abroad they're saying the same things. Get the screws on them. Tighten the screws on them. Cold- bloodedly continue the tight-screw policy. Don't hesitate to apply the "strong method" of breaking windows. That's the way they're talking here, and abroad it's not much different. I believe they've already intro- duced martial law, and ifwe should get into the war zone we'll be threat- ened with the gallows. That's the strong method. I can understand that it makes an impression on you. It's clean, precise, and abhors chatter. It qualifies the nation for great things by treating each individual person who is part of it like a dog! Leo Fischel smiled.
Gerda shook her tousled head decisively, but in a slow, friendly way.
- Y o u must be clear about this, Fischel added. - W h e n the industri- alists' association supplied a bourgeois workers' opposition party with an election fund, or when my former bank made money available for some- thing, they weren't doing anything different. And a deal only comes about at all if I either force another person to meet me halfway, because otherwise it will hurt him, or if I give him the impression that there's a good deal to be made; then I mostly outsmart him, and that's also a form of my power over him. But how delicate and adaptable this power is! It's creative and flexible. Money gives measure to a man. It's ordered selfish- ness. It's the most splendid organization ofselfishness, a creative super- organization, constructed on a real notion of bearish speculation!
Gerda had been listening to her father, but her own thoughts buzzed in her mind. She answered: -Papa, I didn't understand everything, but you're surely right. Of course, you're looking at things as a rationalist, and for me it's precisely the irrational (what goes beyond all calculation) in what's going on now that's fascinating!
-What does irrational mean? General Director Fischel protested. -By that you mean illogical and incalculable and wild, the way one sometimes is in dreams? To that I can only say that buying and selling is
168o • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
like war; you have to calculate and you can calculate, but even there what is decisive in the last analysis is will, courage, the individual, or, as you call it, the irrational. No, my child-he concluded-money is self- ishness brought into relation with enterprise and efficiency. All of you are trying another way to regulate selfishness. It's not new, I acknowl- edge it, it's related. But wait and see how it works! For centuries capital- ism has been a proven way oforganizing human powers according to the ability to make money; where its influence is suppressed, you will find that arbitrariness, backroom deals, kowtowing for advantage, and adven- turism will spring up. As far as I'm concerned, you can do away with money if you like, but you won't abolish the superior power of whoever is holding the advantages in his hand. Except that you'll put someone who doesn't know what to do with them in the place of someone who did! For you're mistaken if you believe that money is the cause of our selfishness; it's the consequence.
-But I don't believe that at all, Papa, Gerda said modestly. -I'm only telling you that's what's going on n o w -
-And furthermore-Fischel interrupted her-it's the most reason- able consequence!
-What's going on now-Gerda went on with her sentence-rises above reason. The way a poem or love rises above the commerce of the world.
-Y ou're a deep girl! Fischel embraced her and released her. He liked Gerda's youthful ardor. -M y fortune! he called her mentally, and fol- lowed her with a tender glance. A discussion with a person one loves and understands is bracing. He had not philosophized this way for a long time; it was a remarkable period.
In conversation with this child Fischel had achieved some clarity about himself. He wanted to buy. Not a ship; at least five ships. He summoned his secretary. -W e can't do this our- selves-he told him-it wouldn't look good, but let's do it through an intermediary. But for Leo Fischel this was not the main thing. The main thing was that he had gained a feeling ofconnection with events and yet a feeling ofisolation, too. In spite ofthe ups and downs going on around him, he had created order within himself.
To THE COMPLEX: LEO FISCHEL-GERDA-HANS SEPP Note: Development of a Man of Action (Leo Fischel)
Title: Return to an abandoned world I Leo Fischel as messenger from the world I Encounter with a messenger from an abandoned world I News from a lost world
Walking through the train, Ulrich saw a familiar face, stopped, and realized that it was Leo Fischel, who was sitting in a compartment by himself, leafing through a stack of flimsy papers he held in his hand. With his pince-nez far down on his nose, and his reddish-blond mutton- chop sideburns, he looked like an English lord of the 186os. Ulrich was so in need of contact with everyday life that he greeted his old acquaint- ance, whom he had not seen for months, almost joyfully.
Fischel asked him where he was coming from.
"From the south," Ulrich responded vaguely.
'We haven't seen you for quite a while," Fischel said with concern.
"You've been having trouble, haven't you? ''
"How so? ''
"I just mean in general. In your position with the campaign, I'm think-
ing. "
"I never had a connection with the campaign that could be called a
position," Ulrich objected with some heat.
"You just disappeared one day," Fischel said. "Nobody knew where
you were. That led me to think that you were having problems. " "Except for that error, you're very well informed: how come? '' Ulrich
laughed.
"I was looking for you like a needle in a haystack. Hard times, bad
stories, my friend," Fischel replied with a sigh. "The General didn't know where you were, your cousin didn't know where you were, and you weren't having your mail forwarded, I was told. Did you get a letter from Gerda? ''
"Get it? No. Perhaps I'll find it waiting for me at home. Has some- thing happened to Gerda? ''
Director Fischel did not answer; the conductor was passing by, and he
z68z
1682 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
motioned him in to give him some telegrams, requesting that he send them off at the next stop.
Ulrich now first noticed that Fischel was traveling first class, which he would not have expected of him.
"Since when are you seeing my cousin and the General? '' he asked.
Fischel looked at him reflectively. Obviously he did not understand the question right away. "Oh," he then said, "I think you hadn't even left yet. Your cousin consulted me on a matter of business, and through her I met the General, whom I wanted at that time to request somethingofon account of Hans Sepp. You know, don't you, that Hans shot and killed himself? ''
Ulrich gave an involuntary start.
"It even got into some of the newspapers," Fischel confirmed. "He was called up for his military service and a few weeks later shot himself. "
"But why? ''
"God knows! Frankly speaking, he could just as well have done it sooner. He could always have shot himself. He was a fool. But in the final analysis, I liked him. You won't believe it, but I even liked his anti- Semitism and his diatribes against bank directors. "
"Was there anything between him and Gerda? "
"Bitter quarrels," Fischel confirmed. "But it wasn't that alone. Listen: I've missed you. I searched for you. When I'm talking with you I have the feeling I'm talking not with a reasonable person but with a philoso- pher. Whatever you say-please permit an old friend to say this-is never to the point, never has hands and feet, but it has head and heart! So what do you say about Hans Sepp's having shot himself? ''
"Is that why yOu. . ___were searching for me? "
"No, not because of that. On account of business and the General and Arnheim, who are friends ofyours. The man before you is no longer with Lloyd's Bank but has gone into business for himself. It's a handful, let me tell you! I've had a lot oftrouble, but now, thank goodness, things are going splendidly-"
"If I'm not mistaken, what you call trouble is losing your job? "
"Yes; thank goodness I lost my job at Lloyd's; otherwise today I would still be a head clerk with the title of Director and would remain one until I was put out to pasture. When I was forced to give that up, my wife began divorce proceedings against m e - "
"Honestly! You really do have a lot of news to telll"
"Hmphl" Fischel went. 'We no longer live in the old apartment. While the divorce is going on, my wife has moved in with her brother"- he took out a business card-"and this is my address. I hope you'll pay me a visit soon. " On the card Ulrich read several ambiguous titles, such
From the Posthumous Papers · z683
as "Import/Export" and "Trans-European Goods and Currency Ex- change Company," and a prestigious address. "You have no idea how one rises all by oneself," Fischel explained to him, "once all those weights like family and job responsibilities, the wife's fancy relations, and responsibility for the leading minds of humanity are taken off one's shoulders! In a few weeks I became an influential man. And a well-off man, to boot. Perhaps the day after tomorrow I'll have nothing again, but I may have even more! "
"What are you now, actually? "
"It's not easy to explain casually to an outsider. I conduct transactions. Transactions of goods, transactions of currency, political transactions, art transactions. In every case the important thing is to get out at the right moment; then you can never lose. " As in the old days, it seemed to give Leo Fischel pleasure to accompany his activity with "philosophy," and Ulrich listened to him with curiosity.
-Philosophy of money
ofthe free man, among others-
Then Ulrich: "But with all that, it's also important for me to know
what Gerda said about Hans's suicide. "
"She claims I murdered him! But they had broken up definitively well
before! "
RACHEL
And while Ulrich was letting the notion of remorse surface in his re- flections, in order to dissolve it immediately again in the deep play of thought, his little friend Rachel was suffering this word in all its tor- tures, dissolved by nothing but the palliative effect of tears and the cautious return of temptation after the remorse had gone on for a while. One will recall that Diotima's intense little maid, ejected from her parents' house because of a misstep, who had landed in the golden aura of virtue surrounding her mistress, had, in the weakest of a series of increasingly weak moments, submitted to the attacks of the black Moorish boy. It happened and made her very unhappy. But this un- happiness aspired to repeat itself as often as the scanty opportunities that Diotima's house offered would allow. On the second or third day after every unhappiness a remarkable change occurred, which can be compared to a flower that, bent over by the rain, raises its little head again. Can be compared to fine weather that, way up above, peeks from a remote corner of the sky through a rainy day; finds friendly lit- tle spots of blue; forms a blue lake; becomes a blue sky; is veiled by a light haze of the overwhelming brightness of a day of happiness; is tinged with brown; lets down one hot veil of haze after another and fi- nally towers, torrid and trembling, from earth to sky, filled with the zigzags and cries of birds, filled with the listless droop of tree and leaf, filled with the craziness of not-yet-discharged tensions that cause man and beast to roam madly about.
On the last day before the remorse, the head of the Moor always twitched through the house like a rolling head of cabbage, and little Ra- chel would have loved to creep on it like a caterpillar with a sweet tooth. But then remorse set in. As if a pistol had been fired and a shimmering glass ball been turned into a powder of glassy sand. Rachel felt sand be- tween her teeth, in her nose, her heart; nothing but sand. The world was dark; not dark like a Moor, but nauseatingly dark, like a pigsty. Rachel, having disappointed the confidence placed in her, seemed to herself be- smirched through and through. Grief placed a deep drill in the vicinity of her navel. A raging fear of being pregnant blinded her thoughts. One
From the Posthumous Papers · 1685
could go on in this fashion-every limb in Rachel ached individually with remorse-but the main thing was not in these details but seized hold ofthe whole person, driving her before the wind like a cloud ofdust raised by a broom. The knowledge that a misstep that has happened can- not be rectified by anything in the world made the world something of a hurricane in which one can find no support to stand up. The peaceful- ness of death seemed to Rachel like a dark feather bed, which it must be delightful to roll on. She had been torn out ofher world, abandoned to a feeling whose intensity was unlike anything in Diotima's house. She could not get at this feeling with an idea, any more than comfortings can get at a toothache, while it actually seemed to her, on the other hand, that there was only one remedy, to pull little Rachel entirely out of the world like a bad tooth.
Had she been cleverer, she would have been able to assert that re- morse is a basic disturbance of equilibrium, which one can restore in the most various ways. But God helped her out with his old, proven home remedy by again giving her, after a few days, the desire to sin.
We, however, cannot of course be as indulgent as the great Lord, to whom earthly matters offer little that is new or important. We must ask whether in a condition in which there is no sin there can be any remorse. And since this question has already been answered in the negative, ex- cept for a few borderline cases, a second question immediately arises: from which ocean did the little drop of hell's fire fall into Rachel's heart, ifit may not be said to have originated in the ocean whose clouds Ulrich had discovered? Every such question was suited to plunge Ulrich out of the sky on which he wanted to set foot purely theoretically. There are so many lovelythings on earth that have nothing to do with divine, seraphic love, and most decidedly there are among them things that forbid any- thing and everything to be expected from their rediscovery. This ques- tion was later to be of the greatest significance for Ulrich and Agathe.
LATE 1920S
The weeks since Rachel had left Diotima's house had passed with an improbability that a different person would hardly have accepted calmly. But Rachel had been shown the door of her parents' house as a sinner, and at the conclusion ofthat fall had landed, straight as an arrow, in paradise, at Diotima's; now Diotima had thrown her out, but such an enchantingly refined man as Ulrich had been standing there and had
1686 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
caught her: how could she not believe that life is the way it is described in the novels she loved to read? Whoever is destined to be a hero fate throws into the air in daredevil ways over and over, but it always catches him again in its strong arms. Rachel placed blind confidence in fate, and during this entire time had really done nothing but wait for its next inter- vention, when it might perhaps unveil its intentions. She had not become pregnant; so the experience with Soliman seemed to have been only a passing incident. She ate in a small pub, together with coachmen, out-of-work servant girls, workers who had business in the neighbor- hood, and those undefinable transients who flood a large city. The place she had chosen for herself, at a specific table, was reserved for her every day; she wore better clothes than the other women who frequented the pub; the way she used her knife and fork was different from what one was accustomed to seeing here; in this place Rachel enjoyed a secret respect, which she was acutely aware of even though not many people wanted to show it, and she assumed that she was taken for a countess or the mistress of a prince, who for some reason was compelled for a time to conceal her class. It happened that men with dubious diamonds on their fingers and with slicked-down hair, who sometimes turned up among the respectable guests, arranged to sit at Rachel's table and di- rected seductively sinuous compliments to her; but Rachel knew how to refuse these with dignity and without unfriendliness, for although the compliments pleased her as much as the buzzing and creeping ofinsects and caterpillars and snakes on a luxuriant summer day, she still sensed that she could not let herselfgo in this direction without running the risk of losing her freedom. She most liked to converse with older people, who knew something of life and told stories of its dangers, disappoint- ments, and events. In this way she picked up knowledge that, broken into crumbs, came to her the way food sinks down to a fish lying quietly at the bottom ofits tank. Adventurous things were going on in the world. People were now said to be flying faster than birds. Building houses en- tirelywithout bricks. The anarchists wanted to assassinate the Emperor. A great revolution was imminent, and then the coachmen would sit in- side the coaches and the rich people would be in harness, instead of the horses. In a tenement block in the vicinity, a woman had, in the night, poured petroleum on her husband and lit him; it was unimaginable! In America, blind people were given glass eyes with which they could really see again, but it still cost lots of money and was only for billionaires. These were the gripping things Rachel heard, of course not all at once, as she sat and ate. When afterward she stepped out into the street, noth- ing of such monstrosities was to be seen: everything flowed on in its well-ordered way or stood there exactly as it had the day before; but was
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1687
not the air boiling in these summer days, was not the asphalt secretly yielding underfoot, without Rachel having to picture clearly that the sun had softened it? On the church roofs the saints stretched out their arms and lifted their eyes in a way that made one think that everywhere there must be something special to be seen. The policemen wiped away the sweat of their exertions in the midst of the commotion that roared around them. Vehicles going at high speed braked violently as an old lady crossing the street was almost run over because she was not paying attention to anything. When Rachel got back to her little room, she felt her curiosity sated by this light nourishment; she took out her undergar- ments to mend them, or altered a dress or read a novel-for with aston- ishment at the way the world was run, she had discovered the institution of the lending library-her landlady came in and chatted with her defer- entially, because Rachel had money without having to work and without one's being able to discern any misconduct; and so the day passed, with no time to miss anything in the least, and poured its contents, filled to the brim with exciting things, into the dreams of the night.
To be sure, Ulrich had forgotten to send money promptly, or to ask Rachel to come to him, and she had already begun to use up the small savings from her work. But she was not concerned, for Ulrich had prom- ised to protect her for the present, and to go to him to remind him seemed to her quite improper. In all the fairy tales she knew, there was something one was forbidden to say or do; and it would have been ex- actly that had she gone to Ulrich and told him she was out of money. This is not in any way to imply that she expressly thought that her man- ner oflife seemed like a fairy tale, or that she believed in fairy tales at all. On the contrary, that was the way the reality that she had never known differently was constituted, even if it had never been as beautiful as it was now. There are people to whom this is permitted, and people to whom it is forbidden; the ones sink from step to step and end in utter misery, while the others become rich and happy-and leave behind lots of children. Rachel had never been told to which of the two groups she belonged; she had never revealed to the two people who might have ex- plained the difference to her that she was dreaming, but had worked industriously, except for the two unintentional missteps that had had such serious consequences. And one day her landlady actually reported that while she was out to eat, a fine lady had asked for her and an- nounced that she would return in an hour. Anxiously, Rachel gave a de- scription of Diotima; but the lady who was looking for her was most decidedly not tall, the landlady asserted, and not stout either, not even if by stout one did not mean fat. The lady who was looking for Rachel was most decidedly, rather, to be called small and skinny.
1688 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
And indeed the lady was slender and small, and returned within a half hour. She said "Dear Fraulein" to Rachel, mentioned Ulrich's name, and pulled from her purse a tightly folded, rather considerable sum of money, which she gave to Rachel on behalf of their friend. Then she began to tell an involved and exciting story, and Rachel had never in her life been so enthralled by a conversation. There was a man, the lady said, who was being pursued by his enemies because he had nobly sacrificed himself for them. Really not nobly; for he had to do it, it was his inner law, every person has an animal which he inwardly resembles. -You, for example, Fraulein-the lady said-have either a gazelle or a queen snake in you-it can't always be determined at first glance.
If it had been the cook in Diotima's kitchen who had said that, it would have made either no impression on Rachel or an unfavorable one; but it was said by someone who with every word radiated the certainty of a well-bred lady, the gift: ofcommand that would make any doubt appear to be an offense against respect. It was therefore firmly established in Rachel's mind that there was some link between herself and a gazelle or a queen snake, a link that at the moment was over her head, but that could doubtless be explained in some fashion, for one sometimes does hear such things. Rachel felt herself ch_arged with this piece of news like a candy box one can't get open.
The man who had sacrificed himself, the lady continued, had within himself a bear, that is to say, the soul of a murderer, and that meant that he had taken murder upon himself, all murder: the murder of unborn and handicapped children, the cowardly murder that people commit against their talents, and murder on the street by vehicles, bicyclists, and trams. Clarisse asked Rachel-for of course it was Clarisse who was speaking-whether she had ever heard the name Moosbrugger. Now, Rachel had, although she later forgot him again, loved and feared Moos- brugger like a robber captain, at the time when he had horrified all the newspapers, and he had often been the topic of conversation at Di- otima's; so she asked right away whether it concerned him.
Clarisse nodded. - H e is innocent!
For the first time Rachel heard from an authority what she had earlier often thought herself.
- W e have freed him, Clarisse went on. - W e , the responsible peo- ple, who know more than the others do. But now we must hide him. Clarisse smiled, and so peculiarly and yet with such rapturous friendli- ness that Rachel's heart, intending to fall into her panties, got stuck on the way, somewhere in the neighborhood of her stomach. -Hide where? she stammered, pale.
- T h e police will be looking for him---Clarisse declared-so it has to
From the Posthumous Papers · 1689
be where no one would think of looking for him. The best thing would be ifyou would pretend he was your husband. He would have to wear a wooden leg, that's easy to pretend, or something, and you would get a little shop with living quarters attached, so it would look as ifyou were supporting your invalid husband who can't leave the house. The whole thing would be for only a few weeks, and I could offer you more money than you need.
- B u t why don't you take him in yourself? Rachel dared to counter.
-My husband isn't in on it and would never allow it, Clarisse an- swered, adding the lie that the proposal she had made came from Ul- rich.
-But I'm afraid ofhim! Rachel exclaimed.
-That's as it should be, Clarisse said. -But, my dear Fraulein, ev- erything great is terrible. Many great men have been in the insane asy- lum. It is uncanny to put oneself on a level with someone who is a murderer; but to put oneself on a level with the uncanny is to resolve to be great! '
-But does he want to? Rachel asked. -Does he know me? He won't do anything to me?
- H e knows that we want to save him. Look, his whole life he's known only substitute women; you understand what I mean. He'll be happy at having a real woman to protect him and take him in; and he won't lay a finger on you ifyou don't let him. I'll back you up on that all the way! He knows that I have the power to compel him, ifI want!
- N o , no! was all Rachel could get out; from everything Clarisse was saying she could hear only the shape of the voice and language, a friend- liness and a sisterly equality that she could not resist. A lady had never spoken to her this way, and yet there was nothing artificial or false in it; Clarisse's face was on a level with hers and not up in the air like Di- otima's; she saw her features working, especially two long furrows that constantly formed by the nose and ran down by the mouth; Clarisse was visibly struggling together with her for the solution.
-Consider, Fraulein- Clarisse went on to say-that he who recog- nizes must sacrifice himself. You recognized right away that Moosbrug- ger only appears to be a murderer. Therefore you must sacrifice yourself. You must draw what is murderous out of him, and then what's behind it, which corresponds to your own nature, will come out. For like is attracted only by like; that's the merciless law of greatness!
- B u t when will it be?
-Tomorrow. I'll come in the late afternoon and get you.
