No More Learning

"It seems to me," the presiding judge says emphatically, "that you always manage to put the blame on someone else. "
"Now tell me, why did you start stabbing her? " the prosecutor gently begins at the beginning again.
31
WHOSE SIDE ARE YOU ON?
Was it something he had heard at the session ofthe trial he attended, or had he just picked it up from the reports he had read? He remem- bered it all so vividly now, as though he could actually hear these voices. He had never in his life "heard voices"-by God, he was not like that. But if one does hear them, then something descends like
Pseudoreality Prevails · 1 2 3
124 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
the quiet peace of a snowfall. Suddenly walls are there, from the earth to the sky; where before there was air, one strides through thick soft walls, and all the voices that hopped from one place to an- other in the cage of the air now move about freely within the white walls that have fused together down to their inmost essence.
He was probably overstimulated from work and boredom; such things happen sometimes; anyway, he didn't find it half bad, hearing voices. Suddenly he was saying under his breath, "We have a second home, where everything we do is innocent. "
Bonadea was lacing up a string. She had meanwhile come into his room. She was displeased with their conversation; she found it in poor taste. She had long since forgotten the name of the man who had killed that girl, the case the papers had been so full of, and it all came back to mind only reluctantly when Ulrich began to speak of him.
"But if Moosbrugger can evoke this disturbing impression of inno- cence," he said after a while, "how much more innocent that poor, ragged, shivering creature was, with those mouse eyes under that kerchief, that Hedwig, who begged him for a night's shelter in his room and got herself killed for it. " .
"Must you? " Bonadea offered and shrugged her white shoulders. For when Ulrich gave this turn to the conversation, it came at the maliciously chosen moment when the clothes his offended friend had halfput on when she came into his room, thirsting for reconcilia- tion, were once more heaped on the carpet, forming a small, charm- ingly mythological crater of foam like the one that had given birth to Aphrodite. Bonadea was therefore ready to detest Moosbrugger, and to pass over the fate of his victim with a fleeting shudder. But Ulrich
would not let it go at that, and insisted on vividly depicting for her Moosbrugger's impending fate.
"Two men who have no bad feelings against him at all will put the noose around his neck, only because that is what they are paid for. Perhaps a hundred people will be watching, some because it is their job, others because everyone wants to have seen an execution once in his life. A solemn gentleman in a top hat, frock coat, and black gloves will then tighten the noose, while at the same moment his helpers grab hold ofMoosbrugger's legs and pull, to break his neck. Then the . man with the black gloves plays doctor, and lays a hand on Moos-
brugger's heart to check whether it is still beating-because if it is, the whole procedure has to be gone through once again, more impa- tiently and with less solemnity. Now, are you really for Moosbrugger or against him? " Ulrich asked.
Slowly and painfully, like a pe~on awakened at the wrong time, Bonadea had lost "the mood," as slie was accustomed to calling her fits of adultery. Now, after her hands had irresolutely held her slip- ping clothes and open corset for a while, she had to sit down. Like every woman in a similar situation, she had firm confidence in an established public order ofsuch a degree ofjustice that one could go about one's private affairs without having to think about it. But now, reminded of the opposite, compassionate partisanship for Moos- brugger as victim took hold of her, sweeping aside any thought of Moosbrugger the criminal.
"Then you are always for the victim," Ulrich insisted, "and against the act? "
Bonadea expressed the obvious feeling that such a conversation in such a situation was not appropriate.
"But ifyour judgment is so consistent in condemning the act," Ul- rich replied, instead of instantly apologizing, "then how can you jus- tify your adulteries, Bonadea? "
It was the plural that was in such especially bad taste! Bonadea said nothing but sat down, with a disdainful look, in one of the luxuri- ous armchairs and stared up, insulted, at the dividing line between wall and ceiling.
Pseudoreality Prevails · 1 2 5
THE FORGOTTEN, HIGHL Y RELEV ANT STORY . OF THE MA. JOR'S WIFE
It is not advisable to feel kinship with an obvious lunatic, nor did Ul- rich do so. And yet why did one expert maintain that Moosbrugger was a lunatic and the other that he was not? Where had the reporters got their slickly factual account of the work of Moosbrugger's knife? And by what qualities did Moosbrugger arouse that excitement and horror that made half of the two million people who lived in this city react to him as if he were a family quarrel or a broken engagement, something so personally exciting that it stirred normally dormant areas of the soul, while his story was a more indifferent novelty in the country towns·and meant nothing at all in Berlin or Breslau, where from time to time they had their own Moosbruggers, the Moosbrug- gers in their own families, to think about. The awful way society had of toying with its victims preoccupied Ulrich. He felt an echo of it in himselftoo. No impulse stirred in him either to free Moosbrugger or to assist justice, and his feelings stood on end like a eat's fur. For some unknown reason Moosbrugger concerned him more deeply than the life he himselfwas leading. Moosbrugger seized him like an obscure poem in which everything is slightly distorted and displaced, and reveals a drifting meaning fragmented in the depths of the mind.
"Thrill-seeking! " He pulled himself up short. To be fascinated with the gruesome or the taboo, in the admissible form of dreams and neuroses, seemed quite in character for the people of the bour- geois age. "Either/or! " he thought. "Either I like you or I don't. Ei- ther I defend you, freakishness and all, or I ought to punch myself in the jaw for playing around with this monstrosity! " And finally, a cool but energetic compassion would also be appropriate here. There was a lot that could be done in this day and age to prevent suc! t events and su<:h characters from happening, if only society would make half the moral effort it demands of such victims. But then it turned out
that there was yet another angle from which the matter could be con- sidered, and strange memories rose up in Ulrich's mind.
We never judge an act by that aspect of it which is pleasing or dis- pleasing to God. It was Luther, oddly enough, who had said that, probably un'der the influence of one of the mystics with whom he was friends for a while. It could certainly have been said by many another religious. They were, in the bourgeois sense, all immoralists. They distinguished between the sins and the soul, which can remain immaculate despite the sins, almost as Machiavelli distinguished the ends from the means. The "human heart" had been "taken from them. " "In Christ too there was an outer and an inner man, and ev- erything he did with regard to outward things he did as the outer man, while his inner man stood by in immovable solitude," says Eck- hart. Such saints and believers would in the end have been capable of acquitting even Moosbrugger! Mankind has certainly made progress since then, but even though it will kill Moosbrugger, it still has the weakness to venerate those men who might-who knows? -have ac- quitted him.
And now Ulrich remembered a sentence, which was preceded by a wave of uneasiness: "The soul of the Sodomite might pass through the throng without misgiving, and with a child's limpid smile in its eyes; for everything depends on an invisible principle. " This was not so very different from the other sayings, yet in its slight exaggeration it had the sweet, sickly breath of corruption. And as it turned out, a space belonged to this saying, a room with yellow French paperbacks on the tables and glass-bead curtains instead of doors; and a feeling stirred in his chest as when a hand reaches inside the split carcass of a chicken to pull out the heart: It was Diotima who had uttered that sentence the last time he saw her. It came, moreover, from a con- temporary author Ulrich had loved in his youth but whom he had since learned to regard as a parlor philosopher, and aphorisms like this taste like bread doused with perfume, so that for decades one doesn't want to have anything to do with any of it.
Yet however strong the distaste that this aroused in Ulrich, he thought it disgraceful that he had let it keep him all his life from re- turning to the other, authentic statements of that mysterious lan- guage. For he had a special, instinctive understanding for them,
Pseudoreality Prevails · 1 2 7
128 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
which might rather oe called a familiarity that leapt over the under- standing, although he could never make up his mind to embrace them wholeheartedly as tenets of faith. They lay-such statements, which spoke to him with a fraternal sound, with a gentle, dark in- wardness that was the opposite of the hectoring tones of mathemati- cal or scientific language, though otherwise indefinable-like islands scattered among his preoccupations, without connection and rarely visited; yet, when he surveyed them, to the extent that he had come to know them, it seemed to him that he could feel their coherence, as if these islands, only a little separated from each other, were the out- posts of a coast hidden behind them, or represented the remains of a continent that had perished primordial eras ago.
He felt the softness of sea, mist, and low black ridges· of land asleep in a yellowish-gray light. He remembered a little sea voyage, an escape along the lines of "A trip will do you go~dl" or "Try a change of scene! " and he knew precisely what . a strange, absurdly magical experience had superimposed itself by its deterrent f<;>rce once and for all, on all others of its kind. For an instant the heart of a twenty-year-old beat in his breast, whose hairy skin had thickened and coarsened with the years. The beating of a twenty-year-old heart inside his thirty-two-year-old chest felt like an improper kiss given by a boy to a man. Nevertheless, this time he did not shrink from the memory. It was the memory of a passion that had come to a strange end, a passion he had felt at twenty for a woman considerably older than he, not only in years but by virtue of her settled domestic state.
Characteristically, he remembered only imprecisely what she looked like. A stilted photograph and his memory of the hours he had spent alone thinking of her took the place of live impressions of the face, clothes, voice, and movements of this woman. He had in the meantime become so estranged from her world that the fact of her having been the wife of an army major struck him as so incredible, it was funny. By this time, he thought, she will long have been a retired colonel's wife. According to the regimental scuttlebutt she was a trained artist, a virtuoso pianist who had never performed publicly out of deference to the wishes of her family; later on, in any case, her marriage made such a career impossible. She did, in fact, play the piano beautifully at regimental parties, with all the radiance of a well- gilded sun floating above chasms of feelings, and from the first Ul-
rich had fallen in love not so much with this woman's sensual pres- ence as with what she stood for. The lieutenant who at that time had home his name was not shy; his eye had already practiced on female small game and even espied the faintly beaten poacher's path leading to this or that respectable woman. But for such twenty-year-old offi- cers a "grand passion," if they thought of such a thing at all, was something else entirely; it was a concept, something that lay outside their range of actiVity and was as devoid of experienced content, hence as luminously vacuous, as only a really grand concept can be. So when for the first time in his life Ulrich saw in himself the possi- bility of applying this concept, it was as good as done; the part played in this by the major's wife was no more than that of the last contribu- tory cause that triggers the outbreak of a disease. Ulrich became lovesick. And since true lovesickness is not a desire for possession but the world's gentle self-unveiling, for the sake of which one willingly renounces possession ofthe beloved, the lieutenant proceeded to ex- plain the world to the major's wife in an unaccustomed and persist- ent manner such as she had never heard before. Constellations, bacteria, Balzac, and Nietzsche whirled around in a vortex of ideas the point ofwhich, as she sensed with growing clarity, was directed at certain differences-not considered a proper subject of conversation in those days-between her own body and that ofthe lieutenant. She was bewildered by his insistence on linking love with subjects that, as far as she knew, had never had anything to do with love. One day, when they had gone out riding, as they walked beside their horses she left her hand in his for a moment and was appalled to find that her hand stayed there as if in a swoon. In the next second flames ran through them from their wrists to their knees and a bolt of lightning felled both of them so that they almost tumbled by the wayside, where they found themselves sitting on the moss, wildly kissing and then overcome with embarrassment, because love was so great and out of the ordinary that, to their surprise, they could find nothing to say or do other than what people usually do in such embraces. The horses, growing restive, at last released the lovers from this
predicament.
The love between the major's wife and this too-young lieutenant
remained short and unreal throughout its course. They both mar- veled at it; they held each other close a few more times, both sensing
Pseudoreality Prevails · 1 2 9
130 • THE MAN WITH0 UT QU. ALITIES
that something was wrong and would not let them come fully to- gether, body to body in their embraces, even if they shed all obsta- cles of clothing and morality. The major's wife did not want to deny herself a passion she felt to be beyond her power to judge, but she was throbbing with secret reproaches on account of her husband and the difference in age. When Ulrich told her one day, on some thread- bare pretext, that he had to take a long fudough, the officer's lady breathed a tearful sigh of relief. By this time Ulrich was so far gone in love that he had no more pressing need than to get away as quickly and as far as possible from the vicinity of the cause of this love. He traveled blindly at random, until a coast put an end to the railroad tracks, took a boat to the nearest island, and there, in some place he had never heard of, minimally provided with bed and board, he wrote that first night the first of a series oflong letters to his beloved, which he never mailed.
These letters, written in the dead of night after filling his thoughts all day, were later lost-as they were probably meant to be. At first he had still had much to say about his love for her and all sorts of thoughts she inspired in him, but all that was soon and increasingly displaced by the scenery. Mornings the sun raised him from his sleep, and when the fishennen were out on the water, the women and children near their houses, he and a donkey who was grazing among the shrubs and hillocks between the island's two little villages seemed to be the only higher fonns of life on this adventurous out- post of the world. Ulrich followed his companion's example and climbed up on a hillock or lay down on the island's rim in the com- pany of sea, rock, and sky. He had no sense of presuming, because the difference in size did not seem to matter, nor did the difference between mind and nature, animate and inanimate; this communion diminished all kinds of differences. To put it quite soberly, these dif- ferences were neither lost nor lessened, but their meaning fell away; one was no longer "subject to those divisions that afflict mankind" as described by those religious seized by the mysticism of love, of whom the young cavalry lieutenant at that time knew absolutely nothing. Nor did he reflect on these phenomena-as a hunter on the track of wild game might track down an observation and follow it up-in- deed, he hardly noticed them, but he took them into himself. He
sank into the landscape, although it was just as much an inexpressible being borne up by it, and when the world surpassed his eyes, its meaning lapped against him from within in soundless waves. He had penetrated the heart of the world; from it to his far-off love was no farther than the nearest tree. In-feeling linked living beings without space, as in a dream two beings can pass through each other without mingling, and altered all their relations. Other than this, however, his state of mind had nothing in common with dreaming. It was clear, and brimful of clear thoughts; however, nothing in him was moved by cause, purpose, or physical desire, but everything went rippling out in circle after ever-renewed circle, as when an infinite jet falls on abasin's surface. This was what he also described in his letters, and nothing else.
Life's very shape was completely altered. Not placed in the focus of ordinary attention but freed from sharpness. . Seen this way, every- thing seemed a little scattered and blurred, and being infused all the while with a delicate clarity and certainty from other centers. All of life's questions and occurrences took on an incomparable mildness, gentleness, and serenity, while their meaning was utterly trans- formed. Ifin this state ofbeing a beetle, for instance, should run past the hand of a man deep in thought, it was not an approach, a passing by, a moving off, nor was it beetle and man, but a happening that ineffably touched the heart, and not even a happening but, although it was happening, a condition. And with the help of such tranquil ex- periences everything that usually makes up an ordinary life was en- dowed with a radical new meaning for Ulrich at every tum.
In this condition even his love for the major's wife quickly took on its predestined form. Thinking ofher incessantly, he sometimes tried to visualize her doing whatever she might be doing at that very mo- ment, aided by his thorough knowledge of her circumstances. But as soon as he succeeded in seeing his beloved as if she were physically present, his feeling for her, which had grown so infinitely clairvoyant, became blind, and he had to quickly reduce her image to that blissful certainty of her-being-there-for-him-somewhere proper to a Great Love. It was not very long before she had turned entirely into that impersonal center of energy, the underground dynamo that kept his lights going, and he wrote her a final letter, setting forth that the
Pseudoreality Prevails · 1 3 1
132 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
great ideal of living for love actually had nothing to do with physical possession and the wish "Be mine! " that came from the sphere of thrift, appropriation, and gluttony. This was the only letter he mailed, and approximately the high point of his lovesickness. , from which it soon declined and suddenly ended.
33
BREAKING WITH BONADEA
Meanwhile Bonadea. who could not go on staring continually at the ceiling, had stretched out on her back on the divan, her tender rna. : temal belly in white batiste free to breathe unhampered by whale- bone and laces. She called this position "thinking. " It flashed through her mind that her husband was not only a judge but also a hunter, whose eyes sometimes sparkled when he spoke of the beasts that preyed on game; she felt there might be something in this to help both Moosbrugger and his judges. Yet she did not want her hus- band put in the wrong by her lover, except as a lover; her family feel- ing de. manded that the head of her household be seen as dignified and respected. So she came to no decision. And while this conflict was drowsily darkening her horizon like two banks of clouds amor- phously merging with each other, Ulrich enjoyed being free to follow his thoughts. But this ·had lasted for quite a while, and as nothing had occurred to Bonadea that would have given matters a new tum, she reverted to feeling aggrieved that Ulrich had negligently insulted her, and the time he was letting pass without making it up to her
began to weigh on her as a provocation.
"So you think I am doing wrong in coming ·here to see you? " she
finally asked him, with grave emphasis, sadly, but ready for battle. Ulrich gave no answer but shrugged his shoulders. He had long since forgotten what she was talking about, but he simply couldn't
stand her at this moment.
"So you are re~y capable of blaming me for our passion? "
"Every such question has as many answers hanging on it as there are bees in a hive," Ulrich replied. "All human spiritual disorder, with its never-resolved problems, hangs on eveiy single one of them in some disgusting way. "
He was only saying aloud what he had been thinking, off and on, all day. But Bonadea took "spiritual disorder" as referring to herself and decided that this was too much. She would have liked to draw the curtains again and so do away with this quarrel, but she would just as gladly have howled with grief. All at once she understood that Ulrich had grown tired ofher. Given her temperament, she had hith- erto never lost her lovers except as one mislays something and for~ gets it when attracted to something new, or in that other easy-come, easy-go fashion that, no matter how personally irritating sometimes, still had something of the air of the workings of a higher power. And so her flrst reaction to Ulrich's quiet resistance was the feeling that she had grown old. She was humiliated by her helpless and obscene position, half-naked on a sofa, an easy target for insults. Without stopping to think, she got up and grabbed her clothes. But the rus- tling and swishing of the silken chalices into which she was slipping back did not move Ulrich to remorse. Right above her eyes, Bonadea felt the stabbing pain of helplessness. "He's a brute," she said to her- self over and over. "He said it on purpose to hurt me! He's not lifting a fmger! " With every ribbon shetied and every hook she fastened, she sank deeper into that abysmally black well of a long-forgotten childish anguish at being abandoned. Darkness welled up around her; Ulrich's face was visible as if in the waning light, set hard and brutal against the dark of her misery. "How could I ever have loved that face? " Bonadea asked herself, but at the same moment the words "Lost forever! " tightened her whole chest in a spasm.
Ulrich, who guessed that she had made up her mind never to come back, did nothing to stop her. In front of the mirror, Bonadea firmly smoothed her hair put on her hat, and tied her veil. Now that the veil was fastened in front of her face it was all over; it was as solemn as a death sentence, or when the lock snaps shut on a suit- case. He was to have no last kiss, nor even to realize that he was miss-
Ing his last chance ever to kiss her again!
At this thought she almost threw her arms around his neck in pity,
and could have cried her eyes out on his chest.
Pseudoreality Prevails · 133
134
34
A HOT FLASH AND CHILLED WALLS
After Ulrich had escorted Bonadea out and was alone again, he no longer had any desire to go on working. He went out to the street with the intention of sending a message to Walter and Clarisse that he would come to see them this evening. As he was crossing the small foyer, he noticed a pair of antlers on the wall; somehow they re- minded him of Bonadea's movements when she had tied her veil before the mirror, except that here there was no resigned smile. He looked around, contemplating his environment. All these circular lines, intersecting lines, straight lines, curves and wreaths of which a domestic interior is composed and that had piled up around him were neither nature nor inner necessity but bristled, to the last de- tail, with baroque overabundance. The current and heartbeat that constantly flows through all the things in our surroundings had stopped for a moment. ''I'm only fortuitous," Necessity leered. "Ob- served without prejudice, my face doesn't la<? k much different from a leper's," Beauty confessed. Actually, it did not take much to pro- duce this effect: a varnish had come off, a power of suggestion had lost its hold, a chain of habit, expectation, and tension had snapped; a fluid, mysterious equilibrium between feeling and world was upset for the space of a second. Everything we feel and do i. s somehow oriented "lifeward," and the least deviation away from this direction toward something beyond is difficult or alarming. This is true even of the simple act of walking:· one lifts one's center of gravity, pushes it forward, and lets it drop again-anq the slightest change, the merest hint of shrinking from this letting-oneself-drop-into-the-future, or even of stopping to wonder at it-and one can no longer stand up- right! Stopping to think is dangerous. I t occurred to Ulrich that ~very decisive point in his life had left behind a similar feeling.
He found a messenger and sent him offwith his note. It was about four in the afternoon, and he decided to walk there, taking his time. It was a deliciously late-spring·kind of fall day. There was a ferment
in the air. People's faces were like spindrift. After the monotonous tension of his thoughts in the last few days he felt as if he were ex- changing a prison for a warm bath. He made a point ofwalking in an amiable, relaxed manner. A gymnastically well trained body holds so much readiness to move and fight that today it gave him an unpleas- ant feeling, like the face of an old clown, full of oft-repeated false passions. In the same way, his truth-seeldng had filled his being with capacities for mental agility, divided into troops of thoughts exercis- ing each other, and given him that-strictly speaking-false clown expression that everything, even sincerity itself, assumes when it be- comes a habit. So Ulrich thought.
He flowed like a wave among its fellow waves, if one may say so, and why not, when a man who has been wearing himself out with lonely work at last rejoins the commu- nity and delights in flowing along with it?
At such a moment nothing may seem so remote as the thought that people are not much concerned, inwardly, with the life they lead and are led by. And yet we all know this as long as we are young. Ulrich remembered how such a day had looked to him in these same streets ten or fifteen years ago. It had all been twice as glorious then, and yet there had quite definitely been in all that seething desire an aching sense of being taken captive; an uneasy feeling that "Everything I think I am attaining is attaining me," a gnawing surmise that in this world the untrue, uncaring, persmially indifferent statements will echo more strongly than the-most personal and authentic ones. "This beauty," one thought, "is all well and good, but is it mine? And is the truth I am learning my truth? The goals, the voices, the reality, all this seductiveness that lures and leads us on, that we pursue and plunge into-is this reality itselfor is it no more than a breath ofthe real, resting intangibly on the surface of the reality the world offers us? What sharpens our suspicions are all those prefabricated com- partments and forms of life, semblances of reality, the molds set by earlier generations, the ready-made language not only of the tongue but also of sensations and feelings. "
Ulrich had stopped in front of a church. Good heavens, if a gigan- tic matron were to have been sitting here in the shade, with a huge belly terraced like a flight of steps, her back resting against the houses behind her, and above, in thousands of wrinkles, warts, and pimples, the sunset in her face, couldn't he have found that beautiful
Pseudoreality Prevails · z35
136 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
too? Lord, yes, it was beautiful! He didn't want to weasel out of this by claiming he was put on earth with the obligation to admire this sort of thing; however, there was nothing to prevent him from find- ing these broad, serenely drooping forms and the filigree ofwrinkles on a venerable matron beautiful-it is merely simpler to say that she is old. And this transition from finding the world old to finding 'it beautiful is about the same as that from a young person's outlook to the higher moral viewpoint of the mature adult, which remains ab- surdly didactic until one suddenly espouses it oneself. It was only seconds that Ulrich stood outside the church, but they rooted in him and compressed his heart with all the resistance of primal instinct against this world petrified into millions of tons of stone, against this frozen· moonscape of feeling where, involuntarily, he had been set down.
It may be a convenience and a comfort for most people to find the world ready-made, apart from a few minor personal details, and there is no disputing that whatever endures is not only conservative but also the foundation of all advances and revolutions; but it must be said that this casts a feeling ofdeep, shadowy unease on those who live according to their own lights. It flashed on Ulrich with surprising suddenness, as he appreciated the architectural fine points of the sa- cred edifice, that one could just as easily devour people as build such monuments or allow them to stand. The houses beside it, the firma- ment above, the indescribable harmony of all the lines and spaces that caught and guided the eye, the look and expression ofthe people passing below, their books, their morals, the trees along the street . . . it all seems at times as stiff as folding screens, as hard as a pnnter's die stamp, complete-there is no other way of putting i t - so complete and finished that one is mere superfluous mist beside it, a small, exhaled breath God has no time for anymore.
At this moment he wished he were a man without qualities. But it is probably not so very different for anyone. Few people in mid-life really know how they got to be what they are, how they came by their pastimes, their outlook, their wife, their character, profession, and successes, but they have the feeling that from this point on nothing much can change. It might even be fair to say that they were tricked, since nowhere is a sufficient reason to be found why everything should have turned out the ~y it did; it could just as well have
turned out differently; whatever happened was least of all their own doing but depended mostly on all sorts of circumstances, on moods, the life and death of quite different people; these events converged on one, so to speak, only at a given point in time. In their youth, life lay ahead of them like an inexhaustible morning, full of possibilities an~ emptiness on all sides, but already by noon something is sud- denly there that may claim to be their own life yet whose appearing is as surprising, all in all, as if aperson had suddenly materialized with whom one had been corresponding for some twenty years without meeting and whom one had imagined quite differently. What is even more peculiar is that most people do not even notice it; they adopt the man who has come to them, whose life has merged with their own, whose experiences now seem to be the expression of their own qualities, and whose fate is their own reward or misfortune. Some- thing has done to them what flypaper does to a fly, catching it now by a tiny hair, now hampering a movement, gradually enveloping it until it is covered by a thick coating that only remotely suggests its original shape. They then have only vague recollections of their youth, when there was still an opposing power in them. This opposing power tugs and spins, will not settle anywhere and blows up a storm of aimless struggles to escape; the mockery of the young, their revolt against institutions, their readiness for everything that is heroic, for martyr- dom or crime, their fiery earnestness, their instability-all this means nothing more than their struggles to escape. Basically, these struggles merely indicate that nothing a young person does is done from an unequivocal inner necessity, even though they behave as if whatever they . are intent upon at the moment must be done, and without delay. Someone comes up with a splendid new gesture, an outward or inward-how shall we translate it? -vital pose? A form into which inner·meaning streams like helium into a balloon? An ex- pression of impression? A technique of being? It can be a new mus- tache or a new idea. It is playacting, but like all playacting it tries to say something, of course-and like the _sparrows off the rooftops when someone scatters crumbs on the ground, young souls instantly pounce on it. Imagine, ifyou will, what it is to have a heavy world weighing on tongue, hands, and eyes, a· chilled moon of earth, houses, mores, pictures, and books, and inside nothing but an unsta- ble, shifting mist; what a joy it must be whenever someone brings out
. Pseudoreality Prevails · z3 7
138 · THE MAN WIT. H0UT QUALITIES
a slogan in which one thinks ~necan recognize oneself. What is more natural than that every person of intense feeling get hold of this new form before the common run ofpeople does? It offers that moment of self-realization, of balance between inner and outer, between being crushed and exploding.
There is no other basis, Ulrich thought-and all this, of course, touched him personally as well-as he stood with his hands in his pocket~. his face looking as peaceful and contentedly asleep as if he were dying in the sun's rays that whj. rled about him, a gentle death in snow-no other ba5is, he thought, for that everlasting phenomenon variously called the new generation, fathers and sons, intellectual revolution, change of style, evolution, fashion, and revival. What makes this craving for the renovation of life into a perpetuum mobtle is nothing but the discomfort at the intrusion, between one's own misty self and the alien and already petrified carapace of the self of one's predecessors, of a pseudoself, a loosely fitting group sotd. With a little attention, one can probably always detect in the latest Future signs of the coming Old Times. The new ideas will then be a mere thirty years older but contented and with a little extra fat on their bones or past their prime, much as one glimpses alongside a girl's shining features the extinguished face of the mother; or they have had no success, and are down to skin and bones, shrunken to a re- form proposed by some old fool who is called the Great So-and-so by his fifty admirers. .
He came to a halt again, this time in a square where he recognized some of the houses and remembered the public controversies and int~llectual ferment that had a~companied their construction. He thought of the friends of his youth; they had all been the friends of his youth, whether he knew them personally or only by name, whether they were the same age as he or older, all the rebels who wanted to bring new things and new people into the world, whether here or scattered over all the places he had ever known. Now these houses stood in the late, already fading afternoon light, like kindly aunts in outmoded hats, quite proper and irrelevant and anything but exciting. He was tempted to a little smile. But the people who had left these unassuming relics behind had meanwhile become pro- fessors, celebrities, names, recognized participants in the recognized
development of progress; they had made it by a more or less direct path from the mist to the petrifact, and for that reason history may report of them someday, in giving its account of the century: "Among those present were . . . "
35
BANK DIRECTOR LEO FISCHEL AND THE PRINCIPLE OF INSUFFICIENT CAUSE
At this moment Ulrich was interrupted by an acquaintance address- ing him out of nowhere. Before leaving home that morning this ac- quaintance had had the unpleasant surprise of fmding in a side pocket of his briefcase a circular from Count Leinsdorf, which he had received some time ago and forgotten to answer because his sound business sense disinclined him from having anything to do with patriotic movements originating in high social circles. "Rotten business," he doubtless said to himself at the time, though that was not at all what he would have wanted to say publicly; but, as memory will, his had played a dirty trick on him by taking orders from this first, unofficial reaction of his feelings and letting the matter drop, instead of waiting for a considered decision. When he opened the form letter this time, he saw something he had previously overlooked and that now caused him acute embarrassment; it was really only a phrase, two little words that turned up in all sorts ofplaces through- out the text, but these two words had cost the portly man several minutes of indecision as he stood, briefcase in hand, before leaving his house. They were: "the true. "
Bank Director Fischel-for that is what he was called, Director Leo Fischel of the Lloyd Bank, though he was only a manager with the title of director-(Ulrich, though much younger, could regard himself as a friend from earlier days; he had been quite close to
Pseudoreality Prevatls · 1 39
140 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
Fischel's daughter, Gerda, the last time hehad stayed in the city, though he had called on her only once since his retum)-Director Fischellmew Count Leinsdorf as a man who made his money work for him and kept up with modem methods; in faGt, running his mind over the account (Count Leinsdorfused Lloyd's, among other banks, for his dealings on the stock exchange), he recognized Count Leins- dorf for a man of consequence, as they say in business. Therefore Leo Fischel could not understand how he could have been so care- less about so important an invitation, in which His Grace appealed to a select circle to take part in a great and communal undertaking. Fischel himselfhad been included in this circle only because ofsome very special circumstances, to be gone into later, and all this was the reason he had rushed up to Ulrich the moment he caught sight of him. He had heard that Ulrich had something to do with the affair, was indeed in a "prominent position"- o n e of those inexplicable but not uncommon rumors that anticipate the facts-and fired offthree questions at him like a three-barreled pistol:
''What is really meant by 'the true patriotism,' 'the true progress,' and 'the true Austria'? "
Startled out of his mood but continuing its spirit, Ulrich replied in the manner he always fell into in his conversations with Fischel: "The P . I. C. "
"The what? " Director Fischel innocently spelled the letters out after him, this time not suspecting a joke, because such abbrevia- tions, while not so numerous then as they are now, were familiar from cartels and trusts, and radiated confidence. But then he said: "Please, no jokes just now, I'm in a hurry and late for a meeting. "
"The Principle of Insufficient Cause," Ulrich elucidated. "You are a philosopher yourself and know about the Principle of Sufficient Cause. The only exception we make is in our own individual cases: in our real, i mean our personal, lives, and in our public-historical lives, everything that happens happens for no good or sufficient reason. "
Leo Fischel wavered between disputing this and letting it pass. Director Leo Fischel of the Lloyd Bank loved to philosophize (there still are such people in the practical professions) but he actually was in a hurry, so he said: "You are dodging the issue. I lmow what prog- ress is, I know what Austria is, and I probably lmow what it is to love my country too, but I'm not quite sure what true patriotism is, or
what the true Austria, or true progress may be, and that's what I'm asking you. "
"All right. Do you lrnow what ari enzyme is? Or a catalyst? "
Leo Fischel only raised a hand defensively.
"It doesn't contribute anything materially, but it sets processes in
motion. You must lrnow from history that there has never been such a thing as the true faith, the true morality, and the true philosophy. But the wars, the viciousness, and the hatreds unleashed in their name have transformed the world in a fruitful way. "
"Some other time! " Fischel implored him, and then tried another tack: cards on the table. "Look, I have to cope with this on the Ex- change, and I really would like to lrnow what Count Leinsdorf actu- ally has in mind: just what does he mean by that additional 'true' of his? "
"I give you my solemn word," Ulrich said gravely, "that neither I nor anyone else lrnows what 'the true' anything is, but I can assure you that it is on the point of realization. "
"Y,ou're a cynic! " Director Fischel declared as he dashed off, but after the first step he turned back and amended himself: "Quite re- cently I was saying to Gerda that you would have made a first-rate diplomat. I hope you'll come see us again soon. "
THANKS TO THE ABOVE-MENTIONED PRINCIPLE THE PARALLEL CAMPAIGN BECOMES A TANGIBLE REALITY BEFORE ANYONE KNOWS WHA T IT IS
Director Leo Fischel of the Uoyd Bank, like all bank directors before the war, believed in progress. As a capable man in his field he lrnew, of course, that only where one has a thorough lrnowledge of the facts can one have a conviction on which one would be willing to
Pseudoreality Prevails · 141
142 • THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
stake one's own money. The immense expansion of activities does not allow for such competence outside one's own field. Accordingly, efficient, hardworking people have no convictions beyond the limits of their own narrow specialties; none, that is, they will not instantly abandon under pressure from the outside. One might gc;> so far as to say that conscientiousness fqrces them to act differently from the way they think. Director Fischel, for instance, could form no concept at all of true patriotism or the true Austria, but he did have his own opinion of true progress, which was certainly different from Count Leinsdorf's opinion. Exhausted by stocks and bonds or whatever it was he had to deal with, his only recreation an evening at the opera once a week, he believed in a progress of the whole that must some- how resemble his bank's progressively increasing profitability. But now that Count Leinsdorf claimed to know better even in this re- spect, and thus began to put pressure on Leo Fischel's conseience, Fischel felt that "you can never know, after all" (except, of course, with stocks and bonds), and since one might not know but on the other hand would rather not miss out on anything, he decided ~oin- formally sound out his general manager on the matter.
When. he did, the general manager had for quite similar reasons already had a talk with the chief executive of the National Bank and knew all about it. For not only the general manager of the lloyd Bank but, it goes without saying, the chief executive of the National Bank had also received an invitation from Count Leinsdorf. Leo Fischel, who was only a head of department, owed his invitation en- tirely to his wife's family connections: she came from the upper reaches ofthe government/bureaucracy and never forgot it, either in her social relations or in her domestic quarrels with Leo. He there- fore contented himself, as he and his superior talked about the Paral- lel Campaign, with wagging his head significantly, as if tO s~y "big proposition," though it might in other circumstances have meant "rotten business"-either way it couldn't hurt, but on account of his wife Fischel would probably have been happier if it had turned out to be a "rotten business. "
So far, however, von Meier-Ballot, the chief executive who had been consulted by the general manager, had himself formed an ex- cellent impression of the undertaking. When he received Count Leinsdorf's "suggestion," he went over to the mirror-naturally,
though not for that reason-and there he saw, above the tailcoat and the little gold chain ofhis order, the. composed face of a middle-class government minister, in which the hardness of money was at most barely visible somewhere far back in the eyes. His fingers hung down like flags in a calm, as though they had never in their life had to carry out the hasty movements with which an apprentice bank teller counts his cash. This bureaucratically overbred high fmancier who had hardly a thing in common any longer with the hungry, roaming wild dogs of the stock-exchange game, saw vague but pleasingly modulated pessibilities ahead, an outlook he had an opportunity of confirming that same evening in conversation with the former Minis- ters of State von Holtzkopf and Baron Wisnieczky at the Industrial- ists' Club.
These two gentlemen were well-informed, distinguished, and dis- creet persons in some kind of high positions into which they had been shunted after the brief caretaker government between two po- litical crises in which they had participated had become superfluous. They were men-who had spent their lives in the service of the State and the Crown, with no taste for the limelight unless ordered into it by His Majesty himself. They had heard the rumor that the great campaign . was to have a subtle barb aimed at Germany. They were still convinced, as they had been before the failure of their mission, that the lamentable manifestations that had even then been making the political life of the Dual Monarchy a focus of infection for Europe were extraordinarily complicated. But just as they had felt duty-bound to regard these problems as solvable when they received the order to solve them, so they would declare that it was not outside the realm of possibility that something might be achieved by the means Count Leinsdorfwas suggesting. Specifically, they felt that "a landmark," "a splendid show ofvitality," "a commanding role on the world stage that would have a bracing effect on the situation here at home," were goals so well formulated by Count Leinsdorf that one could no more refuse them than refuse a call for every man who de- sired the Good to step forward.
It is ofcourse possible that von Holtzkopfand Wisnieczky, as men informed and experienced in public affairs, felt some qualms, espe- cially as they might assume that they themselves would be expected to play a part in the further development of this campaign. But it is
Pseudoreality Prevails · 143
144 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
easy for people who live on the ground floor to be choosy and tum down whatever does not s1,1it them. One whose gondola in life is nine thousand feet up in the air, however, can't simply step outside, even if one is not in accord with everything going on. And since persons in such high circles really are loyal and-as opposed to the previously . mentioned bourgeois dither-do not like to act otherwise than they think, they must in many cases avoid giving too much careful thought to an issue. The banker von Meier-Ballot accordingly found his own favorable impression of the affair confirmed by what the two other gentlemen had to say about it; while he personally and professionally was given to caution, he had heard enough to decide that this was an affair to which he would lend his presence in any case, but without committing himself.
At this time the Parallel Campaign was not yet in existence, and not even Count Leinsdorf had any idea what form it would take. It can be said with certainty that at the moment, the only definite thing that had occurred to him was a list ofnames.
But even this is a great deal. It meant that even at this stage, with- out anyone needing to have a clear conception ofanything, a network of readiness that covered a great many connections was in place; and one can certainly maintain that this is the proper sequence. For first it was necessary to invent knife and fork, and then mankind learned to eat properly. This was how Count Leinsdorf explained it.
37
BY LAUNCHING THE SLOGAN "YEAR OF AUSTRIA," A JOURNALIST MAKES A LOT OF TROUBLE FOR COUNT LEINSDORF, WHO ISSUES A FRANTIC CALL FOR ULRICH
Although Count Leinsdorf had sent out invitations in many direc- tions "to start people thinking," he might riot have made headway so quickly had not an influential journalist who had heard that some- thing was in the wind quickly published two long articles in his paper offering as his own ideas everything he had guessed to be in the works. He did not know much-where, indeed, could he have found out? -but no one noticed; indeed, this was just what made it possible for his articles to be so irresistibly effective. He was really the inven- tor of the idea of the "Year of Austria" that he wrote about in his columns, without himself knowing what he meant by it but writing sentence after sentence in which this phrase combined with others as in a dream and took on new forms and unleashed storms of enthusi- asm. Count Leinsdorf was horrified at first, but he was wrong. The phrase "Year of Austria" showed what it means to be a journalistic genius, for it was a triumph of true instinct. It caused vibrations to sound that would have remained dumb at the mention of an "Aus- trian Century"; the call to bring about such an era would have struck sensible people as impossible to take seriously. Why this is so would be hard to say. Perhaps a certain vagueness, a metaphorical quality that lessens realistic perceptions, lent wings to the feelings of more people ~ just Count Leinsdorf. For vagueness has an elevating and magnifying power. '
It seems that the bona fide, practical realist just doesn't love reality or take it seriously. As a child he crawls under the table when his parents are out, converting their living room by this simple yet in- spired trick into an adventure. As a boy he longs for a watch; as a young man with a gold watch, for a wife to go with it; as a man with
145
146 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
watch and wife, for a promotion; and yet, when he has happily achieved this little circle of desires and should be peacefully swing- ing back and forth in it like a pendulum, his supply of unsatisfied yearnings does not seem to have diminished at all. For if he wants to elevate himself above the daily rut, he resorts to figures of speech. Since to him snow is evidently unpleasant at times, he compares it to a woman's shimmering bosom, and as soon as he begins to tire of his ~fe's breasts, he likens them to shimmering snow. He would be hor- rified if the beaks of his wife's nipples actually turned to coral, or their billing and cooing turned out to come froin the horny beak of a real dove, but poetically it excites him. He is capable of turning ev- erything into something else-snow to skin, skin to flower petals, petals to sugar, sugar to powder, powder to drifting snow again-as long as he can make it out to be something it is not, which may be taken to prove that he cannot bear to stay in the same place for long, no matter where he may find himself. Most of all, no true Kakanian could, in his. soul, bear Kakania for long. To ask of him an "Austrian Century" would be tantamount to asking him to sentence himself and the world to the punishments of hell by an absurdly voluntary effort. An Austrian Year, on the other hand, was quite something else. It meant: Let's show them, for once, who we could be! -but, so to speak, only until further·notice, and for a year at most. One could understand by it whatever one liked, it wasn't for eternity, and this somehow touched the heart. It stirred to life the deepest love of one's country.
And so Count . Leinsdorf had an undreamed-of success. After all, his original idea had also come to him as such a figure of speech, but a number of names had occurred to him as well, and his moral nature aspired to something beyond such intangibles. He had a well-defined concept of the way the imagination of the common people or, as he now put it to a faithful journalist, the imagination of the public, must be directed to a goal that was clear, sound, reasonable, and in har- mony with the true aims of mankind and their own country. This journalist, spurred on by his colleague's success, wrote all this down immediately, and as he had the advantage of having it from "an au- thentic source," it was part ofthe technique ofhis profession to draw attention to this by attributing his information in large type to "influ- ential circles. " This was precisely what Count Leinsdorf had ex-
pected of him, for His Grace attached great importance to being no ideologue but an experienced practical statesman, and he wanted a fine line drawn between a "Year of Austria" as the brainchild of a clever member of the press and the circumspection of responsible circles. To this end he borrowed the technique of someone he would not normally have liked to regard as a model-Bismarck-to let newsmen serve as the mouthpiece for his actual intentions so as to be able to acknowledge or disavow them as circumstances might dictate.
But while Count Leinsdorf acted with such shrewdness, he over- looked something. For it was not only a man like himselfwho saw the Truth we so much need; innumerable other people saw themselves as possessing it as well. It may be defmed as a calcification of the previously described state of mind, in which one still makes meta- phors. Sooner or later even the desire for these metaphors disap- pears, and many ofthe people who still retain a supply ofdefinitively unfulfilled dreams create for themselves a point at which they stare in secret, as though it marks the beginning of a world that life still owes them. In almost no time after he had sent out his statement to the press, His Grace had intimations that all those who have no money harbor inside them an unpleasant crank. This opinionated man-within-the-man goes with him to the office every morning and has absolutely no way to air his protest against the way things are done in the world; so instead he keeps his eyes glued to a lifelong secret point ofhis own that everyone else refuses to see, although·it is obviously the source of all the misery in a world that will not recog-
·nize its savior. Stich fixed points, where the center of a person's equi- librium coincides with the world's center of equilibrium, may be, for instance, a spittoon that can be shut with a simple latch; or the aboli- tion of open salt cellars in restaurants, the kind people poke their knives into, so as to stop at one stroke the spread of that scourge of mankind, tuberculosis;· or the adoption of Oehl's system of short- hand, so effective a time-saver it can solve the problems of society once and for all; or conversion to a natural mode of living that would halt the present random destruction ofthe environment; not to men- tion a metaphysical theory ofthe motions ofcelestial bodies, simplifi- cation of the administrative apparatus, and a reform of s~x life. In the right circumstances a man can help himself by writing a book about
Pseudoreality Prevails · 147
148 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
his point, or a pamphlet, or at least a letter to the editor, thereby putting his protest on the historical record, which is marvelously comforting even if nobody ever reads it. Usually, however, it can be counted on to attract the attention of a few readers who assure the author that he is a new Copernicus, whereupon they introduce them- selves as unrecognized Newtons. This custom of picking the points out of each other's fur is widespread and a great comfort, but it is without lasting effect because the participants soon fall to quarreling and find themselves isolated again. However, it can also happen that a small circle of admirers gathers around one prophet or another, and with united energy accuses heaven of being remiss in not suffi- ciently supporting its anointed son. And if a ray of hope should sud- denly fall from on high upon such little piles of points, as it did when Count Leinsdorfissued a public statement that a "Year of Austria"- if it should materialize, which was still not yet settled-would fu any case have to be in accord with the true aims ofexistence, they receive it like saints vouchsafed a divine vision.
Count Leinsdorf had aimed at bringing about a powerful demon- stration arising spontaneously out of the midst of the people them- selves, meaning the universities, the clergy, certain names never absent from the rosters of charity affairs, and even the press. He was counting on the patriotic parties, the "sound sense" of the middle class, which hung out flags on the Emperor's birthday, and the sup- port of leading financiers; he even included the politicians, because he hoped in his heart that his great work would render politics super- fluous by bringing it all down to the common denominator of "our fatherland," from which he subsequently intended to subtract the "land," leaving the fatherly ruler as the only remainder. But the one thing His Grace had not reckoned with and that surprised him was the widespread need to improve the world, which was hatched out by the warmth of a great occasion as insect eggs are hatched by a fire. His Grace had not counted on this; he had expected a great amount of patriotism but was not prepared for inventions, theories, schemes for world unity, and people demanding that he release them from intellectual prisons. They besieged his palace, hailed the Parallel Campaign as a chance to help mak~ the truth prevail at last, and Count Leinsdorf did not know what to do with them. In awareness of his social position he could not, after all, sit down at table with all
these people, yet, given a mind filled with intense morality, he did not want to avoid meeting them, either; but since his education had been in politics and philosophy to the exclusion of science and tech- nology, he had no way of telling whether there was anything to their proposals or not.
In this situation he felt an increasingly desperate need for Ulrich, who had been recommended to him as the very man for the occa- sion; obviously, his secretary or any ordinary secretary could not cope with such exigencies. Once, when he had been very annoyed with his secretary, he had even prayed to God-though he was ashamed ofit the next day-for Ulrich to come. And when this did not happen, he personally took systematic steps to find him. He ordered the direc- tory to be checked, but Ulrich was not yet in it. He then went to his friend Diotima, who could usually be counted on for advice, and it turned out that the admirable woman had actually seen Ulrich al- ready, but she had forgotten to ask for his address, or pretended she had in order to us~the opportunity to propose a new and far better candidate for secretary of the great campaign. But Count Leinsdorf was quite agitated and declared most positively that he had already grown used to Ulrich, that a Prussian was out of the question, even a reformed Prussian, and that he wanted to hear nothing at all about still further complications. Dismayed to see that he had apparently hurt his friend's feelings, he came up with an idea of his own-he told her that he would drive straight to his friend the Commissioner of Police, who should certainly be able to dig up the address of any citizen whatever.
Pseudoreality Prevails · 149
CLARISSE AND HER DEMONS
When Ulrich's note arrived Walter and Clarisse were again playing the piano so violently that the spindly reproduction furniture rattled and the Dante Gabriel Rossetti prints on the walls trembled. The aged messenger who had found house and doors open without being challenged was met by a full blast of thunder in the face as he fought his way into the sitting room, and the holy uproar he had wandered into left him nailed to the wall With awe. It was Clarisse who finally discharged the· onrushing musical excitement with two powerful crashes and set him free. While she read the note, the interrupted outpouring still writhed under Walter's hands; a melody ran along jerkily like a stork and then spread its wings. Clarisse kept a mistrust- ful ear on this while she deciphered Ulrich's handwriting.
When she announced their friend's impending arrival, Walter said: "Too bad! "
She sat down again beside him on her little revolving piano stool, and a smile that for some reason struck Walter as cruel parted her lips, which looked sensual. It was that moment when the players rein in their blood in order to be able to release it in the same rhythm, eyes blazing out of their heads in four long parallel axes while their buttocks tense and grip the little stools that keep trying to wobble on the long necks of their wooden screws.
The next instant, Clarisse and Walter were off like two locomo- tives racing side by side. The piece they were playing came rushing at their eyes like flashing rails, vanished under the thundering engine, and spread out behind them as a ringing, resonant, marvelously pres- ent landscape. In the course of this. ride these two people's separate feelings were compressed into a single entity; hearing, blood, mus- cles, were all swept along irresistibly by the same experience; shim- mering, bending, curving walls of sound forced their bodies onto the same track, bent them as one, and expanded and contracted their chests in the same breath. In a fraction of a second, gaiety, sadness,
anger, and fear, love and hatred, desire and satiety, passed through Walter and Clarisse. They became one, just as in a great pan~c hun- dreds of people who a moment before had been distinct in every way suddenly make the same flailing movements offlight, utter the same senseless screams, their gaping mouths and staring eyes the same, all swept backward and forward, left and right, by the same aimless force, howling, twitching, tangling, trembling.