"
"Are you involved with the oil fields too?
"Are you involved with the oil fields too?
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v2
But this vague trembling of the borderline was a not unpleasant feeling.
Ulrich began by speaking of the mischief of interpreting the kind of experiences they were talking about not as if what was going on in them was merely a peculiar change in thinking, but as if superhuman thinking was taking the place of the ordinary kind. Whether one called it divine illumination or, in the modem fashion, merely intui- tion, he considered it the main hindrance to real understanding. In his opinion, nothing was to be gained by yielding to notions that would not stand up under careful investigation. That would only be like Icarus's wax wings, which melted with the altitude, he ex- claimed. Ifone wished to fly other than in dreams, one must master it on metal wings.
He paused for a moment, then went on, pointing to his books: "Here you have testimony, Christian, Judaic, Indian, Chinese, some separated by more than a thousand years. Yet one recognizes in all of them the same uniform structure of inner movement, divergent from the ordinary. Almost the only way they differ from each other comes from the various didactic superstructures of theology and cos- mic wisdom under whose protective roofthey have taken shelter. We
832 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
therefore may assume the existence of a certain alternative and un- common condition of great importance, which man is capable of achieving and which has deeper origins than religions.
"On the other hand," he added, qualifying what he had said, "the churches, that is, civilized communities of religious people, have al- ways treated this condition with the kind of mistrust a bureaucrat feels for the spirit of private enterprise. They've never accepted this riotous experience without reservations; on the contrary, they've di- rected great and apparently justified efforts toward replacing it with a properly regulated and intelligible morality. So the history of this alternative condition resembles a progressive denial and dilution, something like the draining of a swamp.
"And when confessional authority over the spirit and its vocabu- lary became outmoded, our condition understandably came to be re- garded as nothing more than a chimera. Why should bourgeois culture, in replacing the old religious culture, be more religious than its predecessor? Bourgeois culture has reduced this other condition to the status of a dog fetching intuitions. There are hordes of people today who find fault with rationality and would like us to believe that in their wisest moments they were doing their thinking with the help of some special, suprarational faculty. That's the final public vestige of it all, itself totally rationalistic. What's left of the drained swamp is rubbish! And so, except for its uses in poetry, this old condition is excusable only in uneducated people in the first weeks of a love af- fair, as a temporary aberration, like green leaves that every so often sprout posthumously from the wood of beds and lecterns; but if it threatens to revert to its original luxuriant growth, it is unmercifully dug up and rooted out! "
Ulrich had been talking for about as long as it takes a surgeon to wash his arms and hands so as not to carry any germs into the field of operation, and also with all the patience, concentration, and even- handedness it paradoxically takes to cope with the excitement at- tendant on the task ahead. But after he had completely disinfected himself he almost yearned for a little fever or infection-after all, he did not love sobriety for its own sake. Agathe was sitting on the li- brary ladder, and even when her brother fell silent she gave no sign of participation. She gazed out into the endless oceanic gray of the
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 833
sky and listened to the silence just as she had been listening to the words. So Ulrich took up the thread again, with a slight obstinacy that he barely managed to mask by his lighthearted tone.
"Let's get back to our bench on the mountain, with that herd of cows," he suggested. "Imagine some high bureaucrat sitting there in his brand-new leather shorts with 'Gruss Gott' embroidered on his green suspenders. He represents 'real life' on vacation. Of course, this temporarily alters his consciousness of his existence. When he looks at the herd ofcows he neither counts them, classifies them, nor estimates the weight on the hoof of the animals grazing before him; he forgives his enemies and thinks indulgently of his family. For him the herd has been transformed from a practical object into a moral one, as it were. He may also, ofcourse, be estimating and counting a little and not forgiving a whole lot, but then at least it is bathed in woodland murmurs, purling brooks, and sunshine. In a word, what otherwise forms the content of his life seems 'far away' and 'not all that important. ' "
"It's a holiday mood," Agathe agreed mechanically.
"Exactly! I f he regards his nonvacation life as 'not all that impor- tant,' it means only as long as his vacation lasts. So that is the truth today: a man has two modes of existence, of consciousness, and of thought, and saves himself from being frightened to death by ghosts-which this prospect would of necessity induce-by regard- ing one condition as a vacation from the other, an interruption, a rest, or anything else he thinks he can recognize. Mysticism, on the other hand, would be connected with the intention of going on vaca- tion permanently. Our high official is bound to regard such an idea as disgraceful and instantly feel-as in fact he always does toward the end of his vacation-that real life lies in his tidy office. And do we feel any differently? Whether something needs to be straightened out or not will always eventually decide whether one takes it com- pletely seriously, and here these experiences have not had much luck, for over thousands of years they have never got beyond their primordial disorder and incompleteness. And for this we have the ready label of Mania-religious mania, erotomania, take your choice. You can be assured that in our day even most religious people are so infected with the scientific way of thinking that they don't trust
834 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
themselves to look into what is burning in their inmost hearts but are always ready to speak of this ardor in medical terms as a mania, even though officially they take a different line! "
Agathe gave her brother a look in which something crackled like fire in the rain. "So now you've managed to maneuver us out of it! " she accused him, when he didn't go on.
"You're right," he admitted. "But what's peculiar is that though we've covered it all up like a suspect well, some remaining drop of this unholy holy water bums a hole in all our ideals. None of our ideals is quite right, none of them makes us happy: they all point to something that's not there-we've said enough about that today. Our civilization is a temple ofwhat would be called unsecured mania, but
it is also its asylum, and we don't know if we are suffering from an . ,I
excess or a defic1ency.
"Perhaps you've never dared surrender yourself to it all the way,"
Agathe said wistfully, and climbed down from her ladder; for they were supposed to be busy sorting their father's papers and had let themselves be distracted from what had gradually become a pressing task, first by the books and then by their conversation. Now they went back to checking the dispositions and notes referring to the di- vision of their inheritance, for the day of reckoning with Hagauer was imminent. But before they had seriously settled down to this, Agathe straightened up from her papers and asked him once more: "Just how much do you yourself believe everything you've been telling
? " me.
Ulrich answered without looking up. "Suppose that while your heart had turned away from the world, there was a dangerous bull among the herd. Try to believe absolutely that the deadly disease you were telling me about would have taken another course if you had not allowed your feelings to slacken for a single instant. " Then he raised his head and pointed to the papers he had been sorting: "And law, justice, fair play? Do you really think they're entirely superfluous? "
"So just how much do you believe? " Agathe reiterated.
"Yes and no," Ulrich said.
"That means no," Agathe concluded.
Here chance intervened in their talk. As Ulrich, who neither felt
inclined to resume the discussion nor was calm enough to get on with
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 835
the business at hand, rounded up the scattered papers, something fell to the floor. It was a loose bundle of all kinds of things that had inad- vertently been pulled out with the will from a corner of the desk drawer where it might have lain for decades without its owner know- ing. Ulrich looked at it distractedly as he picked it up and recognized his father's handwriting on several pages; but it was not the script of his old age but that ofhis prime. Ulrich took a closer look and saw that in addition to written pages there were playing cards, snapshots, and all sorts of odds and ends, and quickly realized what he had found. It was the desk's "poison drawer. " Here were painstakingly recorded jokes, mostly dirty; nude photographs; postcards, to be sent sealed, of buxom dairy maids whose panties could be opened behind; packs of cards that looked quite normal but showed some awful things when held up to the light; mannequins that voided all sorts of stuff when pressed on the belly; and more of the same. The old gentleman had undoubtedly long since forgotten the things lying in that drawer, or he would certainly have destroyed them in good time. They obviously dated from those mid-life years when quite a few aging bachelors and widowers warm themselves with such obscenities, but Ulrich blushed at this exposure of his father's unguarded fantasies, now released from the flesh by death. Their relevance to the discussion just broken off was instantly clear to him. Nevertheless, his first impulse was to destroy this evidence before Agathe could see it. But she had already noticed that something unusual had fallen into his hands, so he changed his mind and asked her to come over.
He was going to wait and hear what she would say. Suddenly the realization possessed him again that she was, after all, a woman who must have had her experiences, a point he had totally lost sight of while they were deep in conversation. But her face gave no sign of what she was thinking; she looked at her father's illicit relics seriously and calmly, at times smiling openly, though not animatedly. So Ul- rich, despite his resolve, began.
"Those are the dregs of mysticism! " he said wryly. "The strict moral admonitions of the will in the same drawer as this swill! "
He had stood up and was pacing back and forth in the room. And once he had begun to talk, his sister's silence spurred him on.
"You asked me what I believe," he began. "I believe that all our moral injunctions are concessions to a society of savages.
836 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
"I believe none of them are right.
"There's a different meaning glimmering behind them. An alche- mist's fire.
"I believe that nothing is ever done with.
"I believe that nothing is in balance but that everything is trying to raise itself on the fulcrum of everything else.
"That's what i believe. It was born with me, or I with it. "
He had stood still after each of these sentences, for he spoke softly and had somehow or other to give emphasis to his credo. Now his eye was caught by the classical busts atop the bookshelves; he saw a plas- ter Minerva, a Socrates; he remembered that Goethe had kept an over-lifesize plaster head of Juno in his study. This predilection seemed alarmingly distant to him; what had once been an idea in full bloom had since withered into a dead classicism. Turned into the rearguard dogmatism of rights and duties of his father's contempo- raries. All in vain.
"The morality that has been handed down to us," he s3. id, "is like being sent out on a swaying high wire over an abyss, with no other advice than: 'Hold yourself as stiff as you can! '
"I seem, without having had a say in the matter, to have been born with another kind of morality.
"You asked me what I believe. I believe there are valid reasons you can use to prove to me a thousand times that something is good or beautiful, and it will leave me indifferent; the only mark I shall go by is whether its presence makes me ·rue or sink.
''Whether it rouses me to life or not.
''Whether it's only my tongue and my brain that speak of it, or the radiant shiver in my fingertips.
"But I can't prove anything, either.
"And I'm even convinced that a person who yields to this is lost. He stumbles into twilight. Into fog and nonsense. Into unarticulated boredom.
"Ifyou take the unequivocal out ofour life, what's left is a sheep- fold without a wolf.
"I believe that bottomless vulgarity can even be the good angel that protects us.
"And so, I don't believe!
"And above all, I don't believe in the domestication of evil by
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 837
good as the characteristic of our hodgepodge civilization. I find that repugnant.
"So I believe and don't believe!
"But maybe I believe that the time is coming when people will on the one hand be very intelligent, and on the other hand be mystics. Maybe our morality is already splitting into these two components. I might also say into mathematics and mysticism. Into practical im- provements and unknown adventure! "
He had not been so openly excited about anything in years. The "maybe"s in his speech did not trouble him; they seemed only natural.
Agathe had meanwhile knelt down before the stove; she had the bundle of pictures and papers on the floor beside her. She looked at everything once more, piece by piece, before pushing it into the fire. She was not entirely unsusceptible to the vulgar sensuality of the ob- scenities she was looking at. She felt her body being aroused by them. This seemed to her to have as little to do with her self as the feeling of being on a deserted heath and somewhere a rabbit scutters past. She did not know whether she would be ashamed to tell her brother this, but she was profoundly fatigued and did not want to talk anymore. Nor did she listen to what he was saying; her heart had by now been too shaken by these ups and downs, and could no longer keep up. Others had always known better than she what was right; she thought about this, but she did so, perhaps because she was ashamed, with a secret defiance. To walk a forbidden or secret path: in that she felt superior to Ulrich. She heard him time and again cau- tiously taking back everything he had let himself be carried away into saying, and his words beat like big drops of joy and sadness against her ear.
13
ULRICH RETURNS AND LEARNS FROM THE GENERAL WHA T HE HAS MISSED
Forty-eight hours later Ulrich was standing in his abandoned house. It was early in the morning. The house was meticulously tidy, dusted and polished; his books and papers lay on the tables precisely as he had left them at his hasty departure, carefully preserved by hisser- vant, open or bristling with markers that had become incomprehen- sible, this or that paper still with a pencil stuck between the pages. But everything had cooled off and hardened like the contents of a melting pot under which one has forgotten to stoke the fire. Painfully disillusioned, Ulrichstaredblanklyatthesetracesofavanishedhour, matrix of the intense excitement and ideas that had filled it. He felt repelled beyond words at this encounter with his own debris. "It spreads through the doors and the rest of the house all the way down to those idiotic antlers in the hall. What a life I've been leading this last year! " He shut his eyes where he stood, so as not to have to see it. "What a good thing she'll soon be following me," he thought. "We'll change everything! " Then he was tempted after all to visualize the last hours he had spent here; it seemed to him that he had been away for a very long time, and he wanted to compare.
Clarisse: that was nothing. But before and after: the strange tur- moil in which he had hurried home, and then that nocturnal melting of the world! "Like iron softening under some great pressure," he mused. "It begins to flow, and yet it is still iron. A man forces his way into the world," he thought, "but it suddenly closes in around him, and everything looks different. No more connections. No road on which he came and which he must pursue. Something shimmering enveloping him on the spot where a moment ago he had seen a goal, or actually the sober void that lies before every goal. " Ulrich kept his eyes closed. Slowly, as a shadow, his feeling returned. It happened as if it were returning to the spot where he had stood then and was again standing now, this feeling that was more out there in the room
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 839
than in his consciousness-it was really neither a feeling nor a thought, but some uncanny process. If one were as overstimulated and lonely as he had been then, one could indeed believe that the essence of the world was turning itself inside out; and suddenly it dawned on him-how was it possible that it was happening only now? -and lay there like a peaceful backward glance, that even then his feelings had announced the encounter with his sister, because from that moment on his spirit had been guided by strange forces, until . . . but before he could think "yesterday," Ulrich turned away, awakened as abruptly and palpably from his memories as if he had bumped against some solid edge. There was something here he was not yet ready to think about.
He went over to his desk and without taking off his coat looked through the mail lying there. He was disappointed not to find a tele- gram from his sister, although he had no reason to expect one. A huge pile of condolence mail lay intermingled with scientific com- munications and booksellers' catalogs. Two letters had come from Bonadea; both so thick that he did not bother to open them. There was also an urgent request from Count Leinsdorfthat he come to see him, and two fluting notes from Diotima, also inviting him to put in an appearance immediately upon his return; perused more closely, one of them, the later one, revealed unofficial overtones of a very warm, wistful, almost tender cast. Ulrich turned to the telephone messages that had come during his absence: General Stumm von Bordwehr, Section ChiefTuzzi, Count Leinsdorf's private secretary (twice), several calls from a lady who would not leave her name, probably Bonadea; Bank Director Leo Fischel; and, for the rest, business calls. While Ulrich was reading all this, still standing at his desk, the phone rang, and when he lifted the receiver a voice said: "War Ministry, Culture and Education, Corporal Hirsch," clearly taken aback at finding itself unexpectedly ricocheting off Ulrich's own voice, but hastening to explain that His Excellency the General had given orders to ring Ulrich every morning at ten, and that His Excellency would speak to him right away.
Five minutes later Stumm was assuring him that he had to attend some "supremely important meetings" that very morning, but abso- lutely had to speak to Ulrich first. When Ulrich asked what about, and why it could not be taken care of over the phone, Stumm sighed
840 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
into the receiver and proclaimed "news, worries, problems," but could not be made to say anything more specific. Twenty minutes later a War Ministry carriage drew up at the gate and General Stumm entered the house, followed by an orderly with a large leather briefcase slung from his shoulder. Ulrich, who well remem- bered this receptacle for the General's intellectual problems from the battle plans and ledger pages of Great Ideas, raised his eyebrows interrogatively. Stumm von Bordwehr smiled, sent the orderly back to the carriage, unbuttoned his tunic to get out the little key for the security lock, which he wore on a fine chain around his neck, un- locked the case, and wordlessly exhumed its sole contents, two loaves of regulation army bread.
"Our new bread," he declared after a dramatic pause. "I've brought you some for a taste! "
"How nice of you," Ulrich said, "bringing me bread after I've spent a night traveling, instead of letting me get some sleep. "
"Ifyou have some schnapps in the house, which one may assume," the General retorted, "then there's no better breakfast than bread and schnapps after a sleepless night. You once told me that our regu- lation bread was the only thing you liked about the Emperor's ser- vice, and I'll go so far as to say that the Austrian Army beats any other army in the world at making bread, especially since our Commis- sariat brought out this new loaf, Model1914! So I brought you one, though that's not the only reason. The other is that I always do this now on principle. Not that I have to spend every minute at my desk, or account for every step I take out of the room, you understand, but you know that our General Staff isn't called the Jesuit Corps for nothing, and there's always talk when a man is out of the office a lot; also my chief, His Excellency von Frost, may not, perhaps, have a completely accurate idea· of the scope of the mind-the civilian mind, I mean-and that's why for some time now I've been taking along this official bag and an orderly whenever I want to go out for a bit; and since I don't want the orderly to think that the bag is empty, I always put two loaves ofbread in it. "
Ulrich could not help laughing, and the General cheerfully joined in.
"You seem to be less enchanted with the great ideas of mankind than you were? " Ulrich asked.
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 841
"Everyone is less enchanted with them," Stumm declared while he sliced the bread with his pocketknife. "The new slogan that's been handed out is 'Action! ' "
"You'll have to explain that to me. "
"That's what I came for. You're not the true man of action. " "I'm not? "
"Well, I don't know about that. "
"Maybe I don't either. But that's what they say. "
"Who's 'they'? "
"Amheim, for one. "
"You're on good terms with Amheim? "
"Well, ofcourse. We get along famously. Ifhe weren't such a high-
brow we could be on a first-name basis by now!
"
"Are you involved with the oil fields too? "
To gain time, the General drank some ofthe schnapps Ulrich had
had brought in and chewed on the bread. "Great taste," he brought out laboriously, and kept on chewing.
"Of course you're involved with the oil fields! " Ulrich burst out, suddenly seeing the light. "It's a problem that concerns your naval branch because it needs fuel for its ships, and if Amheim wants the drilling fields he'll have to concede a favorable price for you. Besides, Galicia is deployment territory and a buffer against Russia, so you have to provide special safeguards in case ofwar for the oil supply he wants to develop there. So his munitions works will supply you with the cannons you want! Why didn't I see this before? You're positively born for each other! "
The General had taken the precaution of munching on a second piece of bread, but now he could contain himself no longer, and making strenuous efforts to gulp down the whole mouthful at once, he said: "It's easy for you to talk so glibly about an accommodation; you've no idea what a skinflint he is! Sorry-1 mean, you have no idea," he amended himself, "what moral dignity he brings to a busi- ness deal like this. I never dreamed, for example, that ten pennies per ton per railway mile is an ethical problem you have to read up on in Goethe or the history of philosophy. "
"You're conducting these negotiations? ''
The General took another gulp of schnapps. "I never said that
842 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
negotiations were going on! You could call it an exchange ofviews, if you like. "
"And you're empowered to conduct them? "
"Nobody's empowered! We're talking, that's all. Surely one can talk now and then about something besides the Parallel Campaign? And if anyone were empowered, it certainly wouldn't be me; that's no job for the Culture and Education Department, it's a matter for the higher-ups, even the Chiefs of Staff. If I had anything at all to do with it, it would be only as a kind of technical adviser on civilian intel- lectual questions, an interpreter, so to speak, because of Arnheim being so educated. "
"And because you're always running into him, thanks to me and Diotima! My dear Stumm, ifyou want me to go on being your stalk- ing horse, you'll have to tell me the truth! "
But Stumm had had time to prepare himself for this. "Why are you asking, if you know it already? " he countered indignantly. "Do you think you can nail me down and that I don't know that Arnheim takes you into his confidence? "
"I don't know a thing! "
"But you've just been telling me that you do know. "
"I know about the oil fields. "
"And then you said that we have a common interest with Arnheim
in those oil fields. Give me your word of honor that you know this, then I can tell you everything. " Stumm von Bordwehr seized Ulrich's reluctant hand, looked him in the eye, and then said slyly:
"All right, since you're giving me yourword ofhonor that you knew everything already, I give you mine that you know all there is. Agreed? There isn't anything more. Arnheim is trying to use us, and we him. I sometimes have the most complicated spiritual conflicts over Di- otima! " he exclaimed. "But you mustn't say a word to anyone; it's a military secret! " The General waxed cheerful. "Do you know, inciden- tally, what a military secret is? " he went on. "A few years ago, when they were mobilizing in Bosnia, the War Ministry wanted to ax me. I was still a colonel then, and they gave me the command ofa territorial battalion; of course, I could have been given a brigade, but since I'm supposed to be Cavalry, and since they wanted to ax me, they sent me to a battalion. And since you need money to fight a war, once I got there they sent me the battalion cashbox too. Did you ever see one of
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 843
those in your time in the army? It looks like a cross between a coffin and a corn crib; it's made ofheavywood with iron bands all around, like the gate to a fortress. It has three locks, and three officers carry the keys to them, one each, so that no one can unlock it by himself: the commander aJ. ld his two co-cashbox-key-unlockers. Well, when I got there we congregated as iffor a prayer meeting, and one after the other we each opened a lock and reverently took out the bundles of banknotes. I felt like a high priest with two acolytes, only instead of reading the Gospel we read out the figures from the official ledger. When we were done we closed up the box, put the iron bands back on, and locked the locks, the whole thing over again, except in reverse order. I had to say something I can't remember now, and that was the end ofthe ceremony. Or so I thought, and so you'd have thought, and I was full of respect for the unflagging foresight of the military adminis- tration in wartime! But I had a fox terrier in those days, the predeces- sor to the one I have now; there was no regulation against it. He was a clever little beast, but he couldn't see a hole without starting to dig like mad. So as I was going out I noticed that Spot-that was his name; he was English-was busying himselfwith the cashbox, and there was no getting him away from it. Well, you keep hearing stories about faithful dogs uncovering the darkest conspiracies, and war was almost upon us too, so I thought to myself, Let's see what's up with Spot. And what do you suppose was the matterwith Spot? You must remember that Ord- nance doesn't provide the field battalions with the very latest supplies, so our cashbox was a venerable antique, but who would ever have thought that while the three ofus were locking up in front, it had a hole in the back, near the bottom, wide enough to put your arm through? There'd been a knot in the wood there, which had fallen out in some previous war. But what was to be done? The whole Bosnian scare was just over when the relief troops we had applied for came, and until then we could go through our ceremony everyweek, except that I had to leave Spot home so he wouldn't give our secret away. So you see, that's what a military secret sometimes looks like! "
"Hmm . . . it seems to me you're still not quite so open as that cashbox ofyours," Ulrich commented. "Are you fellows really closing the deal or not? "
"I don't know. I give you my word of honor as an officer on the General Staff: it hasn't come to that yet. "
844 • THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
"And Leinsdorf? "
"He hasn't the faintest idea, of course. Besides, he wouldn't have anything to do with Arnheim. I hear he's still terribly angry about the demonstration-you remember, you were there too. He's now dead set against the Germans. "
"Tuzzi? " Ulrich asked, continuing the cross-examination.
"He's the last man we'd want to find out anything! He would ruin the scheme at once. Of course we all want peace, but we military men have a different way of serving it than the bureaucrats. "
"And Diotima? "
"Oh, my dear fellow, please! This is altogether a man's affair; she couldn't think of such things even with gloves on! I certainly can't bring myself to burden her with the truth. And I can see why Am- heim wouldn't tell her anything about it. He talks such a lot and so beautifully, it might well be a pleasure for him to hold his tongue about something for once. Like taking a dose of bitters for the stom- ach, I imagine. "
"Do you realize that you've turned into a rogue? " Ulrich asked, and raised his glass. "Here's to your health! "
"No, not a rogue," the General defended himself. "''m a member of a ministerial council. At a meeting everyone proposes what he would like and thinks right, and in the end something comes out that no one really wanted, the so-called outcome. I don't know ifyou fol- low me--l can't express it any better. "
"Of course I follow you. But the way"you're all treating Diotima is disgraceful, just the same. "
'Td be sorry to think so," Stumm said. "But a hangman, you know, is a disreputable fellow, no question about it; yet the rope manufac- turer who supplies the prison with the rope can be a member of the Ethical Society. You don't take that sufficiently into account. "
"You got that from Arnheim! "
"Could be. I don't know. One's mind gets so complicated nowa- days," the General complained sincerely.
"And where do I come in? "
'Well, you see, I was thinking, here you are, a former army offi- cer . . . "
"Never mind. But what has this to do with being, or not being, a 'man of action'? " Ulrich asked, affronted.
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 845
"Man of action? " the General echoed, mystified.
"You began everything by saying I wasn't a man of action. "
"Oh, that. That's got nothing at all to do with it; I just happened to
start with it. I mean, Amheim doesn't exactly think ofyou as a man of action; he once said so. You have nothing to do, he says, and that puts ideas into your head. Or words to that effect. "
"Idle ideas, you mean? Ideas that can't be 'introduced in spheres of power'? Ideas for their own sake? In short, true and independent id~as! Is that it? Or possibly the ideas of an 'unworldly aesthete'? "
'Well," Stumm von Bordwehr agreed diplomatically, "something like that. "
"Like what? What do you think is more dangerous to the life of the mind-dreams or oil fields? There's no need to stuff your mouth with bread; stop it! I couldn't care less what Amheim thinks of me. But you started off by saying, 'Amheim, for one. ' So who else is there who doesn't see me as enough of a man of action? "
'Well, you know," Stumm affirmed, "quite a few. I told you that 'Action! ' is now the great rallying cry. "
'What does that mean? "
"I don't really know either. Old man Leinsdorf said: 'Something has to be done! ' That's how it started. "
"And Diotima? "
"Diotimacalls it aNew Spririt. So now lots ofpeople on the Coun- cilaresayingthat. Iwonderifyouknowwhatit'slike,thatdizzyfeel- ing in your stomach when a beautiful woman has such a head on her shoulders? "
'Til take your word for it," Ulrich conceded, refusing to let Stumm wriggle out of it. "But now I'd like to hear what Diotima has to say about this New Spirit. "
"It's what people are saying," Stumm answered. "The people on the Council are saying that the times are getting a New Spirit. Not right away, but in a few years; unless something unexpected happens sooner. And this New Spirit won't have many ideas in it. Nor is it a time for feelings. Ideas and feelings-they're more for people who have nothing to do. In short, it's a spirit of action, that's really all I know about it. But it has sometimes occurred to me," the General added pensively, "to wonder if, in the end, that isn't simply the mili- tary spirit? "
846 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
"An action has to make sense! " Ulrich claimed, and in all serious- ness, far beyond this jesters' motley conversation, his conscience re- minded him ofthe first conversation he had had on that subject with Agathe, on the Swedish rampart.
But the General agreed. ,"That's what I just said. If someone doesn't have anything to do, and doesn't know what to do with him- self, he becomes energetic. Then he starts boozing, bawling, brawl- ing, and bullying man and beast. On the other hand, you'll have to admit that someone who knows exactly what he wants can be an intri- guer. Just look at any of our youngsters on the General Staff, silently pressing his lips together and making a face like Moltke: In ten years he'll have a general's paunch under his tunic buttons-not a benign one, like mine, but a bellyful of poison. So it's hard to decide how much sense any action can make. " He thought it over, and added: "If you know how to get hold of it, there's a great deal to be learned in the army-I'm more and more convinced ofit as time goes on-but don't you think the simplest thing would be ifwe could still find the Great Idea? "
"No," Ulrich retorted. "That was nonsense. "
"All right, but in that case there's really nothing left but action. " Stumm sighed. "It's almost what I've been saying myself. Do you re- member, by the way, my warning you once that all these excessive ideas only end up in homicide? That's what we've got to prevent! But," he wheedled, "what we need is someone to take over the lead- ership. "
"And what part have you had the kindness to assign to me in the matter? " Ulrich asked, yawning openly.
"Very well, I'm leaving," Stumm assured him. "But now that we've had this heart-to-heart talk, ifyou wanted to be a true comrade there is something important you could do. Things are not going too well between Diotima and Arnheim. "
"You don't say! " His host showed some small signs of life.
"You'll see for yourself; no need to take it from me. Besides, she confides in you more than in me. "
"She confides in you? Since when? "
"She seems to have got used to me a little," the General said proudly.
"Congratulations. "
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 847
"Thanks. And you ought to look in on Leinsdorf again soon. On account of his antipathy to the Prussians. "
"I won't do it. "
"Now look, I know you don't like Amheim. But you'll have to do it anyway. "
"That's not why. I have no intention of going back to Leinsdorf. "
"But why not? He's such a fine old gentleman. Arrogant, and I can't stand him, but he's been splendid to you. "
''I'm getting out of this whole affair. "
"But Leinsdorf won't let you go. Nor Diotima either. And I cer- tainly won't!
Ulrich began by speaking of the mischief of interpreting the kind of experiences they were talking about not as if what was going on in them was merely a peculiar change in thinking, but as if superhuman thinking was taking the place of the ordinary kind. Whether one called it divine illumination or, in the modem fashion, merely intui- tion, he considered it the main hindrance to real understanding. In his opinion, nothing was to be gained by yielding to notions that would not stand up under careful investigation. That would only be like Icarus's wax wings, which melted with the altitude, he ex- claimed. Ifone wished to fly other than in dreams, one must master it on metal wings.
He paused for a moment, then went on, pointing to his books: "Here you have testimony, Christian, Judaic, Indian, Chinese, some separated by more than a thousand years. Yet one recognizes in all of them the same uniform structure of inner movement, divergent from the ordinary. Almost the only way they differ from each other comes from the various didactic superstructures of theology and cos- mic wisdom under whose protective roofthey have taken shelter. We
832 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
therefore may assume the existence of a certain alternative and un- common condition of great importance, which man is capable of achieving and which has deeper origins than religions.
"On the other hand," he added, qualifying what he had said, "the churches, that is, civilized communities of religious people, have al- ways treated this condition with the kind of mistrust a bureaucrat feels for the spirit of private enterprise. They've never accepted this riotous experience without reservations; on the contrary, they've di- rected great and apparently justified efforts toward replacing it with a properly regulated and intelligible morality. So the history of this alternative condition resembles a progressive denial and dilution, something like the draining of a swamp.
"And when confessional authority over the spirit and its vocabu- lary became outmoded, our condition understandably came to be re- garded as nothing more than a chimera. Why should bourgeois culture, in replacing the old religious culture, be more religious than its predecessor? Bourgeois culture has reduced this other condition to the status of a dog fetching intuitions. There are hordes of people today who find fault with rationality and would like us to believe that in their wisest moments they were doing their thinking with the help of some special, suprarational faculty. That's the final public vestige of it all, itself totally rationalistic. What's left of the drained swamp is rubbish! And so, except for its uses in poetry, this old condition is excusable only in uneducated people in the first weeks of a love af- fair, as a temporary aberration, like green leaves that every so often sprout posthumously from the wood of beds and lecterns; but if it threatens to revert to its original luxuriant growth, it is unmercifully dug up and rooted out! "
Ulrich had been talking for about as long as it takes a surgeon to wash his arms and hands so as not to carry any germs into the field of operation, and also with all the patience, concentration, and even- handedness it paradoxically takes to cope with the excitement at- tendant on the task ahead. But after he had completely disinfected himself he almost yearned for a little fever or infection-after all, he did not love sobriety for its own sake. Agathe was sitting on the li- brary ladder, and even when her brother fell silent she gave no sign of participation. She gazed out into the endless oceanic gray of the
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 833
sky and listened to the silence just as she had been listening to the words. So Ulrich took up the thread again, with a slight obstinacy that he barely managed to mask by his lighthearted tone.
"Let's get back to our bench on the mountain, with that herd of cows," he suggested. "Imagine some high bureaucrat sitting there in his brand-new leather shorts with 'Gruss Gott' embroidered on his green suspenders. He represents 'real life' on vacation. Of course, this temporarily alters his consciousness of his existence. When he looks at the herd ofcows he neither counts them, classifies them, nor estimates the weight on the hoof of the animals grazing before him; he forgives his enemies and thinks indulgently of his family. For him the herd has been transformed from a practical object into a moral one, as it were. He may also, ofcourse, be estimating and counting a little and not forgiving a whole lot, but then at least it is bathed in woodland murmurs, purling brooks, and sunshine. In a word, what otherwise forms the content of his life seems 'far away' and 'not all that important. ' "
"It's a holiday mood," Agathe agreed mechanically.
"Exactly! I f he regards his nonvacation life as 'not all that impor- tant,' it means only as long as his vacation lasts. So that is the truth today: a man has two modes of existence, of consciousness, and of thought, and saves himself from being frightened to death by ghosts-which this prospect would of necessity induce-by regard- ing one condition as a vacation from the other, an interruption, a rest, or anything else he thinks he can recognize. Mysticism, on the other hand, would be connected with the intention of going on vaca- tion permanently. Our high official is bound to regard such an idea as disgraceful and instantly feel-as in fact he always does toward the end of his vacation-that real life lies in his tidy office. And do we feel any differently? Whether something needs to be straightened out or not will always eventually decide whether one takes it com- pletely seriously, and here these experiences have not had much luck, for over thousands of years they have never got beyond their primordial disorder and incompleteness. And for this we have the ready label of Mania-religious mania, erotomania, take your choice. You can be assured that in our day even most religious people are so infected with the scientific way of thinking that they don't trust
834 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
themselves to look into what is burning in their inmost hearts but are always ready to speak of this ardor in medical terms as a mania, even though officially they take a different line! "
Agathe gave her brother a look in which something crackled like fire in the rain. "So now you've managed to maneuver us out of it! " she accused him, when he didn't go on.
"You're right," he admitted. "But what's peculiar is that though we've covered it all up like a suspect well, some remaining drop of this unholy holy water bums a hole in all our ideals. None of our ideals is quite right, none of them makes us happy: they all point to something that's not there-we've said enough about that today. Our civilization is a temple ofwhat would be called unsecured mania, but
it is also its asylum, and we don't know if we are suffering from an . ,I
excess or a defic1ency.
"Perhaps you've never dared surrender yourself to it all the way,"
Agathe said wistfully, and climbed down from her ladder; for they were supposed to be busy sorting their father's papers and had let themselves be distracted from what had gradually become a pressing task, first by the books and then by their conversation. Now they went back to checking the dispositions and notes referring to the di- vision of their inheritance, for the day of reckoning with Hagauer was imminent. But before they had seriously settled down to this, Agathe straightened up from her papers and asked him once more: "Just how much do you yourself believe everything you've been telling
? " me.
Ulrich answered without looking up. "Suppose that while your heart had turned away from the world, there was a dangerous bull among the herd. Try to believe absolutely that the deadly disease you were telling me about would have taken another course if you had not allowed your feelings to slacken for a single instant. " Then he raised his head and pointed to the papers he had been sorting: "And law, justice, fair play? Do you really think they're entirely superfluous? "
"So just how much do you believe? " Agathe reiterated.
"Yes and no," Ulrich said.
"That means no," Agathe concluded.
Here chance intervened in their talk. As Ulrich, who neither felt
inclined to resume the discussion nor was calm enough to get on with
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 835
the business at hand, rounded up the scattered papers, something fell to the floor. It was a loose bundle of all kinds of things that had inad- vertently been pulled out with the will from a corner of the desk drawer where it might have lain for decades without its owner know- ing. Ulrich looked at it distractedly as he picked it up and recognized his father's handwriting on several pages; but it was not the script of his old age but that ofhis prime. Ulrich took a closer look and saw that in addition to written pages there were playing cards, snapshots, and all sorts of odds and ends, and quickly realized what he had found. It was the desk's "poison drawer. " Here were painstakingly recorded jokes, mostly dirty; nude photographs; postcards, to be sent sealed, of buxom dairy maids whose panties could be opened behind; packs of cards that looked quite normal but showed some awful things when held up to the light; mannequins that voided all sorts of stuff when pressed on the belly; and more of the same. The old gentleman had undoubtedly long since forgotten the things lying in that drawer, or he would certainly have destroyed them in good time. They obviously dated from those mid-life years when quite a few aging bachelors and widowers warm themselves with such obscenities, but Ulrich blushed at this exposure of his father's unguarded fantasies, now released from the flesh by death. Their relevance to the discussion just broken off was instantly clear to him. Nevertheless, his first impulse was to destroy this evidence before Agathe could see it. But she had already noticed that something unusual had fallen into his hands, so he changed his mind and asked her to come over.
He was going to wait and hear what she would say. Suddenly the realization possessed him again that she was, after all, a woman who must have had her experiences, a point he had totally lost sight of while they were deep in conversation. But her face gave no sign of what she was thinking; she looked at her father's illicit relics seriously and calmly, at times smiling openly, though not animatedly. So Ul- rich, despite his resolve, began.
"Those are the dregs of mysticism! " he said wryly. "The strict moral admonitions of the will in the same drawer as this swill! "
He had stood up and was pacing back and forth in the room. And once he had begun to talk, his sister's silence spurred him on.
"You asked me what I believe," he began. "I believe that all our moral injunctions are concessions to a society of savages.
836 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
"I believe none of them are right.
"There's a different meaning glimmering behind them. An alche- mist's fire.
"I believe that nothing is ever done with.
"I believe that nothing is in balance but that everything is trying to raise itself on the fulcrum of everything else.
"That's what i believe. It was born with me, or I with it. "
He had stood still after each of these sentences, for he spoke softly and had somehow or other to give emphasis to his credo. Now his eye was caught by the classical busts atop the bookshelves; he saw a plas- ter Minerva, a Socrates; he remembered that Goethe had kept an over-lifesize plaster head of Juno in his study. This predilection seemed alarmingly distant to him; what had once been an idea in full bloom had since withered into a dead classicism. Turned into the rearguard dogmatism of rights and duties of his father's contempo- raries. All in vain.
"The morality that has been handed down to us," he s3. id, "is like being sent out on a swaying high wire over an abyss, with no other advice than: 'Hold yourself as stiff as you can! '
"I seem, without having had a say in the matter, to have been born with another kind of morality.
"You asked me what I believe. I believe there are valid reasons you can use to prove to me a thousand times that something is good or beautiful, and it will leave me indifferent; the only mark I shall go by is whether its presence makes me ·rue or sink.
''Whether it rouses me to life or not.
''Whether it's only my tongue and my brain that speak of it, or the radiant shiver in my fingertips.
"But I can't prove anything, either.
"And I'm even convinced that a person who yields to this is lost. He stumbles into twilight. Into fog and nonsense. Into unarticulated boredom.
"Ifyou take the unequivocal out ofour life, what's left is a sheep- fold without a wolf.
"I believe that bottomless vulgarity can even be the good angel that protects us.
"And so, I don't believe!
"And above all, I don't believe in the domestication of evil by
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 837
good as the characteristic of our hodgepodge civilization. I find that repugnant.
"So I believe and don't believe!
"But maybe I believe that the time is coming when people will on the one hand be very intelligent, and on the other hand be mystics. Maybe our morality is already splitting into these two components. I might also say into mathematics and mysticism. Into practical im- provements and unknown adventure! "
He had not been so openly excited about anything in years. The "maybe"s in his speech did not trouble him; they seemed only natural.
Agathe had meanwhile knelt down before the stove; she had the bundle of pictures and papers on the floor beside her. She looked at everything once more, piece by piece, before pushing it into the fire. She was not entirely unsusceptible to the vulgar sensuality of the ob- scenities she was looking at. She felt her body being aroused by them. This seemed to her to have as little to do with her self as the feeling of being on a deserted heath and somewhere a rabbit scutters past. She did not know whether she would be ashamed to tell her brother this, but she was profoundly fatigued and did not want to talk anymore. Nor did she listen to what he was saying; her heart had by now been too shaken by these ups and downs, and could no longer keep up. Others had always known better than she what was right; she thought about this, but she did so, perhaps because she was ashamed, with a secret defiance. To walk a forbidden or secret path: in that she felt superior to Ulrich. She heard him time and again cau- tiously taking back everything he had let himself be carried away into saying, and his words beat like big drops of joy and sadness against her ear.
13
ULRICH RETURNS AND LEARNS FROM THE GENERAL WHA T HE HAS MISSED
Forty-eight hours later Ulrich was standing in his abandoned house. It was early in the morning. The house was meticulously tidy, dusted and polished; his books and papers lay on the tables precisely as he had left them at his hasty departure, carefully preserved by hisser- vant, open or bristling with markers that had become incomprehen- sible, this or that paper still with a pencil stuck between the pages. But everything had cooled off and hardened like the contents of a melting pot under which one has forgotten to stoke the fire. Painfully disillusioned, Ulrichstaredblanklyatthesetracesofavanishedhour, matrix of the intense excitement and ideas that had filled it. He felt repelled beyond words at this encounter with his own debris. "It spreads through the doors and the rest of the house all the way down to those idiotic antlers in the hall. What a life I've been leading this last year! " He shut his eyes where he stood, so as not to have to see it. "What a good thing she'll soon be following me," he thought. "We'll change everything! " Then he was tempted after all to visualize the last hours he had spent here; it seemed to him that he had been away for a very long time, and he wanted to compare.
Clarisse: that was nothing. But before and after: the strange tur- moil in which he had hurried home, and then that nocturnal melting of the world! "Like iron softening under some great pressure," he mused. "It begins to flow, and yet it is still iron. A man forces his way into the world," he thought, "but it suddenly closes in around him, and everything looks different. No more connections. No road on which he came and which he must pursue. Something shimmering enveloping him on the spot where a moment ago he had seen a goal, or actually the sober void that lies before every goal. " Ulrich kept his eyes closed. Slowly, as a shadow, his feeling returned. It happened as if it were returning to the spot where he had stood then and was again standing now, this feeling that was more out there in the room
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 839
than in his consciousness-it was really neither a feeling nor a thought, but some uncanny process. If one were as overstimulated and lonely as he had been then, one could indeed believe that the essence of the world was turning itself inside out; and suddenly it dawned on him-how was it possible that it was happening only now? -and lay there like a peaceful backward glance, that even then his feelings had announced the encounter with his sister, because from that moment on his spirit had been guided by strange forces, until . . . but before he could think "yesterday," Ulrich turned away, awakened as abruptly and palpably from his memories as if he had bumped against some solid edge. There was something here he was not yet ready to think about.
He went over to his desk and without taking off his coat looked through the mail lying there. He was disappointed not to find a tele- gram from his sister, although he had no reason to expect one. A huge pile of condolence mail lay intermingled with scientific com- munications and booksellers' catalogs. Two letters had come from Bonadea; both so thick that he did not bother to open them. There was also an urgent request from Count Leinsdorfthat he come to see him, and two fluting notes from Diotima, also inviting him to put in an appearance immediately upon his return; perused more closely, one of them, the later one, revealed unofficial overtones of a very warm, wistful, almost tender cast. Ulrich turned to the telephone messages that had come during his absence: General Stumm von Bordwehr, Section ChiefTuzzi, Count Leinsdorf's private secretary (twice), several calls from a lady who would not leave her name, probably Bonadea; Bank Director Leo Fischel; and, for the rest, business calls. While Ulrich was reading all this, still standing at his desk, the phone rang, and when he lifted the receiver a voice said: "War Ministry, Culture and Education, Corporal Hirsch," clearly taken aback at finding itself unexpectedly ricocheting off Ulrich's own voice, but hastening to explain that His Excellency the General had given orders to ring Ulrich every morning at ten, and that His Excellency would speak to him right away.
Five minutes later Stumm was assuring him that he had to attend some "supremely important meetings" that very morning, but abso- lutely had to speak to Ulrich first. When Ulrich asked what about, and why it could not be taken care of over the phone, Stumm sighed
840 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
into the receiver and proclaimed "news, worries, problems," but could not be made to say anything more specific. Twenty minutes later a War Ministry carriage drew up at the gate and General Stumm entered the house, followed by an orderly with a large leather briefcase slung from his shoulder. Ulrich, who well remem- bered this receptacle for the General's intellectual problems from the battle plans and ledger pages of Great Ideas, raised his eyebrows interrogatively. Stumm von Bordwehr smiled, sent the orderly back to the carriage, unbuttoned his tunic to get out the little key for the security lock, which he wore on a fine chain around his neck, un- locked the case, and wordlessly exhumed its sole contents, two loaves of regulation army bread.
"Our new bread," he declared after a dramatic pause. "I've brought you some for a taste! "
"How nice of you," Ulrich said, "bringing me bread after I've spent a night traveling, instead of letting me get some sleep. "
"Ifyou have some schnapps in the house, which one may assume," the General retorted, "then there's no better breakfast than bread and schnapps after a sleepless night. You once told me that our regu- lation bread was the only thing you liked about the Emperor's ser- vice, and I'll go so far as to say that the Austrian Army beats any other army in the world at making bread, especially since our Commis- sariat brought out this new loaf, Model1914! So I brought you one, though that's not the only reason. The other is that I always do this now on principle. Not that I have to spend every minute at my desk, or account for every step I take out of the room, you understand, but you know that our General Staff isn't called the Jesuit Corps for nothing, and there's always talk when a man is out of the office a lot; also my chief, His Excellency von Frost, may not, perhaps, have a completely accurate idea· of the scope of the mind-the civilian mind, I mean-and that's why for some time now I've been taking along this official bag and an orderly whenever I want to go out for a bit; and since I don't want the orderly to think that the bag is empty, I always put two loaves ofbread in it. "
Ulrich could not help laughing, and the General cheerfully joined in.
"You seem to be less enchanted with the great ideas of mankind than you were? " Ulrich asked.
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 841
"Everyone is less enchanted with them," Stumm declared while he sliced the bread with his pocketknife. "The new slogan that's been handed out is 'Action! ' "
"You'll have to explain that to me. "
"That's what I came for. You're not the true man of action. " "I'm not? "
"Well, I don't know about that. "
"Maybe I don't either. But that's what they say. "
"Who's 'they'? "
"Amheim, for one. "
"You're on good terms with Amheim? "
"Well, ofcourse. We get along famously. Ifhe weren't such a high-
brow we could be on a first-name basis by now!
"
"Are you involved with the oil fields too? "
To gain time, the General drank some ofthe schnapps Ulrich had
had brought in and chewed on the bread. "Great taste," he brought out laboriously, and kept on chewing.
"Of course you're involved with the oil fields! " Ulrich burst out, suddenly seeing the light. "It's a problem that concerns your naval branch because it needs fuel for its ships, and if Amheim wants the drilling fields he'll have to concede a favorable price for you. Besides, Galicia is deployment territory and a buffer against Russia, so you have to provide special safeguards in case ofwar for the oil supply he wants to develop there. So his munitions works will supply you with the cannons you want! Why didn't I see this before? You're positively born for each other! "
The General had taken the precaution of munching on a second piece of bread, but now he could contain himself no longer, and making strenuous efforts to gulp down the whole mouthful at once, he said: "It's easy for you to talk so glibly about an accommodation; you've no idea what a skinflint he is! Sorry-1 mean, you have no idea," he amended himself, "what moral dignity he brings to a busi- ness deal like this. I never dreamed, for example, that ten pennies per ton per railway mile is an ethical problem you have to read up on in Goethe or the history of philosophy. "
"You're conducting these negotiations? ''
The General took another gulp of schnapps. "I never said that
842 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
negotiations were going on! You could call it an exchange ofviews, if you like. "
"And you're empowered to conduct them? "
"Nobody's empowered! We're talking, that's all. Surely one can talk now and then about something besides the Parallel Campaign? And if anyone were empowered, it certainly wouldn't be me; that's no job for the Culture and Education Department, it's a matter for the higher-ups, even the Chiefs of Staff. If I had anything at all to do with it, it would be only as a kind of technical adviser on civilian intel- lectual questions, an interpreter, so to speak, because of Arnheim being so educated. "
"And because you're always running into him, thanks to me and Diotima! My dear Stumm, ifyou want me to go on being your stalk- ing horse, you'll have to tell me the truth! "
But Stumm had had time to prepare himself for this. "Why are you asking, if you know it already? " he countered indignantly. "Do you think you can nail me down and that I don't know that Arnheim takes you into his confidence? "
"I don't know a thing! "
"But you've just been telling me that you do know. "
"I know about the oil fields. "
"And then you said that we have a common interest with Arnheim
in those oil fields. Give me your word of honor that you know this, then I can tell you everything. " Stumm von Bordwehr seized Ulrich's reluctant hand, looked him in the eye, and then said slyly:
"All right, since you're giving me yourword ofhonor that you knew everything already, I give you mine that you know all there is. Agreed? There isn't anything more. Arnheim is trying to use us, and we him. I sometimes have the most complicated spiritual conflicts over Di- otima! " he exclaimed. "But you mustn't say a word to anyone; it's a military secret! " The General waxed cheerful. "Do you know, inciden- tally, what a military secret is? " he went on. "A few years ago, when they were mobilizing in Bosnia, the War Ministry wanted to ax me. I was still a colonel then, and they gave me the command ofa territorial battalion; of course, I could have been given a brigade, but since I'm supposed to be Cavalry, and since they wanted to ax me, they sent me to a battalion. And since you need money to fight a war, once I got there they sent me the battalion cashbox too. Did you ever see one of
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 843
those in your time in the army? It looks like a cross between a coffin and a corn crib; it's made ofheavywood with iron bands all around, like the gate to a fortress. It has three locks, and three officers carry the keys to them, one each, so that no one can unlock it by himself: the commander aJ. ld his two co-cashbox-key-unlockers. Well, when I got there we congregated as iffor a prayer meeting, and one after the other we each opened a lock and reverently took out the bundles of banknotes. I felt like a high priest with two acolytes, only instead of reading the Gospel we read out the figures from the official ledger. When we were done we closed up the box, put the iron bands back on, and locked the locks, the whole thing over again, except in reverse order. I had to say something I can't remember now, and that was the end ofthe ceremony. Or so I thought, and so you'd have thought, and I was full of respect for the unflagging foresight of the military adminis- tration in wartime! But I had a fox terrier in those days, the predeces- sor to the one I have now; there was no regulation against it. He was a clever little beast, but he couldn't see a hole without starting to dig like mad. So as I was going out I noticed that Spot-that was his name; he was English-was busying himselfwith the cashbox, and there was no getting him away from it. Well, you keep hearing stories about faithful dogs uncovering the darkest conspiracies, and war was almost upon us too, so I thought to myself, Let's see what's up with Spot. And what do you suppose was the matterwith Spot? You must remember that Ord- nance doesn't provide the field battalions with the very latest supplies, so our cashbox was a venerable antique, but who would ever have thought that while the three ofus were locking up in front, it had a hole in the back, near the bottom, wide enough to put your arm through? There'd been a knot in the wood there, which had fallen out in some previous war. But what was to be done? The whole Bosnian scare was just over when the relief troops we had applied for came, and until then we could go through our ceremony everyweek, except that I had to leave Spot home so he wouldn't give our secret away. So you see, that's what a military secret sometimes looks like! "
"Hmm . . . it seems to me you're still not quite so open as that cashbox ofyours," Ulrich commented. "Are you fellows really closing the deal or not? "
"I don't know. I give you my word of honor as an officer on the General Staff: it hasn't come to that yet. "
844 • THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
"And Leinsdorf? "
"He hasn't the faintest idea, of course. Besides, he wouldn't have anything to do with Arnheim. I hear he's still terribly angry about the demonstration-you remember, you were there too. He's now dead set against the Germans. "
"Tuzzi? " Ulrich asked, continuing the cross-examination.
"He's the last man we'd want to find out anything! He would ruin the scheme at once. Of course we all want peace, but we military men have a different way of serving it than the bureaucrats. "
"And Diotima? "
"Oh, my dear fellow, please! This is altogether a man's affair; she couldn't think of such things even with gloves on! I certainly can't bring myself to burden her with the truth. And I can see why Am- heim wouldn't tell her anything about it. He talks such a lot and so beautifully, it might well be a pleasure for him to hold his tongue about something for once. Like taking a dose of bitters for the stom- ach, I imagine. "
"Do you realize that you've turned into a rogue? " Ulrich asked, and raised his glass. "Here's to your health! "
"No, not a rogue," the General defended himself. "''m a member of a ministerial council. At a meeting everyone proposes what he would like and thinks right, and in the end something comes out that no one really wanted, the so-called outcome. I don't know ifyou fol- low me--l can't express it any better. "
"Of course I follow you. But the way"you're all treating Diotima is disgraceful, just the same. "
'Td be sorry to think so," Stumm said. "But a hangman, you know, is a disreputable fellow, no question about it; yet the rope manufac- turer who supplies the prison with the rope can be a member of the Ethical Society. You don't take that sufficiently into account. "
"You got that from Arnheim! "
"Could be. I don't know. One's mind gets so complicated nowa- days," the General complained sincerely.
"And where do I come in? "
'Well, you see, I was thinking, here you are, a former army offi- cer . . . "
"Never mind. But what has this to do with being, or not being, a 'man of action'? " Ulrich asked, affronted.
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 845
"Man of action? " the General echoed, mystified.
"You began everything by saying I wasn't a man of action. "
"Oh, that. That's got nothing at all to do with it; I just happened to
start with it. I mean, Amheim doesn't exactly think ofyou as a man of action; he once said so. You have nothing to do, he says, and that puts ideas into your head. Or words to that effect. "
"Idle ideas, you mean? Ideas that can't be 'introduced in spheres of power'? Ideas for their own sake? In short, true and independent id~as! Is that it? Or possibly the ideas of an 'unworldly aesthete'? "
'Well," Stumm von Bordwehr agreed diplomatically, "something like that. "
"Like what? What do you think is more dangerous to the life of the mind-dreams or oil fields? There's no need to stuff your mouth with bread; stop it! I couldn't care less what Amheim thinks of me. But you started off by saying, 'Amheim, for one. ' So who else is there who doesn't see me as enough of a man of action? "
'Well, you know," Stumm affirmed, "quite a few. I told you that 'Action! ' is now the great rallying cry. "
'What does that mean? "
"I don't really know either. Old man Leinsdorf said: 'Something has to be done! ' That's how it started. "
"And Diotima? "
"Diotimacalls it aNew Spririt. So now lots ofpeople on the Coun- cilaresayingthat. Iwonderifyouknowwhatit'slike,thatdizzyfeel- ing in your stomach when a beautiful woman has such a head on her shoulders? "
'Til take your word for it," Ulrich conceded, refusing to let Stumm wriggle out of it. "But now I'd like to hear what Diotima has to say about this New Spirit. "
"It's what people are saying," Stumm answered. "The people on the Council are saying that the times are getting a New Spirit. Not right away, but in a few years; unless something unexpected happens sooner. And this New Spirit won't have many ideas in it. Nor is it a time for feelings. Ideas and feelings-they're more for people who have nothing to do. In short, it's a spirit of action, that's really all I know about it. But it has sometimes occurred to me," the General added pensively, "to wonder if, in the end, that isn't simply the mili- tary spirit? "
846 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
"An action has to make sense! " Ulrich claimed, and in all serious- ness, far beyond this jesters' motley conversation, his conscience re- minded him ofthe first conversation he had had on that subject with Agathe, on the Swedish rampart.
But the General agreed. ,"That's what I just said. If someone doesn't have anything to do, and doesn't know what to do with him- self, he becomes energetic. Then he starts boozing, bawling, brawl- ing, and bullying man and beast. On the other hand, you'll have to admit that someone who knows exactly what he wants can be an intri- guer. Just look at any of our youngsters on the General Staff, silently pressing his lips together and making a face like Moltke: In ten years he'll have a general's paunch under his tunic buttons-not a benign one, like mine, but a bellyful of poison. So it's hard to decide how much sense any action can make. " He thought it over, and added: "If you know how to get hold of it, there's a great deal to be learned in the army-I'm more and more convinced ofit as time goes on-but don't you think the simplest thing would be ifwe could still find the Great Idea? "
"No," Ulrich retorted. "That was nonsense. "
"All right, but in that case there's really nothing left but action. " Stumm sighed. "It's almost what I've been saying myself. Do you re- member, by the way, my warning you once that all these excessive ideas only end up in homicide? That's what we've got to prevent! But," he wheedled, "what we need is someone to take over the lead- ership. "
"And what part have you had the kindness to assign to me in the matter? " Ulrich asked, yawning openly.
"Very well, I'm leaving," Stumm assured him. "But now that we've had this heart-to-heart talk, ifyou wanted to be a true comrade there is something important you could do. Things are not going too well between Diotima and Arnheim. "
"You don't say! " His host showed some small signs of life.
"You'll see for yourself; no need to take it from me. Besides, she confides in you more than in me. "
"She confides in you? Since when? "
"She seems to have got used to me a little," the General said proudly.
"Congratulations. "
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"Thanks. And you ought to look in on Leinsdorf again soon. On account of his antipathy to the Prussians. "
"I won't do it. "
"Now look, I know you don't like Amheim. But you'll have to do it anyway. "
"That's not why. I have no intention of going back to Leinsdorf. "
"But why not? He's such a fine old gentleman. Arrogant, and I can't stand him, but he's been splendid to you. "
''I'm getting out of this whole affair. "
"But Leinsdorf won't let you go. Nor Diotima either. And I cer- tainly won't!
