Since he did not move, she stopped; she was
suddenly
bad-tempered; she too became fearful.
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v2
So what had given their being together a certain tension was now, in his opinion, over and done with before one had thought of it.
Clarisse did not come; she did not come the next day either; she did not come at all.
Moosbrugger smoked cigarettes and yawned. Several times Rachel put her hand around his neck and her hand in his hair; he shook her off. He pulled her onto his lap, and then immediately set her on her feet again because he had changed his mind. What he felt beside boredom was that he had been insulted. These women had fetched him out of school like a boy and taken him home; he had sometimes observed this picture and thought that such sonny boys could never develop into real men. But he realized that for the time being he had to go along with it; he did not dare venture out on the street as long as the zeal of the police was still fresh, and to visit Biziste or other friends would not be a good idea at all. He had Rachel bring him the newspapers and looked for what was being said about him; but this time he was not at all pleased with his press: the papers dismissed his escape in three to five lines. He knew that Rachel was just as downcast as he was at Clarisse's not showing up; but he still laid on her the resentment that was building in him, even if he did not regard Rachel as its cause, since she was Clarisse's represent- ative. Rachel committed the error of continuing to refuse to provide al- cohol, though ifshe had done so, that would have been a mistake as well.
Moosbrugger was silent after such refusals, but the insults to which he was exposed formed, together with the stale boredom and his longing for a tavern, a tangle of revulsion whose spindle was the skinny girl who moved around him the entire day. He spoke only when he had to and disregarded all Rachel's attempts to bring the conversation back to the level of the first morning. Tortured in addition by her own cares, Rachel was very unhappy.
A few days later they had their first scene. After supper and a period ofyawning, Moosbrugger pulled over the little purse from which Rachel paid for their daily needs, and tried to fish out a coin with his thick fin- gers. Rachel, who immediately saw what he was up to, could not get her purse away from him in time; she ran around the table and fell on his arm. -No! she exclaimed. -You mustn't go to the tavern! You'll be- But she did not get to finish her sentence, for Moosbrugger's arm shoved her away so violently that she lost her balance and had to make
1698 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
strenuous efforts not to fall. Moosbrugger put on his hat and left the room, as unapproachable as a huge stone figure.
In desperation, Rachel thought over what she should do. She decided to do battle against Moosbrugger's indiscretion. She reproached herself with letting herselfbe frightened by the change in his behavior, which in the loneliness of reflection seemed to her understandable. As the weaker person, it was easy for her to be the cleverer, but she had to bend every effort to make clear to him that in this case she really was more clever; and if he saw that, then he might possibly accommodate himself to his situation; for Rachel understood quite well that it was no situation for a hero to be in. But when Moosbrugger came home he was drunk. The room filled with a bad smell, his shadow danced on the walls, Ra- chel was dispirited, and her words chased after this shadow with sharp reproaches she did not intend. Moosbrugger had landed on the bed and wasbeckoningherwithhisfinger. -No,neveragain! Rachelscreamed. Moosbrugger pulled from his pocket a bottle he had brought along. He had left the tavern at eleven, only one third filled with schnapps; the second third was filled with a bad conscience, and the third third with anger at having left. Rachel committed the strategic error of rushing at him in order to tear the bottle away. The next moment, she thought her head was bursting; the lamp revolved, and her body lost all connection to the world; Moosbrugger had warded off her attack with a powerful slap of his paw to her face, and when Rachel came to, she was lying far away from him on the floor; something was dripping out between her teeth, and her upper lip and nose seemed to have grown painfully to- gether. She saw how Moosbrugger was still staring at the bottle, which he then rudely smashed on the floor; after which he stood up and blew out the lamp.
Whether deliberately or merely in his stupor, Moosbrugger had taken the bed, and Rachel crept weeping onto the pile of blankets, near which she had fallen. The pain in her face and body did not let her sleep, but she did not dare light the lamp to make poultices for herself. She was cold, humiliation filled her mind with a hazy restlessness that closely re- sembled feverish fantasies, and the spilled schnapps covered the floor with a nauseating, paralyzing haze. All night she thought over as well as she could what had to be done. She had to find Clarisse, but she had no idea where Clarisse lived. She wanted to run away, but then she told herself that she would be betraying Clarisse's confidence if she left Moosbrugger in the lurch before Clarisse returned; she had taken money for this. It also occurred to her that she could go find Ulrich, but she was ashamed and put that off for later. She had never been beaten before, but aside from the pain it wasn't so bad; it simply expressed the
From the Posthumous Papers · 1699
fact that she was weaker than this giant whom she loved, that her entrea- ties did not penetrate to his ear, and that she had to be circumspect; he did not mean to harm her, she realized that quite well, and the most unpleasant thing remained the fear that her chastisement would be re- peated, an idea that robbed her breast of courage and made her totally miserable.
So day came before she reached any conclusions. Moosbrugger got up, and stumbling with inner emptiness, she had to follow his example. A glance in the mirror showed that her nose and mouth were badly swol- len in a discolored, greenish-yellow, half-extinguished face; the magic of this night had made Rachel ugly and unprepossessing. Neither she nor Moosbrugger said anything. Moosbrugger had a fuzzy head; in his sleep he had smelled the schnapps and woken up with the feeling of not hav- ing drunk enough. When he saw Rachel's swollen face, he had an inkling of what had happened the day before; a dim recollection that she had provoked him kept him from asking her about it. But he really would have liked to ask her; he just did not know how to go about it. And Ra- chel waited for a kind word from him the way any girl in love waits; when he let himself be served in silence, she became more and more sulky. Moosbrugger would have liked most of all to go straight back to the bar, but he was afraid of this girl, who would again make a scene, and he could not go on beating her every time. Her eyes, swollen with weeping, repelled him even more than her swollen mouth, which was visible every time she moistened the cloth she was holding to it. It was indeed his fault, he said to himself, what's right is right, but to have this around first thing in the morning was too much. Rachel's tender back and her slen- der arms, which she exposed as she washed, the devil take them, he didn't like them, they looked like chicken bones.
He summed it all up by finding himself in a really stupid situation that he had to stick out as honorably as he could. In the evenings he went to the tavern; he had made up his mind to risk it in this part of town where no one knew him, and Rachel no longer dared to refuse him the money or reproach him for it. Not even when he began to play cards and needed more. There was pretty good company in the bar; in this way, Moosbrugger thought, you can stick it out if you sleep a lot during the day. But Rachel did not sleep during the day, and bothered him like a bat. A few times he caught her in his arms. A few times, too, he made an attempt to begin a better life and to talk with her as the little Fraulein whom she indeed was. But then it came out that Rachel could do no more. She answered evasively and monosyllabically. Whenever Moos- brugger opened his mouth she froze, without meaning to, for she would have liked to talk with him; but he had poured something alien into her,
1700 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
violence, an<l the well that is the source of everything worth saying had frozen over. So there remained nothing for Moosbrugger to do but turn to the wall.
But there was one occasion when she always spoke up, and that was when Moosbrugger returned from the tavern. Ifhe was not drunk he did not respond, or merely growled incomprehensible answers, and Rachel pursued him into sleep with reproaches about his heedlessness. He had beaten her in the tension, the very unpleasant tension, that ruled in him as long as he had been tempted to leave the house but could not make up his mind to do so; now that this was no longer a problem, he was tender and well-mannered, and Rachel, sensing that she was not in any danger, became bolder and bolder. He stayed out longer from one day to the next, in the hope of returning only after she had gone to sleep. But Rachel had developed a strange habit of sleeping. When he left the house after dark she instantly fell asleep, and when he returned she woke up, and with an assurance as ifit were only the continuation ofher dream, she began to quarrel with him. Her poor soul, condemned to be unable to resolve her situation through reflection and thought, allowed itself to be borne upward by the drunken powers of sleep.
-Such a scrawny little chicken! Moosbrugger thought about her, and the insult that such a meager chicken was allowed to scratch around him, day in, day out, gnawed at him. But Rachel, as if she knew what he thought about her without his having said it aloud, and in almost tele- pathic (somnambulent) concord with the silent man who groped his way through the room in the night, felt an obsessive desire to cackle and argue. And when Moosbrugger came home drunk, which was not ex- actly seldom, his stumbling and tottering was like a large ship dancing on the same waves as the girl's small, excited sentences. And if one of these sentences struck too close to home, the powerfully drunken Christian Moosbrugger grabbed at her. As mentioned, it was never again the im- pulsive rage it had been the first time, when he had nearly crushed Ra- chel with a sweep of his hand, but he wanted to make this screeching, rebellious child shut up, and with cautiously measured force, the way a drunk carefully calculates his step over the curb, he let his hand fall on her. When Rachel was beaten she became still for a moment. A bound- less astonishment came over her, as at a totally unexpected, conclusive answer. Since leaving her parents' house she had not been religious; the way she had grown up, she thought religion was something for coarse people: but if Elohim, or better yet an evil spirit, had suddenly sat on a bench in the park among the dressed-up people, that was exactly how it seemed to her when she was beaten. She was drawn to observe this evil spirit closely once more and sought to set it in motion. Then she would
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 7 0 1
open her mouth again and say something about which she knew just as surely that it would irritate Moosbrugger as that if he would follow it it would be what he needed for his salvation. Then Moosbrugger would hit her with the back of his hand, or shove her to the wall. And Rachel, although again astonished, would find another expression, as sharp and penetrating as a knitting needle. And then of course Moosbrugger would have to increase the size of his gift. This giant, not wanting to kill her, beats her wildly on her back, her buttocks, tears her shift, throws her by the hair to the ground, or with a kick sends her flying into the comer; but he does all this with as much care in his wildness as his drunken condition permits, so that no bones will be broken. Rachel is amazed at the evil spirit of force and brutality that demolishes all words. When Moosbrugger shoves her she becomes completely weightless. No will can prevail against his strength. The will returns only when the pain stops. And as long as the pain is there she howls, and is herself aston- ished at the way she screams at the walls. And Moosbrugger would like to seize his head and, raising it from his fists, smash his own head against the ground, if that would only get this damned nothing of a person to shut upl
On the days after such evenings it seemed to Rachel as if she herself had been drunk. Her reason told her that she had to put an end to this. She went looking for Ulrich. But she was told he was away, and no one knew where he was or when he would return. On her way back she thought she noticed that everything in the world was secretly contrived for beatings. It was just a thought that went through her mind. Parents their child. The state its convicts. The military its soldiers. The rich the poor. The coachman his horse. People went walking with big dogs on leashes. Everyone would rather intimidate another person than come to an understanding with him. What had happened to her was no different from what it would have been if she had thrust her hand into pure lye instead of the diluted lye that is used everywhere for laundering. She had to get out! Her mind was confused. She resolved that in the evening, when Moosbrugger was out of the house, she would flee with everything she still possessed. It would be enough to last her for a few weeks by herself. She put on an innocent face when she entered the room, so as not to make Moosbrugger suspicious. But although it was only six o'clock and still daylight, she did not find him there. An instant suspicion made her inspect the room. Almost all her clothes were missing. The lamp and some of the blankets were gone. If thieves hadn't broken in during his absence, Moosbrugger himself must have thrown it all to- gether and pawned it.
Rachel packed up what was left. But then she did not know where to
1702 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
go, as evening was falling. She decided to stick it out one more night and hold her tongue when Moosbrugger came back sodden drunk, as was to be expected from these preparations. Then in the morning she intended to disappear without a trace. She lay down on the bed, and even though Moosbrugger had also taken the pillow, for the first time she slept soundly the whole night.
Despite her deep sleep, in the morning she immediately knew, even before she opened her eyes, that Moosbrugger had not come home. She looked around, wanting quickly to take the opportunity to make herself ready. But she was sad; she feared that in his rashness Moosbrugger had fallen into the hands of the police, and that grieved her. Involuntarily she hesitated while she tied up her bundle. In truth, Moosbrugger had for quite a while had something in mind. He had noticed that Rachel kept her money on her breast, and wanted to take it from her. But he shrank from reaching for it. He was afraid of those two girlish things between which it lay; he didn't know why. Perhaps because they were so unmasculine. So he fell back on his other plan. It was the more natural one. It lifted Moosbrugger up and set him down again. But ifit worked out the way he wanted, it would give him travel money and he could let himself be borne away. He really liked living with Rachel. She had her oddities, which dully persecuted him; but each time he fell into a rage or caught her for love, he unloaded a part of his unease, and this made the water level of his plan rise fairly slowly. He felt reasonably secure with Rachel; indeed, that was what it was, a really ordered life, when he went out in the evenings, drank something, and then had his quarrel with her. It removed, so to speak, the bullet from the magazine every evening. Both were lucky that he beat Rachel, as it were, in small installments. But just because life with her was so healthy, she did not greatly arouse his fantasies, and he nourished his secret plan to disappear into the world; he wanted to begin by getting totally drunk. When it got to be nine in the morning Rachel went for a newspaper to see ifthere was any bad news in it. She found it immediately. During the night a woman had been torn to pieces by a drunk or a madman; the murderer had been seized, and the establishment ofhis identity was imminent. Rachel knew that it was none other than Moosbrugger. Tears started to her eyes. She did not know why, for she felt cheerful and relieved. And should it occur to Clarisse to free Moosbrugger again, Rachel would tell the police abouther. Butshehadtocryalldaylong,asifitwerepartofherselfthat would go to the gallows.
NARRATIVE DRAFTS MID TO LATE 19. 20S
THE REDEEMER (C. 1924/zs)
I.
A dreadful chapter The dream
Around midnight, no matter what the night, the heavy wooden door of the entryway was closed and two iron bars thick as arms were shoved in behind it; until then, a sleepy maid with the look of a peasant about her waited for late guests. A quarter of an hour later a policeman came by on his long, slow rounds, overseeing the closing time of inns. Around 1:oo a. m. the swelling three-step of a patrol from the nearby supply barracks emerged from the fog, echoed past, and faded away again. Then for a long time there was nothing but the cold, damp silence of November nights; only around three did the first carts come in from the country. They broke over the pavement with a heavy noise; wrapped in their cov- erings, deaf from the clatter and the morning cold, the corpses of the drivers swayed behind the horses.
Was it like that or wasn't it, when on this night, shortly before the closing hour, the couple asked about a room? The maid, unhurried, first shut and barred the door, and then without asking any questions went on ahead. First there was a stone staircase, then a long, windowless corri- dor, and suddenly two unexpected comers; a staircase with five stone steps hollowed out by many feet, and another corridor, whose loosened tiles wobbled under their soles. At its end, without the visitors being put off by it, a ladder with a few rungs led up to a small attic space onto which three doors opened, doors that stood low and brown around the hole in the floor.
I704 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
"Are the other rooms taken? " The old woman shook her head while, by the light of her candle, she opened one of the rooms. Then she stood with her light raised and allowed the guests to enter. It might not have happened often that she heard the rustle of silk petticoats in this room; and the tattoo of high heels, which in fright gave way to every shadow on the tile floor, seemed stupid to her; obtuse and obstinate, she looked the lady, who now had to brush past her, straight in the face. The lady nod- ded patronizingly in her embarrassment; she might be forty, or some- what older. The maid took the money for the room, extinguished the last light in the corridor, and went to bed in her room.
After that there was no sound in the whole house. The light of the candle had not yet found time to creep into all the comers of the wretched room. The strange man stood by the window like a flat shadow, while the lady, with uncertain expectations, had sat down on the edge of the bed. She had to wait an agonizingly long time; the stranger did not stir from his place. I f up till now things had gone as quickly as the beginning of a dream, now every motion was mired in a stubborn resist- ance that did not let go of a single limb. He felt that this woman was expecting something from him. Opening her stays-that was like open- ing the doors of a room. A table was standing in the middle. At it sat the man, the son. He observed it secretly, hostilely, and fearfully, full of ar- rogance. He would have liked to throw a grenade, or tear the wallpaper to tatters. With the greatest effort he finally succeeded in at least wrest- ing a sentence from the stubborn resistance. "Did you really notice me right away when I looked at you? "
Oh, it worked. She could not control her impatience any longer. She had let herself be led astray, but no one should think she was a bad woman. So in order to save her honor she had to find him still magical. The blood that had risen to her throat in fear and vexation now rushed pell-mell down to her hips.
At this moment he felt that it would be quite impossible to take a bird in his hand, and this naked skin was to be pressed against his naked and unprotected skin? His breast was to be filled with warmth from her breast? He sought to draw things out with jokes. They were tortured and fearful. He said, "Isn't it true that fat women lace their feet too. Along with their shoes. And above the knot the flesh spills over a little, and there is a little unpleasant smell there. A little smell that exists nowhere else in the world. "
She said to herself: "He must be a writer; now I understand his odd behavior. Later I will play the elegant lady with him. " She resolutely began to undress; she owed it to her honor.
He became anxious; now he knew for certain: I can never take this
From the Posthumous Papers · 1705
leap into another human being, let myselfinto an utterly alien existence.
Since he did not move, she stopped; she was suddenly bad-tempered; she too became fearful. What if she had fallen victim to an unconscion- able man? She did not know him. The woman, who had not revealed her name, began to have regrets. She still waited. But something told her: it will get better once we've gone further.
He felt all that. The idea . . Open up! " tortured him. Like a child's toy. That's what she wants. But over and over again there is some new wall of disappointment with no way through, and then she will get angry with me.
And the second torture was: She's pursuing me. She's just unrolling herself. Always right in front of me. What's she talking about so inces- santly? I'm supposed to fall like a dog all over the round, rolling ball of her life. Otherwise she'll do something to me. His eyes darted back and forth in the darkness like fish.
Now she was sitting before him in only shoes and stockings. Her hips rolled down in three swelling folds. She began to tremble.
She had taken off all her clothes because he had spoken about her. That seemed certain to her. And she felt that she was wronging him; did he not have to mistrust her, since he knew nothing more about her than that she had followed him? She wanted to tell him that Leopold was, of course, a good person. . . . Again silence intervened.
Then he heard himself saying the nonsensical sentence: Whoever loves is young. At the same moment he felt her arms around his neck. To save herself she had to find him enchanting. . . Beloved, beloved! Leave your eyes, you look so suffering and noble! "
Then with the strength of despair he lifted up his burden and heard himself asking: . . Would you rather make Kung Fu-tse, or do you prefer rallies? " She took these for technical terms from men's talk. She did not want to expose her ignorance. She made herself cozy with them. What does your Kung Fu-tse do? The tip of his tongue touched her lips. This ancient manner of understanding between people, such foreheads al- ways sitting above such lips, was familiar to her. The stranger knew so much. She slowly flattened out her tongue and pushed it forward. Then she quickly drew it back and smiled roguishly; when she was still a child she knew herself to be already famous for her roguish smile. And she said without thinking, moved perhaps by some unconscious association of sounds: ''I'd like rallies. My husband will be gone for a week. "
At this moment he bit off her tongue. It seemed to him to be a long time before his teeth got all the way through. Then he felt it thick in his mouth. The storm of a great deed whirled up in him, but the unfortu- nate woman was a white, bleeding mass, beating all around her in a cor-
1706 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
ner of the room, circling around a high, hoarse, screeching note, around
the reeling root of a sound.
In those places where the woman and his reaction to her is described: Is this a woman at all? Or is it the being pushed from the experience into a jackal's den of the imagination, condensation of all the hatefulness of the world in the infantilely special person with skirts and ringlets, rage against the most lovable thing on earth?
It is probably unnecessary to say that this is not a true experience but a dream, for no decent person would think such a thing in a waking state.
The place of this dream lay on one of the major traffic arteries that radiate out from the center of Vienna. Even though from that time on, when world metropolises full of enormous rushing around came into being, Vienna was still only a big city, traffic in the peak hours filled this tube of streets with a dizzying stream of life, which can best be com- pared with swill being poured into a trough. Dark lumps of cars shot around in a no-longer-transparent fluid ofvoices, metals, air, stones, and wood, in a pleasantly tart smell of haste, through the standing throng of interests running in and out at the opening of a thousand stores, and the constitutive stream of pedestrians hastening toward some distant goal pushed fmward. This is the city person's drink that invigorates the nerves. At the place of this dream fifty cars a minute came by on average, at a speed of twenty miles an hour, and six hundred pedestrians. If the eye, or at least the mind, took all that in, then the stimulus had to tra- verse a path of 1,800 feet per second, leaving aside smell, hearing, aroused desire, and everything else, and observing only the mad film.
An unnatural spread.
But the place itself did not appear on this film; only the fence around its grounds did. Ifone were propelled on past this garden fence, there lay behind it well-tended grounds, and among trees one saw a small white house with broad wings and looked into the noble stillness of a scholar's home. Between it and the nature in front of the fence the un- nature of trees, muflled sound, and pure air intervened; as indeed the
From the PosthuTIUJtls Papers · 1707
un-nature of various ideals and antiquities also lie between life and the thinking of a scholar (and only a quite complicated connection makes it possible for life to afford scholars).
The scholar who had unfortunately had this dream had a great many friends among men and women, and was a quite pleasant, handsome, and well-to-do young man. In order not to expose him, and for various reasons, let us assume that his name was simply Anders [literally, "dif- ferent'': an earlier name for Ulrich-TRANs. ].
Here it could also go on:
One of his women friends happened to be with him at the moment and was called . . . and because of the moral songs she sang. She looked like a beautiful woman from an illustrated magazine of 1870. Her beauty was like a lion's skin stuffed by a furrier. She spelled out this beauty from an invisible book and underlined the teasing as well as the tragic quali- ties of love with gestures like the emphases of an eight-year-old school- girl reciting Schiller.
It would not be appropriate to inquire further into the meaning of his horrible dream, but on the other hand we cannot avoid mentioning Christian Moosbrugger, for Moosbrugger doubtless had something to do with its source. Who was Christian Moosbrugger?
What distinguished him from other good-natured and right-thinking carpenters was merely that he was to be executed on account of several sex murders.
In one of the newspaper reports, a collection of which lay in front of Anders (while he held an unopened letter in his hand), it was said of Moosbrugger that he was good-natured. All the other reports described him in similar fashion, but the thing about his smile, for instance, was wrong, and in general the business about his self-important smile, his good nature, and his monstrous deeds was by no means a simple affair.
There was no doubt that he was, at times, mentally ill. But since the bestial crimes that he committed in this condition were presented in the newspapers in the most extreme detail, and thirstily sucked up by their readers, his mental illness must have somehow partaken of the general mental health. He had cut up a woman, a prostitute of the lowest class, with a knife in the most horrifying manner, and the newspapers fully and pitilessly described the delights, to be sure incomprehensible to us, of a wound reaching from the back part of the neck to the middle of the front part; further, two stab wounds to the breast, which bored through the
I708 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
heart, two more in the left side of the back, and the cutting off of the breasts. In spite of (the most vivid retching of) their loathing, the report- ers and editors could not look away before adding up thirty-five stab wounds to the belly, which, moreover, was slit open by a wound running to the sacrum and continuing on up the back in a swarm of wounds, while the neck bore traces of strangulation.
Perhaps one ought not repeat this at all, for it is dubious whether the novelist will be allowed the protection ofthe duties ofhis calling enjoyed by the newspapers, which, like those men who prowl in the dark of night with shielded lanterns and seamen's boots, have to climb into all those things in which mankind, upon waking, is accustomed to proclaim its interest. But ultimately it cannot be said anywhere but in a less serious place than the newspapers how remarkable it is that no sooner were Moosbrugger's abominable excesses made known to thousands of peo- ple, who lose no opportunity to scold the public's desire for sensation, than they were immediately felt by these very people to be "at last some- thing interesting again": by capable officials in a hurry to get to the of- fice, by their fourteen-year-old sons, and by their spouses immersed in a cloud of household cares. People of course sighed over such a monster, but inwardly he preoccupied them more than their professions did. In- deed, it might happen that on going to bed the very correct Section Chief Tu. zzi, or the second in command of the Nature Cure Association, said to his sleepy wife: What would you do i f I were a Moosbrugger now?
c. 1932
49
ULRICH's DIARY
Often Ulrich thought that everything he was experiencing with Agathe was reciprocal hypnotic suggestion and conceivable only under the in- fluence of the idea that they had been chosen by some unusual destiny. At one time this destiny represented itself to them under the sign of the Siamese twins, at another under that of the Millennium, the love of the seraphs, or the myths of the "concave" experiencing of the world. These
From the Posthumous Papers · 1709
conversations were no longer repeated, but they had in the past assumed the more potent shadow ofreal events, ofwhich mention was made ear- lier. One might call it merely half a conviction, if one is of the opinion that the kind of thinking involved in conviction is one that has to be en- tirely certain of its subject; but there is also a total conviction that arises simply from the absenee of all objections, because an emotional mood that is strong and one-sidedly motivated keeps all doubt away from con- scious awareness: there were times when Ulrich already felt almost con- vinced of something without even knowing what it was. But if he then asked himself-for he had to assume that he was suffering from delu- sions-what it was that he and Agathe must have reciprocally imagined at the beginning, their wondrous feeling for each other or the no less remarkable alteration in their thinking in which this feeling expressed itself, that could not be determined either; for both had appeared at the very beginning, and taken singly, one was as unfounded as the other.
This sometimes made him think of the idea of a hypnotic suggestion, and then he felt the uncanny anxiety that steals up on the independent will which sees itself treacherously attacked and shackled from within. "What am I to understand by this? How is one to explain this vulgar notion of hypnosis, which I use as facilely as everyone else, without un- derstanding it? I was reading about it today," Ulrich noted on a piece of paper. "The language of animals consists of affective expressions that evoke the same affects in their companions. Warning call, feeding call, mating call. I might add that these utterances activate and permeate not only the same affect but also quite directly the action associated with it. The terror call, the mating call, goes right through them! Your word is in me and moves me: if the animal were a person it would feel a mysteri- ous, incorporeal union! But this affective suggestibility is also supposed to be still completely intact in people, in spite of the highly developed language of reason. Affect is contagious: panic, yawning. It easily evokes the ideas appropriate to it: a cheerful person spreads cheerfulness. It also encroaches on unsuitable vehicles: this occurs in all gradations, from the silliness of a love token to the complete frenzy of love, whose brainstorms are worthy of the madhouse. But affect also knows how to exclude what is inappropriate, and in both ways evokes in people that persistent unified attitude that gives the state ofhypnotic suggestion the power of fixed ideas. Hypnosis is only a special case of these general relations. I like this explanation, and I'll adopt it. A singular, persistent, unified attitude, but one that blocks us offfrom the totality oflife: that is our condition! "
Ulrich was now beginning to write many such pages. They formed a sort of diary, with whose aid he sought to preserve the mental clarity he
1710 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
felt was threatened. But immediately after he had put the first of his notes on paper, he thought of a second: "What I have called magnanim- ity may also be connected with hypnotic suggestion. By passing over what is not part of it, and seizing hold of what furthers it, it is magnani- mous. " When that was done, his observations did not, of course, seem nearly as remarkable as they had before he had written them down, and he made another effort to look for an indisputable milestone of the con- dition in which he found himself together with his sister. He found it once more in the realization that thinking and feeling were changed in the same sense, and they not only corresponded with each other to a remarkable degree but also stood in contrast to the ordinruy condition as something one-sided, indeed almost insoluble and addictive, an inevita- ble synthesis of aspirations and insights of all kinds. When their conver- sations were in the right mood-and the susceptibility to this was extremely great-the impression they gave was never that one word was forcing another, or one action dragging the next along after it, but that something was aroused in the mind to which the answer followed as the next-higher step. Every movement of the mind became the discovery of a new, even finer movement; they furthered each other reciprocally, and in this manner gave rise to the impression of an intensification that did not end, and ofa discussion that rose without falling. It seemed that the last word could never be spoken, for every end was a beginning, and every final result the start of a new opening, so that every second shone like the rising sun but at the same time carried with it the peaceful pass- ing of the setting sun. "If I were a believer, I would find in this the con- firmation of the unfathomable assertion that His nearness is for us as inexpressible a raising up as our oppressive helplessness allows us to feel! " Ulrich wrote.
He recalled having read with his senses on fire, in those early years when he was entering upon his intellectual life, the description of similar feelings in all sorts of books that he never read through to the end be- cause impatience and a will that urged him to assert his own power pre- vented him, although he was moved by them, indeed for just that reason. Then too, he had not lived as was to have been expected, and when he now happened to pick up several of these books again, which was something he did gladly, meeting the old witnesses once more made it seem as if he were quietly entering a door in his house that he had once arrogantly slammed shut. His life seemed to lie unrealized behind him, or perhaps even before him. Intentions not carried out can be like rejected lovers in dreams, who have remained beautiful over many years while the astonished wanderer returning home sees himself devastated: in the exquisite expansion ofthe powerofone's dreams, one thinks these
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 7 1 1
lovers make one grow young again, and this was the mood, divided be- tween enterprise and doubt, between the tips of flame and ashes, in which Ulrich now most frequently found himself. He read a great deal. Agathe, too, read a great deal. She was already content that the passion for reading, which had accompanied her in all the circumstances of her life, no longer served as mere distraction but had a purpose, and she kept up with her brother like a girl whose blowing dress leaves her no time to think about the path she's taking. It happened that brother and sister got up in the night, after just having gone to bed, and met each other anew with their books, or that they prevented each other from going to bed at all, in spite of the late hour. About this Ulrich wrote: "It seems to be the only passion we permit ourselves. Even when we are tired we don't want to part. Agathe says: 'Aren't we brother and sister? ' That means: Siamese twins; for otherwise it would be meaningless. Even when we're too tired to talk she won't go to bed, because we can't sleep beside each other. I promise to sit beside her until she falls asleep, but she doesn't want to undress and get into bed; not out of shame but be- cause she would be doing something before I did. We put on bathrobes. A few times we've even fallen asleep leaning on each other. She was warm with the fervor of her mind. I had, to support her, wrapped my arm around her body and didn't even realize it. She has fewer ideas than I do, but a higher temperature. She must have a very warm skin. In the morning we are pale with fatigue, and sleep for part of the day. Inciden- tally, we don't derive the slightest intellectual progress from this read- ing. We burn in the books like the wick in oil. We assimilate them really without any effect other than our burning. . . . "
Ulrich added: "The young person listens with only half an ear to the voice ofthose books which become his destiny: he flees them in order to raise his own voice! For he is not seeking truth; he is seeking himself. That's the way it was with me too. Large-scale conclusion: There are always new people and always the old events, merely mixed in new com- binations! Moral fragility of the age. They are essentially like our read- ing, a burning for its own sake. When was the last time I told myself that? Shortly before Agathe's arrival. Ultimate cause of this phenome- non? The absence of system, principles, a goal, and also absence of the possibility of intensifying life and any logical consequence in it. I hope to be able to write down some things that have occurred to me about this. It's part of the 'General Secretariat. ' But the strange thing about my present condition is that I am further away than ever from such active participation in intellectual work. That's Agathe's influence. She radiates immobility. Nevertheless, this incoherent state has peculiar weight. It is pregnant with meaning. What characterizes it, I would say, is the great
1712 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
amount of rapture it contains; although this notion is of course as vague as all the rest. Temporizing restriction, which I allow myself to be guilty of! Our condition is that other life which has always hovered before me. Agathe is working toward it, but I ask myself: can it be carried out as actual life? Not long ago she, too, asked me about that. . . . "
But Agathe, when she had done so, had merely lowered her book and asked: "Can you love two people who are enemies? " She added by way of explanation: "I sometimes read something in a book that contradicts what I have read in another book, but I love both passages. Then I think of how both of us, you and I, contradict each other about lots of things. Isn't that what it depends on? Or is conscience not involved? "
Ulrich immediately recalled that in the irresponsible state of mind in which she had altered the will, she had asked him something similar. This led to a remarkable depth and undermining beneath the present situation, for the main current of his thoughts led Agathe's statement without reflection back to Lindner. He knew that she was seeing him; she had, to be sure, never told him so, but also made no efforts to con- ceal it.
The response to this open manner of concealment was Ulrich's diary. Agathe was not supposed to know anything about it.
When he wrote in it, he suffered from the feeling of having commit-
ted an act of disloyalty. Or it reinforced and liberated him, for the chill- ing state of the wrong secretly committed destroyed the intellectual magic spell that was feared as much as it was desired.
That is why in response to Agathe's question Ulrich smiled but gave no other answer.
But now Agathe had suddenly asked: "Do you have mistresses? " This was the first time that she was again addressing such a question to him. "You should, of course," she added, "but you told me yourself that you don't love them! " And then she asked: "Do you have another friend be- sides me? ''
She said this casually, as if she were no longer expecting an answer, but also in an easy and playful way, as ifa tiny quantity ofa very precious substance were lying in the palm of her hand and she was preoccupied with it.
Late at night Ulrich wrote down in his diary the answer he had given.
so
AN ENTRY
It was only one oflife's small challenges that she asked me this question, and what it means is: But you and I are still living outside of the "condi- tion"! One might just as well exclaim: "Give me some water, please!
Clarisse did not come; she did not come the next day either; she did not come at all.
Moosbrugger smoked cigarettes and yawned. Several times Rachel put her hand around his neck and her hand in his hair; he shook her off. He pulled her onto his lap, and then immediately set her on her feet again because he had changed his mind. What he felt beside boredom was that he had been insulted. These women had fetched him out of school like a boy and taken him home; he had sometimes observed this picture and thought that such sonny boys could never develop into real men. But he realized that for the time being he had to go along with it; he did not dare venture out on the street as long as the zeal of the police was still fresh, and to visit Biziste or other friends would not be a good idea at all. He had Rachel bring him the newspapers and looked for what was being said about him; but this time he was not at all pleased with his press: the papers dismissed his escape in three to five lines. He knew that Rachel was just as downcast as he was at Clarisse's not showing up; but he still laid on her the resentment that was building in him, even if he did not regard Rachel as its cause, since she was Clarisse's represent- ative. Rachel committed the error of continuing to refuse to provide al- cohol, though ifshe had done so, that would have been a mistake as well.
Moosbrugger was silent after such refusals, but the insults to which he was exposed formed, together with the stale boredom and his longing for a tavern, a tangle of revulsion whose spindle was the skinny girl who moved around him the entire day. He spoke only when he had to and disregarded all Rachel's attempts to bring the conversation back to the level of the first morning. Tortured in addition by her own cares, Rachel was very unhappy.
A few days later they had their first scene. After supper and a period ofyawning, Moosbrugger pulled over the little purse from which Rachel paid for their daily needs, and tried to fish out a coin with his thick fin- gers. Rachel, who immediately saw what he was up to, could not get her purse away from him in time; she ran around the table and fell on his arm. -No! she exclaimed. -You mustn't go to the tavern! You'll be- But she did not get to finish her sentence, for Moosbrugger's arm shoved her away so violently that she lost her balance and had to make
1698 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
strenuous efforts not to fall. Moosbrugger put on his hat and left the room, as unapproachable as a huge stone figure.
In desperation, Rachel thought over what she should do. She decided to do battle against Moosbrugger's indiscretion. She reproached herself with letting herselfbe frightened by the change in his behavior, which in the loneliness of reflection seemed to her understandable. As the weaker person, it was easy for her to be the cleverer, but she had to bend every effort to make clear to him that in this case she really was more clever; and if he saw that, then he might possibly accommodate himself to his situation; for Rachel understood quite well that it was no situation for a hero to be in. But when Moosbrugger came home he was drunk. The room filled with a bad smell, his shadow danced on the walls, Ra- chel was dispirited, and her words chased after this shadow with sharp reproaches she did not intend. Moosbrugger had landed on the bed and wasbeckoningherwithhisfinger. -No,neveragain! Rachelscreamed. Moosbrugger pulled from his pocket a bottle he had brought along. He had left the tavern at eleven, only one third filled with schnapps; the second third was filled with a bad conscience, and the third third with anger at having left. Rachel committed the strategic error of rushing at him in order to tear the bottle away. The next moment, she thought her head was bursting; the lamp revolved, and her body lost all connection to the world; Moosbrugger had warded off her attack with a powerful slap of his paw to her face, and when Rachel came to, she was lying far away from him on the floor; something was dripping out between her teeth, and her upper lip and nose seemed to have grown painfully to- gether. She saw how Moosbrugger was still staring at the bottle, which he then rudely smashed on the floor; after which he stood up and blew out the lamp.
Whether deliberately or merely in his stupor, Moosbrugger had taken the bed, and Rachel crept weeping onto the pile of blankets, near which she had fallen. The pain in her face and body did not let her sleep, but she did not dare light the lamp to make poultices for herself. She was cold, humiliation filled her mind with a hazy restlessness that closely re- sembled feverish fantasies, and the spilled schnapps covered the floor with a nauseating, paralyzing haze. All night she thought over as well as she could what had to be done. She had to find Clarisse, but she had no idea where Clarisse lived. She wanted to run away, but then she told herself that she would be betraying Clarisse's confidence if she left Moosbrugger in the lurch before Clarisse returned; she had taken money for this. It also occurred to her that she could go find Ulrich, but she was ashamed and put that off for later. She had never been beaten before, but aside from the pain it wasn't so bad; it simply expressed the
From the Posthumous Papers · 1699
fact that she was weaker than this giant whom she loved, that her entrea- ties did not penetrate to his ear, and that she had to be circumspect; he did not mean to harm her, she realized that quite well, and the most unpleasant thing remained the fear that her chastisement would be re- peated, an idea that robbed her breast of courage and made her totally miserable.
So day came before she reached any conclusions. Moosbrugger got up, and stumbling with inner emptiness, she had to follow his example. A glance in the mirror showed that her nose and mouth were badly swol- len in a discolored, greenish-yellow, half-extinguished face; the magic of this night had made Rachel ugly and unprepossessing. Neither she nor Moosbrugger said anything. Moosbrugger had a fuzzy head; in his sleep he had smelled the schnapps and woken up with the feeling of not hav- ing drunk enough. When he saw Rachel's swollen face, he had an inkling of what had happened the day before; a dim recollection that she had provoked him kept him from asking her about it. But he really would have liked to ask her; he just did not know how to go about it. And Ra- chel waited for a kind word from him the way any girl in love waits; when he let himself be served in silence, she became more and more sulky. Moosbrugger would have liked most of all to go straight back to the bar, but he was afraid of this girl, who would again make a scene, and he could not go on beating her every time. Her eyes, swollen with weeping, repelled him even more than her swollen mouth, which was visible every time she moistened the cloth she was holding to it. It was indeed his fault, he said to himself, what's right is right, but to have this around first thing in the morning was too much. Rachel's tender back and her slen- der arms, which she exposed as she washed, the devil take them, he didn't like them, they looked like chicken bones.
He summed it all up by finding himself in a really stupid situation that he had to stick out as honorably as he could. In the evenings he went to the tavern; he had made up his mind to risk it in this part of town where no one knew him, and Rachel no longer dared to refuse him the money or reproach him for it. Not even when he began to play cards and needed more. There was pretty good company in the bar; in this way, Moosbrugger thought, you can stick it out if you sleep a lot during the day. But Rachel did not sleep during the day, and bothered him like a bat. A few times he caught her in his arms. A few times, too, he made an attempt to begin a better life and to talk with her as the little Fraulein whom she indeed was. But then it came out that Rachel could do no more. She answered evasively and monosyllabically. Whenever Moos- brugger opened his mouth she froze, without meaning to, for she would have liked to talk with him; but he had poured something alien into her,
1700 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
violence, an<l the well that is the source of everything worth saying had frozen over. So there remained nothing for Moosbrugger to do but turn to the wall.
But there was one occasion when she always spoke up, and that was when Moosbrugger returned from the tavern. Ifhe was not drunk he did not respond, or merely growled incomprehensible answers, and Rachel pursued him into sleep with reproaches about his heedlessness. He had beaten her in the tension, the very unpleasant tension, that ruled in him as long as he had been tempted to leave the house but could not make up his mind to do so; now that this was no longer a problem, he was tender and well-mannered, and Rachel, sensing that she was not in any danger, became bolder and bolder. He stayed out longer from one day to the next, in the hope of returning only after she had gone to sleep. But Rachel had developed a strange habit of sleeping. When he left the house after dark she instantly fell asleep, and when he returned she woke up, and with an assurance as ifit were only the continuation ofher dream, she began to quarrel with him. Her poor soul, condemned to be unable to resolve her situation through reflection and thought, allowed itself to be borne upward by the drunken powers of sleep.
-Such a scrawny little chicken! Moosbrugger thought about her, and the insult that such a meager chicken was allowed to scratch around him, day in, day out, gnawed at him. But Rachel, as if she knew what he thought about her without his having said it aloud, and in almost tele- pathic (somnambulent) concord with the silent man who groped his way through the room in the night, felt an obsessive desire to cackle and argue. And when Moosbrugger came home drunk, which was not ex- actly seldom, his stumbling and tottering was like a large ship dancing on the same waves as the girl's small, excited sentences. And if one of these sentences struck too close to home, the powerfully drunken Christian Moosbrugger grabbed at her. As mentioned, it was never again the im- pulsive rage it had been the first time, when he had nearly crushed Ra- chel with a sweep of his hand, but he wanted to make this screeching, rebellious child shut up, and with cautiously measured force, the way a drunk carefully calculates his step over the curb, he let his hand fall on her. When Rachel was beaten she became still for a moment. A bound- less astonishment came over her, as at a totally unexpected, conclusive answer. Since leaving her parents' house she had not been religious; the way she had grown up, she thought religion was something for coarse people: but if Elohim, or better yet an evil spirit, had suddenly sat on a bench in the park among the dressed-up people, that was exactly how it seemed to her when she was beaten. She was drawn to observe this evil spirit closely once more and sought to set it in motion. Then she would
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 7 0 1
open her mouth again and say something about which she knew just as surely that it would irritate Moosbrugger as that if he would follow it it would be what he needed for his salvation. Then Moosbrugger would hit her with the back of his hand, or shove her to the wall. And Rachel, although again astonished, would find another expression, as sharp and penetrating as a knitting needle. And then of course Moosbrugger would have to increase the size of his gift. This giant, not wanting to kill her, beats her wildly on her back, her buttocks, tears her shift, throws her by the hair to the ground, or with a kick sends her flying into the comer; but he does all this with as much care in his wildness as his drunken condition permits, so that no bones will be broken. Rachel is amazed at the evil spirit of force and brutality that demolishes all words. When Moosbrugger shoves her she becomes completely weightless. No will can prevail against his strength. The will returns only when the pain stops. And as long as the pain is there she howls, and is herself aston- ished at the way she screams at the walls. And Moosbrugger would like to seize his head and, raising it from his fists, smash his own head against the ground, if that would only get this damned nothing of a person to shut upl
On the days after such evenings it seemed to Rachel as if she herself had been drunk. Her reason told her that she had to put an end to this. She went looking for Ulrich. But she was told he was away, and no one knew where he was or when he would return. On her way back she thought she noticed that everything in the world was secretly contrived for beatings. It was just a thought that went through her mind. Parents their child. The state its convicts. The military its soldiers. The rich the poor. The coachman his horse. People went walking with big dogs on leashes. Everyone would rather intimidate another person than come to an understanding with him. What had happened to her was no different from what it would have been if she had thrust her hand into pure lye instead of the diluted lye that is used everywhere for laundering. She had to get out! Her mind was confused. She resolved that in the evening, when Moosbrugger was out of the house, she would flee with everything she still possessed. It would be enough to last her for a few weeks by herself. She put on an innocent face when she entered the room, so as not to make Moosbrugger suspicious. But although it was only six o'clock and still daylight, she did not find him there. An instant suspicion made her inspect the room. Almost all her clothes were missing. The lamp and some of the blankets were gone. If thieves hadn't broken in during his absence, Moosbrugger himself must have thrown it all to- gether and pawned it.
Rachel packed up what was left. But then she did not know where to
1702 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
go, as evening was falling. She decided to stick it out one more night and hold her tongue when Moosbrugger came back sodden drunk, as was to be expected from these preparations. Then in the morning she intended to disappear without a trace. She lay down on the bed, and even though Moosbrugger had also taken the pillow, for the first time she slept soundly the whole night.
Despite her deep sleep, in the morning she immediately knew, even before she opened her eyes, that Moosbrugger had not come home. She looked around, wanting quickly to take the opportunity to make herself ready. But she was sad; she feared that in his rashness Moosbrugger had fallen into the hands of the police, and that grieved her. Involuntarily she hesitated while she tied up her bundle. In truth, Moosbrugger had for quite a while had something in mind. He had noticed that Rachel kept her money on her breast, and wanted to take it from her. But he shrank from reaching for it. He was afraid of those two girlish things between which it lay; he didn't know why. Perhaps because they were so unmasculine. So he fell back on his other plan. It was the more natural one. It lifted Moosbrugger up and set him down again. But ifit worked out the way he wanted, it would give him travel money and he could let himself be borne away. He really liked living with Rachel. She had her oddities, which dully persecuted him; but each time he fell into a rage or caught her for love, he unloaded a part of his unease, and this made the water level of his plan rise fairly slowly. He felt reasonably secure with Rachel; indeed, that was what it was, a really ordered life, when he went out in the evenings, drank something, and then had his quarrel with her. It removed, so to speak, the bullet from the magazine every evening. Both were lucky that he beat Rachel, as it were, in small installments. But just because life with her was so healthy, she did not greatly arouse his fantasies, and he nourished his secret plan to disappear into the world; he wanted to begin by getting totally drunk. When it got to be nine in the morning Rachel went for a newspaper to see ifthere was any bad news in it. She found it immediately. During the night a woman had been torn to pieces by a drunk or a madman; the murderer had been seized, and the establishment ofhis identity was imminent. Rachel knew that it was none other than Moosbrugger. Tears started to her eyes. She did not know why, for she felt cheerful and relieved. And should it occur to Clarisse to free Moosbrugger again, Rachel would tell the police abouther. Butshehadtocryalldaylong,asifitwerepartofherselfthat would go to the gallows.
NARRATIVE DRAFTS MID TO LATE 19. 20S
THE REDEEMER (C. 1924/zs)
I.
A dreadful chapter The dream
Around midnight, no matter what the night, the heavy wooden door of the entryway was closed and two iron bars thick as arms were shoved in behind it; until then, a sleepy maid with the look of a peasant about her waited for late guests. A quarter of an hour later a policeman came by on his long, slow rounds, overseeing the closing time of inns. Around 1:oo a. m. the swelling three-step of a patrol from the nearby supply barracks emerged from the fog, echoed past, and faded away again. Then for a long time there was nothing but the cold, damp silence of November nights; only around three did the first carts come in from the country. They broke over the pavement with a heavy noise; wrapped in their cov- erings, deaf from the clatter and the morning cold, the corpses of the drivers swayed behind the horses.
Was it like that or wasn't it, when on this night, shortly before the closing hour, the couple asked about a room? The maid, unhurried, first shut and barred the door, and then without asking any questions went on ahead. First there was a stone staircase, then a long, windowless corri- dor, and suddenly two unexpected comers; a staircase with five stone steps hollowed out by many feet, and another corridor, whose loosened tiles wobbled under their soles. At its end, without the visitors being put off by it, a ladder with a few rungs led up to a small attic space onto which three doors opened, doors that stood low and brown around the hole in the floor.
I704 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
"Are the other rooms taken? " The old woman shook her head while, by the light of her candle, she opened one of the rooms. Then she stood with her light raised and allowed the guests to enter. It might not have happened often that she heard the rustle of silk petticoats in this room; and the tattoo of high heels, which in fright gave way to every shadow on the tile floor, seemed stupid to her; obtuse and obstinate, she looked the lady, who now had to brush past her, straight in the face. The lady nod- ded patronizingly in her embarrassment; she might be forty, or some- what older. The maid took the money for the room, extinguished the last light in the corridor, and went to bed in her room.
After that there was no sound in the whole house. The light of the candle had not yet found time to creep into all the comers of the wretched room. The strange man stood by the window like a flat shadow, while the lady, with uncertain expectations, had sat down on the edge of the bed. She had to wait an agonizingly long time; the stranger did not stir from his place. I f up till now things had gone as quickly as the beginning of a dream, now every motion was mired in a stubborn resist- ance that did not let go of a single limb. He felt that this woman was expecting something from him. Opening her stays-that was like open- ing the doors of a room. A table was standing in the middle. At it sat the man, the son. He observed it secretly, hostilely, and fearfully, full of ar- rogance. He would have liked to throw a grenade, or tear the wallpaper to tatters. With the greatest effort he finally succeeded in at least wrest- ing a sentence from the stubborn resistance. "Did you really notice me right away when I looked at you? "
Oh, it worked. She could not control her impatience any longer. She had let herself be led astray, but no one should think she was a bad woman. So in order to save her honor she had to find him still magical. The blood that had risen to her throat in fear and vexation now rushed pell-mell down to her hips.
At this moment he felt that it would be quite impossible to take a bird in his hand, and this naked skin was to be pressed against his naked and unprotected skin? His breast was to be filled with warmth from her breast? He sought to draw things out with jokes. They were tortured and fearful. He said, "Isn't it true that fat women lace their feet too. Along with their shoes. And above the knot the flesh spills over a little, and there is a little unpleasant smell there. A little smell that exists nowhere else in the world. "
She said to herself: "He must be a writer; now I understand his odd behavior. Later I will play the elegant lady with him. " She resolutely began to undress; she owed it to her honor.
He became anxious; now he knew for certain: I can never take this
From the Posthumous Papers · 1705
leap into another human being, let myselfinto an utterly alien existence.
Since he did not move, she stopped; she was suddenly bad-tempered; she too became fearful. What if she had fallen victim to an unconscion- able man? She did not know him. The woman, who had not revealed her name, began to have regrets. She still waited. But something told her: it will get better once we've gone further.
He felt all that. The idea . . Open up! " tortured him. Like a child's toy. That's what she wants. But over and over again there is some new wall of disappointment with no way through, and then she will get angry with me.
And the second torture was: She's pursuing me. She's just unrolling herself. Always right in front of me. What's she talking about so inces- santly? I'm supposed to fall like a dog all over the round, rolling ball of her life. Otherwise she'll do something to me. His eyes darted back and forth in the darkness like fish.
Now she was sitting before him in only shoes and stockings. Her hips rolled down in three swelling folds. She began to tremble.
She had taken off all her clothes because he had spoken about her. That seemed certain to her. And she felt that she was wronging him; did he not have to mistrust her, since he knew nothing more about her than that she had followed him? She wanted to tell him that Leopold was, of course, a good person. . . . Again silence intervened.
Then he heard himself saying the nonsensical sentence: Whoever loves is young. At the same moment he felt her arms around his neck. To save herself she had to find him enchanting. . . Beloved, beloved! Leave your eyes, you look so suffering and noble! "
Then with the strength of despair he lifted up his burden and heard himself asking: . . Would you rather make Kung Fu-tse, or do you prefer rallies? " She took these for technical terms from men's talk. She did not want to expose her ignorance. She made herself cozy with them. What does your Kung Fu-tse do? The tip of his tongue touched her lips. This ancient manner of understanding between people, such foreheads al- ways sitting above such lips, was familiar to her. The stranger knew so much. She slowly flattened out her tongue and pushed it forward. Then she quickly drew it back and smiled roguishly; when she was still a child she knew herself to be already famous for her roguish smile. And she said without thinking, moved perhaps by some unconscious association of sounds: ''I'd like rallies. My husband will be gone for a week. "
At this moment he bit off her tongue. It seemed to him to be a long time before his teeth got all the way through. Then he felt it thick in his mouth. The storm of a great deed whirled up in him, but the unfortu- nate woman was a white, bleeding mass, beating all around her in a cor-
1706 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
ner of the room, circling around a high, hoarse, screeching note, around
the reeling root of a sound.
In those places where the woman and his reaction to her is described: Is this a woman at all? Or is it the being pushed from the experience into a jackal's den of the imagination, condensation of all the hatefulness of the world in the infantilely special person with skirts and ringlets, rage against the most lovable thing on earth?
It is probably unnecessary to say that this is not a true experience but a dream, for no decent person would think such a thing in a waking state.
The place of this dream lay on one of the major traffic arteries that radiate out from the center of Vienna. Even though from that time on, when world metropolises full of enormous rushing around came into being, Vienna was still only a big city, traffic in the peak hours filled this tube of streets with a dizzying stream of life, which can best be com- pared with swill being poured into a trough. Dark lumps of cars shot around in a no-longer-transparent fluid ofvoices, metals, air, stones, and wood, in a pleasantly tart smell of haste, through the standing throng of interests running in and out at the opening of a thousand stores, and the constitutive stream of pedestrians hastening toward some distant goal pushed fmward. This is the city person's drink that invigorates the nerves. At the place of this dream fifty cars a minute came by on average, at a speed of twenty miles an hour, and six hundred pedestrians. If the eye, or at least the mind, took all that in, then the stimulus had to tra- verse a path of 1,800 feet per second, leaving aside smell, hearing, aroused desire, and everything else, and observing only the mad film.
An unnatural spread.
But the place itself did not appear on this film; only the fence around its grounds did. Ifone were propelled on past this garden fence, there lay behind it well-tended grounds, and among trees one saw a small white house with broad wings and looked into the noble stillness of a scholar's home. Between it and the nature in front of the fence the un- nature of trees, muflled sound, and pure air intervened; as indeed the
From the PosthuTIUJtls Papers · 1707
un-nature of various ideals and antiquities also lie between life and the thinking of a scholar (and only a quite complicated connection makes it possible for life to afford scholars).
The scholar who had unfortunately had this dream had a great many friends among men and women, and was a quite pleasant, handsome, and well-to-do young man. In order not to expose him, and for various reasons, let us assume that his name was simply Anders [literally, "dif- ferent'': an earlier name for Ulrich-TRANs. ].
Here it could also go on:
One of his women friends happened to be with him at the moment and was called . . . and because of the moral songs she sang. She looked like a beautiful woman from an illustrated magazine of 1870. Her beauty was like a lion's skin stuffed by a furrier. She spelled out this beauty from an invisible book and underlined the teasing as well as the tragic quali- ties of love with gestures like the emphases of an eight-year-old school- girl reciting Schiller.
It would not be appropriate to inquire further into the meaning of his horrible dream, but on the other hand we cannot avoid mentioning Christian Moosbrugger, for Moosbrugger doubtless had something to do with its source. Who was Christian Moosbrugger?
What distinguished him from other good-natured and right-thinking carpenters was merely that he was to be executed on account of several sex murders.
In one of the newspaper reports, a collection of which lay in front of Anders (while he held an unopened letter in his hand), it was said of Moosbrugger that he was good-natured. All the other reports described him in similar fashion, but the thing about his smile, for instance, was wrong, and in general the business about his self-important smile, his good nature, and his monstrous deeds was by no means a simple affair.
There was no doubt that he was, at times, mentally ill. But since the bestial crimes that he committed in this condition were presented in the newspapers in the most extreme detail, and thirstily sucked up by their readers, his mental illness must have somehow partaken of the general mental health. He had cut up a woman, a prostitute of the lowest class, with a knife in the most horrifying manner, and the newspapers fully and pitilessly described the delights, to be sure incomprehensible to us, of a wound reaching from the back part of the neck to the middle of the front part; further, two stab wounds to the breast, which bored through the
I708 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
heart, two more in the left side of the back, and the cutting off of the breasts. In spite of (the most vivid retching of) their loathing, the report- ers and editors could not look away before adding up thirty-five stab wounds to the belly, which, moreover, was slit open by a wound running to the sacrum and continuing on up the back in a swarm of wounds, while the neck bore traces of strangulation.
Perhaps one ought not repeat this at all, for it is dubious whether the novelist will be allowed the protection ofthe duties ofhis calling enjoyed by the newspapers, which, like those men who prowl in the dark of night with shielded lanterns and seamen's boots, have to climb into all those things in which mankind, upon waking, is accustomed to proclaim its interest. But ultimately it cannot be said anywhere but in a less serious place than the newspapers how remarkable it is that no sooner were Moosbrugger's abominable excesses made known to thousands of peo- ple, who lose no opportunity to scold the public's desire for sensation, than they were immediately felt by these very people to be "at last some- thing interesting again": by capable officials in a hurry to get to the of- fice, by their fourteen-year-old sons, and by their spouses immersed in a cloud of household cares. People of course sighed over such a monster, but inwardly he preoccupied them more than their professions did. In- deed, it might happen that on going to bed the very correct Section Chief Tu. zzi, or the second in command of the Nature Cure Association, said to his sleepy wife: What would you do i f I were a Moosbrugger now?
c. 1932
49
ULRICH's DIARY
Often Ulrich thought that everything he was experiencing with Agathe was reciprocal hypnotic suggestion and conceivable only under the in- fluence of the idea that they had been chosen by some unusual destiny. At one time this destiny represented itself to them under the sign of the Siamese twins, at another under that of the Millennium, the love of the seraphs, or the myths of the "concave" experiencing of the world. These
From the Posthumous Papers · 1709
conversations were no longer repeated, but they had in the past assumed the more potent shadow ofreal events, ofwhich mention was made ear- lier. One might call it merely half a conviction, if one is of the opinion that the kind of thinking involved in conviction is one that has to be en- tirely certain of its subject; but there is also a total conviction that arises simply from the absenee of all objections, because an emotional mood that is strong and one-sidedly motivated keeps all doubt away from con- scious awareness: there were times when Ulrich already felt almost con- vinced of something without even knowing what it was. But if he then asked himself-for he had to assume that he was suffering from delu- sions-what it was that he and Agathe must have reciprocally imagined at the beginning, their wondrous feeling for each other or the no less remarkable alteration in their thinking in which this feeling expressed itself, that could not be determined either; for both had appeared at the very beginning, and taken singly, one was as unfounded as the other.
This sometimes made him think of the idea of a hypnotic suggestion, and then he felt the uncanny anxiety that steals up on the independent will which sees itself treacherously attacked and shackled from within. "What am I to understand by this? How is one to explain this vulgar notion of hypnosis, which I use as facilely as everyone else, without un- derstanding it? I was reading about it today," Ulrich noted on a piece of paper. "The language of animals consists of affective expressions that evoke the same affects in their companions. Warning call, feeding call, mating call. I might add that these utterances activate and permeate not only the same affect but also quite directly the action associated with it. The terror call, the mating call, goes right through them! Your word is in me and moves me: if the animal were a person it would feel a mysteri- ous, incorporeal union! But this affective suggestibility is also supposed to be still completely intact in people, in spite of the highly developed language of reason. Affect is contagious: panic, yawning. It easily evokes the ideas appropriate to it: a cheerful person spreads cheerfulness. It also encroaches on unsuitable vehicles: this occurs in all gradations, from the silliness of a love token to the complete frenzy of love, whose brainstorms are worthy of the madhouse. But affect also knows how to exclude what is inappropriate, and in both ways evokes in people that persistent unified attitude that gives the state ofhypnotic suggestion the power of fixed ideas. Hypnosis is only a special case of these general relations. I like this explanation, and I'll adopt it. A singular, persistent, unified attitude, but one that blocks us offfrom the totality oflife: that is our condition! "
Ulrich was now beginning to write many such pages. They formed a sort of diary, with whose aid he sought to preserve the mental clarity he
1710 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
felt was threatened. But immediately after he had put the first of his notes on paper, he thought of a second: "What I have called magnanim- ity may also be connected with hypnotic suggestion. By passing over what is not part of it, and seizing hold of what furthers it, it is magnani- mous. " When that was done, his observations did not, of course, seem nearly as remarkable as they had before he had written them down, and he made another effort to look for an indisputable milestone of the con- dition in which he found himself together with his sister. He found it once more in the realization that thinking and feeling were changed in the same sense, and they not only corresponded with each other to a remarkable degree but also stood in contrast to the ordinruy condition as something one-sided, indeed almost insoluble and addictive, an inevita- ble synthesis of aspirations and insights of all kinds. When their conver- sations were in the right mood-and the susceptibility to this was extremely great-the impression they gave was never that one word was forcing another, or one action dragging the next along after it, but that something was aroused in the mind to which the answer followed as the next-higher step. Every movement of the mind became the discovery of a new, even finer movement; they furthered each other reciprocally, and in this manner gave rise to the impression of an intensification that did not end, and ofa discussion that rose without falling. It seemed that the last word could never be spoken, for every end was a beginning, and every final result the start of a new opening, so that every second shone like the rising sun but at the same time carried with it the peaceful pass- ing of the setting sun. "If I were a believer, I would find in this the con- firmation of the unfathomable assertion that His nearness is for us as inexpressible a raising up as our oppressive helplessness allows us to feel! " Ulrich wrote.
He recalled having read with his senses on fire, in those early years when he was entering upon his intellectual life, the description of similar feelings in all sorts of books that he never read through to the end be- cause impatience and a will that urged him to assert his own power pre- vented him, although he was moved by them, indeed for just that reason. Then too, he had not lived as was to have been expected, and when he now happened to pick up several of these books again, which was something he did gladly, meeting the old witnesses once more made it seem as if he were quietly entering a door in his house that he had once arrogantly slammed shut. His life seemed to lie unrealized behind him, or perhaps even before him. Intentions not carried out can be like rejected lovers in dreams, who have remained beautiful over many years while the astonished wanderer returning home sees himself devastated: in the exquisite expansion ofthe powerofone's dreams, one thinks these
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 7 1 1
lovers make one grow young again, and this was the mood, divided be- tween enterprise and doubt, between the tips of flame and ashes, in which Ulrich now most frequently found himself. He read a great deal. Agathe, too, read a great deal. She was already content that the passion for reading, which had accompanied her in all the circumstances of her life, no longer served as mere distraction but had a purpose, and she kept up with her brother like a girl whose blowing dress leaves her no time to think about the path she's taking. It happened that brother and sister got up in the night, after just having gone to bed, and met each other anew with their books, or that they prevented each other from going to bed at all, in spite of the late hour. About this Ulrich wrote: "It seems to be the only passion we permit ourselves. Even when we are tired we don't want to part. Agathe says: 'Aren't we brother and sister? ' That means: Siamese twins; for otherwise it would be meaningless. Even when we're too tired to talk she won't go to bed, because we can't sleep beside each other. I promise to sit beside her until she falls asleep, but she doesn't want to undress and get into bed; not out of shame but be- cause she would be doing something before I did. We put on bathrobes. A few times we've even fallen asleep leaning on each other. She was warm with the fervor of her mind. I had, to support her, wrapped my arm around her body and didn't even realize it. She has fewer ideas than I do, but a higher temperature. She must have a very warm skin. In the morning we are pale with fatigue, and sleep for part of the day. Inciden- tally, we don't derive the slightest intellectual progress from this read- ing. We burn in the books like the wick in oil. We assimilate them really without any effect other than our burning. . . . "
Ulrich added: "The young person listens with only half an ear to the voice ofthose books which become his destiny: he flees them in order to raise his own voice! For he is not seeking truth; he is seeking himself. That's the way it was with me too. Large-scale conclusion: There are always new people and always the old events, merely mixed in new com- binations! Moral fragility of the age. They are essentially like our read- ing, a burning for its own sake. When was the last time I told myself that? Shortly before Agathe's arrival. Ultimate cause of this phenome- non? The absence of system, principles, a goal, and also absence of the possibility of intensifying life and any logical consequence in it. I hope to be able to write down some things that have occurred to me about this. It's part of the 'General Secretariat. ' But the strange thing about my present condition is that I am further away than ever from such active participation in intellectual work. That's Agathe's influence. She radiates immobility. Nevertheless, this incoherent state has peculiar weight. It is pregnant with meaning. What characterizes it, I would say, is the great
1712 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
amount of rapture it contains; although this notion is of course as vague as all the rest. Temporizing restriction, which I allow myself to be guilty of! Our condition is that other life which has always hovered before me. Agathe is working toward it, but I ask myself: can it be carried out as actual life? Not long ago she, too, asked me about that. . . . "
But Agathe, when she had done so, had merely lowered her book and asked: "Can you love two people who are enemies? " She added by way of explanation: "I sometimes read something in a book that contradicts what I have read in another book, but I love both passages. Then I think of how both of us, you and I, contradict each other about lots of things. Isn't that what it depends on? Or is conscience not involved? "
Ulrich immediately recalled that in the irresponsible state of mind in which she had altered the will, she had asked him something similar. This led to a remarkable depth and undermining beneath the present situation, for the main current of his thoughts led Agathe's statement without reflection back to Lindner. He knew that she was seeing him; she had, to be sure, never told him so, but also made no efforts to con- ceal it.
The response to this open manner of concealment was Ulrich's diary. Agathe was not supposed to know anything about it.
When he wrote in it, he suffered from the feeling of having commit-
ted an act of disloyalty. Or it reinforced and liberated him, for the chill- ing state of the wrong secretly committed destroyed the intellectual magic spell that was feared as much as it was desired.
That is why in response to Agathe's question Ulrich smiled but gave no other answer.
But now Agathe had suddenly asked: "Do you have mistresses? " This was the first time that she was again addressing such a question to him. "You should, of course," she added, "but you told me yourself that you don't love them! " And then she asked: "Do you have another friend be- sides me? ''
She said this casually, as if she were no longer expecting an answer, but also in an easy and playful way, as ifa tiny quantity ofa very precious substance were lying in the palm of her hand and she was preoccupied with it.
Late at night Ulrich wrote down in his diary the answer he had given.
so
AN ENTRY
It was only one oflife's small challenges that she asked me this question, and what it means is: But you and I are still living outside of the "condi- tion"! One might just as well exclaim: "Give me some water, please!
