Attempts to Find Robert Musil

Letters to & from Mark Mirsky on Musil's Unions

Attempts to Find Robert Musil — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 17:40:32 GMT

Lately I have been thinking about Musil’s early short stories, Unions, which I began translating on the urging of my dear friend Mark Mirsky, who suddenly died last year, leaving the world a much less interesting and a colder place. Mark had been teaching one of the stories in this volume, “The Completion of Love,” for many years, and asked me to look at a particular passage in the Wilkins-Kaiser translation he had been using. This led to a realization that the whole book deserved another translational treatment and Rainer’s enthusiasm about publishing it for Contra Mundum. We had planned to publish a section of it in Mark’s Fiction magazine, but the scheduling got mixed up. Instead, we published a really revelatory text of Musil’s notes on the writing of Unions (Fiction, Number 64, 2019—order here: https://www.fictioninc.com/) and Mark’s own illuminating essay on what the stories meant to him.

I was thinking about Unions because of some questions that came up in our Man Without Qualities reading group recently, about Musil’s non-narrative phenomenological method of narrative, which is stretched to an extreme in these two experimental stories. I remembered some of what Musil had written about his intentions in writing the stories and wanted to look at the texts in relationship to his later writing. And then I reread Mark’s essay and missed him.

I went looking for our emails (to see if I could find an attachment that included my translation of the Musil notes on Unions to easily excerpt some for you (but could not—you will have to get the Fiction issue).

And so I am sharing some of our discussion here. I am sure he would not mind. I have excerpted some extraneous or overly personal information (but left in other extraneous sentences just because everything is actually related to everything else, isn’t it?).

The exchanges mention Mark’s immense and unfinished (unfinishable?) novel-in-progress called Dream Castle, and also another translation of Unions that came out simultaneously with our Contra Mundum one (Peter Wortsman’s Intimate Ties, Archipelago Books), and a reading done at Unnameable Books in Brooklyn to celebrate our volume.

The really interesting stuff about the stories themselves comes in the last letters (after we get warmed up for about half a year). And then I have included Mark’s Introductory Remarks that were read at the book launch for Unions, all about his work spreading the gospel of Musil in Fiction magazine and as editor of Musil’s Diaries, and our decade’s long collaboration.

October 1, 2018

Hello, Dear Mark,

I have been terribly busy and have not gotten to read much more of the castle yet...though I look forward to getting lost in its corridors soon.

I am working quickly toward a complete manuscript of Unions, and am really almost ready to get you a copy-ready version of Completion. What is your printing schedule? We would like it to come out as close as possible before the publication date....

Hope you are well and that harvest has yielded some pumpkins and squash.

Fondly,

Genese

October 1, 2018

Hopefully we will be printing in the early spring. When does your publisher intend to bring out the whole collection. I can’t publish it if you are bringing it out before Fiction is to appear.

I understand your devotion however to the whole of Unions, and whenever you do go back into the corridors of my castle, happy to hear from you.

This has been a strange harvest--none of the pears were really sweet. There were just a few pumpkins though I managed to bring down two on the bus despite my hernia, and a bum knee and bring one out to my grandchildren in Brooklyn where it was turned into a pie. There is another one here if I can convince Inger to devote herself to it before it begins to sink into melancholy. The squash however seemed to have like the weather but I haven’t tasted them. The sweet potatoes I did dig up despite luxuriant foliage were tiny. They however, can wait until November to be pried out of a semi frozen soil, since they are safe from the rabbits, squirrels and turkeys that together with an occasional deer roam the yard.

Mark

January 9, 2019

Hello Dear Mark,

I hope you are well and that the family is well and that New York has a little bit of the great deal of pretty snow we have up here right now.

I am wondering what the projected publication date for the Spring Fiction is, as we are trying to line up the right time for publication of the book. Also, did you not say I would be getting paid something for the translation work? I hope so, as my rural bohemian life is very ill-funded (especially as the house needs all sorts of repairs!).

What else is happening? Besides the decline of everything we care about? I am very afraid that Burton may be sick, or worse, as I have not received responses from him in quite awhile. You would not have any way of knowing, would you?

Please tell me you are more or less well.

Most Fondly,

Genese

January 9, 2019

Dear Genese,

I am struggling to get the new issue of Fiction together. I am on sabbatical now and that has complicated my back and forth with the staff of the office. I believe we agreed that you would publish your book in May. If I can’t get the magazine out by then, it is my fault and I will publish the Musil regardless of the fact that the book will be out before it. I imagine it will reach a different audience in any case.

Yes, of course, I will pay you for your translation.

Sorry to hear that Burton may not be well. My links to the academic world where someone would know how Burton is going no longer exist. It’s one of the sadnesses of getting old. Most of the close friends I had among writers are now gone and the active correspondance I had with others has fallen off. Your note reminds me that I have to send notes to others like Cynthia Ozick who are dear to me, but who I am shy of intruding on.

I am afraid that at 79 my own bones are at risk and I am trying to ignore the need to go and see doctors and just fight off the arthritis that is going to require some kind of care and a small hernia that is worrisome.

I have begun a revision of Dream Castle, yet again, in response to some of your excellent criticism and that of others, hoping to tighten its plot.

In addition to my own career as a writer and its disappointments, the present political situation is so dire, dangerous, and a reminder of how willful the craving for ignorance is in a large segment of the American population that each morning I wake unsure of what further nightmares lie in the news of the day.

Love,

Mark

March 15, 2019

Dear Mark,

Sorry I did not respond right off. But you know how time swallows one. Turned out Burton was chipper and hale as ever.

Sorry to hear that you are feeling the weight of the decades. But spring is upon us, well, upon you. Here we still have cold and snow despite the softening of everything, the rot and sweet mud rising.

I am writing about Unions and publication dates. We are in the middle of typesetting and cover design. Were planning on Mayish, but Rainer just discovered that Archipelago is coming out with a rival translation in May, done by Peter Wortsman, called Intimate something or other. We would like to get ours out before theirs if possible. Would you mind if we came out with the book before the excerpt? Were you going to be ready by May anyway? Damn Archipelago books! We hardly have a chance now at all, being such underdogs!

Oh gee, such is life. Considering we hardly had much chance to begin with...chance for what? Oh well. I am at work, so must go...but please let me know if it would be okay, and how you are.

Fondly,

Genese

March 15, 2019

Go ahead and get it out. Just mention that it will be published as well in Fiction. I have never had more trouble in getting an issue together but I have been deep into revisions, since I began my sabbatical in January which are now finished, both on a book you saw previously (I have cut it and pruned it by many pages) Dream Castle and another novel much shorter than I worked on for several years. Wortsman has been hovering on the edge of Musil’s work as a translator for years, so I guess this is not that surprising. When I taught Kafka’s The Trial last semester I realized that there were two rival translations, one by David Wylie, in addition to the one done many years ago that appeared with Modern Library. The Wylie you could access on the web without cost, the other, which you had to pay for, the Breon Mitchell, but which seemed to me the superior one.

Glad to hear that Burton is hale and chipper.

With affection,

Mark

March 20, 2019

Dear Mark,

Thank you for the go ahead. We were really rather stricken to find that another translation is coming out just about the same moment (but now we will be a fortnight ahead of them). I am really rather curious what Wortsman has done with it.

It is marvelous that you are working on Dream Castle and yet another novel.

Speaking of Castles and Kafka, I read a marvelous book recommended by Burton, about Kafka’s Castle and Don Quixote. The Old and the New by Marthe Roberts. Really beautifully written and intelligent, mostly about idealism and its opposite, about the complex cocktail of belief and unbelief in both books, about the old and the new, the old world of values and ideals and the new world of confusion and chaos. Perhaps you would find it interesting?

The sun is fracturing through the icy windows. It is about 8 degrees and there is still quite a bit of snow out there on the Central Vermont tundra. Very beautiful, but we have really had enough, considering the snow started in early November. But this is what it is.

I will let you know, of course, first thing, about when the New York reading is. Perhaps you might like to say a few words at it?

Most Fondly,

Genese

June 27, 2019

Dear Mark,

You were very missed at the reading, but I understand that it was a long way for you to come from Hull! Your three or four emissaries were very nice. One, named Taber? or something like that, did yeoman’s duty by lugging the heavy box in the heat all the way from the Bronx to Brooklyn, and Konstantin gave a nice introduction to the work of Fiction and your interest in Musil (and my work, for which I thank you, deeply). I don’t know if anyone bought any of the Fictions, but I still hope they felt it was worthwhile to have lugged them and to have been there. It was a big crowd and it felt meaningful to me, at least.

I have been thinking about the two stories more and more, as I prepared to read from them and discuss them, and now still after the “performance”...and thinking about how you said you found Veronica puzzling (not sure if that was the word). I did/do too, but I think I might have SOME glimmer of insight for us both. The passages I chose to read from The Temptation are very ecstatic, visionary really in my translation. ..her descriptions of the house and garden, her descriptions of the dog’s fur and the giants. I am starting to see her as a Saint. The Saint Veronica of the cloth, with the characteristics of a female mystic, including the sickness. Maybe, I thought, while falling asleep the other night, the imprint on the cloth is Her face, not Jesus’s at all...Not even Musil’s, but Veronica’s own damp face. Not so sure about that part, but the other seems right to me. She is a strange sort of holy woman, who communicates with the animals and trees, but not so well with people or society. She is a recluse, but passionate.

Anyway, thank you so much for bringing me back to Musil. I am even now invited to go to Lausanne next April for a Musil translation conference! I probably will talk about Unions [the talk was cancelled due to Covid].

I hope you are enjoying the beautiful almost summer. The rain is making everything grow here and it still smells of lilacs, though the blossoms are mostly on the ground.

Love,

Genese

July 5, 2019

Dear Genese,

Forgive me for not replying sooner. The last few weeks have been very stressful--in addition to severe arthritis in one knee that keeps me limping during the day and unable to sleep for more than a few hours at a time during the night . . .

Trying to plant the two gardens in my back lots here in Hull (two years ago I had four--last year three, but two is the limit of my strength right now), cut back on thickets of thorns and push the lawnmower, or rather control it from running away on the downward slope has taxed my strength to the point that I come back into the house from gardening and just collapse.

I am happy that the staff pulled through and showed up for the reading. My statement that I was told Constantine, the managing editor, read, was brief, but I hope it conveyed how much our collaboration on Musil has meant not just to me, but to the magazine. Tabor who hauled the copies of Fiction from the office for the event is a former undergraduate student of mine who has the kind of enthusiasm for reading and thinking about literary texts that makes me excited about returning to teaching. We have had a wholesale change of staff at the magazine in the last few months that has been challenging, particularly as I am on sabbatical, but I have tried to recruit new students like Tabor to help us keep the publication alive.

Your gift of Musil’s notes to the magazine set me thinking about both stories in Unions again. Since we are publishing “The Completion of Love,” I have thought most about that, or rather returned to thinking about it. I have a copy of Unions with me here in Hull (I ordered an extra one for myself to be able to focus both on your introduction and the new translation as it appeared in Contra Munda. Now I have gone back and read Veronica again--the first time I read it or rather worked my way through the puzzles of Johannes and Demeter and their relation to Veronica as a woman, the radical nature of events escaped me and only the strange suspension that the dialogue, spoken or thought, the interaction between the characters and the dreaming of Veronica registered. My difficulties in a sense veiled the taboos that Musil was engaging with. It was on a flight to California in 2006 to Stanford University where I was to speak about Musil, Kafka, Borges and Ozick (I have to search for the lecture I gave at Santa Barbara and Stanford to remind myself exactly what I did say) that re-reading Veronica both the sexual taboo and the idea of suicide suddenly was clear and that of course turned the story into something very different for me. Your introduction clarified the background of Veronica in relation to Martha and Musil and I want to think about what Musil was trying to do with Martha’s memories of her adolescence as well as the much more direct questioning of “God” means in the story, a subject that Musil ends with in The Completion of Love, but seems to begin with in Veronica. I am reading it now with, keeping in mind your suggestion that she is meant to reflect the consciousness of a mystic, afflicted with a sickness that is part of her illumination. (There was a brilliant piece about female hermits who were voluntarily walled up in tiny chambers of Church walls that I think of now as I read over your remarks. It was a piece about female saints in the English medieval world that appeared some months ago in the London Review of Books, if I recall correctly--since my copies are in Manhattan, I can’t be specific.

So more of Veronica later in response to the ideas that you set forth both in your introduction and in your letter. Meanwhile, thank you for writing. Thinking about Musil afresh is a a way of coming awake from a slumber that tends to envelop me here in Hull.

Love,

Mark

July 10, 2019

Dear Mark,

And now I must apologize for not writing back at once to your illuminating message. I am hoping that your physical stresses have been alleviated and that you are feeling less or no pain at all.

Your comment about Completion ending with God and Temptation beginning with God is very suggestive. It makes me realize even more how much changing the title to Intimate Ties has obliterated the important mystical overtones of the word Union. Unio mystica. Every time the word union appears in the stories, Wortsman has changed the phrase to intimate ties! Maybe not every time, but I noticed quite a few. I suppose it is inevitable that these anti-mystical people would have a hard time with these stories. I am, however, by no means clear myself what Musil was trying to say about God, unions, transgressions, but I think it is safe to assume that his thinking runs in the same way his more mature thinking on these things runs...crime, taboo-breaking as liberating ethical-spiritual energies. The crimes can be religious, moral, aesthetic, or social. They awaken deadened energies, release us from congealed habits, dead words, superficiality.

Okay, I had better continue on my crooked way, in hopes that I might accidentally do something of value.

Love,

Genese

P.S. Can you send me your introductory remarks read by Constantine?

July 10, 2019

Dear Genese,

I have been working over “The Quiet Veronica” in your translation all week. The suggestions you give in the introduction to the Contra Munda edition about its relation to Martha’s childhood house and her adolescence and your further remarks in your note to me about the “sickness” of the Saint Veronica, a figure, whom I am convinced now, as I have worked my way through the whole of the story again, Musil was deliberately referencing, though I think with his characteristic irony.

I have found moreover, numerous ties between the two stories in Unions, which points to Musil’s intentions that they be read together. I wonder though whether anyone has translated “The Enchanted House”? I want badly to know exactly what he changed between that early draft of his story and the one in Unions. Can you help me?

Yes, “The Quiet Veronica” puzzled me in the past and I have started rewriting a lecture I gave on Jewish fiction back in 2006 at Santa Barbara, in which I included such unlikely figures as Borges, Musil, Flann O’Brien, together with Schultz, Kafka, Cynthia Ozick, and I have expanded as I did not in that lecture on its puzzle, and the process of reading it over several times until its startling thoughts began to emerge.

I have attached my introduction

Love,

Mark

And here are Mark’s Introductory Remarks:

As the founding editor of Fiction in 1972, together with Donald Barthelme and Jane DeLynn, and the fortuitous presence of the Swiss novelist Max Frisch and his wife Marianna in Manhattan (both of whom would be influential in introducing me to the importance of Robert Musil’s work) I looked forward to this event that celebrates a new translation of Unions, a book that contains the story of Musil’s that I love most, “The Completing of Love,” as well as the one that most puzzles me , “The Temptation of Quiet Veronica.” It’s painful to miss it, but it does give me the opportunity to set down a few remarks about Fiction and the work of Robert Musil. We published Musil first, a selection from the Diaries, in 1994.

I was already an avid reader of Musil and I had heard about plans to publish his Diaries, which Philip Payne had already begun translating but all attempts to secure permission from the American publisher were fruitless—we were shuffled off despite numerous letters and phone calls. How we got permission is still vivid in my memory. We were at the KGB, I believe, a bar that sponsored literary readings. I have no idea who among our authors were reading that night, but the former managing editor, Alan Aycock, who had gone on to be a senior editor with us, and had been in a back and forth on my behalf with the firm who had contracted to publish Musil’s Diaries came up to my table, and whispered, that its editor was sitting in the room and that the Diaries might be available. It seems as if his publishing house had gone out of business and the Diaries were back in the hands of their American agent. The editor urged us to get in touch with the agent and happily we found them glad to sell us first rights for publication in Fiction. We were offered almost as much we could take and in fact we ran excerpts in the next three issues, Volume 12, #2&3, a double issue, and Volume 13, another double issue, #1&2 and Volume 14, #1 We were able to secure a glorious Egon Schiele, “Standing Nude,” 1917, from a private collection, for the cover of the first, in an issue that featured other important writers, S.Y. Agnon, Peter Altenberg, Robert Menasse, so that Musil was in good company.

In the course of researching Musil further, when the editor at Basic Books, John Donatich, another Musil enthusiast, after reading our excerpts in Fiction, decided to contract the Diaries at Basic Books, and asked me to write the introduction and assume the editing of Payne’s translation. Genese Grill was recommended to me by a graduate student at CUNY working on German literature who was helping me understand the selection process of Philip Payne since his translation was also an abridgement of the German original. Genese, a student of Burton Pike’s at the CUNY graduate center, I was told, was working on an exciting thesis under Pike’s, the reigning American expert on Musil, direction. I got in touch with Genese, read her thesis, and understood Musil in a way that radically changed both my understanding of his work, and I have to say, my own fiction.

I prevailed on Genese to start translating more of Musil into English, since his plays and some of his short prose still remained unknown in English. Since then eight succeeding issues of Fiction have contained material of Musil’s, including Genese’s translation of his play, Vinzenz and the Mistress of Important Men, in Volume 15, 2, and Volume 16, 31, and my second favorite among his short prose, “To an Unknown Young Girl” in Issue 59.”

Donald Barthelme, whose willingness to design and layout the first issues of Fiction as well as contribute to them, though the magazine would last four or five issues and then fade away. It has often seemed so as editors left, and I had to scramble for staff and funding. It has been the privilege of publishing writers like Musil that has kept me at the task for forty-seven years. Musil has become almost a life-long project with me, as it has with Genese. I have taught him year after year in my classes, choosing shorter pieces when they were creative writing classes and longer ones, like the whole of The Man Without Qualities, when I was given graduate classes in literature. I have felt many of my students to whom he was unknown suddenly quicken with the same pleasure I felt on discovering him. I’ve asked several of my former and current students to attend this event in my place, since I am not in Manhattan at present. I hope they will add their own remarks to my own. Musil is a writer’s writer, who straddles the 19^th and 20^th century but like his project in writing fiction, he is not a writer to can be confined in a particular century. As I read and re-read him, he seems as relevant to the twenty-first century as to the one in which he first wrote and the one in which, almost at mid-point, he was still revising his great work.

Mark Mirsky (1939 - December 5, 2025)

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How Reading The Man Without Qualities Makes Us Feel

Attempts to Find Robert Musil — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 18:53:30 GMT

Dear Readers,

I know, I know, I haven’t been keeping up my side of the conversation here over the last weeks. Personal difficulties, exhaustion, sickness, slogging through mud season, and the strange vacant state of being more or less done with this big project all contribute to my silence.

The Man Without Qualities Reading Group is proceeding amid much continuing excitement (this upcoming Monday we will be discussing Chapters 101-104, so are about 500 pages in to the almost 2000 page work. Still time to join us if you feel like really exploding your consciousness!

Reading the book again like this, with such extraordinary thinkers and feelers has been really important for me. I can see all over again how unusual the book is, how brilliant the writing—the metaphors, the descriptions, the tempo, the lyricism, the formal brillance, how challenging the intellectual acrobatics, how funny and psychologically astute it is, how sad and astonishing and true and strange.

Burton Pike once said to me that what makes great books great is that they could not have been written by anyone but the peculiar person who wrote them. It is their very strangeness that makes them great. Which of course does not mean that all one need be is strange to write a great book, but rather that the really great ones are expresssions of extremely idiosyncratic personalities and minds.

Sometimes, this read around, I wonder at how different the chapters can be from each other. Sometimes they are almost purely little essaylets, or philosophical stream of consciousness or the same embedded in dialogue; other times they are vivid descriptions of scenarios and vignettes, character portraits and experiements with characters in different situations; other times they are pictures of a character’s emotional and imagistic thought (and feeling) process; other times cultural, political, philosophical critique, and so on. I wondered what it would have been like to read the book only by reading one sort of these (say the more novelistic chapters) alone, without the others. Would it work just to have the events, characters, scenes, without the intellectual underpinnings? Would it “read”?

This brings us, of course, to the larger question of what the actual form of the novel does for us, as it is (uncompleteness included). How does the concatenation or the dynamic of the different sorts of moods and music from one chapter to another effect us? How is it possible that one writer can bring us so many different tones and tastes within one book? If it makes up a map of the whole world (see Borges), the world is one seen through the eyes of someone who sees through myriad sorts of glasses from almost endless perspectives. We get to be inside Musil’s wild brain. And we emerge changed.

Many readers in our group have expressed feeling lost, baffled, uncertain as we make our way through the jungle of Musil’s head. Some have said that it makes them doubt that they can read!

Here is some of my response to that phenomenology of reading unearthed by our group of readers (how does reading the book make one feel?):

I think I might have mentioned that on studying Kafka sentences I once realized that they often end up contradicting at their latter parts something asserted in their beginnings! The effect upon the reader: confusion, unsettling. But with Musil, at least, I think the goal is not total dissolution, or at least it is a sort of break down of sureties and verities on the way to something else…stations of comprehension through aporia (not knowing)?

What if we looked at the way thinking is portrayed in the novel?

In Chapter 84, when Ulrich returns impulsively to Clarisse and Walter’s house because he “owes Clarisse an explanation,” I am struck by the very act of leaping up like that to continue a gripping conversation. That he cares that much about the things they are discussing, these really existentially vital questions about how to live. One could almost leave out the content of what is discussed and just admire the passion of the search and the dialogue. And the groping toward something, the wildly experimental attempts: maybe this, maybe the exact opposite, what about that? And when Clarisse says at the end, after presenting her cryptic but extremely suggestive image of the RING (we all are just rings, with nothing inside…but maybe the emptiness is the most important part?) she then says, we can’t expect Ulo to get this all right immediately…. It is a NEW Idea….it requires uncertainty, confusion….and it will necessarily make us doubt everything we have ever known!

One of my favorite Musil passages ever “appears in this chapter:

“Extract the meaning out of all literature, and what you will get is a denial, however incomplete, but nonetheless an endless series of individual examples all based on experience, which refute all the accepted rules, principles, and prescriptions underpinning the very society that loves these works of art! In the end, a poem, with its mystery, cuts through to the point where the meaning of the world is tied to thousands of words in constant use, severs all these strings, and turns it into a balloon floating off into space. If this is what we call beauty, as we usually do, then beauty is an indescribably more ruthless and cruel upheaval than any political revolution ever was.”

Then he goes on to say he could almost say the opposite…art was not a negation of life, but LOVE…”beauty works by intensification and contrast”...”art is subversive because art is love.” (399).

The point here, foreshadowed in earlier parts of this chapter, may be that art changes the way we see the world, changes our ideas of the world, our interpretation of it, which, as Ulrich argues, is more important than changing what we do or how ….We care, he says, too much about the PLOT, and not enough about the ESSENCE. Paying attention to the ESSENCE would be: “opening up some new experience of life” rather than following the “pattern of what we already know.”

So instead of “mere literature” we get its opposite: not everyday life, but a life modelled on the very greatest literature: more alive, more particular, more intense, more opening….

Which brings us back to how reading this book makes us feel. Is it only disorienting and the sort of disempowering which Liana suggests above (I don’t know how to read!?--another reader confessed this fear to me the other day) or is it sometimes also exhilarating like that balloon flying off away from all known word-uses and known patterns, a glimpse of something, an opening onto another way, other ways of seeing and being in the world? A glimpse infused with … love . . . and intensification of concentration and regeneration? Love not just of what others before have said the world is; not just love of a limited controlled description of the world; but of a practically infinite miracle of possibilities. It’s a dizzying height, but I think if one lets go of the structural underpinnings of received ideas and concepts and maybe can get a little comfortable with being unmoored–at least while in the safety of a work of art–one will find it’s like being reborn. The question then remains: how to bring that feeling back into the “real” world?

While looking to see if I could find a source on Chapter 86, which readers found especially complicated, I found an essay (rather academic, but still interesting) discussing this chapter, bringing up the central techniques of of irony and alienation–and how, as Pike notes, Musil uses very precise language to demonstrate how very imprecise our process of thinking is:

Arnheim’s ﬁrst encounter with love is described as something powerful that nevertheless escapes any effort to capture it with senses or with discourse. Like many other phenomena in MwQ, it is deﬁned negatively, through its absence.
Besides emotionally loaded terms that evoke non-presence and evasion such as “bafﬂing,” “absent,” “rare,” “no connection,” or “beyond visible,” we can see more complex metaphors that compare “something absent” to expressions disconnected with their faces and belonging to other faces that are not visible, then to melodies in the noise, until ﬁnally to “reﬂections in a stream.” Piling up parables of ﬂeetingness, the metaphorical chain also builds a reading experience with open meaning: it both talks about the inability of capturing feelings with words and enacts it by presenting the text that is powerful but also racing as if always a few paces ahead of the reader. It is an eloquent example of how Musil employs his literary theorizing “to forge with the greatest possible precision a language of images that would portray the inexact process by which a character proceeds through life” (Pike 1994, p. 222)—put bluntly, he uses his literary Precision to mediate the imprecision of life experience. What is important, Musil’s literary theorizing comes into existence primarily as a reading experience, so for us to understand it properly, it is necessary not to translate it into content but to follow how every single word and sentence compose the literary meaning as an ever-changing, spatiotemporally unique entity. That is also the reason why, according to Burton Pike (1994, p. 222), MwQ is not easily “amenable to structuralist or post-structuralist theoretical generalizations.”
As Harrington (2002b, p. 67 ff.) stresses, one of the prevalent aesthetic devices in MwQ is irony. Although it often works to alienate the reader from the text—to emphasize its constructedness— irony does not prevent the text from absorbing the reader into its rhythm and ﬂow. In fact, alternating between the moments of immersion and alienation maintains an emotionally engaged dialogue between the novel and the reader, where the agency in the meaning-making process circulates between one and the other. Lengthy blocks of text with paragraphs spanning one or more pages contain essayistic introspections that carry our attention as the text progresses onwards, often branching out into several disparate lines of thought, only to be abruptly cut without a deﬁnite resolution. And when Clarisse says at the end, after presenting her cryptic but extremely suggestive image of the RING (we all are just rings, with nothing inside…but maybe the emptiness is the most important part?) she then says, we can’t expect Ulo to get this all right immediately…. It is a NEW Idea….it requires uncertainty, confusion….and it will necessarily make us doubt everything we have ever known!
A sort of text-reader dialogue does not occur in the reader’s mind—as neurocognitivists might suggest—but rather through a newly formed entity that is reducible neither to the reader nor the text. Wolfgang Iser (1972, p. 284) talks about Satzdenken or “sentence-thoughts” through which the literary meaning comes into existence as a phenomenologically unique event continuing in time with the reading process.
In this sense, Musil’s writing relates to what the philosopher Susanne Langer (1957) deems a nondiscursive knowledge mediated by art. Contrary to discursive knowledge, it “is not expressible in ordinary discourse [since] … the forms of feeling and the forms of discursive expression are logically incommensurate” (Langer1 957, p. 91). Musil brilliantly turns this incommensurability between feelings and discourse into an advantage as he makes it an essential part of the text-reader confrontation.
With that in mind, we can continue in a dialogue with the novel by reading the above-stated paragraph within a larger framing. First, we can notice that unlike most of the chapter, the paragraph is in quotation marks. The reason for that is explained in the paragraph that follows, as the text then returns to the perspective of the narrator:
“This was how it was expressed, much later on and in other accents, by a poet Arnheim esteemed because to know of this reclusive man who avoided all notoriety made one an insider; not that Arnheim understood him, for he associated such allusions with the talk about the awakening of a new soul that had been in fashion during his youth, or with the then popular pictures of reedy girls, painted with a pair of lips that looked like ﬂeshy ﬂower buds.” (chpt 86, paragraph 9)
Here, the alienation effect makes the reader step away from the lyrical account of feelings and observe the situation from a distance. Like in the rest of the novel, the ironical tone is used to ridicule Arnheim as someone who prioritizes social status over the true meaning of things (“made one an insider; not that Arnheim understood him”). The quoted paragraph on love is a work of an unknown poet who, as it appears, wrote about Arnheim because of the glory he would acquire later in life. The omniscient narrator’s retrospective look gives us scornful innuendos that gradually turn the meaning of the love section into kitsch. Importantly, however, the ironic development in the text does not eliminate the preceding romantic paragraph. If we follow the reading experience step by step, we can see that the romantic tone and the subsequent ironic tone become parts of a single literary meaning. This meaningful whole continually emerges and attains its “objectivity” through the artistic depiction (text) and the perceiver (reading process),but at the same time provokes feelings that acquire certain degree of autonomy, as they mediate to the reader more general and typical textures of love—akin to the dual process Simmel (2017, p. 27 ff.) describes inThe Philosophy of Landscape…

From “Social Theorizing Through Literary Fiction: Social Aesthetics and The Man Without Qualities, by Jan Vána: https://www.academia.edu/129205787/Social_Theorizing_through_Literary_Fiction_Social_Aesthetics_and_The_Man_Without_Qualities

This week’s session is going to delve into phenomenology again, as we explore how in Chapters 101 and 103 Musil puts different characters into strange situations and lets them feel, talk, and sometimes (though rarely) act.

As to the biography, which this Substack is ostensibly about, it is being refined and refined. I am working on footnotes, image and text rights, and so on. Stay tuned for updates and as I figure out how to continue to use this space to write about things that may be of interest to you Musilians!

Genese

Act I of "Tempora Maier" a draft of Musil's satirical play, "a picture of the future"

Attempts to Find Robert Musil — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 17:24:49 GMT

TEMPORA MAIER [1]

Dramatis Personae

TEMPORA MAIER, Time. (Loves boxers — not without a bad conscience — engineers, enterprising merchants, the Clemenceaus and [Romain] Rollands[2], etc. When it comes to writers, with condescension, the type of [Kasimir] Edschmid.[3] — Loves health.

TRUSTY MAIER, Wholesale Merchant

FAUST[4] BELLYPUNCH, World Master of Boxing

FOUNTAINMOUTH, Writer (possibly a second writer named TINCLANK)

DUMMEST and PARROT, National Assemblymen

FIEND and THINK, Satyrs[5]

PASTOR OBSTIPATIUS SEIGERT

FAITHLEIN SEIGERT, His Daughter

EUGENIE BELLYPUNCH, Faust’s Grandmother

EGYDIUS GANTER, University Professor of Feuilletonistics

(An idea that is held onto for longer than five minutes is already a compulsion. Except in economics.)

A love story, on the second level. On the first, a satire [satyr play] about conditions that will come.

Eugenics is not the butt of the satire, but that which wants to be made eternal with the help of eugenics.

Journalistic writing: Perutz, Höllriegel,[6] etc. has already created a dry, exact narrative style that has replaced the family magazine novel in the newspapers, for which they may, indeed, congratulate themselves. But they would say: we influence the people through the newspapers; more than can be said for you Etho-Aesthetes. We have created the novelistic style of the times, which is precisely the newspaper style: intelligent, curious, chopped up into bits, etc.

One compares it to Dostoevsky, etc.

ACT ONE

Nature preserve near to a futuristic metropolis. View of a vast, delightful field, surrounded by trees. To the right and the left of the stage, the forest crowds in. On the right side, upfront, stands a single old tree; under it, a bench.

TEMPORA MAIER: Well, this could be the place. I must admit that I feel a bit frightened. One hears such incredible stories about these satyrs.

FAUST: You couldn’t have chosen a better companion, Tempora. My right hand can knock down a two-year old bull. I can also dispatch a three-year old bull with five blows to his skull. (They make themselves comfortable.) It only took me 23 minutes to win the world championship and I can calculate that my hand (wooing) is worth 25,000 marks a minute.

TEMPORA MAIER: (Changing the subject) I am indescribably excited to find out who will win the Schiller Prize tomorrow for the best feuilleton of the last two years.

FAUST: Pschaw! Two thousand marks!

TEMPORA MAIER: That is only symbolic. You must know that spirit cannot be compensated with money. The choice is between Fountainmouth and Tinclank.

FAUST: On the occasion of my world championship fight, Tinclank wrote that my blows revealed more intuition than Goethe’s poems. — By the way, who was Goethe? — I think Tinclank is the better of the two. He has the modern spirit. But basically, all of them are merely imitative people, who only write words about other people’s actions.

TEMPORA MAIER: I must repeat to you again that you lack the proper understanding of spirit. I could never do without ingenious men like Fountainmouth and Tinclank. Only just consider, what it meant to all of us, when Fountainmouth, in the Whitsuntide edition of The Steelyard, established how much our contemporary spirit, under the tutelage of the feuilleton, has become so much sharper and sprightlier than the ponderous breadth of former times.

FAUST: That’s why we have a Professor of Feuilletonistics at the university. That’s more than enough.

TEMPORA MAIER: You are a despiser of spirit, Faust Bellyblow.

FAUST: Tempora, if I say university professor, I mean it in earnest. That is where these things belong. That is where they are put in order. It is calming to know they are there. But they have as little to do with me as a corpse in the anatomy department: excepting, of course, if I had hit him myself. The only thing that is alive is action; without thoughts!

Moreover, you interest yourself more than I like for this professor, Egydius Ganter. I assure you, when I see this man’s chest, I have to hold my nose. (They both are silent; enraged.)

TEMPORA MAIER: (After a while, sheepishly) I am afraid, Faust Bellyblow. I have heard that these satyrs defile virgins.

FAUST: In truth. But you are insulting me again! I have promised you that I would catch one of them live. Then you can defile him, or do whatever you want with him.

TEMPORA MAIER: You are crude, Faust!

FAUST: Forgive me. I was careless, and something that I read in the morning paper just flew into my mouth.

TEMPORA MAIER: Is it true then, that people want to apprehend these creatures, if they really exist, before the eugenic medicinal court?

FAUST: Of course, this is true. There is even supposed to be an expedition going out soon. And I think that they definitely should go before the eugenic medical tribunal.

TEMPORA MAIER: You are an expert on the higher Health Court?

FAUST: Precisely. There are few people among us who would be more competent to rule on questions of our healthy progeny.

TEMPORA MAIER: And what is really known about these satyrs?

FAUST: I must admit, that I have never interested myself too much in the question. It is said that they once were important for poets. I mean, for people who, themselves, were like them. They are indecent.

TEMPORA MAIER: Oh! Horrors! Indecent!

FAUST: I must admit, I never was too interested in them. A relict of the bygone life of the mind.

(Some writers even today. They go searching in the woods. Blei and … fall from a branch. The girl pleases him. Nostalgia. The party comes. Exits.)

(Faust and Tempora turn back. Engagement to be married. In fury, he catches one from a tree.)

FAUST: They are unhealthy.

TEMPORA MAIER: Pfui! Unhealthy?

FAUST: Yes, they are a repulsive remnant of an uncivilized past. (He takes his jump rope out of his bag and begins to jump over it like a child at play, swinging it from behind over his head and jumping over it with his feet.)

TEMPORA MAIER: What are you doing, Faust?

FAUST: I am training the flexors and the extensor muscles of my legs.

TEMPORA MAIER: I mean, why are you doing it so savagely, without culture? (Faust stops, questioningly.) You must practice body-spirit: in between every jump, one must raise one’s eyes to the sky, while thinking deep thoughts about Hellenic culture. This is the Greek form of pilgrimage. Soul and physical strength grow at the same rate.

FAUST: That bores me. (Weighs the rope in his hand before packing it away.) With this rope, I will catch one of the satyrs for you.

TEMPORA MAIER: You know, I passionately adore decency and health. But tell me: what actually does unhealthy and indecent mean?

FAUST: (After reflecting a while over this new question) I should think: whatever is neither decent or healthy.

TEMPORA MAIER: That’s circular logic, Faust. Our strict, logical education does not allow for that.

FAUST: Perhaps you are right. But what counts as healthy is decided every year by our parliament, no? And what is decent simply need not be questioned by any healthy person.

TEMPORA MAIER: Yes, but what do these satyrs do?

(The whole society arrives. Egydius Ganter also, etc. Trusty Maier —pokes at Faust’s muscles: You are so enchantingly healthy, whole, etc. — Milrath from the World Evening Post. Socialistic wait-and-see battle plan. Capitalism gets increasingly stronger. But Socialism has become an institution of the Capitalistic world. The poor man lives badly and expensively — the rich man well and cheaply. The poor man gives evidence of great bravery, but does not have the civilian courage for a revolution. Thus, the rich man believes that the organization is good, because it makes the poor man manly.)

FAUST: Tempora, I must admit that I really have no idea about what they do. I simply do not know. One has never crossed my path nor insulted me, so that I might take notice of him. But we shall go into the woods and I will catch one for you. Then you can ask him about anything you wish to know. I give you my word that the fellow will deliver his last truth to you. May I take your arm?

TEMPORA MAIER: It is too early. It is disobedient to go on, before the elders arrive.

FAUST: We will just go a little bit ahead; in fifteen minutes we will be back. (Tempora lays her arm upon his.) (Enamored, Faust continues) If a man hits me in the arm with a sledge hammer, its shaft will fly out of his hand, but if your arm lays upon it like a down feather, it trembles: I am neither a politician nor a scholar, but I am willing to bet that decent and healthy mean nothing more than this. (Both exit in the direction of the woods.)

(—? Men and women. Offspring of Harlequins and Columbines? Come out of the woods; not from the trees. Even libertinage is dull without resistance from society. —)

(Think and Fiend climb down from an old tree. Dark, strange, somewhat worn clothing. Fiend, the older one, looks like a gaunt man-about-town; Think, lyrical, spiritually passionate, young. They sit down, emotionally and physically exhausted, upon the grass.)

(Also: one of the satyrs is caught, the other one sneaks in disguised, and learns thus about this whole world. Fantastically checked clothing, tight trousers, a sort of waistcoat. Fiend very tall and lean. Think a childish face with a little pointy nose …. Have you ever heard of such roguery? They are murdering spirit!)

FIEND: They will only stop spirit from being bred. Pitiful….

THINK: They want to send out an expedition against us. Did you hear?

FIEND: Yes, my dear Think, they want to nip it in the bud. Poor boy—you haven’t even had much chance to make use of it yet.

THINK: Pathetic! This health sniveling! They want to treat the writers and intellectuals like robbers, alcoholics, and the terminally ill, to keep them from reproducing!

FIEND: The operation is not at all brutal and doesn’t hurt. — The operation doesn’t hurt and is spiritually very liberating. —

THINK: But consider the infamy!

FIEND: My dear young friend, I would not see it so terribly. Just think how far we have fallen in general, even without this. We had to remove ourselves into the woods and had to publish the newspapers, The Tree-Monastery and the Treetop from here. Well and good. We debate fiercely in these two newspapers about the meaning of the world. But we are not allowed to show ourselves in the world, beyond the woods or beyond these two newspapers. The university and the daily papers are there for the intellectual. In school, one learns how to make verses. Morality is firmly established, and any ambiguities are handled by the health court. We have no social function. We also have no income. And for the last hundred years we are treated like a vacuum on all official public occasions. So that we did not starve, we have become accustomed to this animalistic life in the trees. But I admit to you that I am sick of living off the gifts of crazy women, who read our books because they have not found the right man. Am utterly sick of it. I couldn’t care less if they castrate me. On the contrary, that would free me from these women readers and it would all be a part of the world order. Did you, by the way, see the beautiful lady who was sitting here?

THINK: A giant calf with an even more gigantic butcher!

FIEND: Ach, I miss the world. It is what it is, but in any case, it is steady, warm, and eventful material. I am going to give up writing and become the manager of this boxer.

THINK: We’re too passive. We are the exceptions, the unique cases, etc.

FIEND: We have already let it go too far. In the law there is no exception, only a monstrosity.

THINK: We will finally make the people think about their private affairs, etc., just as I always vainly hoped to do.

(He wants to unify the intellectuals before the Expedition and instigate an intellectual invasion — overthrow — in the city, rushing through the streets like the suffragettes — first Christians — and suchlike. Fiend remains skeptical, but they both agree to go into the woods. The search party comes and they retreat to their trees.)

Tempora Maier and her Contemporaries

A Picture of the Future

We get a description of this future world.

There are only free thinkers and Church devotees; every intellectual expression is measured by one of these two positions.

They want to go into the woods to warn their fellows, but the party comes and they have to hide in the trees.

Central points: Trusty Maier and Faithlein Seigert. Around the former, people who are bidding, more or less, for the hand of his daughter. From the realms of politics, business, literature, and science. Around the latter, there is one person who lays more emphasis on “depth.”

They go toward the woods also. Tempora Maier and Faust return. Faust delivers his offer of marriage, wherein he proves that the boxer is the epitome of contemporary virtues.

While Tempora Maier stalls and rejects him, he becomes furious and discovers Think’s leg and pulls him down. Fiend leaps, clamoring from the tree and is caught by Faust’s other hand. Faust ties them both up and encourages Tempora to begin her questioning.

But then the search party, alerted by the cries, comes back. Each person asks a characteristic question, which Fiend and Think answer only by sticking out their tongues. It is decided that it would be better to turn them over to the Psychotechnical Institute, so they are left tied up.

— Only the weary, skeptical satyr is caught; the other escapes to the woods. And then one knows that this will lead to revolution.

His wife brings him breakfast. That means: we were married in the bad old days —

I am one of the most important people in the history of human evolution —

Recently, someone was castrated due to an error in the apparatus and then it turned out that he was one of the Virtuous Superiors, or such like. There have been cases in which the wrong people were married to each other and such like.

1: Institute’s servant smears the tachistoscope. Asks assistant: what do we have for our daily program today?

2: A commission of foreign nations is there for research purposes.

3: Simultaneously other investigations: a bride and groom, a politician, a deracinated person.

National Psychotechnical Institute

[1] Draft from Musil’s notebook, volume 19 (1919–1921). Written above the title, in pencil, presumably by Martha Musil, are the words: “Draft for a satirical drama”. See TB II fn 142, 368. Although the passages are reproduced here as if they came one after the other, in the original hand-written text some of them have been inserted to the side of and parallel with the main text. I have also made some minor orthographical changes for consistency’s sake. While the German version in TB I includes words that have been crossed out by Musil, they have not been included here.

[2]Romain Rolland, who was an outspoken pacifist during and after WWI, is compared here with the exemplary nationalist, anti-pacifist Clemenceau. See TB II, fn, 143, 368.

[3] Edschmid was a German writer, who initially allied himself with the Expressionists, but who took a turn back toward Realism in the mid-1920’s. At the time of this writing, Musil would probably have associated him with Expressionism.

[4] The word “Faust” in German does not only suggest the famous Dr. Faustus, but is also the word for “fist”.

[5] On a loose sheet of paper, inserted into notebook 19, Musil has written, under the title, “Satyrs”: “A socially-minded collective that is rich in models worthy of imitation and praise, that is rife with the spirit of harmony and spiritual sympathy, that is enlivened by intellectual interests and ruled by a spirit of justice and a love of beauty that provides from the outset every normal personality with a psychophysical attitude, etc.

The stimulation and the inspiration, the appreciation and the sympathy, the presentation of opportunities must always be accompanied by deliberate repression of misleading seductions, by conscientious warnings, by vivid antipathy for the unethical, the immoral, and the ugly …” (Appendix to Notebook 19, TB II, 1135).

[6] Reference to Leo Perutz (1882-1957), playwright, short story writer, adventure fantasy novelist; Arnold Höllriegl (1883-1938), was a Berlin journalist and sometime editor of the Viennese newspaper, Der Tag, travel writer, and short story writer.

Musil on the Moscow Arts Theater: "the strongest shocks & the deepest moments of happiness, which art, which life, is capable of providing"

Attempts to Find Robert Musil — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 13:43:47 GMT

MOSCOW ART THEATER

[Prager Presse (April 21, 1921)]

Prague has the good fortune of seeing them perform again. Years ago, in Berlin, I was there when they presented Uncle Vanya, still in those days, under Stanislavski himself. I admit that I hesitated before the reunion; war lay between, and that which one calls art had changed its aspect in the meantime; the Russian revolution had kept Stanislavski and Nemirovitsch-Dantschchenko, the spiritual forces behind this artists’ troupe, behind in Moscow, while a portion of the performers and directors, who had fallen into Denikin’s[1] hands, were banished or released to the freedom of the West — I don’t know how to say it more correctly, but it doesn’t matter. In any case it was not to be expected, even if one had the kernel of the troupe before one, that it would not have suffered from this distancing from the source of its powers. Unless it were a case of a miracle. But this is not a small troupe of actors, but rather a wandering human community, who carry their God and their soul permanently with them.

Well, it is the kernel of the troupe. And it is a case of a miracle!

I saw The Night Asylum, The Three Sisters, The Karamazovs; these pieces constituted the strongest shocks and the deepest moments of happiness, which art, which life, is capable of providing. Despite the fact that I did not understand a word. It is the perfection of theater.

I will attempt to remember and refer to a few details that I noticed, without affirming that one should remember this or that in particular and not the inexhaustibility of so much else; the real work of art is infinite, says Goethe.

Above all, there is the music of their voices. All of these actors can sing. One learns to with Stanislavski, before one depicts people. That is such a simple and splendid idea. We do it too — peripherally. But not even opera singers intone correctly and therein it is clear how much finer vocal chords and ear must be, if they are to depict the undulations of the speaking soul, which is often apparently speaking of something else entirely. That is why the choral yammering of the modish stage never coalesces into song — this impoverishment of the spiritual side of song is, to me, like having ink splattered into my ear. Here, one experiences the thousand convolutions and rhythmic fragments of expression that obtain between two human beings. Because they can sing, they do not; instead, they speak the most dream-like beautiful prose that I have ever heard. And if they really do sing sometimes, because the poet wants it, there is a moment of silence — I don’t know whether it is really in the room or just in the enchanted soul of the listener — when one believes one is clearly feeling that something is happening to one now — a rhythm of the blood or still deeper inside — but the voices already have nothing more to ground them and they hover in a heaven of sorrow.

The eye is no less considered than the ear. One could keep one’s ears covered and just look, without tiring. The gestures seem to grow out of the characteristics of the roles, to take on their own meaning — images that engulf and then dissolve into new configurations! — Without compromising the modesty of their role as servants to the action, the way the fluttering of a gown accompanies someone in the act of walking: this alone has never before existed. But that is not even the half of it. As an example, I will merely suggest one thing, the authority with which they direct the attention of the audience. They succeed in ensuring that one sees everything, when usually, otherwise, one is always hanging on some nail or other and has to chase after the backstory; if one had been paying too much attention to the hero, or had begun to ignore the hero because a clock was striking in the background. With the Moscow Theater, one misses nothing and their directors orchestrate the movements of our attention with such an uncanny artistry that these movements themselves are an enjoyment to behold. It is an artistry of nuance: of time and intense nuance, as never before experienced.

I believe they succeed in this because they leave so much out; although one hardly notices it. One believes that their performance grows naturally out of the scene itself, like a garden filled with a thousand freely sprouting ideas; but in truth, these people perform with a remarkable restraint and control and, in lieu of the many gestures that would be possible in reality — and which those actors bent on realistic portrayals would pile on, one on top of the other — instead of these many gestures, they choose only one, which embodies the entire significance of the moment, because it is a distillation of all the dimensions of this magical directing. In this way, they gain the necessary time to synthesize the single effects into a symphony that is ten-times denser than reality. They sound the pure note, uninterrupted by all peripheral actorly sounds, the note of poetry, and what they perform is no longer theater, but art.

II.

It would be, thus, a mistake to call their style Naturalistic or Impressionistic, even though the pieces by Gorky, Chekhov, and the interpretation of Dostoevsky might mislead one in this direction — or to mistake their work as the late flowering of a faded artistic movement. What they enact — beside the fact that Impressionism is as much an asylum for homeless artists as is Expressionism today — does not seem to us like a twenty-year-old obsolete artform, but rather as the art of the future, insofar as the European theater could be conceded to have a future at all.

In order to check my theory, I sought them out and mischievously asked them what they themselves called their style. Just as I had imagined, they looked at me with big eyes and answered: We perform The Life of Humans by Leonid Andreyev with decorations by Aubrey Beardsley, we perform Maeterlinck, we perform Hamlet in the style of Gordon Craig, Stanislavski performs in the Moscow Chamber Theater amid stylized decorations: We play every piece according to its essence. — I am certain, just as they may softly elevate realistic plays (usually performed so badly) above the boards, that they restore to fantastical ones a dizzying sense of reality.

For they create the body of the play from out of its soul. If I have heard correctly, it happens that they work sometimes for three years on one piece. Vladimir Nemirovitsch-Dantschenko, the writer, watches over the spirit; Stanislavski conjures forth the bodily share. I would find it, in any case, quite natural, and it should be taken as a lesson for our dramatists, who ready their pieces in three months. One can easily come up with ideas and in the chaos of our times a versatile soul experiences all kinds of scenarios; usually, if one throws a costume (as new and as modish as possible) over this astral momentary body the work of art is already finished. But it is not the kind of work, in the sense of that internal totality, which Goethe called infinite and inexhaustible. This totality occurs moreover only when — seemingly paradoxically — the soul of a writer has exhausted itself on a work; when it has transformed its shape so much within the work, that it can barely recognize itself anymore, so that it can barely encompass the work any longer, as if the soul were encountering the work, in its terrifying completion, as if it were a second nature. And in reality, there is nothing more natural than this seeming paradox. For whoever is a writer and not just a schmoozer, does not just arrange his ideas, but rather arranges his world picture, his world wish, his world will inside of every single idea. And insofar as struggle and work are larger in his whole existence than the contents of any one moment, these two things will be greater and more filled with rich associations than can be grasped by any one moment, and the work that has come into being will, in the moment of its completion, overshadow its creator, just as the many-branched crown of a tree overshadows the branch that bears it. — Of course, this doesn’t belong in a newspaper. And yet it does. For, the fact that such rigor is hardly ever practiced these days is one of the reasons that our artistic fashions spread like galloping consumption and our educated public follows the competition of book-makers as if they were bookies.

The same is true for the actor. Nothing is simpler for a person with mimetic abilities than to empathize more or less with an indicated type, to rashly appropriate a “personal” interpretation of the stereotypical, and to let fall all manner of possible gestures into this empty infinite space. But the art of acting, if it is to be more than boring cinema, only occurs when personal whim is inhibited by a sense of responsibility toward the conception of a total meaning. The way in which the Moscow Artists do this is the strongest argument one can find against all the usual critical and theater blather about how something well written can be effective on the stage, or, how, on the other hand, something can be a nullity, but still a great piece of theater; inane talk, which comes, with its professional jargon about scenes, dramatic structure, and the like, half out of the literature seminar and half from the Operetta market. The Moscow Artists, on the other hand, take the intellectual vision of the writer, which has been seen, heard, thought, and felt simultaneously, that is all united, but they also take whatever is not fully clear, but which is alive, nevertheless, and they work through it, through all of its suggested dimensions, until, instead of something shrouded in shadow, they arrive at a completely embodied unison. This has, by the way, a social aspect to it. The repertoire of the Moscow performers is only 11 plays, enough, thus, for only one season. But if our standing repertoire theater no longer offers even the possibility of the highest achievements of art, it must be forced off the stage, and the thought of a future wherein fewer plays were performed is more comforting, after all, than the thought of the European stage slowly languishing of incurable dementia.

Today it seems as if the Russians had brought an exotic world with them, as if the sky of the steppes and the vast, deep homeland hovered over their performances. In truth, it is something that could become our own; it is the cosmos of a well-crafted literature, an arrangement of incommensurable associations, enclosed within the atmospheric arc of an enormous sky. There are actors under this sky, who are some of the greatest performers alive today, but even these strong individuals bow down before the spirit, no, they bow down toward it, the way someone does who lifts up something fragile. Their collaboration is neither balletic, nor a tyrannical discipline, but rather the life of a spiritual community. It is, in itself, a performance of human absorption, one of the most astonishing performances there is. Aside from in this troupe, it does not exist on the stage. Nor, either, aside from them, does it exist in contemporary life.

[1] Reference to Anton Ivanovich Denikin (1872-1947), the Polish-born Russian general, leader of the anti-Bolshevik forces in the Russian Civil War (1918-1920).

The Moscow Art theatre's 1898 production of Anton Chekhov's play The Seagull, with Meyerhold seated on the floor, centre, and Stanislavski on the far right; published in Efros' journal in 1917.

https://www.contramundumpress.com/theater-symptoms

"Analysis and Synthesis"

Attempts to Find Robert Musil — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 18:41:48 GMT

Analysis and Synthesis

Thoughtful people are always analytical. Creative writers are analytical. For every analogy is an inadvertent analysis. And one only comprehends a phenomenon insofar as one recognizes how it occurs or how it is connected, related to, bound to another phenomenon. Naturally, one can just as easily say that every analogy is a synthesis, as is every comprehension. Naturally; they are two halves of the same process.

Nevertheless, today there are many literati who are angry at analysis and who cozy up to synthesis. Their alleged reason is this: if one continually practices partial analysis or partial synthesis (through more thinking) then suddenly everything is connected to everything else, is caused by everything; everything collapses into likenesses and an endless number of combinatory possibilities. Of course that corresponds thoroughly with the truth (and is caused by historical coincidence, which we have to thank for the mode of our internal existence and its categorization into values). But it grows tedious when it is managed like a game, without strong passions or great talent. In these cases, the others rant and rave about the “naked” analysis, the “naked” psychology (although it has nothing to do with psychology, but is more like an ethical experiment), and about an insufficient earnestness when it comes to a value judgments, about sterile rationalism and the like (even though it is not a matter of anything rational, but rather an emotional-rational and senti-mental way of thinking).

—They mistake the naturally egalitarian lack of talent of the representative of the mediocre with the thing itself. They are right to think that an intimacy with internal possibilities does not alone a reality make; but their fear overlooks the fact that making a reality requires a step forwards and not backwards. They know that a person, in order to create an evocative exemplar or a work of art, requires other qualities as well, such as thinking and moral fantasy; but they forget that one must encourage the use of these qualities rather than dissuade the writer from intellectual activity altogether.

To subtly decentralize mankind’s thinking process is certainly not in itself the New Human Being, but it is the only basis from which to create such Beings for someone who has the talent to do so. One is suspicious of nothing more than all wishes for simplification of literature and life, for the Homeric or religious mood, for unity and wholeness.

Musil visiting The Goethe House in Frankfurt.

Conscious Essayism

Attempts to Find Robert Musil — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 16:42:53 GMT

Last night in our Musil reading group a number of people said that they did not emotionally relate to the characters in the book. A few of us said that we very much did. Of course it raises the question of ways of relating (emotional, intellectual, etc.), but also of individual approaches & experiences of literature. Musil wanted the reader to be shattered in some way, to feel and think in new ways because of the EXPERIENCE of the book (not just intellectually). One could say, by undergoing the ordeal of the book in some moments, but also experiencing its charm and humor.

I’m curious what you, readers, feel about the characters in the book. Do you relate to them, care about them?

Brad Freeman asked who was Musil’s audience—something I had never really thought about. It made me think of something Musil said after the publication of one of the book’s volumes: “If this book succeeds, it will have been wrong,” which seemed to suggest that there was no audience for it… which then made me think that his goal was in a way to CREATE an audience with the book, to inspire the different kinds of thinking that he felt were required to create what he calls “a new morality,” and a new way of being in the world. And not that there had not been others before him who thought and felt like this (the essayists, the experimentors, certain mystics, certain writers, certain non-systematic philosophers, certain scientists, artists), but that this hybrid mode of thinking was very rare, maligned, minimized, made to seem frivolous. This devaluation led to an under-cultivation of the parts of human potential that could have been (still could) bulwarks against barbarism on the one hand, and hollow, superficial life on the other.

We were talking about Musil’s idea of a Utopia of Essayism and Utopia of Exact Living, which, were they lived out in real life would presumably be steps toward reconciling the real world with the world of ideas (which were and currently still are mired in cognitive dissonance, hypocrisy, moral posing and supposing).

Living with Precision would possibly mean “that a life’s work could be reduced to three poems or three actions or treatises . . . in which the individual’s capacity for achievement is intensified to its highest degree…keeping silent when one has nothing to say, doing only the necessary when one has nothing special to do, and, most important, remaining indifferent unless one has the ineffable sense of spreading one’s arms wide, borne aloft on a wave of creation….” “In short, from every ton of morality a milligram of an essence would be left over, a millionth part of which is enough to yield an enchanting joy.”

“The logical outcome of this would be a human being full of the paradoxical interplay of exactitude and indefiniteness. He is incorruptibly, deliberately cold, as required by the temperament of precision; but beyond this quality, everything else in him is indefinite. The stable internal conditions guaranteed by a system of morality have little value for a man whose imagination is geared to change. Ultimately, when the demand for the greatest and most exact fulfillment is transferred from the intellectual realm to that of the passions, it becomes evident . . . that the passions disappear and that in their place arises something like a primordial fire of goodness.”

He then goes on to say that this man of precision already exists: in those separated moments when someone carries out their profession. But not in their lives! If he were asked to take himself and “everything else seriously and without bias” there is no doubt that he “would regard the utopia of himself as an immoral experiment on a person engaged in serious business. Which is why Ulrich, in his concerns with the question of . . . whether a goal or a meaning can be found for what is happening and has happened to us—had always, all his life, been quite alone.”

Musil, too.

I, too.

You?

Martha’s sketch of Robert

A Reading of Chapters 67 and 68 of The Man Without Qualities (Pike/Wilkins Translation)

Attempts to Find Robert Musil — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 14:08:40 GMT

This morning I felt like rereading some chapters we will be discussing in this week’s reading group, and I decided to read them aloud and record them, to share with you.

We know that Musil read his work aloud to his wife, Martha, and that Burton Pike, who edited and translated the novel along with Sophie Wilkins, found his own rhythm of translating when he realized this.

In these chapters about Ulrich’s relationship with Diotima (and Arnheim and with himself) there is so much going on. The way he weaves thousands of years of philosophy into a carriage ride! We get to think with him about idealism and materialism, the relationship between the body and the soul, civilization and savagery, aristocracy and the nouveau riche, kinship and otherness, attraction and revulsion, and on and on and on.

Here is a picture of Musil’s mother (Ulrich’s description of the woman surrounded by ruffles and layers reminded me of Hermine):

In discussions with the brilliant readers in our group, I came to consider one difference between the chapters where Ulrich interacts with others and when he muses to himself. In the former he is usually expressing an extreme side of his character (the materialistic, cynical one), as a reaction against their extreme idealism; when he is alone, however, he allows the depth and complexity of his feeling and thinking to come through. The chapters I read here mainly showcase the cynical Ulrich, but the other ones let us in on the secret that will become more and more obvious once Ulrich meets his sister, Agathe: that he is at least partly a mystic, albeit the kind who wants to drive on the mystic road with a truck.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy my rather imperfect reading (I slipped up on a few words and couldn’t repress laughter at some points).

Musil's 1914 Review of Walser and Kafka

Attempts to Find Robert Musil — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 17:53:55 GMT

Just before Musil went off to join the army in WWI he wrote his last “Literary Chronicle” for the Neue Rundschau. It is astonishing to experience Musil experiencing and trying to describe the new phenomena of Robert Walser and Franz Kafka here, fresh, unprepared, astonished. The reader familiar with Musil will see that he is also writing—as usual—about some of his own literary, ethical, and human concern. Here is my translation of this remarkable meeting of mind and page.

Die »Geschichten« von Robert Walser. (Kurt Wolff Verlag, Leipzig, 1914.)

Benevolent-minded people and women with a strong charitable bent will find these thirty short stories playful. They will accuse them of lacking character, of being capricious, of trifling with life; perhaps they will accuse them of having no heart and of merely impressing by the kind of stupefying determination with which something insignificant, like a park bench, sometimes takes up its place in the world. On the whole, it seems to me, they wouldn’t go so far as to say so, but deep down they will be tormented by the fact that the stories lack moral earnestness. Which is in fact the case: in so many things we maintain such rigid customs when it comes to our feelings that we handle them as if they originated inside things themselves. For example, we find—a case that relates to Walser—a burning theater to be nothing but a terrible catastrophe. When someone could experience it as a splendid catastrophe or as one that had been well-deserved. Since we are liberal, we naturally don’t want to keep him from doing so; but what we believe we have a right to demand in such cases are reasons. And when this person has no need for reasons at all, but simply finds the whole thing to be just as much an enchanting catastrophe as we find it terrible, then we venture at first to suspect: depravity. And if we then find nothing more than a lovable fellow, we say that he has no moral earnestness or that he sins against the earnestness of the circumstance. Yes, we don’t only demand this respect in the face of circumstances on sad occasions, but even in enjoyment we demand a certain earnestness. When it comes to expressing the greenness of a meadow, for example, the writer must communicate it to us with such enchantment that we feel how his whole heart—in flight—is over-grown with greenness. Or at least he will say that he cannot manage this, and that the meadow is not green at all, but rather an economic catastrophe—because of the agrarian’s beautiful meadow, the factory workers can’t eat meat. But if he simply feels that it is quite idiotically, uproariously laughably green—and this is indeed the most ordinary thing one wants to say about a beautiful lawn afterall—then we really do conclude that the emotional rights of a beautiful meadow have been somehow too carelessly handled. Now in most of his reactions, Walser is hardly and by absolutely no means intentionally a revolutionary or a deviant of feeling, but rather a lovable somewhat fantastical good citizen; but he constantly transgresses against the inalienable expectations of the objects of the world and the imagination: the expectation that they will be taken by us as actual. A meadow for him is in one moment a real object, and in another just something on paper. If he rhapsodizes or rages against something, he never lets us forget that he is doing it in writing and that his feelings are on a tightrope. Suddenly he makes his characters go silent and lets the story speak, as if it were a character. Marionette voices, romantic irony; but there is something in this jape that is loosely reminiscent of Morgenstern’s poems, where the gravity of real relationships suddenly begins to tremble on the filament of a word association; except that with Walser this association is never purely verbal but rather an association of meanings, so that the line of feeling that he directly follows swells into a grand momentum, swerves aside, and continues on swaying merril in the direction of a new seduction. I would not really want to maintain that these arenot shenanigens, but in any case they are not—despite the exceptional mastery of words, which can intoxicate one—literary shenanigens, but rather human ones, with much tenderness, dreamyness, freedom, and the moral richness of one of those seemingly useless, lethargic days, when our firmest convictions loosen into a pleasant languidness.

Franz Kafka.

It seems to me nevertheless that Walser‘s particular type must remain unique and is not likely to become a literary genre, and it is unpleasant for me to say that Kafka’s first book, Observations (Ernst Rowohlt Verlag, Leipzig, 1913), seems like a special case of the Walser type, even though it appeared earlier than Walser’s Stories. Here as well, contemplation of a kind for which a writer fifty years ago would certainly have invented the book title Soap Bubbles; it suffices to note the specific difference and to say that in the latter the same kind of figments sound sad and in the former merry, that in one there is something freshly baroque, while in the other, in sentences that designedly fill whole pages, there is rather something of a conscientious melancholy—that of an iceskater performing his long slides and figures. Very great artistic mastery here as well, but perhaps only here a whiff of these small endlessnesses streaming into emptiness, a meek allusion to nothingness, a friendly softness as in the hours of a suicide between decision and act, or however one may call this feeling that one can name in very different ways, because it simply resonates like a very soft dark overtone; and is very allluring, though too vague and soft. It strikes a chord with the interiority of experience that makes Kafka’s other book, the novelle, The Stoker (Kurt Wolff, Verlag, Leipzig, 1913), so ravishing. This story is fully fluttering and fully containment. It is really without composition, without noteworthy external or internal plot, and yet each step is arranged so tightly and it is so full of activity that one feels how vast and varied for some people is the path from one uneventful day to another. A young man travels from Europe to America, away from his family, to an unexpectedly good and respected fairytale uncle; along the way, he makes friend with a stoker, takes an interest in his fate, begins brash unfinishable things that—from the perspective of the world—seem to protrude into life like torn off filaments, and he thinks brash thoughts that he cannot bring to conclusion; that is all. It is a conscious naivité and yet has nothing of the unpleasantness of such things. For it is real naivité, that in literature (just like the false kind; the difference is not here!) is something indirect, complicated, misbegotten, a longing, an ideal. But there is something here that deserved consideration, a well-grounded something, a feeling with living causes; while the false, so-called genuine, the beloved artless naivité does not have this and thereby is so worthless. A primordial drive to goodness takes shape in Kafka’s story—no resentment, rather something of the submerged passion of childhood for Goodness; the feeling of an agitated child’s prayer, and something of the fretful eagerness of painstaking schoolwork, and much for which one can conceive of no other expression save moral tenderness. The demands of that which one must do; are here posed with a conscience that is not driven by ethical principles but by a fine, haunting oversensitivity, which incessently uncovers small questions of great significance and which reveals remarkable convolutions in questions that for others are merely smooth uninteresting solids. And then, amidst all of this, there comes a part where it is reported how an aging unloved virgin bumblingly, shyly, seduces a young boy; very short, but of such a power in so few strokes, that the writer—who until then had maybe seemed to be only a mild narrator—appears as a very willful artist, one who has bent down to small and lowly emotions.

What do you want to know about Musil?

Attempts to Find Robert Musil — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 13:22:52 GMT

I suppose it is natural that I feel somewhat depleted after handing in the draft. Postpartum depression is what I usually call this state.

Once the Musil reading group begins again on Monday I am sure I will be re-inspired. But for the meantime, I realize I have not written anything for a week here and I don’t want to leave you all without some interesting Musilian tidbits.

What do you want me to write about? Send questions, themes, ideas!

And for your listening pleasure, a video of me long ago (2015) in Burlington Vermont’s lovely Crow Bookshop, where I used to work, reading from my newly minted translation of a collection of Musil’s small prose.

https://www.cctv.org/watch-tv/programs/reading-new-translation-thought-flights-collection-short-prose-robert-musil

https://www.contramundumpress.com/thought-flights

Utopian Bridge

Attempts to Find Robert Musil — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 20:27:52 GMT

Burton taught a course in literary criticism by having us translate one-page of a text and make observations about what sorts of images, sentences, syntax, tempo were used? A close reading that trained our eyes and ears to the subtle differences and similarities between each writer’s particular melody, rhythm, level of abstraction, mood, obsessions. How did each writer translate the world into words, and how would we then interpret and translate that written world? How did each writer fit and not quite fit into the shared cultural continuum; for it was important that there was one, despite the necessity of sometimes breaking away from it.

These days, when differences between cultures, persons, languages, and ideas are increasingly diminished by the forces of globalism and moral conformity, by technological attempts to anticipate and control thoughts and language, it is all the more important to salvage a space for individual idiosyncratic aesthetic and ethical experimentation, where translation and communication need not mean a collapse into sameness. Nor does a celebration of difference spell an inability to communicate from one person or one culture to another.

In his 2005 essay “Literature as Experience,” Burton wrote asking how one might build a utopian bridge from an “isolated subjective mind to the social, moral, and ethical concerns of society at large?” A belief in such a possibility seemed, he wrote, to have “since been lost, a belief that in spite of the increasing solipsism and dehumanizing specialization of modern life there is some sphere or level […] in or on which all the conflicting and apparently unrelated fragments, self and world, feeling and intellect, science and society, skepticism and belief, could somehow be melded into a coherent, ethical whole.”

In April of 2021, I asked him what he thought then about this utopian bridge: was a belief in communication from subjective self to subjective self today hopelessly naive? He then reminded me of Musil’s condition toward the end of his life, in poverty and exile, looking at a world under totalitarianism. From out of the darkness and despair of that historical moment, Musil dared to look to the youth to come, after the war, to the future. He seemed to say that significance must still be sought and communication approximated—in even the worst of times, lest we relinquish our humanity to the brutal engines of destruction. Burton concluded that Musil “could at best only hope, so can we now. I don’t see any way, now as well, of gathering together the unrelated fragments of the world; just a hope. The bridge is for the future, not for now.” Then he signed off, saying, “Age is beginning to catch up with me (rather a surprise!), so I look forward to your carrying on”. In his honor, we must try now, despite everything, to imagine the sorts of bridges that allow for difference and that foster creative individual aliveness.

https://centerforthehumanities.org/event/a-celebration-of-burton-pike

(A young Burton Pike with a member of the at that time future generation on his shoulders)

Pesky Editorial Pleasures

Attempts to Find Robert Musil — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 17:45:16 GMT

So, as I edit my draft to turn in on January 1st, several keys on my keyboard don’t work (so I am resorting to an on-screen keyboard for n, u, h, s, and 8). Well, it is annoying, but then I think of what writers used to have to do, all of this by hand over & over again… then again, in the old days, writers didn’t have to do all this editing on their own.

It’s gruelling, my eyes hurt, and getting everything right is virtually impossible, so it is not really satisfying either. New readers have also raised excellent questions, which raise doubts and inaugurate imposture syndrome. I wonder, are there scholars who don’t have such doubts, or alternately who are wise enough to realize that they can’t get everything absolutely gleamingly perfect & right?

This book, despite my 25 year knowledge of Musil, has been very challenging because of all the complex thinkers he interacted with….I did my best, I hope, in the time & word count allowed….& there will happily be more edits & suggestions before it appears….

Thanks to all of you who inspired me & cheered me on so far. The book is for you.

Here, just because I have nothing else to share, is a working bibliography for you (warning: the formatting got all screwy when I pasted it):

Bibliography

Adamik, Marianne. “Das tägliche Leben der Musils in der Rasumofskygasse” in Erinnerungen an Robert Musil, En Face—Texte von Augenzeugen, edited by Karl Corino. Wädenswill, Switzerland: Nimbus, 2010, 123-124.

Adorno, Theodor W. Prismen. Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft. Baden-Baden: Suhrkampf, 1955.

Amann, Klaus. Literature and Politics, trans. Genese Grill. N.Y.: Contra Mundum Press, 2023.

Austria Child Mortality Rate. Statista, 2025. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041789/austria-all-time-child-mortality-rate/.

Baedeker, Karl. “Robert Musil und ein junger Mann seiner Zeit” in Erinnerungen, 331-335.

Bahr, Hermann. Inventur, ed. Gottfried Schnödl, Weimar: VDG, 2001.

Dagmar Barnouw. Weimar Intellectuals and the Threat of Modernity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.

Bashkirtseff, Marie. The Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff, trans. A.D. Hall. Chicago & New York: Rand,McNally & Co, 1908.

Berliner Mietverein. “Berliner Pensionen. Frau Wirtin und die möblierten Herren Jens Sethmann” in https://www berliner-mieterverein.de/magazin/online/mm0517/berliner-pensionen-frau-wirtin-und-die-moeblierten-herren-051724.htm, August 9, 2025.

Franz Blei. Ed, The Great Bestiary of Modern Literature. Berlin: Rowohlt, 1922.

Bonnachi, Silvia. Robert Musils Studienjahre in Berlin: 1903-1908. Beilage zu Musil-Forum. Saarbrücken: Arbeitstselle für Robert-Musil-Forschung, 1992.

Patricia P. Brodsky, “The Military School: A Shared Source in Rilke and Musil,” in Modern Language Studies Vol. 10, No. 1 (Winter, 1979-1980): 88-93.

Canetti, Elias. “Erfahrungen mit Musil in Wien 1935-1936” in Erinnerungen, 233-288.

Dorrit Cohn. “Psyche and Space in Musil’s ‘Die Vollendung der Liebe’,” in The Germanic Review 49 (1974): 154-168.

Corino, Karl. Ed. Erinnerungen an Robert Musil, En Face—Texte von Augenzeugen, edited by Karl Corino. Wädenswill, Switzerland: Nimbus, 2010.

“Freundschaft mit Robert and Martha Musil: Gespräch mit Bruno und Erna Fürst,” in Erinnerungen, 269-273.

“Musils Besuch im Goethe-Haus und seine Frankfurter Lesung: Gespräch mit Josephine Rumpf” in Erinnerungen, 197-199.

“Musil in Paris: Gespräch mit Otto Pächt” in Erinnerungen, 297-299.

Robert Musil: Eine Biographie. Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowholt, 2003.

“Von der Seele träumen dürfen.” Nachträge zur Biographie und zum Werk Robert Musils. Würzberg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2022.

Max Dessoir. Das Doppel Ich. Leipzig, Ernst Günthers Verlag, 1890.

Dilthey, Wilhelm. Weltanschauung und Analyse des Menschen seit Renaissance und Reformation. Abhandlungen zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Religion. Leipzig: Teubner 1914 (Wilhelm Diltheys Gesammelte Schriften Bd. 2).

Dinklage, Karl. Ed. Robert Musil: Leben, Werk, Wirkung, Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1960.

“Musils Herkunft und Lebensgeschichte” in Leben, Werk, Wirkung, 187-264.

Dobravik, Milan. “Robert Musil und seine Mäzene” in Erinnerungen, 249-254.

Donath, Gustave. “Aus Robert Musils Jugendzeit” in Erinnerungen,

Durrell, Lawrence. Literary Lifelines: The Richard Aldington-Lawrence Durrell Correspondence, ed. Ian S.

MacNiven & Harry T. Moore. London: Faber & Faber, 1981.

David Edmonds, The Murder of Professor Schlick: The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020.

Ehrenfeld, Stella. “Eine Hilfsaktion für Musil” in Erinnerungen, 257-260.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1820-1872, Vol. IV, ed. By Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1910.

“The Transcendentalist.” https://emersoncentral.com/ebook/The-Transcendentalist.pdf. December 3, 2025.

Fanelli, E.V. “‘Als er Fräulein Valerie liebte.’ Musils Valerie-Erlebnis” in Musil Forum,

19./20. Jahrgang 1993/94. International Robert-Musil-Gesellschaft, Saarbrücken: 7-30.

Fanta, Walter. Die Entstehungsgeschichte des “Mann ohne Eigenschaften“ von Robert Musil. Paderborn, Germany: Böhlau, 2000.

Ed. et al. Die Klagenfurter Ausgabe: Kommentierte digitale Edition, Klagenfurt, Austria: Robert Musil Institute, 2009.

“Schreiben Wie Musil” in Musil Studien. Berlin: De Gruyter Brill, Bd. 49, 2020.

Lewis S. Feuer, Einstein and the Generations of Science. Abingdon, Oxon & NY: Taylor & Francis, 1982.

Fontana, Oskar Maurus. “Die Nachkriegszeit und Musils neue Arbeitstätte,” in Erinnerungen, 99-105.

“Eine Begegnung mit dem Verleger Claasen” in Erinnerungen, 377-379.

Frisé, Adolf. “Eine erste Begegnung mit Musil” in Erinnerungen, 189-192.

Fürst, Bruno. “Musils Späte Jahre” in Erinnerungen, 375-376.

Edmund Glaise von Horstenau, Ein General im Zwielicht. Wien-Kölln-Graz: Peter Broucek, 1980.

Goethe, J.W. von. Faust. Part I, translated by Anna Swanwick. Vol. XIX, Part 1. The Harvard Classics. New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1909–14.

Gordon, Paul. “Die Uraufführung der Schwärmer 1929” in Erinnerungen, 155-161.

Groethuysen, Bernhard. Die Dialektik der Demokratie. Rosdorf, Germany: Seidel, 1932.

Guillemin, Bernard. “Die Arbeit am Mann ohne Eigenschaften” in Erinnerungen, 346.

“Eine erste Begegnung mit Musil” in Erinnerungen, 169-170.

“Eine unnangenehme Begegnung mit Professor Bohnenblust” in Erinnerungen, 383-385

“Martha and Robert Musil in Berlin” in Erinnerungen, 193-195.

“Musils Ratlosigkeit und Anerkennunngsbedürfnis in den 1930er Jahren” in Erinnerungen, 215-219.

Hakel, Hermann, “Eine Lesung Musils in Wien 1935” in Erinnerungen, 329-330.

Hall, Murray. “Der Preis Der Stadt Wien” https://personal.murrayhall.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/DER-PREIS-DER-STADT-WIEN.pdf. September 12, 2025.

Hayasaka, Nanoa. Robert Musil und der genius loci. Munich: Brill/Fink, 2011.

Hexner, Erwin P. “Musils Interessenkreis” in Erinnerungen, 275-277.

Hirslanden Clinique de Grangettes. “History.” https://www.hirslanden.ch/en/clinique-des-grangettes/portrait/history.html December 28, 2025.

Ricarda Huch, Die Romantik

Jensen, Anthony K. “Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945)” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: iep.utm.edu/Ernst-Cassirer/221. December 28, 2025.

Jacobi, Jolande. “Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Musil über den Wiener Kulturbund” in Erinnerungen, 280.

Høi Jensen. The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of the Magic Mountain. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025.

Alfred Kerr, Gesammelte Schriften in Zwei Reihe. Berlin: S. Fischer, 1917.

“Nachruf auf Musil in Londoner PEN-Club” in Erinnerungen, 462-463.

Kesser, Arnim. “Musil als Kulturdiagnostiker” Erinnerungen, 426-427.

Kraus, Karl. Die Fackel. https://fackel.oeaw.ac.at/, June 6, 2025.

Lejeune, Robert. “Robert Musils Schweizer Jahre” in Erinnerungen, 411-424.

Lilla, Mark. “Introduction” in Thomas Mann. Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, translated by Walter D. Morris. New York: NYRB, 2021.

David Luft. The Austrian Dimension in German Intellectual History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Robert Musil and the Crisis of European Culture: 1880-1942. Oakland: University of California Press, 1984.

“Schopenhauer, Austria, and the Generation of 1905” in Central European History, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Mar., 1983): 53-75.

Lukacs, Palko. “Musils individualpsychologische Behandlunng und sein Interesse an der jüngeren Generation” in Erinnerungen, 165-168.

Mach, Ernst. Die Analyse der Empfindungen und das Verhältnis des Physischen zum Psychischem. Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1922.

Maeterlinck, Maurice. The Treasure of the Humble, translated by Alfred Sutro. New York:Dodd, Mead & Co., 1900.

Mandl, Eva Maria. “Schöner Palawatsch”. Ea von Allesch, Böcklinstraße 106, Löwengasse 47, Paracelsusgasse 9 (1915; 1918-1922). Pratercottage. http://www.pratercottage.at/2011/08/18/ea-von-allesch/. May 11, 2025.

Mann, Thomas. Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, translated by Walter D. Morris. New York: NYRB, 2021.

Mayer, Hans. “Erinnerung an Robert Musil” in Erinnerungen, 443-448.

McBride, Patrizia. “On the Utility of Art for Politics: Musil’s ‘Armed Truce of Ideas.’” The German Quarterly, Autumn, 2000, Vol. 73, No. 4 (Autumn, 2000): 366-386.

Moran, Dermot “Introduction.” Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, Vol. I, ed. Dermot Moran, transl. J. N. Findlay. Abingdon on Thames: Routledge, 2001.

Morgenstern, Soma. “Begegnung Musils mit Georg Lukács und Béla Bálazs” in Erinnerungen, 107-112.

“Der Anschluss Österreichs 1938—Robert Musil und Joseph Roth” in Erinnerungen, 368-369.

“Musils Kafka-Lektüre,” in Erinnerungen, 116-117.

“Robert Musil und Joseph Roth” in Erinnerungen, 241-247.

Musil, Alfred, “Musils Ablösung als Kompagniekommandant” in Erinnerungen, 81-82.

Musil, Aloisa, “Tagebuchaufzeichnungen der Grossmutter Aloisa Musil” in Erinnerungen, 23-24.

Martha Musil, et al. Briefwechsel mit Arnim Kesser and Philip Jacottet, ed. Marie Louise von Roth, Annette Daigger, & Martine von Walter. Lausanne, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 1997.

“Musils Kabenlektüre” in Erinnerungen, 25-26.

Robert Musil, Briefe 1901-1942, ed. Adolf Frisé, (Reinbeck bei Hamburg, Rowohlt, 1981.

Briefe 1901-1942, Kommentar, Register, ed. Adolf Frisé .Reinbeck bei Hamburg, 1981.

Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Ed. Adolf Frisé. Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978.

“Der Sechste Exkurs” in Franz Blei. Ed, The Great Bestiary of Modern Literature. Berlin: Rowohlt, 1922.

Die Klagenfurter Ausgabe: Kommentierte digitale Edition, ed. Walter Fanta, et al. Klagenfurt, Austria: Robert Musil Institute, 2009.

Literature and Politics, trans. Genese Grill; ed. Philip Payne & with an Introduction by Klaus Amann. N.Y.: Contra Mundum Press, 2023.

Tagebücher. Ed. Adolf Frisé. Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1983.

Tagebücher. Anmerkungen, Anhang, Register. Ed. Adolf Frisé. Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt,1983.

Theater Symptoms: Plays & Writings on Drama, trans. Genese Grill. N.Y.: Contra Mundum Press, 2020.

Thought Flights, trans. Genese Grill. N.Y.: Contra Mundum Press, 2015.

Unions: Two Stories, trans. Genese Grill. N.Y.: Contra Mundum Press, 2019.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Joyful Wisdom, translated by Thomas Common.The Complete Works of Nietzsche, vol. 10. New York: Russell & Russell, 1964.

Nübel, Birgit. Ed. with Norbert Christian Wolf. Das Robert Musil Handbuch. Berlin: De Gruyter Brill, 2016.

“Vereinigungen (1911)” in Handbuch, 120-156.

Otten, Karl. “Eindrücke von Robert Musil” in Erinnerungen, 11-18.

Pater, Walter. Studies in the History of the Renaissance . London: Macmillan & co, 1873.

Perloff, Marjorie. The Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire . Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Valerie Petter-Zeiss. “Die verlassee Wohnung der Musils” in Erinnerugen, 389-390.

“Martha und der galante Robert Musil” in Erinnerungen, 352-354.

“Martha Musils Kampf um die Renaissance des Werks” in Erinnerungen, 469-472.

Petry, Walther. “Musils Rede zur Rilke-Feier am 16. Januar 1927” in Erinnerungen, 151-154.

Oliver Pfohlmann, “Biografie” in Handbuch, 1-34.

“Biografie über Alfred Kerr: Lebenskünstler, Romantiker – und begnadeter Kritiker.” November 18, 2016. Deutschland Rundfunk. https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/biografie-ueber-alfred-kerr-lebenskuenstler-romantiker-und-100.html.

Pietzner, Carlo, “Die Begegunng eines jungen Malers mit Musil” in Erinnerungen, 355-365.

Rasch, Wolfdietrich, “Musil in Berlin in Erinnerungen” in Erinnerungen, 221-232.

Rosenthal, Otto, “Ein Familienurlaub am Wörthersee” in Erinnerungen, 131-136.

“Musils Gallenoperation in Erinnerungen, 143-145.

Roth, Marie Luise. “Robert Musil im Spiegel seines Werkes: Versuch einer inneren Biographie” in Leben, Werk, Wirkung, 13-4.

Un destin de femme—Martha Musil: L’amante, L’épouse, la Soeur. Lausanne, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2006.

Ryan, Judith. The Vanishing Subject: Early Psychology and Literary Modernism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Schmidt, Jochen. Ohne Eigenschaften.Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1975.

Schnitzler, Arthur. Anatol and Other Plays, translated by Grace Isabel Colbron. New York: Modern Library, 1917.

Schöne, Albrecht. “Über den Gebrauch des Konjunktivs bei Robert Musil”. Euphorion 55, 1968, 196-220.

Schönwiese, Ernst “Die Bedeutung der Wiener Volkshochschule und die Lesungen Musils in den 1930er Jahren” in Erinnerungen, 325-327.

Schwerin, Hans. “Erinnerung an Musils Exil in Genf” in Erinnerugen, 449-451.

Seidl-Kreis, “Die Unterstützung Musils durch das ‘Comité international pour le placement des intellectuels réfugiés’ in Genf” in Erinnerungen, 405-407.

Sigmund, Karl. Exact Thinking in Demented Times. New York: Basic Books, 2017.

Silone, Ignazio. “Musil in der Schweiz” in Erinnerungen, 396-403.

Simmel, Georg. The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Translated by Kurt Wolff. New York: Free Press, 1950.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Wilhelm Dilthey. 9/29. 2020. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dilthey/ .

Stern, Luitpold, “Robert Musil als Bataillonsadjutant” in Erinnerungen, 83-84.

Tau, Max. “Der Mäzen Klaus Pinkus und seine Unterstützung für Musil” in Erinnerungen, 205-208.

Taucher, Franz, “Die Zensur des Propaganda Ministeriums” in Erinnerungen, 461.

Galin Tihanov, “Robert Musil in the Garden of Conservatism,” in A Companion to the Works of Robert Musil, ed. Philip Payne, et al. Rochester: Camden House, 2007.

Turner, Frederick et al. “A Brief History of Emergence.” Atheneum Magazine. Winter, 2024, 9-15.

Von Allesch, Johannes. “Eine letzte Begegegng mit Musil” in Erinnerungen, 409-410.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus . London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1922.

Woodward, William B.“Fechner’s Panpsychism: A Scientific Solution to the Mind-Body Problem. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 8 (1972): 367-386.

Wotruba, Fritz. “Musil in der Schweiz” in Erinnerungen, 429-433.

Wright, G.H. “Introduction.” Norman Malcolm. Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Musil’s Underwood

Christmas and New Year in Swiss Exile, 1939

Attempts to Find Robert Musil — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 13:29:22 GMT

Despite the uncertainty, Robert and Martha were settling into their first real home in Geneva, on the grounds of “the Pouponnière”—a nursery or, if you will, “doll’s house”— established and overseen by a German philanthropist, Barbara Borsinger von Baden, during the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918 to care for sick children as “la Pouponnière de L’Oeuvre des Amis de l’Enfance.” In 1933, she expanded the establishment to care for mothers and orphans, adding a school for the training of nurses, and, in the case of the Musils and some others, accommodations for adult refugees. Today, much expanded and altered by the construction of new buildings, it is the Hirslanden Clinique des Grangettes.

When the Musils lived there, on the ground floor of a little villa across from the main building, the Pouponnière was just outside city limits, on Chemin des Grangettes 29, “a road off the Route de Chêne, bus stop Ermitage on Line 12, and then just a few steps further and two lefts.” The fact that the house where they lived was part of a nursery, was “an irony” for those who knew Musil’s feelings about children. But it was lovely. They were surrounded by “a small garden, with fig and apple trees and magpies sitting in tall birches.” For the first time since leaving Vienna, Robert’s room was large enough to unpack and organize all his writing materials.[iv] His study had a glass door through which he could see a stone path with primitive columns leading to a small, lush overgrown garden—“I look at it and am working again with pleasure . . . for the first time!” They were situated “between mostly abandoned villas and infinite gardens.” One October morning when he woke up just before 5 a.m. and happened to walk outside, the world still abuzz in autumn, he “didn’t know if the garden was illuminated by moonlight or the first moments of dawn, and the whole thing had something so somnambulant about it” that he almost had to pinch himself.

Orphanage in Lausanne

Geneva in general pleased them inordinately. They found its lake-side landscape “often enchanting; when seen from the banks of the Sécheron district, or from on top of Pregny Hill, or, looking back from Bellerive.” They were “completely in love” with the city; in this time, when they were so bereft of spiritually enriching comforts, it was “a great gift.”[vi]He was “as in love with the landscape as someone who risks death for a woman in order to be near her.”

The ecstatic timeless experience of the Other Condition—the garden that was both dusk and dawn at once—was a respite from an increasingly unsustainable reality. On October 22^nd, he wrote to Rolf Langnese to thank him for his help in making normal life a bit more bearable. In Martha’s words, this philanthropist was “a pianist and funded [the conductor Hermann] Scherchen and his orchestra.” Langnese, like many other friends and admirers, had been trying to mobilize benefactors for Musil’s cause and, in the meantime, sent Musil 350 francs which had, Robert wrote, “removed a stone from his neck that had already been dragging him ‘toward the fishes.’” Musil told him that he still had not entirely given up on the world, “because he hadn’t expected much from it before either,” but it often seemed “almost certain” that he would be “trampled by this herd of oxen, since everything that one could hold onto was beneath their hoofs.” Then, in a letter written to the Wotrubas on the same day he swung in the other direction for a moment: he was working again, and well, and discovering things he had overlooked: it was “like a balloon that only achieves its simple form when it’s fully blown up.” But then: “How can one blow and blow, when one sits upon needles?”

So many times they were rescued from poverty by a sudden surprise act of generosity: the Churches would send a check; Langnese would remember them; on the 28th of October, a woman named Doris Gäumen Wild spontaneously collected a few hundred francs from some friends (in thanks, Musil sent her a manuscript page of The Man Without Qualities, in hopes that it might perhaps be valuable someday or rather “just as a memory of the childhood custom of giving someone a stone or a piece of an earthworm”); in late December, Mathilde Lejeune-Jehle (sister-in-law of Robert Lejeune) and her husband won 50 francs playing Lotto and sent it to him.[xi] Such offerings saved them from being, as Robert wrote, in reference to the Villon poem, with “les neiges d’antan.”

They lived in constant fear, not only of poverty, but of “an ever-present, invisible Gestapo,” imagining, even in Geneva, the “sudden night-time knock on their door.” Once, when the Pächts and the Fürsts sent them a Christmas Pudding from England, packed in an earthenware orb-like shell, they thought it was a bomb and buried it in the garden.] How could he write under such circumstances? On November 14^th he lamented that he continually crossed out what he had written, and insisted he had no publisher, even though Bermann-Fischer was still in the wings (and sent him 250 Swiss francs three weeks later).

On the same day Musil wrote to Olden, complaining about Olden’s essay “On the Radio,” wherein he had mentioned both Thomas and Heinrich Mann in the same breath as Goethe, Schopenhauer, and Kleist (and hadn’t mentioned Musil at all)—but then wrote again, ten days later, to apologize, acknowledging that he was a “poisonous scoundrel.” “May this serve as an apology to you, so that you will forget my small paroxysm about the plurality of Manns in my last letter.” In fact, he admitted: “Thomas has expressed himself multiple times with such great generosity about me that I would have done better to have expressed my own esteem toward him rather than a fleeting resentment.” To Lejeune on the 26^th of November, he continued in the spirit of gratefulness: “This awareness that you concern yourself so much with me, and then the warmth flowing from the Wotrubas to me, so that art does not grow cold . . . from this I borrow the recklessness to keep building a house of cards, while the earth’s fissures expand.”

In some ways, things were not so terrible. Musil, for all his curmudgeonly critical tendencies and anxiety, was an ecstatic. To the Countess Dobřenský, he wrote, towards the end of the year, “If only the house with my lovely workroom were not as acoustic as a drum and the little girl over my head or wherever were not always near enough to hear, as annoying as a fly, there would be little lacking for me (expect perhaps that a more delicate and imaginative culinary spirit might enter Miss Mühlberg’s Germanic skull); and even just as things are, we are happy, albeit with a tremulous happiness occasionally interrupted by troubles.”

Due to a sudden windfall of 150 francs, the Musils were able to make the expensive trip to Zurich mid-December to see an exhibition of Wotruba’s works and visit with the Lejeunes. They were back at the Pouponnière for Christmas, which they celebrated with a hundred children, all seated around a large Christmas tree illuminated by candles—each with a doll in its lap—“a harmonious golden trembling . . . of children and candlelight.” Considering that Musil had “avoided children like snails,” his whole life, the pleasure he took in the spectacle was “remarkable, and showed what fate makes of one.” Summing up the year, Musil wrote to the Hexners that he did, indeed, “commend fate,” in order to make clear that he had much to be thankful for, even though he was more “usually anxious and in deep displeasure” about the world and his own prospects in it.

A reading in Winthertur, arranged by the Literary Association, was not an auspicious beginning for the new year. There were only fifteen people in the audience, no one from the board of the Association was present, and there was no festive reception. Lejeune remembers that their high hopes for Musil’s “appearance in this city that was well-known for its support of the fine arts,” were disappointed. The whole occasion “left a bitter after-taste,” hardly compensated for by the honorarium of 100 francs.[iv] Musil had read from unpublished sections of the novel and had found no echo. Afterwards a secretary had handed him an envelope with the money. It had been: “nothing more than a charity event.” Still, they spent some time in Zurich after the reading, in a sort of social whirlwind that was too much for them. Every afternoon they had visitors, including a very nice, earnest young writer named Armin Kesser—who would later become one of Martha’s closest friends and helpmates after Musil’s death.

Musil's play "The Utopians"

Attempts to Find Robert Musil — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 16:37:28 GMT

Robert Musil’s 1921 play, The Utopians, explores the clash between ideals and reality, internal presentiments and communal truth, and the existential challenge of living a motivated life. A group of childhood friends are gathered together after some time apart in the home of Thomas, a hyper-logical professor and his more emotional wife, Maria. Maria’s sister, Regina, whose first husband Johannes committed suicide in this same house, returns with their mutual friend Anselm, a confidence man and seducer who enlivens and irritates, exposing with his antics the essential façade of bourgeois existence, and also their chaperone, a Miss Mertens, who idolizes them both, until she discovers their true complex natures. Regina, who has abandoned her second husband, Josef, imagines that she still communicates with her dead husband, Johannes, and, we discover, has led a secret nymphomaniacal existence since his death in a cryptic attempt to be true to him—by sleeping with other men who somehow stand in for him.

As they all wait for Regina’s husband to arrive—in order, he hopes, to bring some order and propriety to the situation— a private detective, hired by Josef, arrives and turns out to have been one of Regina’s former lovers when he was a servant in her home. The detective, however, has a secret ambition to convince Thomas, whose work he admires, to join his firm, Stader, Newton, and Galileo, which vaunts the most modern methods in detection science—an unjustly maligned form of scholarship, which plumbs the depths of the human soul. Meanwhile, Anselm, whom everyone thinks is about to marry Regina, seduces his friend Thomas’s wife Maria (Regina’s sister), in an attempt to shake both Thomas and Maria out of their stupor. Even though he is revealed to be a confidence man, who is already married, Maria runs away with him, in part because Thomas’s intense rationality fails to provide her with emotional fables or absolute assurances. Regina, meanwhile, has an existential breakdown, turning to Thomas for fellow feeling, affection, and advice. But Thomas, as much as he would like to, cannot provide any conclusive comfort, as he is committed to what Musil elsewhere calls “the utopia of the next step,” a radically honest way of being in the world that judges each event only by what it brings in its wake. To live according to this utopian standard is terrifying and catapults one beyond the pale of normal, conformist social life. The “tragic conflict” between an isolated human being and the vast and terrifying world of unlimited possibilities is described by Thomas in The Utopians as the state of a man alone on his own plank amid infinity.

The Utopians— which took Musil approximately ten years to write and which he considered one of his major works —was awarded the prestigious Kleist Prize almost immediately, but was only premiered in 1929, against Musil’s wishes, under the directorship of Jo Lhehrman — a con-man who could almost have come right out of one of Musil’s own plays. Translator and Musil scholar Burton Pike wrote that, “After the dust has settled around The Man without Qualities, Musil’s only serious play . . . may one day be considered his finest work. It contains in distilled form, and with the greater strength of a distillation, most of the important elements of the later novel as well as many of its subordinate concerns.”

But Pike also notes the more serious preoccupations of Musil’s popular farce, Vinzenz and the Mistress of Important Men, when he points out that behind the “sophistic detachment” of Vinzenz, the conman who plays the role of Anselm in the more serious play, “lurks a refusal to commit himself or accept the world”. Pike continues, with praise for this other play as well: “[M]ore exactly than any character in Musil’s earlier works, except Anselm and possibly Thomas … Vinzenz prefigures Musil’s ultimate man of possibility, Ulrich.”

Here is an excerpt (the whole play, in my translation, is available in Theater Symptoms, published by Contra Mundum Press).

ACT TWO

The scene is Thomas’s study. The walls are covered with a strange pattern made of book spines. In the background, at an angle, a large opened window. Park. Deepening darkness. At first only one small lamp is lit. The set is in the same style as the first act. Except that the furniture is scant and heavy, spiritually overweight. Above, and even in some places between the books, a starry night.

ANSELM: (Coming from the opened window) How the trees rustle. One doesn’t know: is it the ocean?

MARIA: We are waiting in vain. Thomas must have been held up.

ANSELM: Why did he really go into the city?

MARIA: He didn’t say. He went away shortly after the conversation with Josef.

ANSELM: The reception was pathetic —that party! Josef should have wandered from the park’s entrance to his room along a Disillusionment Allée! Allée of the contingent century! Why didn’t Thomas set up gramophones in the bushes, to whisper lovers’ vows in extinct languages?! Dummies of beautiful women who collapse into bone-dust the moment one looks at them?! Let out his frogs and mice?! Hung an x-ray image of the beautiful Regina in his consultation room?! Trailed intestines from the branches!!

MARIA: Disgusting! You are always mucking about in these phantasmagorias!

ANSELM: Because I am filled with rage! If I wanted to think like Thomas — not to believe in the immortal portion: I could do it much better. I could come up with an infinite amount of filth! (He goes to the window again.)

MARIA: It looked preposterous enough without any of that. But it amounted to nothing, Thomas felt that himself; he wasn’t really engaged in the thing. It’s your fault, Anselm! You had promised to go and speak with him beforehand.

ANSELM: (Turns around while walking) And Josef didn’t even notice it at all, it didn’t register, you say?

MARIA: Right off, he just said: I have things to tell you that will alter your perspective. I had the impression that he saw and heard nothing before that.

ANSELM: “Important” things, did he say?

MARIA: Sure, yes; probably, no?

ANSELM: He could have also said, terrible. Or revolting … ?

MARIA: Don’t torment yourself again! What can it mean that even you persuade me that there are unworthy things in this portfolio? I almost have the feeling — that you want to prepare me.

ANSELM: And then Thomas silenced you? You should not have allowed him to!

MARIA: Don’t get so worked up; Josef wanted to speak with him.

ANSELM: The portfolio came from a detective? Thomas must have told you what was in it, before he went to the city to check on its accuracy!

MARIA: But who says that he’s doing that?! I find this assumption irrational and invalid!

ANSELM: (With condescension) He is envious!

MARIA: He fears more than there is cause to.

ANSELM: He is envious of my ideas. And would like to destroy me using moral reasons, like a bourgeois!

MARIA: Only because you’re so secretive.

ANSELM: Give me the portfolio!

MARIA: But I have no right to do that.

ANSELM: Is it here in this desk?

MARIA: Yes, but Thomas has the key to the drawer.

ANSELM: Open the drawer!

MARIA: Like a sneak, without having discussed it with him? I will do no such thing.

(She stands up indignantly and walks over to the opened window.)

ANSELM: (At the desk) I will do no such thing, I will do nothing! We are in the dark, in a nameless catastrophe: let me lead you!

MARIA: I don’t want to be complicit!

ANSELM: One must have the courage for short cuts. You will make yourself guilty by not doing this.

MARIA: It would be stealing!

ANSELM: You believe that everything one does must always be speakable and nameable; that’s Thomas’s dread legacy! But one must act in such a way that one cannot say it, not think it, not even understand it, but just does it! Nobody at all understands how to act today.

MARIA: (Turning away, then quickly turning back again) Where is Regina?

ANSELM: (Stubbornly) I don’t know … No, I do know; she has locked herself in her room.

MARIA: Still? Weeping and screaming? Lets no one in?

ANSELM: Apparently.

MARIA: Listen! ... ? I believe I heard screaming before. (Distraught, coming away from the window) I can’t bear this; the trees are still rustling so senselessly.

ANSELM: Like water!

MARIA: No, the wind runs through the trees; as if it had feet; runs; runs. It’s so pointless.

ANSELM: And what happens? So many things happen in the world. As if there were nothing but ticking clocks hanging in a room, each one telling a different time.

MARIA: Runs, runs, without taking a breath, listen to it! It’s frightful.

ANSELM: Yes, it is frightful! Why did this leaf fall in front of the window just now? Don’t imagine that there’s someone who knows. Everywhere: two, three steps further an answer; then fog. Every second, demands glide by you, facts with red, green, yellow eyes and foghorn cries. Decisions threaten and glide away in the fog. (He has taken his head in both hands) My life, God, if I wanted to think about my life, it’s filled with eyes like these!

MARIA: What kind of a fit is Regina having?

ANSELM: Faintheartedness. Nerves … a wild swoon!

MARIA: But she’s practically hysterical, no?

ANSELM: Or it’s a lack of restraint. I don’t want to think about it!

MARIA: And you’re certain that these documents are the cause?

ANSELM: They must be stolen for her sake; they expose her utterly.

MARIA: And what do they say?

ANSELM: But I have not read them.

MARIA: And about you? There’s nothing at all in them — about you?

ANSELM: It could only be inconsequential things. Or lies that I don’t know about.

MARIA: And they’re supposed to be in this drawer?

ANSELM: I’ve already told you everything.

(Maria tries to open the drawer with a bunch of keys. It has grown dark and Anselm turns all the lights on so that she can see.)

MARIA: (Stops) Let me speak with him.

ANSELM: (Fiercely) No! ... You must do something surreptitious. Come away. You must grasp a resolution. It’s not a thought, Maria. A grasping: as if, in the most insubstantial darkness, your splendid hand were to close and suddenly you felt a part of an unexpected wonderful body in it!

MARIA: That’s all so unnatural. (She interrupts herself again.) Even if you were to say, we will live together like man and wife: I could speak with Thomas. But this way it’s nothing and just the same, something frightful … Can’t we just be friends?

ANSELM: I don’t want anything for myself! As a boy, understand me, as an innocent child, the moment I saw you, I experienced such a feeling of happiness, spreading out over my entire body — that I had no idea how to save myself. How much stronger is such a feeling — in a man, where it localizes like a blister and erupts!

MARIA: (Moved) I cannot be rid of the feeling that all of this is happening just because you want to take revenge upon him for something or other …!

ANSELM: Believe me: I didn’t come into his house for that. If there has ever been a human being, no matter how far away I was, who, like a beacon, let me dream of home, it was he. If ever a human being’s face bore the power of all human faces … But hate? Yes, perhaps despite all hate! Perhaps therefore hate? Sometimes I believe that one may only do evil to someone whom one loves: otherwise the evil is as dirty as a love that one carries into a bordello!

MARIA: You shouldn’t speak of love if you have to feel anger, dirt, and evil along with it!

ANSELM: (Despairingly) But what then?? What shall I call it?! To need human beings! Anyone who is a human being cannot just hang suspended in his own web of thoughts the way Thomas does! He must be won over, loved, cheered on! To swing together! Is this not a tormenting need?! Not to be alone, Maria!! Being alone means: not knowing where to go. In the unbearable confusion of truths, wishes, feelings! Have some mercy for every disappointment, evil thing, lie, that has served to soothe an indescribable fear that you, yourself, do not understand.

MARIA: Quiet! Listen, rather; didn’t she just scream again?

ANSELM: She screams without ceasing, but one only hears it sometimes.

MARIA: But we must help her; why don’t you help her?

ANSELM: Why don’t you help her?....

MARIA: What are you trying to induce me to do? You’ve changed entirely! The way you are dragging me into this; I told him that you were his friend.

ANSELM: Sometimes I seem like someone who has arisen, a haunted man without a foothold, falling. But just consider how much suffering there is every moment in the world; what an ocean of suffering and uncertainty, in which we all fight against drowning: should it depend upon whether one ends this one affair crudely or gracefully? It only depends upon how one situates it within the whole.

MARIA: And you believe that Regina’s condition won’t worsen if we three all travel together?

ANSELM: No; the portfolio must be removed from the world. Then these excesses diminish. The release will gradually be complete; like something unfurling to a standing position. I promise you.

MARIA: Listen! Again!

ANSELM: (Grabs her hand wildly) You can feel too how much she suffers! How she struggles; like a little cat that is being drowned!! (They go to the window together.)

MARIA: Regina will do something to herself.

ANSELM: (Presses her hand) Do you think so?! Ah, I am abandoning her! And I feel the right she imagines she has to me, as if her heart were thrashing about in mine for a way out. (They listen.)

MARIA: What is she screaming?

ANSELM: Johannes.

MARIA: This delusion.

ANSELM: It’s no delusion. She’s calling me. She called every man Johannes. It was her justification. Oh, her frenzied subterfuge from the truth! (There seems to be nothing more to hear. Maria has gotten free and has gone back to the desk.) She drove him to suicide; you know that, of course; because he doubted himself: she only wanted to love him like a sister.

MARIA: (Trying the lock again) Regina, love like a sister?! Do you really believe that?

ANSELM: Yes; she was like that then. And he was excessively sensitive; he was much more tender than Regina.

MARIA: I don’t think that Regina was ever tender at all; how else could she have borne this life that you’ve told me about? (Stubbornly) None of the keys fit.

ANSELM: Try this one. (He hands her one of his own.)

MARIA: No, no. I don’t want to anymore.

ANSELM: (After he has tried the key in vain himself) I’ll try it with a knife. (He opens his pocket knife.)

MARIA: Let’s just let it be, instead.

ANSELM: (Pushing her aside) No; I want to! (He tries to spring the lock.)

MARIA: (Tries to stop him) Leave it. I don’t want to anymore! (She flinches as if at a wild cry.) Again! .... (They listen …) No, that was a door. Thomas? Terrible. Go! Listen: steps. (Anselm quickly puts the knife away.)

MISS MERTENS: (Rushes into the room) Oh God! I’m coming from Mrs. Regina; she won’t let me in! Just listen!

MARIA: Oh, it’s appalling …! Yes, we’ve heard it too, but what should we do? Call the doctor?

MISS MERTENS: No, she doesn’t want a doctor.

ANSELM: Of course not; we have to let it run its course.

MISS MERTENS: (Having gone to the window) Really, everyone can hear it. (She turns to Anselm, sharply) Doctor Anselm? I’m asking you: are you the only one who does not hear the way Regina cries?

ANSELM: (Lacerated by pain and self-irony, altogether reckless) She is singing! It wasn’t a lie; she is singing filth! Not humiliation before swine, nymphomania. Not weakness, artificial excuses, superstition; sickness, an ailment. Such things can only be sung. In common language it would have been that.

MISS MERTENS: (Almost speechless with outrage and surprise) Doctor Anselm …??

ANSELM: The men never meant the slightest thing to her, oh certainly, I know! She let Johannes die, she married Josef, the way one hires a caretaker. But sometime or other she began to believe that she must make it up to Johannes in some way, by throwing away on other men that which she denied him. After death, some people are declared holy, after all, and the wish is often enough the father of a thought.

MARIA: But be silent, do!

MISS MERTENS: You are abusing the delusions of an exceedingly tender womanly conscience!

ANSELM: So, you love her that much? Then you’ll want to understand it: even as a child, while we others talked, she would crawl under some bush and put earth in her mouth or little stones, put worms in her mouth, pick her nose, taste the excretions of her eyes and ears. And she thought: someday something wholly miraculous will come of it! What’s wrong? Are you feeling nauseous? Don’t you love your saint? Your Saint Potiphar?! Men — they are not anything else, they are nothing but — the mystery that one takes into one’s body.

MISS MERTENS: You slander her!

ANSELM: (In nervous despair) But don’t torment me! Do you believe I don’t want to help her?! If I only knew myself — how to help her!

MISS MERTENS: I will lay myself before the door if she doesn’t let me in! — and to think that I believed I had never seen a more sensitive paragon of erotic delicacy. (Exits.)

MARIA: How could you speak so roughly!

ANSELM: (Walks back and forth excitedly) She’s heard enough. She won’t even come along now; no matter how much she loved Regina. Is there anything as unappetizing as virtue?!

MARIA: But you never should have sacrificed Regina like that!

ANSELM: Why does she have to make such scenes! With the whole journey here!

MARIA: Is it better then, if one does something in secret?

ANSELM: Yes! For the hundredth time, yes! I will always prefer to do wrong in secret, instead of parading an exceptional good thing in public as a cover; it’s more worthy. Thomas does everything publicly. Men of reason are always overt. But I’m able to lie only for this one reason: because I am terrified of the smugness of a strange man who believes that he keenly understands me. A man like that clings more dreadfully than an estrous woman; it is as if one had stepped, by accident, into someone’s brain!

MARIA: (Shivering from the memory) It’s the most repulsive thing in the world, a woman who forgets herself like that.

ANSELM: (Changing suddenly) Oh, not so simple. It’s not at all that simple, either. When Johannes was dead, Regina ate almost nothing for weeks; a few crackers daily was all. She grew thin, she wanted to force an otherworldly communion with him. It was very beautiful, very strong. A glowing condition of goodness. She didn’t love him, she just loved. She shone! But then came reality, which — even though Thomas triumphs over it! — always upholds its rights; all the thousand hours, which had to be spent somehow. And every one leaves only one very tiny mark, like a smallpox scar, a mark of: look, it has passed. And all of a sudden, one’s whole face has the blinking expression of a complete person. You have no idea how many people are devastated by the fact that they manage to live! But we’re losing time. Didn’t you want to try to open that drawer?

MARIA: Finish speaking and then I will answer you.

ANSELM: (Looks at her mistrustfully, testing her for a moment) Yes! I can understand it! … I knew that you were waiting for that. I can understand how every faithlessness that she committed in this life seemed to her to be a faithfulness in the other. Every external humiliation like an internal elevation. She painted herself with filth the way another woman uses makeup. Isn’t that beautiful too?

MARIA: No!! (She looks at him with questioning disbelief and then throws away the bunch of keys.) I won’t do this anymore!

ANSELM: (Decidedly) All right, then let me do it. (He opens his knife again.)

MARIA: No, I won’t have it! There is something mysterious about you that you will not admit to me: that binds you to Regina! (She ensconces herself in the chair at the desk.)

ANSELM: (Walks back and forth in front of her and sometimes stops excitedly) What do you think? Should it be? Haven’t you heard, she’s begun again?.... She is sitting all alone in the star-sea, in the starry mountains and cannot speak. She can only make ugly faces, little evil Regina…. Even a grimace is a world of its own, from the inside. Without any neighbors and alone with her music of the spheres spread out across infinity…. She couldn’t speak with the beetle and put it in her mouth; she wasn’t able to talk with herself and so she ate herself. She also couldn’t speak with other people and yet she felt — this terrible longing to unite with all of them!

MARIA: No, no, no, no! That’s the lie!

ANSELM: But when one is subject to foreign laws, lies are the evaporated sense of home in dreamt of, nearby countries — don’t you understand?! They are closer to the soul. Perhaps more honest. Lies are not true, but aside from that they are everything!

MARIA: But this excuse with Johannes is so repulsively fraudulent!

ANSELM: She doesn’t believe in it either. No, Maria, she doesn’t believe it. She doesn’t even believe that there’s a reason to scream. She just does it. And as she does, she feels that she is a mystery that cannot make itself understood. It’s the last, random, false expression of what is left to her. A gigantic human need lies in it; perhaps the same need we all have!

MARIA: (Springing up) I can’t listen to this anymore. (It’s unclear whether she means Anselm’s talking or Regina’s cries, which seem to be heard again.) This sensuality is appalling! (She wants to go to the window, but Anselm stands in her way and she grabs onto him with both her hands and holds him tight.) Why don’t you go away with her?!

ANSELM: No. I can’t. She can come along, for a little while longer. Give me the keys.

MARIA: I just touched you for the first time and I’m supposed to run away with you; it’s really too ridiculous!

ANSELM: Trust me with the keys.

MARIA: No … I can’t trust you! (He tries to pick up the keys. Maria stops him and picks them up herself; they stand there for a moment fighting and pressed against each other.)

ANSELM: (Takes her hand and presses her nails against his neck, lips, and eyes) Touch me! Hurt me! Here! Here! Take a knife and cut designs in me like a tree! If you don’t believe me, torture me until I am unconscious and you can do with me what you will.

MARIA: (Tearing herself away) You’re a bad little boy and I am supposed to seduce you; you demand it.

ANSELM: (Throwing himself in her chair) I demand nothing for myself … except the permission to leave your shoes outside your door, to brush your skirts. To breathe the air that was in your breast. To be the bed that may bear your impression. To be allowed to abandon myself to you! Aside from this, all other reality becomes uncertain.

MARIA: (Parrying and placating) As long as we have known each other we have never seen more of each other than our faces and hands.

ANSELM: But when I leaned upon you just now, it felt as if my life, far removed from all the world’s events — without arms, without hands — could hold and touch yours. (He tries to grab her hand again.)

MARIA: (Uncertainly) But we’re no longer young.

ANSELM: That only means: Thomas has made you cowardly. It’s considered unnatural when, for once, the path of two people’s communion is not approached along the same paths as eating and digesting are. I want to possess your life. To partake in the grace of your being!

MARIA: But why does it have to be a woman?

ANSELM: Because you are a woman. Because it is unspeakably confusing that you — on top of everything else — are also a woman. That your skirts wander across the floor like bells around what is invisible! (He buries his head in his arms.)

MARIA: No, no, those are excuses, Anselm ….

ANSELM: I don’t know what else to say. Betray me to Thomas!

MARIA: (Touches his hand to make him look up. He does not. She sits on the arm of the chair) Anselm, everything you’re saying is all so disturbingly unnatural. Silly childish things. Long buried things.

ANSELM: (Lifting his head) But everything “worthy,” “important” that you’re doing now is so incredibly insignificant to you.

MARIA: No, no!... Yes. — But I don’t want to!

ANSELM: (Straightening up) There is something in you that gets nothing at all from all this. And you have not had the courage to live for it! In the old days, you would have despised the kind of life you now lead!

MARIA: In those days, if we slept two hours too many it was like something we could never make up for, that, even days later, was remembered with a sudden pain as a great loss; you’re right about that. We felt, we are. We ate very little, did not grant the body too much space. Sometimes I held my breath as long as I could. But in reality, it all came to absolutely nothing. (She says this while scribbling on a piece of paper.)

ANSELM: Did it really come to nothing? At 8:20 every morning it was your practice to come into this park. I can still see the hands on the clock in my room. I took one of my books where you had written your beautiful name, and traced its lines: following your hand through space exactly as your hand must have gone. Then I ran after you.

MARIA: (Sloughing it off by standing up) Those are childish foolishnesses; they have nothing more to do with us.

ANSELM: (Springing up) Those were acts! Inexpressible forms of friendship. Acts are, after all, the freest things that exist. The only things that one can do whatever one wants with, like dolls. World of wishes, having grown so unfathomably spacious! (Once more as if terrified by memories) Nothing that happens to us can be understood and it is only when we do something ourselves that we are saved, in the midst of the unfathomable itself.

MARIA: Do you still recognize this? (She shows him her drawing.)

ANSELM: (Interrupted, almost irritated) A sugar loaf?[1] An angel?

MARIA: Close the window. I keep having the feeling that someone is going to come in through the window.

ANSELM: (Sensing an advantage) First tell me what it is.

MARIA: It’s also from back then. I had drawn your face from memory, it didn’t look any more beautiful than this, so I wanted to make up for it by drawing myself in a nightgown also. (Anselm quickly shuts the window in order to take advantage of the situation. In the moment when the window is closed, they hear a door nearby.)

MARIA: (As if caught) It’s Thomas! Go! (Foolishly, she turns out the light.) Go away, I can’t stand it! No, stay, turn on the light; I’ve already torn it up. He knows this drawing, I told him about it once. Please, turn the light back on!!

ANSELM: (Confused) I can’t find the light….

(Thomas walks into the dark room. There is only a little light in the area around the window. He moves around there, going back and forth. In the darkest corner of the room, he suspects the presence of Anselm and Maria.)

THOMAS: Is someone here?

ANSELM: I am, Thomas. Good evening.

THOMAS: Are you alone there?

ANSELM: No, we were waiting for you. Maria is here. (Trying to sound casual) We were chatting and can’t find the light now. (He feels along the wall.)

THOMAS: But why bother? It’s really very nice in the dark. (Pause.) Why don’t you two keep talking? Am I interrupting again? … But for heaven’s sake, continue to converse; what were you talking about? Is it something I may not know about?

MARIA: It wasn’t anything good. Regina is unwell.

THOMAS: And Anselm was waiting for me here to explain to me why he did not come see me.

MARIA: I’ll turn on the lights.

THOMAS: Please, leave it dark. It’s truly a more remarkable thing than you would believe, two men in the dark. Can your eye tell us apart? No. You just don’t hear it yet: each of us also says exactly the same thing as the other. But I assure you; that’s how it is. Thinks the same thing. Feels the same thing. Wants the same thing. One sooner, the other later; the one thinks it, the other does it; the one escapes, the other is caught. But whether one is the detective or the criminal, the one who burns or the one who extinguishes, honest or lying: if each one takes a role, it’s always the same game of cards, only shuffled and dealt out differently.

MARIA: (As if she wanted to ask, horrified, Thomas, are you drunk?) Thomas, are you …?

THOMAS: What? Thomas, are you what? One has friends so that one doesn’t become vain. Don’t let yourself be deceived. It’s only an error when one murders someone on account of differences. The similarities are what horrify us! The envy, because one wants to differentiate oneself, even though one stays glued together in one block! Admit it, Anselm! (Silence.)

Oh, only darkness and silence. (He waits.)

But in the drawer lies my pistol. Ever since we were boys, you wanted to be stronger than me. If I were to shoot now? I can aim well at that somewhat darker blackness over there…. (He waits. Silence.)

Naturally, you’re patient. You grind your teeth. You won’t open up. Maria is to believe you have feelings that will survive even death … but have you heard me? I have turned the key … now I’ve opened the drawer ... two minutes more and I am free of you; I can smear your brains on the wall! (He waits.)

If you have not answered by the time I count to one hundred, you never existed. One … two … You were only a delusion. Oh, I would be so happy. Three … He has no work; he has achieved nothing! He creeps around and rubs himself on people. Do you understand, Maria, he has no self-esteem; he must be loved, like an actor. But he can be loved, no? No? He can, can’t he?!

MARIA: You are dreaming, Thomas …?

THOMAS: Ah, you two don’t believe I would do it. But he has stolen my position in life away from me —

MARIA: But that was what you wanted!

THOMAS: You’re right, you’re right. (He stands up and moves closer to the place where he assumes Anselm is.) I wanted that! For that’s how it is in the world of dogs. The scent in your nose decides. A soul scent! There is the animal Thomas, there lours the animal Anselm. Nothing differentiates one from the other but a paper-thin feeling of an enclosed body and the hammering of blood underneath. Do neither of you have the heart to grasp this? Will it hunt us down to our deaths or … into each other’s arms?!

MARIA: (Has jumped up frightened and stood in his way) Thomas, you have been drinking!?

THOMAS: (Lighting a match) Look at me, Maria! (He searches for Anselm with the small flame; Maria quickly turns the light on. The drawer is opened, but Thomas stands there without a weapon.)

(Still looking for Anselm in vain) Just look at me, Maria …. (Anselm is gone.)

Gone? Disappeared without a sound? … Arrived without a sound? What was there between you two?

MARIA: (Intensely) There was nothing!

THOMAS: Nothing? But that’s everything! I know that you would never say an untrue word to me. Nothing has stirred; but the whole earth, with everything that is on it, moves.

[1] Up until the late 19th Century, sugar was transported in sugar loaves, which looked something like those white cones to which one affixes wings, heads, and halos at Christmas time.

Between Mist and Petrifaction

Attempts to Find Robert Musil — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 20:11:01 GMT

I’ve been reading a very interesting book, Exact Thinking in Demented Times, by Karl Sigmund, about The Vienna Circle and the people who either agreed or didn’t agree to be considered associates or opposition to this group of mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers who gathered together, discussed ideas, published manifestos and books, held lecture series, and spread the various iterations (in differing subtle variations) throughout the world when the advent of the Nazis sent its members scattering.

I’m reading this while re-reading The Man Without Qualities with about 85 people who have joined Samantha Rose Hill and I for this year-long experiment.

Musil’s direct connections or affiliations, agreements and opposition to this group of thinkers is scarcely documented in his notebooks or letters, and he was living in Berlin, not Vienna, during the high point of the group’s activities. But of course their questions were very much his questions, even though their answers were largely not his: is it possible to establish an accurate basis for truth or knowledge of the world? Is scientific thought capable of establishing absolute truth? What is the role of language and concept making in either defending science’s unimpeachability or calling its axioms and conclusions into doubt? Is there a “thing-in-itself” beyond phenomena and logic?

Ernst Mach, an enormous influence on the Vienna Circle—and most physicists in Austro-Hungary—was, of course, the subject of Musil’s doctoral dissertation. Musil was interested in Mach’s use of the scientific method of “Thought Economy,” whereby the mind connects things that are strictly not equivalent, as a shortcut or provisional pragmatic practice. While Mach would declare that all real knowledge was empirical—based on sense perceptions—he did not see a problem with the use of thought economy as a reasonable expedient. Musil, however, worried that it undermined the very foundations of scientific truth by acknowledging that most propositions were only approximate. On the other hand, Musil saw that important knowledge was to be found—not inside logical laws or provisional concepts—but in the exceptions to rules and laws, in the non-repeatable and particular. And also in something referred to repeatedly as mist in The Man Without Qualities—a realm consistently conterpoised against petrification.

Members of the Vienna Circle saw Mach as an ally because he banished the metaphysical and its representative Kantian idea that there was a “thing-in-itself” floating, as it were, invisibly behind phenomena, something that could not be grasped or known. (Mach even rejected the existence of atoms, because they could not be seen.)But they could not themselves really get away from the contradiction inherent in accepting both logical axioms and empirical measurement but not “metaphysics”—because logic (and its prime representative Mathematics) was not tied to the physical or material. It seems (to me)to be a form of metaphysics itself. So they tried to remove anything that seemed subjective or shaky, like intuition, which may be why they took (against his will) Wittgenstein’s orphic statement(of that which cannot be spoken clearly, one had better not speak at all) as a positivist tenet. In 1929, a group of Circle members published a manifesto called The Scientific Worldview, which declared that any question meaningfully posed (that is, with language that was not “nonsensical”), could be answered by science and that “The scientific worldview knows no unsolvable riddle”.

This would of course rule out much discussion, and many questions, especially of the philosophical-literary sort engaged in by Musil in his novel. Besides, by 1931, Kurt Gödel had exploded the scientific-philosophical-mathematical-scientific foundation with his Incompleteness Theorem, which proved that, in Sigmund’s words, “there exist true propositions for which there is no formal proof” and that “the process of mathematical thinking can never be entirely captured by purely formal axiomatic reasoning, In this sense, mathematics is an inexhaustible fountain.”

In my re-reading of Musil, I am picking up a whole thematic that seems to refer to all of these questions, flowing forth from a series of metaphors having to do with mist and petrification, a tension between something ungraspable but vitally important (spirit, mind, Geist, meaning, authentic living, becoming) and the world’s and society’s attempt to turn the individual and indvidual thought into stone, to drag back any new idea into some preconception or pattern (economy of thought) and restrict the birth of anything that does not fit into a law. Mist is the realm of art, of ethics, of, even, a scientific ideation that is creative and alive rather than habitual and dead. Petrifaction happens whenever we either rest in unexamined assumptions and cliche or grip prematurely onto absolute truth—both tend to manifest themselves in a discourse that has no more desire for metaphors, a positivistic quantitative description of things, of the world, of people that serves some purpose, but misses the essential spirit, mind, Geist, that matters.

What makes this more than just a reactionary lament for a non- or pre-scientific way of looking at the world is thatMusil is always aware of and always keeps alive the tension between what can and cannot be known via empirical or logical methods, and that other important something that seems to elude such testing or knowing. Like Gödel, his fellow Brno-ian, he is not suggesting either that that which cannot be conclusively known or proven is not there or that it is unscientific or metaphysical, but just that we might need other means with which to approach it.

And because, at the edge or rim of the cauldrons of the prized vagueness wherein creative ideas can ferment, we find the precision to curb the soul of the operation—and because Musil was doing this as a scientist, an ethicist, and exact thinker. As Ulrich in the novel notes that a substance can be poisonous in one quantity, but beneficial in another, the results of such a mixed method depend, as everything else does, upon the context, the amount, the gestalt interactions, and —by the laws of the utopia of the next step—by what the discoveries bring in their wake. It is not a matter of abandoning the inquiry or the attempt, of slipping into silence or passive wonder, but rather of asking new and different questions, in different ways. Indeed, the novel is filled with question marks:

But what of ‘spirit’ [Geist] standing by itself, a naked noun, bare as a ghost to whom one would like to lend a sheet? One can read the poets, study the philosopheres, buy paintings, hold all-night discussions—does this bestow spirit on us? If it does, do we then possess it? And even if we should, this spirit is so firmly bound up with the accidental form in which it happens to manifest itself! It passes right through a person who wants to absrob it, leaving only a small tremor behind. What can we do with all this spirit? It is constantly being spewed out in truly astronomical quantities on masses of paper, stone, and canvas, and just as ceaselessly consumed at a tremendous cost in nervous energy. But what becomes of it then? Does it vanish like a mirage? Does it dissolve into particles? Does it evade the earthly law of conservation? The motes of dust that sink and slowly settle down to rest inside us bear no relation to all that expense. Where has it gone, where and what is it? If we knew more about it there might be an awkward silence around this noun, ‘spirit’.

(from chapter 40, of Book One, of The Man Without Qualities, translated by Burton Pike and Sophie Wilkins

photo by Michael Newman, of Brno in autumn fog. https://web.archive.org/web/20161023005236/http://www.panoramio.com/photo/67318200

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"Boyhood Friends"

Attempts to Find Robert Musil — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 17:35:21 GMT

Happy Robert Musil’s Birthday!

This chapter from The Man Without Qualities, Book 1, translated by Sophie WiIkins and Burton Pike, is an introduction to Ulrich’s, the man without qualities’, friends Walter and Clarisse. As is well known, these characters are very closely based on Musil’s own friends, Gustav (Gustl) Donath and Alice Charlemont. He knew Gustl since he was a boy, living beside him in Brno/Brünn for years and later for a time beside him and Alice in Vienna. Like almost all of Musil’s frienships with other men, his friendship with Walter was competitive and intense, rather than warm and supportive. But the friendship, and its constellation of elected affinities and individuation was important enough for him that he once considered that the novel that came to be The Man Without Qualities should be called The Story of Three People, with the added spice of Alice as the third electron. Musil was fascinated with triads and threesomes and said somewhere that love could not exist between two people alone, but always requires the influence of a third, as other, rival, or outsider.

On June 13th, 1905, Musil wrote to Gustl, “Haven’t you noticed that we used to believe we had immoderate talents and now hardly believe any more that we have moderate ones? Where did they go?” When they were young—barely a few short years hence—they may not have really had the talents yet, but they “knew their perfume” and intimated how they might develop them. He quotes a poem by Alice about waiting behind golden gates to hear the approaching footsteps of the “other”—as each brings each something from his or her own garden. And then, the suggestive question: “Shall we not try again to bring loneliness and discourse into proportion?” And then—was he suggesting a romantic ménage à trois like the one tried by Emma Rudolf, Alfred Polgar, and Henry Skene , or the one abandoned by Nietzsche, Paul Ree and Lou Andreas Salome? —he asks: “Isn’t it wise (in the rose-wreathed sense of the word) to develop all of the possibilities of such relationships? Can’t Alice bring you something from me, too? And you something from me for her? Isn’t it almost the only daringly fine thing, to touch one another sometimes only through the medium of a third person?”

Other biographical traces are unavoidable. When the narrator speaks of Walter’s playing of Wagner as a “secret vice,” it is hard not to think of Musil’s notebooks, wherein he recalls how Walter initiated him into the “most universal school secret” of masturbation. It is only on this, my most recent rereading of the book that I notice something else relevant to Musil’s biography: Ulrich’s jealousy of his friends’ piano playing, of the way it has taken over their life—a trope that recurs in a Nachlass fragment wherein Ulrich is so jealous of Agathe’s playing the piano that he shoots a hole in it—probably is a reflex of his jealousy about his mother, who was not only a pianist, but whose extra-marital affair with the man they called “the house friend” drove him crazy.

There is an alternate scene of Ulrich and Clarisse in the garden, listening to Walter play the piano inside, wherein Ulrich and Clarisse have become lovers. And there is, as well, a scence in which Ulrich goes to the “Island” as lovers with Clarisse instead of Agathe, wherein Clarisse’s madness infects him (an incredible scene I already recorded for this birthday episode, but it got lost….another time then).

On: The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of the Magic Mountain (by Morten Høi Jensen)

Attempts to Find Robert Musil — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 16:18:38 GMT

I just finished Morten’s fine book, uttering an unsophisticated “wow” as I closed the volume. I am reminded of one of Mann’s characters—was it in his story, “Tristan”?— who responds to all astonishing phenomena with the rather banal expression “wie schön” (how beautiful). But how does one best respond to a great book? Certainly one should be able to muster more nuanced observations than one does upon looking at a sunset. One responds, of course, by writing another book influenced, inspired by it—and I am grateful that I have had a chance to read this one while revising mine, for at just the last moment I have been able to deepen my understanding about some important aspects of the times.

And yet, inarticulateness, or at least an acceptance of some ultimate inability to explain or come to final conclusion is, of course, a theme of this book, of Mann, and of my Musil. Is there a realm of dream—a snow chapter mysticism—where I understand what all of this means? Like Maeterlinck’s colored sea glass in the epigraph to Musil’s Törleß? If I cannot express it, does it remain useless, what Musil would call “shoddy mysticism”—or is there some function of digestion and subconscious processing where it is all working itself up to the surface, eventually to words, to ideas, to a conduct of life more meaningful than some vague pronouncement about “love” and “humanity”? What does the story of Mann’s trajectory from militant pro-German anti-democratic German nationalist to a cultural prince of the Weimar Republic and defender of Democracy teach us about our times, our selves (because it does, it must, it will)?

One specter I am wrestling with—so lucidly explored and untangled in this book—is the way that one can hold many different seemingly incompatible beliefs, tastes, impulses, at once. But that the polarizing force of political movements does not readily allow for such complexity. So that Mann could continue to maintain that he had not, in principle, rejected much of what he wrote in his 1918 Reflections of a Non-Political Man, but still become a champion of Democracy, coming to understand that the term, the practice, the promise of Democracy need not be the opposite of his beloved Humanism, but in fact a synonym for Humanism. That he could come to recognize that his ideas had been taken up and ill-used for radical extremist purposes he had not envisioned, that he could continue to believe in the essential importance of the non-conscripted work of art while also giving speeches to defend a particular political system he felt was most likely to protect the human freedom to create and enjoy art. This book explains this all so well, but it is so very very fragile, this and other subtleties, that I feel uneasy. Uneasy about the relationship between convictions and art, fascisms and freedoms, intellectual analysis and emotion.

The thing is, I should have been taking more notes, as the book is deceptively light and so very enjoyable to read that it seduces one before one realizes how very, very subtle and complex, how richly tapestried are its vital threads of contradiction and confluence (I should have been tipped off by the title). Also: it is a book that should be read and reread and I have only read it just this once. But I want to get down some thoughts, some impressions, before they escape me.

I have already written at length about Musil’s uneasy competitive relationship with Thomas Mann(The Great Man of Letters and his Worthy Rival), but Morten has made me think more deeply about the alleged differences between the two great writers. And I must admit I am unsure, confused, a bit uneasy about the whole question.

As a person brought up on Mann from my early teens and only discovering Musil in my early 30s, I was devoted to the former long before I heard the latter’s criticisms—understanding to some extent, though not agreeing or giving up my admiration for Mann. They are very different people and different writers, but they were dealing with many of the same vital questions. A major difference, stressed by Musil, certainly supported by many of Mann’s own statements, was that Mann could celebrate the irrational more fully than Musil could. But look: Musil also was fascinated by the irrational. Respected it. Loved it. Feared it. Knew it must be curbed by intellect.

Mann took 12 years to write his Magic Mountain (I had not known this) and his writing of it was overtaken not only by world events but by the dramatic evolution of personal conviction impelled by these events. Musil’s Man Without Qualities was conceived as early as 1905 or 1913 or…but really one could say that it began in earnest as what it became between 1924 and 1926, which means he worked on it for about 18 years before he died in 1942. It was supposed to end, like The Magic Mountain, in the conscription for WWI, was to a large extent about the forces that allowed for the outbreak of that war, but it was still not finished when the Nazis came to power in ‘33 or at the Anschluss with Austria in 1938, or while in exile in the last years of his life. It was not only a different world he was writing in, but like Mann, he was a different man. And after we read these two great books—as our own worlds change around us—we will be different people too.

In his epilogue, Morten writes:

The pessimistic humanism that grew out of Mann’s writing of The Magic Mountain deserves our attention because it is open to the possibility of its own failure, which means it is also open to the possibility of enrichment. This was Mann’s idea of education and democracy: a continuing process with no end point of perfection. For this reason, his occasional claim that Hans Castorp’s words— “For the sake of goodness and love, man shall grant death no dominion over his thoughts”—constitute The Magic Mountain’s message, or that he ought to have placed the “Snow” chapter at the novel’s conclusion, are misguided. The Magic Mountain, this masterpiece of ambiguities, is not reducible to a political slogan. Fittingly, Mann is contradicted by his own great creation, a novel whose “radical openness” eschews the closure of conviction.”

I urge everyone to read Morten’s masterful, thoughtful, lively, charming book. It reverberates. It rips open and does not glibly put these difficult questions back together.

Link to buy book

Robert Musil and the Architecture of Possibility

Attempts to Find Robert Musil — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 11:30:16 GMT

Robert Musil and the Architecture of Possibility

The spaces he lived in, at least in his adult life, were small, cramped, often they were so during the war years, and while in exile in Switzerland; unsatisfactory, temporary, uncomfortable. Perhaps like the confines of a mortal head —no matter how broad and high the brow of genius—within which a seeming infinity of ideas and impressions teems and churns. A poltergeist-brain still somehow alive, just barely succeeding at the legerdemain of living off nothing, knocking against the walls of need, hunger, an unappreciative public, horrific political realities and the confusion about how and when to take a stand against them, knocking against the mortality of the body itself. Robert Musil worked on and on and on in a series of stifling rooms, filling pages and pages with markings, words, abbreviations, symbols; paragraphs transposed, revised, crossed out, destroyed, lost, rediscovered, with markings in different colored inks, in pencil too, pages and pages, some typed, mostly by Martha, his wife and imaginary twin, new and different versions of scenes written decades before, old words and old worlds made new, new words and new worlds put into relation with the old ideas and the still-unanswered, probably unanswerable questions, pages and pages, seemingly ad infinitum, unfinished, unfinishable, yes — as unfinishable as the irrepressible continuation of a life force, seemingly self-generating, as if they could continue to write themselves even after the early death of their First Mover, the Author.

These pages, including letters and diary entries and drafts of chapters for the great unfinished novel, The Man without Qualities, as well as for stories and plays and essays, and for projects never even rightly begun, but conceived and put aside for later, for “after the novel would be finished” – as if that time could ever come — are collected together and called, in German, Der Nachlass, the remains, by which is meant the literary and biographical remains. And they constitute about 9000 pages of words, rendered as non-linear as was Musil’s brain itself, in the Klagenfurter Ausgabe, begun as a CD-Rom, and now being fashioned into a new searchable on-line data-base. One may search for any word or name, a phrase or passage, the way a living mind gropes for something forgotten, but unlike a living brain, this artificial intelligence retrieves the sought after passage instantly, along with all the other instances when Musil wrote it down—as if the amassing of all of these words had been conjured in no time at all. But how might such time be more rightly reckoned or measured? Surely not by counting words or numbers of pages. It seems impossible, when we consider, in mortal measure, how many there are.

We might measure the time spent writing by the number of cigarettes he consumed, tobacco burned away into ashes and smoke, immeasurable and inchoate thoughts burned into the laser-sharp focus of crystal-clear sentences—he wrote the words down, smoked the cigarette down to his fingertips, but he still was not satisfied, wanted yet another smoke, and another. “I live to smoke,” he wrote. But he might just as easily have said, “I smoke to write”.

There are photographs of him sitting at a desk, a vast desk, to be sure, with enough space for reams of paper, towers of pages, towers of books, folders and boxes filled with leaves. We know that some were lost. Though much of the Nachlass was kept safe during the war in an abandoned Viennese apartment, it was then moved and stored elsewhere, and subsequently destroyed. Luckily, they had the most important papers with them in Switzerland. Other papers still were secreted away, like the one folded-up page carefully hidden in the resewn lining of Martha’s coat (referring to an adultery, to the sexual secrets of a happy, but complex marriage). For a page can be folded up almost as tightly as the snaking membranes of a brain, taking up little space until unfolded, released. When read, the expansion exponentially unfurls, as each word is a portal to a much larger room, an estate, a city, a country, a cosmos. Musil knew this, and called the moments when one suddenly temporarily stepped through such a portal—and out of normal consciousness into a heightened sense of timeless-spaceless significance — “the other condition” of experiencing.

Still, he referred to the last rooms where he and Martha lived in Geneva, Switzerland, on Chemin des Clochettes 1, as “Puppenzimmer,” dolls’ rooms. We can easily imagine him as an overgrown Alice in Wonderland, with arms and legs ranging awkwardly out of the opened windows, trying, painfully, to write. Horribly humiliating for such a correct and upright man. Despite the difficulty, he might yet appreciate the artistic uses of such spatial incongruities. In The Man without Qualities he wrote of the toy horse Ulrich admired as a child, noting that the magic it emanated came from its distance from reality, a distance effected by its diminutive size and tawdry material. In a theater review of the Russian Cabaret—one of the only theatrical experiments he praised unconditionally in his many reviews—he is thinking, again, of this horse, and hearkening to the powerful effect afforded by strange juxtapositions of near and far, real and unreal, small and large:

Remove, for example, the life-sized quality of a horse, its ability to move, and the undefinable essence of its realness, and it remains a small brown papier mâché pony, with a swan’s neck, tiny black hooves, gracious little leather straps; it stands behind the magic window of a pastry shop and it penetrates, along unreal passageways, into the soul of a child, shining with a glittering splendor that is never again attainable. Perhaps the strange magic of primitive sculptures and drawings, the enjoyment of sketches or extreme stylizations, the overwrought ornamentation of our fashions, yes, the whole essence of human art and artificiality, is based on nothing more than such internal amalgams of the under- and the over-real.

Now do the same thing with a cabaret song; let go entirely of the little bit of sense that it may have. And, instead of that, sing nothing for many minutes except, “Ach, that is the little hunter,” or “Occarina-Macaroni,” and you will arrive at the same borderland. On the far side of this border lies idiocy; on the nearer side, however, the little hunter spins—blond, merry, round, and as green as an illuminated billiard table—around three singing farm girls, who prod it in circles with a melody that shimmies from their hands and their hips; and right there on that border, exactly in the middle, you are sitting, and you are as happily sad as if you were sitting in water and wanted to make puppets out of it.[i]

Transport, transubstantiation, from real to unreal, to under(sub-) and over (hyper-) real, through metaphor and imagination, arrived at through portals opening onto timelessness and vast spaces, landing in a sort of puddle, but glad to be there.

Still, all in good time, one grows old and one’s bones ache, and such fancies may fail to fully console. Although time is not always experienced as linear, as we creep on towards death, we know that there will be a telos, a final ending, and though the world may continue, we, at least, will no longer be here to experience those timeless mystical moments that once compensated for the unmystical, persistently dull, forward march of linear time.

If one is a writer or any kind of artist—or, perhaps, an inventor, a scientist pursuing some impossibly far-off quest, or any other kind of utopian feat—one despairs of ever having enough Time in which to fill up the small Space of the page of mortal life one is granted. The quest is “utopian” because that something that one wants to create or discover seems to be no-where; at least it has not yet been found. Any new creation—the real embodiment of a mere idea—is just as unlikely as the instantiation of an ideal alternate reality. This is not a refutation or denial of reality, for the new thing will not be seen if it cannot bind itself to what is already real, if it does not find purchase in the physical and material nature of the world or the real human desires and dreams that thrash against the stony walls that seem to bind us until someone brave and persistent enough finds a new way through, around, or deeper in. The “new” something was always there, a part of the real, but had not been adequately seen and described before. It had been waiting to be revealed and explained, from out of the complexity of all that there is.

It is important to realize that Musil’s skepticism about our ability to come to a final version of our co-created picture of the Real was not a nihilistic denial of meaning(s), nor a despairing denial of truth(s). He was engaged in a serious experiment, impelled by a search for right conduct of life, which seemed to have something important to do with possibility and the spaces it opens up in what we mistakenly take to be a limited status quo. He was not escaping life, engagement, reality, but earnestly attempting to face it and to be an agent—a creative subject, to use Nietzsche’s phrase—of its continual transformation. Unlike some of his pseudo-mystical contemporaries, who doubted the efficacy of words and preached silence and stupor—and even more unlike contemporary post-modern thinkers who deny the possibility of any meaning or shared communication whatsoever—he affirmatively generated a proliferation of words, more and more possibilities, to mock, by overfilling, the purportedly empty voids of Nihilism with his multiple meanings. Like Nietzsche, he knew that the artist’s role is to create—even if something must be destroyed before beginning to build again; and that the world contained an infinite amount of material with which to build.

Still, in a sense, any new creation is an insult to the status quo, and to linearity. And it constitutes a rebellion against preconceived limitations of space. It stops time, expanding and elevating a moment into a shimmering, hovering pause. It expands space, by opening up a new portal, a new possibility, in what seemed, moments before, fully complete, inviolable, solid. If, moreover, one, like Musil (writer, physicist, engineer, psychologist of sense perception, philosopher, mathematician, mystic, mortal), resists completion to an almost pathological degree, this suspension of time is spun out in Arabian Nights fashion, to an almost impossible extent, over vast reams and rolls of paper, over decades of space.

As a scientist, he was committed to the experimental method and fascinated by the workings of probability and possibility. This commitment manifested itself in a writing practice obsessed by alternate and non-linear versions, each with different admixtures and outcomes. What if this character instead of that character were in this or that situation? What if we added some more of this chemical? Or of this? Like an exponentially self-generating kaleidoscopic version of Goethe’s Wahlverwandschaften (Elective Affinities), the scientist Musil poured elements into alembics and observed the explosions and the failures. He resisted coming to conclusion, though he would write down and even reluctantly publish some approximations, some attempts at suggestions of possible answers to his ethical and aesthetic question: how should one live?

Thinking is non-linear, but one thinks, rightly or wrongly, of writing as if it were moving in one direction, from beginning to end; on the page, from left to right and top to bottom; in the book from front to back. Nietzsche, always the contrarian, wrote that good writing was rücksichtig and vorsichtig, a pun on two German words that mean careful, but also mean backwards- and forwards-looking, always aware of how whatever is being written relates to what came before and what will come after. When looked at this way, “before” and “after” are no longer such stern mistresses of time and space. For the manuscript starts to become circular, or, rather, like a reverberating star—whose center illuminates its edges just as its edges tell us about its center. Or, again, like a sky filled with many reverberating stars—all possible spaces circling in and out of our normalized experience of time.

(Certainly, I have written about all of this before. Probably more eloquently. I wrote a whole book about it, called The World as Metaphor in Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften: Possibility as Reality) back when I was a real scholar, with all the references and examples at my fingertips; but I return to these questions now, in a different mood, looking backwards and forwards again, wondering how a writer like Robert Musil struggled and somehow succeeded—according to an ethics and aesthetics of failure to conclude—to create such eternally shimmering work within the confines of the real strictures of mortal space and time, especially given the impossible task he had taken on.)

He was committed to an artistic and philosophical practice of the “motivated” moment, a practice which demanded that all actions (and the writing of a sentence is surely a kind of action) be fiercely compelled, that they be motivated by a burning need, a heightened flaming, vivid intensity. This sort of artistic practice may be pursued practicably if, like Nietzsche, one is willing to publish the fragments of the expanding and retracting star in pieces, in books of aphorisms even, with each fragment existing as a new comet penetrating and excavating the heavens, without the luxury of a concern for the niceties of perfection or about the inconsistency of contradictions and complexity that necessarily obtain over the course of a life’s work. Nietzsche wrote by flashes of intermittent lightning, in the rare moments when he was well enough to use his tormented eyes and when his head did not ache too much to think (or too much from thinking). His relationship with time and space and the filling up of the area of the page with the rush of non-linear words was necessarily different from Musil’s—for Musil was a man with what seemed at the time to be plenty of time, if only he had not been a perfectionist or a writer committed to the architecture of possibility. As it turned out, he miscalculated (though he surely could not have done differently, had he known), since he died very young, at 61, in the midst of a revision to a beautiful passage from “Breaths of a Summer’s Day,” a passage about timelessness and “the other condition,” about a garden, which shimmers and seems to magically hold the moment—that moment which Faust is forbidden to ask to linger awhile, no matter how beautiful—a passage that he had first written years before. He was returning to the center of the star as if no time had passed at all.

Had he lived another ten or twenty years, I do not believe his task ever could have been completed, not even if he were immortal; his great work was inherently inconclusive; it contained its infinity within its mortality. He could not and would not come to closure.

He also, probably, could not have felt at home anywhere in the world, even if he had not been forced, first by poverty, then by the war and even worse poverty, to move about and then go into exile with his Jewish wife. He wrote that the Jew and `the Intellectual (Geist is the word he used, which also means Spirit or Mind) were extraterritorial. Only as an outsider could he see and comment upon what he saw. Only as outsider could he dare to open up space and time, invent a new language and describe new vistas within the given, see what had always been there, but never had been revealed before.

In an early literary fragment, Musil imagines asking those he dubs the “2 X 2 = 4 people” to tell him “what is a street”. Their answer, which he translates to mean, “Something straight, day-bright, serves as something to move forward on,” does not satisfy him in the least. For a street, he muses, “can just as easily be many-branching, mysterious, and beset with riddles, with ditches and underground passageways, hidden dungeons and buried churches.”[ii] As a scientist of possible space, a physicist in the early days of relativity science, as an extraterritorial outsider, he knows that reality itself is stranger and more complex than any linear or habitual description could fathom.

Musil’s commitment to experiment was grounded in an evaluation of all things and events based upon a concept he called “The Utopia of the Next Step”: nothing, no written draft, no criminal or allegedly good act could be judged in the moment of its becoming, but only by the next step that it engendered. (Shades of Nietzsche’s judgment of Bizet, who made him, he said, “fruitful”; and who thus was deemed good). For Musil—who had read Nicolas of Cusa and who was aware that one might think of every point as part of a line, but that a line must not be thought of as straight, but as something that stretched round until it became a circle—the next step was not conceived of as a marching forward, but as a returning back, now enriched and complexified, to the beginning, to a reverberating central presence in the “other condition” of infinite space and time. And the next step after that might be a firm footfall on the very solid sidewalks of a metropolitan city, onto the street as seen by the young Musil— in fact, without any mystical over-reaching or descent into fantasy, truly “many-branching, mysterious,” a street replete with portals: bridges and pathways and tunnels, houses and apartment buildings, hallways and basements and attics and drawing rooms, and especially studies, with large writing desks piled with pages, filling up with words; pages shuffled and reshuffled, resisting their bindings and exploding their margins again and again, ad infinitum, as long, anyway, as people still care to read and think and consider the still unfathomed mysteries of time and space, the varied meanings of our lives. As long as people continue to endeavor to approach, along the many-branched byways, approximate and open-ended answers to the question of how to live, and of what agency we might have in discovering and describing to others that which always hides in plain sight—waiting to be seen and revealed—amid the non-linear architecture of possibility.

Chemin de Clochettes, where Musil last lived in Geneva

[i] Translation mine, from Theater Symptoms: Robert Musil’s Plays and Writings on Theater (New York, London, Melbourne: Contra Mundum Press, 2020).

[ii] “From Out of the Stylized Century (The Street)” in Thought Flights, translated by myself (New York, London, Melbourne: Contra Mundum Press, 2009).

"How to Help Writers?"

Attempts to Find Robert Musil — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 14:05:59 GMT

How to Help Writers?

First of all, one must make one thing clear: the misery suffered by German writers is not exaggerated by well-wishing and overly-solicitous friends. I have recently spoken personally with many of the best writers about their circumstances, which I know first hand. Not a single one of the most well-known and celebrated German writers lives—this is so not only today, but for years now—off of his regular earnings. They live off foreign royalties, translations of their works, film versions, transactions with foreign papers, luxury editions, in short, from unpredictable, shifting and unreliable supplementary income. Even in the case of very prominent personalities, it amounts more or less to nothing better than just holding themselves above the water; just enough not to have to dissolve their households and sell off their furniture, in other words, in the best-case-scenario at a subsistence level that drove our civil servant families to despair before their circumstances were improved. And sometimes this minimum is not even maintained; I know a man, famous throughout all of Europe, who had to write supplicating letters in order to find a job with a newspaper. If one looks directly at the next class down—at those writers who are younger, but mostly really mostly in their forties, whose work is no less worthy, but has had less time and a less favorable time in which to have an effect—one cannot name a single one who could attain even the poverty level by the application of every writerly means. I surmise that not more than half of them earn what a family needs for the most bare necessities of life. One of the best and well-known forfeits his time with a medical practice, another, whose name is spoken with admiration everywhere, had to part with his children because he could not support them any longer; a third and fourth live off their patrons’ support, which could fail to materialize at any moment. Please take note that behind all of these are names that would be known to everyone, were I to name them—not writers who cannot make their livelihood as writers, but rather those who previously lived off their literary income, but have since abandoned this life and career and are now washed away.

Perhaps one will say: well, they still live. But they live on the edge, on the most extreme edge! In a situation of such unbearable uncertainty and humiliation, that hardly one of them can still create. Clinging to an existence that would never satisfy another talented person. Begging at German-Czech, Swiss, American editorial desks. And I can assure you without exaggeration and on the basis of intimate knowledge: at any moment it can happen that one of them will be ruined. All it takes is for one of his small emergency supports to fail without being replaced immediately. Are we awaiting the sensation of the first suicide?

Yet there are exceptions to what has just been described. The economic picture is not at all clear. One need only step into the literary cafe of any metropolis and be astonished at who has so much money for musing, drinking, cigarettes and the founding of new journals. But the truth is: literati who are good at practical matters are doing just as badly nowadays as any other practical people, though trade in pictures, books, furniture, cigarettes and liquor, ideas for films and rackets of all kinds seem to provide for them adequately. And within this class of people there are different gradations of skill and aptitude, people who have installed themselves at the right moment as correspondents for foreign papers or who have made a connection in journalism, or film, theater, cabaret, the book business, etc. Among them are some valuable people, but also many profiteers and conformists. This category is crowned by the well-nigh upper-middle-class existence of a few well-known writers, whose ability to earn money exceeds, even today, their other not at all small other abilities.

One can see that not everyone lives in the shadows. But one should not let oneself be deceived by the ability of some to conform any more than one is deceived by the ability that allows some people (but not all) to practice their literary activities in the leisure hours outside of their bourgeois employment. With a few exceptions, one can declare that the best of writers are having the worst time of it. When this situation began to become known, a famous critic expressed the opinion that it would not hurt German literature if a large number of its bearers perished or wandered off into other careers. There is much to be said for this; but it is now clear that the ones who perish first are those who should be saved.

It is lovely that an Austrian minister wants to help German writers. One can do so in general or individually. General help for the whole field, individual help for the most worthy victims.

I believe that I have just demonstrated that the latter requires an understanding of the field and the persons, and along with these ambiguities one must suffer the stings of artistic judgment. But if the granting were simply done by the government, it would presumably fall to the Imperial Art Protectorate, that official office that also normally oversees subsidies for artists, thus garanteeing that only the most needy, but only in part the most worthy will be recipients. Nevertheless it will be good to make this intention or some other like it official as soon as possible, so that those whom it concerns whill have the possibility to express themselves.

But due to its fundamental nature, such help can not be more than a small charitable act delivered to a dying man, unless it is preceded by a reform of the living conditions of the whole profession. I say profession, for if one wants to save the writer, the holy dozen or hundred valuable free spirits, it will not suffice to simply slip them somethingjust once; instead, one must make writing something one can possibly live on once again. Only no illusions about this point! I wish a plague on the house of every bad writer, but I must carefully preserve his life because economically I am his siamese twin. Over decades one has handled writing as a luxury, handed over to the field of business, to the laws of sensation and demand, and since many could live from this, the more worthy and less marketable were just able to eke out a life: that was the relationship in the booming economic climate before the war; and what is playing out now is nothing but the continuation, but in a time of general crisis. I believe that the help can come—not suddenly via ideals, but rather only—with economic politics, exactly as one turns ones attention toward protecting any other threatened industry. I won’t provide any tips; the questions are not simple and will only be advanced through a collaboration between economic politicians and an appointed representation of writers; but every child knows that too much intermediary profit depends on a book; that everyone who participates in its production is sufficiently compensated, when the ur-producer, the writer, earns almost nothing at all. We know about the newspapers, that many of the largest have not gone bust, and even if they have reason to complain, they are, so-to-speak prosperously starving, while their external co-workers receive shameful fees, even when they are international papers. We also know, finally, that the theaters have not neglected the interests of their shareholders nearly as much as they have neglected their writers. Thousands of existences bank on the writer today or develop in symbiosis with him, while he alone cannot earn his living at it: couldn’t an economic situation such as this be improved with some decisive pressure, even without creating a crisis whereby the highest immedially must become the lowest?

I’d like to allow myself to give the Minister, who so commendably stepped up on behalf of German writers, one further suggestion. We writers living in Austria will do our best to comply with his suggestions, but there are a few reasons that do not allow us to contribute at the moment to an emergency fund. More importantly: we are German writers living in Austria. For anyone who knows the conditions, that means that the wellspring of our audience and our livilihood flows and dries up for the most part in Germany. The danger of ruin is just as real as if we lived in Germany. If there is a feeling within the Austrian government that German literature must be helped, then there is an inducement and legitimation to begin right off at our own door. The Austrian corner is small, but it is important today. The phenomena in Germany repeat themselves here, play themselves out here and and are also influenced by what happens here. A representative delegation of writers (there is none in Austria), who could aproach the problem, should be rapidly established, and if it were successful in making some improvements in our own condition, it would be an example, considering the close relationships that exist, that could leap in the same moment over to Germany and have the greatest effect. [Austrian] Federal Minister Schürff would deserve no small credit, were he able to influence his German colleagues to become interested in his suggestions.

Dr. Hans Schürff