Zurechnungsfähigkeiten: Kriminologie in Robert Musils Mann ohne Eigenschaften by Mark Ludwig (review)

Among the most productive interdisciplinary trends in German studies of late has been the marriage of Wissenschaftsgeschichte and literary studies. In the past ten years, a spate of dissertations and monographs have appeared, particularly in the German-speaking countries, rereading major works and epochs of German literature from this perspective. At its best, work in this vein has shed new light on the imbrications of literature and scientific knowledge. Less successful efforts have tended to reduce literature to artifact, burying the specific qualities of the literary underneath the historical archive. Mark Ludwig’s recent monograph on Musil’s Mann ohne Eigenschaften (MoE) belongs to the former category. Written in clear and elegant German prose, Zurechnungsfähigkeiten is an important contribution to Musil studies and the field at large.

A dimension of MoE that has received scant attention in the scholarship relative to its importance in the novel is criminology. The lack of an extensive inquiry into the centrality of criminology to the novel has been a vexing absence in the literature. Zurechnungsfähigkeiten remedies this deficiency, showing not only the extent to which criminological discourse around 1900 found its way into the novel but also how the discursive characteristics of this nascent discipline informed the poetic conception of MoE. Ludwig’s central claim is that Musil drew on the fluid, heterogeneous character of early criminological discourse to develop an encyclopedic poetics that could adequately suggest the complexity of modernity without claiming to offer a comprehensive view of a particular historical age—a goal of the Zeitroman that Musil regarded as impossible in an increasingly “incomprehensible” modernity (20–21). This is an original thesis about the novel’s poetics that not only demonstrates the power of the Wissenschaftsgeschichte model for illuminating the discursive roots of the literary but also reveals a new dimension of Musil’s artistic and conceptual ingenuity.

Locating the disparate but plentiful “traces” of criminological discourse throughout the text, Ludwig musters evidence for Musil’s extensive engagement with early criminology, including texts by Gottschalk, Lombroso, Kretschmer, Garofalo, Sighele, and others. This task leads to some important new discoveries that broaden our understanding of Musil’s scientific and philosophical sources. The innovative dimension of Ludwig’s argument, however, lies in his discovery of a link between criminology and poetics. Drawing on independent research on Musil’s Nachlass and Walter Fanta’s seminal work on the novel’s Entstehungsgeschichte, Ludwig shows convincingly that a criminological complex was central to Musil’s earliest conceptions of the novel. In the published text, this complex—made operational through the figure of Moosbrugger—functions as a “Kopplungsstelle” that propels the narrative by linking its disparate strands (71). Ulrich’s interest in Moosbrugger, for instance, ensures his integration into the “Parallel Campaign” by Count Stallburg.

But beyond such narratological coupling, the criminological complex assumes the position of a second-order observation in the text, one that enables the performance of a highly self-conscious mode of literary representation. As Ludwig argues, criminological discourse is uniquely positioned to structure such second-order observations because of its nascent disciplinary status around 1900. Still not fully differentiated from other disciplines, early criminology was constituted by an array of scientific discourses including psychiatry, psychology, physiognomy, anthropology, sociology, and law. As an emerging field that occupied the public imagination, criminology was also refracted by journalistic and literary discourse. Further enabling Musil’s use of criminology was an already porous boundary with literature, as evidenced by the genre of the Fallgeschichte, which Musil employed as a model for developing the criminological/Moosbrugger complex. As Ludwig shows, criminology’s fluid heterogeneity and its porous boundary with literature made it an especially apt tool in a novelistic project conceived as a kind of “discourse encyclopedia” of modernity (93). By making criminological discourse the novel’s coupling point, Musil could create an encyclopedia of second-order observations on modernity while at the same time acknowledging the limits of observer positions as...