Modernism: Representations of National Culture

Robert Musil: The man without qualities

ROBERT MUSIL: THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES Title: Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The man without qualities) Originally published: Berlin, Rowohlt, vol. I (1930), vol. II (1933), and vol. III (1943) Language: German The excerpts used are from Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities, translated by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), pp. 28–31, 575–577. About the author Robert Musil [1880, Klagenfurt – 1942, Geneva]: writer, dramatist and essayist. Musil spent most of his childhood in Steyr and Brünn (Cz. Brno), where his father, an engineer, was appointed to the chair of Mechanical Engineering at the German Technical University in 1891. Between 1892 and 1894, Musil attended the military boarding schools at Kismarton (Ger. Eisenstadt) in Hungary, and then, until 1897, in Mährisch Weißkirchen (present-day Hranice, Czech Republic). Between 1898 and 1901 he studied at the German Technical University in Brünn, qualifying as an engineer . Following his military service (1901–1902), he worked as an unpaid assistant at the Technical University in Stuttgart. In 1904, he obtained his grammar school matriculation and went to Berlin to study psychology and philosophy. In 1909, Musil completed his doctoral studies at the University of Berlin with a thesis on the Austrian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach. Mach’s theory that the world was to be understood objectively based on sensory experiences was often adopted by Musil in his literary works. Between 1911 and 1914, Musil worked as a librarian at the Technical University of Vienna. When the First World War started, Musil was a journalist for the Neue Rundschau. After serving briefly on the Italian front, he was transferred to the ‘War Press Service’. After the war, Musil worked as a civil servant and, from 1921 as a theatre critic, essayist and writer in Vienna. His play Die Schwärmer (The enthusiasts) was published in 1921, for which Musil was awarded the prestigious H. Kleist Prize in 1923. He also received the G. Hauptmann Prize in 1929. Between 1931 and 1933, Musil lived in Berlin. In 1932, the Musil-Gesellschaft (Musil Society ) was established in Berlin, aiming to provide Musil with the necessary financial means to continue working on the novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The man without qualities). After Hitler’s appointment as Germany’s chancellor, Musil returned to Vienna, but immigrated to Switzerland in 1938, where he lived until his death in 1942. Musil’s first novel Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß (The confu- 216 LITERARY REPRESENTATIONS OF THE “NATIONAL CHARACTER” sions of young Törless) was highly acclaimed when published in 1906. Many of the themes discussed in this novel, like sexuality and alienation, were explored in Musil’s subsequent writings. Musil’s main novel, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften remained unfinished. The first two parts were published in 1930 and 1933, but the third was published posthumously by his widow in 1943. Musil’s complete works were published during the 1950s, generating successive waves of critical scholarship about his contribution to Austrian and world literature. Main works: Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß [The confusions of young Törless] (1906); Vereinigungen [Unions] (1911); Die Schwärmer [The enthusiasts] (1921); Drei Frauen [Three women] (1924); Vinzenz und die Freundin bedeutender Männer [Vinzenz and the friend of important men] (1924). Nachlaß zu Lebzeiten [Posthumous papers of a living author] (1936); Über die Dummheit [About stupidity] (1937); Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften vols. I–III [The man without qualities] (1930– 1943); Diaries, ed. by. A. Frisé, 2 vols. (1976). Context Since the publication of the studies by Carl Schorske, William M. Johnston , William McGrath, Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin in the 1970s and 1980s, Vienna has become a fashionable scholarly topic. Schorske, for example , explained the origins of the modernist culture of Vienna through the retreat of the heirs of Austrian liberalism, the children of the bourgeoisie, from the political realm — where various illiberal collectivisms threatened the liberal assumptions of historical, rational progress — and into the cultural temple of the aesthetic and psychological. It was a form of ahistorical modernism , Schorske contended, epitomized by the concept of Vienna as a “garden .” Another of Schorske’s interpretations, namely his perception of the emergence of a “politics in a new key,” proved equally resilient in the scholarship . Fin-de-siècle Vienna was the home not only of literary personalities like Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Arthur Schnitzler, composers like Arnold Schönberg and Gustav Mahler, or painters like Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt...