Oberleutnant Robert Musil als Redakteur der Tiroler Soldaten-Zeitung ed. by Mariaelisa Dimino, Elmar Locher, and Massimo Salgaro (review)

This volume collects contributions to a 2015 conference at the University of Verona on Robert Musil's editorship of the Tiroler Soldaten-Zeitung (renamed Soldaten-Zeitung in August 1915). Musil became its editor in October 1916.

There has long been uncertainty about which SZ articles, all published anonymously, Musil wrote himself. Between 1960 and 2014, seven scholars ascribed between three and thirty-eight pieces to him, mostly on subjective stylistic grounds. In the central contribution to this collection, "Die Tiroler Soldaten-Zeitung und ihre Autoren. Eine computergestützte Suche nach Robert Musil," Massimo Salgaro, Simone Rebora, Gerhard Lauer, and J. Berenike Herrmann undertake a stylometric analysis of the twenty-eight SZ texts most often ascribed to Musil, using a digital comparison of their diction with known texts by Musil and others (including Zweig, Blei, Kafka, and Albert Ritter, another writer on the SZ staff). In a handy table on page 100, they ascribe thirteen of the twenty-eight to Musil with 100 percent reliability and the rest with lesser rates of reliability. They emphasize that their results should be treated as only the beginning of more detailed interpretive analysis.

It is curious that several other contributors to this volume—perhaps because they had not seen the results beforehand—ascribe SZ texts, either implicitly or explicitly, to Musil although they either do not appear in the table on page 100 at all or have low reliability ratings.

Of the fourteen other essays in this volume, nine focus on Musil's editorial work for the SZ or on the echoes of that work to be found in his postwar oeuvre. Christoph Hoffmann discusses Musil's 1922 report "Psychotechnik und ihre Anwendungsmöglichkeiten im Bundesheere," written during his service as Fachbeirat in the Bundesministerium für Heereswesen. Hoffmann distinguishes between Musil's "Schreibposition" as an "Autor" of literary works and as the "Verfasser" (121) of a technical report largely summarizing the results of other studies. Regina Schaunig is similarly interested in the question of "Kontinuitäten und Zäsuren" (133) in Musil's work as literary author and wartime journalist, beginning with the essay "Europäertum, Krieg, Deutschtum," his response to the outbreak of the war, which he welcomed with patriotic enthusiasm. Massimo Libardi and Fernando Orlandi assert that Italian Germanists have a more clear-eyed view of Musil's wartime journalism than their Austrian colleagues since for the latter, it is a taboo subject that contradicts their image of the writer as antimilitaristic and progressive. They analyze texts from the SZ as "Übungsplatz" (157) for both the satire of the "Parallelaktion" and the quasi-religious "anderer Zustand." Walter Fanta sees in the unfinished satirical drama "Der kleine Napoleon," written shortly after the war, Musil's "Wendung vom Saulus zu Paulus, vom Bellizisten zum Militärkritiker" (184), and argues against including the wartime journalism in his literary oeuvre. Ivana Z. Bogdanović focuses on the SZ Christmastime essay "Heilige Zeit" (100% reliability rating), striking a remarkably personal note in her analysis of Musil as "Ghostwriter der k. und k. Propaganda" (193). As a scholar primarily interested in the mystical aspects of the "anderer Zustand," she feels "die Empörung, irgendwo hinters Licht geführt worden zu sein" (196) by the discovery of his wartime propaganda. This shock will be familiar to readers of Günter Grass's Beim Häuten der Zwiebel; Musil, however, never tried to conceal his work on the SZ.

Salvatore Pappalardo and Karl Corino contribute analyses of the SZ's treatment of irredentism, Italian in the case of the former and Czech in the case of the latter, and both connect this treatment to the way the topic appears in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Pappalardo too easily attributes to Musil many of the SZ texts he quotes. I wonder if the author of Törless would have described the Trieste irredentists as "meist junge Burschen, die noch in die...