No More Learning

Mood: This is the tragedy of the failed person (more properly: the
From the Posthumous Papers · 1723
person who in questions of emotion and understanding is always aware of a further possibility. For he is not simply a failure) who is always alone, in contradiction with everything, and cannot change anything. All the rest is logically consistent.
Preface
People will find the excuse-because they don't want to explore the idea-that what is offered here is as much essay as novel.
Query: Why is it that people today don't pay attention to ideas in art, while in other respects they demonstrate an absolutely ridiculous inter- est in "doctrines"?
1st section before Agathe
An athletic young man-very intellectual-attempts normal life-has
ideas that don't seem to fit in-suspicious of the transparent humbug with ideals-tries to find a way out by means of functional morality-is himself morally indifferent-but unhappy about it-is arrogant toward his time but always looking for a way out of his arrogance-and from this an emotion crystallizes: swimming through a space-jagged stage sets loom up--Ulrich was good. As a child. He simply saw that this "good" could not become the desiccated commonly accepted one. If among his ideas there are some that are right, then he is a precursor. But appar- ently evil develops the way he doesn't imagine it ala journalism. He is interested in evil and despises the common.
Preface
I dedicate this novel to German youth. Not the youth of today-intel- lectual vacuum after the war-quite amusing frauds-but the youth that will come after a time and that will have to begin exactly where we stopped before the war, etc. (On this also rests my justification for writ- ing a prewar novel today! )
Preface
"Superfluous," "wandering" discussions: that's a reproach that's often been made against me, in which it was perhaps graciously conceded that I could tell a story. But these discussions are for me the most important thing!
I could have depicted many things more realistically. For instance,
1724 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
Hans Sepp and National Socialist politics. But there is already enough of the ridiculous in the book, and I then would not have been able to coun- terbalance it, which was what I was trying to do.
Preface
Where one speaks of relative originality:
The phenomenon that a relatively or entirely original writer-com- pletely inaccessible to the average critic-who in desperation analyzes him only in isolated, dependent particles-as has happened to me.
Preface
Why Vienna instead ofan invented metropolis. Because it would have been more effort to invent one than a "crossed-out" Vienna.
Manner ofrepresentation to befrequently used
Assemble a composite person, but with cards faceup! From settled ideas and a few obsessive linkages of ideas, e. g. , the way Hagauer is. All the intellectual characters this way: Arnheim, Diotima, etc. Whatever is added that is human and personal, particularly to those characters who are "only people," is accidental; moreover, from the psychological point ofview also characteristic, frequently repellent, like Arnheim's predilec- tion for the behind, or wishy-washy psychology like Schnitzler's.
events } depictions•
conversations interweavings
. are the only bearers of the narration
•ofthe nature ofthe person, ofchanges in the physical and moral landscape
From the Posthumous Papers · 1725
Theories, halfironic, chiefly in the agitations ofthe unsympathetic and halfsympathetic figpres
Journey with Agathe
Trip across. Seasickness. Burgeoning awareness of a fearful passion for each other because they see each other in this state, bear it, feel it appropriate, with mouths agape, vomiting. The whole ship an orgy.
Ancona. Exhaustion. Taken for a married couple, room with double bed; they don't want to reject it; fear almost amounting to a feeling of persecution, sweetness.
Only the terrible things about Rome. The smoothed and polished, the ravinelike streets with green window shutters. The being tortured from before.
That was the first trip. On the second, with Clarisse, he recalls it. In Venice, where Clarisse is confined on the way back, meeting with Gus- tav [the model for Walter-TRANs. ]. Rather fat paunch, deep devotion to Clarisse. Forced back to Vienna; meeting with Agathe, beginning of the spy story. The inner city entwined around St. Stephen's Cathedral like a ball of tangled yarn. Yellow-gray darkness. Air like down.
On the trip: They really don't do anything at all; they only suffer the fear that they could be accused, and the desire.
Someplace or other, memory from Esslingen. Second floor of the mu- seum. He is sitting at the window; it mirrors nothing, reflects the room. But ifone bends closer, then from all sides the blackness plunges in, and then the church, the jagged black houses with their caps of snow.
First trip. It's boringly different; we're traveling as man and wife. Nothing else; everything only in the hesitation that they have to over- come inwardly to do so. They are traveling without passports. Morning in Budapest. Conference with a lawyer. The square before the Parlia- ment: something breaks under their feet like thin sheets of ice; gusts of
wind sweep the square clean of people, mere existence makes itself pal- pable as an exertion. Impatience to get on the train. Just ten minutes before departure, resistance against order. Reacting to some kind of feeling, they buy second-class tickets; some pleasant thought or other of
I726 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
black leather. Tip, alone. Everywhere they are taken for a young married couple. It's boring, Agathe lies down to nap. It turns fine; white plain like a sea, forests buried in snow, heavy pillows of snow on the branches ofthe firs. Achilles [earlier name for Ulrich-TRANs. ] wakes Agathe up; this white and black, perhaps a white and mysteriously bottle-green landscape rushes through their eyes-lovely, she says, presses his hand-and melts into sleep; he stares at the strange countryside, sees in the darkness of the compartment Agathe's shoulders and hips as she lies on her side, like hills, mysterious. . . .
Morning near Fiume. Through the opened window damp, warm air. Speckled flanks of the bowl of the valley they are descending into.
In Fiume rain, storm. Somebody in the train says that the steamer left already this morning; someone else: it will still be there. Going across the harbor square the storm turns their umbrella inside out-laughter on the flagstones, the rain soaks their clothes so that they are wading in their shoes.
Walk in the sunshine, palm trees, a street like a ribbon tied in bows.
What is an execution compared to an operation?
He drives back with someone else, who is horrified. When they get to where the pavement begins, the carriage jolts so that they don't continue talking. Trees are tom past, sometimes the glance is flung through a hole into sand, pines. . . .
The man: walks, looks around. Achilles feels an inexpressible link to him. Dostoyevskian. Laughs at it. Yields voluntarily.
At his execution, Moosbrugger is simply embarrassed. Execution like a fire-brigade drill. The solemn flourishes at the end don't move Ulrich. On his way out he nods vaguely and politely. Feels that it is perhaps out of place. Only when he looks into the face of his driver does he notice a difference of brightness and warmth in the surround- ings as opposed to before. This face seems to him quite hard, he sees every single hair of the beard stubble. A man who was there to do a journalistic study, whom he had invited to share his carriage and for- gotten, gets in with him. Out of some vague feeling he remains sitting on the right. Country road, then extended city street. Pubs, people in black skirts and shirtsleeves. Ulrich feels a vague, scornful hatred for these people.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1727 Study for Conclusion
Ulrich, to begin with without irony:
Reversal ofa feeling about life with hard, bright, challenging . . . into soft, dark, smeared . . . What was so important to one a moment ago becomes completely indifferent.
One has the feeling that this passivity is not entirely without activity, but this activity is something quite different from the disputatious pas- sivity of before. Ulrich remembers having felt something similar in [chapter] 30. He was dissatisfied with himself and (1) his house made him shudder. He recalled once more his feeling of the "ahistorical," the world new with every day. In addition: accidental and essential qualities, possibly being broken in spirit from strength; one's being is still strength, but the object being seized is always simply larger.
(1) I was born, abandoned into this world; from one protective dark- ness into another. Mother? Ulrich had not had a mother. The world my mother? He stood up and stretched his muscles.
[Fragment]
I did not answer my father's letter. An odd destiny had led me into the same aristocratic circles to which he owed his rise in life, the naYve lack of dignity of which irritated me; I had resolved to look around in these circles as in a room into which one had stumbled by some secret chance, and ifin doing so I would have had to have the least thought ofa resem- blance, this would have been impossible for me. It was no doubt for this reason that I refrained from giving my father the satisfaction of having his wish fulfilled. He took it amiss, and I received no more letters from him, so that not long after, I was completely surprised by a message re- porting his demise. I cannot say I was shaken; we had little fondness for each other. Also, I was totally lacking in the feeling for that continuity which, it is claimed, binds ancestors and posterity; the inheritance of certain dispositions and qualities, while certainly present, did not seem to me any more important than that the most disparate melodies can be constructed from the same notes, and the generally prevailing demand for pious respect is a con game; at least that's how most unconstrained young people feel it, although later they deny it. Besides, I was in a great hurry to complete the arrangements for my trip.
1728 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
I remember that while I was overseeing the packing, the barbaric ideas ofpatriarchy that are dinned into shrinking children went through my head; the hand that strikes out at the father grows from the grave, the disobedient child is afflicted with its parents' tears when they are dead, and many such techniques from the wild primitive era of mankind. Pri- mal epochs come to life again in the nursery, where nannies let them- selves go. Somewhat later I was overcome by the desolate feeling that the entire atmosphere surrounding the ultimate questions and their phi- losophy, which I had involuntarily been seeking in my memory, are of a pronounced banality. Just as when you look up at the starry sky for the space of five minutes. We know nothing, and what we feel is warmed- over cabbage. I did not even know whether I ought to give myself over to my distaste or whether I should set it straight; the beginnings of both were in me. Whatever the philosophers may have contributed, no mat- ter how enormous it might be as an intellectual accomplishment, from the human point of view we have remained in these questions undeni- ably limited and boring. Of course my own ideas shared in this too, ex- cept that it suddenly seemed to me incredibly remarkable that one lives with this quite contentedly. The well-known feeling of extraterritoriality rose up in me: even if I do not presume to be able to order things and thoughts any better, in the order that they have found for themselves they are for me immensely alien. And I gradually noticed that I had fallen into a quite specific stream of ideas and emotions that I had al- most forgotten.
The thought of my father, whom I did not esteem, was unpleasant for me, the way a plant might feel whose roots have been burned by acid. I remembered once having said to someone: The founders of empires have no ancestors! That, too, was now unpleasant to me, because it sounded so childishly arrogant, if I had meant just then that everyone ought to be such a founder ofkingdoms. That person was my
Or: I had hardly begun to look around in my new circle when I re- ceived a telegram from my father that reported . . . I was now completely master of my life. When I stepped out onto the square in front of the railroad station . . .
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1729 August 16, 1929, evening
The man without qualities thought through consistently First considerations
Don't give him a name. Explain briefly in Part I. It's not hard to say what a man without qualities looks like: like most other people.
There is only at times a shimmer in him, as in a solution that is trying to crystallize but always drops back.
Clarisse says and sees: You look like Satan. Colossal energy, etc.
Walter says: Your appearance is falling apart, etc. More or less what could be said about him.
Amheim and Diotima are troubled. Amheim says: The "cousin. "
It's only for the police that he has qualities. For General Stumm: The old comrade.
For Count Leinsdorf he is something definite (true).
For Bonadea he is splendid, mean, etc.
I say: the or a man without qualities (and this is without overvaluing
him, as would be the case with a "hero" Ulrich) is an object to be de- picted. I constantly ask myself: what would a man without qualities say, think, do, in such a situation.
The ideas are such as present themselves to any clever person today. They could also be different; it doesn't amount to the formation of a will or a conviction, beyond a given point or a paranoid system.
By this means one gains relations to the characters, the situative dia- logue.
Of course they are all without qualities, but in Ulrich it is somehow visible.
He is tall, etc. , sympathetic but also unsympathetic.
The other people, on the other hand, have their stories told properly.
Possibly: Everything about the man without qualities in the present tense, everything else that is narrated in the imperfect.
Characterize Ulrich as unsympathetically as myself.
Amheim calls him: The young doctor.
Diotima: My learned cousin (with ironic undertone).
Bring out more strongly the leave from life: resolve to commit suicide (instead of that, then the war); don't give reasons. They were neither
I730 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
concrete ones nor a disdain for life; on the contrary, although he found life abominable he made an effort to love it, felt himself somehow obli- gated to.
Ocean trip: the way it was. To hang on to it, grab hold of it as con- cretely as possible.
For the first time as man and wife beside each other in this weakness afteiWard. Their bodies are as insubstantial as silk ribbons. Nothing hap- pens. Only afteiWard the timorous walking among the loud people.
Railroad journey: their muscles are tossed back and forth, back and forth. Their bodies sway. The weak smile that was yesterday's day pales. Here and there a glance. Or a closing ofthe eyes. Need for the schedule, for a sturdy compartment conversation. But between silence, fatigue, gliding through a strange landscape, and even boredom, still a hanging on to the possession of something different.
First attempt to strip naked. Above rocks on an inaccessible rock ter- race. Even undressing has no effect. Here the charming play of clothes in the room has no force. The naked body like a line. If at least it were burned by the sun.
Union. Like two one-celled animals. Consciously-in a pause when the moon is gone-sexuality as concentration on a goal and a way. There must be this penetration.
(Conversation) The moon is there again and the penetration begins. Until they release each other fatigued and sa- tiated. Lying on their beds like flour dust in human shape. Happy, con- fused; but all human content was blown away. Can that be repeated? Only if an intellectual system is involved, such as unio mystica or the like. This system might perhaps be possible. Tragedy: an unborn world.
Normal desire in Ulrich. Also in Agathe. But repressed again and again until the longing for ordinary obstacles like rivals etc. comes.
Diotima-Arnheim: Sitting knee-to-knee holding hands. Diotima's knees make a motion to open. She presses them together. She stands up, Amheim kisses the curled hair on her neck. (He is unaware of this nes- tling up from behind. ) The kiss down her back, through her legs, comes out at her breasts.
Diotima-Ulrich afteiWard. Diotima just looks at him, upset. Every- thing in her is destroyed. He has put her feelings back on track again.
Meingast. Is democracy a system that picks out leaders? No.
Does it further the intellectual and spiritual? No.
It drags down whatever is outstanding, while raising the general level
only a tiny bit.
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1731
My view of, or task I would set for, literature: partial solution, contri- bution to the solution, investigation, or the like. I feel exempted from having to give an unequivocal response. I have, after all, also postulated the morality of individual cases, etc.
A justified objection: That was from the period before the war. There was no way of shaking up the totality. It went further too: everyone had this feeling. Whether one wanted it that way or not, there was a finn system of coordinates. A floating ball, which one pushed and turned every which way. One's interest exhausted itself in the variations. The tacit assumption was probably not the solidity of the environment but one's lack of concern for it, without one's being aware of it.
Disposition to understanding the way I am in, for instance, Martha [Musil's wife-TRANs. ]: because she paid no attention to the totality in any event.
This situation has now changed. The whole person has been flung into uncertainty. Discussions are of no use to him, he needs the solidity that has been lost. Hence the desire for resolution, for yes and no. In this sense, a person with as little substance as Brecht is exemplary through the form of his behavior. He moves people because he demonstrates their own experience to them. One has to understand this completely.
Therefore the didactic element in the book must be strengthened. A practical formula must be advanced.
Not further thought out: apparently this gives the practical-theoreti- cal opposition, the original spy concept, new content.
LATE 1920s
a. Loving fear
It was spring. The air like a net. Behind it something that stretched the weave. But was not able to break through. They [Ulrich and Agathe-TRANs. ] both knew it but no longer trusted themselves to talk about it. They knew, in the moment when they would seek words for it . . . it would be dead. Fear made them tender. Their eyes and hands (often) brushed each other, a trembling around the lips sought its reflec-
1732 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
tion, one second seemed to separate itself from the ranks of the others and sink into the depths.
The second time, such a movement was a massive mountain of bliss. The third time, very nearly comical.
Then the loving fear came over them.
They looked for a jest, a cynical word; just something unimportant but
real; something that is at home in life and has a right to a home. I t makes no difference what one talks about. Every word falls into the silence, and the next moment the corpses of other words are shining in a circle around it, the way masses of dead fish rise to the surface when one casts poison into the water. The order of words in a real connection destroys the deep reflective luster with which, unspoken, they lie above the un- utterable, and one could just as well speak about lawyers as philosophy.
b.
Ulrich comes in, a book in his hand; it is Emerson, whom he loves. He heard only at the last moment that Agathe was making music. What he hates: music as subterfuge, music as intoxicant deadening the life-form- ing will. He becomes gloomy, wants to turn around, but nevertheless reads aloud to Agathe the place he wanted to show her.
Can be applied to the description of the nature of an idea:
"'In common hours, society sits cold and statuesque. We all stand waiting, empty-knowing, possibly, that we can be full, surrounded by mighty symbols which are not symbols to us, but prose and trivial toys. Then cometh the god and converts the statues into fiery men, and by a flash of his eye burns up the veil which shrouded all things, and the meaning of the very furniture, of cup and saucer, of chair and clock and tester, is manifest. The facts which loomed so large in the fogs of yester- day-property, climate, breeding, personal beauty, and the like-have strangely changed their proportions. All that we reckoned solid shakes and rattles. . . . ' "
His voice sounds despondently "cold and silent" as he reads with lost confidence. Agathe has interrupted her playing; when the words, too, have died away, her fingers take a few acoustic steps through the bound- less land of music, stop, and she listens. "Lovely," she says, but does not know what she means.
Agathe is playing the piano.
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1733
To her surprise Ulrich says: ''Yes; it can drive one mad. " Agathe, who knows that Ulrich does not like it when she plays music, abandons the instrument.
- P a y attention! Ulrich says, having stepped back and drawn a pistol from his pocket. He fires at the piano, shooting into the center of its long black flank. The bullet cuts through the dty, tender wood and howls across the strings. A second churns up jumping sounds. The keys begin to hop. The jubilantly sharp reports of the pistol drive with increasing frenzy into a splintering, screaming, tearing, drumming, and singing up- roar. He does not know why he is shooting. Certainly not because of anger at the piano, or to express anything at all symbolically. When the magazine is empty Ulrich lets it drop to the carpet, and his cheeks are still hollowed out from tension.
Agathe had neither lifted her hand nor uttered the slightest sound to prevent the destruction of the expensive instrument. She felt no fear, and although the way her brother began must have been quite incom- prehensible to her, the thought that he had gone mad did not seem terri- fying to her, caught up as she was by the pathos of the shots and the strange wounded cries of the struck instrument.
When her brother then asked whether she was angry at him, she de- nied it with radiant eyes. -I ought to feel like a fool-Ulrich said, some- what ashamed-but if I tried to repeat that, it would turn into ordinary target practice, and its never being repeatable was perhaps the stimulus.
-Always, when one has done something, Agathe said. Ulrich looked at her in astonishment and said nothing.
c.
It was only the next day that Ulrich referred to the incident again. "Now you won't be able to play the piano for a while," he tried saying by way of excuse; where the piano had stood there was emptiness in the room. "Why did you say yesterday that these books could drive one mad? " Agathe asked. "Before your mad idea. Are they very beautiful? ''
"Just because they're beautiful. It's perhaps good that you can't make music now. " What followed was a long conversation. -It's all like blow- ing bubbles, Ulrich said. Beautiful? With his hands he spontaneously formed in the air an iridescent ball-"completely self-contained and round, like a globe, and the next instant vanished without trace. I've been working again for a while-"
1734 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
(But it is also possible to take everything theoretical out of the descrip- tion of the Other Condition and apply it as fiction in an ironic way as depiction of the age. Then all that would remain here would be those remarks that have the character of events. )
Agathe: Depict a deep depression.
It is as ifa secret drawer within her had been turned upside down and contents never before seen had come to light. Everything is obscured. Little reflection; really an inability to reflect. The idea: I must kill my- self, is present only in the form of this sentence, unspoken, yet its pres- ence eerily known; it fills the dark vacuum more and more completely.
The condition is uncanny. Much less free of the fear of death than were many of the healthy moments in which Agathe had often thought of death. And much less beautiful: dull, colorless. But the idea now has a fearful attraction.
'She begins to put her affairs in order: there really aren't any. Ulrich is right, when he struggles and works, that yields content; he is marvelous the way he is~he thinks.
Then: He'll get over it. I'm not leaving behind anyone who will weep over me.
Sadness at living. The flowing of the blood is a weeping. Everything done badly, without energy, half; like a small parrot among coarse spar- rows. Incapable of the simple emotions. She had been afraid of her fa- ther; the same fear that had recurred often in her life: not being able to defend herself, because the defense leads to things that one finds just as meaningless. She never knew love, and the suggestion that this was now the most important thing; this child's idea, this rapture of so many women, is a matter ofindifference to her.
But The sovereignty ofthe resolve. Whoever is able to do this is free and owes no one an accounting. The world becomes quite calm. In spite ofits rush. The strange loneliness! With which one is born.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1735 All objects in the room become friends for the first time; have seri-
ously found their place.
A long time ago she had obtained a capsule with cyanide; it was her solace in many hours. Pours it for the first time into a glass; the carafe with water beside it. Describe how it is done. Possibly the confidence that this world, in which Agathe feels herself so imperfect, is not the only one.
At the last moment, Ulrich enters.
Agathe would have had to say farewell, become sentimental, offer ex- planations. Or jump up and run away from him. She looks at him help- lessly, and he notices the disturbance in her face. The spark jumps over to him. -Today you have no courage. He was still trying to jest. -1, at least, shot up a piano. -Let's kill ourselves . . . , Agathe said. We are miserable creatures who hear within ourselves the law o f another world, without being able to carry it out! We love what is forbidden and will not defend ourselves.
Ulrich threw himself down beside her and embraced her. We will not let ourselves be killed by anything before we have tried it/
What? Agathe looked at him, trembling.
God has . . . Ulrich smiled . . . The lost paradise! We don't need to ask ourselves whether what we propose will stand every test: everything is fleeting and fluid. Whoever is n o t like us will not understand us. Because one understands nothing ofwhat one sees and does, but only what one is.
Do you understand me, my soul?
And ifitfails, we'll kill ourselves?
We'll kill ourselves! Voices were singing in them like a chorus ofheav- enly storms: Do what you feel! I
Next chapter
I f they had done what they were feeling, in an hour everything would have been over. But as it is, they travel.
1736 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
1930-1934
Nations chapter
This chapter, as reminder of the world, inserted in the progression of the extremely personal chapters. Also works as antidote to the other life that Ulrich has devised.
Basic idea: presenting and ironizing "making everyone dance to the same tune. " (But deeper basic idea: Age ofempiricism. )
Extremes appeal more to the average person than does the strict truth.
Sketch for crisis and decision chapter
Preceded by: Ulrich-Bonadea
Ulrich stays behind; like a dog that has killed a chicken. Leaves the room briefly; Agathe comes in; she's had enough of Lindner; Peter pre- ceded her. Her thoughts and their result. This should be followed by a-not written-conversation to the effect that disavowal produced by the result justifies the crisis.
On the real and urgent level, Ulrich has to go on an errand. Agathe's attempt at suicide. Saved by Ulrich. Final resolve.
What is the resolve based on? What Agathe's attempted suicide?
Ulrich really ought to answer-in the sense ofSchleiermacher's moral indifference ofthe religious person-that the Other Condition offers no precepts for everyday life. You can marry, live as you wish, etc. Utopias, too, have not produced any practicable results.