by Robert Musil
It was this infatuation that brought Stumm von Bordwehr, soon after Diotima had dismissed him from her presence, irresistibly back to her. He planted himself close to the object of his admiration, especially as he knew no one else among those present, and listened in on her conversations with the other guests. He would have loved to take notes, for he would hardly have believed the sovereign ease with which she handled such intellectual riches, like someone toying with a string of priceless pearls, had his own ears not borne witness to her skill as she welcomed, one after another, such a variety of celebrities. It was only when she had given him a look after ungraciously turning away from him several times, that he realized the unseemliness of a general’s eavesdropping on his hostess in that fashion, and backed away. He made a few lonely tours of the overcrowded premises, drank a glass of wine, and was just about to find a decorative place to stand against a wall when he noticed Ulrich, whom he had seen once before, at the first meeting, and his memory lit up; Ulrich had been a bright, restless lieutenant in one of the two squadrons General Stumm had once gently led as a lieutenant colonel.
“A man of my own sort,” Stumm thought. “And to think how young he still is, to have made it to so high a position!” He made a beeline for Ulrich, and after they had shaken hands and compared notes for a while, Stumm indicated the assembled company and said: “An incredible opportunity for me to learn about the most important problems in the civilian world.”
“You’ll be amazed, General,” Ulrich said.
The General, who needed an ally, warmly shook his hand. “You were a lieutenant in the Ninth Uhlans,” he said significantly, “and someday that will turn out to have been a great honor for us, even if the others don’t yet realize it as I do.”
81
COUNT LEINSDORF’S VIEWS OF REALPOLITIK. ULRICH FOSTERS ORGANIZATIONS
While the Council did not yet give the slightest sign of coming up with any answers, the Parallel Campaign was making great strides at the Palais Leinsdorf: it was there that the threads of reality meshed. Ulrich came twice a week.
He had never dreamed that such numbers of organizations existed. Organizations for field sports and water sports, temperance clubs and drinking clubs, were heard from—in short, organizations and counterorganizations of every kind. They worked to promote the interests of their members and to hamper those of the others. Everyone in the world seemed to belong to at least one organization. Ulrich in his amazement said:
“Your Grace, this goes far beyond what we, in our innocence, have always regarded as natural manifestations of the social instinct. We’re faced with the monstrous fact that in the kind of state we have invented, with its law and order, everybody is also a member of a gang… .”
But Count Leinsdorf was in favor of organizations. “Remember,” he said, “that no good has ever come of ideological politics; we must go in for practical politics. I won’t deny that I even regard the far too intellectual concerns of your cousin’s circle as potentially dangerous!”
“Could you give me some guidelines, sir?” Ulrich asked.
Count Leinsdorf looked at him, wondering whether the inexperienced young man was ready for so daring a disclosure. But then he decided to risk it.
“Well now, you see,” he began cautiously, “I’ll tell you something that may be new to you, because you are young: realpolitik means not doing the very thing you would love to do; however, you can win people over by letting them have their way in little things!”
His listener’s eyes popped; Count Leinsdorf smiled complacently.
“So you see,” he explained, “all I am saying is that in practice, politics must be guided not by the power of an idea but always by some actual need. Of course everyone would like to make the great ideas come true, that goes without saying. So one should never do what one would like to do. Kant was the first to say so.”
“Really!” Ulrich exclaimed in amazement. “But one must aim at something, surely?”
“Aim? Bismarck wanted to make the King of Prussia great; that was his aim. He didn’t know from the start that to achieve it, he would have to make war on Austria and France, and that he would found the German Empire.”
“Is Your Grace suggesting that we should aim at a great-and powerful Austria and nothing else?”
“We still have four years to go. In four years all sorts of things can happen. You can put a people on its feet, but it must do its own walking. Do you see what I mean? Put it on its feet—that’s what we must do. But a people’s feet are its firm institutions, its political parties, its organizations, and so on, and not a lot of talk.”
“Your Grace! Even if it doesn’t exactly sound like it, you have just uttered a truly democratic idea!”
“Well, it may be aristocratic too, even though my fellow peers don’t see eye-to-eye with me on this. Old Hennenstein and Türckheim told me they expected nothing but a filthy mess to come of all this. So we must watch our step. We must start building on a small scale, so be very nice to the people who come to us.”
Consequently Ulrich for some time after this turned no one away. One man who came to him talked a great deal about stamp collecting. To begin with, he said, it made for international understanding; second, it satisfied the need for property and position on which society was unquestionably based; third, it not only called for considerable knowledge but also required decisions on a level that it was not too much to call artistic. Ulrich looked the man over, with his careworn and rather shabby appearance; but the man caught the question in Ulrich’s glance and countered it by saying that stamps were also commercially valuable, a factor not to be underrated; millions were made in trading them; the great stamp auctions attracted dealers and collectors from all over the world. It was one way to get rich. But as for himself, he was an idealist; he was putting together a special collection for which there was no commercial interest as yet. All he asked was that a great stamp exhibition be held in the Jubilee Year, when he could be depended upon to bring his specialty to public attention.
After him came a man with the following story: On his walks through the streets—though it was even more exciting when one rode a trolley—he had for years been in the habit of counting the number of straight strokes in the big block letters of the shop signs (there were three strokes in an A, for instance, and four in an M) and dividing the sum total by the number of letters counted. His average so far had been consistently two and a half strokes to a letter, but this was obviously not invariable, since it could change with every new street. Now, deviations from the norm could be quite distressing, while there was great satisfaction every time the numbers came out right—an effect quite like the catharsis said to be achieved while watching classical tragedy on the stage. If you considered the letters themselves, however—anyone could check this out—divisibility by three was a rare bit of luck, which is why most inscriptions tended to leave you with a noticeable sense of frustration, except for those consisting of several letters each composed of four strokes, as in M, E, W, for instance, which could be depended upon to leave one feeling remarkably happy. So what to do? the visitor asked. Simply this, an order issued by the Public Health Office favoring four-stroke letter series in shop signs and discouraging as far as possible the use of one-stroke letters, such as O, S, I, C, which lead to poor and therefore depressing results.
Ulrich looked the man over and took care to keep a distance between them; yet he did not really look like a mental case, but was a well-dressed person in his thirties with an intelligent and amiable expression. He went on calmly explaining that mental arithmetic was an indispensable skill in every line of work, that to teach by means of games was in keeping with modern educational methods, that statistics had often revealed deep connections between things long before these could be explained, that everyone knew the damage done by an education based on book learning alone, and, in conclusion, that the excitement his findings had aroused in all those who had chosen to repeat his experiments spoke for itself. If the Public He
alth Office could be induced to adopt his discovery, other countries would soon follow suit, and the Jubilee Year could turn out to be a blessing for all mankind.
Ulrich advised all these people to organize: “You still have almost four years’ time, and if you succeed, His Grace will be sure to use all his influence on your behalf.”
Most of them, however, were already organized, which of course changed matters. It was relatively simple when a soccer club wanted an honorary professorship for its outside right, to demonstrate the importance of modern physical culture; one could always promise to take the matter under consideration. But it was hard in such cases as the following: A man in his fifties presented himself as a senior executive in a government department; his forehead shone with the light of martyrdom when he identified himself as the founder and president of the Oehl Shorthand Association, hoping to draw the attention of the great patriotic campaign’s Secretary to the Oehl shorthand system.
Oehl shorthand was an Austrian system, he went on to explain, which was all you needed to know to understand why it was not widely adopted or encouraged. Was the Secretary himself a practicing stenographer, by any chance? No? Then he was perhaps not aware of the advantages of any stenographic system: the saving in time, in mental energy. Did he have any idea what a tremendous waste of mental effort was entailed by all those curlicues and prolixities, the imprecision and the bewildering repetition of similar parts, and the confusion that arose between truly expressive, significant graphic components and merely ritualistic and arbitrarily idiosyncratic flourishes of the pen?
Ulrich was amazed to meet a man so implacably determined to stamp out ordinary, presumably harmless, handwriting. When it came to saving mental effort, shorthand was a vital necessity for a rapidly growing world that had to get things done quickly. But even from a moral standpoint the question of Short or Long was crucial. The long-eared script, as the senior official bitterly termed it because of the senseless loops it was full of, encouraged tendencies to imprecision, arbitrariness, and wastefulness, especially the waste of time, while shorthand inculcated precision, willpower, manliness. Shorthand, he said, taught people to do what was necessary and to avoid what was unnecessary and irrelevant. Surely there was a lesson in practical morality here, of the greatest possible significance especially for any Austrian. And then there was the aesthetic side of it. Wasn’t prolixity rightly considered an ugly quality? Had not the great classical authors rightly declared economy of means to be an essential element of beauty? But even regarding it from the public-health angle, the senior executive official went on, it was most important to shorten the time spent sitting hunched over one’s desk. After having in this fashion illuminated the subject of shorthand from various other scientific-scholarly angles as well, to his listener’s edification, the visitor finally began to dilate upon the Oehl system’s immense superiority over all other systems of shorthand. He showed that from every one of the points of view under consideration, all other systems of shorthand were a mere betrayal of the very principle of shorthand. He then unfolded the story of his own personal martyrdom to the cause. There were all the older, more powerful systems, which had had time to ally themselves with all sorts of vested interests. All the trade schools were teaching the Vogelbauch system and stood pat against any change, backed up, in accordance with the laws of inertia, by the business community. The newspapers, which obviously profit enormously from the advertisements of the trade schools, would not hear of any proposals for reform. And the Education Office? What a sad joke that was, according to Herr Oehl. Five years ago, when shorthand was first made a required subject in the secondary schools, the Office of Education had set up a committee of advisers on the system to be chosen; the committee was naturally packed with representatives of the trade schools and the business community and with government stenographers, who were of course hand in glove with the press, and that was that! It was all too obvious that the Vogelbauch system was slated to win! The Oehl Shorthand Association had issued a warning and a protest against such criminal indifference to the public interest. But its delegates could no longer get anyone at the Education Office to see them!
Ulrich took cases of this kind to His Grace. “Oehl?” Count Leinsdorf said. “An official, you say?” His Grace rubbed his nose for a long time but came to no decision. “Perhaps you should see his head of department and find out if there’s anything to what he says,” he mused after a while, but he was feeling creative and canceled this suggestion. “No, I’ll tell you what we’ll do: we’ll draw up a memorandum. Let’s find out what they have to say for themselves.” And he added confidentially, to give Ulrich an insight into the deeper workings of things: “With any of these things, you can never tell whether they are nonsense or not,” he said. “But you see, my dear fellow, you can always depend on something important coming of the fact that somebody attaches importance to it. Take the case of Dr. Arnheim, that darling of all the newspapers. The newspapers could just as easily pursue some other hare. But given that they pursue him, that makes Arnheim important. You said, didn’t you, that this man Oehl has an organization behind him? Not that it proves anything, of course, but on the other hand, as I said, we must keep up with the times, and when a good many people are for something, the chances are that something will come of it.”
82
CLARISSE CALLS FOR AN ULRICH YEAR
There was really no reason for Ulrich to pay Clarisse a visit other than his having to give her a good talking-to about the letter she had written to Count Leinsdorf; when she had come to see him a few days earlier, he had forgotten all about it. On his way there, however, it occurred to him that Walter was definitely jealous of him and would be upset about the visit when he heard of it. But there was nothing Walter could do about it. The majority of men find themselves in this funny situation if they happen to be jealous: they cannot keep an eye on their women until after office hours.
The time of day Ulrich had chosen to go there made it unlikely that he would find Walter at home. It was quite early in the afternoon. He had phoned to say he was coming. The snowy whiteness of the landscape outside shone so intensely into the room that it was as though there were no curtains at all on the windows. In this merciless light that glittered off every object stood Clarisse, greeting Ulrich with a laugh from the center of the room. On the side toward the window, the minimal curvature of her boyish body flashed in vivid colors, while the side in shadow was a bluish-brown mist from which her forehead, nose, and chin jutted out like snowy ridges whose edges are blurred by wind and sun. The impression she gave was less that of a human being than of the meeting of ice and light in the spectral solitude of an Alpine winter. Ulrich caught some of the spell she must cast on Walter at times, and his mixed feelings for his boyhood friend briefly gave way to an insight into the image two people presented to each other, whose life he perhaps knew hardly at all.
“I don’t know whether you told Walter anything about the letter you wrote to Count Leinsdorf,” he began, “but I’ve come to speak to you alone, and to warn you never to do that kind of thing again.” Clarisse pushed two chairs together and made him sit down.
“Don’t tell Walter,” she asked him, “but tell me what you have against it. You mean the Nietzsche Year? What did your Count say to that?”
“What do you suppose he could have said? The way you tied it in with Moosbrugger was utterly crazy. And even without that he’d probably have thrown your letter away.”
“Oh, really?” Clarisse was very disappointed. Then she said: “Luckily, you have some say in it too!”
“But don’t you see, you’re simply out of your mind!”
Clarisse smiled, accepting this as a compliment. She laid her hand on his arm and asked him: “But an Austrian Year is nonsense, isn’t it?”
“Of course it is.”
“But a Nietzsche Year would be a fine thing. Why should it be wrong to want something just because we happen to like the idea ourselves?”
“And what e
xactly is your idea of a Nietzsche Year?”
“That’s your affair.”
“Very funny.”
“Not at all. Why does it seem funny to you to try to put into practice something you take seriously as an intellectual matter? Tell me that.”
“I’ll be glad to,” Ulrich said, freeing his arm from her hand. “After all, Nietzsche isn’t the issue; it could just as well be Christ or Buddha.”
“Or you. Why not get to work on an Ulrich Year!” She said this with the same casual air as when she had urged him to free Moosbrugger. This time, however, his attention had not strayed, and he was looking at her face while he listened to her words. All he saw was Clarisse’s usual smile, that funny little grimace that was the unintended result of the mental effort she was making.
“Oh well,” he thought, “she doesn’t mean any harm.”
But Clarisse drew closer to him again. “Why don’t you make it You Year? You might just be in a position to do it now. Only don’t say anything to Walter about it—I’ve told you that already—nor about my Moosbrugger letter. Not a word, ever, that I’ve talked to you about it. But I assure you, this murderer is musical, even though he can’t actually compose. Haven’t you ever noticed that every human being is the center of a cosmic sphere? When the person moves, the sphere moves with him. That’s the way to make music, without thinking about it, simple as the cosmic sphere around you… .”