by Robert Musil
“No wonder,” His Grace commented, turning to the others. “There’s no dearth of patriotism among the population, but one would have to be as well informed as an encyclopedia to satisfy all the people on every point they bring up. Our government departments simply can’t cope, which proves that the time has come for us to intervene from above.”
“In this connection”—Arnheim spoke up again—“Your Grace might be interested to note that General von Bordwehr has been attracting increasing interest in the Council of late.”
Count Leinsdorf looked at the General for the first time. “In what way?” he asked without in the least bothering to mask the rudeness of his question.
“Oh, how very embarrassing! I never intended anything of the kind,” Stumm von Bordwehr demurred bashfully. “The role of the soldier in the council chamber can only be a modest one; that’s always been a principle with me. But Your Grace may remember that at the very first meeting, only doing my duty as a soldier, so to speak, I suggested that if the Committee had no better idea, they might remember that our artillery has no up-to-date guns and our navy, for that matter, has no ships—not enough ships, that is, to defend the country if that should ever have to be done—”
“And?” His Grace interrupted him and shot a surprised, questioning look at Diotima that made no secret of his displeasure.
Diotima shrugged her beautiful shoulders in resignation; she had almost become hardened to the fact that wherever she might turn, the pudgy little General popped up like a nightmare, as if sponsored by some sinister forces.
“And lately, you see,” Stumm von Bordwehr hastened to say before his modesty could get the better of him in the face of his success, “voices have been raised that would support such a proposal if someone were to come forward with it. It is being said, in fact, that the Army and the Navy are a concept behind which all could rally, and a great concept too, after all, and His Majesty would be pleased as well. Besides, it would be an eye-opener for the Prussians—no offense, I hope, Herr von Arnheim.”
“Not at all, General. The Prussians wouldn’t be at all disconcerted by it.” Arnheim waved this aside with a smile. “Besides, it goes without saying that whenever such Austrian concerns come up I am simply not present, even while I most humbly take the liberty of listening in anyway… .”
“Well then, in any case,” the General concluded, “opinions have in fact been expressed that the simplest thing would be not to keep talking much longer but to settle for a military solution. For myself, I’d be inclined to think that this could be done in combination with something else, some great civilian concept, perhaps, but as I say, it’s not for a soldier to interfere, and views to the effect that nothing better is likely to come out of all this civilian thinking have just been voiced in the most intellectual quarters.”
Toward the end of the General’s speech, His Grace was listening with a fixed stare, and only involuntary twitchings in the direction of twiddling his thumbs, which he could not quite suppress, betrayed the strain of his painful inner workings.
Section Chief Tuzzi, whose voice was not usually heard on these occasions, now slipped in a comment, speaking slowly and in a low tone: “I don’t believe the Ministry of Foreign Affairs would have any objections.”
“Aha, so the departments have been in touch on this subject already?” Count Leinsdorf asked ironically, in a tone betraying his irritation. Unshaken, Tuzzi replied affably: “Your Grace is joking. The War Department would sooner welcome universal disarmament than have any truck with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.” He went on to tell a little story. “Your Grace must have heard about the fortifications in the southern Tyrol that have been built during the last ten years at the insistence of the Chief of the General Staff. They are said to be perfectly splendid, quite the latest thing. They have of course also been equipped with electrically charged barbed wire and huge searchlights that get their current from underground diesel engines; no one could say that we’re behind the times in this. The only trouble is that the engines were ordered by the Artillery, and the fuel is provided by the War Ministry’s Department of Works, according to regulations, which is why the fortifications can’t be made operational, because the two authorities can’t agree on whether the match that has to be used to start the engine should be regarded as fuel and supplied by the Department of Works, or as a mechanical part for which the Artillery is responsible.”
“How delightful!” Arnheim said, though he knew that Tuzzi was confusing a diesel engine with a gas engine and that even with gas it was a long time since matches had been used. It was the kind of story that circulates in government offices, full of enjoyable self-deprecation, and the Section Chief had told it in a tone of tolerant amusement. Everyone smiled or laughed, none more appreciatively than General Stumm. “Of course, it’s the civilians in the other departments who are really to blame,” he said, to take the joke a little further, “because the minute we order something not regularly provided for in the budget, the Finance Ministry loses no time in reminding us that we don’t know the first thing about the workings of constitutional government. So if war were to break out—God forbid!—before the end of the fiscal year we would have to telegraph the commanding officers of these fortifications at dawn, on the first day of mobilization, empowering them to buy matches, and if there were none to be had in those mountain villages, the war would have to be conducted with the matches in the pockets of the officers’ orderlies.”
The General had probably gone a little too far in his elaboration of the joke; as its humor thinned out, the dire seriousness of the problems facing the Parallel Campaign became apparent again. His Grace said pensively: “As time goes on …,” but then he remembered that it is wiser in a difficult situation to let the others do the talking, and did not finish. The six persons present were silent for a moment, as though they were all standing around a deep well, staring down into it.
“No,” Diotima said, “that’s impossible.”
What? all eyes seemed to ask.
“We would only be doing what Germany is accused of: arming for war.” Her soul had paid no attention to the anecdotes, or had forgotten them already, arrested at the moment of the General’s success.
“But what is to be done?” Count Leinsdorf asked gratefully, but still troubled. “We must look for some temporary expedient, at the very least.”
“Germany is a relatively naïve country, bristling with energy,” Arnheim said, as though he felt called upon to apologize to his lady on behalf of his country. “It has been handed gunpowder and schnapps.”
Tuzzi smiled at this metaphor, which struck him as more than daring.
“There’s no denying that Germany is regarded with growing distaste in those circles to which our Campaign is meant to appeal.” Count Leinsdorf did not pass up the opportunity to slip this in. “And even, I am sorry to say, in those circles it has already appealed to,” he added, for a wonder.
Arnheim surprised him by stating that he was not unaware of it. “We Germans,” he said, “are an illfated nation. Not only do we live in the heart of Europe; we even suffer the pains of this heart… .”
“Heart?” Count Leinsdorf asked involuntarily. He would have been prepared for “brain” and would have more readily acceded to this. But Arnheim insisted on heart. “Do you remember,” he asked, “that not so long ago the City Council of Prague awarded a very large order to France, although we had also made a tender, of course, and would have filled our order more efficiently and more cheaply? It is simply an emotional prejudice at work. And I must admit that I fully understand it.”
Before he could go on, Stumm von Bordwehr was happy to elucidate. “All over the world,” he said, “people are struggling desperately, but in Germany they’re struggling even harder. All over the world a lot of noise is being made, but even more in Germany. Business has lost touch with traditional culture everywhere, but most of all in Germany. Everywhere the flower of youth is stuck into barracks as a matter of course, b
ut the Germans have more barracks than anyone else. And so we are bound, in a way, as brothers, not to hang back too far behind Germany,” he concluded. “If all this sounds a bit paradoxical, I hope you’ll all excuse me, but such are the complications faced by the intellect nowadays.”
Arnheim nodded in agreement. “America may be even worse than we are,” he added, “but America is at least utterly naïve, without our intellectual conflicts. We Germans are in every respect the nation at the center of things, where all the world’s currents crisscross. More than any other we need a synthesis. And we know it. We have a sense of sin, as it were. But admitting this frankly, at the outset, I think it is only fair to acknowledge that we also suffer for the others, that we take their faults upon ourselves, so to speak, and that in a sense we are being cursed or crucified, however you might want to put it, on behalf of the whole world. A change of heart in Germany would probably be the most significant thing that could happen. I rather suspect that some vague idea of this is present in that conflicted and, as it seems, somewhat impassioned opposition to us of which you have just spoken.”
Now Ulrich joined in: “You gentlemen underestimate the pro-German elements. I am reliably informed that any day now there is going to be a fierce demonstration against our campaign by those who consider us anti-German. Your Grace will see the people of Vienna demonstrating in the streets. There is to be a protest against the appointment of Baron Wisnieczky. Our friends Tuzzi and Arnheim are assumed to be acting in collusion, while you, sir, are said to be working to undermine the German influence on the Parallel Campaign.”
Count Leinsdorf’s eyes now reflected something between the impassivity of a frog’s gaze and the irritability of a bull’s. Tuzzi looked up slowly at Ulrich’s face and gave him a warm, questioning look. Arnheim laughed heartily and stood up, trying to catch the Section Chief’s eye with an urbane, humorous glance as a way of deprecating the absurd insinuation about the two of them, but as he could not connect with him he turned to Diotima instead. Tuzzi had meanwhile taken Ulrich by the arm and asked where he had got his information. Ulrich told him it was no secret but a widely accepted rumor he had heard at a friend’s house. Tuzzi brought his face closer, forcing Ulrich to turn slightly aside from the others, and with this effect of privacy he suddenly whispered: “Don’t you know yet why Arnheim is here? He is an intimate friend of Prince Mosyutov and very much persona grata with the Czar. He keeps in touch with Russia and is supposed to influence this Campaign in a pacifist direction. Unofficially, of course, on his Russian Majesty’s private initiative, as it were. A matter of ideology. Something for you, my friend,” he concluded in a mocking tone. “Leinsdorf has no inkling of it.”
Section Chief Tuzzi had this information through official channels. He believed it because he saw pacifism as a movement that was in keeping with the outlook a beautiful woman would have, which would explain Diotima’s being so enraptured with Arnheim and Arnheim’s spending more time in Tuzzi’s house than anywhere else. Before this he had come close to being jealous. He could believe in “intellectual affinities” up to a point, but he did not care to use devious methods to find out whether this point had been passed or not, so he had forced himself to go on trusting his wife. But while this was a victory of his manly self-respect over mere sexual instincts, these could still arouse enough jealousy in him to make him see for the first time that a professional man can never really keep an eye on his wife unless he is willing to neglect his work. Though he told himself that if an engine driver could not keep his woman with him on the job, a man at the controls of an empire could afford even less to be a jealous husband, it went against his character as a diplomat to settle for the noble ignorance in which this left him, and it undermined his professional self-assurance. So he was most thankful to be restored to his old self-confidence by this harmless explanation for everything that had worried him. There was even a little bonus in his feeling that it served his wife right that he knew all about Arnheim, while she saw only the human being and never dreamed that he was an agent of the Czar. Now Tuzzi again enjoyed asking her for little scraps of information, which she undertook to provide with a mixture of graciousness and impatience. He had worked out a whole series of seemingly harmless questions, the answers to which would enable him to draw his own conclusions. The husband would have been glad to take the “cousin” into his confidence, and was just wondering how to go about it without exposing his wife, when Count Leinsdorf again took the lead in the conversation. He alone had remained seated, and nobody had noticed anything of the struggle going on inside him as the problems piled up. But his fighting spirit seemed to be restored. He twirled his Wallenstein mustache and said slowly and firmly: “Something will have to be done.”
“Have you come to a decision, Count?” they asked him.
“I haven’t been able to come up with anything,” he said simply. “Still, something must be done.” He sat there like a man who does not intend to move from the spot until his will is done.
The effect was so powerful that everyone present felt the futile straining after an answer rattling inside him like a penny in a piggy bank that no amount of shaking will get out through the slot.
Arnheim said: “Now, really, we can’t let ourselves be influenced by that sort of thing.”
Leinsdorf did not reply.
The whole litany of proposals intended to give the Parallel Campaign some content was gone over again.
Count Leinsdorf reacted like a pendulum, always in a different position but always swinging the same way: This can’t be done because we have to think of the Church. That can’t be done, the freethinkers won’t like it. The Association of Architects has already protested against this. There are qualms about that in the Department of Finance.
So it went, on and on.
Ulrich kept out of it. He felt as if the five persons taking their turn to speak had just crystallized out of some impure liquid in which his senses had been marinated for months now. Whatever had he meant by telling Diotima that it was necessary to take control of the imaginary, or that other time, when he had said that reality should be abolished? Now she was sitting here, remembering such statements of his, and probably thinking all sorts of things about him. And what on earth had made him say to her that one should live like a character in a book? He felt certain that she had passed all that on to Arnheim by now.
But he also felt sure that he knew what time it was, or the price of eggs, as well as anyone. If he nevertheless happened, just now, to hold a position halfway between his own and that of the others, it did not take some queer shape such as might result from a dim and absent state of mind; on the contrary, he again felt flooded by that illumination he had noticed earlier, in Bonadea’s presence. He recalled going with the Tuzzis to a racecourse last fall, not so long ago, when there was an incident involving great, suspicious betting losses, and a peaceful crowd had in a matter of seconds turned into a turbulent sea of people pouring into the enclosure, not only smashing everything within reach but rifling the cash boxes as well, until the police succeeded in transforming them back into an assemblage of people out for a harmless and customary good time. In such a world it was absurd to think in terms of metaphors and the vague borderline shapes life might possibly, or impossibly, assume. Ulrich felt that there was nothing amiss with his perception of life as a crude and needy condition where it was better not to worry too much about tomorrow because it was hard enough to get through today. How could one fail to see that the human world is no hovering, insubstantial thing but craves the most concentrated solidity, for fear that anything out of the way might make it go utterly to pieces? Or, to take it a step further, how could a sound observer fail to recognize that this living compound of anxieties, instincts, and ideas, such as it is, though it uses ideas at most in order to justify itself, or as stimulants, gives those ideas their form and coherence, whatever defines them and sets them in motion? We may press the wine from the grapes, but how much more beautiful than a pool of w
ine is the sloping vineyard with its inedible rough soil and its endless rows of shining wooden stakes. In short, he reflected, the cosmos was generated not by a theory but—he was about to say “by violence,” but a word he had not expected leapt to mind, and so he finished by thinking: but by violence and love, and the usual linkage between these two is wrong.
At this moment violence and love again did not have quite their conventional meaning for Ulrich. Everything that inclined him toward nihilism and hardness was implied in the word “violence.” It meant whatever flowed from every kind of skeptical, factual, conscious behavior; a certain hard, cold aggressiveness had even entered into his choice of a career, so that an undercurrent of cruelty might have led to his becoming a mathematician. It was like the dense foliage of a tree hiding the trunk. And if we speak of love not merely in the usual sense but are moved by the word to long for a condition profoundly different, unto the very atoms that make up the body, from the poverty of lovelessness; or when we feel that we can lay claim to every quality as naturally as to none; or when it seems to us that what happens is only semblances prevailing, because life—bursting with conceit over its here-and-now but really a most uncertain, even a downright unreal condition—pours itself headlong into the few dozen cake molds of which reality consists; or that in all the orbits in which we keep revolving there is a piece missing; or that of all the systems we have set up, none has the secret of staying at rest: then all these things, however different they look, are also bound up with each other like the branches of a tree, completely concealing the trunk on all sides.
These two trees were the shape his life had taken, like a two-pronged fork. He could not say when it had entered into the sign of the tree with the hard, tangled branchwork, but it had happened early on, for even his immature Napoleonic plans had shown him to be a man who looked on life as a problem he had set himself, something it was his vocation to work out. This urge to attack life and master it had always been clearly discernible in him, whether it had manifested itself as a rejection of the existing order or as various forms of striving for a new one, as logical or moral needs or even merely as an urge to keep the body in fighting trim. And everything that, as time went on, he had called essayism, the sense of possibility, and imaginative in contrast with pedantic precision; his suggestions that history was something one had to invent, that one should live the history of ideas instead of the history of the world, that one should get a grip on whatever cannot quite be realized in practice and should perhaps end up trying to live as if one were a character in a book, a figure with all the inessential elements left out, so that what was left would consolidate itself as some magical entity—all these different versions of his thinking, all in their extreme formulations against reality, had just one thing in common: an unmistakable, ruthless passion to influence reality.