by Robert Musil
“No doubt she’s abnormal,” he replied. “But is Meingast normal? Or even Walter? Is playing the piano normal? It’s an unusual state of excitement associated with tremors in the wrists and ankles. For a physician, there’s no such thing as normal. Still, if you want my serious opinion, my sister is somewhat overwrought, and I think it will pass once the great panjandrum has left. What do you make of him?” There was a hint of malice in “the great panjandrum.”
“He’s a gasbag,” Ulrich said.
“Isn’t he, though!” Siegmund was delighted. “Repulsive, repulsive.
“But his ideas are interesting, I wouldn’t deny that altogether,” he added after a pause.
143
COUNT LEINSDORF HAS QUALMS ABOUT “CAPITAL AND CULTURE”
And so it happened that Ulrich again appeared before Count Leinsdorf.
He found His Grace, enveloped in tranquillity, dedication, solemnity, and beauty, at his desk, reading a newspaper that was lying spread out over a high pile of documents. The Imperial Liege-Count sadly shook his head after once more expressing his condolences to Ulrich.
“Your father was one of the last true representatives of capital and culture,” he said. “How well I remember the days when we both sat in the Bohemian Diet. He well deserved the confidence we always placed in him!”
Ulrich inquired out of politeness how the Parallel Campaign had fared in his absence.
“Well, because of that hullabaloo in the street outside my house that afternoon, which you observed, we’ve set up a Commission to Ascertain the Desires of the Concerned Sections of the Population in Reference to Administrative Reform,” Count Leinsdorf told him. “The Prime Minister himself asked us to take this off his shoulders for the time being, because as a patriotic enterprise we enjoy, so to speak, the public’s confidence.”
With a straight face Ulrich assured him that at any rate the Commission’s name had been well chosen and was likely to have a certain effect.
“Yes, a good deal depends on finding the right words,” His Grace said pensively, and suddenly asked: “What do you make of this business of the municipal employees in Trieste? I should think it would be high time for the government to pull itself together and take a firm stand.” He made as if to hand over the paper he had folded up when Ulrich came in, but at the last moment chose to open it again and read aloud to his visitor, with vivid feeling, from a long-winded article. “Can you imagine this sort of thing happening in any other country in the world?” he asked, when he had finished. “For years the Austrian city of Trieste has been hiring only Italians, subjects of the King of Italy, in its civil service, to make a point that their allegiance is to Italy, not to us. I was there once on His Majesty’s birthday: not a single flag in all Trieste except on the administration building, the tax office, the prison, and the roofs of a few barracks! But if you should have any business in some municipal office in Trieste on the King of Italy’s birthday, you wouldn’t find a clerk anywhere without a flower in his buttonhole!”
“But why has this been tolerated till now?” Ulrich inquired.
“Why shouldn’t it be tolerated?” Count Leinsdorf said in a disgruntled tone. “If our government forces the city to discharge its foreign staff, we will immediately be accused of Germanizing. That is just the reproach every government fears. Even His Majesty doesn’t like it. After all, we’re not Prussians!”
Ulrich seemed to remember that the coastal and port city of Trieste had been founded on Slavic soil by the imperialistic Venetian Republic and today embraced a large Slavic population, so that even if one were to view it as merely the private concern of its inhabitants—without regard to its also being the gateway to the Empire’s eastern trade and in every way dependent on the Empire for its prosperity—there was no getting around the fact that its large Slavic lower middle class passionately contested the favored Italian upper class’s right to consider the city as its own property. Ulrich said as much to the Count.
“True enough,” Count Leinsdorf instructed him, “but once the word is out that we’re Germanizing, the Slovenes immediately side with the Italians, even though they have to take time off from tearing each other’s hair out, and all the other minorities rally to support them as well! We’ve been through this often enough. In terms of practical politics, it’s the Germans we have to regard as a threat to peace within the Empire, whether we want to or not.” This conclusion left Count Leinsdorf deep in thought for a while, for he had touched on the great political scheme that weighed on his mind, though it had not come clearly into focus for him until this moment. But suddenly he livened up again, and continued cheerfully: “Anyway, the others have been told off properly this time.” With a tremor of impatience, he replaced his pincenez and again read aloud to Ulrich with relish all those satisfying passages in the edict issued by His Imperial and Royal Majesty’s Governor in Trieste.
“‘Repeated warnings issued by the governmental institutions of public safety to no avail… harm done to our people … In view of this obstinate resistance to the prescribed official orders, the Governor of Trieste finds himself obliged to take steps toward enforcing the observance of the existing lawful regulations …’” He interrupted himself to ask: “Spoken with dignity, don’t you think?” He raised his head but immediately lowered it again, eager to get to the final bit, whose official urbane authority underlined his voice with great aesthetic satisfaction:
“‘Furthermore,’” he read, “‘it is reserved to the administration at any time to give careful and sympathetic consideration to each individual case of application for citizenship made by such public functionaries, insofar as these are officially deemed worthy of exceptional regard through long years of public service and an unblemished record, and in such cases the Imperial and Royal Administration is inclined to avoid immediate enforcement of these regulations, while reserving its right to enforce them at such time and in such circumstances as it may think fit.’ Now, that’s the tone our government should have taken all along!” Count Leinsdorf exclaimed.
“Don’t you think, sir, on the basis of this last point, that in the last analysis this leaves things pretty much where they have always been?” Ulrich asked a little later, when the tail end of this long snake of an official sentence had finally vanished inside his ear.
“Yes, that’s just it!” His Grace replied, twiddling his thumbs for a while, as he always did when some hard thinking was going on inside. Then he gave Ulrich a searching look and opened his heart to him.
“Do you remember how, when we were at the police exhibition, the Interior Minister announced that there was a new spirit of ‘mutual support and strictness’ in the offing? Well, I wouldn’t expect them to immediately lock up all the troublemakers who were raising such a rumpus on my doorstep, but the Minister could at least have said a few dignified words of repudiation in Parliament!” His feelings were hurt.
“I assumed it was done during my absence,” Ulrich cried with feigned astonishment, aware that a genuine distress was roiling the mind of his benevolent friend.
“Not a thing was done!” His Grace said. Again he fixed his worried, protuberant eyes on Ulrich’s face with a searching look, and he opened his heart further: “But something will be done!” He straightened up and leaned back in his chair, shutting his eyes as he lapsed into silence.
When he opened them again he began to explain in a calmer tone: “You see, my dear fellow, our Constitution of 1861 entrusted the undisputed leadership in the new experimental governmental scheme to the German element in the population, and in particular to those within that element who represented capital and culture. That was a munificent gift of His Majesty’s, a proof of his generosity and his confidence, perhaps not quite in keeping with the times; for what has become of capital and culture since then?” Count Leinsdorf raised one hand and then dropped it in resignation on the other. “When His Majesty ascended the throne in 1848, at Olmütz, that is to say, practically in exile …,” he went on slowly, but suddenly becoming impa
tient or uncertain, he fished a few notes out of his pocket with trembling fingers, struggled in some agitation to set his pincenez firmly on his nose, and read aloud, his voice sometimes quavering with emotion, as he strained to decipher his own handwriting:
“‘… he was surrounded by the uproar of the nationalities’ wild urge for freedom. He succeeded in quenching the extreme manifestations of this upsurge. Finally, even if after granting some concessions to the demands of his peoples, he stood triumphant as the victor, and a gracious and magnanimous victor, moreover, who forgave his subjects the errors of their ways and held out his hand to them with the offer of a peace honorable for them as well. Although the Constitution and the other liberties had been granted by him under the press of circumstances, it was nevertheless an act of His Majesty’s free will, the fruit of his wisdom and compassion, and of hope in the progressive civilization of his peoples. But in recent years this model relationship between the Emperor and his peoples has been tarnished by the work of agitators, demagogues—’” Here Count Leinsdorf broke off reading his exposition of political history, in which every word had been scrupulously weighed and polished, and gazed pensively at the portrait of his ancestor the Grand Marshal and Knight of the Order of Maria Theresa, hanging on the wall facing him. When Ulrich’s expectant gaze finally drew his attention, he said: “That’s as far as I’ve come.
“But you can see that I have been giving these problems a great deal of thought lately,” he went on. “What I have just read to you is the beginning of the response which the Minister should have presented to Parliament in the matter of the demonstration against me, if he had been doing his job! I’ve gradually worked it out for myself, and I don’t mind telling you that I shall have occasion to present it to His Majesty as soon as I have finished it. You see, it was not without purpose that the Constitution of 1861 entrusted the leadership of our country to capital and culture. It was meant to secure our future. But where are capital and culture today?”
He seemed really put out with the Minister of the Interior, and to divert him Ulrich remarked innocently that one could at least say about capital that it was nowadays not only in the hands of the bankers but also in the time-tested hands of the landed aristocracy.
“I’ve nothing at all against the Jews,” Count Leinsdorf assured Ulrich out of the blue, as though Ulrich had said something that required such a disclaimer. “They are intelligent, hardworking, and reliable. But it was a great mistake to give them those unsuitable names. Rosenberg and Rosenthal, for instance, are aristocratic names; Baer and Wolf and all such creatures are originally heraldic beasts; Meyer derives from landed property; Silver and Gold are armorial colors. All those Jewish names,” His Grace disclosed, to Ulrich’s surprise, “are nothing but the insolence of our bureaucrats aimed at our nobility. It was the noble families, not the Jews, who were the butt of these officials, which is why the Jews were given other names as well, like Abrahams, Jewison, or Schmucker. You can not infrequently observe this animus of our bureaucracy against the old nobility surfacing even today, if you know how to look for it,” he said oracularly, with a gloomy, obstinate air, as though the struggle of the central administration against feudalism had not long since been overtaken by history and vanished completely from sight. In fact, there was nothing His Grace could resent so pureheartedly as the social privileges enjoyed by important bureaucrats by virtue of their position even when their names might be plain Fuchsenbauer or Schlosser. Count Leinsdorf was no diehard country Junker; he wanted to move with the times, and did not mind such a name when it was that of a Member of Parliament or even a cabinet minister or an influential private citizen, nor did he at all object to the political or economic influence of the middle class; what provoked him, with a passion that was the last vestige of venerable traditions, was the social status of high-ranking administrative officials with middle-class names. Ulrich wondered whether Leinsdorf’s remarks might have been prompted by his own cousin’s husband. It was not out of the question, but Count Leinsdorf continued talking and was, as always happened, soon lifted above all personal concerns by an idea that had apparently been working inside him for a long time.
“The whole so-called Jewish Question would disappear without a trace if the Jews would only make up their minds to speak Hebrew, go back to their old names, and wear Eastern dress,” he explained. “Frankly, a Galician Jew who has just recently made his fortune in Vienna doesn’t look right on the Esplanade at Ischl, wearing Tyrolean costume with a chamois tuft on his hat. But put him in a long, flowing robe, as rich as you like so long as it covers his legs, and you’ll see how admirably his face and his grand sweeping gestures go with his costume! All those things people tend to joke about would then be in their proper place—even the showy rings they like to wear. I am against assimilation the way the English nobility practice it; it’s a tedious and uncertain process. But give the Jews back their true character and watch them become a veritable ornament, a genuine aristocracy of a rare and special kind among the nations gratefully thronging around His Majesty’s throne—or, if you’d prefer to see it in everyday terms, imagine them strolling along on our Ringstrasse, the only place in the world where you can see, in the midst of Western European elegance at its finest, a Mohammedan with his red fez, a Slovak in sheepskins, or a bare-legged Tyrolean!”
At this point Ulrich could not do otherwise than express his admiration for His Grace’s acumen, which had now also enabled him to uncover the “real Jew.”
“Well, you know, the true Catholic faith teaches us to see things as they really are,” Count Leinsdorf explained benevolently. “But you would never guess what it was that put me on the right track. It wasn’t Arnheim—I’m not speaking of the Prussians right now. But I have a banker, a man of the Mosaic faith, of course, whom I’ve had to see regularly for years now, and at first his intonation always used to bother me a bit, so that I couldn’t keep my mind on the business at hand. He speaks exactly as if he wanted me to think he was my uncle—I mean, as if he’d just got out of the saddle, or back from a day’s grouse shooting; exactly the way our own kind of people talk, I must say. Well and good; but then, when he gets carried away, he can’t keep it up and, to make no bones about it, slips into a kind of Yiddish singsong. It used to bother me considerably, as I believe I’ve told you already, because it always happened when some important business matter was at stake, so that I was always unconsciously primed for it, and it got so that I couldn’t pay attention to what he was talking about, or else I imagined I was listening to something important the whole time. But then I found a way around it: Every time he began to talk like that I imagined he was speaking Hebrew, and you ought to have heard how attractive it sounded then! Positively enchanting—it is, after all, a liturgical language; such a melodious chanting: I’m very musical, I should add. In short, from then on he had me lapping up the most complicated calculations of compound interest or discount positively as if he were at the piano!” As he said this, Count Leinsdorf had for some reason a melancholy smile.
Ulrich took the liberty of pointing out that the people so favored by His Grace’s sympathetic interest would be more than likely to turn down his suggestion.
“Oh, of course they won’t want to!” the Count said. “But they would have to be forced to for their own good. It would amount to a world mission for the Empire, and it’s not a question of whether they want to or not. You see, many people at the beginning have had to be made to do what’s best for them. But think, too, what it would mean if we ended up allied with a grateful Jewish State instead of with the Germans and Prussia! Seeing that our Trieste happens to be the Hamburg of the Mediterranean, as it were, apart from the fact that it would make us diplomatically invincible to have not only the Pope on our side but the Jews as well!”
Abruptly, he added: “You must remember that I have to concern myself with problems of the currency, too, these days.” And again he smiled in that strangely sad, absentminded way.
It was astonishi
ng that His Grace, who had repeatedly sent out urgent calls for Ulrich, did not discuss the problems of the day now that he had finally come, but lavished his ideas on him. Apparently ideas had come to him in abundance while he had had to do without his confidant, ideas as restless as bees that stream out for miles but are sure to return in their own good time, laden with honey.
“You might perhaps object,” Count Leinsdorf resumed, although Ulrich had not said anything, “that I have on earlier occasions often expressed a decidedly low opinion of the financial world. I don’t deny it: too much is too much, and we have too much finance in modern life. But that’s precisely why we must deal with it! Look, culture has not been pulling its weight alongside capital—there you have the whole secret of developments since 1861. And that’s why we must concern ourselves with capital.”
His Grace made an almost imperceptible pause, just long enough to let his listener know that now he was coming to the secret of capital, but then went on in his gloomily confidential tone:
“You see, what’s most important in a culture is what it forbids people: whatever doesn’t belong is out. For instance, a well-bred man will never eat gravy with his knife, only God knows why; they don’t teach you these things in school. That’s so-called tact, it’s based on a privileged class for culture to look up to, a cultural model; in short, if I may say so, an aristocracy. Granted that our aristocracy has not always lived up to that ideal. That’s exactly the point, the downright revolutionary experiment, of our 1861 Constitution: Capital and culture were meant to make common cause with the aristocracy. Have they done so? Were they up to taking advantage of the great opportunity His Majesty had so graciously made available to them? I’m sure you’d never claim that the results of your cousin’s great efforts that we see every week are in keeping with such hopes.” His voice grew more animated as he exclaimed: “You know, it’s really most interesting, what sorts of things claim to be ‘mind’ these days! I was telling His Eminence the Cardinal about it recently, when we were out hunting in Mürzsteg—no, it was Mürzbruck, at the Hostnitz girl’s wedding—and he laughed and clapped his hands together: ‘Something new every year,’ he said. ‘Now you can see how modest we are; we’ve been telling people the same old thing for almost two thousand years.’ And that’s so true. The main thing about faith is that it keeps believing the same old thing, even if it’s heresy to say so. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I always go out hunting because my predecessor in the days of Leopold von Babanberg did too. But I never kill,’ he said—he happens to be known for never firing a shot on the hunt—‘because it goes against my grain, something tells me it’s not in keeping with my cloth. I can talk about this to you, old friend, because we were boys in dancing class together. But I’d never stand up in public and say: “You shall not shoot while hunting!” Good Lord, who knows whether that would be true, and besides, it’s no part of the Church’s teaching. But the people who meet at your friend’s house make a public issue of things like that the minute it occurs to them! There you have what’s called “intelligence” nowadays!’ It’s easy for him to laugh,” Count Leinsdorf went on, speaking for himself again. “He holds that job in perpetuity, but we laymen have the hard task of finding the right path amid perpetual change. I told him as much. I asked him: ‘Why did God let literature and painting and all that come into the world anyway, when they’re really such a bore?’ And he came up with a very interesting explanation. ‘You’ve heard about psychoanalysis, haven’t you?’ he asked me. I didn’t know quite what I was supposed to say. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you’ll probably say it’s just a lot of filth. We won’t argue about it, it’s what everyone says; and yet they all run to these newfangled doctors more than to our Catholic confessional. Take it from me, they rush to them in droves because the flesh is weak! They let their secret sins be discussed because they enjoy it, and if they disparage it, take it from me, we always pick holes in the things we mean to buy! But I could also prove to you that what their atheistic doctors imagine they invented is nothing but what the Church has been doing from the beginning: exorcising the Devil and healing the possessed. It’s identical step for step with the ritual of exorcism, for instance, when they try with their own methods to make the person who’s possessed talk about what’s inside him; according to Church teaching, that’s precisely the turning point, where the Devil is getting ready to break out! We merely missed adapting ourselves in time to changing conditions by talking of psychosis, the unconscious, and all that current claptrap instead of filth and the Devil.’ Isn’t that interesting?” Count Leinsdorf asked. “But what comes next may be even more so. ‘Never mind the weakness of the flesh,’ the Cardinal said. ‘What we need to talk about is that the spirit is weak too. And that’s where the Church has kept its wits and not let anything slip by. People aren’t nearly so scared of the Devil in the flesh, even if they make a great show of fighting him, as they are of the illumination that comes from the spirit. You never studied theology,’ he said to me, ‘but at least you respect it, and that’s more than a secular philosopher in his blindness ever does. Let me tell you, theology is so difficult that a man can devote himself to studying it and nothing else for fifteen years before he realizes that he hasn’t really understood a word of it! If people knew how difficult it is, none of them would have any faith at all; they’d only run us down! They’d run us down exactly the way they run people down—you understand?’ he said slyly,’—who are writing their books and painting their pictures and trotting out their theories. And today we’re only too glad to let them have plenty of rope to hang themselves with, because, let me tell you, the more earnestly one of those fellows sets about it, the less he’s a mere entertainer, or working for his own pocket; the more, in other words, he serves God in his mistaken way, the more he bores people, and the more they run him down. “That’s not what life is like!” they say. But we know very well what it’s like, and we’ll show them too, and because we can also wait, you may yet live to see them come running back to us, full of fury about the time they wasted on all that clever talk. You can see it happening in our own families, even now. And in our fathers’ day, God knows, they thought they were going to turn heaven itself into a university.’