by Robert Musil
Such debates were no rarity, given a father’s tendency to worry.
“And what would you live on, if I were not a capitalist?” the master of the house wanted to know.
Gerda usually cut short any such ramifications. “I can’t be expected to know everything; all I know is that we already have scientists, teachers, religious leaders, political leaders, and other men of action engaged in creating new values.”
At this point Bank Director Fischel might bother to ask ironically: “And by these religious and political leaders I suppose you mean yourselves?” but he did it only to have the last word; in the end, he was always relieved that Gerda didn’t notice how resigned he was, how he had learned to expect that her nonsense would always lead to his giving in. He was finally driven to conclude such arguments more than once by cautiously praising the reasonableness of the Parallel Campaign, in contrast to the rabid countermoves advocated in his own house; but he did it only when Clementine was out of earshot.
What gave Gerda’s resistance to her father’s admonitions an air of stubborn martyrdom, something that even Leo and Clementine vaguely sensed, was that breath of innocent lust wafting through this house. The young people discussed among themselves many things about which the elders kept a resentful silence. Even what they called their nationalism, this fusion of their constantly warring egos into an imaginary unity they called their Christian-Germanic commune, had, compared with the festering love life of their elders, something of the winged Eros about it. Wiser than their years, they disdained “lust” and “the inflated lie about the crude enjoyment of animal existence,” as they called it, but talked so much about suprasensuality and mystical desire that the startled listener reacted willy-nilly by feeling a certain tenderness for sensuality and physical desires, and even Leo Fischel had to admit that the unbridled ardor of their language sometimes made the listener feel the roots of their ideas shooting down his legs, though he disapproved, because in his opinion great ideas were meant to be uplifting.
Clementine, for her part, said: “You shouldn’t simply turn your back on everything, Leo.”
“How can they say ‘Property kills the spirit’?” he started to argue. “Do I lack spirit? Maybe you do, insofar as you take their nonsense seriously.”
“You don’t understand, Leo. They mean it in a Christian sense; they want to leave the old life behind, to have a higher life on earth.”
“That’s not Christian, that’s just crackbrained,” Leo said stubbornly.
“What if it is not the realists who see reality, but those who look inward?” Clementine suggested.
“That’s a laugh!” Fischel claimed. But he was wrong; he was crying inwardly, overwhelmed by the uncontrollable changes all around him.
These days Director Fischel felt the need for fresh air more often than he used to; at the end of the day’s work he was in no hurry to get home, and if there was still some daylight he loved to wander a bit in one of the parks, even in winter. His liking for these city parks dated back to his days as a junior assistant. For no reason he could see, the city administration had ordered the iron folding stools freshly painted in late autumn; now they stood there, bright green, piled up against each other along the snowy paths, pricking the imagination with their springtime color. At times, Leo Fischel would sit down on one of these chairs, all alone and muffled up to the ears at the edge of a playground or a promenade, and watch the nursemaids with their charges, flaunting their winter health in the sun. The children played with their yo-yos or threw snowballs, and the little girls made big eyes like grown women—ah, Fischel thought, the very same eyes that in the face of a beautiful woman delight you with the thought that she has the eyes of a child! It did him good to watch the little girls at play—in their eyes love still floated as in a pond in fairyland, where the stork comes to get it later on—and sometimes to watch their governesses too. He had often enjoyed this spectacle in his youth, when he was still standing outside life’s shop window, without the money to walk in, and all he could do was wonder what fate might have in store for him. What a sorry mess it had turned out to be, he thought, and for an instant he felt as if he were sitting on the green grass amid white crocuses with all the tension of youth. When his sense of reality recalled him to the sight of snow and green paint, his thoughts oddly enough kept coming back to his income. Money means independence, but all his salary went for the needs of the family and the savings required by common sense, so a man really had to do something more, apart from his job, to make himself independent; possibly turn to account his knowledge of the stock exchange, like the top executives at the bank.
But such thoughts came to Leo only while he was watching the little girls at play, and then he rejected them, because he certainly did not feel that he had the necessary temperament for speculation. He was a head of department, with the honorary title of a director and no prospect of rising above this, so he instantly chastened himself with the thought that so toilworn a back as his own was already too hunched over ever to straighten up again. He did not know that he was using such thoughts solely to erect an insurmountable barrier between himself and the pretty children and their maids, who, at such moments in the park, meant the charms of life to him, for he was, even in the disgruntled mood that kept him from going home, an incorrigible family man who would have given anything if only he could have transformed that Circle of Hell at home into a garland of angels around the father-god, the titular bank director.
Ulrich also liked the parks and walked across them whenever he could on his way somewhere, which was now he happened again to run into Fischel, who at the sight of him immediately recollected all he had already had to suffer at home on account of the Parallel Campaign. He expressed his dissatisfaction at his young friend’s taking so lightly the invitations of old friends, a point he could make with all the more sincerity since time passing makes even the most casual friendships grow as old as the closest ones.
Fischel’s young old friend said that he was truly delighted to see Fischel again and deplored the foolishness that was keeping him too busy to have done so before.
Fischel complained that everything was going to the dogs and that business was bad. Anyway, the old moral order was losing its grip, what with all the materialism and the hastiness in which everything had to be done.
“And here I was just thinking that I could envy you!” Ulrich countered. “A businessman’s work is surely a veritable refuge of sanity? At least it’s the only profession resting on a theoretically sound basis.”
“That it is!” Fischel agreed. “The businessman serves the cause of human progress, asking only for a reasonable profit. And yet he is just as badly off as everyone else, when it comes to that,” he added gloomily.
Ulrich had agreed to walk him home.
On their arrival, they found a mood already strained to the breaking point.
All Gerda’s friends were present, and a tremendous battle of words was in full swing. Most of the young people were still at school or in their first or second term at the university, though a few had jobs in business. How they had come to form this group was something they themselves no longer knew. One by one. Some had met in nationalist student fraternities, others in the socialist or Catholic youth movement, and others out hiking with a horde of Wandervögel.
It would not be wholly out of order to suppose that the only thing they all had in common was Leo Fischel. To endure, a spiritual movement needs a physical basis, and this physical basis was Fischel’s apartment, together with the refreshments provided by Frau Clementine, along with a certain regulation of the traffic. Gerda went with the apartment, Hans Sepp went with Gerda, and Hans Sepp, the student with the impure complexion and all-the-purer soul, though not their leader, because these young people acknowledged no leader, was the most impassioned of them all. They might meet elsewhere occasionally, where the hostess would be someone other than Gerda, but the nucleus of their movement was basically as described.
Still,
the source of these young people’s inspiration was as remarkable an enigma as the appearance of a previously unknown disease, or a sequence of winning numbers in a game of chance. When the sun of old-style European idealism began to fade and its white blaze darkened, many torches were passed from hand to hand—ideas, torches of the mind, stolen from Heaven knows where, or invented by whom?—and flaring up here and there, they became that dancing pool of fire a little spiritual community. And so there was much talk, those last few years before the great war carried all of it to its foregone conclusion, among the younger generation, about love and fellowship—and the young anti-Semites who met at Bank Director Fischel’s felt themselves to be most particularly under the sign of an all-embracing love and fellowship. True fellowship is the work of an inner law, and the deepest, simplest, most perfect, and foremost of these is the law of love. Love, as already noted, not in its base, sensual form, for physical possession is an invention of Mammon that in the end only disrupts the community and strips it of its meaning. And one can’t, of course, love just everybody and anybody. But one can respect the character of every individual, as long as that person truthfully strives to keep growing, with an unremitting inner responsibility. And so they fiercely argued about everything, in the name of love.
But on this particular day a united front had formed against Frau Clementine, who was so pleased at feeling young again, and inwardly agreed that married love really did have something in common with interest paid on capital, but drew the line at tolerating harsh criticism of the Parallel Campaign on the grounds that Aryans could create viable symbols only if they kept alien elements out of it. Clementine was just on the verge of losing her temper, and Gerda’s cheeks were aflame with round red spots because her mother would take no hint to leave the room. When Leo Fischel had entered with Ulrich, she was pleading in sign language with Hans Sepp to break it off, and Hans said in a conciliating tone: “These days, no one can create anything great!” supposing that he had thereby reduced everything to the customary impersonal formula acceptable to all those present.
Unluckily, Ulrich joined in at this point and asked Hans—poking a little malicious fun at Fischel—whether he did not believe in any kind of progress at all.
“Progress?” Hans Sepp retorted with a patronizing air. “You need only think of the kind of men we had a hundred years ago, before progress set in: Beethoven! Goethe! Napoleon! Hebbel!”
“Hmm,” Ulrich said. “The last-named was only just born a hundred years ago.”
“Our young friends dismiss numerical precision,” Director Fischel gloated.
Ulrich did not pursue this. He knew that Hans Sepp held him in jealous contempt, yet he felt a certain sympathy for Gerda’s peculiar friends. So he sat down among them and went on: “We’re undeniably making so much progress in the several branches of human capability that we actually feel we can’t keep up with it! Isn’t it possible that this can also make us feel that there is no progress? After all, progress is surely the product of all our joint efforts, so we can practically predict that any real progress is likely to be precisely what nobody wanted.”
Hans Sepp’s dark shock of hair turned into a tremulous horn pointed at Ulrich. “There, now you’ve said it yourself: what nobody wanted! A lot of cackling back and forth, a hundred ways, but no way to go! Ideas, of course, but no soul! And no character! The sentence leaps off the page, the word leaps from the sentence, the whole is no longer a whole, as Nietzsche has already said. Never mind that Nietzsche’s egomania is another minus value for existence! Can you tell me one single, solid, ultimate value from which you, for instance, take your bearings in life?”
“Just like that—on demand!” Fischel protested, but Ulrich asked Hans: “Is it really utterly impossible for you to live without some ultimate value?”
“Utterly,” said Hans, “but I admit that I am bound to be unhappy as a result.”
“The hell you say!” Ulrich laughed. “Everything we can do depends on our not being overly perfectionist, not waiting for the ultimate inspiration. That’s what the Middle Ages did, and ignorant they stayed.”
“Did they, now?” Hans Sepp retorted. “I’d say that we’re the ignorant ones.”
“But you must admit that our ignorance is manifestly of a very rich and varied sort?”
A drawling voice was heard muttering at the back: “Variety . . . knowledge . . . relative progress! All concepts from the mechanistic outlook of an era corrupted by capitalism. There’s hardly more to be said. . . .”
Leo Fischel was also muttering to himself; something to the effect that in his opinion Ulrich was being far too indulgent with these juvenile misfits. He took cover behind the newspaper he unfolded.
But Ulrich was enjoying himself. “Is the modern house, with its six rooms, maid’s bath, vacuum cleaner, and all that, progress, compared with the old houses with their high ceilings, thick walls, and handsome archways, or not?”
“No!” Hans Sepp shouted.
“Is the airplane progress, compared with the mail coach?”
“Yes!” Director Fischel shouted.
“The machine compared with handicrafts?”
“Handicrafts!” from Hans, and “Machine!” from Leo.
“It seems to me,” Ulrich said, “that every step forward is also a step backward. Progress always exists in only one particular sense. And since there’s no sense in our life as a whole, neither is there such a thing as progress as a whole.”
Leo Fischel lowered his paper. “Would you say that it’s better to be able to cross the Atlantic in six days rather than having to spend six weeks on it?”
“I’d be inclined to say that it’s definitely progress to have the choice. But our young Christians wouldn’t agree to that, either.”
The circle of friends sat still, taut as a drawn bow. Ulrich had paralyzed their tongues but not their fighting spirit. He went on evenly: “But you can also say the opposite: If our life makes progress in the particular instance, it also makes sense in the particular instance. But once it has made sense to offer up human sacrifice to the gods, say, or burn witches, or wear powdered wigs, then that remains one of life’s valid possibilities, even when more hygienic habits and more humane customs represent progress. The trouble is that progress always wants to do away with the old meaning.”
“Do you mean to say,” Fischel asked, “that we should go back to human sacrifice after we have succeeded in putting such abominable acts of darkness behind us?”
“Is it darkness, necessarily?” Hans Sepp replied in Ulrich’s place. “When you devour an innocent rabbit, that’s darkness, but when a cannibal dines reverently and with religious rites on a stranger, we simply cannot know what goes on inside him.”
“There certainly must have been something to be said for the ages we have left behind,” Ulrich agreed, “otherwise so many nice people would never have gone along with them. I wonder if we could turn that to account for ourselves, without sacrificing too much? And perhaps we are still sacrificing so many human beings today only because we never clearly faced the problem of the right way to overcome mankind’s earlier answers. The way in which everything hangs together is extremely obscure and hard to express.”
“But to your way of thinking, the ideal aim must always be some sort of bottom line or balanced books, right?” Hans Sepp burst out, against Ulrich this time. “You believe in bourgeois progress every bit as much as Director Fischel, you just manage to express it in the most twisted and perverted words you can find, so that you can’t be pinned down.” Hans had been the spokesman for his friends. Ulrich turned to look at Gerda’s face. He intended to pick up casually where he had left off, ignoring the fact that Fischel and the young men were as ready to pounce on him as on each other.
“But aren’t you striving toward some goal yourself, Hans?” he asked doggedly.
“Something is striving. Inside me. Through me,” Hans rapped out.
“And is it going to get there?” Leo Fischel indulged
himself in sarcasm, thereby, as all but himself realized, going over to Ulrich’s side.
“I wouldn’t know,” Hans answered gloomily.
“You should take your exams—that would be progress.” Fischel could not refrain from piling it on, so irritated was he, no less by his friend than by these callow youths.
At this moment the room seemed to explode. Frau Clementine cast an imploring look at her husband; Gerda tried to forestall Hans as he struggled for words, which finally came bursting out as yet another attack on Ulrich.
“You may be sure,” he shouted, “that basically even you don’t have a single idea that Director Fischel couldn’t come up with just as well!”
With this parting shot he rushed out of the room, followed by his cohorts, making their bows in angry haste. Director Fischel, bludgeoned by the looks he was getting from his wife, pretended to remember his duties as a host and trudged grumpily into the foyer to speed his guests on their way. Clementine heaved a sigh of relief, now that the air was cleared, then she rose too, and Ulrich suddenly found himself alone with Gerda.
103
THE TEMPTATION
Gerda was visibly upset when they were left alone together. He took her hand; her arm started trembling, and she broke away from him.
“You have no idea what it means to Hans to have a goal,” she said. “You make fun of all that; that’s cheap enough. It seems to me your mind is more disgusting than ever!” She had been groping for the harshest possible word and was startled by what she had come up with. Ulrich tried to catch hold of her hand again; she pulled her arm close to her side. “That’s no longer good enough for us!” She hurled her words with a fierce disdain, but her body swayed toward him.
“I know,” Ulrich said sarcastically. “Everything you people do must meet the highest standards. That’s exactly what makes me behave the way you’ve just described so amiably. You probably wouldn’t believe how much it meant to me to talk to you quite differently back in the old days.”