The Man Without Qualities Read online

  74 The fourth century B.C. versus the year 1797. Ulrich receives another letter from his father

  75 General Stumm von Bordwehr considers visits to Diotima as a delightful change from his usual run of duty

  76 Count Leinsdorf has his doubts

  77 Arnheim as the darling of the press

  78 Diotima’s metamorphoses

  79 Soliman in love

  80 Getting to know General Stumm, who turns up unaccountably at the Council

  81 Count Leinsdorf’s views of realpolitik. Ulrich fosters organizations

  82 Clarisse calls for an Ulrich Year

  83 Pseudoreality prevails; or, Why don’t we make history up as we go along?

  84 Assertion that ordinary life, too, is utopian

  85 General Stumm tries to bring some order into the civilian mind

  86 The industrial potentate and the merger of Soul with Business. Also, All roads to the mind start from the soul, but none lead back again

  87 Moosbrugger dances

  88 On being involved with matters of consequence

  89 One must move with the times

  90 Dethroning the ideocracy

  91 Speculations on the intellectual bull and bear market

  92 Some of the rules governing the lives of the rich

  93 Even through physical culture it is hard to get a hold on the civilian mind

  94 Diotima’s nights

  95 The Great Man of Letters: rear view

  96 The Great Man of Letters: front view

  97 Clarisse’s mysterious powers and missions

  98 From a country that came to grief because of a defect in language

  99 Of the middling intelligence and its fruitful counterpart, the halfwit; the resemblance between two eras; lovable Aunt Jane; and the disorder called Modern Times

  100 General Stumm invades the State Library and learns about the world of books, the librarians guarding it, and intellectual order

  101 Cousins in conflict

  102 Love and war among the Fischels

  103 The temptation

  104 Rachel and Soliman on the warpath

  105 Love on the highest level is no joke

  106 Does modern man believe in God or in the Head of the Worldwide Corporation? Arnheim wavering

  107 Count Leinsdorf achieves an unexpected political success

  108 The unredeemed nationalities and General Stumm’s reflections about the terminology of redemption

  109 Bonadea, Kakania; systems of happiness and balance

  110 Moosbrugger dissolved and preserved

  111 To the legal mind, insanity is an all-or-nothing proposition

  112 Arnheim sets his father, Samuel, among the gods and decides to get Ulrich into his power. Soliman wants to find out more about his own royal father

  113 Ulrich chats with Hans Sepp and Gerda in the jargon of the frontier between the superrational and the subrational

  114 Things are coming to a boil. Arnheim is gracious to General Stumm. Diotima prepares to move off into infinity. Ulrich daydreams about living one’s life as one reads a book

  115 The tip of your breast is like a poppy leaf

  116 The two Trees of Life and a proposal to establish a General Secretariat for Precision and Soul

  117 A dark day for Rachel

  118 So kill him!

  119 A countermine and a seduction

  120 The Parallel Campaign causes a stir

  121 Talking man-to-man

  122 Going home

  123 The turning point

  PART III: INTO THE MILLENNIUM (THE CRIMINALS)

  124 The forgotten sister

  125 Confidences

  126 Start of a new day in a house of mourning

  127 Old acquaintance

  128 They do wrong

  129 The old gentleman is finally left in peace

  130 A letter from Clarisse arrives

  131 A family of two

  132 Agathe when she can’t talk to Ulrich

  133 Further course of the excursion to the Swedish Ramparts. The morality of the Next Step

  134 Holy discourse: Beginning

  135 Holy discourse: Erratic progress

  136 Ulrich returns and learns from the General what he has missed

  137 What’s new with Walter and Clarisse. A showman and his spectators

  138 The testament

  139 Reunion with Diotima’s diplomatic husband

  140 Diotima has changed the books she reads

  141 Problems of a moralist with a letter to write

  142 Onward to Moosbrugger

  143 Count Leinsdorf has qualms about “capital and culture”

  144 Cast all thou has into the fire, even unto thy shoes

  145 From Koniatowski’s critique of Danielli’s theorem to the Fall of Man. From the Fall of Man to the emotional riddle posed by a man’s sister

  146 Bonadea; or, The relapse

  147 Agathe actually arrives

  148 The Siamese twins

  149 Spring in the vegetable garden

  150 Agathe is quickly discovered as a social asset by General Stumm

  151 Too much gaiety

  152 Professor Hagauer takes pen in hand

  153 Ulrich and Agathe look for a reason after the fact

  154 Agathe wants to commit suicide and makes a gentleman’s acquaintance

  155 The General meanwhile takes Ulrich and Clarisse to the madhouse

  156 The lunatics greet Clarisse

  157 A great event is in the making. Count Leinsdorf and the Inn River

  158 A great event is in the making. Privy Councillor Meseritscher

  159 A great event is in the making. Meeting some old acquaintances

  160 A comparison

  161 A great event is in the making. But no one has noticed

  PART I

  A SORT OF INTRODUCTION

  1

  FROM WHICH, REMARKABLY ENOUGH, NOTHING DEVELOPS

  A barometric low hung over the Atlantic. It moved eastward toward a high-pressure area over Russia without as yet showing any inclination to bypass this high in a northerly direction. The isotherms and isotheres were functioning as they should. The air temperature was appropriate relative to the annual mean temperature and to the aperiodic monthly fluctuations of the temperature. The rising and setting of the sun, the moon, the phases of the moon, of Venus, of the rings of Saturn, and many other significant phenomena were all in accordance with the forecasts in the astronomical yearbooks. The water vapor in the air was at its maximal state of tension, while the humidity was minimal. In a word that characterizes the facts fairly accurately, even if it is a bit old-fashioned: It was a fine day in August 1913.

  Automobiles shot out of deep, narrow streets into the shallows of bright squares. Dark clusters of pedestrians formed cloudlike strings. Where more powerful lines of speed cut across their casual haste they clotted up, then trickled on faster and, after a few oscillations, resumed their steady rhythm. Hundreds of noises wove themselves into a wiry texture of sound with barbs protruding here and there, smart edges running along it and subsiding again, with clear notes splintering off and dissipating. By this noise alone, whose special quality cannot be captured in words, a man returning after years of absence would have been able to tell with his eyes shut that he was back in the Imperial Capital and Royal City of Vienna. Cities, like people, can be recognized by their walk. Opening his eyes, he would know the place by the rhythm of movement in the streets long before he caught any characteristic detail. It would not matter even if he only imagined that he could do this. We overestimate the importance of knowing where we are because in nomadic times it was essential to recognize the tribal feeding grounds. Why are we satisfied to speak vaguely of a red nose, without specifying what shade of red, even though degrees of red can be stated precisely to the micromillimeter of a wavelength, while with something so infinitely more complicated as what city one happens to be in, we always insist on knowing it exactly? It merely distr
acts us from more important concerns.

  So let us not place any particular value on the city’s name. Like all big cities it was made up of irregularity, change, forward spurts, failures to keep step, collisions of objects and interests, punctuated by unfathomable silences; made up of pathways and untrodden ways, of one great rhythmic beat as well as the chronic discord and mutual displacement of all its contending rhythms. All in all, it was like a boiling bubble inside a pot made of the durable stuff of buildings, laws, regulations, and historical traditions.

  The two people who were walking up one of its wide, bustling avenues naturally were not thinking along these lines. They clearly belonged to a privileged social class, with their distinguished bearing, style of dress, and conversation, the initials of their names embroidered on their underwear, and just as discreetly, which is to say not for outward show but in the fine underwear of their minds, they knew who they were and that they belonged in a European capital city and imperial residence. Their names might have been Ermelinda Tuzzi and Arnheim—but then, they couldn’t be, because in August Frau Tuzzi was still in Bad Aussee with her husband and Dr. Arnheim was still in Constantinople; so we are left to wonder who they were. People who take a lively interest in what goes on often wonder about such puzzling sights on the street, but they soon forget them again, unless they happen to remember during their next few steps where they have seen those other two before. The pair now came to a sudden stop when they saw a rapidly gathering crowd in front of them. Just a moment earlier something there had broken ranks; falling sideways with a crash, something had spun around and come to a skidding halt—a heavy truck, as it turned out, which had braked so sharply that it was now stranded with one wheel on the curb. Like bees clustering around the entrance to their hive people had instantly surrounded a small spot on the pavement, which they left open in their midst. In it stood the truck driver, gray as packing paper, clumsily waving his arms as he tried to explain the accident. The glances of the newcomers turned to him, then warily dropped to the bottom of the hole where a man who lay there as if dead had been bedded against the curb. It was by his own carelessness that he had come to grief, as everyone agreed. People took turns kneeling beside him, vaguely wanting to help; unbuttoning his jacket, then closing it again; trying to prop him up, then laying him down again. They were really only marking time while waiting for the ambulance to bring someone who would know what to do and have the right to do it.

  The lady and her companion had also come close enough to see something of the victim over the heads and bowed backs. Then they stepped back and stood there, hesitating. The lady had a queasy feeling in the pit of her stomach, which she credited to compassion, although she mainly felt irresolute and helpless. After a while the gentleman said: “The brakes on these heavy trucks take too long to come to a full stop.” This datum gave the lady some relief, and she thanked him with an appreciative glance. She did not really understand, or care to understand, the technology involved, as long as his explanation helped put this ghastly incident into perspective by reducing it to a technicality of no direct personal concern to her. Now the siren of an approaching ambulance could be heard. The speed with which it was coming to the rescue filled all the bystanders with satisfaction: how admirably society was functioning! The victim was lifted onto a stretcher and both together were then slid into the ambulance. Men in a sort of uniform were attending to him, and the inside of the vehicle, or what one could see of it, looked as clean and tidy as a hospital ward. People dispersed almost as if justified in feeling that they had just witnessed something entirely lawful and orderly.

  “According to American statistics,” the gentleman said, “one hundred ninety thousand people are killed there every year by cars and four hundred fifty thousand are injured.”

  “Do you think he’s dead?” his companion asked, still on the unjustified assumption that she had experienced something unusual.

  “I expect he’s alive,” he answered, “judging by the way they lifted him into the ambulance.”

  2

  HOUSE AND HOME OF THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES

  The street where this little mishap had occurred was one of those long, winding rivers of traffic radiating outward from the heart of the city to flow through its surrounding districts and empty into the suburbs. Had the distinguished couple followed its course a little longer, they would have come upon a sight that would certainly have pleased them: an old garden, still retaining some of its eighteenth- or even seventeenth-century character, with wrought-iron railings through which one could glimpse, in passing, through the trees on a well-clipped lawn, a sort of little château with short wings, a hunting lodge or rococo love nest of times past. More specifically, it was basically seventeenth-century, while the park and the upper story showed an eighteenth-century influence and the façade had been restored and somewhat spoiled in the nineteenth century, so that the whole had something blurred about it, like a double-exposed photograph. But the general effect was such that people invariably stopped and said: “Oh!” When this dainty little white gem of a house had its windows open one could see inside the elegant serenity of a scholar’s study with book-lined walls.

  This dwelling and this house belonged to the man without qualities.

  He was standing behind a window gazing through the fine green filter of the garden air to the brownish street beyond, and for the last ten minutes he had been ticking off on his stopwatch the passing cars, trucks, trolleys, and pedestrians, whose faces were washed out by the distance, timing everything whirling past that he could catch in the net of his eye. He was gauging their speeds, their angles, all the living forces of mass hurtling past that drew the eye to follow them like lightning, holding on, letting go, forcing the attention for a split second to resist, to snap, to leap in pursuit of the next item . . . then, after doing the arithmetic in his head for a while, he slipped the watch back into his pocket with a laugh and decided to stop all this nonsense.

  If all those leaps of attention, flexings of eye muscles, fluctuations of the psyche, if all the effort it takes for a man just to hold himself upright within the flow of traffic on a busy street could be measured, he thought—as he toyed with calculating the incalculable—the grand total would surely dwarf the energy needed by Atlas to hold up the world, and one could then estimate the enormous undertaking it is nowadays merely to be a person who does nothing at all. At the moment, the man without qualities was just such a person.

  And what of a man who does do something?

  There are two ways to look at it, he decided:

  A man going quietly about his business all day long expends far more muscular energy than an athlete who lifts a huge weight once a day. This has been proved physiologically, and so the social sum total of everybody’s little everyday efforts, especially when added together, doubtless releases far more energy into the world than do rare heroic feats. This total even makes the single heroic feat look positively minuscule, like a grain of sand on a mountaintop with a megalomaniacal sense of its own importance. This thought pleased him.

  But it must be added that it did not please him because he liked a solid middle-class life; on the contrary, he was merely taking a perverse pleasure in thwarting his own inclinations, which had once taken him in quite another direction. What if it is precisely the philistine who is alive with intimations of a colossally new, collective, antlike heroism? It will be called a rationalized heroism, and greatly admired. At this point, who can tell? There were at that time hundreds of such open questions of the greatest importance, hovering in the air and burning underfoot. Time was on the move. People not yet born in those days will find it hard to believe, but even then time was racing along like a cavalry camel, just like today. But nobody knew where time was headed. And it was not always clear what was up or down, what was going forward or backward.

  “No matter what you do,” the man without qualities thought with a shrug, “within this mare’s nest of forces at work, it doesn’t make the sligh
test difference!” He turned away like a man who has learned to resign himself—indeed, almost like a sick man who shrinks from every strong physical contact; yet in crossing the adjacent dressing room he hit a punching bag that was hanging there a hard, sudden blow that seemed not exactly in keeping with moods of resignation or conditions of weakness.

  3

  EVEN A MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES HAS A FATHER WITH QUALITIES

  When the man without qualities had returned from abroad sometime before, it was a certain exuberance as well as his loathing for the usual kind of apartment that led him to rent the little château, a former summer house outside the city gates that had lost its vocation when it was engulfed by the spreading city and had finally become no more than a run-down, untenanted piece of real estate waiting for its value to go up. The rent was correspondingly low, but to get everything repaired and brought up to modern standards had cost an unexpectedly large sum. It had become an adventure that resulted in driving him to ask his father for help—by no means pleasant for a man who cherishes his independence. He was thirty-two, his father sixty-nine.

  The old gentleman was aghast. Not really on account of the surprise attack, though that entered into it because he detested rash conduct; nor did he mind the contribution levied on him, as he basically approved of his son’s announcing an interest in domesticity and putting his life in order. But to take on a house that had to be called a château, even if only in the diminutive, affronted his sense of propriety and worried him as a baleful tempting of fate.

  He himself had started out as a tutor in the houses of the high aristocracy while still working for his degree, and he had continued tutoring even as a young law clerk—not really from necessity, for his father was quite well off. But those carefully nurtured connections paid off later on when he became a university lecturer and law professor, and they led to his gradually rising to become the legal adviser to almost all the feudal nobility in the country, although by this time he had no need of a professional sideline at all. Even long after the fortune he had made could stand comparison with the dowry brought him by his wife—the daughter of a powerful industrial family in the Rhineland, his son’s mother, who had died all too soon—he never allowed these connections, formed in his youth and strengthened in his prime, to lapse. Even after retiring from his practice, except for the occasional special consultation at a high fee, the old scholar who had achieved distinction made a careful catalog of every event concerning his circle of former patrons, extended with great precision from fathers to sons to grandsons. No honor, wedding, birthday, or name day passed without a letter of congratulation from him, always a subtle blend of perfectly measured deference and shared reminiscence. He received just as promptly in return brief letters of acknowledgment, which thanked the dear friend and esteemed scholar. So his son was aware, from boyhood on, of the aristocratic knack for meting out almost unconsciously and with unfailing condescension the exact degree of affability called for, and Ulrich had always been irritated by the subservience of a man who was, after all, a member of the intellectual aristocracy toward the owners of horses, fields, and traditions. If his father was insensitive on this point, it was not because of any calculation; it had been a natural instinct for him to build a great career in this way, so that he became not only a professor and a member of academies and many learned and official committees but was also made a Knight, and then a Commander, the recipient of the Grand Cross of various high orders. His Majesty finally raised him to the hereditary nobility, having already previously named him to membership in the House of Lords. There the distinguished man joined the liberal wing, which sometimes opposed the leading peers; yet none of his noble patrons seemed to mind or even to wonder at this; they had never regarded him as anything but the personified spirit of the rising middle class. The old gentleman participated keenly in the technical work of legislation, and even if a controversial issue had him voting on the liberal side the other side bore him no grudge; their sense of the matter was, rather, that he had not been invited to join them. What he did in politics was no different from what he had always done: combine his superior knowledge—which sometimes entailed working toward a gentle improvement of conditions—with the demonstration that his personal loyalty was always to be relied upon; and so he had risen quite unchanged, as his son maintained, from the role of tutor to the upper class to that of tutor to the Upper House.