Arrows from a Quiver

Musil's last publication During His Lifetime

The following eleven aphorisms, printed in 1937 in Die Rappen [The Black Horses], a
”year book” put out by the Bermann-Fischer publishing house in Vienna, were Musil’s last publication during his lifetime. After the Austrian Anschluss with Nazi Germany, Musil and his Jewish wife, Martha, fled to Switzerland where they lived in uneasy exile until Robert’s death in 1942.

During the years of exile, Musil continued to work on aphorisms dealing with the increasingly horrific political and cultural situation, hoping, mostly in vain, to publish some of them in translation outside of the German realm. This project, a sign of resistance to the Gleichstaltung (switched on conformity... to the regime) was of the utmost importance to Musil. Musil felt that the onset of totalitarianism and violence was intimately connected to the neglect of aesthetic education and critical thinking, vividly characterized by the disregard of the individual and the championing of the collectivity. Other aphoristic attempts to understand how humankind had degenerated to cruelty, barbarism, and what he would call an astonishing “lack of civil courage,” can be found in my translation of Literature and Politics, introduced by Klaus Amman.