Bread Work

Musil's struggle for existence

The hunger years following World War I, despite the constant scarcity and uncertainty, despite the fact that all the “bread work” he had to do to make money distracted him from his main creative work, may have been some of Musil’s happiest years. Just before the war, he had quit his tedious job as librarian and was employed by the Neue Rundschau as a sort of talent scout and reviewer for the works of upcoming writers. He wrote a few columns called, “Literary Chronical”—including the beautiful review of Kafka and Walser—before the war came and interrupted this new, more interesting labor.

He signed up for military service at the Austrian Embassy in Berlin. A notebook entry, titled: “Berlin, August, War,” describes the mood of the “uprooted intellectuals”: “the ugly singing in the cafes…the agitation…People throw themselves in front of trains because they can’t go to the front.” There are emergency weddings in the maternity wards. The women wear simpler clothes. Even he jumps onto a passing automobile to get a special edition of the paper. The various professions participate in the frenzy: “The Theater Association declares: Apollo is silent and Mars rules the day.”

The reports from the front were not encouraging. A friend named Einstein [not Albert] has told him about the scene in the barracks: “Disorder, chaos…filth, makeshift beds, drinking…people stealing like crazy…Einstein is enthusiastic. Everything else blotted out. If he sleeps with his wife, he is only interested in button polish. He never enters his study.” And then “the list of casualties:…dead….dead…dead…printed one beneath the other, devastating impression. His brief “library-less summer”—his first as an independent writer—was at an end. What he would later call his “five years of slavery” was about to begin.

Coming out of the war years, in 1918-19, into the chaos and precarity of the political, economic, and cultural reorganization of a now crippled, poverty-stricken Austria, he suffered like everyone else from hunger and the terrible inflation—the latter wiped away much of his parents’ and Martha’s savings and inherited wealth.

Like everyone else, he was reduced to meager rations and horrors like Kunerol, Eierol, Sacharin, Mehlersatz (substitutes for butter, sugar, and flour). He was very thin and he and Martha, like most everyone else, had trouble finding somewhere to live. In their most desperate years they accepted the charity of Dr. Eugenie Schwarzwald, who provided room and board in a large boarding house called “Helmstreitmuehle” for a motley collection of residents whose political affiliations ranged from Marxist to Royalist. Musil was seated on purpose—to keep the peace—between his sometimes-friend Egon Kisch (a founder of the Red Guard) and a reactionary Austrian general, Karl Pflanzer-Baltin, who, in Musil’s words, had been “one of the most bloodthirsty generals…who now peacefully requested his beets”. Musil could barely stomach the food, taking small polite spoonfulls of the gruel and waiting for the barely palatable ersatz pastries for desert.

Despite the hardships, he was part of a lively cultural ferment, the “mocha symposia” at Cafe Herrenhut and Cafe Museum, and was writing essays and reviews for The Prague Press and the German Neuer Merkur. He was courted by multiple other papers and magazines for submissions. He also had a job in the Archive of the Press Service of the Foreign office where his official task was to create an index of newspaper clippings, but was secretly charged with writing essays for various newspapers in support of the Anschluss with Germany (see “Buridan’s Austria” of February, 1919, and “The Anschluss with Germany,” of March, 1919). His support of Anschluss was explicitly not grounded in any sort of ethnic nationalism, but was based on his conviction that Austria would benefit culturally by being connected with Germany: more publishers, more museums, more money for art. As far as money for art was concerned, the best “bread work” was for the Czech magazines, who paid him in hard Czech crowns—allowing him and Martha to finally get their own apartment, the one in Rasumofskygasse they kept for decades. Unlike purists, like Rilke for example, writing for money was not beneath him—though it did come with certain sacrifices and dangers. Most of all the danger of too much comfort.

After the job at the Foreign Office was liquidated, he was given another position—really a sinecure that paid well but asked little of him, as a sort of Cultural Attache, responsible for supervising the education of soldiers. For the Neuer Merkur and the Prague Press he was charged with enticing contributors to write on subjects as varied as relativity theory to music—a job that kept him in constant contact with writers, scientists, philosophers and sociologists.

His activity during these post-WWI-years belies his reputation as a man who resented the success of others, for he spent a great deal of time and heartfelt energy recommending a vast array of people whom he valued and helping them find work, publishers, and readers. He was publishing theater, art, and book reviews, feuilleton sketches, and essays. He was in lively correspondance with many people: Kafka, Alban Berg, Schnitzler, Max Brod, Rilke…and many others whose names are unknown in America.

At times he complained outright that all this literary networking and bread work was taking him away from his own real writing (at that time he was working on his play, The Utopians—which he considered one of his most important works), writing his friend Johannes von Allesch that the situation is like being a telephone operator, called from all sides: poetic work, essays, newspaper, office. In a gloomy letter to an old friend written in December, 1921, he summarized how he had been doing: “grown older and in a bad mood. I manage for now quite well as a free-lance theater critic and civil servant in the ministry.” He has not given up on the plans of his youth, but he regards them as increasingly hopeless: “hardly hope for much; but also don’t regret anything; and fear just one thing…” which is to face the fact in a few years of being a well-behaved German writer.. like “a frightened horse no longer having the strength to break out of his path.”

For perhaps the only time in his life he did not feel like a complete outsider; with the exception of these occasional complaints, one can feel his relative merriness in the witty lightness of many of the letters written during these years; he often seemed happy in an uncharacteristic way. But happiness and belonging were obviously not everything for Musil. More than amxiety about losing these, he had a horror of complacency and conformity—Nietzsche’s “wretched contentment.” Perhaps he only really felt comfortable if he was uncomfortable, if he was struggling with his own challenging work, a bit alienated, other, alone.

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