Return to the Beginning

Some notes from my first forays into writing Musil's biography

The following was written during a visit to Brno, Czechia and Vienna, Austria in the winter of 2022 when I had just begun imagining writing a biography of Robert Musil and considering the themes that might run through the book and the crafting of a proposal. Interestingly, what became the main theme of the book: Attempts to find another (kind of) human being, is not directly mentioned.

I sat in a sunny café, trying to connect the themes of the biography I am writing with the physical details and historical data I am collecting. I scribbled a list on a stray piece of paper:

1. Utopia of the Motivated Life: seeking heightened aliveness of Other Condition (O.C.); dejection of losing ecstatic moments & returning to everyday dreariness. Moments inspired by finding correspondences/metaphor, which connects to other theme(s)

2. Resistance to Monoculture and Conformity, despite pleasure in Correspondences! Individuality, perspectivism, uncertainty, incompletion.

3. Paradoxes (really sub-category of above): Musil writes, “Let’s turn things around as much as possible for a change” (T II 813). Relates to Other Condition, because O.C. both is impelled by such new seeing and also itself allows for it.

4. Lone man out on his plank in an open sea, with nothing firm to cling to. No solid place to stand, but still standing. Neurath’s boat. Ethical openness, existing in discomfort of not attaching to dogmatic position, but also not falling into nihilisms. Connect with what Martha calls R.’s “Neurosis with the demon of possibilities….” which does not let him finish.

5. Grenzerlebnisse (boundary experiences): relationships, between Self and Other (siblings, friends, rivals, nationalities), political and socio-geographical tensions and pleasures, collectivism vs. individuality. Also: between reality and dream, reality and fiction, truth and lies. Versions of reality.

6. Love as intellectual spark (subcategory of O.C. & Grenzerlebnisse). Search for intellectual partner/Valerie/Martha.

How did being there bring the abstract conceptions into focus?

First of all, the special nature of the Empire itself, illuminated by Jan Morris’s descriptions of Trieste. Of this other Kakanian crownland, she writes: “When they sang ‘The Emperor’s Hymn,’ [to the tune of what now, in tragic irony, is “Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles] proud loyalists of Trieste sang it in at least three of the ten languages into which it had been officially translated,” i.e., Italian, Slovene, and Croatian. “The most appealing aspect of the Austrian Hungarian Empire,” she suggests, “at least in retrospect, was its European Cosmopolitanism…it contained within itself half the peoples of Europe. It was multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, multi-faith, bound together, whether willingly or unwillingly, by the imperial discipline”.

Citing Musil’s joke about the letters “ass” written at the bottom of every official brief at the close of the Empire (“ass” stood for asserviert, i.e., awaiting further consideration), Morris writes that the late Empire’s “methods were tangled in obfuscation, its protocols had become absurd, its armies were ineffective…the way of all empires, when they last too long. As their confidence shrivels and their apparently permanent convictions fade, they become caricatures of themselves…” Nationalisms, along with the ossification of structures and forms, broke apart what was in many ways a utopia of the unseparated but not-united state where difference could flourish within a common whole.

In The Man Without Qualities, the poet Feuermaul, who comes to a meeting of the Parallel Campaign to espouse brotherly love and world peace, is said to have been born in Brno, behind the old theater. But Feurmaul’s father was an industrialist specializing in the raw material of weaponry. Brno is thus presented as the cauldron of WWI symbolically—as an object lesson in the tension between love and violence figured forth by Feuermaul and his father—but also literally and practically—since there are rumors that Arnheim’s (a figure based partly on Walter Rathenau) presence at Diotima’s salon is not so innocuous as it might seem and that the answer to the great question of the Parallel Campaign might be a deal between this German industrialist and the weapons manufacturers of Austro-Hungarian Brno.

Before the collapse of the Empire, Brno was a powder keg, where ethnic conflicts and ambivalence were most concentrated and most violent before they erupted elsewhere. In his notes on the significance of Brno for the novel, Musil writes that Brno, like “every larger city in which the army kept its ammunition,” was encircled by a “wreath of gun-powder steeples […] large enough to turn a whole city quarter into rubble with one lightning stroke”. The Czech/Moravian children lived in uneasy harmony next to their German neighbors, learning however different versions of history in their respective schools:

In the German schools, one could learn that the evangelist Capistrano, who led a crusade against the Turks, preached against the Hussites at a time when good Austrians could still be born in Naples; that the hereditary confraternity between the houses of the Habsburgs and the Hungarians, which had laid the ground in 1364 for the Austrian Hungarian Monarchy, was not concluded in any other place but here; that the Swedes in the 30 Years’ War besieged this brave city a whole summer long, without being able to overtake it, and neither could the Prussians succeed at that in the Seven Years’ War. Naturally, the proud Hussite memories of the Czechs were just as much woven into the city and into the independent historical memories of the Hungarians, possibly also more or less into those of the people from Naples, the Swedes, and Prussians, and in the non-German schools in the city there was no lack of evidence that this city was not German, and that the Germans were a nation of thieves, who appropriate even the pasts of others.

But the post WWI success of nationalist movements to topple the Empire and gain autonomy certainly did not eliminate the violence of ethnic tensions, not least because different ethnicities—stranded, as it were, in islands of cultural isolation—still dwelt under alien governance, not of the centralizing Austrian Kaiser, but of other often openly hostile nationalist rulers. Morris notes that “Mussolini thought [that] Czechoslovakia ought really to be called Czecho-Germano-Polino-Rutheno-Romano-Slovakia.” Jewish inhabitants of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire were often left more or less stateless after its collapse, and people like Musil (who, despite his Czech name and mostly non-German family heritage was part of the German cultural elite) would now be suspected of fraternizing with enemies if they wrote for Prague papers, while simultaneously mistrusted by the Czechs for having Germanic cultural associations. Later, after the end of WWII, the German elements, who were a vast majority of the population, were expunged and erased from Brno, in a gruesome death march—whether they had been Nazi sympathizers or not.

Šárka showed me the park in between the German grammar school Musil attended and the rival Czech school. Apparently, the boys he fought with on his way to and from school were from the rival ethnic contingent. I find that although many people can speak German, they would much rather communicate in English or even suffer my few garbled Czech phrases than use the language of people they consider their cultural enemies. Only in the opera am I addressed in a formal and correct hochdeutsch by an elderly usher who shows me to my seat.

I am trying to understand the differences not only between the German Austrians and the Czechs, but between the Bohemians and the Moravians, the latter having been all but consumed by the Czechs. Šárka said that while the Germans looked down on the Czechs, the Czechs looked down on the Moravians. She and Suat’s wife claim that there is no significant difference between the Moravian and Czech languages, but Suat notes that often when he asks about a particular word, his wife will say, “Oh, that’s a Moravian word,” thus calling into question the assumption of sameness. Nevertheless, Moravia seems to my uneducated eye and ear to be virtually erased. Another related issue is the determination of who was Czech and who German, which Šárka says was a matter of self-fashioning after the war: anyone who could deny their German heritage would suddenly become Czech, and names were (as in America) changed accordingly.

As everywhere else, ethnic conflicts here were and continue to be mixed up in questions of economic class. One day I make the long trek to the Industrial district, where Herma Dietz, Musil’s working-class mistress worked and presumably lived. In his notes for possible inclusion in the novel, Musil has Ulrich tell Agatha that the “true Brno is naturally the ring of the Factory quarter”:

“the textile and thread city,” continued Ulrich, turning to Agathe. “Those large, narrow, filthy carton-houses with their countless window holes, little passages that consist of nothing but courtyard walls and iron gateways, the broad, curving streets, pot-holed and dismal!” A few times after the death of his father he had wandered through this quarter. He saw the high chimneys again (before him), on which the filthy flags of smoke hung, and the streetcar tracks smeared with oil, then his memories lost themselves without interruption in the rural landscape that also began without interruption behind the factory walls, with its heavy, rich, fertile earth, that burst open black-brown in the spring, with low towns spreading to either side of the street, and houses that were not only painted in screaming colors, but in colors that screamed with incomprehensibly ugly voices. It was a humble and yet strangely mysterious countryside, from where presumably the industrial and metropolitan business concerns pulled their male and female workers, because it was squeezed in between the extensive beet plantations of the large estates, which did not have even the most exigent prosperity to spare. Every morning the factory sirens called hordes of farmers out of these towns into the city and dispersed them again in the evenings back to the countryside, but as the years passed, more and more of these dark-skinned Czech country people, with the oily wool-dross of the factories on their faces and fingers, remained in the city and made the already existing Slavic lower-middle class grow mightily. From this situation, difficult relationships developed.

In the story “Tonka,” Musil has the figure based on Herma accompany her grandmother when she chaperoned the women (probably prostitutes) from the prison who were let out by day to do scullery work. Did they speak “hantec” (a mostly lost dialect of working-class people made up presumable of a mixture of Moravian, Yiddish, German, and bits of the languages of other ethnic minorities)? Now the area is inhabited mostly by Roma brought here from Slovakia; the streets are a mix of run-down, collapsing old factories and rubble sites, dotted with incongruously shiny new high-rises in a bid for gentrification. Children run in the streets bouncing balls and speeding on scooters; mothers trundle by burdened down with bags and babies; old men sit on stoops smoking, but also there are many wonderful murals on the high old factory walls, probably commissioned to cheer up the place, though I think I am the only one raising my eyes to admire them. It is almost as if they are written or painted in a different language—as alien as the sterile new buildings popping up in between the rubble, as alien as the Jugendstil mansions and courtyards just a short walk away? Are there remnants of the textile culture still to be seen? Perhaps a few more shops selling fabric, in big rolls, and multi-colored spools of thread, a tailor or two more than one would expect in other neighborhoods.

The uncomfortable-comfortable mix of cultures continues in this city, even after what was Moravia and part of the Dual Monarchy became Czechoslovakia, even after the Czechs freed themselves from Communist rule and became the Czech Republic. The rich texture of the city’s multi-cultural past, its pleasures and its discontents live on. And of course, as in any contemporary European city, multi-national trade and popular culture have changed the face of the everyday life here. I am drinking tea in a Chinese cup out of an English pot in a café called “Café in the Ghetto” (the name is in English) that sits right next to the Museum for the History of the Roma. German punk rock music blares. One of the waiters is a transgender woman in a dress. All the books on the shelves are in Czech, but perhaps some are translations. The plants are mostly familiar, both similar and different to and from each other, none quite sui generis. After visiting the Mendel Museum—for the father of genetics also lived and worked in Brno, growing his famous peas in a monastery garden—I am especially alert to similarities and difference, one of Musil’s favorite themes! I saw some chameleons in the botanical gardens, aping the leaves they lounged upon. And the room of ferns there was a revelation…from miniscule ground-creeping varieties to one so tall it bent under the rim of the interior greenhouse roof; some with rounded, some with pointed leaves, and on and on.

This area is called the “Bronx of Brno” and, as mentioned above, Brno is called “the Moravian Manchester”. How do the industrial rough and the more refined cultural aspects of the city work together? Morris writes of a similar confluence in Trieste and elsewhere,

Trieste poet Scipio Slataper…pictures his city waking up one day ‘between a crate of lemons and a sack of coffee beans’ and suddenly realizing its lack of culture. Doubtless the same misgivings had been felt in Chicago, say, where the wealth and confidence made in steel, slaughter-houses and railroads, and the meeting of clever people from many countries, created museums and art galleries, a great university and a celebrated orchestra; or in Manchester, a hard-headed cotton capital, also full of foreigners…

Strange bed fellows? Or did Brno’s textile industry, its Czech and German population, its mimicry of the Viennese capital on smaller scale and its links to the traditions of other further-flung crown lands, its complex literary and scientific culture make up a perfect—but necessarily temporary—cocktail of languages, cultures, disciplines, values?

Suat notes the confluence of philosophy and science here: Ernst Mach, another son of Brno, about whom Musil wrote his doctoral thesis, though more strictly a scientist, was appointed to a Chair of Philosophy in Vienna. Indeed, the old Technische Hochschule, where Musil’s father taught and Musil himself studied engineering, today houses the philosophical department of the Masarykova University. And the reliefs in the hallway have not been changed to reflect the new discipline, but still depict engineers building trains and bridges, holding tools and measurements, frozen in the midst of industrial projects in mines and by bridges—as if to remind us in good Musilian fashion that the practical sciences need not be anathema to the humanities, that precision requires soul and that, as Musil predicted, “The man of the future will be both mathematician and mystic.”

Sitting in a lovely café where they specialize in crepes, right down the street from that apartment where the Musils lived for a quarter of a century, Suat and I agree that Musil himself was probably a genius precisely because he contained so many disparate disciplines and perspectives in himself, without dissolving them into sameness. He practiced metaphoric alchemy by applying the tools and terms of one discipline to the problems of another (as Darwin did with economics); he strove to see distinctions and thrilled at correspondences. He proliferated alternative versions and possibilities, but also observed the limitations of time, space, and scientific realities. Indeed, he focused his laser-sharp intelligence at the very flashpoint of conflagration, where one state or substance erupts, dissolves, and turns into something else.

The question is haunting: how was it possible to combine so many different ethnicities, languages, religions, disciplines, values, ways of life together without each one cancelling the other out, without one fully suppressing or overtaking the others? Could it only have lasted for one short moment just here, in this quintessential Kakanian city, before erupting into one World War after another or—even if these wars could have been avoided—without all of the rich variety dissolving into assimilation and the erasure of difference?

Even though I had told myself that I had visited Vienna enough times before not to be impressed, on my way home I found myself weeping at the sheer beauty of its golden fountains at dusk, at Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze, and the Breughels in the Kunsthistorisches Museum. I visited the dark, narrow apartment building on Rasumovsky Street where Robert and Martha lived for many years (around the corner from the house Wittgenstein designed for his sister, Greta). I saw the Palace across the way from the Musils’ apartment and tried to imagine what it had been like when a new construction had not blocked the view from Musil’s study window onto the garden below; and I went to his local café, still very much the same as it was when he and Martha stopped there to drink a cup of coffee, nibble on pastry, and read the newspaper on their way to and from the Prater. In my luggage, I carried home spices and some herbal liqueur from the Christmas Market in Brno, books purchased at used book shops in Vienna, marzipan and chocolates, my notebook bulging with maps, memorabilia, and scribbled thoughts, and two acorns purloined from the garden Musil once gazed upon, rumored to have been an inspiration for the one where Ulrich and Agathe lounged on chairs watching the leaves fall in different versions of the mystical chapter, “Breaths of a Summer’s Day”. I must have caught Covid on the crowded subway, for I brought it back, too, and spread it to my father and his wife in New York, who luckily had relatively mild cases. I carried danger and adventure with me, over borders and through checkpoints, measuring time lost and time captured, stashing keepsakes of sameness and of difference. I mourned the constant fleetingness of everything precious and strange and almost forgotten, and shored up what traces still remain against tomorrow.

View of the garden of the Tivioli Palace, wherefrom I purloined the acorns.