The "Great Man of Letters" & His Worthy Rival

The relationship between Thomas Mann & Robert Musil (full essay version)

In 1999, ninety-nine prominent German authors, literary critics, and scholars of German literature ranked the most significant German-language novels of the twentieth century—and put the three volumes of Musil’s The Man Without Qualities (1930, 1932, and the posthumous edition of 1943) in first place—with Kafka’s Trial in second place and Mann’s Magic Mountain in a modest third. Such rankings may be crude and more or less irrelevant to our appreciation of great books, but for Musil, who suffered deeply about his relative neglect—especially in comparison to Mann, whom he called the “Großschriftsteller” (great man of letters or “bigshot writer”)—knowing that he was finally, for once, in first place would have been a potent balm for decades of accumulated disgruntlement.

From afar, it may be difficult to understand Musil’s persistent criticisms of Mann as anything other than ungracious resentment. For one may acknowledge Mann’s immense talent without diminishing Musil’s; one may note similarities between their views and their works without playing the competitive game of who did what better. Musil certainly did have a tendency—acknowledged and occasionally regretted by himself—to be especially hard on and even unfair to successful rivals. And yet, when one looks more closely at the views and works of these contemporaries, and at the criticisms levelled by Musil against Mann, some significant differences emerge that are not only illuminating for a better evaluation of the extent to which Musil’s criticisms may have been partly justified, but more significantly may help us understand the unique qualities of each writer. Musil was preternaturally concerned to distinguish himself from others—leading him to tragically avoid reading Proust because he was anxious that people might think he had been influenced by him. One of the things he held against Mann was that he could apparently admire a great writer (like himself) while also admiring mediocre ones. In his “Germany Aphorisms,” Musil wrote:

“Thomas Mann. That he can praise so many writers, not merely like them, is related to his success in these times; for these times love, without distinguishing, most of them also.

[…] I am the absolute opposite in my criticism of almost everything. In part that is a feature of my untimeliness, in part perhaps it is my naughtiness? One could add: autism, negativity, fanaticism with its variants (system, limitation, schizothymic components, etc.). It is true that I rarely am “warm,” but I can become warm and then begin to loosen up; but it is also true, that I, for example in the case of Thomas Mann, have not really altered my judgment, rather merely reconfigured it. At the same time, I easily judge amateurs and their ilk too generously, feel myself to be unobjective; but is this something that runs deep?”

What then—if we may strain what is left after pressing the sour grapes—was Musil’s more or less consistent judgment of Thomas Mann, and how might the two writers be meaningfully differentiated?

A comparison of one aspect of their first works provides an important clue to a significant difference in philosophical temperament that would increasingly diverge over the decades. Mann’s Buddenbrooks, which appeared in 1901, contains a scene wherein the thoroughly bourgeois Thomas Buddenbrooks has a temporary enlightening crisis upon encountering Schopenhauer. He questions the significance of his whole life and the superficial values of the society around him. In turn, the young cadet Törleß in Musil’s first novel, which appeared in 1905, also has a crisis which makes him see beneath the veneer of polite and hypocritical society. He comes to understand that everything in life has a double face; that everything is much more uncertain than he once believed—even the field of mathematics includes entities as unexplainable as imaginary numbers. Thomas Buddenbrooks’ breakdown lasts about one day before he reverts back to the shallowness of his previous existence—and this ability to push troubling thoughts under the surface is one of the things Musil complained about in Mann. Although Törleß seems, at the end of the novel, to have found some way to live with the double nature of life—an acceptance that may carry a tinge of the sort of avoidance Thomas Buddenbrooks exhibits—Musil himself and a score of characters in his subsequent fiction decidedly refuse to close the doors of complex perception, preferring instead to exist in uneasy awareness of irreducible uncertainty.

Musil’s critiques of Mann—when they are more than quite relatable annoyance at Mann’s public persona as self-appointed “Intellectual Prince” representing the nation—tend to circle around this fundamental temperamental difference, around what Musil perceives as Mann’s tendency to smooth over philosophical and ethical problems too glibly, his tendency to avoid disturbing his own or his readers’ complacent sense that all is more or less right with the world. Musil felt that Mann used intellectual discourse as a filler rather than evidencing any real interest in grappling with ideas; he suggests that Mann’s answers to questions which for Musil are unanswerable and exponentially complexifying are too simple and appeasing. He was frustrated that the general reader would rather have that sort of consoling fiction than the brave and radically honest ambiguity his works offered.

Speaking of ambiguity, although Mann’s personal sexuality was—as we now know—far from simple, and certain aspects of it would be scarcely acceptable to the bourgeois readers his works please even today, Musil often pointed to what he deemed a lack of passion, a lack of eroticism in Mann’s works as another sign that Mann avoided realms that are murky and perhaps perverse.

When Musil read Buddenbrooks he declared it: “Very fine and boring; perhaps masterfully al fresco—but boring; here and there surprisingly masterful.” A few years later, Mann was one of the first readers of Young Törleß and about twenty years later (mid-January, 1924) Musil would thank him in a letter for friendly words Mann presumably wrote about Musil’s first book in his inscription for a gift copy of his newest work, Felix Krull (unfortunately lost, so we don’t know what he said about this book that might have appealed to him for its treatment of adolescent homosexuality).

Musil met Mann for the first time in 1912, when Mann came to Vienna for the premier of his play, Fiorenza. Musil had made the first move in a letter and they met in Mann’s hotel, the “Imperial”. At the time, Mann was not yet the Great Man of Letters he would become a little more than a decade later. His Death in Venice appeared in the October and November issues of the Neue Rundschau and was then published the same year as a book by Hyperion. Musil read it in the 1916 version and transcribed this line into his notebook: “Whoever is outside of himself, despises nothing more than returning back to himself” with the comment: “Psychology o[f] Ecstasy.” Karl Corino, Musil’s eminent German biographer, notes that Musil was likely attracted at the time to this reference to their shared ecstatic response to beginning of World War I. In part, this response was related to what Heidegger would later call “being towards death,” the way that a keener awareness of mortality tends to heighten one’s sense of aliveness. Wittgenstein, too, experienced this sense of ecstatic awakening on the front.

Mann’s war enthusiasm led him to transform, writes Mark Lilla in his introduction to the new English translation of Mann’s 1918 Reflections of a Non-Political Man, “from one month to the next,” from a nonpolitical man of letters” to “an intransigent and inflammatory defender of the German cause on the international stage,” and, over the next few years, to “devote himself entirely to a defense of Germany against the onslaught of ‘alien’ Western ideas of enlightenment and democracy.” Musil would never take up Mann’s anti-democratic stance or extreme nationalist fervor, but later in the war, Musil’s assignment with the War Press Quarter would in fact be to rouse patriotic sentiments and repress criticism, and after the war—while advocating for an Anschluss with Germany, he read Mann’s Reflections with great interest.

In this complicated, messy, and fascinating book, Mann polemicized against what he called “civilization,” i.e. “reason, skepticism, humanitarianism, democracy, and progress,” in defense of something he considered preternaturally German, i.e. “Culture,” something—Lilla’s words again— “more primordial, drawing energy from the dark side of human nature and producing greater depth of feeling, and therefore greater art.” Musil, as a great synthesizer of ratio and mysticism—who saw the dangers and limitations of too much of each—was deeply engaged in Mann’s discussion, without succumbing to its polarized conviction. Contra Mann’s theory in this book, Musil would later argue explicitly against the idea that art was bound to nation or race—affirming art’s autonomy from political affiliation as well—but he certainly shared at the time of reading and continued to share Mann’s belief in the need for a “European catastrophe,” or at least a personal one. Mann himself strongly repudiated many of the ideas expressed in this book when he saw them being taken up by proto-Nazis, at which point he began his transformation into a defender of democratic values. Lilla writes: that "Thomas Mann eventually learned that political freedom and artistic freedom are compatible. But he never abandoned the conviction that artistic freedom can serve as a check…on the claims of politics. There is more to life than is dreamed of in our values and commitments and causes and programs." Musil transcribed the following line, with evident approval, from Mann’s screed: “…. the deeper truth is that everyone wanted the war a[nd] clamored for it”—and his own belief that life required some measure of passionate intensity—even danger—rhymed with Mann’s.

In one long diary entry, Musil wrangled with Mann’s words: “politics of moderation. Radicalism is admissible in morality, in art; in politics it is a catastrophe.” Musil considers a counter-argument paraphrased from Max Adler, a sociologist and socialist theoretician of Austro-Marxism, found in an article from the Worker Newspaper of Feb 15, 1919, that “Pol[itical] freedom and equality remain only words when econ[omic] equality is lacking, i.e., there is no equality before the law in reality…How is fraternity possible between the haves and the have-nots”. After which he gives Mann the floor again, with evident approval: “Where…convictions are the trump card one doesn’t ask too much about talent a[nd] the bunglers will thrive.” Musil must also have read Mann’s discussion of Wagner in Reflections. Mann had written that Wagner, “as an artist and an intellectual …was a revolutionary all his life,” but it was “just as certain that this national culture-revolutionary was not in favor of political revolution.” These lines were closely echoed by Musil’s own words shortly afterwards:

“As an individual I am revolutionary. That can’t be otherwise, for the creative individual it is always like that. But in politicis I am evolutionary. But something has to happen for this evolution.”

Other passages from Musil’s writing, especially his own commentary during the 30s about the encroachment of politics on art and ethics, seem to be practically paraphrases of some of Mann’s statements in Reflections. Corino notes that while Musil’s ideas about the war and German nationalism diverged from Mann’s by 1919, his reading of the book concentrated on sentences “that could outlive the changes of the times.” These included a serious engagement—and disagreement—with sentences that seemed to undervalue the intellect in favor of feeling, such as: “The intellectual idea in the work of art is not understood, if one understands it as an aim in itself; it should not be valued literarily.” Musil must have been driven to dip back in to Death in Venice to find and transcribe this line that seemed more to his own liking: “The happiness of the writer is the idea that may become fully feeling, the feeling that may become fully idea.” This quote meant so much to him that he inscribed it into the copy of his book, Unions, which he gave to Mann on December 7, 1919. While Musil found at least a few lines he could relate to in Mann’s second novel, Mann for his part failed to warm up to Unions, which he tried to read in the countryside at the turn of the year 1920-21. “The delicate reason:” writes Corino, “too much feminine sexuality.”

In Musil’s “Open Letter on Activism”—a post-war movement that intended to rally “intellectual workers” to apply their literary efforts to solving the world’s problems, Musil noted that Mann had “undoubtedly demarcated a truly existent danger. Intellect, in so far as it is expansive and finds its expression in contradictions, cannot be filed without further ado under the rubric of one or another idea of progress or a program.”

Perhaps because of these fundamental agreements, during 1919-20 the personal and epistolary contact between Mann and Musil was, according to Corino, “not without intensity.” They discussed launching a journal that never happened and Musil tried to solicit works from Mann for the Prague Press (i.e. excerpts from Mann’s new project, The Magic Mountain). And they exchanged books.

At the end of 1923, Mann gave Musil a copy of his Felix Krull fragment with the aforementioned inscription praising Young Törleß. Musil wrote back noting the affinity between Mann’s confidence man and characters (Anselm and Regina) in his own play, The Utopians. But this generally friendly period was transformed in 1924 by the appearance—and astonishing commercial success of—Mann’s Magic Mountain (by 1928 it had sold 100,000 copies). Corino assumes “a moderate shock” on the part of Musil. Mann’s main character, Hans Castorp, was an engineer like Musil’s Anders (one early name for Ulrich); Mann’s book leads up to WWI like Musil’s planned Twin Sister (the novel project that would become The Man Without Qualities by 1926) and included essayistic passages and intellectual debate as Musil’s would. Corino characterizes Musil’s response as a developing “resistance” and a mechanism to establish distinctions between himself and Mann.

Despite continuing public praise and respect, the snide remarks begin around this time to proliferate in notebooks and letters. Corino paraphrases Musil’s idea that Mann, ‘despite all his new sympathy for social democracy has really remained bourgeois, committed to the ideals of the bourgeoisie and to a super-ego that barely differentiates itself from a Christian conscience.” In public, he transforms this criticism into a sort of cryptic laudation for Mann’s 50^th Birthday in a statement printed in the Berliner Tageblatt on June 7, 1925:

“May I call the power of your work a power of conscience? I well know that its inimitable charm can be explained by the possession of many other and ultimately—as you yourself state— contradictory qualities. But as out of contradictions at last, of itself, a whole, something indivisible, unique, and illustrious appears, when a tender patience takes each contradiction carefully in hand, and a firm patience that can wait, does not let go of any one of these too early: this one creative mystery of your art justifies the love of a nation [for Mann].”

In a 1927 draft of an essay called “The Good in Literature,” a review of a 1926 book by Paul Häberlin on the subject, Musil elaborates on his feelings about Mann’s “power of conscience”:

“Here I may call up Thomas Mann as the contemporary writer whom the society in which we currently live has chosen as preeminent. In him we can see uncommonly clearly how those elements which he himself calls “unorderly,” which could just as naturally be called elements of a counter-order, are in battle with bourgeois opinions. He himself has often stressed the existence of the sick, the wayward at the basis of art, and has tried with admirable effort to call these elements back and to reintegrate them into bourgeois order. One can thus regard him as the most visible representative of the awakened conscience about the fact that rules and exceptions may no longer exist in the same asyntactic relationship in which they existed a hundred years ago; even if one, like myself, cannot endorse his attempts at resolution. They level the exceptions far too much into the bourgeois rules.”

In 1919, Mann had earned more than 100,000 Marks, and 300,00 in 1921. The discrepancy with Musil’s meagre earnings (his mother and his wife had lost the bulk of their savings after the war), was further widened when, in 1929, Mann won the Nobel Prize for Literature, gaining not only more honors, but a heap of money ($46,299 = today, about $855,00). According to Dagmar Barnouw in her Weimar Intellectuals and the Threat of Modernity, Post-1921, after his adoption of democratic values, Mann

“resumed [his] position as Geistesfuerst [Intellectual Prince]: ‘In the afternoon I ‘governed’, he noted in his diary on July 8, 1921, referring to one of the many duties of his position, like writing prefaces and introductions, consulting, deciding, affirming literary values in what was to him a spiritual patrician republic…always notoriously generous with his time and his evaluations, as long as his own leading position was not questioned.”

While Musil was still struggling to complete the first volume of The Man Without Qualities, Mann became, writes Corino, increasingly an object of “hate and envy.” According to Musil’s friend, Klaus Pinkus, Musil would tremble at the mention of Mann’s name.

In a letter to his friend Johannes Allesch on March 15, 1931, encouraging Allesch to write a monograph on his works (never completed), Musil critiques some aspects of The Magic Mountain:

“The novel of our generation (Thomas Mann, James Joyce, Proust, etc.) has found itself faced above all with the difficulty that the naiveté of the narration is insufficient for the development of intelligence. I deem the “Magic Mountain” in this respect a fully unsuccessful attempt; in its “intellectual” parts, it is like a shark’s stomach.”

Musil’s assessment of Mann’s insufficient intellectual bona fides may or may not have been influenced by a rejection suffered a few months previously by an organization which Mann co-founded back in 1926, the Section for Literature of the Prussian Academy of the Arts. Mann, likely in response to the publication in 1930 of the first volume of The Man Without Qualities and its success among cognoscenti, if not the general public, had nominated Musil for membership, but the majority of the members voted against his inclusion, concluding that he was “too intelligent to be a creative writer.”

In notes for his lecture “On Stupidity,” written in 1931-32, we find further criticisms of Mann: in his books, “no blood is shed, or at most only incidentally. But the characters die exhaustively a[nd] with decorum. There are no grand passionate love affairs, a[nd] generally something carefully guarded in such matters. All the characters have money, a[nd] aside from this there is never any indigence.” He then compares this with the prose works of their “forerunners and contemporaries…Murder, death, suicide: in Tolstoy a[nd] Dostoevsky, in Balzac, Stendhal,—Flaubert? Social destitution, sex[ual] freedom in Naturalism, libertinage in contemporary developments.”

Sometime in October and November of 1932, he drops this bomb into the privacy of his notebooks:

“A propos Thomas Mann, one could object that he reminds one of a boy who played with himself and then later becomes the father of a family. The knowledge of immorality and its overcoming by a healthy human being, this immorality in Thomas Mann—now rendered harmless, but nevertheless remembered with a wink of his eye—can only (almost) have its source in this. And what does his problem child Castorp do all that time up on the Magic Mountain? Masturbate, of course! But Mann takes the sexual organs off his characters as if they were plaster sculptures.”

Shortly after which Mann’s generosity to him may have made him feel slightly guilty (though his assessment would no doubt have remained the same). Musil’s friend Bernard Guillemin had written to Mann to solicit help with the lagging sales of the first volume of The Man Without Qualities, and Mann offered to name one book only in response to the 1932 Book-of-the-Year survey sent out by Das Tagebuch—this book would be Musil’s novel. Mann’s praise of the novel elicited a rapturous letter of thanks from Musil on December 5^th. Although he was aware of Mann’s intention to help, he was, he wrote: “utterly unprepared for the statement itself, its unlabored comprehensiveness, its sensitivity, its energy, its inimitable comprehension of what was necessary.” Further:

“I may simply say that I have experienced one of those uncommon moments of happiness, where it strikes, sparkling and leaping out beyond coherence. A moment of wonder transported me out of the necessity-driven selfish condition of neediness into that supra-sphere, where neediness is no longer something destitute, rather it is merely the space from which an elevation can begin. And I have your magical abilities to thank for this!”

(The draft, Corino tells us, is written over and over in many formulations and corrections, some in Martha’s hand as well.)

Despite this momentary eruption of genuine gratefulness, the seething continued, channeled particularly into the elucidation of Musil’s concept of the Großschriftsteller represented by the character Arnheim in Musil’s novel. The statesman and writer, Walther Rathenau— “universal specialist,” critique of modern fragmentation and mechanization, was the first model for this character. According to Corino, after Rathenau’s assassination in 1922, this figure began to take on more of Mann’s aspects. Corino points to passages of “The Great Man of Letters” chapters that would appear in Volume II published on December 15, 1932 that contain key phrases that Mann himself (if not anyone else) would have recognized as referring to him. The Great Man of Letters:

“must travel quite a bit, must be received by high-ranking statesmen, must give lectures; must make the impression on the leaders of public opinion that he constitutes a force of conscience [Gewissensmacht] not to be underestimated; he is chargé d’affaires of the intellect of the nation, whenever it is necessary to demonstrate Humanitas abroad; when he is at home, he receives notable guests and despite all this has time to think of his career, which he must carry out with the suppleness of a circus artist, whose exhaustion is not noticed…He sits on all prize committees, signs all appeals, writes all introductions, delivers all birthday speeches, opines on all important occurrences and is invited everywhere where it is necessary to demonstrate how far we have come.”

Corino calls our attention particularly to the term “Gewissensmacht” (force of conscience) which would certainly have reminded Mann of Musil’s use of the term “Gewissenskraft” (strength of conscience) in his appreciation for Mann’s 50^th birthday.

Mann probably had not read these chapters yet when he, continuing to act in his capacity of Great Man of Letters in Musil’s interest, nominated him for the Goethe Prize of the City of Frankfurt on January 17, 1933. The political situation—Hitler would be nominated as German Chancellor on the 30^th of this month—did not make the selection of Musil at all likely. In lieu of Musil, someone who had not even stood on the original list of candidates, Hermann Stehr, a writer of tales of rustic life who was later praised by German Nationalists as a “eulogist of the German soul,” was unanimously elected.

In 1934, after Musil had moved from Berlin to Vienna, Musil’s friends attempted to rally financial help and aid in finding a publisher for the continuation of his work. Thomas Mann, notified about Musil’s need, once more offered to help—seemingly unperturbed by Musil’ oblique critiques. He wrote to Musil’s friend Kurt Pinkus that he would of course be more than happy to “help the author of one of the most significant prose works in Germany in the last decades to find a publisher who would be better equipped than Rowohlt currently is to invest in him.” He offered to use his personal connections with publishers in Switzerland and Holland, but nothing came of these attempts.

Perhaps Mann was getting a bit tired of Musil’s ambiguous commentary. For when Harry Goldsmith asked him to introduce Musil for a reading in Zurich in 1932, Mann declined—though promised he would come. In his notebook, following the November 16^th reading, the Great Man of Letters passes favorable judgment: “High niveau of Musil’s novel [he had read from The Man Without Qualities and Posthumous Papers of a Living Writer]. Relationship with Proust.” Herman Hesse’s wife, Ninon, who sat next to Mr. and Mrs. Mann at the reading, felt that she was the only one in the room who understood him: “There was such a loneliness surrounding him,” she lamented, “as if enclosed in a mandorla of loneliness, he sat before us”. Goldsmith recounts that afterwards, at the soiree, “Mann and Musil sat peaceably side by side, in friendly exchange of nullities.”

On the occasion of Mann’s 60^th birthday, about six months later, Musil was again in the mood to offer up another cryptic tribute to the master, this time in verse:

When the masses disperse

The stars remain in the sky

And into the shuttered house

The guests come from above.

By 1936, Mann had become the public face of the American Guild for German Cultural Freedom, which planned to found a German Academy in New York City to promulgate the idea “that the intellect must be free…Freedom and intellect are one and the same” (Mann’s formulation of the program). It was to be “a sort of protective regime for the threatened German intellect and for threatened German intellectual property,” hoped to offer advice on emigration, stipends, prizes, and publication abroad. Thomas Mann suggested Musil as one of the Austrian members—but he would very soon be in dire need of the help of this and other organizations himself, as an émigré in Switzerland post-Anschluss. But let us look a little more closely at Mann’s process of separating himself from Germany and refashioning himself as the representative in exile of the “Good Germany.”

According to Dagmar Barnouw, Mann’s diaries reveal his “painful scrupling” about leaving Germany, that he “could not make up his mind to break openly with the Nazi regime because he could not bear to lose his audience and endanger his upper-class standard of living, that he was intensely worried about getting his gramophone and cars out of Germany at a time when other intellectuals were beaten to death in concentration camps.” He took three years to break officially with the Nazi regime, which he did so in an open letter to the Swiss critic, Korrodi, resulting in expatriation and withdrawal of his honorary doctorate from Bonn University. But, Barnouw writes, his “income continued to be more than sufficient; compared to almost all other exiles.” Most of Mann’s possessions were released to him by the Nazi authorities in Munich: “he was to sit in his familiar chair at his familiar desk, surrounded by his art objects, his gramophone and records of nineteenth-century music, his library…wherever he went he established his German culture, the best of Germany, the Good Germany…”. Lotte in Weimar was published by Bermann Fischer in Stockholm in 1939, in an edition of 10,000 copies, and his books were translated for publication by Knopf. In Princeton in the winter of 1938, he wrote in his diary that he was the “present president of the intellectual republic of Germany in the U.S.”

Mann was certainly in a position to help or to neglect Musil, and to what extent he did whatever he could or not is a difficult perhaps unanswerable question. In some ways, Musil was difficult to help; and yet, I can’t help wondering whether Mann could not have applied more energy toward getting the Musils a visa, finding a translator and publisher for a translation in New York, finding him work in the U.S. But before we look at the details, we must first glance at the infamous Musil-Mann-Canetti story.

Musil received a copy of Elias Canetti’s novel, Auto-da-Fé and wrote to thank him for it, saying he planned to read it soon. Canetti never received this letter but ran into Musil a few days later. Musil, according to Canetti, “said many friendly things to me about Auto-da-Fé, but admitted that he had only read the first part of the novel. Moved by happiness about this, I committed an indiscretion that alienated him: I remarked that I had received a no less friendly letter from Thomas Mann—which I had received perhaps on that same day. With that our friendship was broken off….”. Another narrative of the event has Musil in the act of reaching out his hand to Canetti and then pulling it back at the mention of Mann’s name. What is extraordinary about this story—which casts a rather dubious light on our man Musil—is that Canetti blames only himself for the incident, deeply regretting his gaffe and attempting, “through a deeper engagement in [Musil’s] work…to make up for it.”

Perhaps we are beginning to approach some understanding of why the mere mention of Mann’s name had such an effect on our Musil. In one diary entry from around 1936 Musil, after having read a book on Augustine’s effect on his times, compares Thomas and Heinrich Mann (whom Musil despised even more than Thomas for his position as leader of literature engagé) to Hitler himself:

“The peoples’ love for its intellectual [or spiritual] leader (… is disavowed through Hitler, Hindenburg, Bismark). Nevertheless, Thomas and also Heinrich Mann strive for this, and in part successfully. They want to take his place, that is the real meaning and the good conscience of their battle. And I don’t want to do that. I am convinced that it is not the right thing to do, etc.”

David Luft, Musil scholar and friend, wrote to me the other day asking if I had seen the big story on Mann on the occasion of his 150^th birthday in Die Zeit newspaper: “Apparently, he is now the uncontested great man, more remembered than Goethe. Who was Musil?” David continued: “No one would have called Musil a Zauberer [magician]. Perhaps that's the difference.” When I wrote back that, yes, Musil would have felt that to be a magician would be dishonest, David replied: “Indeed. And rightly so. Even about mystical experience or prayer, he felt he was lying half the time when he tried to put it into words. Intentionally creating fake mystery was a horror for him. Like Wagner.”

After the Anschluss, when Musil’s publisher, Gottfried-Bermann Fischer, turned to Mann for help getting the Musils out of Nazi Austria, Mann once again used his magical powers to try to help. He contacted a wealthy lady named Madame Loup Mayrisch de Saint-Hubert, who lived in a castle in Luxumbourg. Madame Mayrisch, who later would finance publication of Musil’s chapter “Moonbeams by Sunlight” in a publication, Mass und Wert (Measure and Value) with which Mann was associated, offered Musil a room in her castle—but did not invite his wife Martha along, presumably because the castle was too full. Those who knew Musil would understand that he would never have travelled without Martha—but who would expect anyone to emigrate in such a dangerous situation, leaving his Jewish wife behind? Mayrisch was also concerned about the arrangement because she sometimes entertained visitors from Nazi Germany (perhaps she was concerned about Martha’s Jewish appearance, if she knew about it). In any case, Madame Mayrisch, who offered this one room for a solo Musil, also offered him and Martha money for travel and for upkeep for a number of months, help with transport and papers to emigrate elsewhere from Luxembourg, and advice on finding paid work. Presumably, Martha could stay somewhere nearby. Martha, in a letter to her daughter Annina in Philadelphia (using their code name for Mann, based on his recent authorship of Joseph and his Brothers) noted that they had “Joe’s Father’s friendly intervention” to thank for additional available funds of thirty dollars a month from the American Guild.

That the Musils made no use of Madame Mayrisch’s offer and that Musil made a fuss over whether there were two rooms available (one for him to work and one for him and Martha to sleep in), annoyed Bermann-Fischer royally, and may have led to the temporary hostile break between Musil and his erstwhile publisher. Mann, too, may have been annoyed. What neither of them knew, however, was that the Musils already had a secret plan—to leave Austria en route to Switzerland, under the pretext of taking a vacation in Italy, where they would be visiting Martha’s son.

Once in Switzerland, the Musils visited the Manns just before the Manns’ departure for the United States. Martha, who shared Musil’s antipathy for the Great Man of Letters, wrote to Annina about the visit:

“Yesterday we visited Joe’s father, they are preparing to leave, leaving middle of the month. He looks better than previously. I always thought he looked rather sober and boring, but now he looks more elegant and a bit more interesting. …She speaks too much and too quickly, looks a little bit like the witch in Hansel and Gretel, although she is pretty. The youngest daughter (Elizabeth) picked us up and brought us back again (in a car, they live far out); she is nice and pretty, at least she has beautiful eyes and a pleasant expression. —The second daughter [Monika] whom we met in Vienna, is less congenial [the Musils would actually become friends with Monika and her future husband, while sharing a Pension with them in Switzerland]. The children (6) seem to all be peculiar; the youngest son [Michael] 19 years old and to be married in a few days—; Thomas is very eager to help, had already facilitated some aid, and plans to speak with Dora and van Loon [other potential philanthropists who might help with money and emigration]. Just the same, I believe that he would not really like it if Robert went to America. He is really at the height of his fame and is doing quite well over there; I heard that he only has to give four readings, and that a villa in Princeton is at his disposal. One can’t help but compare Robert’s fate with his.”

A little later, Martha informed Annina that they were going to Mann’s Farewell Lecture, where he would read from his new novel, Lotte in Weimar.

More and more, in the last four years of Musil’s life, we read in letters to those people trying to help the Musils financially, with publishers, with help in papers to either remain in Switzerland or to emigrate to somewhere more safe, that Mann has not been able to provide much help, that the funds of the American Guild have dried up as if, “the aid fund had only waited for me for their means to be exhausted (1938 letter to Nellie Kreis). To his friend Groethhuysen in the same year he apologizes for writing, but explains that his “hourglass is about to run out any moment now,” and there is no one else he can turn to. Toward the end of that year there is some hope of help from Mann, at least the possibility of some earnings from the aforementioned publication in Mass und Wert (funded by Madame Mayrisch). Musil then dares to ask Mann outright for help with finding magazines or translators that might be interested in his work. Nothing much came of this request.

Musil’s good friend from Swiss exile, Fritz Wotruba, describes the tragedy of the situation well:

“Added to the struggles of everyday life and the difficulties with the immigration police and authorities was his lack of success as a writer. The indifference toward his person and his work was almost total. Rejections and attacks were not uncommon; he was used to stupid misunderstanding, the total destruction of his work in his homeland; but this cool indifference was fatal. I stand here before a puzzle. Musil was surrounded by a wall of ice. There is no sense in blaming the countless organizations and institutions established to help. In fact, the lives of tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands were saved. But these organizations had failed this one man.

[…]

What I am writing here is turning into an accusation; but whom and what do I accuse? A devilish fate, the shortcomings of human institutions, or the shortcomings of humanity altogether? I myself belong to those who found help and friends in Switzerland; but I must write down these things, because they are part of Musil’s last years of life. Many people crossed his path in Zurich or in Geneva; but no one recognized his genius. He was one among many; perhaps he had even been famous once, at the moment he was utterly uninteresting. He was neither a James Joyce nor an Andre Gide, he could not even claim the halo of the freedom fighter; Thomas Mann already wore it.

[…]

Now his qualities exacted their revenge, his failings: he was asocial, he was not partisan, neither in art nor in politics, thus he could not be categorized; he was also not what one calls an innovator, and so he had no boisterous disciples. He was untimely, and also a man who had grown old early, who wrote in a peculiarly eccentric style.”

And Musil himself, “in a difficult moment” when he could not come to terms with himself, in the face of the banning of The Man Without Qualities, the collapse of negotiations with yet another publisher, the “failure of Thomas Mann and all the others [to help him], the lavishment of honors on Thomas Mann in America,” while he himself appears to be completely unknown there, he finds himself in a state of “opposition against friends and enemies,” and realizes that he wishes to be neither in one place nor the other, but still complains that he is turned away from these places. In this moment of deep introspection, he considers to what extent he himself might have been responsible for this state and connects his current condition to a characteristic of his personality and of his writing—his irony or “philosophical humor (for the world is not itself ready for earnestness).” Through a complex psychological process, he suddenly finds comfort and nourishment in the fact that bad things have happened to him because they have contributed to make him who he is:

“Now I am ironic not only in my weakness, but also as a strength…Now I understand myself and my way of interacting with the world better. Irony must contain some portion of suffering. (Otherwise, it is like know-it-all-ism); it must contain enmity and empathy.”

He then concludes that an essay he is trying to write about writing would benefit from this realization, and stress, “not grievances, not that I have been maltreated, but rather an explanation and justification for a two-way emigration,” i.e., his emigration to Switzerland and his emigration into his isolated, timeless state—a state that could not have been attained without his own particular combination of suffering, enmity, and empathy.

He is now well aware that he has often been unfair to Mann and others…but continues to sometimes let his rancor erupt. He had complained to his friend Olden about the latter’s placing of both the Manns (Thomas and Heinrich) in the same breath as Goethe, Schopenhauer, and Kleist (and not mentioning Musil at all)—but then quickly writes again to apologize, acknowledging that he is a “poisonous scoundrel.” He is, he explains, rarely satisfied with himself—and generally only feels friendly towards himself when he feels attacked or demeaned from the outside. “May this serve as an apology to you, so that you will forget my small paroxysm about the plurality of Manns in my last letter.” In fact, he admits: “Thomas has expressed himself multiple times with such great generosity about me that I would have done better to have expressed my own esteem toward him than a fleeting resentment”.

On the 6^th of November, 1939, his 59^th birthday, he notes that he has received copies of letters of reference for the English PEN Club, including one from Thomas Mann. To his notebook he confides that he is moved, even flattered. For he has often been “unfair” to Mann. Mann, in a letter to Olden, had written that he was very happy to write such a letter, since he had been concerned about “this extraordinary man and his priceless work for a long time.” He was relieved that “the world has realized that something must be done”. Mann wrote that in the “case of no other contemporary German writer” does he feel more certain of posterity’s acclaim. He continues:

“The Man Without Qualities is without a doubt a great work of prose that ranks with the finest books our epoch has produced, a book that will outlast the decades and that will be held in the highest esteem in the future. At the appearance of its second volume, I called the novel ‘a literary undertaking, whose extraordinary nature, whose far-reaching significance for the development, elevation, and spiritualization of the German novel is unquestionable.’ I stand by these words today.

A work of imagistic intellectuality such as this one signifies no more and no less than a vindication of our deeply compromised epoch.”

In February of 1939, Musil had again gently scolded himself for nursing grievances. An old lady he met in a park had tried to place him and when she said she thought she might know his name from somewhere he wryly suggested she must be confusing him with his cousin (Alois Musil, the famous orientalist) or his father (a relatively unknown engineering professor). Then:

“But today it really occurs to me that I ought not to occupy myself with such petty vexatiousness—including the Großschriftsteller—much longer, and should seriously tackle the problem for a change. There you are, partially confident, partially inconfident; there are the others, whom you learned long ago to undervalue, and half to value, half to fear. You have your task still before you. How can this situation be clarified and regulated. Seek out a conviction, etc. That is, instead of [focusing on] everyone else, focus on my own task!”