A wonderful and generous response to a vexing question, worthy of Robert Musil, whom like many of his readers I wish I could have helped, while he was alive, and strangely of Thomas Mann, about whom I share some of Musil's reflections but who did recognize Musil as a peer and gave his work the respect it deserved.
Your essay, Genese, is more than just a powerful footnote on the back and forth between Musil and Mann, but an exploration of how German nationalism swept up both writers for a while but my own reading of Musil's journals tends to lead me to believe that Musil, even in the sense of the heady madness that broke out in Germany and Austria as the First World War began, understood it as a form of lunacy, in which the beast was predominant, not the spirit.
Also, I see you were also probably referring to the nationalism of WWI, not of II. Musil’s war enthusiasm in 1914, which he later called an “ether swoon,” was not really about nationalism, neither German nor Austrian, but just about a feeling he had not experienced before, of belonging, of being part of a group. He quickly understood that other soldiers from other armies felt the same way about their countries and that it was an illusion of sorts. Mann, on the other hand, really believed that German culture was superior to the others and that this superiority was linked to a certain irrationalism and monarchist disposition. Musil did not approve of the peace treaties after WWI, not because he thought Austria innocent, but because he felt others had also not been completely innocent and that, as he says in a letter in 1921, the declaration of the war was the destruction of an old world, while the peace treaties are an obstacle to the creation of a new one. He was a supporter, more or less, of the Pan-European idea after WWI, and described it as international reconciliation politics.
Thank you, Mark, for reading and for your thoughts. Indeed, what you say about Musil’s response to WWII is, I think, spot on. At one point he said it was not a war of nation against nation, but of Geist (spirit/intellect) against Ungeist.
Yes, I was writing about the delirium that seemed to seize on men, I think in Berlin, when borders between people and a kind of dionysian fury, stealing, drunkenness, passed through the barracks bathhouses, and in the streets in the first days of the war as if to quote Yeats, "All changed, utterly changed, /A terrible beauty is born." Musil records this however as an observer rather than a participator, almost an anthropologist. That's how I retain it in my memory. A Marine lieutenant general, O'Neill, lived a few streets away from us in our summer town and e had several interesting conversations (he was related to a family we were close to) and I thought to give him some of the pages about World War One that Musil wrote but finally I decided not to. He was writing a book about his experiences which was very interesting, gripping ina way, but there was nothing of the metaphysical in his pages and I realized sadly that it would only make me look foolish in his eyes.
I really struggle with Musil's pleasure in danger, but this passage about the opera singer Geraldine Farrar helps me get close:
"I would like to be able to describe this once in my life. A voice rises in a lift, a woman's voice naturally. And already as it rises like mad into the heights...it sinks, feathered in the air. Her skirts sway with the movement. This rising and falling up and down, this laying for a long time pressed against a tone and this streaming out--streaming and always being grabbed again and again by a new convulsion and then streaming out again: is: sexual ecstasy.
It is that European ecstasy that rises to murder, jealousy, automobile racing--ah, it's not even ecstasy anymore, it's the search for adventure. It isn't the search for adventure, but rather a knife that comes down from out of space, a female angel. It is the ecstasy that is never realized while alive. The war."
A wonderful and generous response to a vexing question, worthy of Robert Musil, whom like many of his readers I wish I could have helped, while he was alive, and strangely of Thomas Mann, about whom I share some of Musil's reflections but who did recognize Musil as a peer and gave his work the respect it deserved.
Your essay, Genese, is more than just a powerful footnote on the back and forth between Musil and Mann, but an exploration of how German nationalism swept up both writers for a while but my own reading of Musil's journals tends to lead me to believe that Musil, even in the sense of the heady madness that broke out in Germany and Austria as the First World War began, understood it as a form of lunacy, in which the beast was predominant, not the spirit.
Also, I see you were also probably referring to the nationalism of WWI, not of II. Musil’s war enthusiasm in 1914, which he later called an “ether swoon,” was not really about nationalism, neither German nor Austrian, but just about a feeling he had not experienced before, of belonging, of being part of a group. He quickly understood that other soldiers from other armies felt the same way about their countries and that it was an illusion of sorts. Mann, on the other hand, really believed that German culture was superior to the others and that this superiority was linked to a certain irrationalism and monarchist disposition. Musil did not approve of the peace treaties after WWI, not because he thought Austria innocent, but because he felt others had also not been completely innocent and that, as he says in a letter in 1921, the declaration of the war was the destruction of an old world, while the peace treaties are an obstacle to the creation of a new one. He was a supporter, more or less, of the Pan-European idea after WWI, and described it as international reconciliation politics.
Thank you, Mark, for reading and for your thoughts. Indeed, what you say about Musil’s response to WWII is, I think, spot on. At one point he said it was not a war of nation against nation, but of Geist (spirit/intellect) against Ungeist.
Yes, I was writing about the delirium that seemed to seize on men, I think in Berlin, when borders between people and a kind of dionysian fury, stealing, drunkenness, passed through the barracks bathhouses, and in the streets in the first days of the war as if to quote Yeats, "All changed, utterly changed, /A terrible beauty is born." Musil records this however as an observer rather than a participator, almost an anthropologist. That's how I retain it in my memory. A Marine lieutenant general, O'Neill, lived a few streets away from us in our summer town and e had several interesting conversations (he was related to a family we were close to) and I thought to give him some of the pages about World War One that Musil wrote but finally I decided not to. He was writing a book about his experiences which was very interesting, gripping ina way, but there was nothing of the metaphysical in his pages and I realized sadly that it would only make me look foolish in his eyes.
I really struggle with Musil's pleasure in danger, but this passage about the opera singer Geraldine Farrar helps me get close:
"I would like to be able to describe this once in my life. A voice rises in a lift, a woman's voice naturally. And already as it rises like mad into the heights...it sinks, feathered in the air. Her skirts sway with the movement. This rising and falling up and down, this laying for a long time pressed against a tone and this streaming out--streaming and always being grabbed again and again by a new convulsion and then streaming out again: is: sexual ecstasy.
It is that European ecstasy that rises to murder, jealousy, automobile racing--ah, it's not even ecstasy anymore, it's the search for adventure. It isn't the search for adventure, but rather a knife that comes down from out of space, a female angel. It is the ecstasy that is never realized while alive. The war."