Robert Musil; From
Precision and Soul
Politics in Austria
1912
This irreverent essay will
interest students of Austrian history and culture, but its real significance
lies in what it has to say about modern art and culture generally. Before 1867
the multinational empire of the Habsburgs was ruled from Vienna by
German-speaking aristocrats and bureaucrats. In 1867 the Ausgleich, or compromise, divided the empire into a
dual monarchy:Austria-Hungary. Diplomatically and militarily a unity, the two
parts went their separate ways in domestic politics. This essay foreshadows
Musil's satiric vision of Austria ("Kakania") in The Man without
Qualities as a metaphor of modernity.
People think too one-sidedly
in this context about the difficulties of the nationalities problem. Although
this is a genuine problem, it has long since become a matter of convenience; it
is no longer a serious subject, but has turned into an unacknowledged evasion
and malingering. Like shallow lovers, who are constantly overcoming separations
and obstacles because they sense that the moment these obstacles are overcome
they will have no idea what to do with one another. Like passion, simply a
pretext for not having feelings. When the day of reckoning arrives, it will be
a blessing that the bad manners people have acquired in the meantime will still
know how to produce even from trivial occasions the appearance of neglected
idealism. But behind this appearance the emptiness of the inner life will reel
like the emptiness in an alcoholic's stomach.
There are few countries in
which politics is pursued so passionately as here, and none in which politics,
accompanied by comparable passion, remains such an indifferent affair: passion
as pretext. On the surface, everything is so very parliamentary that more
people are shot dead here than elsewhere, and all the wheels stop every few
moments for the less-than-perfect juggling of parties; one is allowed to insult
high officials, generals, and advisers to the crown; with threats in parliament
one can make important people tremble; people make money with the aid of
politics, and box each other's ears. But this is all half convention, a game by
agreement. The fear one arouses, the power one exercises, the honor one gathers
to oneself, despite the fact that in all relationships that are genuine and
commonly regarded as important they are entirely authentic, remain insincere
in one's soul, wraithlike; believed and respected, but not felt. One takes them
seriously to the extent of impoverishing oneself for them, yet it seems that
arranging one's entire life this way to such an extent does not signify the
ultimate. One could see great idealism in this, even if, at first, a
negative idealism. Action never quite defines these Austrians on its level.
Their religiosity is not credible, nor their childlike loyalty to the Emperor,
nor their anxieties; they wait somewhere behind these. They have the passive
fantasy of spaces left unfilled, and jealously grant a person everything except
his claims, which are so prejudicial spiritually, for the seriousness of his
work. The German, on the other hand, stands in relation to his ideals like
those unbearably devoted wives who are glued to their husbands like a wet bathing
suit.
Under present conditions, of
course, meaninglessness predominates in any case, and Austrians while away the
waiting period with noisy bustle. Their energetic gestures are a mark of
weakness, whereas elsewhere even the appearance of impotence depends on
dammed-up masses of energy. And so German parliamentarism is like a field-happy
nag protesting against a lashing by earnestly and soberly brushing the spot
with its tail, while here in Austria there are passions in public life behind
which one yawns with unruffled mind. One does not know what it is one is
letting oneself be dominated by: now and then a hurricane comes along and all
the ministers immediately fall like practiced gymnasts, but the storm is
calmed, and their successors arrange themselves in precisely the same
positions, with minor changes that might satisfy the experts but must remain
incomprehensible to outsiders. Nonetheless, outsiders too immediately declare
themselves satisfied. There is something uncanny in this obstinate rhythm that
has no melody, no words, no feeling. Somewhere in this country a secret must be
hidden, an idea, but no one knows where. It is not the idea of the state, not
the dynastic principle, not the idea of a cultural symbiosis of different
peoples (Austria could be a world experiment): apparently the whole thing is
really only motion in the absence of a driving idea, like the weaving of a
bicyclist who isn't going forward.
Unfortunate political
situations of this kind always have their basis in cultural conditions.
Politics in Austria still has no human purpose, only Austrian ones. It does not
make one a self, although with its aid one can become anything else, and in
politics no single self is able to get anywhere. The instrument of social
democracy is not yet solid enough in this country, and other powerful
contradictions are missing, such as that between the intellectual drive of a
few disquieting people who live like magnificent vermin on the refuse of the
German merchant state and the righteousness of a Junker class with two legs
rooted in the Bible and two in the soil. Our social structure in Austria is,
almost all the way to the top, a homogeneous mixture of bourgeois and cavalier
styles. In one's natural state one is high-strung and blooming with health. A
hairdresser's assistant, who shared his ideals with the ladies of the
aristocracy while he was waving their hair, would have had a career here as a
German poet not long ago if he had not, after a party, inadvertently put on a
fur coat that did not yet belong to him. At that time he was already
frequenting the most aristocratic houses and reciting his poems at teas, and
the bourgeois press would certainly not have been able to resist this
light-fingered hair-calligrapher for long, for being high-strung is the press's
weakness as well.
In Austria we lack the great
ideal antithesis between bourgeoisie and aristocracy. Even elsewhere this
antithesis has only expressed itself in a very preliminary and distorted way-in
the intellectual circle of liberalism-and is temporarily concealed by the
economic antithesis "proletariat-property," although this latter is
only a smoothing of the road for the march. But meanwhile, in large states that
have a backdrop of world trade and worldwide connections, something new has
developed, a paradox: a nonintellectual but cracked soil in whose fissures,
despite its barren inauspiciousness, culture is now settling better than ever
on what are, for it, barely suitable surfaces. Today culture no longer realizes
its goals through the state, as it once did in Athens and Rome, but utilizes
instead of the perfection of the whole (which does not permit much enhancement)
its imperfections, its gaps, its inability to encompass each and every
individual. Dissolving in the incalculable number is what constitutes the
fundamental cultural difference between this and any other age, the loneliness
and anonymity of the individual in an ever-increasing crowd, and this brings
with it a new intellectual disposition whose consequences are still
unfathomable. The clearest example we can already see today is the small
amount of serious art we have. Its inability to both be good and please many at
the same time is actually unprecedented, and apparently indicates, far beyond
being a kind of aesthetic quarrel, the beginning of a new function for art.
The real precondition of this
culture, however, is the bourgeoisie. For it is characteristic of the
bourgeoisie not to create any families that do not quickly decline, no
tradition, no inherited ideals, and no enduring morality: such things as are
necessary in learning to walk, but interfere with running. Because of its
commercial interests, the bourgeoisie does not concern itself with culture
directly, but tosses out lump sums for it. The bourgeoisie produces no
fascinating people, no prototypes, and thus does not produce either the
temptation that has always emanated from such people, which is to form an ideal
type from the narrow and always-dated realm of the humanly real instead of,
with unfettered imagination, from the realm of human possibilities. The
creative person remains unknown aside from his accomplishment: more thought and
feeling than human being, he creates forms of the soul in an ideal laboratory,
without at the same time having to guarantee their general usefulness the way a
regular manufacturer would. And even the lack of comprehension with which his
creations are met turns to their advantage, for today's injudiciousness is
tomorrow's open-mindedness.
This kind of bourgeoisie does
not exist in Austria. Destiny still makes one an Austrian only on some personal
recommendation, and it is hard to dishonor one's recommender. And so one
treasures catastrophes because they take the responsibility upon themselves,
and misfortune is needed because it generates violent gestures behind which
everyone disappears and becomes conventional. Since heroism is the most
impersonal form of action, one lives one's political life like a Serbian heroic
epic. Little Joan from Domremy was a farm maid in men's trousers; the penitent
gets lice from being an ascetic; when the hero acts, he is fenced in like an
animal in the experience of his heroism; blood, sweat, and dust make his
clothes stick together like boards: he can't bathe, they rub him raw, hang
stiffly on him; he rattles like a mad kernel in his shell; his field of vision
is constricted to the fovea centralis, his glances remain firmly stuck
to objects. Necessity and the hero go together like sickness and fever. And so
every violent act has something pathological about it, a restricted
consciousness, a final, progressive, vortexlike ascent. But, even without this
ascent, the political hero in Austria is the refined technique of a restricted
consciousness. A bad habit, acquired through frequent illness. Quite properly
one does not take it entirely seriously, but will not let go of it so long as
the substance required for the entire spectrum of consciousness is lacking.