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.