The Man Without Qualities

"I think so. I’ve treated the task you set me a little bit like Desert Island Discs . I would take this book to a desert island for a very good reason, which is that I’d never get to the end of it! It’s one of the longest unfinished novels ever written. The first part of the book is set in 1913 and is a mere 100,000 words. He didn’t publish it till 1930, so some people view it as a picture of a society where everybody’s rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. It’s very easy to do that with hindsight, but the autumn of the Empire is more interesting than that. Robert Musil was one of the Vienna café literati. He took refuge in Zurich during the war, where he died. He was strongly in the positivist tradition, a scientist himself and a trained engineer. What he does is he hangs the whole book on the peg of something that never happens. It’s a sort of anti-philosophy, even though he was a philosopher. He says something that perhaps underlies his whole work, namely that “Philosophers are people who do violence but have no army at their disposal and so subjugate the world by locking it into a system.” The actual plot—if you can call it a plot—is the story of an attempt to think of something suitable to do for the celebration of Emperor Franz Joseph’s 70th year in power. He had come to power in 1848, so we’re talking about 1918. The novel has this somewhat surreal quality, partly because we, as readers, know that the Jubilee is never going to happen. There is a somewhat desperate search for a name to emphasize Austria’s superiority over Germany since, most inconveniently, Kaiser Friedrich of Germany would also be having a Jubilee in 1918. Would it be ‘The Year of Austria’, ‘The World Year’, ‘The Austrian Peace Year’, or ‘The Austrian World Peace Year?’ It reminds me of Yes Minister, when Sir Humphrey says at one stage, ‘We must do something; this is something, we must do it.’ Ulrich, who is the man without qualities—a good description—is a successful bureaucrat. He’s an intellectual and very difficult to pin down. The other characters in the book aren’t exactly cardboard characters, but they are typologies of people living in a dream world. One is une grande horizontale , another is a frustrated artist—very common in the late monarchy. One is a salon hostess and another is a shrewd businessman, who is trying to get his hands on the oil fields of Galicia (Galicia at the eastern end of the monarchy, not the one in Spain). There’s an underbelly which keeps emerging, really through press reports of another world—the real world, as it were—and is deeply sinister. A figure called Moosbrugger flits through the pages. He has murdered a prostitute, and bits of his trial are constantly being reported. Like most Austrian trials, it goes on and on and on, and it introduces a jarring note into this whole beau monde that these people live in. They’re not really prepared for what’s coming next, but there’s no reason why they should be. So it’s a very interesting series of philosophical essays, sometimes rather nihilistic, sometimes rather cynical, sometimes progressive and altruistic in the tradition of the Viennese positivists. It’s a duology, I believe. It’s the saga of the von Trotta family. You might say it is the absolute incarnation of Habsburg nostalgia. It begins with the father saving the life of the Emperor at the Battle of Solferino in Italy. The army was very loyal—it was Franz Joseph in many ways. Unfortunately, he was very incompetent as a commander. Joseph Roth was Jewish. He believed that the emperor was the cement that held the Austro-Hungarian monarchy together and was the protector of the Jews. This was true. Franz Joseph did not tolerate anti-semitism . There was a famous and significant mayor of Vienna called Karl Lueger, who was a populist and, though elected and re-elected, was rejected three times by the Emperor because of his open anti-semitism. Lueger, in fact, started his political life going round with a Jewish gentleman doing humanitarian works in the poorer suburbs of Vienna. Then he decided—and this was quite common at the time—that the finance sector was entirely in the hands of the Jews and founded his own bank for Vienna. His famous remark was, “I decide who is a Jew.” It was opportunistic and materialistic anti-semitism, and not based on bogus racial mythology as it was for the Nazis. After the period of left-wing government in Vienna in the 1920s and 30s, Austria became what’s called the Ständestaat (‘corporatist state’) in 1934. It was a continuation of Lueger’s Christian Social party, but in a new form and very autocratic. It was like the Estado Novo in Portugal, which Salazar founded. It wasn’t at all nice, and you can’t pretend it was a democracy, but it wasn’t like the Nazis."

"This is the beginning of the arc. It’s set in 1914 and a very different book. Along with Ulysses and A La Recherche du Temps Perdu , some say it’s one of the three great books of the 20th century. It describes events in Vienna in 1914: a group of people prepares for the 70th anniversary of Emperor Franz Josef and the 30th anniversary of Emperor Wilhelm II. Hence it was called The Parallel Action . The main protagonist, Ulrich, struggles to reconcile the enlightenment spirit of rationality within him and the Nietzschean urge for mysticism and spirit. He fails. But he does have an affair with his sister in the process. And numerous discussions between numerous characters, all representing parts of the declining Habsburg Empire. It’s a fantastic illustration of decline and the philosophical conflict of modernity. Viennese life was dominated by this conflict, and the passion with which people engaged in it was extreme. The Wittgensteins were a good example. Karl Wittgenstein became fabulously wealthy and controlled most of the Habsburg steel industry. His sons were incredibly talented, sensitive men. Three of them killed themselves because they couldn’t handle their father’s materialistic inclinations. Like many at the time, they got caught up in a fight between spirit and body. It was a rather melodramatic fad. Young men thought they had to emulate Otto Weininger, the young misogynistic author whose premature suicide in 1903 probably triggered this period of self-destruction."