1 - Early Philology and Existentialist Readings

Summary

Es ist wohl der Typus einer Verfallszeit, einer

Zivilisationsepoche. Wobei als Ursache des

Verfalls anzusehen wäre, daß die Zeit nicht

mehr einheitlich umspannt werden kann.

(TB I, 354)

MUSIL'S WORKS WERE rediscovered after the Second World War in an atmosphere of profound despair about the nature and direction of European society. Musil's picture of “Kakania” had already foretold not only the decline of old European society, but also the decay of the values on which that society had been built. For this reason, the substructure on which Musil's portrait of the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had been based — Nietzsche's analysis of a retrograde cultural development called nihilism — also shone through in the early postwar period when skepticism about the prospects for Europe was at its greatest extent. If Kakania delivered proof of a nihilistic strain in old Europe that reached back at least as far as the last decades of the nineteenth century, and possibly, as Nietzsche thought, much further, it was also the attitude struck by the individual in response to such nihilism that spoke directly to the first postwar generation of Musil readers and scholars. This attitude — a kind of ironic aloofness toward the monumentalist project of old Europe — was expressed by the desire of the eponymous hero of the novel to subsist “without qualities,” where “qualities” meant the values preordained by the Kakanian collective, which, by definition, were already thoroughly compromised.