German Literature ~ 1900 - 1945 Archives - Page 3 of 6

Diving into the Past: Günter Grass’s Cat and Mouse

I visited Lübeck in July 2015, a few months after Günter Grass had passed away. I was there to visit Thomas Mann’s museum as part of a trip that also took me to Husum, Theodor Storm’s hometown, but since Grass had his own museum and I had time, I decided to drop in. Walking around inside, unable to understand the German on the walls, I did at least manage to enjoy Grass’s drawings and countless photos of undersea wreckage. I gathered that this was something to do with his 2002 novel, Crabwalk, and bought a copy of it as a trophy and memento. Unlike my unread copy of The Tin Drum, I’ve actually dragged myself through Im Krebsgang twice, and will probably read it a third time. I didn’t particularly enjoy it, but it’s easier to write on what you know, and I’ve exams to prepare for.

I cheated with Cat and Mouse because I read it in translation. However, I now think this was a good decision. I was able, for the first time, to meet Grass without my faulty German acting as an untrustworthy intermediary. Grass is often considered the most important German-language writer since the Second World War, and I wanted to see what the fuss was about. Cat and Mouse is a short novel about the past, about Germany’s horrific past, and individual lives within it. It takes us into wartime Danzig and follows a single figure, Joachim Mahlke, through the eyes of a friend. From the warplanes above on the first page the atmosphere is ominous. All the more so because for most of the book we don’t know why we need to hear this story. But as readers, we suspect the narrator has something bothering him, something only half-acknowledged.

Grass's illustration for the first edition of Cat and Mouse, showing a cat wearing an Iron Cross medal — Grass, who was also a talented artist, did the covers for all of his books. The Cat here, with its wonky eyes and Iron Cross, is a little unnerving.

Childhood in a Time of War

Cat and Mouse begins in Danzig a short while into the Second World War – the novel is technically second in a loosely connected trilogy of works by Grass, after The Tin Drum and before Dog Years, but it can certainly be read separately from them. Our main characters are schoolchildren, rather than adults, which gives us a different perspective on the War from what’s typical. Yes, there are planes overhead, but the War’s impact on the children is indirect at best, at least at first. The children compare notes on various warships from rival powers, and they dive in a sunken Polish minesweeper to dig up trinkets.

Real violence seems far away. The opening scene describes a successful attempt by the narrator, who is suffering from toothache, to get a cat to pounce on Mahlke’s oversized Adam’s Apple, which the narrator calls Mahlke’s “mouse”. Beneath the planes, toothache and pranks are the order of the day. The principal of their school is “high party official”, but for the kids he is first and foremost a principal. The magic of childhood is not destroyed by the War so much as slightly distorted. Words like “up to” when describing time hint at later difficulties, while the knowledge of warfare is perhaps disturbing, but at least early on in Cat and Mouse we are given the impression that all is well in their world.

Two Worlds

But there are two worlds at play here, not one. Cat and Mouse as a title reflects a division between two antagonistic beings, one stronger than the other. In practice, this refers to German society at the time, and Mahlke himself. Mahlke is an oddball. He is a Catholic, like the narrator, but his Catholicism is distorted by a strange worship of the Virgin Mary beyond what is acceptable. He doesn’t fit in with his peers either. When the boys go out to the minesweeper, most of them sit on the deck and sunbathe, while Mahlke usually exception dives down alone in search of treasure.

This underwater world is Mahlke’s world. His “light-blue eyes… filled with curiosity only under water”, and Mahlke builds himself a base in part of the boat where water has not reached. Nobody else has ever reached his hideout, which requires lung capacity beyond their own. Like Mahlke’s mind – Cat and Mouse has very little direct or reported speech – the hideout remains hidden from us. In it he stores the trinkets he finds, such as a small Polish virgin and a gramophone. It is a strange hobby, Mahlke’s “fanaticism” for diving, but it provides him with “a goal in life” completely disconnected from matters above water, from the War. For even Mahlke’s perception of the world is strange – we learn that “Great events were shaking the world just then, but Mahlke’s time reckoning was Before learning to swim and After learning to swim”.

War and the classroom

War does eventually break into the classroom, but slowly. A teacher is arrested and students are questioned. Then there is a lieutenant who returns and gives a talk, describing his experience in the air force cheerily as “some merry-go-round” and “pretty much the same as in the old days when we played handball in our good old recreation yard”. But of course, such a speech has been doctored for the schoolchildren, and only briefly do other emotions and darker thoughts break through the humour and lightness, such as when the speaker mentions “some that couldn’t take it”. And when the speech is finished, the narrator informs us casually that “he had graduated from our school in ’33 and was shot down over the Ruhr in ‘43”. The children do not notice what we, who are older and wiser, know to look out for.

Mahkle’s Other Goal

Another time a lieutenant commander comes and Mahlke, for reasons unknown, steals his medal and stows it away in his hideout while the man is supervising their gym class. Guilt then gets the better of him and he confesses the theft to the principal. He is then summarily expelled and sent to a different school. There, Mahlke develops a plan to recover his honour – he plans to come back to his initial school to give a speech, and the only way to do that is through fighting. He joins the army and disappears. The narrator is a little way behind, picking up scraps of information about his friend but little concrete information.

When they meet again, Mahlke is already a hero, but the two of them are unable to connect. Their language fails them. The narrator keeps repeating himself. And Mahlke isn’t given permission to speak at the school either – rules are rules, the principal reminds him. Mahlke, who was no patriot, learns that it was all for nothing.

Form and Structure

Cat and Mouse is interesting at least as much because of its form and structure as because of its story. From the very first words, “…and one day”, we are thrust in media res into the story, and this leaves us with more questions than answers. We do not learn, at least at first, why the narrator is writing, except obliquely, when he says he “ha[s] to write.” And he is speaking just as much as he is writing. Cat and Mouse is an oral story, which raises questions, later answered, about who is listening. When we write, we can be writing for ourselves, but when we speak, we demand something more – judgement, or perhaps support.

Cat and Mouse follows Mahlke and not the narrator. All the same, the narrator, who consciously hides himself, is just as much of an enigma as his quarry. Each chapter seems like a fragment of some longer dialogue, wrenched out of thin air, and many begin with questions, or ellipses to indicate this fragmentation. There are also, occasionally, moments where the long paragraphs split up into short, single-sentence paragraphs, such as:

“What’s the matter with him?” / “I say he’s got a tic.” / “Maybe it’s got something to do with his father’s death”.

These moments, where other characters seem to speak together, remind me of a Greek chorus. Everyone is trying to understand Mahlke, but nobody can. Cat and Mouse’s fragmentary search through the past is partially a quest to reconstruct him from the boy whose legend as “The Great Mahlke”, the amazing diver, has displaced the underlying reality. But there’s much more going on here than that.

An old photo showing the Danzig waterfront around 1900 — Danzig, modern day Gdansk in Poland, was once quite the beauty. Grass grew up here, and the city is the setting for his “Danzig trilogy”, consisting of The Tin Drum, Cat and Mouse, and Dog Years.

Literature after Auschwitz – Cat and Mouse and Memory

Cat and Mouse is, like Ian McEwan’s Atonement, an attempt to reformulate and re-evaluate the past so as to come to terms with it. The narrator is cagey because he feels he has a hand in Mahlke’s ultimate fate, a hand he’s unwilling to acknowledge. The odd comment, like when he says “I alone could be termed his friend”, speaks to a kind of guilt. As the novel progresses, the narrator becomes ever so slightly more open, describing “this gloomy conscience of mine” and mentioning his conversations are with a “Franciscan Father Alban” without getting to the point of ever saying what exactly hangs over him until the very end.

In truth, the narrator is obsessed by Mahlke, because he is unable to escape his guilt – but nor can he face it directly. At the very end of the novel, in the climax scene, Cat and Mouse briefly shifts into the third person – “Pilenz shouted: “Come up!””. The narrator – whose name is Pilenz – is even ready to use linguistic trickery to distance himself from his actions.

Theodor Adorno, one of the major German critical theorists of the 20^th century, wrote that to write poetry after Auschwitz is “barbaric”. Paul Celan, a German-language poet, revised that by suggesting that poetry written after Auschwitz can only be worthwhile if it is about Auschwitz, directly or indirectly. Both of these thoughts reflect a central preoccupation in German-language literature after 1945 – that of guilt, and how to deal with it in writing. Günter Grass, in his autobiographies, confessed to being an enthusiastic member of the SS, but we shouldn’t let that get in the way of thinking about Cat and Mouse. Rather we should read Cat and Mouse in light of Celan’s comment. It is a book that is deliberately reflective, looking back into the past from an unspecified point in the future, and not trying to find answers so much as to atone.

It is not an easy process. The fragmentary nature of the book, as I suggested above, makes it feel like it is compiled from a much greater source. And while on a literal level, this source is the narrator’s chats with the priest, on another level Cat and Mouse records just an individual instance of a general project, that of the German people’s coming to terms with their complicity in violence and horror during the Second World War and Nazi Era more broadly. Cat and Mouse is a book of obfuscations, feints and trickery, but this is not because of the narrator’s bad conscience so much as the challenge of actually truly coming to admit responsibility when every part of you begs you to go on hiding from it.

Pilenz, the Narrator of Cat and Mouse

But questions remain, and Pilenz, the narrator of Cat and Mouse, is at their centre. I’ve avoided using his name just as he avoids it. He only tells us it halfway through the novel. Just as he consciously hides his guilt so too does he consciously hide himself: “I’m not going to speak of myself, my story is about Mahlke”. But sentences like this only further draw our attention to him.

I don’t feel I have all the answers here, or at least an interpretation I can give to what I’ve read that makes sense, but I’ll do my best. Here are the basic facts: Pilenz lives with his mother. His father is away fighting, and an older brother too. The brother, who was the favourite child, dies, and at home he daily bears witness to his mother’s infidelity. It is not a happy life. Other examples, such as a sexually abusive priest from his youth, come up in passing.

I think Pilenz is consumed by guilt, both for his responsibility in Mahlke’s fate, and for his own life’s course. He mentions travelling to Nazareth and Ukraine in search of a way to live. “I should be able to believe, to believe something, no matter what, perhaps even to believe in the resurrection of the flesh” – these are his hopes, but not the reality. After the War, after the destruction, Pilenz has no spiritual centre. He is lost and cannot find himself. In telling Mahlke’s story he is not trying to tell his own so much as save it, to give himself a chance to find the meaning he longs for. We can only guess as to whether he succeeds.

Conclusion

“Who will supply me with a good ending?” Pilenz asks in the final chapter. Reading Cat and Mouse it is obvious that there cannot be a happy ending here. The very absence of a happy ending is the motor that keeps Pilenz talking and us reading. We want to understand what ending we will get, and what Pilenz’s role in it is.

This blurry but nonetheless embarrassing photo of me is the only one I have from my time in the Grass museum.

I think I probably liked Cat and Mouse. It is short and focused, and I found its structure interesting and ideas worth thinking about. I enjoyed the connection between diving into the underwater world of Mahlke’s minesweeper and the Pilenz’s “diving” into the past to try to reconstruct their friendship. Overall, I can readily recommend the book to people who think it all sounds interesting. But I can’t say I enjoyed it on a human level. The characters weren’t endearing, and the message of guilt and atonement felt rather too closely bound with its era to be engaging on a personal, rather than intellectual level. But that’s just me.

Musil’s Three Women – Grigia, The Lady from Portugal, and Tonka

There are some books which, when I take my notes from page to screen, seem more interesting and more enjoyable than they had been as I was reading them. Robert Musil’s Three Women is such a book. Three Women is interesting – I got awfully excited by the thought of all the essays I’ll be able to write next year on it – but it’s not exactly fun to read. Musil takes three different relationships and uses them to weave an intricate network of ideas and associations which provide an intellectual feast for anyone who hungers for one, built on workable plots.

This is, of course, progress for Musil, whose two stories Unions were also in my edition. These were written earlier, and as Frank Kermode writes of Three Women in the preface to my edition, “the difference from the earlier work could be expressed as a new willingness to find a place in his stories for straight narrative”, which is about as open as any serious literary critic could be about the fact that those two stories make no bloody sense whatsoever, however interesting they might be for someone who has got lost on the way to the philosophy section of the library.

Anyway, as I said at the top, now that I’ve extracted my notes, I can start to “appreciate” the stories. What follows is a teasing out of some of the various meanings I found.

A photo of Robert Musil — Robert Musil, author of *Three Women.* His most famous work is the unfinished *Man without Qualities*. However, it’s rather long and I’m not sure I like his writing enough to attempt it just yet.

Three Women and Robert Musil

There are three stories in Three Women, each of them centring on a different woman – “Grigia”, “The Lady from Portugal”, and “Tonka”. The last of these, “Tonka”, as about twice as long as the others, and is also broken up into chapters to make it easier to read. Robert Musil, their author, was an Austrian-German who had seem the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapse, but as Kermode makes clear, this is not the only collapse he witnessed. There is also the sense of “metaphysical collapse”, a sense that modern man (and everyone else) is losing his spiritual anchoring without replacing it with anything. In all of these stories the notion of “will” is of great importance, as is the feeling that looking at the world from only one angle, whether scientific or martial, can lead to our doom. Pretty typical Modernist stuff, to be fair, but Musil does it well.

Grigia

“Grigia” is the first story in Three Women and it takes its name from a peasant woman from Venetia. Homo, the main character, is left home alone by his wife and ailing son as they seek out treatment, so he decides to take up an offer from an old friend to go and attempt to reopen some gold mines in Venetia. Mines are a particularly German setting, taking us back at once to the Romantics. Novalis had studied mining, and Ludwig Tieck’s “The Rune Mountain” and E. T. A. Hofmann’s story “The Mines at Falun” both present classic renditions of the dangers of what lies buried beneath the ground. Of these three, I found “The Mines at Falun” to be the most relevant while I thought about “Grigia”.

In Musil’s story Homo, in an alien mountainous world, begins going “native”. As usual, we have to ask whether that nature has always been there. Homo has an “impression that behind the outward appearance of this district… there was hidden something that he yearningly awaited”; meanwhile, crystals from the mountain are compared to flowers. “Yearningly” and the connection with flowers (also present in Hofmann’s tale) speak to a kind of sexual desire that is hidden, not-fully-acknowledged, within Homo. When the gold starts to flow, Homo finds the attraction of power and wealth too, blotting out memories of his old life. Stars become like “thalers”, and in the villages “they poured out money among the people and held sway like gods”. Homo and his companions, the other mining directors, stop talking as time passes, instead adopting “an animal language”. Power takes away their civility and leaves them beasts.

The first page of Musil's Grigia, the first story in Three Women — The first edition of “Grigia”, the first story in *Three Women*. I quite liked “Grigia” but I wish Musil had focused more on straight narrative.

This power is a temporary state, of course, contingent upon the gold’s flow. “Grigia”, as do all the stories of Three Women, has at its core questions about identity. This is where Musil’s use of sex and eroticism comes in. The peasant women’s husbands all go to America in search of fortune there, and one day Homo hears a story about one who comes back. He goes to one woman, spends time with her until he runs out of money, and then he leaves to the next one. He has been in America and knows the husbands, letting him imitate them. The women do not object, perhaps do not even notice. They are simply glad of his return. Eventually the trickster is caught, but the story speaks to the idea that one can change one’s role at will. For Homo, far from home, the idea is an attractive one.

It is attractive because it absolves him of responsibility. For one going “native” the only possible danger, so long as one stays where one is, is the possibility of guilt. Thinking about everything as acting is much easier. When Homo starts having sex with the peasant women, the language reflects his feeling that everything is in a way unreal, even though in fact it’s a further indication of his moral decline. Of one, he thinks “her passion was so brilliantly and passionately acted”, with a “theatrical quality of it”. And from this a kind of solipsism emerges, the necessary continuation of his growing sense of power. He thinks the women are there for him, and comes to find everything on the mountains as an “enchanted world ordained for him alone”. When he gets close to the peasant woman Grigia, he thinks it will bring him spiritually closer to his wife.

Perhaps it does, but reality intervenes. A vengeful husband traps Homo and Grigia in a cave, but only Grigia has the willpower to escape. Homo, already having had his pleasure, stays where he is. At that moment the mining stops, a failure. To me the story ultimately suggests the dangers of delusions, the need to have a firm grip on things. The need for a kind of spiritual centre. And since Homo’s name isn’t a far cry from Homo Sapiens, perhaps Musil’s message may be meant for us all.

The Lady from Portugal

The second story of Three Women is “The Lady from Portugal”. Unlike the other two stories in Three Women this one is set in the past, in the Alps on the border with Italy during the time of the earlier Holy Roman Empire. Its central characters are the Herr von Ketten (Man of the Chains), a nobleman, and his wife, a Portuguese lady. As with the other stories, the focus here is on identity. The Herr von Ketten is part of a long lineage of warriors, and his entire identity is based on war. For one year of their lives his people court their wives in faraway lands, and for the rest they fight. The Herr von Ketten’s sworn enemies are the forces of the Bishop of Trent. However, the real tension here is between von Ketten and his wife. Can they ever know each other or get close?

The Lady from Portugal imagines, when she reaches the castle, that the Alpine landscape reflects her husband’s character. She hears a story about how no-one has ever seen beyond the mountains, because every time someone sees past one row of peaks, another lies in wait. It is the same with identity – we may think that we know a person, but there is always another layer to be discovered. The castle itself is not to her taste – she finds it hideous, rotting, but she decides to try to make it her own. Meanwhile, her husband has already abandoned her to go to war. Thus begins their period of separation.

They meet, of course, but rarely. When he returns, he leaves “more hastily than was necessary”, and they both end up laughing awkwardly. She tends to his wounds, performing her duty as wife, but for both of them it becomes a comic action. For von Ketten, she is something outside of war, and thus alien. He has no power over her – she is as if from “some other realm.” War, by contrast, is much easier. Instead of the woman’s complexity, “To command is a thing of clarity”. “The thrust of a spear under an iron collar that has slipped is as simple as pointing one’s finger at something and being able to say: This is. This.” The spear and his finger are connected – for von Ketten there’s scarcely a difference.

He enjoys war because it doesn’t require “that other thing” – women. In fighting, his entire life can be focused on one thing. And indeed, it almost seemed to me that the war von Ketten fights is a war against multiplicity, against women. It is key that the Bishop of Trent is described as wearing “womanish robes” – if von Ketten can destroy him, it’s like he can destroy the presence of women in his life. For the Lady there are also challenges. Her children, which have not seen the sea, do not seem like her children to her. When the two meet she’s almost thankful for the brevity of these meetings – “If he had remained longer, he would have had to be truly as he was.” Things are easier because they are acted, rather than felt.

Von Ketten cannot hide from his wife forever. When the Bishop of Trent dies naturally both sides make peace, leaving von Ketten without the cornerstone of his identity. On the way home he is stung by a fly and almost dies. He suffers fevers and a surgeon. This latter is already a challenge to his old world view – “How strange it was to let pain be inflicted on one and not defend oneself”, he thinks. He drifts between death and life but eventually decides to live, but he doesn’t fully recover. His head has shrunk and his cap no longer fits. He has literally lost a part of himself without war.

At home the Lady from Portugal has a guest – a friend from her homeland. For von Ketten what is unbearable is seeing what real closeness can actually look like. “Their souls seemed to be in harmony with each other”, and when he spies them in the garden “among the leaves the shadows all blurred into one”. He starts to second-guess the past, finding evidence for betrayal everywhere. But he is sick, and a soothsayer tells him he will be cured only when he’s “accomplish[ed] a task” – what task, she doesn’t say. Now, just as once she couldn’t understand him, he cannot understand her. “When he gazed into his wife’s eyes, they were like new-cut glass, and although what the surface showed him was his own reflection, he could not penetrate further” – once again, an image of layers.

One day a kitten appears. At first beloved by all, it later gets ill. All three nobles try to take care of it. Ultimately, they fail and send it away, but it comes back well. When it falls ill again they have it killed. Ketten now decides it is time to get rid of the Portuguese guest. But “he could not make the final decision that he had all his life found it so easy to make”. Something has changed, and killing is no longer in his nature. All the same, one night he climbs onto the castle’s rocks to try to catch his wife and guest together. As he does so, his strength returns. But the man has already vanished. His wife explains: “If God could become man, then He can also become a kitten”.

Through this experience of jealousy and care von Ketten moves on from war to a kind of love.

Tonka

“Tonka” is the last story of Three Women, and the longest. It tells the story of a relationship between a young man from the middle classes and a peasant girl, Tonka. As ever, we are made to think about notions of identity. Tonka is a girl who is like “a snowflake falling all alone in the midst of a summer’s day” – she is always out of place. Moreover, she is hard to pin down, always associated with liminality. For instance, her full name is the German “Antonie” but the shortened form comes from the Czech “Toninka”; in addition, her family is made of an aunt “who was actually her much older cousin” and a grandmother who is actually the grandmother’s sister.

The young man brings her into his household as a nurse for his own ailing grandmother. Tonka is not intelligent – she mostly just says “yes” or “no”. Her mind has an “opacity” to it because she cannot express herself. By contrast, the young man’s relatives are all talkers. They know that speech is “not a medium of thought, but a sort of capital, something they wore like jewellery to impress others”, even if their speech is empty. When the grandmother dies, Tonka doesn’t cry – she doesn’t understand the need to fake emotions. His mother berates the young man for being “out of place” when he tries to help Tonka – his relationship doesn’t conform to the strictures of his class. But at the same time, the young man is part of his class – he gets annoyed when something reminds him of Tonka’s earlier life, when she worked in a shop.

Eventually, Tonka and the young man go to Berlin. They were unable to stay with the family. The young man doesn’t want to become like his mother, forced to carry on a relationship in secret. He and Tonka are now in love, though it is a strange love: “He loved Tonka because he did not love her, because she did not stir his soul, but rinsed it clean and smooth, like fresh water. He loved her more than he himself believed.” Tonka is simple, but she is not stupid. Even to the young man she reveals hidden depths, such as when she tells him about chemistry she has remembered, “like pretty stones whose names one does not know, kept in a box!” For a time, all is well. After some difficulty, “suspended between emotion and theory”, they have sex. And then she gets pregnant.

A painting of a seated woman — Egon Schiele, “Edith Schiele in gestreiftem Kleid sitzend”. In “Tonka” there is a great tension between who Tonka says she is and what reason dictates she must be. For the rational, scientific young man who is her partner, the gulf between the two is too great to overcome.

Tonka gets pregnant while the young man is away on a journey. There are two possibilities – either an immaculate conception, or infidelity. The young man is a man of science, but Tonka, “impervious to his reasoning”, is a force of her own. She is from “a world that does not know the concept “truth””. She grows ill, her skin peels away, “letting the peasant skeleton peer through the skin.” By contrast, the young man’s “well-bred face” better survives hardship. Illness seems to reveal who they really are. Money grows tight, and the young man’s forced to turn to his mother. But he has broken the unwritten codes – the family alludes to “amorous acts” that Tonka uses to control him. There are none. They simply cannot understand Tonka’s simplicity.

The young man becomes superstitious just as he becomes suspicious, but at the same time his personality splits. Part of him, the superstitious and suspicious part, is Tonka’s lover – the other is a scientist. And as the relationship worsens, the science improves. He stops shaving because he thinks it helps the relationship, only wears a certain ring. When he tries to confront Tonka with the scientific and medical irrefutability of her infidelity, “all she could do was to vouch for the truth of her words with the truth of her whole being.” There is more than one type of truth in the world. But for the scientist it is a torment to have no certainty. Even though he’s sure she’s betrayed him, this feeling is like a “dream” – they are real only while we experience them. Later we see their flimsy construction.

He starts dreaming. His dreams come as warnings that his work is not his true life. He has a repeated memory of disbelieving in religion as a boy and trying to button up his coat during a frost only to find the cold has numbed his fingers. Tonka ends up in the hospital. The young man is unable to tell her “I believe you” – he cannot face the consequences of those words for his worldview. Eventually she dies, without hearing those words. Only then does the young man appreciate that deep inside her “there is a part of her that remains untouched by all this” – where infidelity is irrelevant because it is not a part of her truth. But it is too late. Unlike Herr von Ketten, the young man is unable to save his love. His need for rational certainty has cost him everything.

Conclusion

I have written too much. All the same, I hope this piece gives an idea of why Musil is an interesting writer and Three Women is an interesting collection. At least when you’re looking to write an essay. Musil’s Modernist concerns in Three Women – the shifting nature of identity and the dangers of a worldview that is too focused on one thing – remain pertinent in our own time, as does the importance he sets upon having an appreciation for the possibility of spirituality and irrationality as an antidote to looking at the world in only one way. Unfortunately, I’m still not sure I actually enjoyed reading Three Women. Even though I found parts of it touching, especially the descriptions of an unusual love in “Tonka”, most of Three Women was just too intellectual for my tastes, like Musil’s Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, which I looked at here.

But still, it’s probably worth checking out Three Women. These stories are much shorter than The Man Without Qualities and may help you decide whether that book’s for you. If you enjoyed the piece or have read Three Women and think I seriously have misinterpreted the stories (I probably did), do leave a comment.

Robert Musil’s Posthumous Papers of a Living Author

Robert Musil’s novel, The Man Without Qualities, is the perhaps the foremost German-language contribution to the exceedingly long and perhaps overly cerebral modernist genre, otherwise the domain of Ulysses and In Search of Lost Time. Why the German-speakers and their works have never been as popular as those of the English and French is a complicated and thorny subject. Musil’s magnum opus, at least, is hurt by the fact that its author departed this life before he had completed it – though he managed over a thousand pages, so perhaps we shouldn’t complain. The Man Without Qualities is, according to critical wisdom, the best thing Musil wrote. However, lacking unlimited time, I decided to try a few of Musil’s other works, to get a feel for him. My first attempt is Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, a collection of creative non-fiction and short stories. Below are my thoughts.

An old photo of Robert Musil, author of Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, looking dapper. — Robert Musil, author of *Posthumous Papers of a Living Author,* is most famous for his *The Man Without Qualities.* He was born in Austria Hungary in 1880 and died in Switzerland in 1942, his work almost forgotten. Only recently has he found much popularity in the English-speaking world, thanks to new translations.

Of Flies and Worms

The first thing I noticed about Posthumous Papers of a Living Author is that it is a book populated with animals. I don’t know if Musil was a vegetarian, but I had the impression as I read that he had great sympathy for animals, regardless of whether he ate them. I think in them he saw a reflection of our own human selves in the modern era. Fears about mechanised slaughter and technology-driven control, and about the destruction of individuals under the treads of science and social pressures, he expresses through his non-fiction, in particular the pieces “Flypaper” and “Fishermen on the Baltic”.

“Flypaper”

“Flypaper”, the first of these little pieces, describes the killing of flies. We begin with a basic scientific and factual description of the paper in question – “Tangle-foot flypaper is approximately fourteen inches long and eight inches wide; it is coated with a yellow poison paste and comes from Canada”. But this beginning is deceptive, for Musil starts to work in his argument immediately after it. The structure of the piece is simple, describing in only two or three pages the process by which flies are killed by flypaper: they land, they try to fly, and then at last they lose their strength and die. Such a description would hardly affect us if Musil had left it like that. But instead, he uses language to draw us into the fly’s struggle, and make us aware of its brutal nature. And in this verbal magic, not even the form can remain neutral.

Part of this comes through metaphors and similes. Although “Flypaper” is short, it is packed with images. And these images are invariably, consciously, human. Entangled flies are like “the mountain climber”, like “the man lost in the snow”, like “the hunted man” – all this within a single, long, sentence. Musil’s use of multiple images within a single sentence makes the particularly human nature of his images hard to avoid noticing. Then there is his use of “we”, not often but just often enough for us to know that the fly’s struggle is much like our own. Musil’s language is also startlingly colloquial at times, like when the flies “take a breather and try again”. Where technical, scientific language would push us away from the fly, Musil’s particularly casual style does the opposite.

A photo of a fly — As annoying as houseflies are, it still pays, so argues Musil in “Flypaper”, to have an awareness of what they go through when we kill them. It might teach us something about ourselves.

And so the fly dies, and by this point we are almost on its side. We have been made aware of its human qualities. And the attention that Musil gives to it, showing in detail how it tries to escape only to lose its strength and collapse, also alters our view of the fly’s death. By breaking down “flies land and die” into its component parts, by defamiliarizing the process of death, Musil turns the flypaper into something abhorrent, and the fly’s struggle into tragedy. When we learn, in the final sentences, that though the fly stops moving, nevertheless there is “some tiny wiggling organ that still lives a long time”, that “it opens and closes, you can’t describe it without a magnifying glass, it looks like a miniscule human eye that ceaselessly opens and shuts” – when we learn all this it’s hard not to feel horror and shock.

“Fishermen on the Baltic”

What “Flypaper” does for flies, the third piece in Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, “Fishermen on the Baltic”, does for worms. But here Musil alters the approach. In “Fishermen on the Baltic” we focus on fishermen preparing worms for fishing. At first they are “an obscure, mouldy, enticing ugliness in the clean white sand”, but then the men take them, cut them into pieces, and put them in their equipment chests. It is “a very tidy operation”, one where Musil uses the passive voice to further distance the fishermen from their slaughter.

But, as Musil himself hints at the end of the piece, “you have to pay close attention”. (It’s hard not to read this as a command for the reader concerning the text, even as it’s ostensibly about the worm-preparation). Take the placing of worms on hooks by the men, “as carefully as nurses to make sure that each hook gets a worm”. Nurses do not aim to kill people. The image, while fitting on one level – nurses and fishermen need steady hands – is repulsive once you go beneath the surface.

“Fishermen on the Baltic” is even shorter than “Flypaper”, but there is still a lot going on here. We should admire the skill of the fishermen’s craft, but Musil wants us to think also about its cost. The worms are killed mechanically while the fishermen banter. Perhaps there is something of an allegory for fascism here. Posthumous Papers of a Living Author was published in 1936, but I haven’t been able to work out when this particular piece was written. Nonetheless, we have a sense of the worms’ ugliness, a sense that they are only useful for us as objects for fishing and not as living beings in themselves. Perhaps it’s not too much of a stretch?

Cultural and Other Declines

Posthumous Papers of a Living Author is not only concerned with modernity’s crushing effect on the individual – it’s also a record of various sorts of decline that Musil saw taking place around him. Partially, this decline is linguistic. Musil is concerned with the way that language, through advertising and overuse, is losing its meaning. In a piece like “It’s Lovely Here”, Musil takes aim at the clichés of postcards. In “Monuments”, Musil connects the fate of monuments in Europe – ignored, or at best used for directions – with the broader cultural decline. If only they used the new tricks of advertising – “Goethe’s Faust is the best!” would be a great inscription for a statue to the German instead of something so boring as a name and date.

Often, language is simply unable to convey its idea. In “Boardinghouse Nevermore”, Musil notes that words like “harmony” are useless at showing what to the naked eye is obvious. This points to a deeper problem: that people assume, with the encroachment of scientific language into everyday speech, that everything can be explained and translated. Such a view ultimately takes the “magic” out of life. Musil, unlike most writers, had actually had a scientific and technical education – nonetheless he understood the dangers of adopting an overly-scientific worldview. In “Can a Horse Laugh?” this is treated with humour. At first an “acclaimed psychologist” is quoted – “…for animals don’t know how to laugh or smile”. Musil, however, spends the rest of the essay arguing against this through the example of a stable boy and his horse. Personal experience defies the scientist. But we shouldn’t blame the horse for proving him wrong.

Snobbery and State of Consciousness

Against this sense of linguistic decline there are a few attempts here to fight back. In addition to “Flypaper”, there are other stories that make us revaluate the world through taking us into different consciousnesses. “Maidens and Heroes” amusingly puts us inside the head of a canine, while “Clearhearing” shows us the world through the eyes and ears of a convalescent. “Binoculars” makes us think about the way we look at things by showing us, through careful descriptions, a zoomed-in version of the world. Musil’s inventiveness is at times really quite impressive.

However, while Musil’s linguistic ventures can be interesting, the cultural criticism is often less so. The advertising criticism of “Monuments” is just about okay, but in something like the “Paintspreader”, talking about talentless “genre painters”, Musil comes across as simply a snob. In “Surrounded by Poets and Thinkers” he asks the question of why writers don’t write long books anymore, and comes to the conclusion that it’s because the reading public are idiots. There is more to the essay than this – it ultimately is about our loss of belief in experts, and the way that as a result we know longer trust each other. In the end, Musil writes, someone whose views are completely awful will be able to gain popularity simply because everyone has an equally poor claim on respect. It’s a timely point, but one overshadowed by the condescending tone. Musil is no egalitarian champion himself.

A monument to Musil, showing a bust on a granite column. — A monument to Musil. While I’m going to read more of him, I can’t help but feel like overall *Posthumous Papers of a Living Author* was a mixed bag. At times it was fascinating – what I wrote about “Flypaper” and “Fishermen on the Baltic”, for example – but at others it was overly intellectual, snobbish, or dull. Photo by Albrecht Conz / CC BY-SA 3.0 DE

Conclusions

I only spoke about a few of the things from Posthumous Papers of a Living Author in this post in part because I ended up having more to say about them than I’d expected – indeed, I had to cut and compress whole themes from my plan. However, another reason I did not speak about many other of the pieces is because, quite frankly, they didn’t leave a great impression on me. Posthumous Papers of a Living Author was, in its author’s words, a “little stop-gap book”, and as a result the quality is very uneven. At times, Musil’s language is fantastic and inventive, while at others it falls victim to modernist overindulgence.

I also think that the ideas of Posthumous Papers of a Living Author are not all equally interesting either. Perhaps I am just jaded, having read more than my fair share of modernist literature, but a lot of Musil’s moaning about cultural and linguistic decline and related matters, however relevant his complaints remain in our own day, just strikes me as picking on easy targets. The fact remains that identifying problems is the first step towards solving them – not the only one. I got the impression that Musil can’t quite pick a side between being art-for-art’s-sake or being engaged with the world, and it hurts these pieces at times.

Overall, Posthumous Papers of a Living Author suffers from much the same problems that Alfred Döblin’s Murder of a Buttercup did – it’s sometimes intellectually satisfying, but it forgets to touch the heart. At its best, Musil seems a worthy precursor to Borges. But unfortunately that isn’t the case often enough. I can only hope that his other works will be more consistent.