The Man Without Qualities

In brief

Ulrich is thirty-two, in Vienna, in August 1913, and has tried being a cavalry officer, an engineer and a mathematician. He decides to take a year’s leave from his own life. His father gets him attached to a patriotic committee, the Parallel Campaign, which is preparing to celebrate seventy years of Franz Joseph’s reign in 1918 and is looking for a great idea to do it with. The reader knows what happens in 1914 and 1918. The committee does not.

That is the comedy, and it runs for a thousand pages. Then Ulrich’s father dies, Ulrich meets the sister he has not seen for years, and the novel turns into a very strange love story and a thought experiment about whether a different way of feeling is possible. Robert Musil worked on that second half for the rest of his life and died in 1942 without finishing it. The English quoted on this page is my own gloss of the German.

The argument

Everything starts from chapter 4, whose title is the book’s axiom: “Wenn es Wirklichkeitssinn gibt, muß es auch Möglichkeitssinn geben.” If there is a sense of reality, there must also be a sense of possibility. Someone who has it does not say that this or that has happened; he says “Hier könnte, sollte oder müßte geschehn”, here something could, should or ought to happen. Musil treats this as a faculty, as real as an engineer’s, and asks what a person who took it seriously would be like. The answer is Ulrich, and the trouble with him is the trouble with the idea. A man who sees that everything could be otherwise cannot commit to any of it, and a civilisation made of such men is unlikely to prevent anything.

So the title is a diagnosis and not an insult. Modern people, Musil argues, have more qualities than ever, but those qualities belong to their professions, classes and nations, and no longer to anyone. Chapter 39 has the formula: “Ein Mann ohne Eigenschaften besteht aus Eigenschaften ohne Mann”. Against this he sets a series of hopeful experiments, none of which he believes will work: the utopia of exact living, the utopia of essayism in chapter 62 (treating each life as a trial rather than a conclusion), and later what he calls the other state, the mystical condition that Ulrich and Agathe try to reach together. My own view is that the first half of the book is the masterpiece and the second is the reason it matters. The satire is easy to love. The attempt to think precisely about feeling, and its failure, is what no other novel has tried on this scale.

The shape of the book

Part I, Eine Art Einleitung, chapters 1 to 19. A Sort of Introduction. Ulrich, his friends, his failed careers and the trial of the murderer Moosbrugger.
Part II, Seinesgleichen geschieht, chapters 20 to 123. Pseudoreality Prevails in Wilkins and Pike, The Like of It Now Happens in Wilkins and Kaiser. The Parallel Campaign, Diotima’s salon and the arrival of Arnheim. It ends with a riot, a walk home and a telegram.
Part III, Ins Tausendjährige Reich (Die Verbrecher), chapters 1 to 38. Into the Millennium (The Criminals). Ulrich and Agathe bury their father and alter his will, and the campaign drifts on around them. Chapter 38 is the last that Musil published. Its title says “Ein großes Ereignis ist im Entstehen. Aber man hat es nicht gemerkt”: a great event is taking shape, but nobody has noticed.
What comes after. Everything else is posthumous, and in Frisé’s edition it is longer than all of Part III.

The opening shows the method. It gives the weather over the Atlantic in meteorological language, then concedes “Es war ein schöner Augusttag des Jahres 1913.” A fine August day: the plain sentence is offered as a slightly old-fashioned way of saying what the science says. Then a lorry hits a man, and the chapter’s title has already told you “Woraus bemerkenswerter Weise nichts hervorgeht”, from which, remarkably, nothing develops. A later chapter is headed “Ein Kapitel, das jeder überschlagen kann”, one anybody can skip.

The state of the text

No one has read The Man Without Qualities as Musil would have finished it, because there is no such book, and every edition after 1933 is an editor’s decision. The layers are these.

1930. Volume 1, Parts I and II, Rowohlt, Berlin, 1,074 pages. Published by Musil.
Dated 1933. Volume 2, Part III to chapter 38, Rowohlt, 605 pages, delivered in December 1932. Published by Musil, and everything he ever saw through to book form of this novel.
The galleys. A further twenty chapters, numbered 39 to 58, reached proof stage and were due to appear in spring 1938. The annexation of Austria that March ended the plan and sent his publisher Gottfried Bermann Fischer into flight. Musil went into exile in Switzerland and kept rewriting them.
Geneva, 1940 to 1942. The last fair-copy drafts, replacing chapter 47 onwards, end at chapter 52, “Atemzüge eines Sommertags”, Ulrich and Agathe lying in a garden as blossom drifts past. This is where the writing stops in the sense that matters.
1943. His widow Martha Musil had a third volume of 462 pages printed in Lausanne, with the galley chapters, drafts of the final chapters and notes.
1952 and 1978. Adolf Frisé’s editions for Rowohlt drew on far more of the papers. The 1952 volume ran to 1,672 pages with new fragments. The revised 1978 text puts the posthumous material in a separate part of over a thousand pages. Its arrangement is Frisé’s work and has no authority from Musil.
Since then. A Rowohlt CD-ROM of the papers in 1992, now hard to run; the Klagenfurt edition on DVD in 2009, edited by Walter Fanta, Klaus Amann and Karl Corino, with transcriptions and facsimiles; and a print collected edition from Jung und Jung beginning in 2016.

The plans went on changing. In the mid-1930s drafts there is an outline headed “Eine Art Ende”, a sort of ending, with Ulrich returning to find mobilisation in the air, a scene in the asylum and a final session of the campaign. There is also a journey, long planned as the book’s turning point, on which brother and sister consummate their love and learn that the state cannot last. Musil kept pushing it back and left it an unrevised fragment. His biographer Corino reads the galleys as committing neither author nor characters to any particular continuation, and Inka Mülder-Bach has described them as a garden of paths that can no longer reach an end. The common apology is that he ran out of time. He had twelve years, and was still moving away from the ending he had. The thread had been cut by the book’s own argument.

The voice

The narrator writes like an engineer who has read everything: exact, ironic and patient, preferring a long, clean, conditional sentence to any scene. His description of Austria-Hungary, which he calls Kakanien after k. k., kaiserlich-königlich, is the most famous thing he wrote. There, he says, “immer nur ein Genie für einen Lümmel gehalten, aber niemals, wie es anderswo vorkam, schon der Lümmel für ein Genie”: only a genius was ever taken for a lout, never, as elsewhere, a lout for a genius. He also admires an untranslatable Austrian phrase, “Es ist passiert”, roughly it just happened, in which disasters lose their weight.

The thought that drives the form comes on Ulrich’s walk home in chapter 122. He realises that what people long for is simply “der erzählerischen Ordnung”, narrative order, the plain sequence that lets you say “Als das geschehen war, hat sich jenes ereignet!”: when that had happened, this took place. Everyone lives by the “Faden der Erzählung”, the thread of the story. Ulrich has lost it, and so, from about here, has the book.

The people

Ulrich

A brilliant, strong, cold, attractive man whose surname is withheld out of consideration for his father. He is the book’s intelligence and, I think, a warning.

Agathe

The sister, who meets him at their father’s house, each of them in a Pierrot-like pyjama, as if they had agreed it. She is leaving a husband, Professor Hagauer, and in Part III she alters their father’s will to spite him. She is the only person who makes Ulrich want anything.

Diotima

Ermelinda Tuzzi, wife of a senior diplomat, Ulrich’s cousin and the soul of the campaign, whose salon generates spiritual vagueness at an industrial rate. Eugenie Schwarzwald’s Viennese salon is the usual model.

Paul Arnheim

A Prussian industrialist and “Großschriftsteller”, a Great Writer, who speaks of soul and buys up oil interests. Walther Rathenau is the usual original, and the portrait is merciless. Arnheim is Ulrich’s rival because he has every quality and means none of them.

Count Leinsdorf and General Stumm

Leinsdorf is the aristocrat presiding over the campaign, sure of his principles and baffled by the century. Stumm von Bordwehr is the book’s most lovable figure, a round little soldier who tries to bring military order to the world of ideas and in chapter 100 invades the State Library to find out which idea is the most important.

Walter and Clarisse

Ulrich’s friends: he a failed artist, she in love with Nietzsche and moving, chapter by chapter, towards madness. Her fixation on Moosbrugger ties intellect to violence.

Moosbrugger

A carpenter who has murdered a prostitute, on trial and then in the cells. Musil gives him some of the most disturbing and inward pages in the novel, and Ulrich the sentence that matters: “wenn die Menschheit als Ganzes träumen könnte, müßte Moosbrugger entstehn”, if mankind as a whole could dream, it would have to produce Moosbrugger. He is what all that reasoning is standing on.

How it was made

Robert Musil was born in Klagenfurt in 1880 and raised largely in Chomutov and Brno, where his father held a chair in mechanical engineering. Military school gave him his first novel, Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß (1906). He trained as an engineer, took a doctorate in Berlin in 1908 on Ernst Mach, and married Martha Marcovaldi in 1911. He served as an officer in the First World War, during which, on a visit to Prague in 1916, he met Kafka. The novel grew from drafts begun around 1919, whose titles survive: Der Spion, Der Erlöser, Die Zwillingsschwester. It made him respected and left him poor. Thomas Mann, asked in 1932 to name outstanding contemporary novels, cited only this one, and a Musil Society was founded in Berlin that year on his initiative.

The Nazis banned his books. In 1938 he and Martha, who was Jewish, left for Switzerland, where he lived on the help of a few patrons and went on revising. He died of a stroke in Geneva on 15 April 1942, aged sixty-one. Eight people came to the cremation, and Martha scattered the ashes on Mont Salève.

What is free where

The German in the EU. Musil died in 1942, so his text has been out of copyright in life-plus-seventy countries, including the Czech Republic, Austria and Germany, since 1 January 2013. Musil Online, run by the Robert Musil Institute at the University of Klagenfurt, is an open-access edition of all of it: the volumes of 1930 and 1933, the galleys, the Geneva chapters, the 1933 to 1936 drafts and the pre-1930 versions, under the textual responsibility of Walter Fanta. All German on this page was matched against it. Projekt Gutenberg-DE is a second legal copy of the text, in Germany.
The German in the US. The answer differs by volume. The 1930 volume entered the US public domain on 1 January 2026. The second volume, published abroad in December 1932 and dated 1933, and the 1943 Lausanne volume appear to remain protected there for ninety-five years from publication, so until the start of 2028 or 2029 and the start of 2039 respectively. Posthumous material first printed later could run longer. Readers in the US should treat Musil Online as lawful where it is hosted, and not assume the same at home beyond Part II.
The English. Neither translation is free. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser’s three volumes appeared from 1953 into the early 1960s; Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike’s two came out in 1995. They are books to buy or borrow, and this page does not quote them.

Readers and critics

Serious attention began only after Frisé’s 1952 edition, and Wilkins and Kaiser’s English followed soon after. One long argument since is over whether the ending could ever have been written; another is over how to edit papers with no last intention. In English, Michael Hofmann’s review of the 1995 translation called Musil by far the least read of the great European novelists of his generation, and set him beside Gibbon, Voltaire and Wilde. Roger Kimball called it a great work of modern satire. Both are right as far as they go, but the satire is what the book is trying to get beyond.

Afterlives

There is no standard film. There is a twenty-part radio play, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Remix (2004), with Manfred Zapatka and Ulrich Matthes among the voices, and Nicolas Mahler made a 156-page comic version in 2013. Volker Schlöndorff filmed Törless in 1966, which is as close as cinema has come. Alberto Arbasino connected Musil’s procedures to Fellini’s 8½, and Milan Kundera’s essays on the novel made him part of a central European canon alongside Broch.

How to read it

Read Parts I and II as a novel. The 123 chapters are short and each is a small essay with a joke at its end. Read a few at a time.
Treat Part III as a different book. It slows and deepens. Chapters 11 and 12, the “Heilige Gespräche”, are the way in.
Read the posthumous material selectively. Start with the galleys, then “Atemzüge eines Sommertags” in the Geneva version, and stop there. The notes are for later.
In English, use Wilkins and Pike. It alone includes the posthumous chapters and hundreds of pages of drafts. Wilkins and Kaiser is admired for its fluency but has none of the posthumous chapters. In German use Musil Online, or a print edition by Frisé or Jung und Jung for its annotation.

Robert Musil, Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß (1906). The short first novel, in German on Project Gutenberg, and free in both the EU and the US.
Hermann Broch, The Sleepwalkers (1931 to 1932). The other great philosophical novel of the collapse, ending in an essay on the disintegration of values.
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (1924). The same run-up to 1914 with a sanatorium in place of a committee; Musil felt its priority keenly.
Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March (1932). The same empire with love instead of irony.
Italo Svevo, Zeno’s Conscience (1923). Another Habsburg subject, in Trieste, cheerfully failing to be cured of possibility.