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Experimenting With Time: Therapeutic Spaces in the German Interwar Novel
Introduction
In a witty, satirical short text from Nachlass zu Lebzeiten (1936), Robert Musil describes the
practice room of a psychoanalyst as a refuge from the chaos of modern life. Safe in the
hands of the “soul-improving expert,” the patient can gently lie down on the couch and
forget about the outside world: “...[I]f the world explodes with all its mechanical energies,
here you find the good old time gently flowing.” (Musil 1987: 107) While in the beginning of
the twentieth century the modern city had become an incomprehensible and alienating
vortex of speeds, motions and energies, in which people no longer knew their place and role,
on the psychoanalyst’s couch everything, even the smallest detail, is charged with meaning.
As Musil writes, life in the modern city was experienced as fragmented and mechanical. The
old, all-encompassing world view, with its gradually unfolding time, had “exploded” into
fragments without unity, but in the psychoanalyst’s room one was sheltered from this chaos,
literally in a safe interior, and “good old time” was once again “flowing” gently like a river
towards the sea.
Musil, who did not believe that Freudian psychoanalysis was a particularly modern theory
but rather an attempt to restore a nineteenth century world view with a traditional view on
the family, presents the practice room of a psychoanalyst as a sheltered interior where
wealthy patients can retreat from the confusion of modern life. It is a well-known argument
that the nineteenth century interior, in which the private life was safely sheltered from the
outside world, had become obsolete in the twentieth century. For example, in his
autobiography Stefan Zweig wrote about his generation: “Each one of us, even the smallest
and the most insignificant, has been shaken in the depths of his being by the almost
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unceasing volcanic eruptions of our European earth.” (Zweig 1964: xvii) In a short piece,
Musil observed that “doors are a thing of the past.”. (Musil 1987: 59) In the twentieth
century, it was no longer possible to keep the “interior” (whether of the house or of the
individual) separated from the “outside”, with its unsettling forces, overturning every form
of order.
In the German literary production of the beginning of the twentieth century, therapeutic
spaces (sanatoria, psychiatric hospitals, therapist’s offices,…)1 were commonly and
prominently used as the setting of the novel or of a crucial scene. We can find this in
important novels such as Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg (1924), Robert Musil’s Der Mann
ohne Eigenschaften (first two parts 1930), Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) or
Elias Canetti’s Die Blendung (1935). In all four cases, a real-life model was used for the
therapeutic setting in the novel which had great significance for the author. Mann used the
Schatzalp sanatorium in Davos, in which he and his wife had spent time in 1912, as the
model for the sanatorium in Der Zauberberg. Musil used the manicomio in Rome, which he
visited in 1913, as the model for the scenes set in a psychiatric hospital in Der Mann ohne
Eigenschaften. After a mental breakdown, Franz Biberkopf, the protagonist of Berlin
Alexanderplatz, is confined to the psychiatric hospital Buch, where Döblin worked as part of
his training as a psychiatrist. Finally, Canetti, who lived across the Steinhof psychiatric
hospital in Vienna2, used his observations of the inmates he daily witnessed for his
descriptions of a psychiatric hospital in Die Blendung.
The sanatorium, the modern psychiatric hospital or the psychiatrist’s/psychoanalyst’s
office are spaces which reflect all the ambivalence and duality which characterizes
modernity, and especially the accelerations of modern development at the beginning of the
twentieth century. On the one hand, these spaces are a product of the newest theories
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about human beings or the psyche. They are cutting-edge places where the newest theories
are tested and implemented. The newest technologies are put to use and modern design
theories adopted to make the therapeutic settings in accordance with the clinical theories
and hypothesis. Several modern psychiatric hospitals which were built in this time were
designed by architectural innovators, such as the Steinhof hospital in Vienna, which was
designed by Otto Wagner. Its design stood in stark contrast with the old, dungeon-like
Narrenturm of Vienna. Similarly, the human wreckage of the First World War caused a boom
in the development of psychiatry as a discipline. Many famous psychiatrists or neurologists,
such as Kurt Goldstein, developed their theories in front hospitals, where they were given
the relative freedom to develop theories and methods to cope with the overwhelming
amounts of shell-shocked soldiers. Different theoretical schools, from psychoanalysis to
neurology or gestalt psychology all took flight in the aftermath of the First World War.
The Narrenturm in Vienna.
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The church of the psychiatric hospital complex Am Steinhof, designed by Otto Wagner.
On the other hand, the increased need for these spaces came out of the large amounts of
people traumatised, disoriented or nervously exhausted by the rapid changes modernity
brought along. The accelerated pace, urbanisation and technological developments, allowing
for war on an unprecedented scale, shook people to the core. The sanatoria, psychiatric
hospitals and therapist’s offices were meant to bring relaxation to the overstrained nerves of
wealthy citizens (Blackshaw and Wieber, eds., 2012). When Walter Benjamin made a trip to
Moscow in 1926, he found his former lover Asja Lacis in a bad state in a sanatorium. In his
Moskauer Tagebuch (1927), he describes his sadness at seeing his love-interest in such a
deplorable state, wearing the required sanatorium-skirt and spending her days with idle
activities (Benjamin 1985). It was the same Asja Lacis who only a few years earlier had fired
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up Benjamin with enthusiasm for the avant-garde spirit of the Soviet Union, with its
unsentimental adoration of machines. This inspired Benjamin to write Einbahnstraβe (1926),
dedicated to Lacis, with its modernist miniatures on topics such as gas stations or
boulevards. This same energetic person, filled with the spirit of progress and
experimentation, was now only a shadow of herself, confined to a drab Moscow sanatorium.
As in Musil’s depiction of the psychoanalyst’s office, these therapeutic spaces were also a
refuge from modernity, spaces to seek shelter from the high tempo and confusing swirl of
modern city life.
While the modern psychiatric hospital or therapeutic space reflects the ambivalence of
modernity, both its innovation and negative impact, it is also a site of experimentation,
struggle and debate. I want to show that the function of these therapeutic spaces in the
interwar German novel is neither that of a space of “retreat” from the complexity of
modernity, as they might seem at first, nor that of a literary analogy for a “society gone
mad,” as the trope of madness is often supposed to convey in literature.3 In times in which
the old, unified world view had been shattered into fragments, including a linear conception
of time or history, these therapeutic spaces are experimental settings where different
responses to the modern fragmentation can be explored. They are not a means to flee from
the present into calmer bygone times, as in the therapist’s office described by Musil. They
are zones where the present situation can be assessed and diagnosed at a more leisurely
manner, and where different possible hypotheses and responses can be explored.
Problematic and pathological responses can be staged and exposed, and the obsoleteness of
older models shown. In the two examples I will explore more in detail, Thomas Mann’s Der
Zauberberg and Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, the protagonists are no longer
able to continue the historical line of their fathers and forefathers. The therapeutic spaces in
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these novels, the sanatorium and the psychiatric hospital respectively, are experimental sites
where this crisis in the experience of time is explored. In the case of Mann, elements of older
temporal regimes are presented side by side with elements of the modern life world, such as
new technologies. In the case of Musil, pathological responses to modern life, such as
redemptive conceptions of time, are exposed and replaced with a more experimental
attitude allowing fragmentation and incompleteness.4
As we will see, both Der Zauberberg and Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften were novels which
were written in response to a crisis of a linear, continuous conception of temporality, as well
as a crisis of the interior, whether the safe interior of the bourgeois home or a more general
conception of interiority separated from outside influences. This crisis of linear temporality
was marked by the fact that people no longer knew how the complex present situation
related to their experience and image of the past and in which direction society was
developing. It is to face this problem that authors such as Mann or Musil turn to the
therapeutic space as a literary device to navigate this crisis of a specific configuration of
temporality and interiority, which in the past had structured the ideal of Bildung. The
therapeutic spaces in these novels are not attempts to erase or evade the problem of the
time, but they can be called “multitemporal,” as Michel Serres called it (Serres and Latour
1995: 60). Contrary to the claims of Marvin Trachtenberg that modern architecture is
‘chronophobic’ (Trachtenberg 2010), erasing time from its design, architectural spaces
contain different temporal layers or different temporal regimes, existing side by side. As the
editors explain in the introduction, multitemporality, for Serres, indicates the relations
between past, present and future. This multitemporal aspect is contrasted with the
temporality of the date or the exact time period. Architectural spaces, including therapeutic
spaces, are not just revealing the features of the present, but they reveal sediments of
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different temporal regimes, traces of the past which can be seen, as it were, in the pleats or
creases of the design. This multitemporal aspect is what makes the therapeutic space so
alluring as a literary device to navigate a time period marked by a crisis in the experience of
time.
The Sanatorium in Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg5
Sanatorium Schatzalp in Davos around 1900.
In the beginning of Der Zauberberg, a novel which explicitly deals with the problem of time,
a crisis in the continuity of time is staged. In a flashback sequence, the protagonist of the
novel, Hans Castorp, recalls his parents and grandparents and their home. Befitting a family
with great wealth, the grandeur of the parental house is described by means of architectural
features and detailed descriptions of luxury objects. But at the same time the design of the
house evokes the impression of belonging to a bygone era, which is becoming an
anachronism in the modern world. Mann writes that Castorp “retained only pale memories
of his parental home.” (Mann 1999: 19) The house, “built in the early years of the last
century, in the northern-classic style of architecture”, was “painted in a depressing weather-
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color.” (19) The house is not described like a home, but like a faded relic from the past. All
the descriptions of the house, including the habits of its inhabitants, come across as oldfashioned. For example: “When they had done, they folded their table-napkins and folded
them in their silver rings – a job at which Hans Castorp never acquitted himself very well, for
they were the size of small tablecloths.” (21)
After dinner, little Hans sometimes followed his aristocratic grandfather into his office,
where he went to smoke a cigar. In the office is a small separated space, an “étagère,” in
which, like in the ‘Holy of Holies’ in a temple, stood cherished objects such as the
grandfather’s cigar case but also a “rococo case in palisander-wood, with yellow silk
stretched behind its glass doors.” (21) Little Hans is delighted when his grandfather solemnly
takes the key which opens the case and its treasures. Mann creates a series of interiors
inside interiors, like boxes containing smaller boxes. The effect is one of a rite of passage, or
entrance in ever-more sacred interiors of a temple or church. Mann repeatedly uses church
metaphors to describe the room. When the grandfather opens the case, Hans smells
pleasant odors which, like church incense, bring him in a dreamy state.
The special case of the grandfather contains, like a Wunderkammer, different special
objects. While all these objects were once the newest and most advanced tools and
technologies, they are now presented unambiguously as outdated, useless and obsolete. The
objects in the case, such as a broken barometer, an album of daguerreotypes or a broken
wind-up figurine, are presented as “fascinating” but also “disused.” The wind-up figure is
described in the following manner: “Once, when you wound him up, he had been able to
leap about all over the table, but he was long since out of repair.” (21) This cabinet of broken
and out-of-use objects creates a Benjaminian effect. Once, these objects were sensational
displays of technological innovation and progress. But now, their fascination mainly consists
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in the fact that they seem to be dysfunctional curiosa from an obsolete, though not so long
ago, era. The last object that the grandfather takes out of the case is what Hans had been
longing the most to see: the family christening basin or baptismal bowl. The revealing of this
silver dish and tray goes along with a story the grandfather “had so often told before.” (21)
The basin, “in the severe taste of the early nineteenth century,” had been in use for hundred
years and was used for the baptizing of Hans’ parents, grandparents and great-greatgrandparents. Of all these people the names were engraved in the bowl, including the name
of Hans. The bowl represents an unbroken continuity and a lineage which Hans was
supposed to continue. It gives him a particular sensation of time, marked by continuity and
persistence: “A familiar feeling pervaded the child: a strange, dreamy, troubling sense: of
change in the midst of duration, of time as both flowing and persisting, of recurrence in
continuity – these were sensations he had felt before on the like occasion, and both
expected and longed for again, whenever the heirloom was displayed.” (23) It seemed as if
up to that point, a continuity of time was possible, an experience of time associated with
sacred spaces and ‘interiors’. The entire experience of going to the special partition of the
office, opening up the case, seeing the bowl and hearing the story of his ancestral lineage
evokes in Hans a religious feeling as if he is entering a sacred space: “That great-great-greatgreat – what a hollow sound it had, how it spoke of the falling away of time, yet how it
seemed the expression of a piously cherished link between the present, his own life, and the
depth of the past! … As he listened to the great-great-great, he seemed to smell the cool,
earthy air of the vault of St. Michael’s or Saint Katherine’s; the breath of regions where one
went hat in hand, the head reverently bowed, walking weavingly on the tips of one’s toes;
seemed, too, to hear the remote and set-apart hush of those echoing places.” (22)
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However, while the bowl represents continuity and persistence, it is also presented as
one of the objects in the case with outmoded, dysfunctional objects that now look pitifully
out of use and obsolete. Something had changed in the experience of the people which no
longer allowed for an experience of continuous time and an experience of space which could
be presented as the interior of a home. Modern life had shattered and fragmented a sense
of continuous, linear time and coherent space, in which the continuation of a certain life
style was possible. The literature of this period is filled with protagonists who are no longer
able to lead the life style of their fathers which they are supposed to continue: from Rilke’s
Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) to Trotta in Joseph Roth’s Radetzkymarsch (1932) or Pasenow in
Hermann Broch’s Die Schlafwandler (1930). These characters knew for certain they cannot
live like their fathers, but they also feel powerless and clueless about how to find one’s place
in a society which was no longer possible to experience as a totality. Hans Castorp, too, is
unable to continue the lineage as it is symbolized by the christening basin. Instead of starting
his career as an engineer, he decides to pay a visit to his cousin in the sanatorium Berghof,
where he will remain for seven years.
In Die Theorie des Romans (1920), Georg Lukács, who Thomas Mann allegedly used as a
model for the character Naphta in Der Zauberberg, famously described the end of a world
view in which the Bildungsroman was possible. The end of this world view with a continuous
sense of time also caused a crisis in the novel. The idea of Bildung arose in the early 18th
century and was strongly colored by a Pietist world view and the secularized forms of these
views adopted by the early Enlightenment. In the process of Bildung an individual gradually
comes to an understanding of his or her place within the general order and the ultimate
coexistence of the individual destiny with the global or divine order. However, the idea of
Bildung not only relied on a religious view of order but also on the closed temporality of
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Christian eschatology. Lukács argued that the Bildungsroman was no longer possible in an
era in which the closed time of Christianity had been replaced with an infinite and openended temporality and futurity (Lukács 1974). In a world in which it was no longer possible
to experience the totality of existence, the individual development of a character in a novel
could no longer function as a picture of the whole of existence. In the words of Patrizia
McBride, the modern novel was “saddled with the impossible task of remedying the loss of
substantive meaning caused by modernity’s open-ended temporality.” (McBride 2013: 236)
It is no coincidence that time becomes such a prominent issue in the novels of this period,
and time is the central topic of Der Zauberberg. Throughout the novel we get reflections and
digressions on time, and more specifically on the problem of narrating time. The section
titled “By the ocean of time” begins in the following way: “Can one tell – that is to say,
narrate – time, time itself, as such; for its own sake? That would surely be an absurd
undertaking. A story which read: ‘Time passed, it ran on, the time flowed onward’ and so
forth – no one in his sense could consider that a narrative.” (Mann 1999: 540) And a little bit
further, Mann writes: “For time is the medium of narration, as it is the medium of life.” (540)
But if time is the medium of narration, or even life, as Mann states, then what are the
consequences of this when the experience of time had been fragmented? Mann indeed
intended to write a novel about time, but as has often been commented in the scholarship
about Der Zauberberg, this posed fundamental problems for the ability of Mann to find a
suitable ending for his novel (Türk 2011, Cohn 2008, Bartram 2004). Scholars have often
noticed that Der Zauberberg combines the features of different novelistic formats. First of
all, it is claimed that the novel contains formal elements of a Bildungsroman, though written
in a time when the possibility of a Bildungsroman is questioned (Bartram 2004, Türk 2011,
Downing 2008). Secondly, the novel has been called a Zeitroman, also by Mann himself
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(Cohn 2008, Türk 2011). Zeitroman refers in this case to two meanings, namely a novel about
time as such and a novel which describes ‘the times’, the complex time period leading up the
First World War and the birth of the Weimar Republic. Thirdly, the novel has been called an
Entwickelungsroman, to avoid the specific connotations of the term Bildung (Downing 2008).
A recurring issue is whether Mann was able to successfully combine these different temporal
aspects of the novel, which all culminate in the ending of the novel, where Hans leaves the
sanatorium for the trenches at the front. The objection is often made that Mann was not
able to bring together the features of the Bildungsroman with the features of the novel as a
Zeitroman (Türk, 2011 Cohn 2008). Different ‘temporal regimes’ exist side by side in the
novel and the ending cannot mend together these different temporal regimes.
When Hans arrives in the sanatorium, he is struck by the fact that the place seems to
induce a different experience of time. The patients spend most of the day doing what is
called a “lying cure,” lying down on comfortable reclining chairs on spacious balconies,
covered with blankets, to breath in the healthy mountain air.6 Simply lying leisurely on a
reclining chair, while reading a book or gazing at the mountains, induces an addictive
slothfulness which makes days, weeks and even, as in the case of Hans, years go by as time
no longer has any meaning. Mann describes extensively how extraordinary comfortable the
rather old-fashioned chair is: “He did not recall in all his experience so acceptable an easychair. The frame – a little old-fashioned, perhaps, a mere matter of taste, for the chair was
obviously new – was of polished red-brown wood, and the mattress was covered in a soft
cotton material; or rather, it was not a mattress, but three thick cushions, extending from
the foot to the very top of the chair-back. There was a head-roll besides, neither too hard
nor too yielding, with an embroidered linen cover, fastened on by a cord to the chair, and
wondrously agreeable to the neck.” (Mann 1999: 67) The balcony was designed to provide a
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perfectly framed mountain view for the people lying down on the chair: “The landscape,
rather severe and sparse, though brightly sunny, looked like a framed painting as viewed
through the arch of the loggia.” (67) This passage seems to suggest that the sanatorium is
indeed an escape from the hectic pace of modern life to a place where time slows down.
Moreover, the setting of balcony with its old-fashioned chair and the view framed like a
painting, suggests the peace and comfort of the old bourgeois interior, serving as a safe
refuge from the hustle and bustle of the world ‘outside.’ This ‘slowing down’ of all activities,
however, has the paradoxical effect of increasing reflection – the title of the chapter is
“Mental Gymnastics”- and an increased sensitivity to impressions.
Patients curing in Davos.
Though at first it seems as if the sanatorium is a space where Hans retreats from the
confusion of modern life, to slow down time and spend 7 years away from the world, it has
in fact a more complex function. The sanatorium is an experimental space where different
hypotheses can be raised, explored and contested. The inevitable problems posed by
modern life can be assessed, in a more controlled setting and with a heightened sensitivity
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(Mann regarded the Steigerung, the rising of the body temperature of the sick person as an
image for the heightened sensitivity of the artist). At the same time, Mann is taking stock of
diverse old theories and world views. Thus, the experimental setting of the sanatorium
encompasses both elements of the most modern and the old, the Medieval mystical theories
of Naphta along the newest medical theories. Elements of the modern, such as modern
technologies, are not avoided in the recluse mountain heights of the sanatorium. Mann
explores poetically the ramifications of the X-ray scanners or the gramophone for the
prevailing conceptions of human beings or culture.
Towards the end of the novel, a gramophone is introduced into the life of the sanatorium.
This “mysterious object” immediately becomes an object of fascination for Hans Castorp
(635). The gramophone is first introduced as a form of entertainment for the patients, like
an attraction at a fair: “Was it some clever artifice, of the same nature as the stereopticon,
the kaleidoscope, or the cinematographic cylinder? Yes – and yet, again, no, far from it.”
(636) The new object is also more than just a witty device or an attraction: “This was no
childish peep-show, like those of which all the guests were sick and tired, at which no one
ever looked after the first few weeks. It was an overflowing cornucopia of artistic enjoyment,
ranging from grave to gay. It was a musical apparatus. It was a gramophone.” (636) The
“new” and “modern” aspect of the gramophone are repeatedly emphasized. It was not just
“that paltry box with a handle to it, a disk and shaft atop and a shapeless brass funnel
attached, which used to be set up on the table outside country inns, to gratify the ears of the
rude with its nasal braying. … With the antediluvian mechanism described above, it had
nothing in common.” (636) The modernity of the new gramophone is emphasized by
temporally distancing it as maximally as possible from the already existing, crude,
“antediluvian” models. By introducing the gramophone, Mann is emphasizing that it is not a
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mere spectacle or device for entertainment, but a technical apparatus which represents a
profound change in the classical topoi of German national identity. In all his works, Mann
strongly associates German culture with music, but the new technical apparatus announces
a new, technological era in which the old views and symbols have to be changed and
updated. As the doctors of the sanatorium introduce the gramophone: “The truly musical, in
modern, mechanical form, the German soul up to date.” (637) While it forms on the one
hand a challenge for “the German soul,” indicating the ‘modernity’ of the gramophone, the
doctors also try to evoke the chauvinist, national feelings by taking pride in German
technological skills: “German make, you know, we do them far and away better than
anybody else.” (637)
The sanatorium in Der Zauberberg is an experimental-literary space where elements of
the modern are introduced, while different aspects (tastes, points of view, styles…) of the
tradition are retained. Thus Mann is able to play with contrasts, assessing the value or
inadequacy of older viewpoints in the face of inevitable modern developments. Mann is not
abandoning tradition or fleeing from the modern, but by means of the setting, he is able to
assess in a literary manner the impact of the modern on the tradition, seeking up the points
of transition, conflict or continuity. This does not happen merely as a struggle of ideas, but
also by exploring the impact of material objects such as the gramophone. As Mann’s Der
Zauberberg is one of the most prominent novels written about the change in the experience
of time, Mann retains different modes of temporality alongside each other, different images
reflecting different time regimes, without being able or willing to integrate them into one
temporal scheme.
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The Psychiatric Hospital in Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften
If the sanatorium serves as the setting for the most of Der Zauberberg, there is only one
chapter in the part of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften as it was originally published which is
set in a psychiatric hospital, and an intriguing chapter draft set inside that same psychiatric
hospital in the many fragments and drafts left behind by Musil after his death. More and
more, Musil scholars consider these fragments to be an essential part of the novel, and not
just the parts published during Musil’s lifetime. While the sanatorium forms the entire
setting for the events in Der Zauberberg, the few scenes set in a psychiatric novel in Der
Mann ohne Eigenschaften reflecting in a condensed and compact manner the issues which
Musil explores throughout the novel.
Similarly to Der Zauberberg, the protagonist, Ulrich, is introduced in Der Mann ohne
Eigenschaften as a figure who is no longer able to take up the life of his father. The beginning
of the novel stages once again a crisis of continuous, linear time, which is expressed in terms
of architectural features. For Ulrich, living the lifestyle of his father would be unimaginable,
which is presented in the beginning of the novel by the inability of Ulrich to live in the house
of his father.7 The house of his father is described as an old-fashioned house, with “three
styles superimposed on one another”. (Musil 1997, vol.1: 15) The house is described as “a
sort of little château with short wings, a hunting lodge or rococo love nest of past times.” (6)
Through the windows, the passer-by could see “the elegant serenity of a scholar’s study with
book-lined walls.” (6) It unambiguously comes across as belonging to a bygone era: “More
specifically, it was basically seventeenth-century, while the park and the upper story showed
an eighteenth-century influence and the façade had been restored and somewhat spoiled in
the nineteenth century, so that the whole had something blurred about it, like a doubleexposed photograph.” (6) Musil is indicating here the layered nature of the architectural
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design, with elements from different temporal regimes layered over each other, beautifully
compared to a double-exposed photograph. The entire beginning of the novel stages the
drastic contrast of modern urban life with the past forms of living, and in this passage, Ulrich
believes that the present requires a completely new style that breaks with the past and that
follows completely different principles, though he does not know what that style should be:
“He was free to follow any principle, from the stylistically pure to total recklessness, free to
choose any style from the Assyrians to cubism. What should he choose? Modern man is born
in a hospital and dies in a hospital, so he should make his home like a clinic. So claimed a
leading architect of the moment; and another reformer of interior decoration advocated
movable partitions in homes instead of fixed walls so that people would learn to trust their
housemates instead of shutting themselves off from one another. Time was making a fresh
start just then (it does so all the time), and a new time needs a new style.” (14-15) Here the
modernist dream is evoked to make a clean break with the past.
When Ulrich arrives in his father’s home in 1913, after having been away for a long time,
the idea that such a home would be his home seems unimaginable. As Musil ironically
writes: it is the house of a man with qualities. After trying to settle into the house, Ulrich
feels out of place: “When it was all done he could shake his head and wonder: ‘Is this life
going to be mine?’ What he possessed was a charming little palace; one must almost call it
that because it was exactly the way one imagines such places, a tasteful residence for a
resident as conceived by furniture dealers, carpet sellers, and interior decorators who were
leaders in their fields. All that was missing was for this charming clockwork to be wound up,
for then carriages bringing high dignitaries and noble ladies would come rolling up the
driveway, and footmen would leap from their running boards to ask, looking Ulrich over
dubiously: ‘Where is your master, my good man?’” (16)
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Ulrich feels as if he walked into a home from an older century, in which everything
perfectly has its place, only it would be a ludicrous idea that Ulrich would take his place in
such an outmoded setting. At a certain moment, Ulrich looks at the hustle and bustle of the
street from behind the window of his father’s house. Musil likes to play with the image of
door- or window-frames. From behind the fixed window-frames of his father’s house, the
world looks like chaos. Ulrich cannot live according to the old life roles, moral beliefs,
symbols and style of the generation of his father. But what should he do instead? Ulrich
chooses to take a holiday of a year to decide what he should do in life. Nevertheless, his
father helps him to become a part of the elite group of aristocrats, businessmen and
establishment figures who want to organize a grand jubilee for the emperor Franz Joseph,
the so called Parallel Campaign.8 Throughout Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften we follow the
chaotic meetings in which this group fruitlessly tries to synthesize the best ideas of their
time or tries to find the one crowning idea which is supposed to represent Austria.
In the beginning of the novel, Musil describes the feeling of confusion and vertigo
surrounding modern life. This is also evoked as a crisis in the experience of time, which can
no longer be experienced as linear: “Time was on the move. … But nobody knew where time
was headed. And it was not always clear what was up or down, what was going forward or
backward.” (7) In Musil’s view, a problematic, even pathological, condition had spread
through society from the end of the nineteenth century. This condition consisted of a feeling
of incomprehension in the face of modernity, compensated by wild, aimless and destructive
behavior.9 It was during a visit to a psychiatric hospital that Musil’s views on the state of
society and the behavior of people was formed. On March 30, 1913, Musil visited a
psychiatric institution in Rome, the manicomio S. Maria della Pietá, also named S. Onofrio
after a church nearby, together with Alice von Charlemont, his mentally unstable friend who
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served as the model for Clarisse in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. What he saw there left a
lifelong imprint on him. This experience, which he described in vivid details in his notebook
7, will form the basis for his evaluation of society in terms of pathology or madness. Geoffrey
C. Howes points out that Musil’s diary does not contain descriptions of well-known cultural
sites, but of visits to sites of medical and psychiatric care as a kind of “modern pilgrimage”
(Blackshaw and Wieber, eds., 2012, 132). Many years later, Musil would incorporate his
impressions during this visit in the chapter Die Irren begrüssen Clarisse (The lunatics greet
Clarisse) of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, which shows that even after many years, Musil
was still deeply impressed by what he had seen. What strikes Musil the most is that the
inmates seem to be caught up in wild, exhausting, mannerisms and gestures, which they
cannot stop from doing, even if this leads them to nothing else but exhaustion and agitation.
Their repetitive gestures, contortions, spasms, reflexes, repeated to the point that it seems
impossible to stop them, wear them out and leave them physically and nervously broken.
Yet, they compulsively make these gestures over and over again, as if it is the only possible
thing to do. But to a spectator, the extreme emotional and physical expenditure of these
inmates seems incomprehensible and absurd self-tormenting.
Musil’s interest in physical details could mistakenly make the reader think that he is
interested in the expressive qualities of psychiatric patients, in the way that Schiele or
Kokoschka were influenced by seeing pictures of contorted patients of the Salpetrière.10
Instead, he finds the agitation of the inmates striking because he saw a similarity between
their plight and the condition society was in. Musil makes this link explicit in the essay from
1913, Politisches Bekenntnis eines jungen Mannes (1913). In this essay, he writes: “An hour
ago, I visited a Roman madhouse… Everything looked to me like the situation we’re in. … In a
cell by himself a naked man was raging; we could hear his screams from far off. … He
20
constantly repeated the same motion, throwing his upper body around with a single jerk of
his muscles, and at the same time always making the same gesture with one hand as if he
were trying to explain something to someone. Screaming something no one understood,
always the same thing. For him, it was probably the important point he had to make clear,
had to hammer into the ear of the world; for us it was pulverized, formless shouting.” (Musil
1990: 36)
The frustrated, compulsive agitation, combined with the total inadequacy and
incomprehension, was for Musil a striking image of the present condition of the world. He
was of the opinion that people were unable to face the present situation and that they
attempted to evade the present by problematic temporal strategies. These ‘temporal
evading strategies’ are: the longing to return to the past (whether a real or imagined past),
the longing for a utopian future moment and the desire to erase all confusion in one swoop
by a redemptive act. In Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, one character, general Stumm,
cynically remarks that he hasn’t heard so much talk about redemption since the religion
classes in his youth. In the way that Musil presents the intellectual climate of the last years
before the war, redemption takes up a crucial, but also a problematic, place: “It was among
the so-called intellectuals that the word ‘redemption’ and its kin came into vogue at this
time. They did not see how things could go on unless a messiah came quickly. Depending on
circumstances, he would be a medical messiah who would redeem the art of healing…, or a
messianic poet capable of writing a drama that would sweep millions of people into the
theaters despite its ineffable sublimity; besides the belief that every kind of human endeavor
needed a messiah to restore it to its pristine purpose, there was of course also the simple
and unadulterated longing for a leader sent to put everything to right with his strong right
arm. The age before the Great War was a messianic age…” (Musil 1996, vol.1: 567)
21
Redemption in this context stood for the longing to completely erase all alienation and
fragmentation and restore a presumed old stability, along with a sense of order and
purpose. If Musil rejected a nostalgic longing for the past, he also rejected the belief in a
utopian, redemptive moment in the future. He strongly denied all historical determinism or
teleology. The necessity that certain people see in the historical events was simply a
necessity they read post-factum in the course of history: “The course of history was
therefore not that of a billiard ball – which, once it is hit, takes a definite line – but resembles
the movement of clouds11, or the path of a man sauntering through the streets, turned aside
by a shadow here, a crowd there, an unusual architectural outcrop, until at last he arrives at
a place he never knew or meant to go to.” (Musil 1996, vol.1: 392) Human existence was not
marked by some kind of iron law of fate, natural rise and decline or destiny, but a chain of
situations.12
As opposed to redemption as a total solution, magically undoing all disorder once and for
all in one blow, Musil adopted an attitude he picked up from his science studies. In the
sciences there are no total solutions, but all knowledge is partial, provisional and open to
further readjustment. He believed that there are no total solutions, only particular ones, and
pleaded for an experimental, inductive ethos in which a sense of possibility is crucial. Musil,
who acclaimed he has been an avid reader of Nietzsche all his life, posits the experimental
ethos of Nietzsche against the usage of Nietzsche to propagate a redemptive belief in the
irrational.
In Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, the character Clarisse glorifies the irrational, which
brings her close to the edge of completely losing her mind. She has an obsession with the
writings of Nietzsche and constantly cites the statements by Nietzsche in which he advocates
the embracing of madness or the irrational. Clarisse wants a redemptive and strongly
22
affective act. She seeks a redeeming figure who could perform such an act, and she gradually
comes to see the character Moosbrugger as such a redemptive figure. Moosbrugger is a
psychotic serial killer of prostitutes, and the trial dealing with his strange and gruesome case
is presented and debated throughout the novel. After Moosbrugger is sentenced, he is
locked up in a psychiatric hospital. It was the strong desire of Clarisse to meet this killer,
about whom she had read and heard so much. In the chapter Die Irren begrüssen Clarisse,
Clarisse, Ulrich and general Stumm are guided through the psychiatric hospital, though they
never get to see Moosbrugger. Comparing this section with the older diary descriptions,
Geoffrey C. Howes remarks that Musil refrains from naming the psychiatric hospital and that
he subtly adapts the architectural descriptions to suggest a similarity with the Steinhof
hospital (Blackshaw and Wieber, eds., 2012, 133-134).
As they are guided through the hospital by doctor Friedenthal , they pass through
different wards separated from each other, with the ward for the dangerously insane as the
innermost ward. However, the temple-like effect of passing through different circles to enter
an ‘inner sanctum’, like Hans Castorp in the office of his grandfather, is displaced by Musil.
The different passages only lead to a rather mundane setting, populated with patients which
are no dantesque grotesques, but simply patients in a deplorable state. Moreover, they
never reach the desired ‘inner sanctum’: the ward with the killer Moosbrugger. The entire
confrontation with Moosbrugger as the supposed climatic core is suspended and displaced
by Musil.
When they first enter the complex, they go via a staircase to a waiting room, which gives
the impression of being old-fashioned: “Clarisse took in every inch of the staircase and the
corridors with her eyes, and even in the little waiting room, with its chairs upholstered in
threadbare green velvet so reminiscent of an old fashioned first-class waiting room in a
23
railway station, her gaze roved about slowly almost the whole time.” (Musil 1996, vol.2:
1061) The entering of the hospital is supposed to be exciting, entering a world of madness
and crime, but to the visitors everything feels surprisingly ordinary. Later they pass through
“cramped and dreary” utility rooms (1063). After going through all this, which feels like a
transition zone, they suddenly find themselves, not in a special ward, but in an open space,
with a completely ordinary road: “It was no different from other such roads, with old wheel
tracks and homely weeds on which the sun was blazing hotly.” (1064) To see such an
ordinary road there comes almost as a shock: “With Clarisse, who was more vulnerable to
the clash of contrasts, the tension shattered in a loud giggle.” (1064) Clarisse had strongly
anticipated this visit, as if it was going to be a redemptive, climactic moment: “And now they
really found themselves inside that world to which Clarisse had felt herself inexplicably
attracted for weeks, not only with the shudder at something incommensurable and
impenetrable, but as though she were fated to experience something there that she could
not imagine beforehand.” (1064) Though Clarisse uses all her phantasy and nearhallucinatory imagination to look at the place, describing the employers in white robes as
“white angels” and romanticizing the drawings of the inmates as special art, the setting is
perfectly plain: “At first there was nothing to differentiate this world from any other big old
park, with the greensward sloping up in one direction toward groups of tall trees, among
which small white villa-like buildings could be seen.” (1064) Instead of finding an exciting
world, she finds the ordinary in all its mundaneness.
Eventually, they enter wards with severely agitated patients, which are described in the
same manner as Musil described his visit to the manicomio: “In this new ward a series of
horrible apparitions crouched and sat in their beds, everything about their bodies crooked,
unclean, twisted, or paralyzed. Decayed teeth. Waggling heads. Heads too big, too small,
24
totally misshapen. Slack, drooping jaws from which saliva was dribbling, or brutish grinding
motions of the mouth, without food or words.” (1064) At a certain moment, a man even
masturbates at the sight of Clarisse (1073). The patients “all seemed to be caught up in a
raging conversation, like alien birds locked in the same cage, each speaking the dialect of its
own island.” (1071)
For Musil, the world inside the psychiatric hospital is a mirror image of the world
‘outside.’ It is not the case that the world inside the hospital is an image of ‘the chaos of
modern life’, or a world completely separated from the modern big city, Vienna in this case.
It is also not a Dantesque mythologized world, something which Musil explicitly disavows in
the chapter (1070). The world in the hospital reflects the clash between the old and the
modern, and the wild contorted gestures of the inmates reflect the ‘symptomatic’ response
of the people in general to this contrast.
The fact that the world inside the psychiatric hospital mirrors the world outside is stated
explicitly in the chapter draft set inside the hospital.13 In this draft Clarisse pays a visit to a
madhouse, where she finds Moosbrugger engaged in a game of cards with a priest and two
doctors. The card game that Clarisse, guided by doctor Friedenthal, witnesses is organized by
the doctors in order to be able to observe Moosbrugger in a more casual setting. The two
doctors at the table strongly disagree on the case of Moosbrugger. Both of them are hoping
to provoke Moosbrugger into a statement that can prove their case. Musil lets the doctors
openly expose the underpinnings of their view, their personal motives and the limits and
blind spots of their discourse, often conflating facts and personal values.14 Howes rightly
analyzes that insanity in Musil’s writings set in a psychiatric hospital comes out of “the
confrontation of systems that make sense on their own terms but are incompatible with
each other.” (Blackshaw and Wieber, eds., 2012, 142) In this draft, Musil lets doctor
25
Friedenthal state explicitly that the scene is a condensed figure for the critique of moral and
epistemological problems which runs throughout Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften: “He sighed,
and added: ‘I sometimes feel as if the windows of this building were nothing more than
magnifying glasses!’” (Musil 1996, vol.2: 1638)
Conclusion
What I have attempted to show in this article is that the prevalence of ‘therapeutic spaces’
in the German novels of the beginning of the twentieth century should be regarded as a
response to a crisis in the experience of time. In Der Zauberberg and Der Mann ohne
Eigenschaften, this crisis of linear, continuous time is staged in terms of architecture. Though
the way these spaces are deployed in a novel can vary widely, from featuring only in a
compact passage such as in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften to forming the entire setting of
the novel such as in Der Zauberberg, they form experimental spaces where the impact of
modernity on the tradition can be assessed and different responses explored. They are not
refuges from modern life to a former life or simply the reflection of the ‘madness’ of
modernity, but they are spaces where the contrast or continuity between the ‘old’ and the
‘new’ can be navigated. This navigating process happens by means of descriptions of the
design and spatial lay-out of buildings or the materiality of objects. The layered temporalities
in the descriptions of the medical spaces make them a perfect literary device to describe the
vicissitudes of temporal experience in the beginning of the twentieth century, and, even
stronger, allowing for a form of suturing of different temporal regimes. Thus in de
descriptions of the sanatoria or psychiatric hospitals, elements of both the modern and
tradition will be found alongside each other and aspects of different temporal regimes exist
next to each other. Der Zauberberg and Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften are two prominent
26
novels written after the First World War about the period before the war. Both have evoked
the reaction of being rather anachronistic because they look back on a time period which felt
to be a bygone era, which was drastically obliterated by the war. Mann and Musil wanted to
counter the view that history could only have developed in one course, leading to war.
Instead, by means of medical spaces, they wanted to tap into different temporalities, both in
the years before the war and in the time of publication, countering the view that war was
inevitable. Mann and Musil avowed a strong influence of Nietzsche on their work and the
sanatorium and the psychiatric hospital allows them to explore untimely forces in the years
before the war, in which the relations between past, present and future can be reconfigured
in a literary manner.
Notes
1
For more about the politics of illness and spatiality in medical spaces in Europe, see
Eschenbruch, Hänel and Unterkircher, eds., 2010, and Blackshaw and Wieber, eds., 2012.
2
The full name is Lower Austrian State Provincial Institution for the Cure of the Mentally and
Nervously Ill ‘am Steinhof’.
3
For examples, see Blackshaw and Topp, eds., 2009 and Sass 1992.
4
As Georg Lukács had argued, the demise of the old world view and the old conception of
time caused a crisis in the modern novel, especially in the function of the ending (Lukács
1974). It is no coincidence that in each of the novels mentioned here, the author was
struggling to find a suitable ending for the constantly expanding novel.
27
5
For a good overview of the popularity of sanatoria in the end of the nineteenth and
beginning of the twentieth century, see “Travel to the Spas: The Growth of Health Tourism in
Central Europe, 1850-1914” by Jill Steward (in Blackshaw and Wieber, eds., 2012, 72-89).
6
Nicola Imrie has shown that these sanatoria were often built in the style of grand hotels, to
attract visitors from a wealthy social class and to create a specific milieu in which they would
feel at ease (Blackshaw and Wieber, eds., 2012, 58-71).
7
In the Viennese literature and theory of this period, a critique of the prevailing style was
common. For a good overview of the problem of style in nineteenth-century Vienna, see
Janik and Toulmin 1973.
8
Specifically, the members of the Parallel Campaign prepare the celebrations of the
seventieth anniversary of Emperor Franz Joseph’s coronation, which was supposed to take
place in 1918, hoping to outdo the similar German plans to commemorate the thirtieth
anniversary of their Emperor Wilhelm II’s reign. Of course, that seventieth anniversary would
never take place because of the collapse of the empire in the First World War.
9
For more about this, see De Cauwer 2012, 2014.
10
For more about this, see Blackshaw and Topp, eds., 2009.
11
For a theoretical analysis of Musil’s usage of clouds, see Serres 1979.
12
The strict rejection by Musil of all forms of eschatology and teleology does not come as a
surprise if we consider the strong influence of Nietzsche on his thought. In Morgenröte,
Nietzsche describes what happens when people are finally freed from teleological thinking:
“We have reconquered our courage for error, for experimentation, for accepting
provisionally… And it is precisely for this reason that individuals and generations can now fix
28
their eyes on tasks of a vastness that would to earlier ages have seemed madness and trifling
with Heaven and Hell. We may experiment with ourselves!” (Nietzsche 1982: 501)
13
As with all the fragments, it is unclear what Musil ultimately wanted to do with the
chapter (integrate it into the novel, change the draft or simply not use it all). Nevertheless,
the many fragments left behind after his death are now considered to be a part of the
complex text which is Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften.
14
For a good analysis of this fragment, see McBride 2000.
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