Switzerland was meant to be a staging-post en route to a home offered by Martha’s daughter in the United States, but the entry of the United States into the war put paid to that plan. Along with tens of thousands of other exiles, they found themselves trapped.

‘Switzerland is renowned for the freedom you can enjoy there,’ observed Bertolt Brecht. ‘The catch is, you have to be a tourist.’ The myth of Switzerland as a land of asylum was badly damaged by its treatment of refugees during World War Two, when its first priority, overriding all humanitarian considerations, was not to antagonize Germany. Pointing out that his writings were banned in Germany and Austria, Musil pleaded for asylum on the grounds that he could earn a living as a writer nowhere else in the German-speaking world. Though allowed to stay, he never felt at home in Switzerland. He was little known there; he had no talent for self-promotion; the Swiss patronage network disdained him. He and his wife survived on handouts. ‘Today they ignore us. But once we are dead they will boast that they gave us asylum,’ remarked Musil bitterly to Ignazio Silone. Depressed, he could make no headway with the novel. In 1942, at the age of sixty-one, after a bout of vigorous exercise on the trampoline, he had a stroke and died.

‘He thought he had a long life before him,’ said his widow. ‘The worst is, an unbelievable body of material — sketches, notes, aphorisms, novel chapters, diaries - is left behind, of which only he could have made sense.’ Turned away by commercial publishers, she privately published a third and final volume of the novel, consisting of fragments in no hard and fast order.

 

Musil belonged to a generation of German intellectuals who experienced the successive phases of the breakdown of the European order between 1890 and 1945 with particular immediacy: first, the premonitory crisis in the arts, giving rise to the various Modernist reactions; then the war and the revolutions spawned by the war, which destroyed both traditional and liberal institutions; and finally the rudderless post-war years, culminating in the Fascist seizure of power. The Man without Qualities — a book to some extent overtaken by history during its writing — set out to diagnose this breakdown, which Musil more and more came to see as originating in the failure of Europe’s liberal elite since the 1870s to recognize that the social and political doctrines inherited from the Enlightenment were not adequate to the new mass civilization growing up in the cities.

To Musil, the most stubbornly retrogressive feature of German culture (of which Austrian culture was a part - he did not take seriously the idea of an autonomous Austrian culture) was its tendency to compartmentalize intellect from feeling, to favour an unreflective stupidity of the emotions. He saw this split most clearly among the scientists with whom he worked, men of intellect living coarse emotional lives. The education of the senses through a refining of erotic life seemed to him to hold the most immediate promise of lifting society to a higher ethical plane. He deplored the rigid sexual roles that bourgeois mores laid down for women and men. ‘Whole countries of the soul have been lost and submerged as a consequence,’ he wrote.

Because of the concentration in his work, from Young Törless onwards, on the obscurer workings of sexual desire, Musil is often thought of as a Freudian. But he himself acknowledged no such debt. He disliked the cultishness of psychoanalysis, disapproved of its sweeping claims and its unscientific standards of proof. He preferred a psychology of what he ironically called the ‘shallow’ — that is, experimental - variety.

Both Musil and Freud were in fact part of a larger movement in European thought. Both were sceptical of the power of reason to guide human conduct; both were diagnosticians of fin de siècle Central European civilization and its discontents; and both assumed the dark continent of the feminine psyche as theirs to explore. To Musil, Freud was a rival rather than a source.

His preferred guide in the realm of the unconscious was Nietzsche (‘master of the floating life within’, as he called him). In Nietzsche Musil found an approach to questions of morality that went beyond a simple polarity of good and evil; a recognition that art can in itself be a form of intellectual exploration; and a mode of philosophizing, aphoristic rather than systematic, that suited his own sceptical temperament. The tradition of fictional realism had never been strong in Germany; as Musil developed as a writer, his fiction became increasingly essayistic in structure, with only perfunctory gestures in the direction of realistic narrative

 

Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törless (Verwirrungenare perplexities, troubled states of mind; Zögling is a rather formal term, with upper-class overtones, for a boarder at a school) is built around a history of sadistic victimization at an elite boys’ academy. More specifically, it is an account of a crisis that one of the boys, Törless (his first name is never given), experiences as a result of participating in the deliberate humiliation and breaking down of a fellow student, Basini, who is caught stealing. The exploration of this inner crisis, moral, psychological, and ultimately epistemological, rendered largely from within Törless’s own consciousness, makes up the substance of the novel.

In the end Törless has his own breakdown and is discreetly removed from the school. Törless’s sense is that he has weathered the storm and come through. But it is not clear how far we are intended to trust his newfound confidence, since it seems to be based on a decision that the only way of getting along in the world is not to peer too closely into the abysses opened up in us by extreme experience, particularly sexual experience. The single glimpse we are allowed of Törless in later life suggests that he has become not necessarily a wiser or a better man, merely a more prudent one.

In later life Musil denied that Young Törless was about youthful experiences of his own, or even about adolescence in general. ‘The reality one is describing is always only a pretext,’ he said, meaning (one presumes) that the action of the novel was simply a vehicle to allow him to explore a certain state of mind.