Forgotten Treasures: A Symposium

Robert Musil’s “The Man Without Qualities” evidences a penetrating, fascinating, entrancing intelligence. And withal a true novel: It is through his characters’ situations that Musil achieves a matchless existential diagnosis of our century. Everything is there: the rule of a technology beyond human control, turning mankind into statistical figures; omnipresent bureaucracy seizing hold of lives; speed, idolized as a supreme value; the previous century’s romanticism transformed into ubiquitous kitsch; exaggerated sympathy for criminals as a mystical expression of the religion of human rights (Clarisse’s passion for Moosbrugger); infantophilia and infantocracy, whose stupid smile casts light on the callousness of the technological era.