The German Genius

was that a whole era was coming to an end, and that heroes were not the answer. For Mann, modern man was self-conscious as never before.
    Thomas Mann has often been compared with Hermann Hesse—and as often contrasted. They were introduced in 1904 in Munich by Samuel Fischer, the publisher. They kept in touch all their lives, exchanging numerous letters, but only became real friends in the 1930s. Their careers had parallels and differences. Hesse cut himself off and remained more or less in one place in Switzerland; Mann moved on, and on. Mann was in favor of World War I, at least to begin with; Hesse opposed it, his “pacificist duet” with Romain Rolland during that time earning him as many enemies as friends. Both flirted with Jungian ideas and both won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
    Hesse was a headstrong child and fiercely solitary, not much engaged with the world (other than his writing), and his first two marriages ended in failure. 15 He was a prolific author (seven novels, numerous volumes of poetry, 3,000 reviews; he edited fifty volumes of literary classics and wrote 35,000 letters). Many of his works are autobiographical, none more so than Steppenwolf ( Prairie Wolf ) which he began in the year The Magic Mountain appeared. It was published in 1928 and tells the story of Hans Haller (the same initials as Hesse himself), who leaves the manuscript of a book he has written to a chance aquaintance, the nephew of his landlady. When he reads the book (the book-within-the-book) the nephew finds that, magically, part of it is addressed directly to him. The book is about personality and human nature and whether we are one self or more than one and whether inner coherence is possible, even in principle.
    It was a theme eerily paralleled (but in a very different way) by Robert Musil. His three-volume work, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften ( The Man without Qualities ), the first volume of which was published in the same year as Steppenwolf , is for some people the most important novel in German written during the last century, eclipsing anything by Mann or Hesse.
    Born in Klagenfurt in 1880, Musil came from an upper-middle-class family, part of the Austrian “mandinarate.” He trained in science and engineering and wrote a thesis on Ernst Mach. The Man without Qualities is set in 1913 in the mythical country of “Kakania,” clearly Austro-Hungary, the name referring to Kaiserlich und Königlich, or K. u. K. , standing for the royal kingdom of Hungary and the imperial-royal domain of the Austrian crown lands. The book, though daunting in length, is for many the most brilliant literary response to developments in other fields in the early twentieth century. There are three intertwined themes that provide a loose narrative. First, there is the search by the main character, Ulrich von…, a Viennese intellectual in his early thirties, whose attempt to penetrate the meaning of modern life involves him in a project to understand the mind of a murderer. Second, there is Ulrich’s relationship (and love affair) with his sister, with whom he had lost contact in childhood. Third, the book is a social satire on Vienna on the eve of World War I. 16
    But the real theme of the book is what it means to be human in a scientific age. If all we can believe are our senses, if we can know ourselves only as scientists know us, if all generalizations and talk about value, ethics, and aesthetics are meaningless, as Wittgenstein tells us, how are we to live? asks Musil. At one point Ulrich notes that the murderer is tall, with broad shoulders, that “his chest cavity bulged like a spreading sail on a mast,” but that on occasions he felt small and soft, like “a jelly-fish floating in the water” when he read a book that moved him. In other words, no one description, no one characteristic or quality, fits him. It is in this sense that he is a man without qualities: “We no longer have any inner voices. We know too much these days; reason tyrannises our lives.”
    Franz Kafka was also fascinated by what it means to be human and by the battle between science and ethics. 17 In 1923 , when he was thirty-nine, he realized a long-cherished ambition to move from Prague to Berlin (he was educated in the German language and spoke it at home). But he was in the Weimar Republic less than a year before the tuberculosis in his throat forced him to transfer to a sanatorium near Vienna, where he died, aged forty-one.
    A slim, well-dressed man