HeyJaredAttempts to Find Robert Musil
Around 1923 Musil planned to publish a collection of his essays under the title, "Versuche einen anderen Menschen zu finden" (Attempts to Find Another Human Being).
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- Sep 14, 2026
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- Jul 4, 2026
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Musil’s Answers to: Writers, Publishers, and Public: A Poll, 1913 (opens the original)
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Musil often contributed his answers to polls of writers and public intellectuals. This one is in response to the George Müller publishing house, and was included in a bound volume published in 1914. The questions seems to have been generally about the relationship between writers, publishers, and the public, a theme about which Musil had very strong opinions. Writers, Publishers, and Public: A PollA writer who is favored by the public today has an average income of a hotel director; in very rare
“Essay Books” by Robert Musil (opens the original)
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Essay BooksOne can choose suspenseful precariousness over certainty; as thinkers, the piquant natures are usually nasty characters. For not wanting to know something that could be made certain, merely to have a beautiful idea, is basically as plumply bourgeois as denying facts to protect someone’s feelings. The most minor mathematical dissertation necessarily has a better spiritual standing than the random work of Schelling or Eucken or any other blender of brain and feeling.Nevertheless, the ma
“The Pilgrimage Within” (opens the original)
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One of Musil’s many admirable character traits was his ability to find something interesting or praiseworthy even in writers or situations he generally contemned or ridiculed. In general, and over and over again in The Man Without Qualities, he is ceaselessly dancing around certain themes and ideas in the most subtle differentiations and shadings of perspectives. A hair’s variation can mean the difference between an ecstatic affirmation of something, someone, an idea or feeling and a harrowing c
“Penthesiliad” (opens the original)
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Published anonymously in Franz Blei’s Der lose Vogel in 1912PenthesileadUndeniable: the appearance that the trend is moving in a different direction. It suffers—already palpable after its first steps—from the pure gravity of the crudest requirements, such as a demand for a right to intellectual work and political powers. These needs have obviously been merely imagined, but their fault is that they have been imagined badly. There are no forces of intellectual nature determined by their goals (or
The Enchanted House (opens the original)
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There is so much to say about this story, published in 1908. Musil later reworked it considerably, changing much, adding much, leaving much out, for his story “The Temptation of the Quiet Veronika” for his 1911 Unions book. In both versions we are dealing with a young woman, loosely based on his soon-to-be wife Martha, or at least one side of her—perhaps an alternate version of what she might have become, had her early experiences left her traumatized rather than open, experimental, sensual. The
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