Robert Musil

Robert Musil (Klagenfurt, 1880 - Geneva, 1942) was an Austrian writer working in German, known for novels, short stories and plays. His unfinished masterpiece, The Man Without Qualities, follows the moral and intellectual decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire through the eyes of Ulrich, a former mathematician who never quite engages with the world around him. It is generally regarded as one of the central modernist novels of the twentieth century.

Born into a family of engineers with minor noble status, Musil spent his teenage years in military boarding schools at Eisenstadt and Hranice. That experience shaped his first novel, The Confusions of Young Törless (1906), a harsh account of cruelty among adolescents in a military school. He first trained as an engineer, then turned to philosophy and psychology at the University of Berlin, where he completed a doctorate on the physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach, whose ideas stayed with him.

For a time Musil worked as a librarian and as an editor for the Berlin journal Die neue Rundschau, while writing stories about love and relationships, gathered in Unions (1911). He served in the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War and afterwards took a civil service post in the new Austrian republic before devoting himself fully to writing. His prose, marked by psychological analysis and irony, returns again and again to reason, feeling and the crisis of Enlightenment values. He defended science and rational thought, but he distrusted narrow rationalism and the cult of feeling, and he opposed authoritarianism on both right and left.

After the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938, he went into exile in Switzerland, partly because of his wife's Jewish origins and partly because of his political opposition to the regime. He died in Geneva in 1942, in serious financial difficulty, leaving his great novel unfinished. Today his work is read as a key document of European modernism and as a sharp portrait of the crisis of the early twentieth century.