Musil-Forum: Studien zur Literatur der klassischen Moderne ed. by Norbert Christian Wolf and Rosemarie Zeller

Abstract

Reviewed by: Musil-Forum: Studien zur Literatur der klassischen Moderne ed. by Norbert Christian Wolf and Rosemarie Zeller Gilbert Carr Musil-Forum: Studien zur Literatur der klassischen Moderne. Edited by Norbert Christian Wolf and Rosemarie Zeller, vol. 36: 2019/2020. Berlin, Boston: de Gruyter, 2021. ix pp. + 412 pp. €99.95. ISBN 978–3-11–072968–9. Despite its delayed publication and the recent change of editorship, the latest Musil-Forum maintains the high quality expected of this series, which presents essays on themes that emanate from Robert Musil's oeuvre — in this case, following on from the 2018 conference at the University of Salzburg on 'Literatur und Polemik in der klassischen Moderne', organized by Norbert Christian Wolf and Harald Gschwandtner. Certainly, polemic might not at first appear as self-evident as other recent themes of Musil-Forum, such as 'Poetik der kleinen Form' (vol. 35), but the focus provides the opportunity for systematic and learned definitions of polemic, if not as a literary genre, then in its performative status between rhetorical aggression and objective critique. This accords with Musil's own pronounced aversion to polemical effect, epitomized by Karl Kraus's rhetorical dominance, in favour of detached irony, about which there is a broad consensus in the volume. While it is accepted that Musil was a polemically abrasive theatre critic, his mastery of polemic in other contexts receives attention. Dirk Rose reads Musil's enigmatic story Die Amsel as an exemplary meta-polemic against the poetics of the novella genre (for example, [End Page 208] Paul Heyse's concept of the 'falcon' as leitmotif) and Georg Lukács's doctrine of realism. In 'Häuserkampf', Hans-Georg von Arburg defines Musil's sustained commentaries on modernist architecture and town planning as polemical not in rhetorical style but as interventions in public debate, relating Ulrich's strictures on lifestyle in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften to Musil's critique of Le Corbusier's modernism. Gunther Martens's '"Was wirst Du machen, wirklich Teneriffa?"' is a tour de force on informed polemic in scientific discourse. The quotation in the title alludes to the animal experiments of Wolfgang Köhler on that island, and thence to Musil's polemics on Darwinism, behaviourism and Gestalt psychology, and their connection with his story Die Affeninsel. This has hitherto been viewed as an allegory of dictatorship, but contains deeper anthropological reflection and critical conclusions about empirical observation, for example, as demonstrated in Martens's semiotic reading of the story Türen und Tore — though perhaps more credit is due to Ernst Mach's empirical scepticism here. In her contribution 'Schwert und Feder', Birgit Nübel singles out Musil's demolition in 'Geist und Erfahrung' of the spurious cultural morphology of Der Untergang des Abendlandes. Barbara Neymeyr more extensively contextualizes this virtuoso 'satire' of Oswald Spengler's imprecision and analogical speculation (p. 174) with a rather long-winded excursus on Nietzsche, albeit with insights into Musil's 'Übergänge' and 'Gestaltlosigkeit' as antidotes to Spengler's binary schematism. 'Von der Polemik zur Meta-Polemik' is a close textual analysis of Musil's aphorisms by Alexander Honold, who situates them — citing Pierre Bourdieu — in a contemporary field of norms, shared by the antagonists in partisan skirmishing and dogmatic assertion. The overarching perspective sought by Musil in his critique of contemporary trends is compared here to the stance embodied in the structurally anomalous figure of Ulrich, who aspires to a sovereign analysis of the era to which he still belongs. Honold qualifies this ambivalence again with regard to Musil's — as it were, Wittgensteinian — critiques of collective value concepts in the polarized anti-intellectualism of the 1930s. Nübel also draws a distinction between polemic and meta-polemic, starting from Friedrich Schlegel's antithesis of rhetorical irony in polemic and a 'transzendentale[] Buffonerie' of meta-irony (p. 19). By analogy, 'polemische[] Rhetorik' (p. 20) — against the false aesthetic of Burgtheater authors or the prestige of Thomas Mann and Hermann Broch in the literary scene — differs from the 'sachlichdiskursive' polemic in Musil's novel against the Nietzsche cult and the Zeitgeist (pp. 21–22). This contribution becomes over-ambitious in eliding the concept of polemic...