Peter Altenberg, the Feuilleton, and 'Black Vienna'

Exploring the sources of Musil's The Man Without Qualities, Part I

A lithograph of Peter Altenberg sharing a table at a coffeehouse with young African woman and surreptitiously rubbing her leg. Credited to Bertha Czegka, 1902.

Given the extent to which Robert Musil was an ardent empiricist—this is a tendency he also lends to Ulrich, the protagonist of The Man Without Qualities—it is perhaps a surprise that he should have been so taken with the work of the coffeehouse poet, bon vivant and notorious sponger of fin de siècle (and after) Vienna, Peter Altenberg. Or, rather, the poet, bon vivant and notorious sponger who published, when he felt like it, under the pen name Peter Altenberg: his given name was Richard Engländer, already the kind of alias favored by prosperous Jewish families that assimilated into Austrian life under the Hapsburgs in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Altenberg, even before he started publishing his captivatingly impressionistic prose pieces thanks to the patronage of the group of coffeehouse writers known as the Jung Wien, was recognized throughout Vienna for his eccentricities: Fond of wearing capes and wide-brimmed hats, open sandals and baggy pajamas, with an imperial mustache of his own devising, Altenberg cut the figure of a flâneur in a capital city renowned for its conformity and conservatism.

A signed photograph of Altenberg from 1903, after his literary reputation was established by the likes of Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hoffmannsthahl and Thomas Mann.

Probably the best introduction to Altenberg’s work in English nowadays is the thin volume—could it have any other dimensions?—Telegrams of the Soul, translated by Peter Wortsman and published by Archipelago. It begins with a five page “autobiography” that is unflinching, in its own way (“At age 23, I worshipped a thirteen-year-old-girl, wept through my nights, got engaged to her, became a book dealer in Stuttgart so as to hurry up and earn enough money to fend for her later. But nothing ever came of it. Nothing ever came of my dreams”), and serves as a defense of Altenberg’s lifelong pursuit of beauty and experience in Vienna’s brothels, hotels and back alleys, an “urlaub vom leben” that lasted, well, a lifetime:

I was nothing. I am nothing. I will be nothing. But I will live out my life in freedom and let noble and considerate souls share in the experiences of this free inner life, by putting them out in the most concentrated form on paper.

I am poor, but I am myself! Absolutely and completely myself! A man without compromises!

Altenberg’s literary form-of-choice is a derivation of the feuilleton, a genre of the personal essay (though it wasn’t always personal) common throughout Europe in the 19th century and often relegated to its own special section of major newspapers. The feuilleton could be a work of cultural criticism; an impressionistic travel piece; a work of more-or less straight journalism; a poetic lark. A feuilleton is brief, always. It is like a postcard—or, as the title of the Altenberg volume suggests, an artful telegram.

Here is a piece in the Archipelago collection called “Elevator”:

The elevator is still a great mystery to me.

I am not so dumb as to spoil the thrill of the blessings of modern culture by allowing myself to get too accustomed to them!

I still feel it as something wonderful, this secret stair-transcendence, this preservation of my knee joints, of my heart, of my oh! by no means costly time.

The door of my elevator closes slowly, automatically, which proves to be downright annoying to people with packages or baskets, albeit rather pleasant for a writer.

I have no idea by what mechanical devices my elevator dangles. I am merely informed every now and then by the super that something’s not quite right today and that the electrical fitter is there. And while I don’t understand just what kind of catastrophe was in the making, of what an electrical fitter does, both seem to be linked to a possibly life-threatening situation.

It’s awful to ride up with a stranger. You feel compelled to initiate a conversation and obsess on it from one floor to another. You suffer a delayed tension like that of a baccalaureate exam. Your face takes on a frozen glower. Finally you say, “Goodbye!” with a kind of intonation as if you’d just ended a friendship for life. That’s why, so as to sidestep all these pleasantries, I never get home before six in the morning. At that hour the elevator isn’t up and running yet.

There are shades, in “Elevator” and elsewhere, of a familiar kind of observational comedy. Pointing out the absurdities of a new technology and what it does to daily human relations. But there are flashes of a more literary sensibility (“this secret stair-transcendence” is one of the most wonderfully translated phrases in the volume) and a persona, most of all, that powers the observations of the elevator ‘phenomenon’ into stranger, more memorable territory.

I have no idea by what mechanical devices my elevator dangles.

What an exquisite line! It leaves the reader dangling in the elevator car along with Altenberg, as clueless about the forces suspending us in the air as Altenberg was at the turn of the 20th century in imperial Vienna.

Having read both Altenberg and Musil in the past, I am struck, this time around, by affinities that aren’t apparent at first, but are hiding in plain sight. (I can’t say much about their affinities in the German language, I’m afraid; I am dependent on reading their work in translation, so take this with a grain of salt … Others in the class will be able to share more insight about the original texts.)

First, there is the eccentric chapter structure of The Man Without Qualities, the fact that it’s a doorstop of a novel—never finished—constructed out of poetically brief, self-contained chapters that often read like feuilletons. The titles can be funny (“The Lady Whose Love Ulrich Won after a Conversation about Sports and Mysticism”), funny and practical (“A Racehorse of Genius Crystallizes the Recognition of Being a Man Without Qualities”), sloganeering (“Whose Side are You On?”) and poetically leering, very much like Altenberg’s writing (“The Tip of Your Breast is Like a Poppy Leaf”). This structural feature is one of the chief ways the novel signals it is an anti-epic epic novel: James Joyce’s Ulyssees was serialized in The Little Review between March of 1918 and December of 1920, and Musil began writing The Man Without Qualities in earnest in 1921.

Second, there is Ulrich’s “urlaub vom leben,” or vacation from life, first brought on by the failure of Ulrich’s training in the sciences to account for a new expression that he encounters in the press, “the racehorse of genius.” It is a deeply perplexing concept.

… Ulrich instantly grasped the fateful connection between his entire career and this genius among racehorses. For the horse has, of course, always been sacred to the cavalry, and as a youth Ulrich had hardly ever heard talk in barracks of anything but horses and women. He had fled from this to become a great man, only to find that when as the result his varied exertions he perhaps could have felt within reach of his goal, the horse had beaten him to it.

(All quotations are from the Sophie Wilkins/ Burton Pike translation we are using for the class.)

This is not so far from Altenberg’s dissection of the rituals of riding a mechanical elevator, is it?

Third, there are mutual concerns the writers share, whether it be sex and the ritual pursuit of female company; or the mystical, Teutonic forms of anti-Semitism that are adopted in the novel by the character Gerda Fischel (who is Jewish) and her crowd of young suitors; or the fascination with Africa and colonial expansion that resulted in exploitative public spectacles in the capital cities of Europe like the “ethnographic” display of African show villages with living inhabitants on fairgrounds and in zoos, alongside the exotic animals.

Peter Altenberg’s second published book, Ashantee (1897), is a problematic document of the writer’s obsession with the women in an Asante “village” that was constructed at the Prater Zoo in Vienna between 1896 and 1897. The cover sort of gives the game away:

But Altenberg’s identification with the “villagers” goes beyond his leering interest in the women’s bodies. In many of the short prose pieces in the book, he turns his gaze outward at the crowds of Viennese who pay a steep admission to insult and brutalize the subjects of the exhibition as they play their roles—roles that have nothing to do with what their lives are actually like in West Africa.

Here is an excerpt from the piece “Conversations with Tíoko”:

“It’s cold and very damp out, Tíoko. Rain puddles everywhere. Your people are naked. What are these thin linen things?! Your hands are cold, Tíoko. I’ll warm them for you. At least they could give you cotton flannel, not these threadbare linen rags.”

“We’re not allowed to dress, Sir, no shoes, not even a head cloth. ‘Take it off,’ says the attendant, ‘take it off. What are you trying to be, some kind of society lady, maybe?!’”

“Why doesn’t he let you dress?”

“We’re supposed to represent savages, Sir, Africans. It’s completely crazy. We’d never go around like this in Africa. Everybody would laugh at us. Like ‘bushmen,’ that’s what they look like, that lot. Nobody lives in huts like these. Back home they’d be fit for dogs. gbé. Quite foolish. They want us to be animals. What do you think, Sir?”

“What do you think, Sir?” Altenberg is turning this question on his readership, and that it’s posed in Tíoko’s own “voice,” I think, is significant.

There is an even stranger and more disturbing story behind the character Soliman in Musil’s novel, the tormented African footman to the Jewish industrialist Arnheim.

But that will have to wait.