The Austrian writer had a long career as a smoker. Most recently, he meticulously kept a record of his consumption.
By then he had been smoking for a long time: Robert Musil at the age of twenty.
Necessity teaches smoking. This is how one could summarize one of the consequences of the First World War. “The war caused millions of deaths and produced millions of smokers,” writes the cultural scientist Dirk Schindelbeck. Many soldiers said the war made them smoke. There were no distractions, and then you just smoked. You went into the field as a non-smoker and came back as a smoker.
Apparently, the bloody routine of war was interrupted only once, when enemy soldiers on the western front fraternized at Christmas 1914. First, instead of hand grenades, smokers’ products flew over the barbed wire, then the Boches and the Frenchmen fraternized, visited each other’s positions and smoked together.
After the holidays the spook was over, murder and manslaughter returned, everyday military life was back for everyone. «Military has time, the eternal waiting, the cigarette. The inauthentic doing.” This is how Robert Musil sums up his smoking career a dozen years after the end of the war. But the sensual impression of the end of a smoker’s life had a different impact. He saw the legacy of a dead man from the German-Austrian Alpenkorps.
Musil tin can around 1910.jpg
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Robert Musil’s favorite brands of cigarettes.
«Patrol battle. The few belongings of the dead man are wrapped in a scrap of newspaper on our dining table. A purse, his rose cap, a small short pipe, two oval tin cans with cut-up Toscana, a small round pocket mirror. A heavy sadness emanates from it . . .» The smoking paraphernalia as part of the poor legacy. As if they were a memento mori for the survivors.
Musil almost drowned
In the early 1920s, Musil formulated a pleasure principle for his writing that was surprising given the post-war depression. This also included a rejection of the cigarette: “Be active – always do what you feel like doing most – do everything completely: – then you will not smoke.”
Robert Musil (far right) at carnival, of course with a cigarette.
In the texts that were written after the war, in “Grigia” or the short story “Die Thirstigen” or in the “Slowenisches Dorfbegräbnis”, Musil has erased the traces of the war as best he could, but the conditioning caused by the circumstances of the Military action was not so easy to undo. Around 1927 his work crisis became so pressing that he went to see Adler’s pupil Dr. Hugo Lukács sought psychotherapeutic help and analyzed his difficulties according to the rules of individual psychology.
On September 18, 1928, when asked about abstaining from certain pleasures during intensive work and the use of stimulants, Musil answered a survey by the “Literarische Welt” on the “physiology of poetic creativity” on the “physiology of poetic creativity”, saying that he drank a lot of strong coffee and smoked a lot. Good old Brockhaus comments: In small doses, nicotine has a stimulating effect on the ganglia of the autonomic nervous system and releases adrenaline from the adrenal glands. The overall effect is inconsistent because the stimulating and paralyzing effects overlap in time.
So when combining caffeine and nicotine, the mix and timing was very important to avoid paralyzing effects. Musil, who was literally working under high pressure on “The Man Without Qualities”, seems to have not always, or increasingly rarely, succeeded in achieving this balance: This led to a collapse in the winter of 1928/29.
On March 5, 1929, Musil’s wife Martha spoke of “too much work, worries, nicotine poisoning and ultimately a nervous breakdown from all of this”. Acute nicotine poisoning is manifested by nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, diarrhoea, palpitations, sweating, dizziness and tremors. It is not known what treatment the Viennese doctors gave Musil, the only thing that is certain is that the patient smoked nicotine-free cigarettes for a while. As the diary shows, the abstinence lasted only for a short time, then he resumed smoking ordinary cigarettes, although with the intention of consuming only one per hour.
The wife Martha Musil was also a practiced smoker from an early age.
It is obvious that he owes the stroke that he suffered on May 20, 1936 while swimming in the Diana-Bad and in which he almost drowned to his decades-long smoking career. The consequences were unmistakable: slight facial paralysis, shaky handwriting, disturbance of the speech apparatus. Even though the symptoms slowly improved over the course of the following months, the patient complained to Johannes von Allesch on August 14, 1936: «Hypertension of the vessels is the innocent name for the fall from a fairly good and strong body to a slow-moving one, which has to protect himself from the sun and wind, is not allowed to smoke, etc. I’m supposed to get better and better over time, but never like before.”
Late temptations
There was something threatening about the nicotine, but also something relieving. In the summer of 1935, Musil took part in the notorious writers’ congress in defense of culture in Paris. On this occasion he met an old acquaintance from Berlin, the philosopher Bernhard Groethuysen. He combined mental discipline with human weakness, for he was an avid smoker and his clothes were rumored to have small burn marks.
In this case, Musil, always properly dressed, was prepared to overlook the traces of the vice and, in retrospect, felt that the evening spent together was one of the few possibilities of consolation that one had in Europe at the time. In January 1936, when he sent out a dedication copy of the “Bequest for Life”, he also thought of Groethuysen. At least the draft of the dedicatory verse has survived: «It brings the hand – but the heart is afraid -. / A little joke to the philosopher. / If I didn’t know that in the wise beard of the Greeks / the cigarette hides / like a firefly / Oh, I didn’t dare.»
Only once does the aging Musil seem to have succumbed to the lure of smoking in the form of an interesting woman by a hair, more precisely by a hair dyed blond. In the summer of 1937 he stayed at Thalhof am Semmering for work vacations. There he and a Hungarian baroness had come into view of each other. But then he shied away: “Life is so easy and willing. It was then that I understood: You could have it right away, that I don’t want anything. And that, as I said, loyalty is, among other things, nothing but the unwillingness to live.”
The paralyzing effect of this not wanting to live was recognized before others by the sculptor Fritz Wotruba, Musil’s companion during the Swiss years. He wrote: “Through him I saw for the first time that even a unique work cannot compensate for the loss of sensual life.”
Robert Musil with his wife Martha in Swiss exile.
What sensual life did the Swiss years from 1938 to his death in 1942 have to offer? The love life of the Geneva cats was the most exciting thing, a kind of animal satyr play on Ulrich and Agathe’s “last love story” in The Man Without Qualities. The rest was begging for a living and fighting the immigration police.
The last cigarette at eleven
With the arrival in Switzerland at the beginning of September 1938 and the start of exile, Musil’s sentence from Vienna gained new topicality: “I treat life as something unpleasant that you can get over by smoking.” The fight was about and against the cigarette. The money for them, like all livelihoods, had to be begged, and once that was done, the devastating effects of nicotine addiction had to be curbed.
A blood pressure of 250 had to be capped. The recipes sometimes sounded like those of a resolute housewife. “Avoid smoking as a silly form of idleness.” Others started pompously, only to devote themselves to the troubles of the level: “Measure psychologically-teleologically and not chronometrically. If you want to smoke, you must be sorry for the time. For what you want to do, you won’t wait for her, you won’t be able to do without and you won’t have enough of her! E.g. with an hourly rhythm, don’t wait for full, but be happy that you can give space to an interest. Missing hours are worth more than missing minutes.”
The cigarette booklet with the smoker’s log from the last days of life.
For him, the practical smoke barrier was the cigarette booklet, in which each cigarette was entered with the exact number of minutes. Musil believed that this was the only way he could limit his consumption of the notorious coffin nails. To his death he worshiped the misconception that smoking a little doesn’t do much harm. On April 15, 1942, in Geneva, at Chemin des Clochettes 1, he smoked two more cigarettes in the morning, the last at 11 a.m., according to the cigarette booklet. By half past twelve he was dead. Stroke.
For someone who, as a smoker, left the world with a huge cloud of gas in his almost 62 years of life, it was obvious that he would be cremated. When the widow scattered the contents of the urn at the edge of two overgrown gardens at the foot of the Salève, this saved grave maintenance and mooring fees. Emigrants had to economize even after they died.