Izenberg, G. Identity Becomes An Issue

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IDENTITY BECOMES AN ISSUE: EUROPEAN

LITERATURE IN THE 1920S
GERALD IZENBERG
Modern Intellectual History / Volume 5 / Issue 02 / August 2008, pp 279 - 307

DOI: 10.1017/S1479244308001650, Published online: 27 June 2008
Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S1479244308001650
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GERALD IZENBERG (2008). IDENTITY BECOMES AN ISSUE: EUROPEAN
LITERATURE IN THE 1920S. Modern Intellectual History, 5, pp 279-307
doi:10.1017/S1479244308001650
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Modern Intellectual History, 5, 2 (2008), pp. 279–307
C 2008 Cambridge University Press
doi:10.1017/S1479244308001650 Printed in the United Kingdom
identity becomes an issue:

european literature in the 1920s∗
gerald izenberg
Department of History, Washington University in St Louis
The meaning of “identity” in its contemporary sense of “who—or what—I am”

is of relatively recent vintage. It became current as a concept of individual and
group psychology only through Erik Erikson’s work in the 1950s and its extension
to collectivities in the social and political upheavals of the 1960s. But an important
strand of European literature began calling the possibility of fixed self-definition into
question in the 1920s, occasionally even deploying the word “identity” explicitly. In the
work of Hermann Hesse, Virginia Woolf, Luigi Pirandello, Robert Musil, Hermann
Broch and Franz Kafka, the dualistic representation of selfhood prevalent in much of
prewar modernism gave way to the image of an infinitely fragmented and ontologically
unfounded self not exhausted by any, or even the sum, of its many possible designations.
For these authors, the events and aftermath of World War One desacralized a
whole range of abstract collective identities—national or imperial citizen, cultured
European, gebildete bourgeois, manly male, the spiritual “eternal feminine”—which
had furnished the most deeply rooted and honored individual identities of prewar
Europe. As a consequence, identity itself was undermined. The paradox of the birth of
identity is that it was discovered in the negation of its very possibility.
‘To thine own self be true’ . . . which self? Which of my many . . . hundreds of selves? . . .
[T]here are moments when I feel I am nothing but the small clerk of some hotel without
a proprietor, who has all his work cut out to enter the names and hand the keys to the
wilful guests.
Katherine Mansfield, Journal, 12 April 1920
I am never anything but what I think of myself—and this varies so incessantly, that often,
if I were not there to make them acquainted, my morning’s self would not recognize my
evening’s. Nothing could be more different from me than myself.
André Gide, The Counterfeiters, 1925
∗
I wish to thank the Center for the Humanities at Washington University for the Faculty
Fellowship in 2007 which enabled me to complete this essay.
279
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i. beginnings
As Virginia Woolf’s Orlando drives out of London toward her country estate—
at eleven a.m. on 11 October 1928, we are told—her view from the speeding car is
a kaleidoscopic succession of fragmentary images: half-words of shop signs, red
flashes of meat in butchers’ windows, women passed so quickly “they almost had
their heels sliced off.” Immediately, however, the description becomes a metaphor
for an ultimate truth about the self:
Nothing could be seen whole or read from start to finish. What was seen begun—like two
friends starting to meet each other across the street—was never seen ended. After twenty
minutes the body and mind were like scraps of torn paper tumbling down from a sack
and, indeed, the process of motoring fast out of London so much resembles the chopping
up small of identity which precedes unconsciousness and perhaps death itself that it is an
open question in what sense Orlando can be said to have existed at the present moment.1
This passage represents the first serious use of the word “identity” that I
have found in its now prevalent sense of the self as a continuous something.2
Woolf’s metaphor implies a complex understanding. The scene brings together
in brilliant compression three distinct spheres: the psychological experience
of self-fragmentation; the ontological condition of the self’s insubstantiality
that underlies its possibility, hinted at in Woolf’s evocation of the sense
of nothingness provoked by impending death; and the historical situation,
the personal technology of speed widely available only after the Great War,
that provides an occasion for the breakthrough of nothingness into everyday
consciousness.3
If the explicit language of identity was uniquely Woolf’s in the 1920s, however,
a deep-lying sense of the self’s lack of substantial being was not. Other writers may
not have used the word, but both the experience that Woolf describes and parallel
analyses of its meaning and historical occasion are at the core of much European
fiction, drama and philosophy in the decade. Woolf herself had probed identity
1
Virginia Woolf, Orlando (London, 1993), 271–2.
2
Citing examples from the Oxford English Dictionary, Phillip Gleason argues that while the
word was used earlier to refer to continuity of personality in a casual, “vernacular” sense,
it was not a theorized analytic category until the 1950s. See Phillip Gleason, “Identifying
Identity: A Semantic History,” Journal of American History 69/4 (March 1983), 912. In any
case, he relates these usages to Locke’s definition of personal identity as continuity of the
self through memory.
3
Earlier in the novel, Woolf challenged identity even more dramatically by abruptly
transforming Orlando from a man into a woman. That sex change, however, “did nothing
whatever to alter their [sic] identity.” Here Woolf was also using identity in the Lockean
sense: “His memory . . . [now we must say] her memory . . . went back through all the
events of her past life without encountering any obstacle” (124).
the birth of identity 281
more deeply three years earlier in Mrs Dalloway without using the word. She
and André Gide, Marcel Proust, Luigi Pirandello, Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka,
Robert Musil, Hermann Broch and Martin Heidegger stand as the discoverers of
the modern idea of identity as fixed self-definition in their works of the 1920s.
And the paradox which will haunt identity from then on is that it was discovered
in the negation of its very possibility. In this essay I will examine that paradox in
some detail for Woolf, Pirandello, Hesse, Kafka, Musil and Broch.
ii. defining identity

Nothing about the self would seem more obvious than the idea that people
have, or seek, identity. Humans seem to need to define themselves as something,
to be able to know and to say “who (or what) they are.” The term has so
permeated popular and academic discourse that it seems always to have been a
fixture of both. We speak readily in the university, the media and the marketplace
of “identity crisis,” “identity politics,” “identity theft.” It would be impossible
to count the number of recent scholarly monographs with the word “identity”
in their titles. In fact, however, this sense of the word is relatively new. It came
into common usage as a term of individual psychology only with the work of
Erik Erikson in the 1950s, when he coined the term “ego identity” to describe
an internal structure fundamental to psychological equilibrium, and the more
famous “identity crisis” to denote the disturbances that disrupt the sense of self
when that structure is not well established. And while American sociology had
used the word in the 1950s to refer to an individual’s social role, it was only in the
later 1960s that social, political and literary theorists began extending Erikson’s
psychological conception to collective identities (though it had a crucial group
component for him)—to gender, ethnicity, nation, race and religion—a process
that not only encompassed ever more parameters of group identity but greatly
expanded claims for its retroactive explanatory importance.
To claim its newness is to say that identity is not congruent with the idea of self
that has become an object of reflection and investigation in Western thought since
the Renaissance. It is also to say that identity as self-definition is different from
the notion of “personal identity” that John Locke introduced in the seventeenth
century and is today a much-debated topic in Anglo-American philosophy.4
In his recent history of the Western idea of the self, Jerrold Seigel suggests that
self and identity are “closely related” terms.5 In an earlier work, Charles Taylor
4
The literature is vast. Among the most prominent contributors are Derek Parfit, John
Perry and Terence Penelhum.
5
J. Seigel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth
Century (Cambridge, 2005), 14–15.
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ties them more tightly together by making identity the necessary foundation
of selfhood. Human beings, he claims, can only act within a set of (explicit or
implicit) commitments and identifications. These provide the frame within which
we determine from case to case what we endorse or oppose. Such frameworks
make up our identity: “To know who you are is to be oriented in moral space, a
space in which questions arise about what is good or bad . . . what has meaning
and importance for you and what is trivial and secondary.”6
Taylor acknowledges that talking about “orientation” in terms of identity
is historically recent. He attributes the innovation to the creeping relativism
of Western consciousness. Our post-Romantic commitment to the value of
individual uniqueness has meant that questions of moral orientation can no
longer always be solved by appeal to universal values; important components of
modern selfhood are particular to each self. But for Taylor there is also a supra-
historical reason for thinking of fundamental orientation in terms of the question
“Who am I?” Only seeing myself as a particular “who” enables me to place myself
as an interlocutor among others with a particular standpoint or role, without
which we could not act or communicate. Thus the space which our frameworks
seek to define—that is, our identity—is “ontologically basic.”7
There are problems with both of Taylor’s explanations, historical and
philosophical. His claim that the newness of the term “identity” points to
the rise of relativism is partly true, though in fact those who first analyzed
identity criticized precisely its apparent timelessness and absoluteness. In any
case, however, the historical argument seems to undermine the philosophical
claim of a necessary connection between identity and moral orientation. It can
certainly be agreed that we necessarily exist in a space of questions about what
to endorse or what to do whose answers depend on the context supplied by
value frameworks. But that does not mean that we need see any particular
framework as ontologically grounded. Taylor’s argument slips from the idea of
the ontological necessity of some framework to the objectivity or universality
of particular frameworks. Thus his philosophical view of identity begs the very
question that its first discoverers were consumed by: what is the status of those
frameworks, and therefore of the self which employs them? What do we mean,
what can we mean, when we say, we are this, or that? In Katherine Mansfield’s
metaphor, Hotel Self has no proprietor to give the residence a fixed identity.
Its only permanent resident is a faceless underling who hands out keys to its
many guests, a continuous but otherwise empty consciousness which exists only
to acknowledge that an indeterminate set of different, equally importunate and
6
C. Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA, 1989),
27–8; original emphasis.
7
Ibid., 29.
transient, selves has legitimate claims on it. As Paul Ricoeur bluntly put it,
“Selfhood . . . is not sameness.”8
It is precisely the insubstantiality of the continuous self which marks the
modern concept of identity off from that of John Locke. Locke had taken up the
topic in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1694) because his radical
empiricism threatened to deconstruct the self into a discontinuous succession
of transient sensory states. His famous solution to the problem was two-
fold: self-consciousness, which always accompanies experience, and memory,
which extends back to the consciousness of previous experiences; together
these constitute “personal identity.” In Amélie Rorty’s conceptual distinction,
Locke was concerned with the problem of individual reidentification as distinct
from the problem of individual identification. Reidentification denotes how one
recognizes oneself as the same self in different contexts and at different times.
Individual identification denotes the sorts of characteristics that identify someone
as “essentially” the person she is, such that if those characteristics were changed,
she would be a significantly different person to herself and to others, though
she might still be reidentified by herself and others as the same human being.9
Ricoeur makes a parallel distinction between identity as sameness or idem—stable
character guaranteed by the permanent structures of habit and identification—
and identity as selfhood or ipse—which does not depend on the continuity of
any specific character traits.10
Having rejected substance metaphysics, Locke would seem not to have any
truck with the notion that the self could be “essentially” anything, but he was
not engaging the psychological and historical concerns that give currency and
significance to Rorty’s category of individual identification. He could be content
with a solution to personal identity that became the problem for writers of the
1920s because he was concerned with issues of his time, not theirs. His empiricism
posed a serious problem for the self for legal, moral and religious reasons. If the
self were not continuous, it could disavow responsibility for what it had done in
the past; such a situation rendered morality, legal responsibility and sin nugatory.
Thus Locke insisted that in his version of personal identity as continuous memory
“is founded all the right and justice of reward and punishment”; person “is
a forensic term, appropriating actions and their needs, and so belongs only to
intelligent agents, capable of a law, and happiness and misery.”11 But it was the
8
Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another (Chicago, 1992), 116.
9
A. Rorty, ed., The Identities of Persons (Berkeley, 1976), 2.
10
Ricoeur, Oneself, passim.
11
J. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. A. C. Fraser (New York, 1959), 1:
467; original emphasis.
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precisely the certainty of continuity without content that tormented the skeptics
of identity in the 1920s.
iii. identity before the war

For a properly historical sense of what the insubstantiality of the self meant to
the 1920s, however, it should be compared not with Locke but with the forms of
identity that writers of the 1920s experienced as preceding them. Two vignettes
from novels of the decade can give an initial sense of what their authors felt had
been lost, for good or ill.
The first is from Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities (1930). Written
during the late 1920s, it is set in Vienna in the last, still blindly un-self-aware year
of Austro-Hungarian innocence before the deluge that destroyed the empire.
An early chapter nicely titled “Even a Man without Qualities Has a Father with
Qualities,” introduces readers to the protagonist Ulrich’s father, his anti-type.
He is a middle-class Viennese law professor who by dint of assiduous service as
tutor in the houses of the high aristocracy had risen to become their legal adviser.
Though now a retired member of the intellectual elite, professionally respected
and independently wealthy, he remains fawningly subservient to “the owners of
horses, fields and traditions.” They, for their part, while happy to use his services,
“never regarded him as anything but the personified spirit of the rising middle
class.”12 Yet despite the aristocracy’s ineradicable condescension, Ulrich’s father
is completely at one with himself, never doubting the legitimacy of the existing
social and political order or the appropriateness of his own place within it. Musil
here sketches a picture of the quintessential European upper bourgeoisie which
will reappear in later historical accounts of the “persistence of the Old Regime”
in nineteenth-century Europe.13 But he has also described the quintessential man
of identity: Ulrich’s father “sincerely venerated the state of affairs that had served
him so well, not because it was to his advantage, but because he was in harmony
and coexistent with it, and on general principles” (10). What matters to him, pace
Marx and Weber, is not the material interest or social status his class position and
belief system serve, but the self-definition they afford him. Ulrich’s father is a
solid and undivided self because he has a definite place in the Austro-Hungarian
imperial and social structure sanctioned by history and God; more precisely, he
is that place. It is against the ontological density of his father’s identity that the
ironic Ulrich, with no vocation, no reverence, and a sense of the utter unreality
of Austria–Hungary, is indeed “The Man without Qualities.”
12
R. Musil, The Man without Qualities, vol. I, trans. R. Wilkins (New York, 1996), 9.
Subsequent page references are given in parentheses in the text.
13
A. J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime (New York, 1981).
The second vignette, from Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf (1927), involves an

equally alienated protagonist in the postwar years who measures his new self-
awareness against a quite different prewar reality. In a first rebellion against his
bourgeois self, Harry Haller had come to think of himself as divided into two
distinct and antagonistic parts, man and wolf. The “man” is decent, humane,
cultured and orderly, the embodiment of all the nineteenth-century bourgeois
virtues; the wolf is a wild creature of impulse, passion and destructive anger
longing to tear up the fabric of society out of hatred for its very decency and
lawfulness. Haller’s irremediably bourgeois side can neither deny the wolf nor
come to terms with it, and sees no way out but suicide.14
The “Treatise on the Steppenwolf ” thrust on Haller one night by a mysterious
stranger articulates his putative man–wolf division more precisely than he had
ever done for himself, then seeks to disabuse him of it. It ascribes the dualistic
way of thinking primarily to artists, alluding to the “two souls” warring within
Goethe’s Faust, an integral conceit of the nineteenth-century cultivated German’s
self-image. But Faust’s two souls evoke a Romantic conflict between the wish to
embrace earthly finitude and the desire to transcend it. The division between
rational human and instinctual animal that bedevils Haller was the more common
trope of a prewar Europe-wide reaction against bourgeois rationalism. The
nonrational might indeed be higher spiritual yearning, or “low” sexual and
aggressive drives—or a confused intertwining of both—but its polarizing essence
for the intellectual avant-garde was its unavailability to the conscious experiential
range of the normative middle-class personality. Artist versus bourgeois, moralist
versus immoralist, conscious versus unconscious, charisma versus bureaucracy,
“life” against “intellect,” Apollo and Dionysus, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde—over and
over, in different but parallel formulations, art and thought in prewar Europe
drew a dualistic portrait of humanity to subvert the false unity of the Victorian
self-image. Whether enthusiastically embraced, vehemently rejected or, most
often, regarded with deep ambivalence, the irrational was omnipresent in prewar
avant-garde culture as the suppressed other of the bourgeois self.
To the “author” of the Steppenwolf treatise, however, this prewar dualism is
false. It is but a paradoxical instance of the universal human need to create
an illusory unity within the self. Even dualism is too fixed and bounded a
formulation, though so pressing is the need for the illusion of unity that one
who arrives at dualism is “almost a genius,” a rare exception to the normal
way of self-deception. But however much a breakthrough, “two souls” is still an
unacceptably limited account of the self. Man is not an enduring form but an
infinity of possibilities. Not all that bites is wolf, and “man” is not exhausted by
14
H. Hesse, Steppenwolf (New York, 1963). Subsequent page references are given in
parentheses in the text.
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the bourgeois. The artist who dichotomizes fails to see that “this whole world,
this Eden and its manifestations of beauty and terror, of greatness and meanness,
of strength and tenderness is crushed and imprisoned by the wolf legend just
as the real man in him is crushed and imprisoned by that sham existence, the
bourgeois” (65).
∗∗∗
In correcting Haller, Hesse was correcting himself. His own prewar novels had
been constructed around the very dualism the treatise condemns. There is no
better evidence for the radical novelty of the analytic of self in Steppenwolf and
The Man without Qualities than the artistic trajectories of their authors. Both
Hesse and Musil had written novels before the war which had brought them
considerable recognition and whose fundamental premise was dualistic.
Hesse had actually used the wolf image to describe one side of the “split
within myself” in his most popular prewar novel, Peter Camenzind (1903), but
the animal there is more benign than the beast of Steppenwolf. Camenzind is
a self-described “poet, wanderer, drunkard, lone wolf,”15 a soulful melancholic
from a village in the Alps who experiences early in life the infinite grandeur of
nature. His talent for writing wrenches him out of his mountain idyll and sends
him to the city, to higher education and the world of commercial publishing.
He yearns to translate his “dispassionate” love for nature into great literature
to convey to humanity the message of the oneness of all life, but is stymied
by both personal shortcomings and the corruptions of modernity. The two are
in fact one: the ambitious Camenzind, so consumed by his own individuality
that he can surrender to nature only intermittently, has become the exemplar of
modern commercial man. In the end, he returns to his village to look after his
dying father, his magnum opus lying unfinished in a drawer. Peter Camenzind
was part of the late upsurge of nostalgic nature-Romanticism in Germany in the
early twentieth century in the face of a rapidly urbanizing and industrializing
society; at its core is the self divided between country and city, rural economy
and capitalist industrialism, the modern striving ego and the timeless unity of
the All.
The divided self in Musil’s early work is darker, less vaporous than Hesse’s
sentimentalist, more like his wolf of the steppes; where Peter Camenzind gestures
vaguely toward the higher regions, Young Törless probes the nether with a scalpel.
The ambitious scion of an Austrian upper-middle-class imperial bureaucrat,
Törless is sent to a prestigious military boarding school to prepare for a career
in state service. In his unsavory friends, however, and within the psyche that
15
H. Hesse, Peter Camenzind, trans. M. Roloff (New York, 1969), 125.
drew him to them, he discovers shocking currents of sexuality, gender confusion

and sadism for which the conventional life of his parents had not prepared him,
which seem completely incompatible with it, yet are nonetheless part of him:
He felt as though torn between two worlds: one was the solid everyday world of respectable
citizens, in which all that went on was well regulated and rational, and which he knew
from home, and the other was a world of adventure, full of darkness, mystery, blood, and
undreamt-of surprises. It seemed as though one excluded the other . . .
[Yet] from the bright daytime world, which was all that he had known until now, there
was a door leading into another world, where all was muffled, seething, passionate, naked,
and loaded with destruction . . . [B]etween those people who moved in an orderly way
between the office and the family . . . and the others, the outcasts, the blood-stained, the
debauched and filthy . . . there was some bridge—and not only that, but . . . the frontiers
of their lives secretly marched together and the line could be crossed at any moment.16
This is one of the most succinct evocations of the prewar dualism which for a
later generation would be epitomized in Freud’s topography of conscious and
unconscious selves.
There is a jarring interpolation in the novel which suggests how disturbing this
dualism was even to its discoverers. Well before the climax of Törless’s descent into
the world of “darkness, mystery and blood,” Musil breaks into the narrative to
relate how, as an adult, Törless was able to integrate these “adolescent experiences”
in a process of self-development whereby he came to understand their usefulness
in reaching a higher level of maturity. Törless discovered that externally correct
behavior, without any deeper interest “in the actual workings of law and morality,”
preserved him from spiritual coarseness while allowing him a degree of irony
towards both. He was able to gloss over the problems that agnosticism about moral
truth presents because morality was not important to him; the only real interest
that “aesthetically inclined intellectuals” feel, Musil editorialized, “is concentrated
on the growth of their own soul” through absorption of new experiences (137).
This variant of Bildung was modernist in its skepticism about morality and its
subordination of ethics to aesthetics. By the early twentieth century the traditional
concept of the ethical personality no longer seemed adequate to human reality.
Nonetheless, by deploying the notion of Bildung at all, Musil offered the clearest
demonstration of that human desire to unify the self that Hesse would expose
in Steppenwolf, and Musil himself proclaim impossible in The Man without
Qualities. From the perspective of the 1920s, the prewar exposé of the false
solidity of bourgeois identity did not surrender the ideal of identity; not only
did it preserve identity in a determinate dualism that would have been a comfort
16
R. Musil, Young Törless, trans. E. Wilkins and E. Kaider (New York, 1964), 50, 56. Translation
slightly modified. Subsequent page references are given in parentheses in the text.
288 gerald izenberg
to the fragmented self of the 1920s, but it often aspired to overcome even that
dualism.
Peter Camenzind and Young Törless belie the implication that to speak of
prewar dualism implies a conflict of one-dimensional opposites. The other side
of “the bourgeois”—who was indeed often stereotypically oversimplified for
polemical purposes—was a diverse set of counter-selves whose only principle
of unity was that each was the opposite of some presumed essential bourgeois
characteristic. The irrational had many faces, dark and light. It could be the
sexual, the perverse, the occult, the quest for transcendence, the primitive, the
charismatic, the demonic—whatever was the opposite of positivism, materialism,
self-interest and rigid moralism. Some of its versions did point in the direction of
an utterly indeterminate self, but few if any drew the most radical inferences from
such pointers. One way or another, the attempt to reconcile opposites under the
banner of form, rational or aesthetic, was the prewar identity order of the day.
iv. the attack on identity

She would not say of any one in the world now that they were this or were that . . . she
would not say of herself, I am this, I am that.
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway
The ontological language of this passage is one crux of Woolf’s novel, the word
“now” another. Once, Clarissa Dalloway would have taken for granted that
everyone was “this or that.” The pivot on which time has turned into “now”
is the Great War. This is true for all of the writers discussed here. But before
examining why the war had this effect, I want to further explore their landscapes
of non-being.
The recovered madman “Henry IV,” the eponymous “hero” of Luigi
Pirandello’s 1921 play, is a useful guide to the terrain. Pirandello learned much
about the self’s lack of stability from the paranoid delusions of his psychotic
wife, but it was in his postwar masterpieces, Six Characters in Search of an Author
and Henry IV, written in a hectic six-week period long after the onset of his
wife’s illness, that he generalized the special case of madness into a philosophy
of identity. “Henry IV” is an Italian aristocrat who while playing the role of that
medieval German emperor in a pageant was knocked unconscious and woke up
believing that he was his dress-up character. For years he has been supported in
his delusion by servants and friends; in his presence they dress in period costumes
and play roles from the historical drama of Henry’s conflict with Pope Gregory
VII. But Henry has not been mad for much of this time. Long before the action
of the play he awoke from his delusion.
The explanation he offers for continuing the masquerade is an analysis of the

disorienting temporality of the self and the consolations of history. Though we are
all fixed in good faith in a certain concept of ourselves, Henry says, we are always
faced with the possibility of acting out of character. It is because of the chaos
that lurks beneath the costume that we cling so tightly to it. But an estranging
glance from someone whose recognition we crave—as Henry experienced from
his beloved before the pageant—is enough to shake our sense of who we are.
Henry took refuge in history, where the script has already been written and no
improvisation is required. Though the historical Henry IV had been defeated
and humiliated by Gregory at Canossa, the role provided “Henry” with the kind
of certainty life denies. “And sad as is my lot,” he tells his servants on revealing
his deception, “hideous as some of the events . . . still all history! All history
that cannot change, understand? All fixed forever!”17 Of course, Henry knew
on awakening that he was playacting. But, he claims later, when he reveals his
deception to the visitors who have come to cure him, he is saner than they because
he at least plays his role with the lucid consciousness that it is a role, while they
continue to live their madness, the illusory fixity of their roles, agitatedly, without
knowing it (204–6).
Henry IV and Six Characters, in which fictional characters claim the same
fixed identities as historical figures, present many of the essential features of the
self without identity that are rehearsed throughout the literature of the 1920s.
Identity is immutable; the self is forever changing. Identity is a unity; the self is
a heap of fragments, a metaphor made flesh by the musician–magus Pablo in
Steppenwolf ’s Magic Theater when he takes materialized pieces of Harry Haller’s
life and shows how they can be arranged and rearranged in an infinite number
of configurations like the pieces in a game of chess. And the radical mutability
of the self underlies the ever-present possibility of uncanny self-estrangement.
“Nothing could be more different from myself than me,” says Edward in André
Gide’s The Counterfeiters.18 The horror of self-estrangement is partly moral—
Edward worries about the disintegration of his sense of responsibility that seems
to go along with the “decentralization” of his self—but more fundamentally it is
the horror of the “nobody” someone becomes to himself when he realizes that
nothing he believed essential to his identity is so in fact. For Proust’s Marcel,
by contrast, as for Locke, the continuity of memory may indeed guarantee
moral responsibility, but that is not enough to rescue us from the effects of
17
L. Pirandello, “Henry IV,” in Naked Masks: Five Plays by Luigi Pirandello, ed. E. Bentley
(New York, 1952), 195. Subsequent page references are given in parentheses in the text.
18
A. Gide, The Counterfeiters, trans. D. Bussy (New York, 1955), 70–71.
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the discontinuities that most powerfully fashion us, our loves, whose end means
the end of “the selves which successively die within us.”19
Even Pablo concedes that a human being cannot live in a fragmented state, that
psychiatry, which labels self-fragmentation schizophrenia, is right to hold that
the multiplicity of possible selves can only be dealt with in the framework of a
coherent self-structure. But it is wrong in holding that only one binding lifelong
structure is possible (192). The ordered self is a construction like the possible
configurations of pieces on a game board, each yielding a different game. In a
different spirit, but with similar self-awareness, Clarissa Dalloway sits before her
mirror preparing for her party:
She pursed her lips when she looked in the glass. It was to give her face point. That was
her self—pointed; dart-like; definite. That was her self when some effort, some call on her
to be her self, drew the parts together, she alone knew how different, how incompatible
and composed so for the world only into one centre, one diamond, one woman who sat
in her drawing-room . . .20
Clarissa’s desire is to appear the perfect hostess; to that end she is the self-
consciously deliberate performer of her identity.
Those who seek permanence, however, value social roles for their
predeterminateness. Henry IV was drawn to historical role-playing because of the
seductiveness of the notion that what happened in the past had to happen. The
past is ineluctably there, like a thing; it must be the necessary effect of preceding
causes. To act one’s role, then, is simply to obey the law of cause and effect
without having to make decisions: “You could have admired,” as Henry said
about his behavior as emperor, “how every effect followed obediently its cause
with perfect logic” (195). The Man without Qualities, however, has discovered
another, opposite, law of history and identity, the principle of insufficient cause:
“in our . . . personal lives, and in our public-historical lives, everything that
happens happens for no good or sufficient reason” (140). Young people may
plead inner necessity to justify their acts, but when they reach middle age they
do not really know how they got to be what they are, how they came by their
pastimes, their outlook, their wife, their character or their profession: “nowhere
is a sufficient reason to be found why everything should have turned out the
way it did; it could just as well have turned out differently” (137). Life is ruled by
empirical accident and metaphysical contingency.
19
M. Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. 6, Time Regained, trans. A. Mayor and T. Kilmartin
(New York, 2003), 301.
20
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (San Diego, 1981), 37. Subsequent page references are given
in parentheses in the text.
∗∗∗
Alone of the works considered here, Kafka’s The Castle (1924) took as its task
to challenge the contingency of identity; the challenge’s failure served only to
confirm it. The Castle takes two existential steps beyond The Trial. At stake there
was the law, and while everything about its instantiation in legal system and
church was discredited by corruption or human fallibility, Kafka seemed in no
doubt that a transcendent Law existed, however unreachable, and unreadable, by
man. Both the proximate and ultimate proof of its existence is not its revelation
but its effects—Joseph K.’s sense of guilt and his quest for justice. In The Castle
the stakes are higher: the possibility of a transcendental foundation for human
identity. And while the castle which presumably hired K. as a land surveyor also
exists (and is also impenetrable), there are serious questions as to whether it
really did hire him, whether it is inhabited by anyone with authority to do so, or
whether indeed it is inhabited at all. Finally the only evidence is K.’s desire that
it be so.
The metaphor of land surveyor is almost too obvious. K. wants to know
“the lay of the land,” to define final and legitimate boundaries, and he wants
sanction for his task from a higher authority. His first exchange with the castle,
by telephone, is unpropitious. He hesitates to say who he “really” is because he
is too easily intimidated on the phone, and announces himself instead as his old
assistant. The voice on the other end initially rejects that self-definition, but when
K. responds “Who am I, then?” the voice answers definitively that K. is indeed
the old assistant. K. is only whoever he says he is.21
That is not what he wants, of course, but he can get no other satisfaction. There
is a letter, ostensibly from the castle, apparently confirming his appointment
though without saying as what, signed only by an anonymous bureaucrat and
delivered by a mere messenger. The letter is full of contradictions, and it is clear
to K. that it has been left up to him to decide what to make of them, “whether he
wanted to be a village worker with a distinctive but merely apparent connection
to the Castle, or an apparent village worker who in reality allowed the messages
brought by Barnabas to define the terms of his position” (24). Should he, that
is, accept a real, socially defined identity as school janitor while continuing to
allege some transcendental connection, or should he insist on his true identity
as transcendentally sanctioned “land surveyor” while allowing it to be defined in
reality by a villager whose only evidence that he represents a higher world is his
own assertion?
21
F. Kafka, The Castle, trans. M. Harman (New York, 1998), 21. Subsequent page references
are given in parentheses in the text.
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K. never chooses between these equally unsatisfactory options. Instead he

functions as janitor while continuing his endless battle for recognition as land
surveyor directly from the castle. “What I want from the Castle is . . . my rights,”
he insists (74). But this proves impossible. He can obtain no direct access to the
authorities. The chairman of the village council, who has the executive power
of appointment, judges the purported letter from the castle authorities to be a
private rather than an official communication and refuses to appoint K. In fact,
he informs him, K. has never really come into contact with the authorities; all his
contacts have been merely apparent. In any case the wording of the letter implies
that K. may not have been appointed at all, that he has been trying to foist himself
on the castle, and that therefore “the burden of proving that you’ve been taken
on rests with you” (70).
K. is not relieved of it throughout the novel, which ends inconclusively or
rather, since it was never completed, appropriately does not end at all. K. never
meets with Klamm, the castle official supposedly in charge of his case. The
only promise of official connection with him is in the deposition that Momus,
Klamm’s village secretary, demands of K. But it will be filed in the village registry
and Klamm himself will never read it—Kafka’s droll hint that the only concretely
tangible identity in this world is the bureaucratic. K. refuses to be interrogated. He
remains suspended between castle and village. But that has dire implications for
his sense of who he is. “You’re not from the Castle, you’re not from the village,”
his landlady tells him early on, “you are nothing. Unfortunately, though, you are
something, a stranger, one who is superfluous and gets in the way everywhere. .
.” (48). Deliberate or not, the translation uses terms that have become familiar
to readers of Camus and Sartre. Without transcendental recognition, one is
ontologically superfluous, a stranger, at home neither within himself nor with
others.
∗∗∗
What complicates the sense of nothingness, however—because in life, unlike in
a vacuum, the void is complex—is that, as Musil puts it in another of his playful–
serious chapter titles, “A Man without Qualities Consists of Qualities without a
Man.” Even as K. quests for transcendental recognition he has acquired a home,
a position, real work and a fiancée in the village. The problem of not having a
sanctioned identity is worse than just being empty; it is being empty and full at the
same time. “One is,” Ulrich acknowledges, “undoubtedly conditioned by one’s
qualities and is made up of them, even if one is not identical with them” (157).
As much as one may feel metaphysically nothing, contingently one is inescapably
something, indeed many things. Living inexorably plunges us into situations in
which we make choices and become emotionally attached. However we came to
be constituted as we are, we are de facto instinctual bodies and social beings.

Ulrich himself enumerates our contingent identities in what is probably the most
detailed list to be found even in psychology or social theory today, after decades
of theoretical identity-consciousness: “the inhabitant of a country has at least
nine characters: a professional, a national, a civic, a class, a geographic, a sexual,
a conscious, an unconscious, and possibly even a private character to boot” (30).
(At least nine: Musil strangely omitted religion, though he had written extensively
about it.) But however many identities a person might add, they do not add up
to a whole. For as Musil says,
He unites them in himself, but they dissolve in him, so that he is really nothing more than
a small basin hollowed out by these many streamlets that trickle into it and drain out again
. . . Which is why every inhabitant of the earth also has a tenth character that is nothing
else than the passive fantasy of spaces yet unfilled. This permits a person all but one thing:
to take seriously what his at least nine other characters do and what happens to them; in
other words, it prevents precisely what should be his true fulfillment. (30)
That tenth “identity” is the space between consciousness and all the others; it is
what prevents us from ever fully identifying with any of our “characters.” The
horror is that we can feel all the impulsions of desire and belonging while at the
same time standing back detachedly observing our own passions, knowing that
they are, in the ultimate sense, insufficiently compelling. But the reverse can also
happen. When Henry IV sees his former lover’s daughter, who resembles her
mother, dressed as she was on the fateful day when she rejected him, his vaunted
lucidity flees him. Caught up again in the passion that once gave his life meaning,
he falls back into the very madness of identity he has just exposed to those who
would cure him.
The space between consciousness and identity is our freedom, though a purely
“negative freedom” (31, 35) which can be liberating but never fulfilling. This “inner
freedom,” Ulrich reflects bitterly, “means knowing, in every human situation,
what one doesn’t need to be bound by, but never knowing what one wants to be
bound by!” (285). A decade later Sartre will describe this freedom as the sentence
to which we humans are condemned, catching the sense of Ulrich’s despair at
his inability to be motivated deterministically enough to overcome the necessary
detachment of non-identity. Its ultimate emotional tragedy is the impossibility
of wholeheartedness.
v. war and the unmaking of identity

Musil’s analysis was certainly intended as an exposé of the universal human
condition, but unlike Sartre later he did not make it in a historical vacuum. On
the contrary, he thought that the “empty invisible space” within the self had
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become apparent for the first time only under particular historical conditions.
“Insofar as this can become visible to all eyes,” Ulrich claims, “it had happened in
Kakania,” Musil’s playfully obscene nickname for the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
It was the absurd contradictions in the structure of Kakania and the impossible
self-definitions it demanded of its subjects that exposed them to the utter
insubstantiality of their identities:
the Austro-Hungarian state . . . did not consist of an Austrian part and a Hungarian part
that, as one might expect, complemented each other, but of a whole and a part; that
is, of a Hungarian and an Austro-Hungarian sense of statehood, with no country of its
own. The Austrian existed only in Hungary, and there as an object of dislike; at home he
called himself a national of the kingdoms and lands of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy
as represented in the Imperial Council, meaning that he was an Austrian plus a Hungarian
minus that Hungarian; and he did this not with enthusiasm but only for the sake of a
concept that was repugnant to him, because he could not bear the Hungarians as little as
they could bear him. (180)
Who’s on first? Given the manifest sham of Austro-Hungarian “identity,” it was

little wonder that the introspective “Austro-Hungarian” could not believe in the
reality of what he was told he was. That Musil and Kafka (and Hermann Broch,
though his crucial novel is set in Germany) were Austro-Hungarian suggests how
marked a site the empire was for the death of identity.
Nevertheless, Musil was only partly right. The breakdown of the link between
particular national context and ontological identity went beyond Austria. And
while it is true that Musil was already questioning what the empire stood for
before the war, it was only after its postwar disappearance that he could fully see
into the contradictions that had destroyed it, and expose what the novel called its
“pseudo-reality.” In virtually every work examined here, the turning point with
regard to identity, often explicitly evoked in the text, is World War One, whose
fallout affected identity for “vanquished” and “victor” alike.
∗∗∗
A sharp debate over the proposition that World War One gave birth to the
characteristic spirit of the twentieth century followed on the publication of Paul
Fussell’s seminal The Great War and Modern Memory, which makes the claim
that contemporary irony about fundamental beliefs originated in the disabused
reaction to the traditionalist pieties which had sustained the war and its horrors.22
While Fussell’s materials are narrowly English, Modriss Eksteins makes a similarly
large claim for Europe as a whole in his Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth
22
P. Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford, 2000), 35.
of the Modern Age, though his modern spirit is not irony but Fascism’s irrationalist
vitalism and aestheticization of violence, offspring of the union between artistic
modernism and total war.23 The other side in the debate includes biographers of
modernist writers, who document in their subjects a deepening sense of crisis
in European culture before the war and interpret their authors’ reaction to the
postwar disaster as confirmation of their earlier predictions.24 More recently
the idea that the war was a seismic cultural event has been challenged from the
opposite direction by Jay Winter, who argues in Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning:
The Great War in European Cultural History that Europeans mourned the war
within traditional prewar tropes and frames of reference.25
The literary works examined here, however, and the authorial trajectories
that led to them, clearly support the notion of radical change with regard to
identity. Though Broch and others did share deep forebodings about the fate of
European culture before 1914—as well as, in cases like Musil’s, optimistic hopes
for its renewal—the war’s traumatic psychological and intellectual impact did
more than simply accelerate the cultural decline they previously described. Just as
some in the years before 1914 anticipated war but not the war which came, writers
and intellectuals who lamented cultural decline did not foresee the qualitative
change war would bring about in their diagnosis of the cultural problem of the
self. The war desacralized a whole range of abstract collective identities—national
or imperial citizen, cultured European, gebildete bourgeois, manly male, “eternal
feminine”—which had served to furnish individual identities before the war.
∗∗∗
The war figures not just as background in Mrs Dalloway but as its other
protagonist, directly in the figure of the shell-shocked veteran Warren Septimus
Smith, obliquely in the novel’s discrediting of the sacred symbols of Englishness.
It is because Woolf did not believe in them that Clarissa can no longer believe
in the reality of fixed identities. The disillusion of war had extended itself
to the ideals used to legitimize it. As Nietzsche had once claimed about the
inevitability of nihilism after the death of the Christian God, the untenability of
one interpretation of the world upon which a tremendous amount of energy had
23
M. Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston, 1989).
24
For example, D. S. Luft, Robert Musil and the Crisis of European Culture, 1880–1942
(Berkeley, 1980); and P. M. Lützeler, Hermann Broch, A Biography, trans. J. Furness
(London, 1987).
25
J. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History
(Cambridge, 1995), 1–5.
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been lavished awakens the suspicion that no ultimate interpretation of the world
is true.26
Clarissa herself is not quite aware that she no longer believes in the icons of
Englishness; she is still impressed enough with an official-looking closed car that
possibly carries “the majesty of England . . . the enduring symbol of the state” to
put on “a look of extreme dignity” when it passes her in the street (16–17). But she
despises all ideologies and passions that can take one over so completely that they
extinguish the capacity to be open and generous, to respond to and connect with
“life” in its infinite, unclassifiable variety. Clarissa’s specific aversions are personal:
they are against those enthusiasms which threaten to make totalitarian demands
on her or to seduce her daughter away from her. But they are also universal: “Love
and religion! . . . How detestable, how detestable they are! . . . The cruelest things
in the world, she thought, seeing them clumsy, hot, domineering, hypocritical,
eavesdropping, jealous, infinitely cruel and unscrupulous . . .” (126).
Woolf goes beyond Clarissa. She is merciless at the expense of a range of
essential English types: the fatuous aristocrat Lady Bruton who, needing a
cause in middle age to replace the self-adulation of lost youth, has fixed on
solving England’s economic problems by getting young people to emigrate; the
odiously smug psychiatrist Sir William Bradshaw, for whom the therapeutic
ideology of “proportion” is nothing but class-based disgust at the “irrationality”
of the psychically ill, a device to isolate the disturbers of good society out of
sight in country asylums while getting rich and famous into the bargain. But
what takes these character sketches beyond Wildean satire to bitter revulsion is
the implication of English identity in the moral, psychological, and ultimately
physical destruction of Septimus Smith.
Observing a group of young boys in uniform, Peter Walsh, Clarissa’s erstwhile
suitor, admires the expressions on their faces that seem to read “duty, gratitude,
fidelity, love of England.” Earlier, passing the statue of a young duke, he had
remarked to himself that the future of civilization lay in the hands of young
men like that, “of young men such as he was, thirty years ago; with their love of
abstract principles” and books sent to them while serving their country abroad
(50). It was that very love of abstraction that had made Clarissa reject him. And
it was those same abstract principles, mediated through the eager improver of
the lower classes Miss Isabel Pole, which had transformed Septimus from vaguely
ambitious lower-middle-class youth to passionate lover of England’s cultural
heritage. As Fussell points out, the Great War occurred at a moment when the
appeal of popular education was at its peak in England because it was imagined
that the study of great literature would actively assist those of modest origins to
26
F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York,
1968), 7.
rise in the class system.27 When the war broke out, Septimus was one of the first to
volunteer, to “save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare’s
plays and Miss Isabel Pole.” He became the ideal British soldier, manly, dutiful,
stoic. So perfect of type was he that when the only friend he had ever made, his
commanding officer Evans, was killed, Septimus prided himself on feeling “very
little and very reasonably. The War had taught him. It was sublime” (86).
The war was indeed a sublime teacher, but Septimus mistook its lesson.
Irrepressible grief, however, and the war’s revelation of the lie of Englishness
have broken through his desperate effort to sustain his refusal to mourn. The
nation was as much a lie as the official version of its culture. Shakespeare was
not about “great language”; like all great writers, he revealed the loathsome truth
about humanity, the truth that Septimus had discovered for himself, and about
himself, in the war, but had fought to deny in order to be a good soldier. The
truth was “that human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond
what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment. They hunt in packs . . . They
desert the fallen. They are plastered over with grimaces” (88–9). He was guilty
like everyone else, foremost of not caring enough to mourn Evans; the death of
one man could not be allowed to unman him for duty.
When she hears of Septimus’s suicide at her party Clarissa must fight off
a similar temptation. Her attraction to death seems quite different from his,
but is actually quite similar. Septimus killed himself to avoid being locked away
by Bradshaw’s hypocritical ideals, which denied the legitimacy of his suffering
and his message. Knowing nothing of Septimus, Clarissa nonetheless scents,
projecting her own self-knowledge, that his death was an act of defiance in
the name of an obscure truth: “Death was an attempt to communicate; people
feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them;
closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in
death” (184). Clarissa does not kill herself—though Woolf later wrote that she
had originally intended to have her either do so or die after the party.28 Instead,
Woolf had Clarissa find a counter to death in the party itself, in the communicative
sociability, the connectedness, which is for her the deeper reality of its superficial
frivolity. But the truth that makes death tempting to her in the first place, the
realization that because of the absence of a common center one is ultimately alone,
is the result of the collapse of that center in the war. If the center “mystically”
evades people, it is because it no longer exists in a believable form. Since it was
the center, its collapse makes it impossible to believe in any center, any common
identity which could unite people in the “imagined community” of those who are
not in physical proximity. The party, the ephemeral but physically real coming
27
Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 157.
28
Virginia Woolf et al., The Mrs Dalloway Reader, ed. Francine Prose (Orlando, 2003), 11.
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together of isolated, unique selves, is for Clarissa the substitute for the false
imaginary of collective national identity.
The case of Hermann Broch is especially telling for the significance of the
war, both because he had been a sharp critic of European culture before it, and
because The Sleepwalkers (1931–2)29 offers a long-term philosophical–theological
perspective on the collapse of identity in the 1920s that begins with the Middle
Ages. A full analysis of Broch’s complex account demands more space than is
available here, but the crux of the argument is that Broch came to—and by the
terms of his own explanation could only have come to—his ultimate philosophy
of history as a result of the war.
His prewar essays exemplify the widespread sense of cultural pessimism of
those years. The arts were atrophying from an overly rationalist penchant for mere
realistic description. They had lost touch with their true vocation, beauty, because
they had abandoned beauty’s roots in the instinctual. “Art was the sexuality of
culture,” he proclaimed; “Now it is dying from psychic impotence.”30 In a vitalist
effusion typical of the times, Broch complained that modern dance, originally the
art nearest sex and thus the most basic one, had rigidified into lifeless formalism.
The only genuine form of dance left was—battle.31
It was only after the outbreak of war that Broch turned from a concern with
high culture to the problem of Western civilization as a whole. The opening
words of “The Disintegration of Values,” a ten-part essay in the last volume of
The Sleepwalkers, are taken directly from the first of four wartime essays collected
under the rubric “Towards an Understanding of Our Era.”32 They mostly read
like academic exercises in philosophy of history; the war was not over when they
were begun and its outcome was unknown. But those first words are a raw cry of
rage:
Is this distorted life of ours still real? is this cancerous reality still alive? the melodramatic
gesture of our mass movement toward death ends in a shrug of the shoulders,—men die
and do not know why; without a hold on reality they fall into nothingness; yet they are
surrounded and slain by a reality that is their own, since they comprehend its causality. . .
[T]his age seems to have a capacity for surpassing even the acme . . . of anti-logicality: it
is as if the monstrous reality of the war had blotted out the reality of the world. Fantasy
has become logical reality, but reality evolves the most a-logical phantasmagoria. An age
that is softer and more cowardly than any preceding age suffocates in waves of blood and
poison-gas; nations of bank clerks and profiteers hurl themselves upon barbed wire; a
29
Hermann Broch, The Sleepwalkers, trans. W. and E. Muir (New York, 1996). Page references
are given in parentheses in the text.
30
H. Broch, “Kultur,” in Philosophische Schriften I, Kommentierte Werkausgabe, Bd. 10/1, ed.
P. M. Lützeler (Frankfurt am Main, 1977), 13. Hereafter KW.
31
Ibid., 21
32
Broch, KW, Bd. 10/2, 11–80.
well-organized humanitarianism avails to hinder nothing, but calls itself the Red Cross
and prepares artificial limbs for the victims. (373)
Clearly, “battle” has changed its valence; the realities of the Great War make it
impossible to aestheticize. Broch now also characterizes prewar European culture
more benignly than he had before. Before the war, he writes, Europe harbored
“a disinterested striving for truth, a disinterested will towards art . . . a definite
social feeling” (374). That progressive spirit has perished. The atrophy of instinct
is no longer, if it ever was, Europe’s worst problem. It is rather that instinct
has been torn loose from any possibility of sublimation to reveal something
wholly new, something mystifying and horrible in human capacity. The cultural–
philosophical history of Europe Broch developed more fully in the last volume
of The Sleepwalkers was a retrospective effort to ground this unanticipated reality
in a comprehensive theory of the self.
It is through one of his minor characters in that last volume that Broch makes
the connection between the war and the loss of identity explicit. Gödicke, a
bricklayer in the Territorial Guard, had been buried under the rubble of a trench
destroyed during a bombardment. Barely alive when unearthed, he survives
against all expectations but remains terribly injured and in such pain that he lies
on rubber air cushions to make it bearable. Worse, however, is the damage to his
“soul.” The simplest action like lifting a spoon to his mouth is made difficult by
the fact that he is not clear in his mind who it is that is being fed. It is not that he
does not remember his past; on the contrary, he remembers quite clearly all the
previous phases of his life:
The difficulties with which the man Gödicke had to contend, then, were certainly not
caused by the fact that he felt this whole series of persons living within him, but rather
sprang from the sudden interruption of the series at a certain point, from the fact that
there was no connection between the earlier biography and himself, though he himself
should obviously have been the last link in the chain, and that being cast adrift in this way
from something which he could hardly any longer describe as his life, he had lost his own
identity [Existenz]. (407 (454)33 )
The translator is correct to render Broch’s Existenz as “identity”; it is the continuity

of his person, not of his physical existence or his memory, that Gödicke can no
longer experience. In part it is of course his physical disability that makes it
impossible for him to be the man he was, the man who slept and still wants to
sleep with the carpenter’s bride; he is so angry at the body which has betrayed him
that he can manage only by splitting himself psychically and trying to starve the
self he can no longer be. But his near death has also detached him reflectively from
33
The second page reference is to H. Broch, Die Schlafwandler, KW, Bd. 1 (Frankfurt am
Main, 1978).
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himself, made him aware of the different selves he can be, and of the impossibility
of subsuming them all into one unified personality named “Gödicke.” The war
is that “sudden interruption” which has cut him off from his whole previous
biography, not just by the physical changes in him but through them by
his traumatic awakening into consciousness of the discontinuous nature of
self.
But even the ultimate survivor, the main protagonist Huguenau, a wholly
amoral deserter who cons and murders his way to wealth during the war, cannot
return to “normal” life after it. Though now an apparently ideological capitalist as
well as a successful businessman, he is often, to his own bewilderment, psychically
alienated from himself, unable not to question the meaning even of money and
success. The war’s craziness has exposed even to him the fatuousness of all goals,
beliefs and identities, through “the curse of the casual, the fortuitous, that spreads
itself over things and their relation to each other, making it impossible to think
of any arrangement that would not be equally arbitrary and fortuitous” (642).
In The Sleepwalkers the war undermines the props of identity even in an
opportunist supposedly without character. In Steppenwolf, Harry Haller’s shock
at the revanchist nationalism of the German educated elite destroys all vestiges of
faith in the gebildete Mensch. His breaking point comes at a dinner at the home
of a young professor of Eastern mythology, a paragon of bourgeois Bildung:
“He believes in the studies whose servant he is; he believes in the value of mere
knowledge and its acquisition, because he believes in progress and evolution”
(78). But he is also a violent jingoist who hates Jews and communists, and rails
against “traitors” who blame Germany equally with the Entente for the outbreak
of the war. Appropriately, Haller finally snaps not over politics but over a portrait
of Goethe in his host’s drawing room, which he dismisses contemptuously as
the image of a conceited sentimentalist who radiates a false sense of superiority.
When the offended professor protests, Haller, unable to restrain his rage, bursts
out that he himself is the traitor whom the professor had condemned, that it
would be better for Germany and the world if at least a few people capable of
thought stood for reason and the love of peace instead of heading wildly with
blind obsession into a new war. With that, he rushes out, aware that his outburst
is a “leave-taking from the respectable, moral and learned world,” a complete
break not only with his past identity, but with the very possibility of identity. He is
rescued from suicidal despair only by his meeting with Hermine, the mysterious
young woman who will show him how to live the truth he had read about in the
“Treatise on the Steppenwolf,” the life without identity.
Neither war nor postwar make their appearance in The Man without Qualities,
yet it is a novel of the war which destroyed Austria–Hungary. As Stefan Jonsson
rightly points out, it was only when the material and institutional support of the
imperial apparatus had vanished that the values and traditions that had anchored
the Austrian subject’s idea of himself in the imperial order were revealed in all
their contingency.34
In “Political Confession of a Young Man. A Fragment,” published in 1913,
Musil admitted that he had been little interested in politics before then.35 And
even in the flurry of essays he published around that time only the brief “Politics
in Austria” addressed the political failings that were to be at the heart of his
later exploration of the illusion of identity. That essay does anticipate the causal
connection between nation and identity in The Man without Qualities, but with
a crucial difference:
Somewhere in this state there must be hidden a mystery, an idea. But it is impossible to
ascertain what it is. It is not the idea of the state, not the dynastic idea, not that of a cultural
symbiosis of different peoples (Austria could have been a world experiment)—apparently
the whole thing is just aimless movement because of the lack of a driving idea, like the
spinning of a bicycle wheel that doesn’t move forward.
Such deplorable political conditions always have their grounds in deplorable cultural
conditions. Politics in Austria have no human [i.e. universal] goal, just an Austrian one.
One can’t become a self [Ich] through them . . . and no self can manifest itself in them.36
Here self as essential identity is still a possibility for Musil. The self aspires
to the universal and derives an identity from identification with a universal
idea. Austria–Hungary, however, which could have been the world’s first truly
multinational polity, is all passion without ideas: the conflicts among its
nationalities and classes have no moral grandeur, only selfish aims. But, as the
parenthesis suggests, Musil believed that Austria might in principle have been a
universal idea that could produce a true self. It was the collapse of the Austrian
empire that enabled him to see that the “identityless self” of prewar Austria was
not merely the consequence of a politically remediable failure but the human
condition.
In the novel the absence of an Austrian “idea” becomes the symbol of
ontological nothingness. Musil brings it to hilarious life in the novel’s anti-
plot, the fruitless effort to find a theme for a mooted celebration of the seventieth
jubilee year of Emperor Franz Josef in 1918. The jubilee project is the novel’s
central “action,” and its very name proclaims its nullity. It is called the Parallel
Campaign [Aktion] because it is not even an original idea; it was generated in
imitation of and rivalry with the thirtieth jubilee of the German kaiser Wilhelm
planned for the same year. The Parallel Campaign remains a phrase in search of
34
S. Jonsson, Subject without Nation: Robert Musil and the History of Modern Identity
(Durham, 2000), 7.
35
R. Musil, Gesammelte Werke II: Prosa und Stücke (Hamburg, 1978), 1010.
36
Ibid., 993.
302 gerald izenberg
content. Ulrich becomes secretary of the campaign’s planning committee through

family connection—its convener is his cousin, the Viennese cultural doyenne he
ironically names “Diotima”—and it is from Ulrich’s absurdist perspective that
we see the campaign’s follies.
Many jubilee themes are proposed, each representing a basic Austrian (and
European) identity, each exposed as contradictory, ridiculous or insubstantial.
The hollowness of all of them taken together explains in retrospect why the empire
could not survive the war, but it also speaks to the impossibility of sustaining
those identities in the postwar world. They were only pseudo-reality before, and
with the end of the political structure that propped them up, they are exposed as
beyond redemption.
The driving political force behind the campaign is Count Leinsdorf,
representative of the old Austrian aristocracy. But his four slogans for the jubilee—
“Emperor of Peace, European Milestone, True Austria, Property and Culture”—
signify nothing because their author is himself a tissue of contradictions. Though
he hates the modern age as a “whirlpool of materialist democracy” and wishes to
return to the past era of faith, hierarchical authority and noblesse oblige, he runs
his estates like an opportunistic capitalist who “could not imagine how industry
. . . or a stock-exchange deal in wheat or sugar could be conducted on religious
principles” (101). Since he at least understands that one cannot rely on aristocratic
tradition to give a veneer of moral legitimacy to a modern commercial state, he
has entrusted the campaign to Diotima, veritable embodiment of the idea that a
link between the “eternal verities” and business can be found “in the profundities
of middle-class culture.”
If Musil treats Diotima with somewhat more ambivalence than he does
Leinsdorf, it is because in her rhetoric there lurks the ghost of a faith he
once shared. But Musil lampoons her notion of culture—it cannot be called
an idea—as vapid and egocentric. Culture is concerned with the “soul,” which
in Diotima’s case “was probably nothing more than a small amount of capital
in love she possessed at the time of her marriage.” Unfortunately, her husband,
an indomitably prosaic middle-class bureaucrat, “was not the right business
opportunity” in which to invest her passion (107). In quest of a more adequate
object, she has turned to literature, the repository of “the Good, the True and the
Beautiful,” which, however, are only names for her own trite belief that spirit is “a
force analogous to the power of love” (359). This insipid definition nonetheless
explains why Diotima also believes that woman is the necessary carrier of culture,
a common prewar artistic trope.37 Because men in the modern world one-sidedly
developed their rational intellects, “only the unfragmented woman still possessed
37
See R. Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge and London, 1995), esp. 91 ff. This is a
central theme of my Modernism and Masculinity.
the fated power to embrace the intellect with those vital forces that, in her opinion,
it obviously sorely needed for its salvation” (103).
Except that, having no ideas of her own, she turns to a man for help. Not
only is her choice of the Prussian industrialist Paul Arnheim the most ironic of
Musil’s novelistic moves, Arnheim is also the most important of Musil’s targets.
If Leinsdorf is the man of the past, and Diotima the emblem of a cultural
ideal she discredits by representing, Arnheim is ostensibly both the man of the
present and the hope of the future. A businessman and intellectual who has made
commercial fortunes and published philosophical works, he embodies the unity
of “capital and culture,” materialism and spirit. Some of Ulrich’s spleen toward
him is jealousy of a man capable of acting successfully in the modern world,
but Arnheim is also unmistakably a charlatan. The supposed union between
“the soul and the price of coal” symbolized in Arnheim’s equally publicized
intellectual and commercial ventures is a self-deceiving “con game” that serves
to keep separate “what Arnheim did with his eyes wide open and what he said
and wrote in his cloud of intuition” (304). Its social purpose is to cloak the
modern takeover of political and social power by money with the veneer of
traditional values which had once legitimized the aristocracy’s preeminence. In
truth, the “soulful” German middle class “look down upon art and literature,
which they once regarded as the ultimate fulfillment, as upon an earlier stage of
development” (420–21). But Arnheim recognizes that the power of business has
to be elevated and concealed by the ideology of soul to pacify the contemporary
social rebellion against money, science and calculation. The fact is that “keeping
the world in order was perhaps his truest and fiercest passion, a craving for power
far surpassing everything even a man in his position could afford” (423).
The aristocrat, “feminine” spirit, the soulful capitalist—these identities of
the prewar world, contradictory and self-serving then, lost any semblance of
plausibility for the postwar world, their hypocrisy exposed by the outpouring
of bloody-minded patriotic enthusiasm when war broke out. The displays of
nationalist fervor woke Musil into shocked awareness of humanity’s ineradicable
propensity to collective irrationality. In a bitterly trenchant postwar essay, “The
Nation as Ideal and Reality,” Musil wrote that the modern nation could never be
the genuine expression of ethical universalism, hence never a valid foundation for
self-identity; modern nationalism was either a cover for racism, the contemporary
incarnation of the old authoritarian state, or the illusory idealization of particular
material interests.38 But none of the age’s putative universal ideologies could make
good their claim to totality either. As Ulrich gently needles General Stumm von
Bordwehr, the cheerfully unimaginative military mind hopelessly infatuated with
Diotima and her quest for the great “Austrian idea,”
38
R. Musil, “Die Nation als Ideal und als Wirklichkeit,” Gesammelte Werke II, 1073–4.
304 gerald izenberg
Our time rejoices in a number of great ideas, and by a special kindness of fate each
idea is paired with its opposite, so that individualism and collectivism, nationalism and
internationalism, socialism and capitalism, imperialism and pacifism, rationalism and
superstition, are all equally at home in them, together with the unused remnants of
countless opposites of an equal or lesser contemporary value. (405)
It is thus appropriate that Musil’s last word on the possibility of a totalizing

ideology goes to Bordwehr: “When you spend a lot of time with ideas you end
up itching all over, and you can scratch till you bleed, without getting any relief”
(406).
The problem went beyond the deficiencies of any particular ideology; it was
inherent in the quest for ideological closure. Values, in the sense of what we
should live for, are a matter of feeling and enthusiasm, the “state of mind in
which all . . . feelings and thoughts have the same spirit . . . But there is nothing
[objective] to sustain such an enthusiasm” because its galvanizing goal is precisely
a matter of feeling, not of knowledge. Man “believes in ideas not because they
are sometimes true but because he needs to believe.” Since this is the case, the
forms of rationality which solve scientific and mathematical questions are of no
help. For
although . . . the number of choices based on feeling is infinitely greater than those based
on clear logic, and every event that moves mankind arises from the imagination, only the
purely rational problems have achieved an objective order, while nothing deserving the
name of a joint effort, or even hinting at any insight into the desperate need for it, has
been done for the world of feeling and imagination. (1126)
With this insight, which came to the mathematically and technologically trained
Musil with the force of revelation when the war broke out, all possibility of
objectively grounded identity was gone.
vi. instead of identity

The deconstruction of identity was, however, only a first step for many of
our authors, a necessary ground-clearing for alternatives. (The two obvious
exceptions are Pirandello and Broch, whose works end in apparent nihilism,
though in life they took political paths out of the identity chaos they depicted:
Fascism in the case of Pirandello, anti-Fascism in the case of Broch.) While the
alternatives they offer cannot be examined in detail here, a brief mention may
amplify our sense of what our authors were dismantling through contrast with
what they believed to be other than identity.
Clarissa Dalloway’s parties are the institutionalization of the quasi-pantheistic
ruminations earlier in the novel in which she feels herself part of all things; to
know her, or anyone, therefore, one must know everyone who completes them
(152–3). For Woolf the counter-ethic that parties embody is expressly linked
to femininity. The war as glorified in the press was for Woolf a “preposterous
masculine fiction”;39 idealism itself—fealty to abstractions—was masculine. In
the person of a “shallow” socialite and party-giver Woolf provocatively created
a feminine counterimage to traditional masculine identity as the negation of
identity itself. Parties, in their evanescence, proclaim the ultimate impossibility
of permanent collective identity, but their messy, lively heterogeneity, their sheer
communal “thereness,” concretely images our sought-for feeling of totality. The
quality for which Peter never stopped loving Clarissa, despite his disdain for her
“frivolity,” was that she had “that extraordinary . . . woman’s gift of making a
world of her own wherever she happened to be” (76).
A belief about woman’s gift also lies behind the final lesson the Steppenwolf
must learn to complete his reeducation, though here it is a false belief. Pablo’s
lecture on life’s infinite configurations is not enough to convert Harry. It must
be driven home by brutal enactment precisely because the emotional pull of the
eternal feminine is stronger than theory. Harry has fallen in love with Hermine,
the young woman who midwifed his rebirth into a new life of sensual possibility.
Despite Pablo’s warning against fetishizing any one life game, he is wholly invested
in his love for her. “I belonged to her not just as this one piece in my game of
chess,” he reflects, going to meet her at the end of his sentimental education
in the Magic Theater in expectation of sexual consummation, “I belonged to
her wholly” (203). His words prove how incompletely he has understood his
lesson, as does his action, when he finds her sexually sated in the arms of Pablo;
overwhelmed by rage, he stabs her to death. The murder, however, proves to be
yet another scene in the Magic Theater. Hermine is the lesson he has not yet
learned. Belonging to anyone or anything “wholly” is exactly what the Magic
Theater meant to unteach. No person is infinite, such that one could become
finished and whole by belonging to her.
And what Harry must learn with regard to Hermine he must also learn about
music, which for him has always been the purest expression of sublimity. He must
modulate his horror at hearing Mozart’s “divine” music mutilated by the tinny
reproductions of radio. Radio’s miserably inadequate rendering makes manifest
a universal truth. The perfection of the greatest music is an unreachable ideal; the
best performances are only aspirations toward it. “When you listen to the radio
you are a witness of the everlasting war between idea and appearance, between
time and eternity, between the human and divine,” Pablo tells him at his “trial” for
killing Hermine (who, this being a magic theater, is of course not really dead—or
alive either.) “[E]xactly as [radio] strips this music of its sensuous beauty, spoils
and scratches . . . it and yet cannot altogether destroy its spirit, just so does life,
39
Quoted in K. L. Levenback, Virginia Woolf and the Great War (Syracuse, 1999), 13.
306 gerald izenberg
so-called reality, deal with the sublime picture-play of the world . . .” (213). Since
nothing in the world can live up to the Idea, one’s only recourse is to laugh. This
is Friedrich Schlegel’s Romantic irony a hundred years on, chastened, lacking
the buoyant optimism of the Romantic celebration of creative destruction. For
Hesse, humor is gallows humor, laughter in the face of death. Mozart can never
be played perfectly. For that matter, Mozart’s music itself is not perfect. Pablo
the modern jazz saxophonist is as “good” as Mozart; in fact he is Mozart, in the
metamorphic play of the Magic Theater.
Harry seems finally to understand. When Mozart offers to resurrect Hermine
so Harry might marry her, he refuses. He will try instead to live the sentence
Mozart ultimately pronounces on him: “You are to learn to listen to the cursed
radio music of life and to reverence the spirit behind it and to laugh at its
distortions” (216). This, perhaps, is a prescription for art, not life; only art can
permit the thorough-bass accompaniment of gallows humor without causing
real hurt to others, or to oneself.
Musil, in contrast, did canvass a solution for the man without qualities within
life, in the very sphere which served as Hesse’s final lesson in self-deception—
love. The second volume of The Man without Qualities (1933) has an entirely
new subject, the relationship between Ulrich and his sister Agathe.40 Volume 2 is
purportedly the positive to volume 1’s negative, but the love between brother and
sister defies easy characterization—not least Musil’s own. The term “mystical”
is uninformative, even if Ulrich sometimes uses it himself (837) The attraction
between Ulrich and Agathe is obviously erotic, though never consummated. That
consummation would violate the ultimate taboo is true but superficial. Sex would
destroy the relationship by reducing it to a finite act in space and time and erasing
the permanently tense force field between the siblings created by unsatisfied
desire. Consummation would destroy it as well by reducing it to simple physical
gratification or, worse, self-centered possession. Musil’s incestuous pair is partly
a late version of the Romantic trope of incest, which figured the brother–sister
relationship as the ideal love because the lovers were both the same and opposite.41
As Ulrich puts it,
It’s the ancient longing for a doppelgänger of the opposite sex, for a lover who will be the
same as yourself yet someone else, a magical figure that is oneself and remains magical,
with the advantage over something we merely imagine of having the breath of autonomy
and independence. (982)
But it is also more.
40
R. Musil, The Man without Qualities, vol. 2, trans. S. Wilkins (New York, 1996). Page
references are given in parentheses in the text.
41
See my Impossible Individuality (Princeton, 1992), 245–8, 285–6, 303–4.
Non-consummation plays the same negative role for Ulrich’s imagination of

the infinite as it does for Hesse’s; it protects desire from disappointment. But what
is unique to Ulrich’s understanding of the permanent tension between himself
and Agathe is its ability to keep in play what Ulrich calls “true morality.” True
morality is more than “a sort of police regulations for keeping life in order”; it
is the faculty of “imagination,” which makes possible “living the infinite fullness
of possibilities” (1116–17). In breaking down boundaries, incestuous desire allows
something positive: infinite receptiveness.
∗∗∗
All these positive prescriptions demand of their characters the ability to live
consciously, even hopefully, with the contradictions of their solutions to non-
identity: the simultaneous aspiration to totality and openness. But common
to optimists and nihilists alike in this strain of 1920s modernism is the
challenge to what they all understood as the ontological beliefs implicit in
the contemporary sense of identity: identity as timeless Being. What they
revealed dramatically, Martin Heidegger in the same decade systematized and
dismantled philosophically. In this paradoxical way, their work inaugurated the
later twentieth century’s complex, and ambivalent, obsession with identity.

Izenberg, G. Identity Becomes An Issue

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IDENTITY BECOMES AN ISSUE: EUROPEAN

Modern Intellectual History / Volume 5 / Issue 02 / August 2008, pp 279 - 307

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identity becomes an issue:

The meaning of “identity” in its contemporary sense of “who—or what—I am”

Katherine Mansfield, Journal, 12 April 1920

André Gide, The Counterfeiters, 1925

ii. defining identity

iii. identity before the war

The second vignette, from Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf (1927), involves an

drew him to them, he discovers shocking currents of sexuality, gender confusion

iv. the attack on identity

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway

The explanation he offers for continuing the masquerade is an analysis of the

K. never chooses between these equally unsatisfactory options. Instead he

be constituted as we are, we are de facto instinctual bodies and social beings.

v. war and the unmaking of identity

Who’s on first? Given the manifest sham of Austro-Hungarian “identity,” it was

The translator is correct to render Broch’s Existenz as “identity”; it is the continuity

content. Ulrich becomes secretary of the campaign’s planning committee through

It is thus appropriate that Musil’s last word on the possibility of a totalizing

vi. instead of identity

But it is also more.

Non-consummation plays the same negative role for Ulrich’s imagination of

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