Robert Musil’s Confusions of Young Torless and Schlöndorff’s Young Torless - Part 1

These final two posts in the film-themed series examine Musil's novel based on his experiences at boarding school and Schlöndorff's film adaptation

Robert Musil (1880-1942) finished Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß (Confusions of Young Torless) (1906)  while studying psychology and philosophy at the University of Berlin. The novel is based on Musil’s experiences as a student in the Austrian military boarding school Mährisch-Weißskirchen in Moravia from 1894 to 1897 (Stopp 94).

On the one hand the novel mirrors the complex two-step of the emerging artist Musil, first against rigid moral authority and then against the suspect moral aestheticism of his early literary contacts (see Mulot, pp.182-200). It reflects not so much Musil’s early travails of school and puberty but rather his later evolution as a young man from technical pursuits to creative writing. It gives to his personal experiences and insights around 1900, at the time of his intensified interest in Nietzsche, a literary expression of more universal significance about the boons and dangers which confront the “aesthetic-intellectual” nature. On the other hand, the early novel foreshadows the late fragment in its moral problems and in their ironic presentation.  (Whitinger 27-28)

The novel, a complex and intensely subjective Bildungsroman, is written from the standpoint of the young Torless.

As we have suggested, Young Törless is partially a developmental novel with a structure similar to that of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but in a different sense. In this respect the novel falls within an essentially German narrative tradition extending from Wilhelm Meister to The Magic Mountain  and more recently to Joseph and his Brothers. In this type of fiction we follow the various stages of development a young man goes through in life to attain the understanding he processes from the sum total of his experiences. Bit in Young Törless this symbolic journey, usually always a repetition and illustration of that of Odysseus and which normally covers several years, takes place in a few months and never gets anywhere in particular. (Ponce et al. 80)

The novel follows his relationship with two other students, Reiting and Beineberg.

Now everything around Törless was empty and boring. But meanwhile he had been growing older and with the onset of adolescence something began to rise up in him, darkly and steadily. At this stage of his development he made some new friends, of a kind corresponding to the needs of his age, which were to be of very great importance to him. He made friends with Beineberg and Reiting, and with Moté and Hofmeier, the boys in whose company he was today seeing his parents off at the railway station. (Musil, Young Torless 9)

Beineberg and Reiting engage in the blackmail, torture and homosexual debasement of their passive victim Basini, a fellow student, who confesses to Reiting to stealing money from Beineberg. A number of these scenes take place in a disused store-room hidden away in the attic of the school.

The walls were completely draped with some blood-red bunting that Reiting and Beineberg had purloined from one of the store-rooms, and the floor was covered with a double layer of thick woolly horse-blanket, of the kind that was used in the dormitories as an extra blanket in winter. In the front part of the room stood some low boxes, covered with material, which served as seats; at the back, in the acute angle formed by the sloping ceiling and the floor, a sort of bed had been made, large enough for three or four people, and this part could be darkened by the drawing of a curtain, separating it from the rest of the room. (Musil, Young Torless 42)

Torless participates in this psychodrama with growing distaste but refrains from asserting any  moral or physical resistance  as the mistreatment of Basini by his fellow students escalates. Indeed, he succumbs to a brief, if cynical, homosexual liaison with Basini.

Basini is by nearly imperceptible degrees coming to take the place of the mother-Božena figure as a sexual object – this is, according to psychoanalysis, a natural development, and is encouraged by hot-house boarding school conditions – and the conflict that is “tearing Törless apart” is conflict between this cathexis of the libido and the repressing and inhibiting forces of consciousness. (Goldgar 125)

On a long bank holiday weekend, Torless is left alone with Basini. On the second night, he brings Basini to the hideaway, forcing him to detail his submissive relationship to Beineberg and Reiting.

Involuntarily, Törless fell back a step. The sudden sight of this naked, snow-white body, with the red of the walls dark as blood behind it, dazzled and bewildered him. Basini was beautifully built; his body, lacking almost any sign of male development, was of a chaste, slender willowyness, like that of a young girl. And Törleß felt this nakedness lighting up in his nerves, like hot, white flames. He could not shake off the spell of this beauty. He had never known before what beauty was. For what was art to him at his age, what – after all – did he know of that? Up to a certain age, if one has grown up in the open air, art is simply unintelligible, a bore! (Musil, Young Torless 119-20). …  But Basini pleaded. “Oh, don’t start being like that again! Nobody’s the way you are! They don’t despise me the way you do. They only pretend they do, so as to be different then afterwards. But you – you of all people! You’re are even younger than me, even if you are stronger. We’re both younger than the others.  You don’t boast and bully the way they do … You’re gentle … I love you ….” […] Then Törleß abandoned his search for words. Lust, which had been slowly seeping into him, emanating from every single moment of desperation, had now grown to its full stature.  It lay naked at his side and covered his head with its soft black cloak. And into his ear it whispered sweet words of resignation, while its warm fingers thrust all questionings and obligations aside as futile. And it whispered: In solitude you can do what you will. (129-30) … At first it had been purely and simply the nakedness of the boy’s slim body that dazzled him. The feeling it had given him was no different from what he would have felt if he had been confronted with the naked body of a little girl, a body still utterly sexless, merely beautiful. It had been an overwhelming shock. . . a state of marvel. ... And the inevitable purity of this feeling was what lent the appearance of affection – this new and wonderfully uneasy emotion – to his relationship with Basini. Everything else had little to do with it. All the other feelings – the erotic desire itself – had been there long before; it had all been there much earlier, indeed before he had come to know Božena. It was the secret, aimless, melancholy sensuality of adolescence, a sensuality attaching itself to no person, and like the moist, black, sprouting earth in early spring, or like dark, subterranean waters that some chance event will cause to rise, sweeping the walls away. (132)

However, the plotline is not the focus of the novel but rather the inner development of Torless represented in a series of intense and confusing emotional experiences.  “It may be said, then, that one common denominator present in all Törleß’s confusions in their complex forms and nature is the fact of his, or one might say, of the young Törleß’s artistic disposition and the problems of perception and expression which this kind of personality brings with it” (Stopp 97).  The train station provides the physical and emotive frame for the novel.

It was a small station on the long railroad to Russia. Four parallel lines of iron rails extended endlessly in each direction, on the yellow gravel of the broad track - each fringed, as with a dirty shadow, with the dark strip burnt into the ground by steam and fumes. Behind the station, a low oil-painted building, there was a broad, worn dirt-road leading up to the railway embankment. It merged into the trampled ground, its edges indicated only by the two rows of acacia trees that flanked it drearily, their thirsty leaves suffocated by dust and soot. (Musil, Young Torless 3)

Elizabeth Stopp emphasises the significance of the train station in the novel’s structure.

The novel thus begins and ends at the railway station and is in this way provided with a convenient mechanism for introducing and dismissing characters. The station also imposes a simple external pattern on the structure, pointing to the fact that what is happening is a stage on the way, from the known past and from home in the imperial capital, to the unknown future, denominated vaguely by Russia a vast expanse of terra incognita: ‘Eine kleine Station an der Strecke, welche nach Rußland führt’ (p. 7).  (99)

His parents’ decision to send their son to this inhospitable environment is based on the  tradition the ruling class of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The reason why Frau Törleß had to leave her boy in this remote and inhospitable outlandish district was that in this town there was a celebrated boarding-school, which in the previous century had developed out of a religious foundation and had since remained where it was, doubtless to safeguard the young generation, in its years of awakening, from the corrupting influences of a large city.  It was here that the sons of the best families in the country received their education, going on afterwards to the university, or into the army or the service of the State; in all such careers, as well as for general social reasons, it was a particular advantage to have been educated at W. (Musil, Young Torless 4)

Early on in the novel, Musil uses a scene from Torless’s childhood to highlight his emotional vulnerability.

“You know, Beineberg,” Törless said, without turning round, “when its’s getting dark, there always seems to be a few moments that are sort of different. Every time I watch it happening I remember the same thing: once when I was quite small I was playing in the woods at this time of the evening. My nursemaid had wandered off somewhere. I didn’t know she had, and so I still felt as if she were nearby. Suddenly something made me look up. I could feel I was alone. It was suddenly so quiet. And when I looked around it was as though the trees were standing in a circle round me, all silent and looking at me. I began to cry. I felt the grownups had deserted me and abandoned me to inanimate beings. (23)

… At this moment he had no liking for human beings – for all who were adults. He never liked them when it was dark. He was in the habit then of cancelling them out of his thoughts. After that the world appeared to him like a sombre, empty house and in his breast there was a sense of awe and horror, as though he must now search room after room - dark rooms where he did not know what the corners might conceal – groping his way across thresholds that no human foot would ever step on again, until - until in one room the doors would suddenly slam behind him and before him would stand confronting the mistress of the black hordes herself. And at the same instant the locks would snap shut in all the doors through which he had come; and only far beyond, outside the walls, would the shades of darkness stand like black eunuchs, warding off any human approach. (24)

Torless’s sexual desire for Bozena, a local prostitute in a bar he frequents with Beineberg, is marked by conflicted disgust. “The memories of these visits gradually took on the character of a particular temptation. Bozena appeared to him as a creature of monstrous degradation, and his relationship to her, with the sensations it invoked in him, was like a cruel rite of self-sacrifice” (31).

For the awakening boy’s first passion is not love for the one, but hatred for all. The feeling of not being understood and of not understanding the world is no mere accompaniment of first passion, but its sole non-accidental cause. And the passion itself is a panic- stricken flight in which being together with the other means only a doubled solitude. Almost every first passion is of short duration and leaves a bitter after-taste. It is a mistake, a disappointment.  Afterwards one cannot understand how one could ever have felt it, and does not know what to blame for it all. That is because the characters in this drama are to a large extent accidental to each other: chance companions on some wild flight. When everything has calmed down, they no longer recognise each other. They become aware of discordant elements in each other, since they are no longer aware of any concord. (31-32)

… Only at one place did his gaze, which fled nervously from one thing to another, find rest. That was above the little curtain over the lower half of the window. There the sky looked, with the clouds travelling across it, and the unmoving moon. Then he felt as if he had suddenly stepped out of doors into the fresh, calm air of the night. For a while all his thoughts grew still.  (35)

At the end of the novel Basini, on the advice of Torless and after suffering a lynching in the gym, in fear confesses to the school authorities. After a school investigation is launched, Torless absconds and Reiting and Beineberg manipulate the situation so they are exculpated and Basini blamed. On his return, Torless appears before the disciplinary board where his philosophical musings so perplex the members they recommend he leaves the school to be privately educated.  Basini is expelled and Torless writes to his parents asking to leave the school.  His mother, who had expected to find an overwrought and desperately perplexed young man, was struck by his cool composure. 

When they drove out to the railway station, they passed, on the right, the little wood with the house in it where Bozena lived. It looked utterly insignificant and harmless, merely a dusty thicket of willow and alder. And Törleß remembered how impossible it had been for him then to imagine the life his parent led. He shot a sidelong glance at his mother.  “What is it, my dear boy?” “Nothing, Mamma, I was just thinking.” And, drawing a deep breath, he considered the faint whiff of scent that rose from his mother’s corseted waist. (174-75)

Robert Lemon stresses the significance of this ending in reconciling Torless with the hypocrisy of conventional morality.

The ending suggests that the protagonist has belatedly absorbed the message of the prostitute’s narrative, since he now finds himself able to conduct a conversation with his mother while furtively indulging his Oedipal, sensual appetites. If we consider that throughout the text he is concerned with this disparity between the everyday realm of experience and another one, beyond language, in which unconscionable acts such as consorting with Božena or abusing Basini can occur, then the significance of these contradictory impulses becomes clear. Törleß’s newfound acceptance of these contradictory impulses signals his “maturity,” that is, a readiness to enter a society marked by moral duplicity. It is thus Božena, the social and cultural Other of Hapsburg imperial society, who inadvertently instructs Törleß in the ways of his own world. (62-63)

Works Cited

Goldgar, Harry. “The Square Root of Minus One: Freud and Robert Musil’s Törless.”  Comparative Literature, vol. 17, no. 2, 1965, pp. 117-32.  JSTOR, doi: 10.2307/1769999.

Kirchberger, Lida. “Musil’s Trilogy an Approach to ‘Drei Frauen.’” Monatshefte, vol. 55, no. 4, 1963, pp. 167-82. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/30156269.

Lemon, Robert. Imperial Messages: Orientalism as Self-Critique in the Hapsburg Fin de Siècle. Camden House, 2011.

Luft, David S. Eros and Inwardness in Vienna:  Weininger, Musil, Doderer. The U. of Chicago Press, 2003. 

Musil, Robert. Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß [Young Törless]. Translated by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser. Robert Musil: Selected Writings, edited by Burton Pike, The Continuum Publishing Company, 1986, pp. 1-175.

Pike, Burton. Preface. From the Posthumous Papers, by Robert Musil, translated by Burton Pike, Vintage Book, 1996, pp. xi-xvi. 

Ponce et al. “Musil and Joyce.” James Joyce Quarterly, vol. 5, no. 2, 1968, pp. 75-85. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25486677.

Rising, Catharine. “Ulrich Redux: Musil’s Design for His Man Without Qualities.” American Imago, vol. 65, no. 4, 2008, pp. 523-545. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26305506.

Stopp, Elizabeth. “Musil’s “Törless”: Content and Form.” The Modern Language Review, vol. 63, no. 1, 1968, pp. 94-118. JSTOR, doi: 10.2307/3722648.

Whitinger, Raleigh. “Törleß' Moral Development: Reflections on a Problem of Musil-Criticism.” Modern Austrian Literature, vol. 22, no. 1, 1989, pp. 19–34. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24647678.