Moosbrugger

In the elite milieu of Robert Musil‘s The Man Without Qualities, the character Moosbrugger appears as something of an exception: he is working class; he is insane; he does not meet or interact with any other characters; and in a novel of ideas, he is known only for an action – a murder. From this point of marginality, however, he comes to figure in many of the novel’s fundamental concerns. This entry considers Moosbrugger as a key feature of Musil’s modernist exploration of psychology, multiplicity, agency, and language. Such themes arise from a distinctly urban context. As a test case for the novel’s philosophy of essayism, the path to Moosbrugger is paved by Viennese inaction – a languor that will be shattered by the violence of war, of which the murderer has been seen as a portent. And, beyond the Austrian capital, a wider debate was being conducted about the relationship between cities and crime. In that conversation, Moosbrugger speaks to anxieties about the social disruption, including to gender roles, that could be bred in urban environments and fanned by the sensationalist news media that thrived therein.