ABSTRACT

Robert Musil (1880-1942), the master novelist of twentieth-century Austria, wrote almost nothing at all about Kierkegaard. This seems to have been a choice, a matter of principle, on his part. “I don’t like [Kierkegaard], I never liked him, and I don’t need him,” Musil declared in the 1930s, dismissing the surge of interest in Kierkegaard after World War I as a matter of “youth and changing times.”1 Musil had no need for Kierkegaard, he explained, because he had long ago absorbed, by cultural osmosis, what Kierkegaard was now presumed to offer: “The positive element that people derive from him today was already in the air back then [lag damals schon in der Luft], and I did not need Kierkegaard to supply it.”2