INTRODUCTION

The decade of the First World War saw the beginning of three major works of German prose inspired by a new experience and embodying a new theme. The relative nature of our perceptions and knowledge of life, the historically, genetically, psychologically or economically determined nature of our personal being, the transient and relative nature of the values and conceptions, including the conception of time, by which we govern our lives – all these constitute a group of insights and modes of living which was first embodied in German literature. The three works are Oswald Spengler's Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West) (volume 1: 1918, volume 11: 1922), Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain) (begun in 1913, completed in 1924), and Robert Musil's Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man without Qualities) (begun from prewar notes in the early twenties and left uncompleted on Musil's death in 1942). All three works bear witness to a paramount imaginative effort to bring to the light of consciousness a change in our perception of the world.

There is nothing abstruse about this theme in the context of its time. Historians have written of the unparalleled loosening of institutional and moral ties that occurred everywhere in postwar Europe (except in Russia, where the opposite process took place). ‘What killed the idea of orderly, as opposed to anarchic, progress’, writes one of them, ‘was the sheer enormity of the acts perpetrated by civilised Europe over the past four years. That there had been an unimaginable, unprecedented moral degeneration, no one who looked at the facts could doubt.’