The novel in the context of Musil's life

The earliest material that can be identified as a definite source for The Man without Qualities was written around 1903; this consisted of passages on two friends of Musil's, Gustav Donath and Alice Charlemont. Gustav and Alice were to become the characters Walter and Clarisse who play a major role in The Man without Qualities. Clarisse in particular figured prominently in manuscript material, above all in connection with her plans to free the murderer, Moosbrugger. But Musil made little headway with this material and, in the first two decades of this century, he was working on the other literary projects which we have already examined. But in the twenties he began serious work on the task of fusing all the themes that obsessed him into one major – one might even say encyclopaedic – novel.

First, around 1920, the project bore the title Der Spion (The Spy); this very quickly became Der Erlöser (The Redeemer – a notion connected with Clarisse's plan to bear the hero a child who would ‘redeem the world’) and by the mid-twenties this in turn had been re-christened Die Zwillingsschwester (The Twin Sister – referring to the hero's sister, Agathe). These were not so much separate projects as a continuum of creative activity which merged each set of drafts into the next and eventually, by early 1927, had transformed itself into The Man without Qualities.