Robert Musil

Das verzauberte Haus ist eine Erzählung von Robert Musil und gehört zu seinen eher selten gelesenen Werken.

Agathe is the sister of Ulrich, the restless and elusive "man without qualities" at the center of Robert Musil's great, unfinished novel of the same name. For years Agathe and Ulrich have ignored each other, but when brother and sister find themselves reunited over the bier of their dead father, they are electrified. Each is the other's spitting image, and Agathe, who has just separated from her husband, is even more defiant and inquiring than Ulrich....

Set in Vienna on the eve of World War I, this renowned novel of ideas, of which this is the second part, tells the story of Ulrich, ex-soldier and scientist, seducer and skeptic, who finds himself drafted into the grandiose plans for the 70th jubilee of the Emperor Franz Josef.

Young Torless is to go to boarding school. His experiences there, the merciless torments of the pupils among themselves and the unsatisfactory answers of his teachers make it clear to Torless that good and bad cannot be differentiated in life. The boy leaves the boarding school at his own request after a short while. The incipient social and personal deformation in Musil's novel is skillfully implemented by Schlondorff in close correspondence with...