Love and the Mind
MUSIL, Robert.
Vinzenz und die Freundin bedeutender Männer. Posse in drei Akten. Berlin, Ernst Rowohlt Verlag, 1924.
8vo, pp. 106; some light browning, neat paper repair to top margin of title; uncut, in contemporary plain paper wrappers, in a cloth folding case.
Rare first edition of Musil’s early farce, featuring an abduction, extramarital affairs, and a staged murder, an important precursor to his most famous work, the unfinished modernist novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man without Qualities).
With Vinzenz und die Freundin bedeutender Männer, Musil (1880–1942)aimed to prove ‘to directors, actors, critics, and audiences that he was a seasoned theatre person, skilled in dramatic effects and an adept entertainer of audiences’ (Deutsche Biographie, trans.). Two productions were staged, one by the Austrian director and screenwriter Berthold Viertel (Berliner Lustspielhaus, December 1923), and the other at Vienna’s Deutsches Volkstheater by its director, Rudolf Beer (August 1924).
Like Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, the present comedy is centred on ‘the relation of the sexes and intellect, of love and mind’, following ‘Vinzenz, the shifty statistician, and Alpha, the friend of important and distinguished men’ (Braun, ‘Musil’s Vinzenz und die Freundin bedeutender Männer’, in The Germanic Review 23:2 (1962), p. 121).
OCLC and Library Hub together find a single copy in the UK, at the British Library.
Wilpert/Gühring 8.