73 Leo Fischel's Daughter Gerda

So many characters, so little time. I debated whether to give this chapter it's own entry and decided to err on the side of generosity. After all, since Musil is so generous with his characters, why shouldn't I be.

The chapter begins with Gerda's mother, Clementine, coming to see Ulrich and beg him to talk to her daughter: "--you're the only man who counts for something with her, and Leo thinks the world of you!--couldn't you come over and try to open Gerda's eyes to the callowness of Hans and his cronies."

Gerda had been inviting a "swarm of odd young people" to their house because it "was the most convenient for their get-togethers." Leo Fischel is Jewish, but these young people seem totally oblivious to him:

. . . the way they insisted on parading their mystical anti-Semitism was not only in poor taste, it revealed an inner brutality. Not that she [Clementine] had come to complain about anti-Semitism, she added, which was a sign of the times, one simply had to resign oneself to it -- she was even prepared to admit that in some respects there might be something to it. 

Reluctantly, Ulrich makes his visit, even though his friendship with Gerda "seemed to be a perfectly natural but pointless intimacy, and they both feared it."

Regarding Gerda's attitude toward her parents, the narrator has this to say:

Had Gerda been born some years later than she was . . . She would then probably have taken pride in being of "racially mixed" parentage; but as things stood, she rebelled against her parents and their problems, did not want to be genetically tainted by them, and was blond, free, Germanic, and forceful, as  if she had nothing to do with them. . . . In her home, nationalism and racism were treated as nonexistent, even though they were convulsing half of Europe with hysterical ideas and everything in the Fischel household in particular turned on nothing else. 

Gerda defiantly rejects any advice Ulrich might give her regarding her friends:

"When I talk with my friends," she said, "our thoughts flow from one to the other, and we know that we live and speak as one with our people -- do you have any idea what this means? We stand with countless others of our own kind, we feel their presence, in a sensory, physical way I'm sure you've never . . . In fact, you can't even imagine such a thing, can you? Your desire has always been been for a single individual; you think like a beast of prey!"

The unresolved sexual tension between them leads Ulrich to recount to Gerda a "crackpot theory" about the "capture of the moon."  As he begins the story, Ulrich "drew her closer  with his hand, inside which her wrist disappeared like a child among high crags."

The pressure of the physical on both Gerda's and Ulrich's "thinking" is revealed in this passage:

"Then why did you tell me this story?" Gerda asked, and tried to extricate her hand from his. But her defiance had quite run out of steam, as it always did when she spoke with this man, who was certainly not Han's intellectual inferior and yet managed to keep from going to extremes in his views, to keep his fingernails clean and his hair combed. Ulrich notice the fine black down growing like a contradiction on Gerda's fair skin; the tiny hairs sprouting from her body seemed to bespeak the variously composed nature of poor modern mankind.

Gerda finally gets out of Ulrich's grip, but the chapter concludes with Ulrich's promise to see her again soon, "although this had not been his intention before he came."