Where Miklos Banffy spends nearly 1500 pages of his Transylvanian Trilogy chronicling the life of Hungarian nobility across their half of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, in The Confusions of Young Törless, Robert Musil compresses much of the experience of the Austrian half into less than a tenth of that in a tale of life in a pre-WWI military academy. (Not to worry about Musil, though. His magnum opus, The Man Without Qualities, runs well past 1500 pages.) The academy is meant to be preparing the boys — co-education of girls was barely thinkable at that time, the first young Austrian woman having passed the general qualification for university studies just ten years before Törless was published in 1906, and co-education at a military institute was definitely not thinkable — for service to the empire, and to Kaiser Franz Josef who had reigned for more than half a century. Musil, though, is not interested in the routines of school, drills and lessons, or the kind of plot that drives many boarding-school novels. His subject is adolescence, the inner life of young Törless.
Indirectly, Musil also comments on the kind of education that was thought normal, even ideal, for the young men who would one day assume leading positions in Austro-Hungarian society. It could hardly be further from the contemporary approach shown, for example, in The Incandescent by Emily Tesh. First and foremost, the school is concerned with its own reputation; all of the students know that scandalous behavior will result in expulsion, most likely done over a break when the errant cadet would simply not return and no one would mention him ever again. Secondarily, the school is concerned with the appearance of good order in its routines. The book shows very little class time and a great deal of scuttling about at night, sneaking into inaccessible corners of the institute and occasionally visiting beerhalls or prostitutes in the adjoining small town. As long as the cadets return by curfew and do not bring the academy into disrepute, they seem to be allowed to do what they want. The teachers are not completely indifferent; when Törless reveals that certain mathematical constructions (imaginary numbers, for example) are causing him philosophical distress, the math lecturer receives him at home one afternoon, and talks him through some of the propositions and helps relieve a few of his worries. He also inspires Törless to acquire a copy of some of Kant’s works, which Törless tries to read on his own but does not make much headway.
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