Born in the waning years of the Habsburg Empire, Robert Musil served his Imperial and Royal Majesty in a bloody continental conflagration and was killed during the war that followed worse. Looking back, call the era in which he lived "was a damn." For Musil, the more stubbornly retrograde feature of German culture was its tendency to separate the intellect of feeling. It seemed that the education of the senses through refinement of erotic life implied promise to raise people to a higher ethical plane. He deplored the rigid roles, extending even to the area of ​​sexual intimacy, confirmed its validity by bourgeois habits of both men and women. "As a result, they have lost and submerged entire regions of the soul," he wrote.