In an early draft of his speech Rede auf dem International Schriftstellerkongress für die Verteidigung der Kultur in Paris on the 21st of June 1935, Robert Musil notes that he had never made public statements about hygiene and that he had little talent (KA/Mappe VI/1/65) for being a hygienist. Despite Musil's concession that he had never publicly commented on hygiene and believed he lacked the talent for being a hygienist, an analysis of Musil's works reveals that, between his time in Brünn and his exile in Switzerland, a considerable number of reflections can be found that deal with the themes of hygiene and body culture, often linked to the concept of illness, as it was highlighted by the classical 19th-century hygiene discourse, which served as a discursive immune system of society.

In this context, Musil also engages in a transcultural approach by explicitly referencing the Japanese bacteriologist and microbiologist Sahachiro Hata (1873–1938) in Chapter 54 of his opus magnum Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Hata, who had worked as an assistant of German physician Paul Ehrlich, developed a treatment (Salvarsan/Ehrlich-Hata 606) for syphilis in 1910, a sexually transmitted disease from which Musil himself suffered. Musil first mentions his affliction with the disease in March 1902 by stating: „Es ist mir als ob ich mit einem Schlage so gräßlich krank geworden wäre“ (KA/Heft 4/43).

By attempting to establish a language about the overstimulated individual within the body politic, Musil's work serves as a bridge between scientific, popular scientific, and political forms of representation, where the boundaries between health and illness become blurred.

This research projects highlights points of this intersection within the transformation of the scientific hygiene discourse in Europe and East Asia in the 19th and 20th centuries. These intersections aim to open new possibilities for a more transculturally oriented study of Robert Musil's works as shown in Kraus (2024a), Kraus (2024b) and Kraus/Pekar (2024).