General Stumm from Air Force

General Stumm von Bordwehr is a literary character from Robert Musil's novel The Man without Qualities and the hero of many comic scenes. The novel describes the preparation of a fictional "parallel action". At the same time as the 30th anniversary of the throne of the German Emperor Wilhelm II planned for 1918, the even larger celebration of the 70th anniversary of the accession to the throne of Emperor Franz Josef is to take place in Austria . General Stumm von Bordwehr is the representative of the War Ministry on the preparatory committee for this festival. In the course of his work he also visits the court library in Vienna , which impresses him deeply.

Wilhelm Muster continued the general's fictional story in his novel The Wedding of the Unicorns (1981). General Stumm was seriously wounded during World War I and was only barely kept alive by various surgical interventions. He spends his remaining years in retirement in Graz . In addition to his physical ailments (he is almost blind, for example), there is also a mental confusion that made him decide in 1929 to set fire to the Graz University Library . He secretly penetrates from the reading room into a remote part of the basement storage room and dies there before he can carry out his project. His skeleton was only found six years later, in 1935.

literature

• Wilhelm Muster : The wedding of the unicorns . Stuttgart 1981. Chapter Mute from the airborne defense .
• Rudolf Rathei: General Stumm von Bordwehr. An obituary . In: Mitteilungen der Vereinigung Österreichischer Bibliothekare , March 1982, pp. 43–47.