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In this thoroughly researched and carefully argued work, literary scholar Anne Fleig sets out two goals for herself: to analyze the close connection between sports, science, and modern culture, in the first place, and to outline the Austrian writer Robert [End Page 255] Musil's own meditations on this connection, out of which emerges what Fleig sees as his aesthetics of sports. In both of these goals Fleig succeeds admirably, marshalling an impressive array of evidence to make her case. To Musil, sports revealed one of the central contradictions of the modern project, that between greater individualism on the one hand, and greater rationalization and uniformity on the other. Scores of other writers in the 1920s had recognized this same contradiction, and they all contributed to the remarkably expansive corpus of sports commentary and analysis from this period. Musil, however, saw in sports not only modernity's contradictions, but also its potential resolution, and herein lay his aesthetics of sports, according to Fleig.

Unlike most commentators on the aesthetics of sports, both during the 1920s and since, Musil did not focus on the experience of the spectator, but instead on the experience of the athlete himself (only on occasion did Musil acknowledge the sportswoman). In particular, he looked at the moment when the athlete managed to leave his own consciousness, becoming a perfectly coordinated, purely unconscious interplay of body parts. Musil referred to this complete absence of self-reflection as "Entrückung," and he saw its beauty in the punch of a boxer, for instance, a moment of leaving one's consciousness and achieving another form of perception altogether. Musil insisted that the true moment of transcendence for the athlete, whose every movement was the product of conscious, rational, modern training, came only with the complete deactivation of modern consciousness. This is the artistically informed moment, rather than the scientifically informed one. This is the aesthetic moment in sports. Only the athlete himself achieved this moment of transcendence, according to Musil, not the spectator who watched him. Musil's aesthetics of sports differed substantially, therefore, from the aesthetics of painting or music, for example, in which the viewer or listener, as well as the producer, could achieve transcendence.

Fleig bases her study on a close reading of Musil's writings, including his uncompleted novel Mann ohne Eigenschaften, his sports essays, diary entries, reports, reviews, letters, and memoir, but she makes her argument most convincingly in Chapter 5, in which she focuses on Musil's 1932 essay in the cultural journal Querschnitt, "Kunst und Moral des Crawlens." In it, a fictional young man writes to ask if the front crawl, a swimming stroke that first gained widespread popularity in the 1920s and that Musil himself learned in 1925, was an "art or a science." Musil's essayistic "I" attempts to answer the question by calculating a universal formula for the movements of the front crawl. The crawl represented a much more complex series of movements than the breaststroke, which it replaced, and it reflected the close attention to technique in the world of 1920s sports, a quest for the best method, which one could then universally apply to all athletes in a discipline. At this point in her analysis, Fleig embarks on a highly illuminating exploration of Musil's own engagement with the emerging discipline of Psychotechnik, which pioneered the development of aptitude tests in order to make the most effective use of an individual's traits and abilities. In other words, it sought to fit the task to an individual's proclivities, rather than to fit the individual to the task. Musil actually worked for the Austrian Ministry of the Army in the early 1920s and issued a report in 1922 entitled "Psychotechnik und ihre Anwendungsmöglichkeiten im Bundesheere" in which, as Fleig writes, "Musil als erster den Zusammenhang von psychotechnischen Verfahren und Sport benannt [hat]" (190). There could be no equation for the front crawl because each swimmer necessarily drew [End Page 256] on his individual traits and personal style. Indeed, that style made one a better swimmer. This un-rationalizable "personal style" of the swimmer, like the swift punch of the boxer, represented to Musil the aesthetic moment in sports, in which the athlete shut off consciousness in the midst of the most highly coordinated set of movements— transcending rationalized, modern training at precisely the moment when it seemed most apparent—and thereby expanded his own possibilities.

As an historian, I particularly appreciate the valuable contribution that Anne Fleig's work makes to the subfield of sports history, which has only recently begun to explore theories of the subjective physical experience of athletic participation. Moreover, the first third of her book offers an impressively thorough overview of the various strands of physical culture that enjoyed such remarkable popularity throughout central Europe in the interwar period. Fleig carefully traces Musil's engagement with a number of contemporary discourses as well, from physiology and Taylorism to art criticism and sports journalism. She devotes an entire chapter to the journal Querschnitt, which published two of Robert Musil's most influential sports essays and which led the cultural discussion of sports throughout the 1920s and early 1930s.

Because of this contextualization of Musil's writings within a series of larger discourses, Fleig's book would interest scholars of Georg Simmel, Franz Blei, and Béla Balázs, as well as those of Robert Musil himself. In fact, in Fleig's eagerness to contextualize, she takes the reader on digressions into the history of Vienna's Prater, Prussian military reform, the bourgeois pastime of strolling, the evolution of dandyism, the art of the essay, fashion, and coquetry. These only occasionally distract. Mostly they enrich and enliven Fleig's carefully considered analysis of Musil and his intellectual context. I recommend her work to historians and literary scholars alike, and I could readily see this book working well in graduate seminars.