Diotima. Arnheim may have been based on Walther Rathenau and Thomas Mann. His detailed portrait of a decaying fin de siècle world is similar to those of Hermann Broch's The Sleepwalkers, Karl Kraus' The Last Days of Mankind or Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday. Some of Musil's working titles were The Gutters, Achilles (the original name of the main character Ulrich) or The Spy. Style and structure Musil's monumental novel contains more than 1,700 pages (depending on edition) in three volumes, the last of which was published by Musil's wife after his death. The novel is famous for the irony with which Musil depicts Austrian society shortly before World War I. The story takes place in 1913 in Vienna, the capital of Austria-Hungary, which Musil refers to by the playful term Kakanien. The name Kakanien is derived from the German abbreviation K und K (pronounced "ka oond ka") for kaiserlich und königlich or "Imperial and Royal", used to indicate the status of Austria-Hungary as a Dual Monarchy. But 'kaka' is also a child's word for faeces in German, just as in American English, in the Spanish caca and in the Italian cacca. Also, 'kakos' is a Greek term for bad borrowed by a number of words in German and English, and Musil uses the expression to symbolise the lack of political, administrative and sentimental coherence in Austria-Hungary. Musil elaborates on the paradoxes of the Kakanian way of life: "By its constitution it was liberal, but the system of government was clerical. The system of government was clerical, but the general attitude to life was liberal. Before the law all citizens were equal, but not everyone, of course, was a citizen. There was a parliament, but it used freedom in such an excessive way that it was kept almost always closed." (Musil: The Man without Qualities, Vol. 1: A Sort of Introduction, Chapter 8 – Kakanien). The story contains approximately twenty characters of bizarre Viennese life, from the beau monde to the demi-monde, including an aristocrat, an army officer, a banker, three bourgeois wives, an intriguing chambermaid, a black pageboy, and last but not least a man who murders a prostitute. The novel is told in the third-person omniscient point of view. According to Italian writer Alberto Arbasino, Federico Fellini's film 8½ (1963) used similar artistic procedures and had parallels with Musil's novel. Production Musil's aim (and that of his