No More Learning

A pause ensued. Fischel almost thought he should leave, but when he scraped his feet Diotima laid a hand on his arm with mute permission to remain. She seemed to be thinking. Fischel racked his brains to see ifhe could help her find a good idea. He would have gladly offered her money for the leading gentleman of the War Ministry she had men- tioned; but such an idea was at that time absurd. Fischel felt helpless. -A Midas! occurred to him; why, he did not exactly know, and he sought to recollect this ancient legend, without quite being able to. The lenses of his spectacles almost misted over with emotion.
At this moment Diotima brightened. - I believe, General Director, that I perhaps might indeed be able to help you a little. I would in any case be delighted if I could. I can't get over the idea that an intellectual can't be forced against the intellect! Of course, it would be better not to talk too much to the gentlemen of the War Ministry about the nature of this intellect.
Leo Fischel obligingly concurred with this circumspection.
- B u t this case has also, so to speak, a maternal side--Diotima went on-a feminine, unlogical aspect; I mean, given so-and-so many thou- sands of soldiers, just one can't be so important. I'll try to make clear to a high officer who is a friend of mine that out of political considerations His Excellency considers it important to have this young man mustered out; the right people should always be put in the right places, and your future son-in-law is not of the slightest use in a barracks, whereas he . . . well, somehow that's the way I see it. Unfortunately, the military is uncommonly resistant to exceptions. But what I hope is that we can at least get the young man a fairly long leave, and then we can think what to do about the rest.
Charmed, Leo Fischel bent over Diotima's hand. This woman had won his complete confidence.
The visit was not without its effect on his way of thinking either. For understandable reasons, he had lately become quite materialistic. His experiences of life had led him to the viewpoint that a right-thinking man had to watch out for himself. Be independent; need nothing from others for which you did not have something they wanted in return: but that is also a Protestant feeling, much as it was for the first colonists in America. Leo Fischel still loved to philosophize, even though his time
1672 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
for it had become much more limited. His affairs now sometimes brought him into contact with the high clergy. He discovered that it is the mistake of all religions to teach virtue as something which is only negative, as abstinence and selflessness; this makes it anachronistic and gives the deals one has to make an aura of something like secret vice. On the other hand, the public religion ofefficiency, as he met it in Germany through his business, had seized hold of him. People are glad to help a capable and enterprising person; in other words, he can get credit any- where: this was a positive formula that allowed one to get somewhere. It taught one to be ready to help withou~ reckoning on gratitude, just as Christian teaching demands, although it did not include the uncertainty of having to rely on noble feeling in someone else, but made use of ego- tism as the single dependable human quality, which it without doubt is. And money is a tool of genius that makes it possible to calculate and regulate this basic quality. Money is ordered selfishness brought into re- lation with efficiency. An enormous organization of selfishness accord- ing to the hierarchical order of how it is earned. It is a creative umbrella organization built on baseness-emperors and kings have not tamed the passions the way money has. Fischel often wondered what human demi- urge might have invented money. Ifeverythingwere to be accessible to money, and every matter to have its price, which unfortunately is still far from being the case, then any other morality besides the existence of trade would be of no use at all. This was his opinion and his conviction. Even during the time when he had revered the great ideas of humanity, he had always felt a certain aversion to them in the mouth of anybody else. If someone simply says "virtue" or "beauty," there is something as unnatural and affected about it as-when an Austrian speaks in the past tense. Now even that had increased. His life was consumed by work, striving for power, efficiency, and the dependence on the greatness of affairs, which he had to observe and exploit. The intellectual and spiri- tual spheres came to seem to him more and more like clouds having no connection with the earth. But he was no happier. He felt himself some- how weakened. Every amusement seemed to him more superficial than before. He increased his stimuli, with the result that he succeeded only in making himself more distracted. He made fun of his daughter, but secretly he envied her her ideas.
And as Diotima had spoken so naturally and freely of maternal feel- ing, soul, mind, and goodness, he was constantly thinking: -What a mother this would be for Gerda! (? wife for you) He wept inside to hear the beauty of her speech, and he had great satisfaction in noticing how these great words gave birth to a tiny element of corruption-however elegantly-for she was ultimately fulfilling: his request, whatever reasons
From the Posthumous Papers · 1673
might have been behind it. In certain cases, when there is a question of some injustice, idealism is almost better than naked calculation; this was the teaching that Fischel drew directly from the impressions of his visit, and that he intended to think about urgently on his further course.
Hans Sepp had left the barracks and not shown up for duty, although he had been transferred from the hospital back to his company. He knew that his return would entail the most unbearable consequences; being punished like an animal and, still worse-for punishment is soli- t:aty-beforehand the dull, set face of the captain and the necessity of having to be interrogated by him. Hans knew that he had made up his mind not to go back. For the first time the holy fire of defiance again flared up in him, and the unbending sense ofpurity that avoids contami- nation with the impure flashed through him. This made even more of a torture the memory that he had lost the right to it. He considered his illness incurable and was convinced that he had been sullied for the rest of his life. He had resolved to kill himself; he had left the barracks to completely cut off a return to life; the thought that in a few hours he would have killed himselfwas the only thing that could to some degree substitute for his self-respect, even ifit could not restore it.
In order not to be immediately recognized ifthey should be looking for him, he had put on civilian clothes. He walked through the city on foot, for he felt incapable of taking a cab; he had a long route before him, as it had seemed to him for some reason a matter ofcourse that he would kill himself only in the open countryside. He actually could have done it on the way, in the middle of the city; presumably, certain ceremonies merely serve to postpone the business a bit, and among these Hans in- cluded a last glimpse of nature; but he was not at all one of those people who think about such questions in a situation such as the one he was now in. The famous dark veil that arises when the moisture content of the emotions becomes extreme without precipitating tears lay before his eyes, and the noises of the world echoed softly. Passing cars, the throng of people, housefronts stretching for blocks, all looked like a bas-relief. The tears that Hans Sepp did not want to shed outwardly in public or for other reasons nonetheless fell through him inwardly as if down an in- credibly deep, dark shaft onto his own grave, in which he already felt himself lying, which signifies about the same thing as that he was simul- taneously sitting beside it and grieving for himself. There is in all this a force that is very cheering, and by the time Hans got to the city line,
1674 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
where the train tracks ran upon which he wanted to throw himself as soon as a train came along, his grief had become attached to and affili- ated with so many things that it really felt quite good. The stretch he was on was apparently not well traveled, and Hans had to tell himself that upon arriving he would have immediately thrown himself in front of a train had one happened to be passing by at that instant, but that not lmowing the schedule, he could not simply lie down on the tracks and wait. He sat down among the sparse vegetation on the slope at the top of a cut where the railway made a curve, and he could see in both direc- tions. A train passed, but he gave himself time. He observed the incred- ible increase in speed that takes place when the train shoots, as it were, through one's vicinity, and listened to the din of the wheels in order to be able to picture how he was going to be pounded in it by the next train. This clanging and bawling seemed, in contrast to what he saw, to last for an extraordinruy length of time, and Hans turned cold.
The question of what had made him want to end his life by means of a railway train was not at all clear. Hanging had something distorted and spooky. Jumping out a window is a woman's way. He had no poison. To cut his veins he needed a bathtub. On this path of eliminating other pos- sibilities, he pursued methodically the same course he had taken in blind determination with a single step: it satisfied him; his instincts had not yet been affected. To be sure, he had left out death by shooting; he thought of it now for the first time. But Hans did not own a pistol, nor did he lmow what to do with one, and he did not want to share his last moment with his army rifle. He had to be free of small misfortunes when he ex- ited this life. This reminded him that he had to prepare himself in- wardly. He had sinned and contaminated himself: he had to hold on to that. Someone else in his situation might perhaps have hoped for the prospect of recovery; but while recovery might be possible, salvation was irrevocably lost. Involuntarily, Hans pulled out of his coat his little note- book and a pencil; but before he could jot down his idea, he remem- bered that this was now quite pointless. He idly held notebook and pencil in his hands. His whole mind was directed at the phrase that he had become impure and godless. There was a lot to be said about that. For instance, that Christianity, influenced by Judaism, permitted sin to be redeemed through remorse and penitence, while the pure, Teutonic idea of being healthy and whole permitted of no bargaining or trading. Wholeness is lost once and for all, like virginity; and of course that is precisely where the greatness and challenge of the idea lies. Where today does one find such greatness? Nowhere. Hans was convinced that the world would suffer a great loss from his having to eliminate himself. The size and force of a train was really almost the only possible way of
From the Posthumous Papers · 1675
expressing the size and force of such a case. Another one went past. This technological marvel was small and tiny if one compared it to the astro- nomical construction techniques of the Egyptians and Assyrians, but at all events a train almost succeeded in enabling the present to express itself gothically, yearning outward beyond the limitations of matter. Hans raised his hand and almost irresolutely waved at people, who waved back and shoved their heads out the window in bunches, like the people-grapes on ancient naive sculptures. This made him feel better, but feeling good, grief, and everything he could think of was simply like smoke, and when it had drifted away the sentence that Hans Sepp had become impure and was not to be saved lay there again, undisturbed;
nothing lasting was connected with it, the idea no longer wished to grow.
1
If Hans had been sitting at home before a table with pen and paper, it
perhaps might have turned out otherwise; it was just this that gave him the feeling that he was here for no other purpose than to put an end to his existence.
He snapped the pencil in two and tore the notebook into little pieces. That was a major step. Then he climbed down the slope, sat in the grass at the edge of the gravel ballast, and threw the shreds of his intellectual world in front of the next train. The train scattered them. Nothing was to be found of the pencil; the bright paper butterflies, broken on the wheels and sucked up, covered the right-of-way on both sides for five hundred paces. Hans calculated that he was approximately twelve times larger than the notebook. Then he seized his head in both hands and began his final farewell. This pulling everything together was to be de- voted to Gerda. He wanted to forgive her and, without leaving her a written word, to die with the all-embracing thought of her on his lips. But even though all kinds of thoughts appeared and disappeared in his mind, his body remained quite empty. It seemed down here in the nar- row cut that he could not feel anything and needed to go and sit up above again in order to embrace Gerda once more in his mind. But it seemed silly, it annoyed him to have to crawl up the slope. Gradually the emptiness in his body increased and became hunger. -That's my mind beginning to disintegrate, he told himself. Since his illness, he had lived in constant fear of going insane. He had let train after train go by and had sat down here in the narrow, stupid world of the railway cut without thinking of anything at all. It might already be late afternoon. Then Hans Sepp became aware, as if someone suddenly turned something around in him, that this was his final state, to be succeeded only by its execution. He had the nauseating feeling of an imaginary skin eruption over his whole body. He pulled out his pocket knife and cleaned his nails with it; this was an ill-bred habit he had, which he considered very tidy and ele-
1676 • THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
gant; it made him want to cry. Hesitantly he stood up. Everything inside him had receded from him. He was afraid, but he was no longer master ofhimself; the sole master was the irrevocable resolve that ruled alone in a dark vacuum. Hans looked left and right. One might say that he had already died as he looked in both directions for a train, for this looking was all that was alive in him, this and isolated feelings that drifted past like clumps of grass in a flood. For he no longer knew what to do with himself. He still noticed that his head commanded his legs to leap before the train approached; but his legs were no longer paying attention, they sprang when they wanted to, at the last minute, and Hans's body was struck in the air. He still felt himself plunging down, falling on great sharp knives. Then his world burst into fragments.
Gerda had come back. After Hans's death she had, for the moment, nothing to live for. But if Fischel had expected to find his daughter crushed, he was mistaken. A young lady who obviously had far-reaching plans walked in, wearing the insignia of a Red Cross nurse.
- I ' m going to go as a nurse, Papa, Gerda said.
- N o t right away, not right away, my child! General Director Fischel answered submissively. - W e have to wait and see. No one has any idea what this is going to turn into-
-What should it turn into! I've already seen the young men at the mobilization stations. They're singing. Their wives and fiancees are with them. No one knows how he is going to come back. But if you walk through the city and look in people's eyes, including the people who aren't going to the front yet, it's like a big wedding.
Fischel, concerned, looked at his daughter over his glasses. - 1 would wish another kind of wedding for you, may God preserve us. A Dutch firm has offered me a shipful of margarine, available at the port of Rot- terdam--do you know what that means? Five crowns difference per ton since yesterday! If I don't telegraph right away, tomorrow it will proba- bly be seven crowns. That means prices are going up. Ifthey come back from the campaign with both eyes, the-young men will need them both to look out for their money!
-Well-Gerda said-people are talking about increases, but there have always been increases at the beginning. Mama is quite wild too.
- O h ? Fischel asked. - H a v e you already talked with Mama? What's she up to?
- A t the moment, she's in the kitchen-Gerda motioned with her
From the Posthumous Papers · 1677
head toward the wall, behind which a hall led to the kitchen-and laying in canned goods like mad. Before that, she cashed in her change, like everyone else. And she fired the kitchen maid; since the manservant has to go in the army anyway, she wants to really cut down on the servants.
Fischel nodded with satisfaction. -She's in favor of the war. She hopes the brutality will cease and people will be purified. But she is also a clever woman and is being prudent. Fischel said this a little mockingly and a little tenderly.
- O h , Papa. Gerda flared up. - I f I had wanted to be the way you are, I would have married a knight in shining armor. You keep misunder- standing me. I'm not letting myself be left by the wayside because my first romantic experience wasn't a good one! You'll manage to get me into a field hospital. When the patients come in from the front they should find real, up-to-date people as nurses, not praying nuns! You have no idea how much love and emotion of a sort we've never experi- enced before are (to be seen) in the streets today! We've been living like animals, brought down one day by death; it's different now! It's tremen- dous, I tell you: everyone is a brother; even death isn't an enemy; a per- son loves his own death for the sake of others; today, for the first time, we understand life!
Fischel had been staring at his daughter with pride and concern. Gerda had got even thinner. Sharp, spinsterish lines cut up her face into an eye segment, a nose-mouth part, and a chin-and-neck section, all of which, whenever Gerda was trying to say something, pulled like horses dragging a load that was too heavy: now one part, now another, never all together, giving the face an overstrained and deeply moving quality. -Now she has a new craze-Fischel thought-and will manage once again not to lead a settled life! In his mind he ran down a list of a dozen men who, now that Hans Sepp was fortunately dead, could be regarded as qualified suitors; but in view of the damned uncertainty that had bro- ken out, there was no predicting what was going to happen to any of them tomorrow. Gerda's blond hair seemed to have become shaggier; she had been neglecting her appearance, but this made her hair look more like Fischel's, and it had lost the presumptuous soft, dark-blond smoothness characteristic of her mother's family. Memories of a brave, unkempt fox terrier and of himself, who had fought his way up and at the moment was standing again before something as yet unseen by man, over which he would go on climbing, mingled in his heart with the brave stupidity of his daughter into a warm togetherness. Leo Fischel straight- ened up in his chair and laid his hand on the desktop with emphasis. -M y child! -he said-I have a strange feeling when I hear you talk this way, while people are shouting hurrah and prices are rising. You say I
1678 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
don't have any idea, but I do, except that I can't say myself what it is. Don't believe that I'm not caught up in this too. Sit down, my child!
Gerda did not want to, she was too impatient; but Fischel repeated his wish more strongly, and she obeyed, sitting hesitantly on the extreme edge of an annchair. -This is the first day you're back; listen to me! Fischel said. - Y o u say I understand nothing about love and killing and such things; that may be. But if nothing happens to you in the hospital, which God forbid, you ought to understand me a little before we part again. I was seven years old when we had the war with Prussia. Then too, for two weeks, all the bells pealed and in the synagogue we prayed to God to annihilate the Prussians, who today are our allies. What do you say to that? What should anyone say to that?
Gerda did not want to answer. She had the prejudice that what was going on now belonged to the enthusiastic young, not the cautious old. And only reluctantly, because her father was looking at her so penetrat- ingly, did she murmur some sort ofresponse.
-Over the course oftime, people simply learn to understand each other better-was what her an- swer about the Prussians amounted to. But Leo Fischel snatched up her words spiritedly: -No! People don't learn to understand each other better in the course of time; it's just the opposite, I tell you! When you get to know a person and you like him, it may be that you think you understand him; but after you've been around him for twenty-five years you don't understand a word he says! You think, let's say, that he ought to be grateful to you; but no, just at that moment he curses you. Always when you think he has to say yes, he'll say no; and when you think no, he thinks yes. So he can be wann or cold, hard or soft, as it suits him; and do you believe that for your sake he'll be the way you want him to be? It suited your mother as little as it suits this annchair to be a horse, because you're already impatient and want to be off!
Gerda smiled weakly at her father. Since she had come back and seen the new situation, he had made a strong impression on her; she could not help herself. And he loved her, there was no doubting that, and it comforted her.
- B u t what are we going to do with the things that won't let us under- stand them? Fischel asked prophetically. -We measure them, we weigh them, we analyze them mentally, and we direct all our keenness to finding in them something that remains constant, something by which we could get hold of them, on which we can rely and which we can count. Those are the laws of nature, my child, and where we have dis- covered them we can mass-produce things and buy and sell to our heart's content. And now I ask you, how can people relate to one another when they don't understand one another? I tell you, there's only one
From the Posthumous Papers · 1679
way! Only when you stimulate or inhibit his desire can you get a person exactly where you want him. Whoever wants to build solidly must make use of force and basic desires. Then a person suddenly becomes unam- biguous, predictable, dependable, and your experience with him is re- peated everywhere in the same fashion. You can't rely on goodness. You can rely on bad qualities. God is wonderful, my child; he has given us our bad qualities so that we can achieve some semblance of order.
- B u t in that case the order of the world would be nothing but base- ness jumping through hoops! Gerda flared up.
-Y ou're clever! Perhaps so. But who can know? At any rate, I don't point a bayonet at a person's chest to have him do what he thinks is right. Are you following the newspapers? I'm still getting foreign papers, al- though it's beginning to be difficult. Here and abroad they're saying the same things. Get the screws on them. Tighten the screws on them. Cold- bloodedly continue the tight-screw policy. Don't hesitate to apply the "strong method" of breaking windows. That's the way they're talking here, and abroad it's not much different. I believe they've already intro- duced martial law, and ifwe should get into the war zone we'll be threat- ened with the gallows. That's the strong method. I can understand that it makes an impression on you. It's clean, precise, and abhors chatter. It qualifies the nation for great things by treating each individual person who is part of it like a dog! Leo Fischel smiled.
Gerda shook her tousled head decisively, but in a slow, friendly way.
- Y o u must be clear about this, Fischel added. - W h e n the industri- alists' association supplied a bourgeois workers' opposition party with an election fund, or when my former bank made money available for some- thing, they weren't doing anything different. And a deal only comes about at all if I either force another person to meet me halfway, because otherwise it will hurt him, or if I give him the impression that there's a good deal to be made; then I mostly outsmart him, and that's also a form of my power over him. But how delicate and adaptable this power is! It's creative and flexible. Money gives measure to a man. It's ordered selfish- ness. It's the most splendid organization ofselfishness, a creative super- organization, constructed on a real notion of bearish speculation!
Gerda had been listening to her father, but her own thoughts buzzed in her mind. She answered: -Papa, I didn't understand everything, but you're surely right. Of course, you're looking at things as a rationalist, and for me it's precisely the irrational (what goes beyond all calculation) in what's going on now that's fascinating!
-What does irrational mean? General Director Fischel protested. -By that you mean illogical and incalculable and wild, the way one sometimes is in dreams? To that I can only say that buying and selling is
168o • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
like war; you have to calculate and you can calculate, but even there what is decisive in the last analysis is will, courage, the individual, or, as you call it, the irrational. No, my child-he concluded-money is self- ishness brought into relation with enterprise and efficiency. All of you are trying another way to regulate selfishness. It's not new, I acknowl- edge it, it's related. But wait and see how it works! For centuries capital- ism has been a proven way oforganizing human powers according to the ability to make money; where its influence is suppressed, you will find that arbitrariness, backroom deals, kowtowing for advantage, and adven- turism will spring up. As far as I'm concerned, you can do away with money if you like, but you won't abolish the superior power of whoever is holding the advantages in his hand. Except that you'll put someone who doesn't know what to do with them in the place of someone who did! For you're mistaken if you believe that money is the cause of our selfishness; it's the consequence.
-But I don't believe that at all, Papa, Gerda said modestly. -I'm only telling you that's what's going on n o w -
-And furthermore-Fischel interrupted her-it's the most reason- able consequence!
-What's going on now-Gerda went on with her sentence-rises above reason. The way a poem or love rises above the commerce of the world.
-Y ou're a deep girl! Fischel embraced her and released her. He liked Gerda's youthful ardor. -M y fortune! he called her mentally, and fol- lowed her with a tender glance. A discussion with a person one loves and understands is bracing. He had not philosophized this way for a long time; it was a remarkable period. In conversation with this child Fischel had achieved some clarity about himself. He wanted to buy. Not a ship; at least five ships. He summoned his secretary. -W e can't do this our- selves-he told him-it wouldn't look good, but let's do it through an intermediary. But for Leo Fischel this was not the main thing. The main thing was that he had gained a feeling ofconnection with events and yet a feeling ofisolation, too. In spite ofthe ups and downs going on around him, he had created order within himself.
To THE COMPLEX: LEO FISCHEL-GERDA-HANS SEPP Note: Development of a Man of Action (Leo Fischel)
Title: Return to an abandoned world I Leo Fischel as messenger from the world I Encounter with a messenger from an abandoned world I News from a lost world
Walking through the train, Ulrich saw a familiar face, stopped, and realized that it was Leo Fischel, who was sitting in a compartment by himself, leafing through a stack of flimsy papers he held in his hand. With his pince-nez far down on his nose, and his reddish-blond mutton- chop sideburns, he looked like an English lord of the 186os. Ulrich was so in need of contact with everyday life that he greeted his old acquaint- ance, whom he had not seen for months, almost joyfully.
Fischel asked him where he was coming from.
"From the south," Ulrich responded vaguely.
'We haven't seen you for quite a while," Fischel said with concern.
"You've been having trouble, haven't you? ''
"How so? ''
"I just mean in general. In your position with the campaign, I'm think-
ing. "
"I never had a connection with the campaign that could be called a
position," Ulrich objected with some heat.
"You just disappeared one day," Fischel said. "Nobody knew where
you were. That led me to think that you were having problems. " "Except for that error, you're very well informed: how come? '' Ulrich
laughed.
"I was looking for you like a needle in a haystack. Hard times, bad
stories, my friend," Fischel replied with a sigh. "The General didn't know where you were, your cousin didn't know where you were, and you weren't having your mail forwarded, I was told. Did you get a letter from Gerda? ''
"Get it? No. Perhaps I'll find it waiting for me at home. Has some- thing happened to Gerda? ''
Director Fischel did not answer; the conductor was passing by, and he
z68z
1682 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
motioned him in to give him some telegrams, requesting that he send them off at the next stop.
Ulrich now first noticed that Fischel was traveling first class, which he would not have expected of him.
"Since when are you seeing my cousin and the General? '' he asked.
Fischel looked at him reflectively. Obviously he did not understand the question right away. "Oh," he then said, "I think you hadn't even left yet. Your cousin consulted me on a matter of business, and through her I met the General, whom I wanted at that time to request somethingofon account of Hans Sepp. You know, don't you, that Hans shot and killed himself? ''
Ulrich gave an involuntary start.
"It even got into some of the newspapers," Fischel confirmed. "He was called up for his military service and a few weeks later shot himself. "
"But why? ''
"God knows! Frankly speaking, he could just as well have done it sooner. He could always have shot himself. He was a fool. But in the final analysis, I liked him. You won't believe it, but I even liked his anti- Semitism and his diatribes against bank directors. "
"Was there anything between him and Gerda? "
"Bitter quarrels," Fischel confirmed. "But it wasn't that alone. Listen: I've missed you. I searched for you. When I'm talking with you I have the feeling I'm talking not with a reasonable person but with a philoso- pher. Whatever you say-please permit an old friend to say this-is never to the point, never has hands and feet, but it has head and heart! So what do you say about Hans Sepp's having shot himself? ''
"Is that why yOu. . ___were searching for me? "
"No, not because of that. On account of business and the General and Arnheim, who are friends ofyours. The man before you is no longer with Lloyd's Bank but has gone into business for himself. It's a handful, let me tell you! I've had a lot oftrouble, but now, thank goodness, things are going splendidly-"
"If I'm not mistaken, what you call trouble is losing your job? "
"Yes; thank goodness I lost my job at Lloyd's; otherwise today I would still be a head clerk with the title of Director and would remain one until I was put out to pasture. When I was forced to give that up, my wife began divorce proceedings against m e - "
"Honestly! You really do have a lot of news to telll"
"Hmphl" Fischel went. 'We no longer live in the old apartment. While the divorce is going on, my wife has moved in with her brother"- he took out a business card-"and this is my address. I hope you'll pay me a visit soon. " On the card Ulrich read several ambiguous titles, such
From the Posthumous Papers · z683
as "Import/Export" and "Trans-European Goods and Currency Ex- change Company," and a prestigious address. "You have no idea how one rises all by oneself," Fischel explained to him, "once all those weights like family and job responsibilities, the wife's fancy relations, and responsibility for the leading minds of humanity are taken off one's shoulders! In a few weeks I became an influential man. And a well-off man, to boot. Perhaps the day after tomorrow I'll have nothing again, but I may have even more! "
"What are you now, actually? "
"It's not easy to explain casually to an outsider. I conduct transactions. Transactions of goods, transactions of currency, political transactions, art transactions. In every case the important thing is to get out at the right moment; then you can never lose. " As in the old days, it seemed to give Leo Fischel pleasure to accompany his activity with "philosophy," and Ulrich listened to him with curiosity.
-Philosophy of money
ofthe free man, among others-
Then Ulrich: "But with all that, it's also important for me to know
what Gerda said about Hans's suicide. "
"She claims I murdered him! But they had broken up definitively well
before! "
RACHEL
And while Ulrich was letting the notion of remorse surface in his re- flections, in order to dissolve it immediately again in the deep play of thought, his little friend Rachel was suffering this word in all its tor- tures, dissolved by nothing but the palliative effect of tears and the cautious return of temptation after the remorse had gone on for a while. One will recall that Diotima's intense little maid, ejected from her parents' house because of a misstep, who had landed in the golden aura of virtue surrounding her mistress, had, in the weakest of a series of increasingly weak moments, submitted to the attacks of the black Moorish boy. It happened and made her very unhappy. But this un- happiness aspired to repeat itself as often as the scanty opportunities that Diotima's house offered would allow. On the second or third day after every unhappiness a remarkable change occurred, which can be compared to a flower that, bent over by the rain, raises its little head again. Can be compared to fine weather that, way up above, peeks from a remote corner of the sky through a rainy day; finds friendly lit- tle spots of blue; forms a blue lake; becomes a blue sky; is veiled by a light haze of the overwhelming brightness of a day of happiness; is tinged with brown; lets down one hot veil of haze after another and fi- nally towers, torrid and trembling, from earth to sky, filled with the zigzags and cries of birds, filled with the listless droop of tree and leaf, filled with the craziness of not-yet-discharged tensions that cause man and beast to roam madly about.
On the last day before the remorse, the head of the Moor always twitched through the house like a rolling head of cabbage, and little Ra- chel would have loved to creep on it like a caterpillar with a sweet tooth. But then remorse set in. As if a pistol had been fired and a shimmering glass ball been turned into a powder of glassy sand. Rachel felt sand be- tween her teeth, in her nose, her heart; nothing but sand. The world was dark; not dark like a Moor, but nauseatingly dark, like a pigsty. Rachel, having disappointed the confidence placed in her, seemed to herself be- smirched through and through. Grief placed a deep drill in the vicinity of her navel. A raging fear of being pregnant blinded her thoughts. One
From the Posthumous Papers · 1685
could go on in this fashion-every limb in Rachel ached individually with remorse-but the main thing was not in these details but seized hold ofthe whole person, driving her before the wind like a cloud ofdust raised by a broom. The knowledge that a misstep that has happened can- not be rectified by anything in the world made the world something of a hurricane in which one can find no support to stand up. The peaceful- ness of death seemed to Rachel like a dark feather bed, which it must be delightful to roll on. She had been torn out ofher world, abandoned to a feeling whose intensity was unlike anything in Diotima's house. She could not get at this feeling with an idea, any more than comfortings can get at a toothache, while it actually seemed to her, on the other hand, that there was only one remedy, to pull little Rachel entirely out of the world like a bad tooth.
Had she been cleverer, she would have been able to assert that re- morse is a basic disturbance of equilibrium, which one can restore in the most various ways. But God helped her out with his old, proven home remedy by again giving her, after a few days, the desire to sin.
We, however, cannot of course be as indulgent as the great Lord, to whom earthly matters offer little that is new or important. We must ask whether in a condition in which there is no sin there can be any remorse. And since this question has already been answered in the negative, ex- cept for a few borderline cases, a second question immediately arises: from which ocean did the little drop of hell's fire fall into Rachel's heart, ifit may not be said to have originated in the ocean whose clouds Ulrich had discovered? Every such question was suited to plunge Ulrich out of the sky on which he wanted to set foot purely theoretically. There are so many lovelythings on earth that have nothing to do with divine, seraphic love, and most decidedly there are among them things that forbid any- thing and everything to be expected from their rediscovery. This ques- tion was later to be of the greatest significance for Ulrich and Agathe.
LATE 1920S
The weeks since Rachel had left Diotima's house had passed with an improbability that a different person would hardly have accepted calmly. But Rachel had been shown the door of her parents' house as a sinner, and at the conclusion ofthat fall had landed, straight as an arrow, in paradise, at Diotima's; now Diotima had thrown her out, but such an enchantingly refined man as Ulrich had been standing there and had
1686 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
caught her: how could she not believe that life is the way it is described in the novels she loved to read? Whoever is destined to be a hero fate throws into the air in daredevil ways over and over, but it always catches him again in its strong arms. Rachel placed blind confidence in fate, and during this entire time had really done nothing but wait for its next inter- vention, when it might perhaps unveil its intentions. She had not become pregnant; so the experience with Soliman seemed to have been only a passing incident. She ate in a small pub, together with coachmen, out-of-work servant girls, workers who had business in the neighbor- hood, and those undefinable transients who flood a large city. The place she had chosen for herself, at a specific table, was reserved for her every day; she wore better clothes than the other women who frequented the pub; the way she used her knife and fork was different from what one was accustomed to seeing here; in this place Rachel enjoyed a secret respect, which she was acutely aware of even though not many people wanted to show it, and she assumed that she was taken for a countess or the mistress of a prince, who for some reason was compelled for a time to conceal her class. It happened that men with dubious diamonds on their fingers and with slicked-down hair, who sometimes turned up among the respectable guests, arranged to sit at Rachel's table and di- rected seductively sinuous compliments to her; but Rachel knew how to refuse these with dignity and without unfriendliness, for although the compliments pleased her as much as the buzzing and creeping ofinsects and caterpillars and snakes on a luxuriant summer day, she still sensed that she could not let herselfgo in this direction without running the risk of losing her freedom. She most liked to converse with older people, who knew something of life and told stories of its dangers, disappoint- ments, and events.