And per- haps we are still sacrificing so many human beings today only be- cause we never clearly faced the pro~lem of the light way to
overcome
mankind's earlier answers.
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v1
He had, in fact, forgotten his promise to see her, or remembered it only when he had other things to do.
"Forget about him," Clementine said, whenever Director Fischel grumbled about it. 'We used to be good enough for him, but he's probably setting his social sights higher these days. I f you go after him you'll only make matterS worse; you're much too clumsy to carry it off. "
Gerda missed this older friend. She wished he would come and knew that if he did come, she would wish him away. For all her twenty-three years, nothiD. g had yet happened in her life other than the cautious wooing of a certain Herr Glanz, who had her father on his side, and her Christian-Germanic friends, whom she sometimes regarded as schoolboys rather than real men. "Why doesn't he ever come to see me? " she wondered, whenever she thought of Ulrich. Among her friends, the Parallel Campaign was see~ as beyond any doubt the opening salvo in the spiritual destruction of the German people, and she felt embarrassed by Ulrich's involvement in it; she longed to hear his side ofit, however, hoping that he would be able to exonerate himself.
Her mother said to her father: "You missed your chance to be in this affair. It would have been a good thing for Gerda, and she'd have had something else to think about; a lot ofpeople go to the Tuzzis'. " It had come to light that he had neglected to respond to His Grace's invitation. Now he had to suffer for it.
The young men whom Gerda called her spiritual comrades in arms had settled down in his house like Penelope's suitors, debating what a young man of German blood should do about the Parallel Campaign.
"A fmancier must be able, at times, to act in the spirit of a Mae- cenas," Frau Clementine exhorted her husband when he fumed that
he had not hired Hans Sepp, Gerda's "spiritual guide," as a tutor, for good money, only to have thts situation come of it.
Hans Sepp, the graduate student, who had not the slightest pros- pect of being able to keep a wife, had come into the household as a tutor but, owing to the conflicts that were tearing the family apart, had become its tyrant. Now he was discussing with his friends, who had become Gerda's friends, at the Fischels', how to save the Ger- man aristocracy from being ensnared by Diotima-of whom it was said that she made no distinction between persons of her own race and those of an alien race-and caught up in the nets of the Jewish spirit. While in the presence of Leo Fischel this sort of talk was usu- ally tempered with a· certain philosophic objectivity, he still heard enough of certain terms and principles for it to get on his neiVes. They worried that such a campaign, which was bound to lead to total catastrophe, should have surfaced in an era not destined to bring forth great symbols, and the recurrent expressio~s "deeply meaning- ful," "upward humanization," and "free personhood" were enough by themselves to make the pince-nez quiver on Fischel's nose every time he heard them. He had to stand by while there proliferated in his own house such concepts as "the art of living thought," "the graph of spiritual growth," and "action on the wing. " He discovered that a biweekly "hour of purification" was held regularly under his roof. He demanded an explanation. It turned out that what they meant by this was reading the poems of Stefan George together. Leo Fischel searched his old encyclopedia in vain for the poet's name. But what irritated him most of all, old-style liberal that he was, was that these green pups referred to all the high government officials, bank presidents, and leading university figures in the Parallel Cam- paign as "puffed-up little men"; then there were the world-weary airs they gave themselves, complaining that the times had become devoid ofgreat ideas, ifthere was anyone left who was ready for great ideas; that even "humanity" had become a mere buzzword, as far as they were concerned, and that only "the nation" or, as they called it, "folk and folkways" still really had any meaning.
"The word 'humanity' is meaningless to me, Papa," Gerda said, when he tried to reason with her. "The life seems to have gone out of it. But 'my nation'-now, that's a physical reality. "
"Your nation! " Leo Fischel began, meaning to say something
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about the biblical prophets and his own father, who had been a law- yer in Trieste.
"I know," Gerda interrupted, "but my nation in a spiritual sense is what I am talking about. "
'Tm going to lock you up in your room till you come to your senses! " Papa Leo said. "And I won't have those friends of yours in my house. They're undisciplined characters who spend all their time brooding over their consciences instead of going to work and making something of themselves. "
"I know, Papa, how your mind works," Gerda replied. "Your gen- eration feels. entitled to humiliate us just because you're supporting us. You're all patriarchal capitalists. " ·
Such debates were no rarity, given a father's tendency to worry.
"And what would you live on, if I were not a capitalist? " the master of the house wanted to know.
Gerda usually cut short any such ramifications. "I can't be ex- pected to know everything; all I know is that we . already have scien- tists, teachers, religious leaders, political leaders, and other men of action engaged in creating new values. "
At this point Bank Director Fischel might bother to as~ironically: "And by these religious and political leaders I suppose you mean yourselves? " but he did it only to have the last word; in the end, he was always relieved that Gerda didn't notice how resigned he was, how he had learned to expect that her nonsense would always lead to his giving in. He was finally driven to conclude such arguments more than once by cautiously piaising the reasonableness of the Parallel Campaign, in contrast to the rabid countermoves advocated in his own house; but he did it only when Clementine was out of earshot.
What gave Gerda's resistance to her father's admonitions an air of stubborn martyrdom, something that even Leo and Clementine vaguely sensed, was that breath of innocent lust wafting through this house. The young people discussed among themselves many things about "Yhich the elders kept a resentful silence. Even what they called their nationalism, this fusion of their constantly warring egos into an imaginary unity they called their Christian-Germanic com- mune, had, compared with the festering love life of their elders, something of the winged Eros about it. Wiser than their years, they disdained "lust" and "the ,inflated lie about the crude enjoyment of
animal existence," as they called it, but talked so much about su- prasensuality and mystical desire that the startled listener reacted willy-nilly by feeling a certain tenderness for sensuality and physical desires, and even Leo Fischel had to admit that the unbridled ardor of their language sometimes made the listener feel the roots of their ideas shooting_ down his legs, though he disapproved, because in his opinion great ideas were meant to be uplifting.
Clementine, for her part, said: "You shouldn't simply tum your back on everything, Leo. "
"How can they say 'Property kilis the spirit'? " he started to argue. "Do I lack spirit? Maybe you do, insofar as you take their nonsense seriously. "
"You don't understand, Leo. They mean it in a Christian sense; they want to leave the old life behind, to have a higher life on earth. " "That's not Christian, that's just crackbrained," Leo said stub-
bornly.
''What if it is not the realists who see reality, but those who look
inward? " Clementine suggested.
"That's a laugh! " Fischel claimed. But he was wrong; he was crying
inwardly, overwhelmed by the uncontrollable changes all around him.
These days Director Fischel felt the need for fresh air more often than he used to; at the end ofthe day's work he was in no hurry to get home, and if there was still some daylight he loved to wander a bit in one of the parks, even in winter. His liking for these city parks dated back to his days as a-junior assistant. For no reason he could see, the city administration had ordered the iron folding stools freshly painted in late autumn; now they stood there, bright green, piled up against each other along the snowy paths, pricking the imagination with their springtime color. At times, Leo Fischel would sit down on one ofthese chairs, all alone and muffled up to tlie ears at the edge of a playground or a promenade, and watch the nursemaids with their charges, flauntillg their winter health in the sun. The children played with their yo-yos or threw snowballs, and the little girls made big eyes like grown women-ah, Fischel thought, the very same eyes that in the face of a beautiful woman delight you with the thought that she has the eyes of a child! It did him good to watch the little girls at play-in their eyes love still floated as in a pond in fairyland,
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where the stork comes to get it later on-and sometimes to watch their governesses too. He had often enjoyed this spectacle in his youth, when he was still standing outsicle life's shop window, without the money to walk in, and all he could do was wonder what fate might have in store for him. What a sorry mess it had turned out to be, he thought, and for an instant he felt as if he were sitting on the green grass amid white crocuses with all the tension of youth. When his sense of reality recalled him to the sight of snow and green paint, his thoughts oddly enough kept coming back to his income. Money means independence, but all his salary went for the needs of the fam- ily and the savings required by common sense, so a man really had to do something more, apart from his job, to make himself indepen- dent; possibly tum to account his knowledge of the stock exchange, like the top executives at the bank.
But such thoughts came to Leo only while he was watching the little girls at play, and then he rejected them, because he certainly did not feel that he had the necessary temperament for speculation. He was a· head of department, with the honorary title of a director and no prospect of rising above this, so he instantly chastened him- self With the thought that so toilworn a back as his own was already too hunched over ever to straighten up again. He did not know that he was using such thoughts solely"to erect an insurmountable barrier between himself and the pretty children and their maids, who, at such moments in the park, meant the charms of life to him, for he Was, even-in the disgruntled mood that kept him from going home, an incorrigible family man who would have given anything if only he could have transformed that Circle of Hell at home into a garland of angels around the father-god, the titular bank director.
Ulrich also liked the parks and walked across them whenever he could on his way somewhere, which was now he happened again to run into Fischel, who at the sight of him immediately recollected all he had already had to suffer at home on account of the Parallel Cam- paign. He expressed his dissatisfaction at his young fiiend's taking so lightly the invitations of old friends, a point he could make with all the more sincerity since time passing makes even the most casual friendships grow as old as the closest ones.
Fischel's young old friend said that he was truly delighted to see
Fischel again and deplored the foolishness that was keeping him too busy to have done so before.
Fischel complained that everything was going to the dogs and that business was bad. Anyway, the old moral order was losing its grip, what with all the materialism and the hastiness in which everything had to be done.
"And here I was just thinking that I could envy you! " Ulrich coun- tered. "A businessman's work is surely a veritable refuge ofsanity? At least it's the only profession resting on a theoretically sound basis. "
"That it is! " Fischel agreed. "The businessman serves the cause of human progress, asking only for a reasonable profit. And yet he is just as badly off as everyone else, when it comes to that," he added gloomily.
Ulrich had agreed to walk him home.
On their arrival, they found a mood already strained to the break- ingpoint.
All Gerda's friends were present, and a tremendous battle of words was in full swing. Most of the young people were still at school or in their first or second term at the university, though a few had jobs in business. How they had come to form this group was something they themselves no longer knew. One by one. Some had met in nationalist student fraternities, others in the socialist or Catholic youth movement, and others out hiking with a horde of Wanderoogel.
It would not be wholly out of order to suppose that the only thing they all had in common was Leo Fischel. To endure, a spiritual movement needs a physical basis, and this physical basis was Fischel's apartment, together with the refreshments provided by Frau Cl~mentine, along with a certain regulation of the traffic. Gerda went with the apartment, Hans Sepp went with Gerda, and Hans Sepp, the student with the impure complexion and all-the- purer soul, though not their leader, because these young people ac- knowledged no leader, was the most impassioned of them all. They might meet elsewhere occasionally, where the hostess would be someone other than Gerda, but the nucleus of their movement was basically as described.
Still, the source of these young people's inspiration was as remark-
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able an enigma as the appearance of a previously unknown disease, or a sequence of winning numbers in a game of chanc:e. When the sun of old-style European idealism began to fade and its white blaze darkened, many torches were passed from hand to hand-ideas, torches of the mind, stolen from Heaven knows where, or invented bywhom? -and flaring up here and there, they became that dancing pool offire a little spiritual community. And so there was much talk, those last few years before the great war carried all of it to its fore- gone conclusion, among the younger generation, about love and fel- lowship-and the young anti-Semites who met at Bank Director Fischel's felt themselves to be most particularly under the sign of an all-embracing love and fellowship. True fellowship is the work of an inner law, and the deepest, simplest, most perfect, and foremost of these is the law oflove. Love, as already noted, not in its base, sensual form, for physical possession is an invention of Mammon that in the end only disrupts the community and strips it of its meaning. And one can't, of course,. love just everybody and anybody. But one can respect the character ofevery individual, as long as that person truth- fully strives to keep growing, with an unremitting inner responsibil- ity. And so they fiercely argued about everything, in the name of love.
But on this particular day a uiuted front had formed against Frau Clementine, who was so pleased at feeling young again, and inwardly agreed that married love really did have something in common with interest paid on capital, but drew the line at tolerating harsh criticism of the Parallel Campaign on the grounds that Aryans could create viable symbols only if they kept alien elements out of it. Clementine was just on the verge of losing her temper, and Gerda's cheeks were aflame with round red spots because her mother would take no hint to leave the room. When Leo Fischel had entered with Ulrich, she was pleading in sign language with Hans Sepp to break it off, and Hans said in a conciliating tone: ''These days, no one can create any- thing great! " supposing that he had thereby reduced everything to the customary impersonal formula acceptable to all those present.
Unluckily, Ulrich joined in at this point and asked Hans-poking a little malicious fun at Fischel-whether he did not believe in any kind of progress at all. .
"Progress? " Hans Sepp retorted with a patronizing air. "You need
only think of the kind of ~en we had a hundred years ago, before progress set in: Beethoven! Goethe! Napoleonl Hebbell"
"Hmm," Ulrich said. "The last-named was only just hom a hun- dred years ago. "
"Our young friends dismiss- numerical precision," Director Fischel gloated.
Ulrich did not pursue this. He knew that Hans Sepp held him in jealous contempt, yet he felt a certain sympathy for Gerda's peculiar friends. So he sat down among them and wen~ on: "We're undeni- ably making so much progress in the several branches of human ca- pability that we actually feel we can't keep up with it! Isn't it possible that this can also make us feel·that there is no progress? After all, progress is surely the product of all our joint efforts, so we can practi- cally predict that ari. y real progress is likely to be precisely what no- body wanted. "
Hans Sepp's dark shock of hair turned into a tremulous hom pointed at Ulrich. "There, now you've said it yourself: what nobody wanted! A lot of cackling back and forth, a hundred ways, but no way to go! Ideas, of course, but no soul! And·no character! The sentence leaps off the page, the word leaps from the sentence, the whole is no longer a whole, as Nietzsche has already said. Never mind that Nietz- sche's egomania is another minus value for existence! Can you tell me one single, solid, ultimate value from which you, for instance, take your bearings in life? " ·
"Just like that-on demand! " Fischel protested, but Ulrich asked Hans: "Is it really utterly impossible for you to live without some ulti- mate value? "
"Utterly," said Hans, "but I admit that I am bound to be unhappy as a result. " .
"The hell you say! " Ulrich_ laughed. "Everything we can do de- pends on our not being overly perfectionist, not waiting for the ulti- mate inspiration. That's what the Middle Ages did, and ignorant they stayed. "
"Did they, now? " Hans Sepp retorted. ''I'd say that we're the igno- rant ones. "
"But you must admit that our ignorance is manifestly of a very rich and varied sort? "
A drawling voice was heard muttering at the back: "Variety . . .
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knowledge . . . relative progress! All con~epts from the mechanistic outlook of an era corrupted by capitalism: There's hardly more to be said. . . . "
Leo Fischel was also muttering to himself; something to the effect that in his opinion Ulrich was being far too indulgent with these juve- nile misfits. He took cover behind the newspaper he unfolded.
But Ulrich was enjoying }timself. "Is the modem house, with its six rooms,. maid's bath, vacuum cleaner, and all that, progress, com~ pared with the old h~uses with their high ceilings, thick walls, and handsome archways, or not? "
"No! " Hans Sepp shouted. .
"Is the airplane progress, compared with the mail coach? "
"Yes! " Director Fischel shouted.
"The machine compared with handicrafts? "
"Handicrafts! " from Hans, and "Machine! " from Leo.
"It seems to m~," Ulrich said, ·~that every step forward· is also a
step backward. Progress always exists in only one particular sense. And since there's no sense in our life as a whole, neither is there such a thing as progress as a whole. "
. Leo Fischel lowered his paper. 'Would you say that it's better to be able to cross the Atlantic in six days rather than having to spend . six weeks on it? "
''I'd be inclined to say that it's definitely progress to have the choice. But our young Christians wouldn't agree to that, either. "
The ·circle offriends sat still, taut as a drawn bow. Ulrich had para- lyzed their tongues but not their fighting spirit. He went on evenly: "But you can also say the opposite: If our life makes progress in the particular instance, it also makes sense in the particular instance. But once it has made sense to offer up human sacrifice to the gods, say, or bum witches, or wear powdered wigs, then·that remains one-oflife's valid possibilities, even when more hygienic habits and more hu- mane customs represent progress. The trouble is that progress al- ways wants to do away with the old meamng. "
"Do you mean to say," Fischel asked, "that we should go back to human sacrifice after we have succeeded in putting such abominable acts of darkness behind us? "
. "Is it darkness, necessarily? " Hans Sepp replied in Ulrich's place. "When you devour an innocent rabbit, that's darkness, but when a
cannibal dines reverently and with religious rites on a stranger, we simply cannot know what goes on inside him. "
"There certainly must have been something to be said for the ages we have left behind," Ulrich agreed, "otherwise so many nice people would never have gone along with them. I wonder if we could tum that to account for ourselves, without sacrificing tQo much?
And per- haps we are still sacrificing so many human beings today only be- cause we never clearly faced the pro~lem of the light way to overcome mankind's earlier answers. The way in which everything hangs together is extremely obscure and hard to express. "
"But to your way of thinking, the ideal aim must always be some sort of bottom line or balanced books, right? " Hans Sepp burst out, against Ulrich this time. "You believe in bourgeois'progress every bit as much as Director Fischel, you just manage to express it in the most twisted and perverted words you can find, so that you can't be pirined down. " Hans had been the spokesman for his friends. Ulrich turned to look at Gerda's face. He intended to pick up casually where he had left off, ignoring the fact that Fischel and the young men were as ready to pounce on him as on each other.
"But aren't you striving toward some goal yourself, Hans? " he asked doggedly.
"Something is striving. Inside me. Through me," Hans rapped out.
"And is it going to get there? " Leo Fischel indulged himself in sar- casm, thereby, as all but himself realized, going over to Ulrich's side.
"I wouldn't know," Hans answered gloomily.
"You should take your exams-that would be progress. " Fischel could not refrain from piling it on, so irritated was he, no less by his friend than by these callow youths.
At this moment the room seemed to explode. Frau Clementine cast an imploring look at her husband; Gerda tried to forestall Hans as he struggled for words, which finally came bursting out as yet an- other attack on Ulrich.
"You may be sure," he shouted, "that. basically even you don't have a single idea that Director Fischel couldn't come up with just as welll"
With this parting shot he rushed out of the room, followed by his cohorts, making their bows in angry haste. Director Fischel, blud- geoned by the looks he was getting from his wife, pretended to re-
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member his duties as a host and trudged grumpily into the foyer to speed his guests on their way. Clementine heaved a sigh of relief, now that the air was cleared, then she rose too, and Ulrich suddenly found himself alone with Gerda.
103
THE TEMPTATION
Gerda was visibly upset when they were left alone together. He took her hand; her ann started trembling, and she broke away from him.
"You have no idea what it means to Hans to have a goal," she said. "You make fun of all that; that's cheap enough. It seems to me your mind is more disgusting than ever! " She had been groping for the harshest possible word and was startled by what she had come up with. Ulrich tried to catch hold ofher hand again; she pulledlier arm close to her side. "That's no longer good enough for us! " She hurled her words with a fierce disdain, but her body swayed toward him.
"I know," Ulrich said sarc~tically. "Everything you people do must meet the highest standards. That's exactly what makes me be- have the way you've just described so amiably. You probably wouldn't believe how much it meant to me to talk to·you quite differ- ently back in the old days. "
"You were never any different! " Gerda answered quickly.
'Tve always been undecided," Ulrich said simply, searching her face. "Would you be interested in hearing about what's going on at my cousin's? "
Something now flickered in Gerda's eyes that was clearly distinct from her uneasiness at Ulrich's proximity: she was burning to find out all she could on that subject, for Hans's sake, and was trying to hide her eagerness. Ulrich perceived this with a certain satisfaction, and like an animal scenting danger, he instinctively changed course and began to talk of something else.
"Do you still remember my story about the moon? " he asked. "First I'd like to tell you something else like that. "
"More of your lies, I'm-sure! " she snapped.
"Not if I can possibly help it. . . . You must remember, from the lectures you've attended, how people go about deciding whether something is a law or not? Either you start out with reasons for be- lieving that it is a law, as in physics or chemistry, and even though your observations never quite add up to the preCise results you're looking for, they come fairly close in some definite pattern, and you work it out from there. Or else, as happens so often in life, you have no such reasons and find yourself facing a phenomenon about which you can't quite tell whether it is a law or pure chance; that's where things acquire a human interest. Then you translate a series of obser- vations into a series offigures, which you divide into categories to see which numbers lie between this value and that, and the next, and so on; you arrange them in series where the frequency with which something happens shows or doesn't show a systematic increase or decrease, and you get either a stable series or a distribl)tive func- tion. You then calculate the degree of. aberration, the mean devi- ation, the degree of deviation from some arbitrary value, the central value, the normal value, the average value, the dispersion, and so forth, and with the help of all these concepts you study your given phenomenon. "
Ulrich laid all this out in so casual a tone that it would have been hard to tell whether he was only just working it out in his own mind or hypnotizing Gerda with a display of science for the fun of it. Gerda had moved away from him, leaning forward in an armchair with a furrow of concentration between her eyebrows as she looked down at the floor. To be spoken to in this matter-of-fact tone, an appeal to her intellect, put a damper on her rebelliousness, which she now felt fading away, together with the self-assurance it had given her. Her schooling had taken her through a few semesters at the university, skimming a vast body of new knowledge that could no longer be con- tained in the old framework of classic and humanistic studies. Such an education leaves many young people feeling powerless in facing a new time, a new world where the soil can no longer be worked with the old tools. She had no idea where Ulrich's line of reasoning was taking her. She believed him because she was in love with him, and
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doubted him because she was ten years younger than he and be- longed to a new generation keenly aware of its fresh energies; the two conflicting strands of feeling mingled hazily within her as she
. listened.
''Besides which, you see, we have data that are indistinguishable
from those that demonstrate a natural law, yet they have no such basis. Statistical series can sometimes have the same regularity that we associate with natural law. I'm sure you can think of examples you've heard in some sociology lecture, like the statistics about di- vorce in America, let's say. Or the ratio between male and female births, one of the most stable factors of the kind. Or the number of conscripts annually who try to evade their military service by some form of self-mutilation, also a relative constant, or the suicide statis- tics; even theft, rape, and bankruptcy occur, as far as I know, at more
·or less the same annual rate. . . . "
At this point Gerda's resistance tried to break through. "Are you
trying to explain progress to me? " she cried out, doing her best to sound sarcastic.
"But of course," Ulrich came back at her, without breaking stride. "It's called the law of large numbers, a bit nebulously. Meaning that one person may commit suicide for this reason and another for that reason, but when a great number is involved, then the accidental and the personal elements cancel each ·other out, and what's left . . . but that's just it: what is left? I ask you. Because you see, what'S left is what each one of us as laymen calls, simply, the average, which is a "something," but nobody really knows exactly what. Let me add that efforts have been made to find a logical and formal explanation for this law of large numbers, as an accepted fact, as it were. But there are also those who say that such regularity of phenomena which are not casually related to each other cannot be explained at all by con- ventional logic, and the point has been made, among others, that such phenomena must be analyzed not as individual instances but as involving some unknown laws of aggregates or collectives. I don't
want to bother you with the details, which I no longer have at my fingertips anyway, but I would certainly love to know, for myself, whether there are such laws of the collective phenomenon, or whether it is simply by some irony of nature that the particular in- stance arises from the happening of nothing in particular, and that
the ultimate meaning turns out to be something arrived at by taking the average ofwhat is basically meaningless. It would certainly make a radical differenc~ to our sense of ourselves if we knew the answer, one way or another! Whichever it turns out to be, any possibility of leading an ordered life depends on this law oflarge numbers. If there were no such law of averages, we might have a year with nothing at all happening, followed by one in which you could count on nothing for certain, famine alternating with oversupply, no births followed by too many, and we would all be fluttering to and fro between our heavenly and our hellish possibilities like little birds when someone suddenly comes up to their cage. "
"Is all this true? " Gerda asked hesitantly.
"You ought to know it yourself. "
"Of course I do, as far as the details go! But what I don't know is
whether this is what you meant before, when they were all arguing. What you were saying about progress simply sounded like a deliber- ate provocation. "
"That's what you·always think about me. But what do we really know about the nature of our progress? Not a thing. There are all sorts of possibilities for the way things might tum out, and I simply mentioned just one more. "
"How things might tum out! That's always the way with you; it would never occur to you to wonder how things should be. "
"You and·your friends-always jumping the gun. There's always got to be a supreme goal, an ideal, a program-an absolute. Yet in the end, all that ever comes of it is a compromise, some common denominator. Isn't it tiring and ridiculous to be always reaching for the heights and always ending up settling for some mediocre result? "
It was essentially the same conversation he had had with Diotima, with only superficial differences. Nor did it make much difference which woman happened to . be sitting there facing him; a body, intra-· duced into a given magnetic field, invariably sets certain processes in motion. Ulrich studied Gerda, who was not answering his last ques- tion. There she sat, a skinny girl, with a little furrow of resentment between her eyes. Another hollow, vertical furrow could be seen in the V of her low-cut blouse. Her arms and legs were long and deli- cate. She suggested a limp springtime, aglow with a premature sum- mer heat, together with the full impact ofthe willfulness locked in so
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young a body. He felt a strange mixture of aversion and detachment at the thought that he was closer to a decision than he had realized and that this young girl was destined to play a part ill it. Willy-nilly he suddenly found himself telling her his impressions of the so-called younger generation in the Parallel Campaign, ending with words that took Gerda by surprise:
"These younger people are also very radical, and I'm not popular with them either. But I pay them back in the same coin, because I, too, am radical in my own way, and I can put up with any kind of disorder more easily than the intellectual kind. I like to see ideas not onlydeveloped but brought together. I want not only the oscillation but also the density of an idea. This is what you, my indispensable friend, criticize as my tendency to describe only what might be, in- stead of what ought to be. Well, I do know the difference. This is probably the most anachronistic attitude one can have nowadays, when intellectual rigor and the emotional life are at the farthest re- move from each other, but our precision in technology has unfortu- nately advanced to such a point that it seems to regard the imprecision of life as its proper complement. Why won't you under- stand? The chances are you're incapable of understanding ~e. and it's perverse of me to try to confuse a mind so well attuned to the times. Still, Gerda, I sometimes honestly wonder whether I might be wrong, after all. Possibly the very people I can't stand are carrying out what I once hoped to accomplish myself. They may be doing it all wrong, not using their heads, one running-this way and the other that way, each spouting an idea that he regards as the only possible idea in the world; each one of them feels tremendously clever, and they all agree in regarding our times as cursed ·with sterility. But suppose it's the other way around, and every one of them is stupid, but all of them together are pregnant with the future? Everyone of our truths seems to be born split into two opposing falsehoods, and this, too, can be a way of arriving at a result that transcends the merely per- sonal. In that case the final balance, the sum total of all the experi- ments, no longer rests with the individual, who becomes unbearably one-sided, but with the experimental collective. In short, I ask you to make allowances for an old man whose loneliness sometimes drives him to excess. "
"You've certainly given me a lot to think about," Gerda said
grimly. ''Why don't you write a book? That way, you might be able to help yourself and us, too. "
"Why on earth should I feel called upon to write a book? " Ulrich objected. "I was born of my mother, after all, not an inkwell. "
G~rda was wondering whether a book by Ulrich would really help anyone. Like all the young people in her circle, she overrated the power of the printed word. A total silence had fallen in the apartment since they had stopped talking, as if the elder Fischels had left the house in the wake of their indignant guests. And Gerda sensed the force emanating from the more powerful male body beside her, as she always did, contrary to all her resolutions, when they were alone to- gether; the effort to resist made her tremble. Ulrich noticed it; he stood up, laid his hand on Gerda's frail shoulder, and said to her: "Look at it this way, Gerda. Suppose the moral sphere works more or less like the physical, as suggested by the kinetic theory of gases: ev- erything whirling around at random, each element doing what it will, but as soon as you work out rationally what is least likely to result from all this, that's precisely the result you get! Such correspondences, strange as they are, do exist. So suppose we also assume that there is a certain number ofideas circulating in our day,'resulting in some aver- age value that keeps shifting, very slowly and automatically-it's what we call progress, or the historical situation. What matters most about this, however, is that our personal, individual share in all this makes no difference; whether we individually move to the right or to the left, whether we think and act on a high or a low level, in an unpredictable m:: a calculated fashion, a new or an old style, does not affect this aver- age term, which is all that. God and the world care about. "
As he spoke he tried to put his arm around her, though it was pal- pably costing him an effort.
Gerda was furious. "You always begin by philosophizing," she cried out, "and it always turns into the usual rooster's cock-a-doodle- doo! " Her face was aflame, with flecks ofcolor in it. . Her lips seemed to be sweating, but there was something attractive about her indigna- tion. ''What you make of it is precisely what we don't want! "
N~w Ulrich could not resist the temptation to ask her, in a low voice: "Is possession so deadly? "
"I don't want to talk about that," Gerda retorted in an equally low tone.
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"It's all the same, whether it's a person you own or a thing. I know that," Ulrich went on. "Gerda, I understand you and Hans better than you think. So what is it that you and Hans want? Tell me. "
"Nothing! That's just it," Gerda exclaimed triumphantly. ''There's no way to state it. Papa also keeps on saying: 'You must make clear to yourselfwhat it is you actually want. Then you will see what nonsense it is. ' Well, everything is nonsense when you make it clear to yourself. To be sensible is never to get beyond the commonplace. I know you'll have some~ingto say about that, you and your sensible way of thinking. " '
Ulrich shook his head. "And what about this demonstration against Count Leinsdorf? " he asked gently, as though he were not changing the subject.
"Oh, so yo1,1 spy on us! " Gerda exclaimed.
"Call it spying if you like, I don't mind; but tell me about it, Gerda. ''
Gerda showed some embarrassment. "Nothing special. Just some sort of demonstration by the Young Germans-marching past his residence, yelling 'Shamel' and things like that. The Parallel Cam- paign is a shame! " '
"In what way? "
Gerda shrugged.
"Do sit down again," Ulrich pleaded. ''You're making far too much
of it. Let's have a quiet talk about it, shall we? ''
Gerda obeyed.
"Now listen to me, and tell me ifyou think I'm on the right track.
You say that possession kills. You're thinking of money, to begin with, and ofyour parents. I agree that they're dead souls. . . . "
Gerda looked offended.
"Very well, let's not talk about money but of 'having' in other ways. Take the man who 'has' himself in hand; the man who 'has' his con- victions; the man· who lets himself be 'had' by another person or by his own passions or merely his own habits or successes; the man who wants to conquer something, the man who wants anything at all: you reject all that? You want to be nomads, nomads forever on the move, as Hans once called it, if I remember. Moving on toward some other meaning, or state of being? Am I right so far?
"Forget about him," Clementine said, whenever Director Fischel grumbled about it. 'We used to be good enough for him, but he's probably setting his social sights higher these days. I f you go after him you'll only make matterS worse; you're much too clumsy to carry it off. "
Gerda missed this older friend. She wished he would come and knew that if he did come, she would wish him away. For all her twenty-three years, nothiD. g had yet happened in her life other than the cautious wooing of a certain Herr Glanz, who had her father on his side, and her Christian-Germanic friends, whom she sometimes regarded as schoolboys rather than real men. "Why doesn't he ever come to see me? " she wondered, whenever she thought of Ulrich. Among her friends, the Parallel Campaign was see~ as beyond any doubt the opening salvo in the spiritual destruction of the German people, and she felt embarrassed by Ulrich's involvement in it; she longed to hear his side ofit, however, hoping that he would be able to exonerate himself.
Her mother said to her father: "You missed your chance to be in this affair. It would have been a good thing for Gerda, and she'd have had something else to think about; a lot ofpeople go to the Tuzzis'. " It had come to light that he had neglected to respond to His Grace's invitation. Now he had to suffer for it.
The young men whom Gerda called her spiritual comrades in arms had settled down in his house like Penelope's suitors, debating what a young man of German blood should do about the Parallel Campaign.
"A fmancier must be able, at times, to act in the spirit of a Mae- cenas," Frau Clementine exhorted her husband when he fumed that
he had not hired Hans Sepp, Gerda's "spiritual guide," as a tutor, for good money, only to have thts situation come of it.
Hans Sepp, the graduate student, who had not the slightest pros- pect of being able to keep a wife, had come into the household as a tutor but, owing to the conflicts that were tearing the family apart, had become its tyrant. Now he was discussing with his friends, who had become Gerda's friends, at the Fischels', how to save the Ger- man aristocracy from being ensnared by Diotima-of whom it was said that she made no distinction between persons of her own race and those of an alien race-and caught up in the nets of the Jewish spirit. While in the presence of Leo Fischel this sort of talk was usu- ally tempered with a· certain philosophic objectivity, he still heard enough of certain terms and principles for it to get on his neiVes. They worried that such a campaign, which was bound to lead to total catastrophe, should have surfaced in an era not destined to bring forth great symbols, and the recurrent expressio~s "deeply meaning- ful," "upward humanization," and "free personhood" were enough by themselves to make the pince-nez quiver on Fischel's nose every time he heard them. He had to stand by while there proliferated in his own house such concepts as "the art of living thought," "the graph of spiritual growth," and "action on the wing. " He discovered that a biweekly "hour of purification" was held regularly under his roof. He demanded an explanation. It turned out that what they meant by this was reading the poems of Stefan George together. Leo Fischel searched his old encyclopedia in vain for the poet's name. But what irritated him most of all, old-style liberal that he was, was that these green pups referred to all the high government officials, bank presidents, and leading university figures in the Parallel Cam- paign as "puffed-up little men"; then there were the world-weary airs they gave themselves, complaining that the times had become devoid ofgreat ideas, ifthere was anyone left who was ready for great ideas; that even "humanity" had become a mere buzzword, as far as they were concerned, and that only "the nation" or, as they called it, "folk and folkways" still really had any meaning.
"The word 'humanity' is meaningless to me, Papa," Gerda said, when he tried to reason with her. "The life seems to have gone out of it. But 'my nation'-now, that's a physical reality. "
"Your nation! " Leo Fischel began, meaning to say something
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about the biblical prophets and his own father, who had been a law- yer in Trieste.
"I know," Gerda interrupted, "but my nation in a spiritual sense is what I am talking about. "
'Tm going to lock you up in your room till you come to your senses! " Papa Leo said. "And I won't have those friends of yours in my house. They're undisciplined characters who spend all their time brooding over their consciences instead of going to work and making something of themselves. "
"I know, Papa, how your mind works," Gerda replied. "Your gen- eration feels. entitled to humiliate us just because you're supporting us. You're all patriarchal capitalists. " ·
Such debates were no rarity, given a father's tendency to worry.
"And what would you live on, if I were not a capitalist? " the master of the house wanted to know.
Gerda usually cut short any such ramifications. "I can't be ex- pected to know everything; all I know is that we . already have scien- tists, teachers, religious leaders, political leaders, and other men of action engaged in creating new values. "
At this point Bank Director Fischel might bother to as~ironically: "And by these religious and political leaders I suppose you mean yourselves? " but he did it only to have the last word; in the end, he was always relieved that Gerda didn't notice how resigned he was, how he had learned to expect that her nonsense would always lead to his giving in. He was finally driven to conclude such arguments more than once by cautiously piaising the reasonableness of the Parallel Campaign, in contrast to the rabid countermoves advocated in his own house; but he did it only when Clementine was out of earshot.
What gave Gerda's resistance to her father's admonitions an air of stubborn martyrdom, something that even Leo and Clementine vaguely sensed, was that breath of innocent lust wafting through this house. The young people discussed among themselves many things about "Yhich the elders kept a resentful silence. Even what they called their nationalism, this fusion of their constantly warring egos into an imaginary unity they called their Christian-Germanic com- mune, had, compared with the festering love life of their elders, something of the winged Eros about it. Wiser than their years, they disdained "lust" and "the ,inflated lie about the crude enjoyment of
animal existence," as they called it, but talked so much about su- prasensuality and mystical desire that the startled listener reacted willy-nilly by feeling a certain tenderness for sensuality and physical desires, and even Leo Fischel had to admit that the unbridled ardor of their language sometimes made the listener feel the roots of their ideas shooting_ down his legs, though he disapproved, because in his opinion great ideas were meant to be uplifting.
Clementine, for her part, said: "You shouldn't simply tum your back on everything, Leo. "
"How can they say 'Property kilis the spirit'? " he started to argue. "Do I lack spirit? Maybe you do, insofar as you take their nonsense seriously. "
"You don't understand, Leo. They mean it in a Christian sense; they want to leave the old life behind, to have a higher life on earth. " "That's not Christian, that's just crackbrained," Leo said stub-
bornly.
''What if it is not the realists who see reality, but those who look
inward? " Clementine suggested.
"That's a laugh! " Fischel claimed. But he was wrong; he was crying
inwardly, overwhelmed by the uncontrollable changes all around him.
These days Director Fischel felt the need for fresh air more often than he used to; at the end ofthe day's work he was in no hurry to get home, and if there was still some daylight he loved to wander a bit in one of the parks, even in winter. His liking for these city parks dated back to his days as a-junior assistant. For no reason he could see, the city administration had ordered the iron folding stools freshly painted in late autumn; now they stood there, bright green, piled up against each other along the snowy paths, pricking the imagination with their springtime color. At times, Leo Fischel would sit down on one ofthese chairs, all alone and muffled up to tlie ears at the edge of a playground or a promenade, and watch the nursemaids with their charges, flauntillg their winter health in the sun. The children played with their yo-yos or threw snowballs, and the little girls made big eyes like grown women-ah, Fischel thought, the very same eyes that in the face of a beautiful woman delight you with the thought that she has the eyes of a child! It did him good to watch the little girls at play-in their eyes love still floated as in a pond in fairyland,
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where the stork comes to get it later on-and sometimes to watch their governesses too. He had often enjoyed this spectacle in his youth, when he was still standing outsicle life's shop window, without the money to walk in, and all he could do was wonder what fate might have in store for him. What a sorry mess it had turned out to be, he thought, and for an instant he felt as if he were sitting on the green grass amid white crocuses with all the tension of youth. When his sense of reality recalled him to the sight of snow and green paint, his thoughts oddly enough kept coming back to his income. Money means independence, but all his salary went for the needs of the fam- ily and the savings required by common sense, so a man really had to do something more, apart from his job, to make himself indepen- dent; possibly tum to account his knowledge of the stock exchange, like the top executives at the bank.
But such thoughts came to Leo only while he was watching the little girls at play, and then he rejected them, because he certainly did not feel that he had the necessary temperament for speculation. He was a· head of department, with the honorary title of a director and no prospect of rising above this, so he instantly chastened him- self With the thought that so toilworn a back as his own was already too hunched over ever to straighten up again. He did not know that he was using such thoughts solely"to erect an insurmountable barrier between himself and the pretty children and their maids, who, at such moments in the park, meant the charms of life to him, for he Was, even-in the disgruntled mood that kept him from going home, an incorrigible family man who would have given anything if only he could have transformed that Circle of Hell at home into a garland of angels around the father-god, the titular bank director.
Ulrich also liked the parks and walked across them whenever he could on his way somewhere, which was now he happened again to run into Fischel, who at the sight of him immediately recollected all he had already had to suffer at home on account of the Parallel Cam- paign. He expressed his dissatisfaction at his young fiiend's taking so lightly the invitations of old friends, a point he could make with all the more sincerity since time passing makes even the most casual friendships grow as old as the closest ones.
Fischel's young old friend said that he was truly delighted to see
Fischel again and deplored the foolishness that was keeping him too busy to have done so before.
Fischel complained that everything was going to the dogs and that business was bad. Anyway, the old moral order was losing its grip, what with all the materialism and the hastiness in which everything had to be done.
"And here I was just thinking that I could envy you! " Ulrich coun- tered. "A businessman's work is surely a veritable refuge ofsanity? At least it's the only profession resting on a theoretically sound basis. "
"That it is! " Fischel agreed. "The businessman serves the cause of human progress, asking only for a reasonable profit. And yet he is just as badly off as everyone else, when it comes to that," he added gloomily.
Ulrich had agreed to walk him home.
On their arrival, they found a mood already strained to the break- ingpoint.
All Gerda's friends were present, and a tremendous battle of words was in full swing. Most of the young people were still at school or in their first or second term at the university, though a few had jobs in business. How they had come to form this group was something they themselves no longer knew. One by one. Some had met in nationalist student fraternities, others in the socialist or Catholic youth movement, and others out hiking with a horde of Wanderoogel.
It would not be wholly out of order to suppose that the only thing they all had in common was Leo Fischel. To endure, a spiritual movement needs a physical basis, and this physical basis was Fischel's apartment, together with the refreshments provided by Frau Cl~mentine, along with a certain regulation of the traffic. Gerda went with the apartment, Hans Sepp went with Gerda, and Hans Sepp, the student with the impure complexion and all-the- purer soul, though not their leader, because these young people ac- knowledged no leader, was the most impassioned of them all. They might meet elsewhere occasionally, where the hostess would be someone other than Gerda, but the nucleus of their movement was basically as described.
Still, the source of these young people's inspiration was as remark-
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able an enigma as the appearance of a previously unknown disease, or a sequence of winning numbers in a game of chanc:e. When the sun of old-style European idealism began to fade and its white blaze darkened, many torches were passed from hand to hand-ideas, torches of the mind, stolen from Heaven knows where, or invented bywhom? -and flaring up here and there, they became that dancing pool offire a little spiritual community. And so there was much talk, those last few years before the great war carried all of it to its fore- gone conclusion, among the younger generation, about love and fel- lowship-and the young anti-Semites who met at Bank Director Fischel's felt themselves to be most particularly under the sign of an all-embracing love and fellowship. True fellowship is the work of an inner law, and the deepest, simplest, most perfect, and foremost of these is the law oflove. Love, as already noted, not in its base, sensual form, for physical possession is an invention of Mammon that in the end only disrupts the community and strips it of its meaning. And one can't, of course,. love just everybody and anybody. But one can respect the character ofevery individual, as long as that person truth- fully strives to keep growing, with an unremitting inner responsibil- ity. And so they fiercely argued about everything, in the name of love.
But on this particular day a uiuted front had formed against Frau Clementine, who was so pleased at feeling young again, and inwardly agreed that married love really did have something in common with interest paid on capital, but drew the line at tolerating harsh criticism of the Parallel Campaign on the grounds that Aryans could create viable symbols only if they kept alien elements out of it. Clementine was just on the verge of losing her temper, and Gerda's cheeks were aflame with round red spots because her mother would take no hint to leave the room. When Leo Fischel had entered with Ulrich, she was pleading in sign language with Hans Sepp to break it off, and Hans said in a conciliating tone: ''These days, no one can create any- thing great! " supposing that he had thereby reduced everything to the customary impersonal formula acceptable to all those present.
Unluckily, Ulrich joined in at this point and asked Hans-poking a little malicious fun at Fischel-whether he did not believe in any kind of progress at all. .
"Progress? " Hans Sepp retorted with a patronizing air. "You need
only think of the kind of ~en we had a hundred years ago, before progress set in: Beethoven! Goethe! Napoleonl Hebbell"
"Hmm," Ulrich said. "The last-named was only just hom a hun- dred years ago. "
"Our young friends dismiss- numerical precision," Director Fischel gloated.
Ulrich did not pursue this. He knew that Hans Sepp held him in jealous contempt, yet he felt a certain sympathy for Gerda's peculiar friends. So he sat down among them and wen~ on: "We're undeni- ably making so much progress in the several branches of human ca- pability that we actually feel we can't keep up with it! Isn't it possible that this can also make us feel·that there is no progress? After all, progress is surely the product of all our joint efforts, so we can practi- cally predict that ari. y real progress is likely to be precisely what no- body wanted. "
Hans Sepp's dark shock of hair turned into a tremulous hom pointed at Ulrich. "There, now you've said it yourself: what nobody wanted! A lot of cackling back and forth, a hundred ways, but no way to go! Ideas, of course, but no soul! And·no character! The sentence leaps off the page, the word leaps from the sentence, the whole is no longer a whole, as Nietzsche has already said. Never mind that Nietz- sche's egomania is another minus value for existence! Can you tell me one single, solid, ultimate value from which you, for instance, take your bearings in life? " ·
"Just like that-on demand! " Fischel protested, but Ulrich asked Hans: "Is it really utterly impossible for you to live without some ulti- mate value? "
"Utterly," said Hans, "but I admit that I am bound to be unhappy as a result. " .
"The hell you say! " Ulrich_ laughed. "Everything we can do de- pends on our not being overly perfectionist, not waiting for the ulti- mate inspiration. That's what the Middle Ages did, and ignorant they stayed. "
"Did they, now? " Hans Sepp retorted. ''I'd say that we're the igno- rant ones. "
"But you must admit that our ignorance is manifestly of a very rich and varied sort? "
A drawling voice was heard muttering at the back: "Variety . . .
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knowledge . . . relative progress! All con~epts from the mechanistic outlook of an era corrupted by capitalism: There's hardly more to be said. . . . "
Leo Fischel was also muttering to himself; something to the effect that in his opinion Ulrich was being far too indulgent with these juve- nile misfits. He took cover behind the newspaper he unfolded.
But Ulrich was enjoying }timself. "Is the modem house, with its six rooms,. maid's bath, vacuum cleaner, and all that, progress, com~ pared with the old h~uses with their high ceilings, thick walls, and handsome archways, or not? "
"No! " Hans Sepp shouted. .
"Is the airplane progress, compared with the mail coach? "
"Yes! " Director Fischel shouted.
"The machine compared with handicrafts? "
"Handicrafts! " from Hans, and "Machine! " from Leo.
"It seems to m~," Ulrich said, ·~that every step forward· is also a
step backward. Progress always exists in only one particular sense. And since there's no sense in our life as a whole, neither is there such a thing as progress as a whole. "
. Leo Fischel lowered his paper. 'Would you say that it's better to be able to cross the Atlantic in six days rather than having to spend . six weeks on it? "
''I'd be inclined to say that it's definitely progress to have the choice. But our young Christians wouldn't agree to that, either. "
The ·circle offriends sat still, taut as a drawn bow. Ulrich had para- lyzed their tongues but not their fighting spirit. He went on evenly: "But you can also say the opposite: If our life makes progress in the particular instance, it also makes sense in the particular instance. But once it has made sense to offer up human sacrifice to the gods, say, or bum witches, or wear powdered wigs, then·that remains one-oflife's valid possibilities, even when more hygienic habits and more hu- mane customs represent progress. The trouble is that progress al- ways wants to do away with the old meamng. "
"Do you mean to say," Fischel asked, "that we should go back to human sacrifice after we have succeeded in putting such abominable acts of darkness behind us? "
. "Is it darkness, necessarily? " Hans Sepp replied in Ulrich's place. "When you devour an innocent rabbit, that's darkness, but when a
cannibal dines reverently and with religious rites on a stranger, we simply cannot know what goes on inside him. "
"There certainly must have been something to be said for the ages we have left behind," Ulrich agreed, "otherwise so many nice people would never have gone along with them. I wonder if we could tum that to account for ourselves, without sacrificing tQo much?
And per- haps we are still sacrificing so many human beings today only be- cause we never clearly faced the pro~lem of the light way to overcome mankind's earlier answers. The way in which everything hangs together is extremely obscure and hard to express. "
"But to your way of thinking, the ideal aim must always be some sort of bottom line or balanced books, right? " Hans Sepp burst out, against Ulrich this time. "You believe in bourgeois'progress every bit as much as Director Fischel, you just manage to express it in the most twisted and perverted words you can find, so that you can't be pirined down. " Hans had been the spokesman for his friends. Ulrich turned to look at Gerda's face. He intended to pick up casually where he had left off, ignoring the fact that Fischel and the young men were as ready to pounce on him as on each other.
"But aren't you striving toward some goal yourself, Hans? " he asked doggedly.
"Something is striving. Inside me. Through me," Hans rapped out.
"And is it going to get there? " Leo Fischel indulged himself in sar- casm, thereby, as all but himself realized, going over to Ulrich's side.
"I wouldn't know," Hans answered gloomily.
"You should take your exams-that would be progress. " Fischel could not refrain from piling it on, so irritated was he, no less by his friend than by these callow youths.
At this moment the room seemed to explode. Frau Clementine cast an imploring look at her husband; Gerda tried to forestall Hans as he struggled for words, which finally came bursting out as yet an- other attack on Ulrich.
"You may be sure," he shouted, "that. basically even you don't have a single idea that Director Fischel couldn't come up with just as welll"
With this parting shot he rushed out of the room, followed by his cohorts, making their bows in angry haste. Director Fischel, blud- geoned by the looks he was getting from his wife, pretended to re-
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member his duties as a host and trudged grumpily into the foyer to speed his guests on their way. Clementine heaved a sigh of relief, now that the air was cleared, then she rose too, and Ulrich suddenly found himself alone with Gerda.
103
THE TEMPTATION
Gerda was visibly upset when they were left alone together. He took her hand; her ann started trembling, and she broke away from him.
"You have no idea what it means to Hans to have a goal," she said. "You make fun of all that; that's cheap enough. It seems to me your mind is more disgusting than ever! " She had been groping for the harshest possible word and was startled by what she had come up with. Ulrich tried to catch hold ofher hand again; she pulledlier arm close to her side. "That's no longer good enough for us! " She hurled her words with a fierce disdain, but her body swayed toward him.
"I know," Ulrich said sarc~tically. "Everything you people do must meet the highest standards. That's exactly what makes me be- have the way you've just described so amiably. You probably wouldn't believe how much it meant to me to talk to·you quite differ- ently back in the old days. "
"You were never any different! " Gerda answered quickly.
'Tve always been undecided," Ulrich said simply, searching her face. "Would you be interested in hearing about what's going on at my cousin's? "
Something now flickered in Gerda's eyes that was clearly distinct from her uneasiness at Ulrich's proximity: she was burning to find out all she could on that subject, for Hans's sake, and was trying to hide her eagerness. Ulrich perceived this with a certain satisfaction, and like an animal scenting danger, he instinctively changed course and began to talk of something else.
"Do you still remember my story about the moon? " he asked. "First I'd like to tell you something else like that. "
"More of your lies, I'm-sure! " she snapped.
"Not if I can possibly help it. . . . You must remember, from the lectures you've attended, how people go about deciding whether something is a law or not? Either you start out with reasons for be- lieving that it is a law, as in physics or chemistry, and even though your observations never quite add up to the preCise results you're looking for, they come fairly close in some definite pattern, and you work it out from there. Or else, as happens so often in life, you have no such reasons and find yourself facing a phenomenon about which you can't quite tell whether it is a law or pure chance; that's where things acquire a human interest. Then you translate a series of obser- vations into a series offigures, which you divide into categories to see which numbers lie between this value and that, and the next, and so on; you arrange them in series where the frequency with which something happens shows or doesn't show a systematic increase or decrease, and you get either a stable series or a distribl)tive func- tion. You then calculate the degree of. aberration, the mean devi- ation, the degree of deviation from some arbitrary value, the central value, the normal value, the average value, the dispersion, and so forth, and with the help of all these concepts you study your given phenomenon. "
Ulrich laid all this out in so casual a tone that it would have been hard to tell whether he was only just working it out in his own mind or hypnotizing Gerda with a display of science for the fun of it. Gerda had moved away from him, leaning forward in an armchair with a furrow of concentration between her eyebrows as she looked down at the floor. To be spoken to in this matter-of-fact tone, an appeal to her intellect, put a damper on her rebelliousness, which she now felt fading away, together with the self-assurance it had given her. Her schooling had taken her through a few semesters at the university, skimming a vast body of new knowledge that could no longer be con- tained in the old framework of classic and humanistic studies. Such an education leaves many young people feeling powerless in facing a new time, a new world where the soil can no longer be worked with the old tools. She had no idea where Ulrich's line of reasoning was taking her. She believed him because she was in love with him, and
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doubted him because she was ten years younger than he and be- longed to a new generation keenly aware of its fresh energies; the two conflicting strands of feeling mingled hazily within her as she
. listened.
''Besides which, you see, we have data that are indistinguishable
from those that demonstrate a natural law, yet they have no such basis. Statistical series can sometimes have the same regularity that we associate with natural law. I'm sure you can think of examples you've heard in some sociology lecture, like the statistics about di- vorce in America, let's say. Or the ratio between male and female births, one of the most stable factors of the kind. Or the number of conscripts annually who try to evade their military service by some form of self-mutilation, also a relative constant, or the suicide statis- tics; even theft, rape, and bankruptcy occur, as far as I know, at more
·or less the same annual rate. . . . "
At this point Gerda's resistance tried to break through. "Are you
trying to explain progress to me? " she cried out, doing her best to sound sarcastic.
"But of course," Ulrich came back at her, without breaking stride. "It's called the law of large numbers, a bit nebulously. Meaning that one person may commit suicide for this reason and another for that reason, but when a great number is involved, then the accidental and the personal elements cancel each ·other out, and what's left . . . but that's just it: what is left? I ask you. Because you see, what'S left is what each one of us as laymen calls, simply, the average, which is a "something," but nobody really knows exactly what. Let me add that efforts have been made to find a logical and formal explanation for this law of large numbers, as an accepted fact, as it were. But there are also those who say that such regularity of phenomena which are not casually related to each other cannot be explained at all by con- ventional logic, and the point has been made, among others, that such phenomena must be analyzed not as individual instances but as involving some unknown laws of aggregates or collectives. I don't
want to bother you with the details, which I no longer have at my fingertips anyway, but I would certainly love to know, for myself, whether there are such laws of the collective phenomenon, or whether it is simply by some irony of nature that the particular in- stance arises from the happening of nothing in particular, and that
the ultimate meaning turns out to be something arrived at by taking the average ofwhat is basically meaningless. It would certainly make a radical differenc~ to our sense of ourselves if we knew the answer, one way or another! Whichever it turns out to be, any possibility of leading an ordered life depends on this law oflarge numbers. If there were no such law of averages, we might have a year with nothing at all happening, followed by one in which you could count on nothing for certain, famine alternating with oversupply, no births followed by too many, and we would all be fluttering to and fro between our heavenly and our hellish possibilities like little birds when someone suddenly comes up to their cage. "
"Is all this true? " Gerda asked hesitantly.
"You ought to know it yourself. "
"Of course I do, as far as the details go! But what I don't know is
whether this is what you meant before, when they were all arguing. What you were saying about progress simply sounded like a deliber- ate provocation. "
"That's what you·always think about me. But what do we really know about the nature of our progress? Not a thing. There are all sorts of possibilities for the way things might tum out, and I simply mentioned just one more. "
"How things might tum out! That's always the way with you; it would never occur to you to wonder how things should be. "
"You and·your friends-always jumping the gun. There's always got to be a supreme goal, an ideal, a program-an absolute. Yet in the end, all that ever comes of it is a compromise, some common denominator. Isn't it tiring and ridiculous to be always reaching for the heights and always ending up settling for some mediocre result? "
It was essentially the same conversation he had had with Diotima, with only superficial differences. Nor did it make much difference which woman happened to . be sitting there facing him; a body, intra-· duced into a given magnetic field, invariably sets certain processes in motion. Ulrich studied Gerda, who was not answering his last ques- tion. There she sat, a skinny girl, with a little furrow of resentment between her eyes. Another hollow, vertical furrow could be seen in the V of her low-cut blouse. Her arms and legs were long and deli- cate. She suggested a limp springtime, aglow with a premature sum- mer heat, together with the full impact ofthe willfulness locked in so
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young a body. He felt a strange mixture of aversion and detachment at the thought that he was closer to a decision than he had realized and that this young girl was destined to play a part ill it. Willy-nilly he suddenly found himself telling her his impressions of the so-called younger generation in the Parallel Campaign, ending with words that took Gerda by surprise:
"These younger people are also very radical, and I'm not popular with them either. But I pay them back in the same coin, because I, too, am radical in my own way, and I can put up with any kind of disorder more easily than the intellectual kind. I like to see ideas not onlydeveloped but brought together. I want not only the oscillation but also the density of an idea. This is what you, my indispensable friend, criticize as my tendency to describe only what might be, in- stead of what ought to be. Well, I do know the difference. This is probably the most anachronistic attitude one can have nowadays, when intellectual rigor and the emotional life are at the farthest re- move from each other, but our precision in technology has unfortu- nately advanced to such a point that it seems to regard the imprecision of life as its proper complement. Why won't you under- stand? The chances are you're incapable of understanding ~e. and it's perverse of me to try to confuse a mind so well attuned to the times. Still, Gerda, I sometimes honestly wonder whether I might be wrong, after all. Possibly the very people I can't stand are carrying out what I once hoped to accomplish myself. They may be doing it all wrong, not using their heads, one running-this way and the other that way, each spouting an idea that he regards as the only possible idea in the world; each one of them feels tremendously clever, and they all agree in regarding our times as cursed ·with sterility. But suppose it's the other way around, and every one of them is stupid, but all of them together are pregnant with the future? Everyone of our truths seems to be born split into two opposing falsehoods, and this, too, can be a way of arriving at a result that transcends the merely per- sonal. In that case the final balance, the sum total of all the experi- ments, no longer rests with the individual, who becomes unbearably one-sided, but with the experimental collective. In short, I ask you to make allowances for an old man whose loneliness sometimes drives him to excess. "
"You've certainly given me a lot to think about," Gerda said
grimly. ''Why don't you write a book? That way, you might be able to help yourself and us, too. "
"Why on earth should I feel called upon to write a book? " Ulrich objected. "I was born of my mother, after all, not an inkwell. "
G~rda was wondering whether a book by Ulrich would really help anyone. Like all the young people in her circle, she overrated the power of the printed word. A total silence had fallen in the apartment since they had stopped talking, as if the elder Fischels had left the house in the wake of their indignant guests. And Gerda sensed the force emanating from the more powerful male body beside her, as she always did, contrary to all her resolutions, when they were alone to- gether; the effort to resist made her tremble. Ulrich noticed it; he stood up, laid his hand on Gerda's frail shoulder, and said to her: "Look at it this way, Gerda. Suppose the moral sphere works more or less like the physical, as suggested by the kinetic theory of gases: ev- erything whirling around at random, each element doing what it will, but as soon as you work out rationally what is least likely to result from all this, that's precisely the result you get! Such correspondences, strange as they are, do exist. So suppose we also assume that there is a certain number ofideas circulating in our day,'resulting in some aver- age value that keeps shifting, very slowly and automatically-it's what we call progress, or the historical situation. What matters most about this, however, is that our personal, individual share in all this makes no difference; whether we individually move to the right or to the left, whether we think and act on a high or a low level, in an unpredictable m:: a calculated fashion, a new or an old style, does not affect this aver- age term, which is all that. God and the world care about. "
As he spoke he tried to put his arm around her, though it was pal- pably costing him an effort.
Gerda was furious. "You always begin by philosophizing," she cried out, "and it always turns into the usual rooster's cock-a-doodle- doo! " Her face was aflame, with flecks ofcolor in it. . Her lips seemed to be sweating, but there was something attractive about her indigna- tion. ''What you make of it is precisely what we don't want! "
N~w Ulrich could not resist the temptation to ask her, in a low voice: "Is possession so deadly? "
"I don't want to talk about that," Gerda retorted in an equally low tone.
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"It's all the same, whether it's a person you own or a thing. I know that," Ulrich went on. "Gerda, I understand you and Hans better than you think. So what is it that you and Hans want? Tell me. "
"Nothing! That's just it," Gerda exclaimed triumphantly. ''There's no way to state it. Papa also keeps on saying: 'You must make clear to yourselfwhat it is you actually want. Then you will see what nonsense it is. ' Well, everything is nonsense when you make it clear to yourself. To be sensible is never to get beyond the commonplace. I know you'll have some~ingto say about that, you and your sensible way of thinking. " '
Ulrich shook his head. "And what about this demonstration against Count Leinsdorf? " he asked gently, as though he were not changing the subject.
"Oh, so yo1,1 spy on us! " Gerda exclaimed.
"Call it spying if you like, I don't mind; but tell me about it, Gerda. ''
Gerda showed some embarrassment. "Nothing special. Just some sort of demonstration by the Young Germans-marching past his residence, yelling 'Shamel' and things like that. The Parallel Cam- paign is a shame! " '
"In what way? "
Gerda shrugged.
"Do sit down again," Ulrich pleaded. ''You're making far too much
of it. Let's have a quiet talk about it, shall we? ''
Gerda obeyed.
"Now listen to me, and tell me ifyou think I'm on the right track.
You say that possession kills. You're thinking of money, to begin with, and ofyour parents. I agree that they're dead souls. . . . "
Gerda looked offended.
"Very well, let's not talk about money but of 'having' in other ways. Take the man who 'has' himself in hand; the man who 'has' his con- victions; the man· who lets himself be 'had' by another person or by his own passions or merely his own habits or successes; the man who wants to conquer something, the man who wants anything at all: you reject all that? You want to be nomads, nomads forever on the move, as Hans once called it, if I remember. Moving on toward some other meaning, or state of being? Am I right so far?
