Ernst Bloch - Traces-Stanford University Press (2006)

Traces
M E R I D I A N
Crossing Aesthetics
Werner Hamacher
Editor
Translated by Anthony A. Nassar
Stanford
University
Press
Stanford
California

TRACES
Ernst Bloch
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
English translation ©  by the Board of Trustees of the
Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.
Traces was originally published in German in  under the title Spuren ©
Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main .
The publication of this work was supported by
a grant from the Goethe Institute.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying
and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system
without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free,
archival-quality paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bloch, Ernst, ‒.
[Spuren. English]
Traces / Ernst Bloch ; translated by Anthony A. Nassar.
p. cm.—(Meridian, crossing aesthetics)
Includes bibliographical references.
 --- (cloth : alk. paper)— --- (pbk. : alk. paper)
I. Nassar, Anthony A. II. Title. III. Series: Meridian (Stanford, Calif.)
. 
'.—dc 
Original Printing 
Last figure below indicates year of this printing:
         
Typeset by Classic Typography
in ./ Garamond and Lithos display
For Siegfried Unseld
Contents*
Not Enough* 
Sleeping 
Drawn Out 
Always in It 
Mingling 
Sing-Song 
Slight Change 
Lamp and Closet 
Learning Good Habits 
The “Mark!” 
       
The Poor 
Filth 
The Gift 
Different Needs* 
* Texts indicated with an asterisk appear for the first time in this edition. Most are
from the years when Traces was being written (–); a smaller number were
written for this edition.
x Contents
Games, Regrettably 
The Useful Member 
Shaker of Strawberries* 
Bread and Games 
Narrow-Minded Comrades* 
Disturbing Whim 
  
Passing It Forward 
The Negro 
The Watershed 
No Face 
Comte de Mirabeau 
Rich Devil, Poor Devil 
The Kitten as David* 
Triumphs of Misrecognition 
Scribe at the Mairie* 
The Beautiful Appearance 
The Rococo of Fate 
Spirit Still Taking Shape 
The Motif of Parting 
Supernaturalism, Stupid and Improved* 
Strange Homeland, Familiar Exile* 
Pippa Passes 
The Long Gaze 
Reunion Without Connection 
The Muse of Restitution 
Raphael Without Hands 
Contents xi

Just Now 
Dark by Us 
The Fall into the Now 
The Spur of Work 
No Free Lunch* 
Ten Years’ Jail, Seven-Meter Train* 
Silence and Mirrors 
Ways Not to Be Seen 
Imminent Boredom 
Moment and Image 
Potemkin’s Signature 
Incognito to Oneself* 
Motifs of Concealment 
Just Knock 
The Corner of the Blanket 
Short Excursion 
Terror and Hope 
Excursus: Human and Wax Figure 
Nearby: Inn of the Insane 
Tableau with Curve* 
Some Patterns from the Left Side 
The Twice-Disappearing Frame 
The Motif of the Door 

Half Good 
The Next Tree 
xii Contents
Flower and Unflower* 

The Leyden Jar 
The First Locomotive 
The Urban Peasant 
The House of Day 
Montages of a February Evening* 
An Odd Flâneur 
Eating Olives Precisely* 
Making a Point* 
The Reverse of Things 
Greeting and Appearance 
Motifs of Temptation 
Appendix: No Man’s Land 
A Russian Fairy Tale?* 
The Clever Way Out 
Disappointment with Amusement* 
The Invisible Hand 
Tales of White Magic 
Wonder 
The Mountain 
Dead and Usable* 
The Pearl* 
Notes 
Traces
Not Enough
One is alone with oneself. Together with others, most are alone even
without themselves. One has to get out of both.
Sleeping
By ourselves we are still empty. So we easily fall asleep with no external
stimuli. Soft pillows, darkness, quiet let us fall asleep; the body grows
dark. When one lies awake at night, that is hardly waking, but rather a
stubborn, exhausting creeping in place. One notices then how unpleasant
it is with nothing but oneself.
Drawn Out
Waiting likewise makes one desolate. But it can also make one drunk.
Someone who stares too long at the door where he expects another to
enter can become intoxicated. As by tuneless singing that draws and
draws. Dark, where it draws us to; probably into nothing good. If the
man, the woman whom one awaits doesn’t arrive, the clear disappoint-
ment doesn’t really undo the intoxication. It only combines with its result,

Not Enough
Sleeping
Drawn Out

Not Enough
Sleeping
Drawn Out

 Always in It
a particular kind of hangover that occurs here too. Against waiting, only
hoping helps, which one must not only drink, but cook somewhat too.
Always in It
We can’t be alone for long. One doesn’t suffice with it; in one’s very own
room something’s not right. Nonetheless one takes the room along every-
where, especially when young. Many are drawn strangely back into them-
selves; they make themselves mute. It rattles down as with chains and
buries those who are only in themselves. Precisely because they can’t get
out of themselves, they grow scared, right in the corner where they are.
Into which they’re driven, even without anything bringing them there.
We always dread only what we don’t see. What visibly assails us causes
awe, if we’re weak, or resistance. But against dread, because it comes out
of us alone, when we’re alone, all that helps is to love oneself or forget
oneself. Whoever cannot do so adequately gets bored. Whoever can, ei-
ther takes himself seriously or takes what he does outside of himself just
as it is. They aren’t so far apart, and alternate in most of us. They let us get
up every morning even when we shouldn’t have to, and during the day
both disperse only halfway.
Mingling
Is it good? I asked. Children like it best at someone else’s home. They
notice soon enough what’s wrong there too. If it were so nice at home,
they wouldn’t leave so eagerly. They sense early that, here as elsewhere,
much could be different.
Sing-Song
Strange, how some act when no one sees them. Some make faces in the
morning, others do a little dance, most hum senselessly to themselves.
 Always in It
Always in It
Mingling
Sing-Song
 Always in It
Always in It
Mingling
Sing-Song
 Always in It
Always in It
Mingling
Sing-Song
Slight Change 
Even during pauses—while counting, say—many hum something we can’t

understand, they themselves can’t hear, in which, however, there may be a
lot. The masks fall away, or new ones rise; the thing is crazy enough. Alone,
many go a little crazy; they sing a bit of what went wrong with them once
and was never set right. They are skewed, and puppets in a dream, because
they were forced to grow up even more skewed and vacant.
Slight Change
I used to know someone who didn’t put on airs. As a child, he would
say, he’d actually been quite vain; at games he had to be the first. Whoever
would not parry would be beaten, and usually the little prince would be
on top, if only because the other wouldn’t properly hit back.
But later that was gone, of course, at a stroke, as though swallowed up.
Those of us from his earlier grades could still remember: he was quite a
pitiful boy then. Others’ awkward years took their toll on this new cow-
ard; they threw him in the pool, tied a rope to his leg on the playground
and made him jump. From the boy who’d done the least to him, he stole
a notebook, for which the other was punished; in short, he’d become a
wretched boy, bad and unsteady. But then something remarkable hap-
pened: at fourteen years, or a little later, in the first flush of puberty, the
same proud boy returned, and the wretched boy fell away; his character
reversed for the second time; he grew strong and soon became the leader
of the same grade. He had his personal slogans, with quite genuine force,
insolent conviction, and little affectation; he would enter pubs with the
cry, “Hats off, Fritz Klein is coming”; the patrons were already hatless.
Another, somewhat later slogan was: “Who rejects me condemns him-
self ”; but he didn’t need to say such foolish stuff, there was already some-
thing about the young man that was quite special, and actually rather dif-
ficult to explain, something he shared with others I would later meet, and
who by the way were not always the best people: he radiated power. One
could hardly pull away.
Yet the same man now went on to say that later—many years later, nat-
urally—he was riding high, he had a plum job. He was setting up house,
and the builders suddenly had a feeling, or rather an old, long forgotten
joke at his expense, he could describe it no better, but his other self from
Slight Change 
Even during pauses—while counting, say—many hum something we can’t

understand, they themselves can’t hear, in which, however, there may be a
lot. The masks fall away, or new ones rise; the thing is crazy enough. Alone,
many go a little crazy; they sing a bit of what went wrong with them once
and was never set right. They are skewed, and puppets in a dream, because
they were forced to grow up even more skewed and vacant.
Slight Change
I used to know someone who didn’t put on airs. As a child, he would
say, he’d actually been quite vain; at games he had to be the first. Whoever
would not parry would be beaten, and usually the little prince would be
on top, if only because the other wouldn’t properly hit back.
But later that was gone, of course, at a stroke, as though swallowed up.
Those of us from his earlier grades could still remember: he was quite a
pitiful boy then. Others’ awkward years took their toll on this new cow-
ard; they threw him in the pool, tied a rope to his leg on the playground
and made him jump. From the boy who’d done the least to him, he stole
a notebook, for which the other was punished; in short, he’d become a
wretched boy, bad and unsteady. But then something remarkable hap-
pened: at fourteen years, or a little later, in the first flush of puberty, the
same proud boy returned, and the wretched boy fell away; his character
reversed for the second time; he grew strong and soon became the leader
of the same grade. He had his personal slogans, with quite genuine force,
insolent conviction, and little affectation; he would enter pubs with the
cry, “Hats off, Fritz Klein is coming”; the patrons were already hatless.
Another, somewhat later slogan was: “Who rejects me condemns him-
self ”; but he didn’t need to say such foolish stuff, there was already some-
thing about the young man that was quite special, and actually rather dif-
ficult to explain, something he shared with others I would later meet, and
who by the way were not always the best people: he radiated power. One
could hardly pull away.
Yet the same man now went on to say that later—many years later, nat-
urally—he was riding high, he had a plum job. He was setting up house,
and the builders suddenly had a feeling, or rather an old, long forgotten
joke at his expense, he could describe it no better, but his other self from
 Lamp and Closet
an earlier time was back. At least the fellows acted that way, grinning. So
something in him, he thought, must not have been right, or remained
weak from those bad old days. If dogs can sense someone’s sex, the work-
ers in that small town (and such workers!) had a sense that was just as ex-
act. A distant memory grew fresh to him too, and he said he learned from
it that no grass grows over inner misdeeds—that one can again become
the coward one was, and again do the ill that one did, when one’s younger
brothers from the old days notice it so clearly.
One of us, who simply did not believe in the individual self, sought a
friendlier interpretation here. But of course it depends on someone’s situ-
ation; pitiful or benevolent airs, weak or strong actions are nurtured ac-
cordingly. If that honest man had had no track for his new self, or rather
his childish self, to roll onto, he could never even have related this in-
structive stuff. Instead, the workers would have found him in the news,
where the little scoundrels fall under the wheels or are hanged, especially
the weak or lapsed.
Lamp and Closet

Someone claimed: the only thing that still lives today is for two at a
time, at most for three. He was thinking of love, friendship, conversation;
he was a kindly, desperate man who froze at work and did not see what
could come out of all this. In all this he made absolutely nothing out of
individual or impressive persons, but was rather totally on the side of the
people—a proper, lively, nonexistent people, of course. So he withdrew, as
unbourgeois as possible, to the petit bourgeois side, not into a house, but
where a lamp still stood on the table.
But another related: as I was fixing up my room, and thinking quite
convivial thoughts, something peculiar happened. I’d bought old fur-
niture, but when I finished, I noticed—or rather, women and friends
noticed—that all the chairs seemed to be missing. Along the walls stood
chests, credenzas, modest closets and above all large ones; in the middle
lay a rug that covered the floor. But a place to sit and talk, which I
thought I loved, had been forgotten. Even the lamps, not forgotten of
course, stood not so much conversably, readably, as simply radiantly and
outwardly, like lanterns detached from the wall. What a man is, said a
shrewd woman, he sees walking ahead of him; but one should not be so
 Lamp and Closet
an earlier time was back. At least the fellows acted that way, grinning. So
something in him, he thought, must not have been right, or remained
weak from those bad old days. If dogs can sense someone’s sex, the work-
ers in that small town (and such workers!) had a sense that was just as ex-
act. A distant memory grew fresh to him too, and he said he learned from
it that no grass grows over inner misdeeds—that one can again become
the coward one was, and again do the ill that one did, when one’s younger
brothers from the old days notice it so clearly.
One of us, who simply did not believe in the individual self, sought a
friendlier interpretation here. But of course it depends on someone’s situ-
ation; pitiful or benevolent airs, weak or strong actions are nurtured ac-
cordingly. If that honest man had had no track for his new self, or rather
his childish self, to roll onto, he could never even have related this in-
structive stuff. Instead, the workers would have found him in the news,
where the little scoundrels fall under the wheels or are hanged, especially
the weak or lapsed.
Lamp and Closet

Someone claimed: the only thing that still lives today is for two at a
time, at most for three. He was thinking of love, friendship, conversation;
he was a kindly, desperate man who froze at work and did not see what
could come out of all this. In all this he made absolutely nothing out of
individual or impressive persons, but was rather totally on the side of the
people—a proper, lively, nonexistent people, of course. So he withdrew, as
unbourgeois as possible, to the petit bourgeois side, not into a house, but
where a lamp still stood on the table.
But another related: as I was fixing up my room, and thinking quite
convivial thoughts, something peculiar happened. I’d bought old fur-
niture, but when I finished, I noticed—or rather, women and friends
noticed—that all the chairs seemed to be missing. Along the walls stood
chests, credenzas, modest closets and above all large ones; in the middle
lay a rug that covered the floor. But a place to sit and talk, which I
thought I loved, had been forgotten. Even the lamps, not forgotten of
course, stood not so much conversably, readably, as simply radiantly and
outwardly, like lanterns detached from the wall. What a man is, said a
shrewd woman, he sees walking ahead of him; but one should not be so
The ‘Mark!’ 
much a man, said the teller, or a man who simply has everything move or
stand along the objective wall. Who in this case had been so unobjective,
perhaps, that his room finally wore only lovely, heavy, proud showpieces,
almost like a woman. That was a lesson to me, concluded the astonished
man, and he visited his friend, the same man we told of above, who was
so humane that he even detested thick neckties.
Learning Good Habits

People sense quite precisely when things aren’t going well for them, at
least emotionally. Their thoughts are somewhat murkier—there they’re
easily diverted. But like their bodies, their feelings imitate the jerking and
swaying of the vehicle that takes them to the factory or office every morn-
ing. Only habit helps a little here, as a very weak intoxicant one hardly no-
tices as such. All of bourgeois life is pervaded by it, and is only thereby
tolerable. If on the other hand the situation gets entirely desperate, not
only monotonously but devastatingly bad, then a much stronger antidote
forms, one that comes out of us. Boys already know the peculiar thrill when
their grades keep getting worse and misfortune is really flying. Adults feel
it differently but relatedly: if someone has bet everything on his last hand
and lost, there sometimes comes a completely deceptive joy that it’s finally
over. A soft joy that absorbs the blows, so that for a time they strike past
or to the side. No strength comes out of it, but when habit degrades and
numbs us, the tiny, glittering thrill in misfortune is the enjoyment of a de-
fiance, a defiance that seems to have no need to defy, that liberates us
strangely if only briefly. There a bit of something that never came is hid-
den: partly as penny jar, partly as lamp, and not just an inward lamp.
The “Mark!”
More and more appears among us to the side. One should observe pre-
cisely the little things, go after them.
What is slight and odd often leads the furthest. One hears a story—say,
about the soldier who arrives too late for muster. He doesn’t insert himself
into the ranks but rather stands next to the officer, who “thereby” notices
The ‘Mark!’ 

The “Mark!”
The ‘Mark!’ 

The “Mark!”
 The ‘Mark!’
nothing. Apart from the amusement that this story provides, an impres-
sion is still working: What was that? Something moved! And it moved in
its own way. An impression that will not let us come to rest over what we
heard. An impression on the surface of life, so that it tears, perhaps.
In short, it’s good to think in stories too. So much just isn’t done with it-
self when it happens, even where it’s beautifully told. Instead, very strangely,
there’s more going on there. The case has something about it; this is what
it shows or suggests. Stories of this kind are not just recounted; instead we
also count what something struck there—or we listen up: What was that?
Out of incidents comes a “Mark!” that would otherwise not be thus; or a
“Mark!” that already is, that takes little incidents as traces and examples.
They point out a “less” or “more” that will have to be thought in the tell-
ing, retold in the thinking; that isn’t right in these stories, because things
aren’t right with us, or with anything. Some things can be grasped only in
such stories, not in a more expansive, elevated style, or then not in the
same way. How some such things came to notice will be retold here, and
tentatively marked; lovingly, marking in the retelling; by marking, intend-
ing the retelling. It’s little strokes and such from life that haven’t been for-
gotten; our refuse is worth a lot these days. But an older impulse was also
there: to hear stories, good ones, poor ones, stories in different tones, from
different years, remarkable ones that, when they come to an end, only re-
ally come to an end in the stirring. It’s a reading of traces every which way,
in sections that only divide up the frame. In the end, everything one meets
and notices is the same.
The Poor
What are you doing? I asked. I’m conserving light, said the poor woman.
She sat in the dark kitchen, a long time already. That was certainly easier
than conserving food. Since there isn’t enough for everyone, the poor step
in. They work for the rich even when they rest, alone.
Filth
How low one can go! I heard that yesterday, and everything that goes
with it.
In the Rue Blondel lay a drunk woman; the watchman rousts her. Je suis
pauvre, says the woman. That’s no reason to throw up in the street, shouts
the watchman. Que voulez vous, monsieur, la pauvreté, c’est déjà à moitié la
saleté, says the woman, and sighs.1 So she described, explained, and can-
celed herself, in one stroke. Whom or what could the watchman still arrest?
The Gift
Everything has a price, they say, just not happiness. On the contrary,
precisely happiness; children begin early with it. An eight-year-old girl

The Poor
Filth
with it.
The Gift

The Poor
Filth
with it.
The Gift

 Different Needs
recently rescued a boy from drowning. Or screamed, seeing the boy turn
blue, until others came and pulled him out. For screaming, the child re-
ceived a twenty from Santa Claus, a lot of money; not too much, as we’ll
hear. As the girl later looks out the window again, something elongated is
drifting on the water. She runs out in front of the house: Mister, there’s
twenty dollars in the water again! (It was just a log, however.) Consider-
ing the possible consequences (seeing a drowned corpse, and so on), here
the trauma was remarkably resolved by money, indeed prevented. Two
evils canceled each other out; the girl angel came to rest. It’s the lowest
sort of misfortune to be poor. Santa Claus, who rarely comes, doesn’t can-
cel it, but at least puts it in its proper place.
Different Needs
It is told that a horse and a dog were friends. The dog saved the best
bones for the horse, and the horse put the most fragrant bunches of hay
before the dog; each wanted to do his best for the other, and neither one
was fed. This depicts exactly the misery shared by two people close to each
other: particularly a man and woman, when they can’t leave their own
house, but even more casual acquaintances. More modest expectations of
what others offer, usually kindly, would help a great deal, of course. For
when one sees their bundle of hay—their evening, their Sunday—one
cannot understand how they can bear to live.
Games, Regrettably
1.
The day didn’t promise much.
No money; even Paris seems smaller then. Went to the old working-
man’s tavern; there are worse places that are no cheaper.
But there I saw someone doing it right. So truly, so shamelessly enjoying
himself, as one should. The man across from me grasped lobsters in his cal-
lused hands, bit off and spat out the red shells till the floor sprayed. But to
Different Needs
Games, Regrettably
1.
Different Needs
Games, Regrettably
1.
Games Regrettably 
the tender creature within he spoke cheerfully once he got it, quietly and
sensibly. Here, finally, was a good not defiled by bourgeois enjoyment; the
sweat of the deprived, the disgrace of capital gains didn’t affect the flavor.
Odd enough in Paris, where no bourgeois yet is embarrassed to be one: to
call himself not just casually but proudly a rentier. The worker with the
lobsters reminded one of something else too, of the great breakthrough
back then, long ago. A certain something, later, glimmering, when money
no longer barks at every good nor wags its tail in it. When we’re spared the
terribly stupid choice between pure conviction and pure taste.
2.
That night one didn’t walk at all the same way. Didn’t try to avoid the
street, even the middle where the cars surged by, right and left, high and
low, fast and right at us.
Instead the middle of the street came alive; something was even grow-
ing on it. The barrage of traffic that usually owned it was laid down, with-
drew into the distance or to the edges; the glorious asphalt was inhabited.
Colorful paper lanterns strung across made a low ceiling: beneath it, there
was dancing. The houses became walls, the illuminated windows round-
about glowed like lamps, like mirrors with their own light source, again
with people in them. And the most beautiful thing was that the dance
floor was enclosed only on the sides but otherwise had the long street to
itself, and the side streets too. At the next corner there was already music
again, and couples roamed through the glowing quarter.
This was a Parisian street on July , the great day. As the Bastille was
stormed, the people also danced on the ground to which the fort had been
leveled. It stood for the Fields of the Blessed, and that has remained; of
course back then one danced differently after nature. But even if the rev-
olutionaries have been pacified since then, long since thrown off their
horns and wings, a distant memory sometimes still courses through this
“national” holiday. Hardly belonging wholesale to the nation; rather,
without a truce with the bourgeois gentilhomme. On July , , as a car
driven by a man with a straw hat wanted to push through one of these
dance streets, the people would not make room, even though no one was
dancing at the moment, and mere taxis had gone through in numbers.
The straw hat must have annoyed them—usually nothing special, but
here, remarkably, a symbol of the ruling class, perhaps because of its light
 Games Regrettably
color and because machines tend not to be operated with straw hats. The
annoying straw hat would not give way, and instead hit the gas, right
through the crowd. But twenty hands had grabbed the car from behind,
dragged it, despite the raging exhaust, back up the street, back and forth,
in a discreet tempo on the voluntary jousting grounds; even the driver
performed calmly, with a certain grim reactionary sportsmanship. Only at
one point could he have broken through, but then came the second pro-
found delight: a young girl jumped suddenly in front of the car, danced,
cheerfully and fearlessly, a flower in her hand, then between her teeth,
gave the driver signals, and as the car stopped, curtsied with wonderful,
with lovely mockery. Here the driver should really have let himself be
pulled back, but the ruling classes capitulate only falsely, abstractly, and
undialectically: in short, instead of grasping the situation and sublating
himself in it, the provocateur shifted the force of his advance into a no-
less-arrogant reverse, turned around, and, with this difficult and twisted
maneuver, now truly drove into the crowd. Several women were pushed
against a wall, the men had no more leverage behind the swerving vehicle,
and the air quickly tensed; obscenities were shouted, the car was grabbed
from the side, very mutinously, and it would have been overturned if the
driver had not regained control of the wheel again, and the car sped for-
ward, escaping.
Yet the straw hat at least learned what happens to the white lily in every
form.2 A young fellow had knocked the hat from his head, threw it in the
air; others caught it. Already the music began to play and couples danced,
but not only with their feet and their bodies; their hands were kept busy
looking for the straw hat as it was knocked through the air from one cou-
ple to another, until it lay on the ground, ragged and flattened, a very
slight, very allegorically trampled representative of the Bastille. Obedient
taxi drivers who now approached and wanted to regain the narrow boule-
vard immediately turned around; the party of business takes no part in the
civil war. And even the rebel street soon forgot that it was the only one in
Paris to dance a little “July .” So the straw hat didn’t end up in a police
report, let alone in history, but only in this little, expectant story.
3.
Likewise in Paris, a quiet man had set the following in motion two
years earlier.
Games Regrettably 
He sat with a green schnapps, occasionally reading. The café at this

hour was quite full, the conversation was animated, political unrest was in
the air. This guest had a book with him that took him far away from in-
flation and devaluation, or perhaps not so far at all, but thirty years had
already gone by since. Since the fin de siècle, as one said at the time, and
the smart set seemed to have forgotten it, in spite of the troops “con-
signed” in the barracks. Yet “older readers,” so read the book,
older readers will perhaps still recall the times, and the great agitation that
went through the world as the newspapers would time and again report, in
very short articles, of anarchist bombings in Paris that were obviously the
work of an extensive gang whom the police could only partly apprehend. The
bombs seemed to fly randomly into houses, into an elegant café by the St.
Lazare station, into the Chamber of Deputies and into a little restaurant, even
into an empty Ste. Madeleine’s. A barracks was blown up, the Serbian ambas-
sador was shot at on the street, Sadi Carnot, President of the Republic, was
stabbed on the ride to the theater. It was the age of Revachol, Vaillant, Henry,
Caserio, and other dangerous propagandists of the deed, the age of dynamite
and the most covert threat to bourgeois society and morality.
Right into rumor, indeed into childhood nightmares led the book: even
the anarchist gangs selected bore the terrifying names of urban legend
(which has no sense of humor). There were the “Hairy Lads of Billan-
court,” the “Panthers of Batignolles,” the “Oak Hearts of Cettes,” the
“Children of Nature,” the “Jailbirds of Lille,” the “Pillory of Sedan,” the
“Yatagan of Terre Noire.” The handbills themselves, after harmless classi-
fieds, displayed a standing rubric with the epigraph, “Directions for the
Manufacture of Nonbourgeois Products.”
Here our guest had to pause, for a younger couple sat down at another
table and began conversing. The couple were so elegant they must have
been dressed in heaven, as “ladies” and “gentlemen” like to think. Now
the quiet reader stood up quite innocently; he only wanted to buy some
cigarettes, no longer even thought of the Panthers of Batignolles. Rather,
Nana was more present—before he’d gone a step away from his table there
was such a terrific explosion that the couple jumped up, tables fell over,
the entire passage stood still.3 Even the reader’s knees trembled, though as
a whole he was unhurt, like the couple as well, which was fortunate: for
how easily the shards from the seltzer bottle could have hurt someone
when he knocked it over on his way to the counter. The manager came
 The Useful Member
and demanded compensation; the reader paid him, relieved though al-
most ashamed to have come away without injury. In the rest of the café
too, the emotional landscape settled; the elegant couple ordered a fresh
aperitif, by deep instinct not entirely satisfied with the man’s merely fi-
nancial penalty.
The reader soon left this scene, the very historical book of dynamite un-
der his arm, finally got his cigarettes at the counter, like peace pipes, and
drove to his customary restaurant. There he recounted his heroic story, in
which out of bad luck an assassin materialized, out of a seltzer bottle the
court of history. How quickly the genie had returned to the bottle! Yet the
man’s dark shame, the couple’s anger at his punishment still hung tangi-
bly in the air. The intellectual’s dismay, the bourgeois’s ancestral memory:
both played over the inept incident. Replayed a past that never ended, a
future from which not even the Parisian bourgeois feels absolved. What
became a celebration like the th of July is already past, but the fear that
was also in it is still raw. If every worker ate lobster, the splinters from the
seltzer bottle would hurt no feelings.
The Useful Member

As Bernhard and Simon visited their coffee house again to play chess,
all the boards were taken. They therefore went over to two proven players.
Suddenly Bernhard, growing bored, shouted, “I bet five marks on West-
fal!” Simon bet the same on Dyssel. At first the two outstanding players
noticed nothing of the bet; only others’ encouragement grew louder, and
their reproofs harsher. Yet soon the men became racehorses to be bet on,
and they not only became but felt themselves to be such. Finally, bit by bit
diverted from the noble disinterestedness of the game, they saw them-
selves as wage slaves, harnessed to capitalism, spilling their toil and their
wits. The winner’s anger was perfectly clear as Simon wanted to buy him
a coffee with a fraction of his winnings; his labor power was already suffi-
ciently exploited in life. Business is pleasure for some, but pleasure easily
became business again. So exactly is even play subject to the forms in
which the earnestness of life flows away; one cannot flee it, not even in
flight. Even the most resistant are taken on capitalism’s wings; to some,
this actually seems an elevation.
 The Useful Member
and demanded compensation; the reader paid him, relieved though al-
most ashamed to have come away without injury. In the rest of the café
too, the emotional landscape settled; the elegant couple ordered a fresh
aperitif, by deep instinct not entirely satisfied with the man’s merely fi-
nancial penalty.
The reader soon left this scene, the very historical book of dynamite un-
der his arm, finally got his cigarettes at the counter, like peace pipes, and
drove to his customary restaurant. There he recounted his heroic story, in
which out of bad luck an assassin materialized, out of a seltzer bottle the
court of history. How quickly the genie had returned to the bottle! Yet the
man’s dark shame, the couple’s anger at his punishment still hung tangi-
bly in the air. The intellectual’s dismay, the bourgeois’s ancestral memory:
both played over the inept incident. Replayed a past that never ended, a
future from which not even the Parisian bourgeois feels absolved. What
became a celebration like the th of July is already past, but the fear that
was also in it is still raw. If every worker ate lobster, the splinters from the
seltzer bottle would hurt no feelings.
The Useful Member

As Bernhard and Simon visited their coffee house again to play chess,
all the boards were taken. They therefore went over to two proven players.
Suddenly Bernhard, growing bored, shouted, “I bet five marks on West-
fal!” Simon bet the same on Dyssel. At first the two outstanding players
noticed nothing of the bet; only others’ encouragement grew louder, and
their reproofs harsher. Yet soon the men became racehorses to be bet on,
and they not only became but felt themselves to be such. Finally, bit by bit
diverted from the noble disinterestedness of the game, they saw them-
selves as wage slaves, harnessed to capitalism, spilling their toil and their
wits. The winner’s anger was perfectly clear as Simon wanted to buy him
a coffee with a fraction of his winnings; his labor power was already suffi-
ciently exploited in life. Business is pleasure for some, but pleasure easily
became business again. So exactly is even play subject to the forms in
which the earnestness of life flows away; one cannot flee it, not even in
flight. Even the most resistant are taken on capitalism’s wings; to some,
this actually seems an elevation.
Shaker of Strawberries
The rich get the best of everything and everyone. At the curb of an ele-
gant street in Paris, quite out of place, stood a poor devil of an invalid.
Both hands trembled, his arms flapped back and forth; that’s what he’d
taken home from the war, a so-called shaker. Brillat-Savarin passed by,
watched, gave not the usual alms but, in departing, his address.4 The
shaker should apply to his chef, pour sucrer les fraises. Better that than
standing on the unpleasant street! Certainly Brillat-Savarin was an inven-
tive gourmet, providing joy to his peers. But the unquestionably exquisite
gentleman obviously had this in common with the merely rich: that he
could derive a particular use from misery, even earn its gratitude. Instead
of the many poor blowing him up, they merely shake his strawberries, op-
erate larger machines just as mechanically. Indeed if the boredom of un-
employment or the perpetual chill of their condition increases their un-
rest, even this can now be used to divert them, train them to sacrifice their
peers, betray them doubly, fascistically. This is new; up to now the better
ranks had only the Lumpenproletariat, or of course mercenaries. No bit-
terness, let alone revolt, could thus ever become a danger from the left in-
stead of the right. So the pauper becomes a particularly good cook for
those who’ve made him a pauper or worse.5 Then it’s not only the fist in
the pocket that won’t get dangerous ideas.
Bread and Games

I know someone who was suddenly impoverished and saw himself
forced to move into ugly quarters. The next day, stepping out onto the
street after a sleepless night, he was astonished at how utterly he’d become
nothing to himself. How seriously he missed the little, familiar things:
paint on the walls, the cozy rectangle of the desk, the aurora of the lamp,
things he used to take with him when he went outside. Only the tobacco
smoke still formed a buffer between him and the bare world, carried him,
enclouded, encrypted his being somewhat. The man was insufferably hon-
ored by the hotel porter’s bow; was inclined not only to bow first to this
minor dignitary but to bow deeply. That is how quickly people collapse,
lose their bearings, when deprived of a fixed outside point. (Even ascetics,
Shaker of Strawberries
The rich get the best of everything and everyone. At the curb of an ele-
gant street in Paris, quite out of place, stood a poor devil of an invalid.
Both hands trembled, his arms flapped back and forth; that’s what he’d
taken home from the war, a so-called shaker. Brillat-Savarin passed by,
watched, gave not the usual alms but, in departing, his address.4 The
shaker should apply to his chef, pour sucrer les fraises. Better that than
standing on the unpleasant street! Certainly Brillat-Savarin was an inven-
tive gourmet, providing joy to his peers. But the unquestionably exquisite
gentleman obviously had this in common with the merely rich: that he
could derive a particular use from misery, even earn its gratitude. Instead
of the many poor blowing him up, they merely shake his strawberries, op-
erate larger machines just as mechanically. Indeed if the boredom of un-
employment or the perpetual chill of their condition increases their un-
rest, even this can now be used to divert them, train them to sacrifice their
peers, betray them doubly, fascistically. This is new; up to now the better
ranks had only the Lumpenproletariat, or of course mercenaries. No bit-
terness, let alone revolt, could thus ever become a danger from the left in-
stead of the right. So the pauper becomes a particularly good cook for
those who’ve made him a pauper or worse.5 Then it’s not only the fist in
the pocket that won’t get dangerous ideas.
Bread and Games

I know someone who was suddenly impoverished and saw himself
forced to move into ugly quarters. The next day, stepping out onto the
street after a sleepless night, he was astonished at how utterly he’d become
nothing to himself. How seriously he missed the little, familiar things:
paint on the walls, the cozy rectangle of the desk, the aurora of the lamp,
things he used to take with him when he went outside. Only the tobacco
smoke still formed a buffer between him and the bare world, carried him,
enclouded, encrypted his being somewhat. The man was insufferably hon-
ored by the hotel porter’s bow; was inclined not only to bow first to this
minor dignitary but to bow deeply. That is how quickly people collapse,
lose their bearings, when deprived of a fixed outside point. (Even ascetics,
 Narrow-Minded Comrades
in whom poverty is supposed to be a great inner radiance, always build

themselves an inner home before leaving the outer one, where furniture,
even rugs and easy chairs, is not lacking.)
The best sedative is sleep; the best means of keeping slaves in their state,
poor “but” honest, likewise seems to be utter poverty itself. For as the
deep impulse to greet the porter shows, poverty in itself is in no way re-
bellious. On the contrary: as they themselves have nothing to hold on to,
the utter contempt of the upper classes flows into the merely poor, and
keeps them on a leash. Otherwise it would be a mystery that there aren’t
more “criminals” who simply grab what otherwise only high birth or skill-
ful fraud can bestow respectably. Otherwise it would be an even greater
mystery that the rich few can hold on to power while the workers don’t in
every case prefer the va banque of the barricades to their dog’s life. If
hunger does not pull one upward—in itself it only induces looting, and is
placated as soon as it’s fed—if, above all, leaders from another class do not
talk down to the mute ones like a ship’s captain through a speaking tube
into the boiler room, there is nonetheless a rather mysterious impulse that
belongs to being revolutionary. It never stems from poverty alone, which
often obscures it, but rather from a feeling of the unpossessed “possession”
one deserves, out of a secret splendor that becomes explosive in the prole-
tariat. All honor to the call for panes; it’s brought much rebellion and sets
the first, immediate, objective paths; but without circenses it would neither
remain nor ever be more than revolutionary. That revolt is even possible
after such primordial enslavement, and such habituation to it, is so extra-
ordinary that it could, in its way, make one a believer.
Narrow-Minded Comrades
When it seemed inappropriate for me to work any longer on a political
journal that had very subaltern contributions, a friend, unconcerned,
replied: If a hundred cats stand before the Berlin castle and meow, I don’t
care that they’re cats, but rather that they’re protesting; I’ll stand next to
them and meow with them. That is certainly well put; the likeness fits.
Only: there are, especially today, far too many people who have no right to
be right. Who went along with the cold war, and even the hot one before-
hand, and now sound almost like the loyal reds who hate what’s become of
 Narrow-Minded Comrades
in whom poverty is supposed to be a great inner radiance, always build

themselves an inner home before leaving the outer one, where furniture,
even rugs and easy chairs, is not lacking.)
The best sedative is sleep; the best means of keeping slaves in their state,
poor “but” honest, likewise seems to be utter poverty itself. For as the
deep impulse to greet the porter shows, poverty in itself is in no way re-
bellious. On the contrary: as they themselves have nothing to hold on to,
the utter contempt of the upper classes flows into the merely poor, and
keeps them on a leash. Otherwise it would be a mystery that there aren’t
more “criminals” who simply grab what otherwise only high birth or skill-
ful fraud can bestow respectably. Otherwise it would be an even greater
mystery that the rich few can hold on to power while the workers don’t in
every case prefer the va banque of the barricades to their dog’s life. If
hunger does not pull one upward—in itself it only induces looting, and is
placated as soon as it’s fed—if, above all, leaders from another class do not
talk down to the mute ones like a ship’s captain through a speaking tube
into the boiler room, there is nonetheless a rather mysterious impulse that
belongs to being revolutionary. It never stems from poverty alone, which
often obscures it, but rather from a feeling of the unpossessed “possession”
one deserves, out of a secret splendor that becomes explosive in the prole-
tariat. All honor to the call for panes; it’s brought much rebellion and sets
the first, immediate, objective paths; but without circenses it would neither
remain nor ever be more than revolutionary. That revolt is even possible
after such primordial enslavement, and such habituation to it, is so extra-
ordinary that it could, in its way, make one a believer.
Narrow-Minded Comrades
When it seemed inappropriate for me to work any longer on a political
journal that had very subaltern contributions, a friend, unconcerned,
replied: If a hundred cats stand before the Berlin castle and meow, I don’t
care that they’re cats, but rather that they’re protesting; I’ll stand next to
them and meow with them. That is certainly well put; the likeness fits.
Only: there are, especially today, far too many people who have no right to
be right. Who went along with the cold war, and even the hot one before-
hand, and now sound almost like the loyal reds who hate what’s become of
their leading comrades. Only this latter kind of dissident, in contrast to the
mere cats of the cold war, can stand up like a man, literally, in word and
deed, not like an opportunistic slacker.
Disturbing Whim
Most are kept dark and hardly see themselves. The man on the assembly
line who performs the same motion eight hours a day is as hidden as the
miner. No one loves the fifth estate for the beautiful eyes it already has.
But then somebody who had time for the proletariat and had done
much with them, in other words not a hostile or even unfriendly figure,
but rather a mournful one, said to a Communist: A bourgeois was hidden
in the citoyen; God save us from what’s hidden in the comrade. He added:
That’s why you’re so careful too, and never want to say what this new
world will look like. Instead you’re precise like Prussians, all order of the
day, but if someone wants to know what kind of society is supposed to
break through here, you all become Austrian, postpone everything till to-
morrow, even the day after. In , when the third estate was revolution-
ary, one didn’t need to be so formal, nor such a cautious dreamer. Of
course there was more content then; the Caliph Stork of those days didn’t
need to buy a cat in a sack and simply believe it was a dream princess.6
Now, as cautiously as you consider the future, you still dream constantly
of the miracle in the working class; here you’re utter believers. Here you
don’t pursue just the sober abolition of want and exploitation but paint
the whole person, the new person, into the undecided setting—whereas
the proletarian today is usually just an unsuccessful petit bourgeois; runs
to the racist parties or to the shopkeepers on the podium. From within his
class consciousness, though you think you’re deep inside it, you hear a
melody that’s unclear or inaudible to us. There is nothing but simple dis-
satisfaction there, and a very understandable, very modern will to live.
There is as much powerful melody in the noise of a car, to which you can
also sing all kinds of songs, or even something more precise.
Thus spoke this irascible man, and was homeless; drank only rarely
from the bottle of the subject, or of friendship, which still had some life
for him. Only he forgot, when giving the other such grief, that a comrade
could never disappoint him. For he represents nothing at all, in contrast
their leading comrades. Only this latter kind of dissident, in contrast to the
mere cats of the cold war, can stand up like a man, literally, in word and
deed, not like an opportunistic slacker.
Disturbing Whim
Most are kept dark and hardly see themselves. The man on the assembly
line who performs the same motion eight hours a day is as hidden as the
miner. No one loves the fifth estate for the beautiful eyes it already has.
But then somebody who had time for the proletariat and had done
much with them, in other words not a hostile or even unfriendly figure,
but rather a mournful one, said to a Communist: A bourgeois was hidden
in the citoyen; God save us from what’s hidden in the comrade. He added:
That’s why you’re so careful too, and never want to say what this new
world will look like. Instead you’re precise like Prussians, all order of the
day, but if someone wants to know what kind of society is supposed to
break through here, you all become Austrian, postpone everything till to-
morrow, even the day after. In , when the third estate was revolution-
ary, one didn’t need to be so formal, nor such a cautious dreamer. Of
course there was more content then; the Caliph Stork of those days didn’t
need to buy a cat in a sack and simply believe it was a dream princess.6
Now, as cautiously as you consider the future, you still dream constantly
of the miracle in the working class; here you’re utter believers. Here you
don’t pursue just the sober abolition of want and exploitation but paint
the whole person, the new person, into the undecided setting—whereas
the proletarian today is usually just an unsuccessful petit bourgeois; runs
to the racist parties or to the shopkeepers on the podium. From within his
class consciousness, though you think you’re deep inside it, you hear a
melody that’s unclear or inaudible to us. There is nothing but simple dis-
satisfaction there, and a very understandable, very modern will to live.
There is as much powerful melody in the noise of a car, to which you can
also sing all kinds of songs, or even something more precise.
Thus spoke this irascible man, and was homeless; drank only rarely
from the bottle of the subject, or of friendship, which still had some life
for him. Only he forgot, when giving the other such grief, that a comrade
could never disappoint him. For he represents nothing at all, in contrast
 Disturbing Whim
to the old bourgeois who would so disappoint. In the triumph of the

bourgeoisie we have what great words, even human values, mean when
the base is not in order. Whereas the proletariat is the only class that does
not want to be one; it does not and certainly could not claim to be par-
ticularly grand as such; every kind of Proletkult is false, and a bourgeois in-
fection. It claims only that it will provide the key to the larder of human-
ity when it is abolished; yet it does not claim to carry, let alone to be, this
larder. In its dehumanization it teaches, with radical precision, that there
has never yet been human life, but always just economic life, which drives
human beings about, making them false, making them slaves, but also ex-
ploiters. What comes then? At least no exploiter will jump out; indeed, if
something worse happens, the table will at least have been cleared, and we
will have at face value what free men and women are about, or not yet.
Even without poverty we will be sufficiently unlike ourselves, or falsely
conditioned; there will be misfortune, sorrow, fate enough, and no elixir
against death. But what’s in the comrade: that will truly be in him, and
not in the relations that deform us even worse than we are. Thus spoke
the Communist, shocking even his friend, and was finally not such a be-
liever—for humanity is something that has yet to be discovered. As much
by taking the cat and leaving the sack as by first discussing the potential
princess, until she becomes one.
Passing It Forward
As one or another, everyone certainly already seems to be here. But no
one is what he thinks; certainly not what he presents. And in fact every-
one is not too little, but too much, from the outset, for what they will be-
come. Later they get used to the skin they’re stuck in; worse, into which
they’ve been stuck, professionally or however else. But once a lad far from
here found a mirror; he had never seen such a thing. He held up the glass,
looked at it, and gave it to a friend: “I didn’t know this was yours.” The
other didn’t own the face either, though it was quite handsome.
The Negro
Someone already saw himself better, precisely in his error. Late one
night this gentleman arrived at a hotel with friends; all the rooms were
taken. All but one; but someone else was already asleep in the room, a
black man; we’re in America. The gentleman took the room anyway; it
was only for the night; early the next day he would have to catch a train.
He enjoined the bellhop to knock at the door as well as the bed, and the
right bed, not the black man’s. He and his friends then drank to the night,
all sorts of strong stuff, so much that his friends, before they put him in
the room, painted him in blackface without his even noticing. When the
bellhop later woke him, he raced to the station, onto the train, and into

Passing It Forward
As one or another, everyone certainly already seems to be here. But no
one is what he thinks; certainly not what he presents. And in fact every-
one is not too little, but too much, from the outset, for what they will be-
come. Later they get used to the skin they’re stuck in; worse, into which
they’ve been stuck, professionally or however else. But once a lad far from
here found a mirror; he had never seen such a thing. He held up the glass,
looked at it, and gave it to a friend: “I didn’t know this was yours.” The
other didn’t own the face either, though it was quite handsome.
The Negro
Someone already saw himself better, precisely in his error. Late one
night this gentleman arrived at a hotel with friends; all the rooms were
taken. All but one; but someone else was already asleep in the room, a
black man; we’re in America. The gentleman took the room anyway; it
was only for the night; early the next day he would have to catch a train.
He enjoined the bellhop to knock at the door as well as the bed, and the
right bed, not the black man’s. He and his friends then drank to the night,
all sorts of strong stuff, so much that his friends, before they put him in
the room, painted him in blackface without his even noticing. When the
bellhop later woke him, he raced to the station, onto the train, and into

 The Watershed
the restroom to wash his face. Seeing himself in the mirror, he bellowed,
“Now, that idiot woke the nigger after all!”
The story’s told in different ways, but always with the same outcome.
Was the man still half-asleep? Certainly, and at the same time he was never
more awake than at that moment. So indefinitely near himself, yet his ha-
bitual whiteness fell from him like taking off a suit, however comfortable,
in which he’d been stuck. Even whites look mostly just like a distortion of
themselves—nothing fits there; life is a sorry tailor. The black man would
lose his suit even faster if he blinked hard just once.
The Watershed
Someone said, It didn’t depend on you and me at all. At least not at
first; I was hardly there when I was conceived. It probably happened quite
accidentally between Father and Mother. Afterward one is here, unfolds
from oneself, insofar as one is worth something.
Is one here by grace of oneself? the man interrupted himself. No; here
too, there’s too much accident, and it insults us. Our encounters, at least,
are unbidden; our beginning with others and the fate from it (which
wouldn’t exist without that beginning) depend on the most accidental
causes. It can be the silliest cause, and often, astonishingly, the only one,
always the same one; the other causes don’t flow then, or at least not far.
For my part, I found after sufficient consideration in a disrespectful hour
that my real life—my rebirth, as it were, or my adult baptism—depended
on the discharge of a Bavarian officer whose name I don’t even know.
As a young man I was very reserved; I sought out no one, and found no
one. In my first semester at Munich, I boarded with a woman whom I
took for a widow; sometimes she would boast of better days. An old man,
clearly ill, had just joined us as a boarder, and might occasionally be seen
in the hallway, groaning nobly. Once I came home late and passed the
widow’s doorway, which stood open, strangely: there lay the old man, al-
ready nicely laid out in his bed; a nightlight still burnt, and right and left
two long candles—the apartment empty, the woman gone, and I alone
with the dead man. Night terrors had returned from my childhood, the
same paralyzed legs, unable to flee this nightmare. Yet what the boy wished
he had the grown man has in plenty: at least the nerve to run. A short
 The Watershed
the restroom to wash his face. Seeing himself in the mirror, he bellowed,
“Now, that idiot woke the nigger after all!”
The story’s told in different ways, but always with the same outcome.
Was the man still half-asleep? Certainly, and at the same time he was never
more awake than at that moment. So indefinitely near himself, yet his ha-
bitual whiteness fell from him like taking off a suit, however comfortable,
in which he’d been stuck. Even whites look mostly just like a distortion of
themselves—nothing fits there; life is a sorry tailor. The black man would
lose his suit even faster if he blinked hard just once.
The Watershed
Someone said, It didn’t depend on you and me at all. At least not at
first; I was hardly there when I was conceived. It probably happened quite
accidentally between Father and Mother. Afterward one is here, unfolds
from oneself, insofar as one is worth something.
Is one here by grace of oneself? the man interrupted himself. No; here
too, there’s too much accident, and it insults us. Our encounters, at least,
are unbidden; our beginning with others and the fate from it (which
wouldn’t exist without that beginning) depend on the most accidental
causes. It can be the silliest cause, and often, astonishingly, the only one,
always the same one; the other causes don’t flow then, or at least not far.
For my part, I found after sufficient consideration in a disrespectful hour
that my real life—my rebirth, as it were, or my adult baptism—depended
on the discharge of a Bavarian officer whose name I don’t even know.
As a young man I was very reserved; I sought out no one, and found no
one. In my first semester at Munich, I boarded with a woman whom I
took for a widow; sometimes she would boast of better days. An old man,
clearly ill, had just joined us as a boarder, and might occasionally be seen
in the hallway, groaning nobly. Once I came home late and passed the
widow’s doorway, which stood open, strangely: there lay the old man, al-
ready nicely laid out in his bed; a nightlight still burnt, and right and left
two long candles—the apartment empty, the woman gone, and I alone
with the dead man. Night terrors had returned from my childhood, the
same paralyzed legs, unable to flee this nightmare. Yet what the boy wished
he had the grown man has in plenty: at least the nerve to run. A short
The Watershed 
time later I was among living people again, in a bar that I would assuredly
not have sought out except for the dead man.
Here is the crux of the story: I had really never been in this bar, because
it was shabby, and because quite disagreeable acquaintances hung out
there. On this particular night, I went there demonstrably only because I
needed human warmth without eye contact. The hair in my soup was at
least human, and the fleck of dirt in the vinegary wine floated like a serene
spirit. Most important, a man was there on this night who otherwise
never came, and whom I got to know—indeed, through whom, in a ver-
itable chain reaction of collision and mutual ignition, I would then get to
know all the people who became important to me. First a female student,
for whose sake I attended a small university I would otherwise never have
thought of. Then a Hungarian woman, a Russian girlfriend, a German
friend of the purest grade of absurdity—all people who moved me just as
they were, and who cannot be replaced by others. I would never have vis-
ited Budapest (at least not at that time) without the Hungarian woman;
without her I would never have gotten to know the Franciscan father (at
least not at the time, a time that would decide everything) who later had
such a vivid influence on me. And again: through the man I met in the
bar, I met my future wife in a remote inn; decided even the residence
where I would write my book (not unconnected with the landscape).
It goes without saying that there are other, certainly less accidental threads
in this causal nexus: but none is so central, none is above all so provably
originative; none so aptly determines all my new beginnings. The small
university, and what followed; the remote inn in the Isar valley, and what
followed: my entire fate would never have taken place without the man in
the bar. Berlin, where students go anyway, wouldn’t flourish like this for a
long time; only recently has the causal force of the fortuitous corpse and
the acquaintance from the bar lessened. The old man whose deathbed I
fled, however, had in fact been an officer, cashiered over an earlier scandal
with a Munich dancer long before I was born. Deathly ill, he had returned
to his wife, whom I thought to be a widow and who would only now be-
come one. His end, in that room with the door open, with a nightlight, in
the abandoned apartment, granted me the beginning of my adult life.
What is even further upstream? asked the strange storyteller. From my
entry into the house to become a tenant; from the officer’s first glimpse of
the dancer; from unrelated, distant inconsequentialities that have ab-
solutely nothing to do with me. That a roof tile should fall on someone’s
 No Face
head, that someone’s plans should be fortunate, another’s unfortunate,

might still seem purposeful to the superstitious, like what they call karma
or providence. But in these little, eerily faint, moreover eerily remote and
past causes, one can grasp with bare hands what is arbitrary, “accidental,”
worthless as it were, unworthy, about the doctrine of karma. Why the pri-
vate affairs of this unimportant officer, whom I encountered only on the
very periphery? What has that to do with my heredity, let alone with the
law by which I began “intelligibly,” and which avoids the jumble of such
determinations?
Everyone should look for the little first causes in his own life; they will
usually be just as trivial, even strange or comical. There’s still no produc-
tion budget for the realization of our existence, said the man, and spat
symbolically into his cupped hand. Afterward, of course, most things look
just right, from the viewpoint of the middle and especially the end of life.
Adaptation to the past pretends to be intentional, sometimes a law of ne-
cessity, by which one must complete the circle of one’s existence. Some-
times courage and logic—yes, grace of oneself, by which the subject and
ultimately the group make history and fate. But life is still confused, and
not built for us; it soon falls into a puddle in the yard, soon on a hill, and
seldom on St. Gotthard; yet there too a stone can create a watershed, can
by the tiniest diversion make this water flow to the Mediterranean, that to
the North Sea. Even the logic of a courage that perhaps ultimately created
a life out of dancer, corpse, and bar—truly created it, as out of other pos-
sible elements—is still as obscure when it enters, if not as arbitrary, as ex-
ternal “accident.” The power to enter into a great fate, the freedom to
have one’s law, the law by which one began and that comes through in
every strength, is finally far more “freedom,” thus accident, good accident,
than law.
No Face
A young girl, pretty, lively, ambitious, seemingly talented, fled the
parental home.
Burned the candle at both ends. Sought the extraordinary; regarded
herself above all as such. Became an actress at a small theater; mailed the
initial critical praise home. Maintained for a long time the impressive il-
 No Face
head, that someone’s plans should be fortunate, another’s unfortunate,

might still seem purposeful to the superstitious, like what they call karma
or providence. But in these little, eerily faint, moreover eerily remote and
past causes, one can grasp with bare hands what is arbitrary, “accidental,”
worthless as it were, unworthy, about the doctrine of karma. Why the pri-
vate affairs of this unimportant officer, whom I encountered only on the
very periphery? What has that to do with my heredity, let alone with the
law by which I began “intelligibly,” and which avoids the jumble of such
determinations?
Everyone should look for the little first causes in his own life; they will
usually be just as trivial, even strange or comical. There’s still no produc-
tion budget for the realization of our existence, said the man, and spat
symbolically into his cupped hand. Afterward, of course, most things look
just right, from the viewpoint of the middle and especially the end of life.
Adaptation to the past pretends to be intentional, sometimes a law of ne-
cessity, by which one must complete the circle of one’s existence. Some-
times courage and logic—yes, grace of oneself, by which the subject and
ultimately the group make history and fate. But life is still confused, and
not built for us; it soon falls into a puddle in the yard, soon on a hill, and
seldom on St. Gotthard; yet there too a stone can create a watershed, can
by the tiniest diversion make this water flow to the Mediterranean, that to
the North Sea. Even the logic of a courage that perhaps ultimately created
a life out of dancer, corpse, and bar—truly created it, as out of other pos-
sible elements—is still as obscure when it enters, if not as arbitrary, as ex-
ternal “accident.” The power to enter into a great fate, the freedom to
have one’s law, the law by which one began and that comes through in
every strength, is finally far more “freedom,” thus accident, good accident,
than law.
No Face
A young girl, pretty, lively, ambitious, seemingly talented, fled the
parental home.
Burned the candle at both ends. Sought the extraordinary; regarded
herself above all as such. Became an actress at a small theater; mailed the
initial critical praise home. Maintained for a long time the impressive il-
lusion of her fame, with a constant eye to her parents, her former circles,
her youthful tormentors, and the misunderstanding that would finally
have to capitulate. Finally, driven from one dump of a theater to another,
failed to find work anywhere. Stranded with empty hands and aching feet
in the same stupid town she had fled. Returned with her ambitions clearly
not satisfied; became a secretary in an office; distributed ration cards, ap-
parently voluntarily, during the War; even that was made possible only by
her father’s respectable status. Some weeks later the former actress Karoline
Lengenhardt, not yet thirty, was put in an institution.
What happened in this girl until she got where she is should give most
of us sleepless nights. Her misfortune lacks even the grandeur that tends to
console the vanity and ambition of others on their way down. Here not
even the inner realization, to say nothing of the outer, agrees with the will
behind it. The inept fervor of her will could not even come through. The
girl even lacked talent. She was not just unfavorably situated or misjudged;
she had not been misjudged at all. Yet there is a flagrant disproportion
between her initial fame and the accidents that hindered or derailed it.
Her face never took shape, and her life between classes, her unbourgeois
ramble, had no goal, indeed no horse, and finally no rider; nothing came
out well, or even came out. The arbitrariness of her lot was enormous, and
stifled the inner calling to which she hearkened, and that was truly there.
What was alive in her fantastic quest sufficed only to put her in an asylum.
Why, asked an authority on women, must we, bounded in every way, suf-
fer so boundlessly?
Comte de Mirabeau
One who was stuck in a good skin saw a quite pitiful man going before
him. Right away it was clear to him: this man before me is my walk, my
way of raising my eyebrows, even my face. Or rather, all this would be my
body and soul, my identical twin, if things turned out as they should.
Things had not turned out as they should have. The count did not dance
to the piper of outward, fortuitous appearance; his unfortunate brother
before him was so only approximately, or just his brother in humanity, as
good folks like to say, though it costs them nothing. He was strange to
him from the outset—or perhaps only since some watershed? He couldn’t
lusion of her fame, with a constant eye to her parents, her former circles,
her youthful tormentors, and the misunderstanding that would finally
have to capitulate. Finally, driven from one dump of a theater to another,
failed to find work anywhere. Stranded with empty hands and aching feet
in the same stupid town she had fled. Returned with her ambitions clearly
not satisfied; became a secretary in an office; distributed ration cards, ap-
parently voluntarily, during the War; even that was made possible only by
her father’s respectable status. Some weeks later the former actress Karoline
Lengenhardt, not yet thirty, was put in an institution.
What happened in this girl until she got where she is should give most
of us sleepless nights. Her misfortune lacks even the grandeur that tends to
console the vanity and ambition of others on their way down. Here not
even the inner realization, to say nothing of the outer, agrees with the will
behind it. The inept fervor of her will could not even come through. The
girl even lacked talent. She was not just unfavorably situated or misjudged;
she had not been misjudged at all. Yet there is a flagrant disproportion
between her initial fame and the accidents that hindered or derailed it.
Her face never took shape, and her life between classes, her unbourgeois
ramble, had no goal, indeed no horse, and finally no rider; nothing came
out well, or even came out. The arbitrariness of her lot was enormous, and
stifled the inner calling to which she hearkened, and that was truly there.
What was alive in her fantastic quest sufficed only to put her in an asylum.
Why, asked an authority on women, must we, bounded in every way, suf-
fer so boundlessly?
Comte de Mirabeau
One who was stuck in a good skin saw a quite pitiful man going before
him. Right away it was clear to him: this man before me is my walk, my
way of raising my eyebrows, even my face. Or rather, all this would be my
body and soul, my identical twin, if things turned out as they should.
Things had not turned out as they should have. The count did not dance
to the piper of outward, fortuitous appearance; his unfortunate brother
before him was so only approximately, or just his brother in humanity, as
good folks like to say, though it costs them nothing. He was strange to
him from the outset—or perhaps only since some watershed? He couldn’t
 Comte de Mirabeau
say. So many a Dickens had never been sung a lullaby about himself; not
even “on his own power” could he bring about the transformation of
David Copperfield from a condition into a book. All the more disturbing,
shameful, and strange were the irregular’s feelings as his ideal type went
before him on the street, the pure product of “inheritance” and “milieu.”
His mirror, yet in no way a mirror; his identity, and yet at the same time
so utterly disparate that he was not even his opposite, that nothing in him
even resisted this most dissimilar of doubles, that the man did not even
become a complex for him. The problem of the impostor appeared here,
the impostor with such corriger la fortune that he no longer fools anyone,
least of all himself. The man spoke of this later, and let it not unclearly be
known that his good fortune was more certain to him than anything, yet
still more remarkable than the misfortune, the normal fortune, that he’d
just seen before him. Soon everyone turned to the price the imposter must
pay, who must daily regain his dream.
One can also just dream, began the man, of having one more sausage.
Someone like that settles where he ends up, falters on success. The ener-
getic striver gets somewhat further, especially in more unstable times,
when the old positions of power can more easily be had. His proper arena
is the bourgeoisie, liberalism, capitalism; this type flourishes today. But
usually the striver alters nothing, neither his type nor the old world; he
only shifts more badly into the old positions of power, as parvenu. The
striver too has been distanced from his origins not by his nature but only
by his intensity; he is constantly aware of his stages, so that his develop-
ment, at best a series of small steps, connects him to his beginnings. A
special case is the master suddenly become servant, along with the sud-
denly elevated pauper—say, Shakespeare’s tinker Christopher Sly (from
Taming of the Shrew). Either he breaks, because his self no longer finds
affinities (a similar process as in the sorrow of those driven far from home,
though domestique gentilhomme does not even want to, can not, get home-
sick), or a long exploited nature wrests from a new perceptual world the
base means of pleasure and power that it needs in order to erupt out of
long repression as a tyrant.
Much, much higher, however, continued the born but reluctant man of
fortune, much higher and more important than the striver and the par-
venu is the impostor, for he does not become, like the striver, but is; ap-
pears as seigneur because he feels himself de jure to be one. So many chil-
dren already dream of secretly being royalty, understand Hauff ’s “Legend
Comte de Mirabeau 
of the False Prince” very well, and what happened with the tailor’s ap-
prentice when he sat deep in thought, stared fixedly ahead, and had some-
thing so peculiar in his aspect and manner that the other apprentices
would always say of this state only: “Labakan has his noble face again.”
There is much less self-interest to be found here than fastidiousness, an in-
vincible confidence, folly. If this confidence should assume aristocratic
forms, it is not to step down again like the parvenu—let alone the ser-
vant-as-master!—it is not to affirm aristocracy as such; the self-suggested
seigneur is not class-conscious. Instead, there are even transitions from
him to a type by rights opposed to him, the rebel. Transitions against his
will, insofar as Casanova and Cagliostro deprive their societies of their
strongest hold, namely, tradition.
Transitions by will: a heterogeneous figure such as Lassalle still led the
workers like a sort of Labakan; in other words, it is not so much the aris-
tocratic as the fabulous, at worst the mythic aspect of the great names of
history that captivates him, and that he projects even into the ground of
revolution.1 Until after all this renunciation, this longing, he collapses
completely into legend and becomes a little Quixote. This, said the man, is
the actual case I see behind the confidence man, or rather, such a newspa-
per article of that kind came especially alive again for me as a legend when
I saw that man on the street, all the peculiar emotions I had for him.
Such a dream prince a non lucendo, a little Quixote, lived in Helbra, for
example, until his fortieth year, under the name Emil Witzel, as mechanic
and son of an invalid miner; then one day he suddenly declares that he
was only given into the invalid’s custody, but was in fact the son of Prince
Lesetto Riquetti of Mirabeau and his wife Marguérite, née de Racine; his
name was thus in truth Prince Riquetti Paul of Mirabeau.2 “In truth” the
mechanic felt himself to be a prince, and in any case he believed it him-
self; indeed, how do we ever know who we are? How absurd must it seem
to an immortal soul to be destined for Heaven or Hell, and yet be sitting
in a kitchen, as a maid, or see oneself objectified as mechanic! How falsely
the usual sunrise wakes us, the clock dial, the city street, the job! How
wrongly people find themselves in these systems—our time isn’t there, our
space isn’t there, not even our name is there—the addressee for whom the
alarm clock rings is identical to only a few, and the whole social story of
waking, and certainly the day of the mechanic, is false.
Mechanic Witzel, with his ludicrous and outmoded imposture, is
brother to Gottfried Keller’s tailor’s apprentice Strapinski with his velvet
 Comte de Mirabeau
waistcoat and nobly melancholy visage, with the dream of a purer, nobler,
higher existence in his heart; here is the false Prince Mirabeau, there the false
Prince Strapinski; both are dream princes with nobility as a selfless symbol,
or as the awareness of being “in truth” no mechanic, no tailor.3 The pre-
sumptions of such imposture are not a deception, but actually correct a
deception, if in a curious way; they correct, if childishly and illusorily, the
falsification and the disgraceful situation in which most of humanity must
still live. Fate stifled their voices in the cradle (like a bandit who abducts
children); now they’ve become the mechanic Witzel, or this pitiful man
who passed before me, and remained abducted. The royal title enchanted
Witzel, though he meant something entirely different: something fabu-
lous, as we already said, a sign of the ultimate unknowability of a person,
and the phototropism that will resolve it. This drive needs symbols, Witzel’s
pompous, another’s perhaps obscure and profound, in order to find these
others, the true symbols that are right almost accidentally. No advance
“upward,” not the truly productive one, ever begins without self-assertions
that are not, or not yet, true. Even the young composer Beethoven, who
suddenly knew or declared that he was the greatest genius that had ever
been, practiced an imposture of the most absurd style when he felt him-
self to be the equal of Ludwig van Beethoven, who he was not yet, after
all. He used this unwarranted presumption in order to become Beethoven,
for without the audacity and even insolence of such predictions nothing
great has ever been accomplished. Mechanic Witzel certainly had no right
to call himself Prince Mirabeau, but why no right, in this accidental, hide-
and-seek world where even Easter eggs are an accident that one may con-
jure up, and not a “right”? The real Prince Mirabeau inherited his name,
the real Beethoven perhaps his talent (some say from himself, from an ear-
lier life), but why does one inherit and not another? And do not all artists,
if not all believers, have to appear to be, before they become? Would we
not need far more corriger la fortune in the root sense in order finally to
eliminate the mystery of the great brother on the street?
The “sources” of imposture, concluded my friend rather wearily, might
then be exposed, and could truly live by daylight. Imposture remains
something quite remarkable: it reveals the glory that all mean and all de-
serve. Yes, that and legend (it has many knights of fortune, and grants
them fortune) excuse the existence of princes and princesses, because they
imitate it and depict it. Someone once said that people are in Heaven and
don’t know it; Heaven certainly still seems somewhat unclear. Leave every-
thing from his statement but the will that it be true—then he was right.
Rich Devil, Poor Devil 
Rich Devil, Poor Devil

Someone with enough money can often become remarkably good. He
can concede something to others, pick out something nice for them.
The rich like to play, for which they use the poor. Just as a rich Ameri-
can did when he announced a most unusual contest. A young man was
needed, preferably a miner, strong and clever. Of the one hundred thou-
sand entries one was selected; the winner came forward. A handsome fel-
low, he had to do no more than fulfill some further requirements: eat and
drink in fine style, wear fine clothes with flair, cut a figure. A tutor in-
structed him in the worldly arts: riding, golf, elegant conversation with
ladies, and whatever else an American gentleman requires. All with his
sponsor’s money; at the conclusion of his polishing the lucky man de-
parted on a three-year journey around the world, letters of credit in his
pocket granting fulfillment of the most exotic wish.
There was just one last term to be met: after his journey the young man
would have to return to the mines as though nothing had happened. He
would have to remain there at least another ten years, a miner as before.
This term too the lucky devil undersigned, thinking only of the life more
directly before him. The time of his shining youth now began. He visited
the operatic splendor of Europe, enjoyed the favors of women, and
showed a talent for it; hunted tigers in India and dined with viceroys; in
short, lived the life of a prince, with contrast lighting into the bargain.
Until the day of his return, when, almost sated, he thanked his patron like
a guest taking his leave. He donned his old clothes and descended into the
pit again, to the coal, the blind horses, the comrades who had become
strangers to him and despised him. Descended into the mine again—
unimaginable, those recent days, months, the reflection, and now the
backing, the waking at dawn, the backbreaking work, the sweat, the
coughing, the coal dust in his lungs, the poor food, the beds for three.
Now, the fellow could of course have broken the contract—in fine style,
using style to find another position; or in revolutionary style, as leader. In-
stead he struck in an astounding way: drove to New York, saw his bene-
factor, shot him. For the worker post festum there was sympathy; the court
exonerated him.
Explanation: is the life that toys with us any different from the rich
man, the good rich man? Of course he must be abolished, so the miner
shot him; the merely social fate that the rich set for the poor must be abol-
ished. But the rich man still stands as an idol of the other fate, the natural
 The Kitten as David
one with death at the end, whose brutality the rich devil only imitated
and made apparent, until it became his own death. However miserable,
however varied and brilliant a life might have been, death extinguishes it
in the same way, and sends it into the pit; in short, the capitalist despot
also lives under the very final fate that sets the tempo for half our lives and
afterward consigns us to the void.
The American devil even has similarities with the most evil despotism
into which fate was ever projected, with Calvin’s God. There no one can
know what awaits him beyond; predestination, whether one is graced or
damned cannot be known down here; but in certain people, says Calvin,
God has caused a sign of grace, as though they were particularly sure of Par-
adise. These are the people whom God will most surely damn; he caused the
signs of grace only that they may be more terribly surprised by Hell; and the
saint already imagined himself to be walking on the parquet of Paradise.
Calvin here, Hell there: in death, which is not and per definitionem cannot
be anyone’s true death (for our space is always life, or something more, but
not what is less than life)—in death too, there is always something of the
rich cat that lets the mouse run before devouring it. No one could think ill
of the “saint” who shot this God like the worker the millionaire. But we
have never heard anything definite about these things; nor is the court
known that could acquit us. The great cat allows only minor guest roles in
life; nonetheless the worker’s revolver is already quite appealing.
The Kitten as David

Pull yourself together, we say. Especially where there’s danger, and
there’s nothing to laugh about. Most often the little man makes himself
even smaller than he already is, so as not to be seen. It sounds better to
say: if you want to survive, you have to gather your strength and not waste
it. Of course that can also go wrong, as with the steady drip when it’s not
steady enough to erode the stone. It might also not want to remain an
obedient and diligent drip.
A kitten fortunately did it differently, though it was an unusual one.
First something about its owner, a Munich paperhanger and upholsterer
who also enjoyed his ease, relaxing and owning. He could do all this after
earning enough money renting out mattresses during carnival; took con-
 The Kitten as David
one with death at the end, whose brutality the rich devil only imitated
and made apparent, until it became his own death. However miserable,
however varied and brilliant a life might have been, death extinguishes it
in the same way, and sends it into the pit; in short, the capitalist despot
also lives under the very final fate that sets the tempo for half our lives and
afterward consigns us to the void.
The American devil even has similarities with the most evil despotism
into which fate was ever projected, with Calvin’s God. There no one can
know what awaits him beyond; predestination, whether one is graced or
damned cannot be known down here; but in certain people, says Calvin,
God has caused a sign of grace, as though they were particularly sure of Par-
adise. These are the people whom God will most surely damn; he caused the
signs of grace only that they may be more terribly surprised by Hell; and the
saint already imagined himself to be walking on the parquet of Paradise.
Calvin here, Hell there: in death, which is not and per definitionem cannot
be anyone’s true death (for our space is always life, or something more, but
not what is less than life)—in death too, there is always something of the
rich cat that lets the mouse run before devouring it. No one could think ill
of the “saint” who shot this God like the worker the millionaire. But we
have never heard anything definite about these things; nor is the court
known that could acquit us. The great cat allows only minor guest roles in
life; nonetheless the worker’s revolver is already quite appealing.
The Kitten as David

Pull yourself together, we say. Especially where there’s danger, and
there’s nothing to laugh about. Most often the little man makes himself
even smaller than he already is, so as not to be seen. It sounds better to
say: if you want to survive, you have to gather your strength and not waste
it. Of course that can also go wrong, as with the steady drip when it’s not
steady enough to erode the stone. It might also not want to remain an
obedient and diligent drip.
A kitten fortunately did it differently, though it was an unusual one.
First something about its owner, a Munich paperhanger and upholsterer
who also enjoyed his ease, relaxing and owning. He could do all this after
earning enough money renting out mattresses during carnival; took con-
siderable trips, buying souvenirs indiscriminately, some as good as a leop-

ard cub, for example. Well, he finally moved into a cottage near Garmisch,
complete with a lightning rod adorned with a brass half moon, also a sou-
venir; a Rottweiler guarded the whole place with its treasures. The dog
was trained to attack six men at once, and only his master could chain
him up by day, letting him run free in the yard at night. The leopard cub,
meanwhile, was taken tenderly onto visiting ladies’ laps all day long, purred,
lapped milk, carefully sheltered from the guard dog’s fury. Until one night:
the owner was awakened by a terrible duet in the garden, by the raging
dog, the weakly mewing cub. So the cub had escaped, and the outcome
could not be in doubt. The paperhanger mourned his cub, and waited till
morning, when he could easily tie the dog up again. As the owner then
entered the garden, however, he saw a shockingly large puddle of blood,
in it the dead Rottweiler, and as he looked around for the leopard cub that
should have been devoured, it was sitting in a tree, completely unharmed
after the unequal contest. In its moment of need it must have concen-
trated on the one weapon it had been given, on the instinctive leap at the
enemy’s throat; therein lay its only strength, while the canine giant flung
its strength in every direction, and so only weakly, or completely aimlessly.
The Rottweiler’s surprise must have been great, as great as the cub’s, which
had now lapped more than just milk. Of course the ladies no longer took
it as tenderly onto their laps as at a gala on behalf of sweet little pickanin-
nies; hardly remarked in this case that God was strong in the weak. The
uneducated paperhanger, on the other hand, thought simply: never tor-
ment a creature for sport, for it might be loaded.
But the moral of the story was of course this: against a guard dog, trained
one-sidedness quickly found its target. The weak of society, the oppressed,
are hardly leopard cubs with an instinct for the leap at the throat. But it’s
been known to happen: not only David, the still fragile boy, does best to
strike Goliath at his weakest point.
Triumphs of Misrecognition
How the girl looked, he no longer quite remembered. Who she was, he
thought he knew. A girlfriend, sometimes charming, sometimes annoy-
ing. The smell of sewing hung about her, something of the shop as well.
siderable trips, buying souvenirs indiscriminately, some as good as a leop-

ard cub, for example. Well, he finally moved into a cottage near Garmisch,
complete with a lightning rod adorned with a brass half moon, also a sou-
venir; a Rottweiler guarded the whole place with its treasures. The dog
was trained to attack six men at once, and only his master could chain
him up by day, letting him run free in the yard at night. The leopard cub,
meanwhile, was taken tenderly onto visiting ladies’ laps all day long, purred,
lapped milk, carefully sheltered from the guard dog’s fury. Until one night:
the owner was awakened by a terrible duet in the garden, by the raging
dog, the weakly mewing cub. So the cub had escaped, and the outcome
could not be in doubt. The paperhanger mourned his cub, and waited till
morning, when he could easily tie the dog up again. As the owner then
entered the garden, however, he saw a shockingly large puddle of blood,
in it the dead Rottweiler, and as he looked around for the leopard cub that
should have been devoured, it was sitting in a tree, completely unharmed
after the unequal contest. In its moment of need it must have concen-
trated on the one weapon it had been given, on the instinctive leap at the
enemy’s throat; therein lay its only strength, while the canine giant flung
its strength in every direction, and so only weakly, or completely aimlessly.
The Rottweiler’s surprise must have been great, as great as the cub’s, which
had now lapped more than just milk. Of course the ladies no longer took
it as tenderly onto their laps as at a gala on behalf of sweet little pickanin-
nies; hardly remarked in this case that God was strong in the weak. The
uneducated paperhanger, on the other hand, thought simply: never tor-
ment a creature for sport, for it might be loaded.
But the moral of the story was of course this: against a guard dog, trained
one-sidedness quickly found its target. The weak of society, the oppressed,
are hardly leopard cubs with an instinct for the leap at the throat. But it’s
been known to happen: not only David, the still fragile boy, does best to
strike Goliath at his weakest point.
Triumphs of Misrecognition
How the girl looked, he no longer quite remembered. Who she was, he
thought he knew. A girlfriend, sometimes charming, sometimes annoy-
ing. The smell of sewing hung about her, something of the shop as well.
 Triumphs of Misrecognition
Occasionally a flicker, though it would not burn; too nervous. Or it lit no

more than the path to a small, honest marriage bed. Just this was not for
her, so it all went nowhere, and they parted.
After some years the man returned to the town. Much had happened.
The girl might have been dull, but he was no hero—or he would never
have begun, as one may imagine. Now the faded lover learned that the girl
was lying in a nearby hospital. For reasons that are often, in such cases,
not the best—sympathy, regret, curiosity, whatever—the man drove to
the hospital, signed in. The doorman claimed not to know the name; up
to the head nurse, who led the visitor, since the patient was not yet ready,
to the head doctor’s office. A few seconds while the man lowered his ex-
pectations; then the chief nurse opened the door to the adjoining room
and said, Fräulein Doktor will see you now. In other words, the little girl
from back then had become the head doctor, momentarily ill but other-
wise unrecognizable, confident, calm, distinguished, and smart. The vain
man felt strange before this inferior who had risen, and whom he had in
any case not recognized in his time. Shortly thereafter she would shrink
again in his presence, but that comforted him even less. He could not re-
cover from the joy, he would say, that the bit of misfortune he had wanted
to visit was so different, was quite enough fortune.
The ups and downs can be reversed, as a father learned who sought his
daughter in the most unusual way. She failed to return home after a walk
down the street in Reval, while foreign troops were marching right through
the town. Run away, abducted, dead: he could choose her misfortune, and
not even exactly. Until finally one day a letter arrived from a middling
German city—perhaps not the girl’s first, but the first to arrive, a very joy-
ous sign of life, telling of her having been discovered for the theater, en-
closing a picture with an all-too-practiced signature and the usual glowing
reviews. The father was long held back by Baltic turmoil; as he finally ar-
rived in this German city, his daughter had moved to Munich. When he
asked about her in Munich he learned that the young actress had died of
influenza a month ago, and the distraught man was directed to her grave.
After all these detours, death had finally taken her; her image, not as a
child murderer’s victim, of course, but lovely and perfected, rose before
him, taken from him at the height of her fortune, and framed. From the
cemetery the man went to the police to learn his daughter’s last address.
Her last address? said the clerk, shuffling papers with annoyance. She al-
ready has a new address? The young lady was here just yesterday, register-
Triumphs of Misrecognition 
ing a new address. As the father kept stammering on about death, and a
grave, and the gravestone he had ordered, the clerk become still ruder,
cursed all foreigners and their ingenuous nature, finally threw the new ad-
dress at the man.
The story ends more tonelessly than one can even imagine. For as the
man climbed the stairs to the apartment, rang, asked for his daughter—
really the dead one, reborn, no longer mortal, quietly fulfilled, he no longer
knew what—she came out of her room. The father saw her and said only,
Why aren’t you taller? We don’t know what the girl should have said, the
real girl and not the dead and buried heroine of the novel, who had been
larger in every way, so sad and so Romantic. The shock of the moment was
bound up with the disillusion of the image to which his daughter had
seemed adequate. It had already sustained him by night; in any case one
can certainly imagine the father’s joy at finding his daughter again.
Let us return to the first story, which anyway ends more positively, and
add an equally positive, not to mention magnificent, story, which might be
only a legend, a Chassidic one, lying beneath much underbrush even in
Buber, but nonetheless shows real backgrounds. It takes place in Alexan-
drian or perhaps Napoleonic times, in a great commercial city, wherever.4
There lived, it is told, an old man, getting by miserably. He rarely left his
garret, daring to come out only in the evening. Street urchins threw stones
at him, and the good citizens would watch, laughing to see him run away
so pitifully. It was hardly a good town; the poor were subject to the provost,
the churches mere currency exchanges between this side and the other.
But as the old man came onto the street again one day, he was astounded
to see a transformation: disquiet, indeed fear was in the air. Throngs stood
at the intersections and the plazas, conferring in hushed voices. The old
man heard of a great army that was advancing on the town, of an emperor
whom no enemy had withstood, and the land went up in flames before
him. An angel of death had taken over the town, and the citizen’s fat
shoulders shook, not in laughter; the old man said softly to himself:
Could he be the one? Turned away and walked through the town, under
the great gate and onto the fields, following a great crowd scattering to
and fro across the plain to see the campfires. Ever further marched the old
man, now up a small rise where other gawkers still stood, among them the
councilmen, who were considering offering no resistance and instead go-
ing to the emperor the next day to hand over the city: when suddenly a
patrol came around the hill, through the thicket; and after a brief chase
 Triumphs of Misrecognition
the twelve, who were trying to hide behind trees, were caught, fettered, es-
corted to the camp in step with the horses. There the password, entry,
laughter and clamor around the campfires, the emperor’s order that the
spies immediately be brought to him.
Down the path to the imperial tent: there stood the whole motley crowd,
councilmen beside commoners, and in the middle the old man, completely
exhausted. The emperor stepped forward and quickly looked them over; yet
no sooner did he see the old man, his quiet face and his frail body, than he
threw himself to the ground and kissed the man’s outstretched hands. And
all knew: if the emperor was the master of the sword, the old man was the
Master of Prayer, whom the mighty of the town could not recognize; he was
too much for their needs, and too great for any role. But the emperor rec-
ognized him, and he recognized him before all the council, with the old
man’s stupendous triumph in the wake of this recognition. The old man
had not sought this triumph, and even avoided it in accordance with his ul-
timate rank, in which there is no shame and not a whisper of vanity. The
councilmen were not granted triumph, or rather his was granted to them,
and to the listener as well; one takes unselfish pleasure in it. The Master of
Prayer went on his way, a great noble, as we see, and more.

Yet is our joy really pure at seeing him so great? That was the question,
and a discussion ensued; an unpleasant feeling said, No. Not everyone felt
that way, least of all the older people, who still had some Wilhelm II in
them; they loved “great” and “small,” above all “great” and “most high,”
or when valor is decorated as from a thunderclap. After some back and
forth the teller of the tale reversed himself, somewhat unwillingly, but he
couldn’t allow himself the point of his stories. Otherwise, he said, an-
other’s misfortune obviously does not always displease us. It pleases us
only conditionally when he rises up; some are debased by envy. They
might not always be so, but here they are bad company, with an evil eye
one has to take into account, as it isn’t evil everywhere. Yet all envy
changes as soon as the lucky other is not alive but only being read about;
as soon as the reader can read himself into his place.
In this way, so it seems, a creature no longer suffers under another’s
splendor, no longer feels joy at another’s degradation; has of course only
changed places, not itself. Let it go well for the hero at another’s expense,
or better yet, grandly; one’s own mediocrity is avenged, finds itself happily
Triumphs of Misrecognition 
compensated, to everyone else’s shame. Even boys, I remember clearly,

love such heroes, poor riders, poor shots, and then all of a sudden appears
the dead aim, or some other sign, and everyone recognizes Old Shatter-
hand.5 Even Andersen’s tale of the ugly duckling swims somewhere in that
water, however profound its motion otherwise: the common birds part
and a swan describes its proud circles, definitely a swan; perhaps it did not
know that it was one, and so dazzles more consolingly—perhaps its higher
rank was concealed, and so emerges more triumphantly. Between duck-
ling, swan, the Fräulein Doktor of our story, and the Master of Prayer at
the end, there are certainly great gaps, but what this entire sphere, or at
least our pleasure in it, has in common, apart from splendor—one can
hardly ignore it—is the impulse, first repressed, then gratified, to be some-
body. Even such favorites as the stories of good Kaiser Josef, even such
sublime moments as the recognition of Odysseus the beggar—for their
dubious catharsis, and so not only for their splendor—therefore belong
here.6 Bourgeois culture, like feudal culture (in spite of the latter’s stronger
group formation), is an elite culture, with ranks above ranks decorated by
persons. The downward effect of this individualist glory is to intimidate,
to create particularly acute feelings of inferiority; their partial abreaction
makes up the mixed pleasure of such sudden greatness, of which we par-
take in the reading. A no-longer-individualistic democracy, contended the
storyteller, would hardly still understand the power of these motifs, or
would resist them.
Small and great, great and small—we prefer the small, said nearly every-
one. The doctor deserves credit for getting to that level, surely, and the fel-
low before her for being capable of shame. The father deserves credit, or
perhaps not, that he had such a picture of his lost daughter, however
framed, who in her grave was indeed lost and called forth feelings as in a
novel. Literary and legendary fate slightly corrects, and rightly so, the re-
ality where people live and that is not really theirs; nonetheless, as great-
ness in the sense of the aforementioned Mirabeau, or even the powerfully
emergent Master of Prayer, there is finally no adequate fate, no correction
to fate. In the girl, greatness appeared only as the first sign that she was
not just a doll; but greatness, as something necessarily personal, is no final
sign of an entry into the right fate, but of an entry beyond fate and into
our space. Except for tyrants, and seldom even for them—often only when
Rubens sees them, but not Van Dyck, and certainly not Rembrandt—and
in heathen solar mythologies. But in the Bible, the hero appears only in his
 Scribe at the Mairie
reduction to the Christ child, to the servant Isaiah, due as much to para-
dox as to his highest ascent into nearness to humanity; even God appears
as a gentle rustling, not as a package of fire, floods, and earthquakes. In
the Master of Prayer, too (who could be a Biblical hero and is a Chassidic
one), all kinds of such depth are at work, a denial of the powerful, “impe-
rial” expression of self, certainly also a light that is not comprehended and
so is not entirely one. Yet precisely because of this light, the old man
should not in the end flash monarchically; instead many a depth shows
itself otherwise, perhaps by a sign nearby that is not royal purple. The
old man may be as hidden as he needs to be, but no one can be secretly
grandiose, for grandiosity appears right away. When it belongs in the
Bible, the Bible gives not even God an allonge periwig but has him as a
likeness of man, almost as a companion who goes alongside him. Even the
old man lost his reward—or rather, he would not even take it until the
emperor disturbed him, or until he let himself be disturbed. Without an
emperor, in a more level world, such anonymi would have it easier. Should
they still exist, should they still be needed, a future society will have no
such sorrows and triumphs of personal misrecognition, but will force the
fate that always hinders, never helps us, over to our side in open and col-
lective struggle. All or no ducklings will be rescued swans in the light;
there will be no other privilege or private greatness.
Scribe at the Mairie

Little people have often vented their shabby wrath at the office. But
they have not always crossed out what would go against their grain if they
were sergeants. That was the experience of a highly placed young lady
whose husband was sentenced to death by firing squad for resisting
wartime orders. The independent actions of this French officer had per-
haps won the battle, but even a good example might make a bad habit
here. The officer’s young wife, in accordance with her station, drove to
Versailles, where she had a friend in Madame Pompadour; to no avail.
Pompadour even brought the young lady before the king, Louis XV, nor-
mally weak before a woman’s tears. But even he could not overturn the ul-
timate verdict—could not even, and especially not, as supreme comman-
der, offer a pardon.
 Scribe at the Mairie
reduction to the Christ child, to the servant Isaiah, due as much to para-
dox as to his highest ascent into nearness to humanity; even God appears
as a gentle rustling, not as a package of fire, floods, and earthquakes. In
the Master of Prayer, too (who could be a Biblical hero and is a Chassidic
one), all kinds of such depth are at work, a denial of the powerful, “impe-
rial” expression of self, certainly also a light that is not comprehended and
so is not entirely one. Yet precisely because of this light, the old man
should not in the end flash monarchically; instead many a depth shows
itself otherwise, perhaps by a sign nearby that is not royal purple. The
old man may be as hidden as he needs to be, but no one can be secretly
grandiose, for grandiosity appears right away. When it belongs in the
Bible, the Bible gives not even God an allonge periwig but has him as a
likeness of man, almost as a companion who goes alongside him. Even the
old man lost his reward—or rather, he would not even take it until the
emperor disturbed him, or until he let himself be disturbed. Without an
emperor, in a more level world, such anonymi would have it easier. Should
they still exist, should they still be needed, a future society will have no
such sorrows and triumphs of personal misrecognition, but will force the
fate that always hinders, never helps us, over to our side in open and col-
lective struggle. All or no ducklings will be rescued swans in the light;
there will be no other privilege or private greatness.
Scribe at the Mairie

Little people have often vented their shabby wrath at the office. But
they have not always crossed out what would go against their grain if they
were sergeants. That was the experience of a highly placed young lady
whose husband was sentenced to death by firing squad for resisting
wartime orders. The independent actions of this French officer had per-
haps won the battle, but even a good example might make a bad habit
here. The officer’s young wife, in accordance with her station, drove to
Versailles, where she had a friend in Madame Pompadour; to no avail.
Pompadour even brought the young lady before the king, Louis XV, nor-
mally weak before a woman’s tears. But even he could not overturn the ul-
timate verdict—could not even, and especially not, as supreme comman-
der, offer a pardon.
The young lady left the castle. Blinded by tears, she walked right past
her equipage, and on down the dusty highway back to Paris. There she
met quite a wretched little man, who marveled at such aristocratic splen-
dor going on foot, and stood there with hat in hand. The noblewoman,
brought low by misfortune, related her story yet again, whereupon the lit-
tle man said: If that’s all, then nothing could be easier. I’m scribe at the
Mairie, with the case file in my desk; between today and tomorrow the
entire verdict could vanish without anyone caring.
The documents indeed vanished; the execution did not take place; a grain
of sand in the gears functioned; the lower bureaucracy for once showed what
it could do for better this time and not for worse. With hat in hand, of
course, before a gracious young noblewoman, not before little people on the
same level, say, who would not even have attained to a scribe’s uniform, let
alone before the intellectual monsters who disturb order. Otherwise every-
one could come along and make files disappear. Where would we be then?
The Beautiful Appearance

One always hesitates to begin something too beautifully. Not only be-
cause it tempts fate; rather, ideal types are sickly. The first struggle brings
everything back out again that had no place in the refined, still air. Things
should not be as they’re painted, or they won’t last long in this life.
Sometimes one reads about noble deeds that from the start are too no-
ble to be true. Some are even true, but how mysteriously they like to turn
into their opposite, so that nothing is left over for the museum of moral-
ity. To name one example that many may have seen in the newspapers:
Arthur Conan Doyle is certainly a famous man, and we owe him much;
he is known for the most enjoyable ingenuity, and recently almost as
much for his legal courage in the struggle for justice. For the sacrifice, ef-
fort, public appeals, spirit voices of all kinds he dedicated to the unfortu-
nate Oscar Slater, who had sat in prison innocent for twenty years or
more. Here humanity appeared spontaneously, quite without political
motivations or even such motivations as in the Dreyfus affair; here was the
rescuer, here the victim, both ready for myth, or as though embodying it.
But no sooner was Slater freed, rehabilitated, compensated, than his
complexion improved beyond recognition; with a great cigar in his mouth
The young lady left the castle. Blinded by tears, she walked right past
her equipage, and on down the dusty highway back to Paris. There she
met quite a wretched little man, who marveled at such aristocratic splen-
dor going on foot, and stood there with hat in hand. The noblewoman,
brought low by misfortune, related her story yet again, whereupon the lit-
tle man said: If that’s all, then nothing could be easier. I’m scribe at the
Mairie, with the case file in my desk; between today and tomorrow the
entire verdict could vanish without anyone caring.
The documents indeed vanished; the execution did not take place; a grain
of sand in the gears functioned; the lower bureaucracy for once showed what
it could do for better this time and not for worse. With hat in hand, of
course, before a gracious young noblewoman, not before little people on the
same level, say, who would not even have attained to a scribe’s uniform, let
alone before the intellectual monsters who disturb order. Otherwise every-
one could come along and make files disappear. Where would we be then?
The Beautiful Appearance

One always hesitates to begin something too beautifully. Not only be-
cause it tempts fate; rather, ideal types are sickly. The first struggle brings
everything back out again that had no place in the refined, still air. Things
should not be as they’re painted, or they won’t last long in this life.
Sometimes one reads about noble deeds that from the start are too no-
ble to be true. Some are even true, but how mysteriously they like to turn
into their opposite, so that nothing is left over for the museum of moral-
ity. To name one example that many may have seen in the newspapers:
Arthur Conan Doyle is certainly a famous man, and we owe him much;
he is known for the most enjoyable ingenuity, and recently almost as
much for his legal courage in the struggle for justice. For the sacrifice, ef-
fort, public appeals, spirit voices of all kinds he dedicated to the unfortu-
nate Oscar Slater, who had sat in prison innocent for twenty years or
more. Here humanity appeared spontaneously, quite without political
motivations or even such motivations as in the Dreyfus affair; here was the
rescuer, here the victim, both ready for myth, or as though embodying it.
But no sooner was Slater freed, rehabilitated, compensated, than his
complexion improved beyond recognition; with a great cigar in his mouth
 The Beautiful Appearance
he appeared in illustrated weeklies, and he invested his compensation in

very successful ventures. Conan Doyle, however, was either bored with
morality or disgusted at having entered battle for ecce homo and won it for
a businessman; in short, he added up the money that the appeal had cost
him and sent Slater the bill. Yet Slater was even further beyond idealism
(which he had had, as victim), and replied that he had not appointed
Doyle, and did not owe him the money. Now, Conan Doyle had accused
his Florestan; the man whom he had freed from one court he now dragged
before another, and asked that he be moved from death row to debtor’s
prison.7 So rescue and innocence diverged with great force into their op-
posites; this is how they end, because both were too beautiful, so elegantly
cut, and almost flawless.
Not as though something bad only came out that was there before.
Those are of course the normal cases, where the ending only strips away
the grand words and money shows its smirk again. The interests then
reach out that were hiding from the start behind the sweet, disingenuous
face. But precisely in the present case, the reversal goes far beyond the eco-
nomic grounds; here is less interest in money than the interest of an ide-
alist who reverses himself and now becomes unideal like no one else.
Where there’s a china shop, the bull cannot be far; on this occasion he was
already among the porcelain, right in the middle, growing, and so hardly
needed to be brought in from outside. Too beautiful days, too beautiful
virtues, are appearance, which might be edifying, but where no one can
survive for too long without turning into the opposite, to the point of ab-
surdity, because of the envy of our inner gods (who are no such thing yet).
This prisoner seemed so poetic; Slater not only seemed but was—as pris-
oner—noble enough for the best bit of pathos; indeed, everything about
him was mythic endurance, with Conan Doyle like Perseus. Then the fig-
ures start to move on reality’s ground floor, the opera of rescue continues
in real life, where the writer Conan Doyle finally becomes even more
poetic than the businessman Slater, and the sublime becomes not only
ridiculous but coarse.
Even where the case is less ideal and the virtues less abstract, a remark-
able opposition still appears in case the poetry cannot hold out; there is a
dissatisfaction that comes out of people, a sort of destructive energy in the
poetry itself (when it’s not poetically concrete enough). Friends who stop
greeting each other have not become strangers as they were before, but en-
emies, and decayed love is poisonous beyond measure. Couples who want
to divorce carry even more hatred before the judge than he needs, or take
appalling pleasure in making public what previously could not have been
more intimate and private. Which is why a writer of antiquity offers the
noteworthy maxim, as thoughtful as it is courageous, truly kind: “Treat
your friends as though they could become your enemies again.” A very
Attic way to keep them from ever becoming enemies.
The Rococo of Fate

It cannot go on like this, we often hear. Usually some wild stuff is
meant; something is askew, and makes the bourgeois uncomfortable.
Then he puts his hands to his head, sometimes in defense. Too much of a
good thing is unhealthy; the mean will prevail again.
In higher cases, however, this “too much” frightens us differently, more
subtly. That is the testimony from a story of a double reversal, nicely com-
pact. It is probably Arabic and can be found in the little book On Chance,
yet there is more in it, the crest that breaks.8 A vizier was walking through
his garden in the cool of the evening, toward a new fountain. Bent over
the water toward his reflection; considered the day, the years, the caliph’s
generosity, his fabulous good fortune. A ring slipped from his finger and
fell. It was his favorite ring, and just at the moment of impact he was
gripped by an insane desire: if only the ring would not fall into the water!
It did not fall; a thin layer of oil must have formed over the water, the ring
remained suspended. As the wish had before, a strange fear now gripped
him, for this could not last; it was such a peaking effect, such a cresting of
fortune, that the wave would have to break.
It had probably already broken, for as the vizier returned to the palace
he was seized by the caliph’s watch and thrown into prison. His slanderers
had won out. In the dungeon he remained many years as a forgotten pris-
oner of the state, come to terms with his fate. Of his wishes there re-
mained only one, almost laughably small: before his death he would like
to eat pomegranate seeds one more time. The sympathetic warden
brought him some, but at just that moment a rat rushed in from the pas-
sage, overturned the bowl, and ate up all the seeds. Again a strange joy
went through the old man: things could not go on like this; it was such a
peaking effect, such a cresting of misfortune, that the wave would have to
to divorce carry even more hatred before the judge than he needs, or take
appalling pleasure in making public what previously could not have been
more intimate and private. Which is why a writer of antiquity offers the
noteworthy maxim, as thoughtful as it is courageous, truly kind: “Treat
your friends as though they could become your enemies again.” A very
Attic way to keep them from ever becoming enemies.
The Rococo of Fate

It cannot go on like this, we often hear. Usually some wild stuff is
meant; something is askew, and makes the bourgeois uncomfortable.
Then he puts his hands to his head, sometimes in defense. Too much of a
good thing is unhealthy; the mean will prevail again.
In higher cases, however, this “too much” frightens us differently, more
subtly. That is the testimony from a story of a double reversal, nicely com-
pact. It is probably Arabic and can be found in the little book On Chance,
yet there is more in it, the crest that breaks.8 A vizier was walking through
his garden in the cool of the evening, toward a new fountain. Bent over
the water toward his reflection; considered the day, the years, the caliph’s
generosity, his fabulous good fortune. A ring slipped from his finger and
fell. It was his favorite ring, and just at the moment of impact he was
gripped by an insane desire: if only the ring would not fall into the water!
It did not fall; a thin layer of oil must have formed over the water, the ring
remained suspended. As the wish had before, a strange fear now gripped
him, for this could not last; it was such a peaking effect, such a cresting of
fortune, that the wave would have to break.
It had probably already broken, for as the vizier returned to the palace
he was seized by the caliph’s watch and thrown into prison. His slanderers
had won out. In the dungeon he remained many years as a forgotten pris-
oner of the state, come to terms with his fate. Of his wishes there re-
mained only one, almost laughably small: before his death he would like
to eat pomegranate seeds one more time. The sympathetic warden
brought him some, but at just that moment a rat rushed in from the pas-
sage, overturned the bowl, and ate up all the seeds. Again a strange joy
went through the old man: things could not go on like this; it was such a
peaking effect, such a cresting of misfortune, that the wave would have to
 The Rococo of Fate
break. Had broken, in fact, for on that evening the caliph came to his cell:
his slanderers had been toppled; he restored the vizier to his offices.
A nice story, even if somewhat too clearly dressed. Closely reminiscent
of the ring of Polykrates, yet the central motif is entirely different.9 The
lord of Samos throws his ring into the sea in order to assuage the jealous
gods; the gods return his sacrifice to him inside a fish. They consider it in-
decent (in the subtle remark of Wilhelm Scholz) to accept gifts from a
man they have already resolved to destroy. What is frightening here, then,
is not at all the immoderate good fortune by which the king cannot lose
his ring even as it falls into the sea; he does not lose it, after all, but offers
it up. And Polykrates’ guest senses the motives for the gentlemanly return:
the undiminished envy of the gods. He turns away in horror, rightly.
Quite different, however, the present material: the supernatural is ab-
sent, and accident as well plays no role, or at most in the unusual form to-
day designated by the phrase “of all things” (ausgerechnet)—brash enough
when applied to some absurd absence or incident. A rat from the passage,
of all things, eats the pomegranate kernels in the cell when they finally ap-
pear; that is certainly quite accidental, or more precisely quite unpre-
dictable or irrational, even in a less constructed situation. Yet conceding
even this absurdity, nothing irrational is intended in the Arabic story; in-
stead everything is a sign.
Indeed, a sign occurring in the smallest things, only there. The premises
are first, a measure, a closed series of fortunes or misfortunes. So in fact a
certain sense of equilibrium that lets the bourgeois (in the vizier himself )
shake his head at excesses, that forbids trees to grow up to the sky. Trees
have already grown taller and excess has already been attained earlier when
they had to begin growing quite far below—in other words when viziers
become uneasy because they have already come too far from their origins.
Napoleon actually thought of fortune as a personal quality, like the shape
of a nose; the world had a duty to bestow good fortune on him, always
more, never enough. Yet in the less aristocratic view of his mother, his luck
“cannot last,” precisely because it has risen too high, too “unnaturally.”
Where a measure is there, however, and the measure is reached, even
the smallest thing suffices to bring it to overflowing. That is the mechani-
cal function, as it were, of the small in terms of measure; it presumes, per-
haps too strongly, a vessel, a bourgeois apportioning (which is not always
there for viziers, and never for those born to it). It transforms even the
subtle, the small, from a sign into a cause of the end. More important,
The Rococo of Fate 
therefore, is the second, the more qualitative kind of smallness, namely

this: that it stands at the end of the course, of a track, no matter if natural
or immoderate. Then, even where no ration has been exceeded, but only
a formal limit, the rococo is easily seen as the sign of running out, of com-
ing to an end. Constructed people and cultures often have this rococo at
the end of their respective sequence of fortunes, misfortunes, fate. Even
for the manic or depressive aspect of fate, there are then variations, Bel-
gian lace and Alhambras, arabesques with rings here, rats there, where the
wave breaks. The demonic effortlessness of success is often related: not ef-
fortlessness ante rem, which pertains to its preparation, its façade, its beau-
tiful appearance, but rather effortlessness post rem, likewise appearance,
entirely improbable success. Indeed, a kind of incest of fortune, of mis-
fortune, finally appears here, to which the births become ever easier, more
elegant, frailer, smaller. The story of the vizier illuminates so many a
miniature of the end, shows them as the crests and arabesques of a closed
spiral, which also signify the close.
What is small here is not also endearing. It is not the inconspicuous
thing where the best can be hidden, the subtlest power of escape and the
final door. It is especially not the proper fairy-tale world and proper sign,
that truly final sign after which change no longer goes on. In the smallness
of the crest there is merely a shift from one series into another, and so on.
There is no sign of the true end in it, as in certain inconspicuous experi-
ences where terror or joy are surpassed by sheer amazement. Signs of the
true, emerging end might be the way this pipe lies here, the way the light
shines on the street, or anything else; with this vertically deep impression,
or rather sign, the seesaw stops, and the stupid conversion into other se-
ries. Smallness, then, announces no new series, but leads out of them, not
far away, but somewhere almost unknown. Only in the end might there
be certain connections between the suspended ring, the suddenly rustling
rat, and the wonder at such things.10
The comedian Valentin once found his ring on the drum just as wanted
to beat it; he had put it there himself earlier, and forgotten to put it on
again—unimaginable, completely understandable the smile with which
he discovered the ring lying there and observed this little surprise, this
great liberation; he momentarily escaped the turmoil of musical compul-
sion. This tiny and almost mute thing became a rescue, at least the sign of
a rescue from the “merciless pursuer,” from the compulsion to work, into
which he had been harnessed.
 Spirit Still Taking Shape
These signs of the small will not be mistaken; they have some of the
smallness of the true end that is dispersed into every true beginning, that
gives it the direction and flavor of our direction. They can be found in
most lives (if one wants to listen properly), give the sign for the exit from
the series (a final sign, today still impotent), for the entry into a potential
fatelessness, at least a workable fate. These amazing little signs now oper-
ate only individually—that is, within the course of a single life; earlier
they operated collectively (as symbols of the Christ child, say, or of the
spirit’s freedom from the stupid giant of necessity), and they will return.
The rococo and the wonder at the inconspicuous share the smallness of
the end in at least this way: breaking here, breaking through there.
Spirit Still Taking Shape

A student who has mastered clauses knows Latin.
—Karl Ludwig Roth11
Felt myself breathing softly, in and out, seethed quietly. Noticed as well
that I could feel; cried, but heard nothing. Sometimes it’s still like that, so
fleeting and warm, neither here nor there.
When it got lighter there was crawling, or I crouched here and there.
Before the cracks in the red sandstone and the scurrying ants; otherwise
there was nothing. Somehow the cracks got smaller as soon as I grew; my
hand covered too much of them. Other things rose up: bushes, the garden
behind the house, quite overgrown; I dared to go anywhere, the wind in
the leaves. When I closed my eyes, the little black pump could no longer
see me. The bush behind it and a young dog I called Meinetwegen were
my first friends.12 A stand for the washtub had that name too—no, it was
that: “meint” was the long post, “wegen” the crossbeam. Totally clear: the
stand was not only called that, but said so incessantly. The streets always
looked different on the way there than they did leaving; that’s why they
were alive. We ran as far as the bakery and the mean lady’s house, and the
clock in the tower tolled.
Later, fear of being alone, especially when it got dark. White faces ap-
peared behind the doors that were never quite locked. They spied on me,
and their bodies were in rags; behind them was a jingling. The path from
 Spirit Still Taking Shape
These signs of the small will not be mistaken; they have some of the
smallness of the true end that is dispersed into every true beginning, that
gives it the direction and flavor of our direction. They can be found in
most lives (if one wants to listen properly), give the sign for the exit from
the series (a final sign, today still impotent), for the entry into a potential
fatelessness, at least a workable fate. These amazing little signs now oper-
ate only individually—that is, within the course of a single life; earlier
they operated collectively (as symbols of the Christ child, say, or of the
spirit’s freedom from the stupid giant of necessity), and they will return.
The rococo and the wonder at the inconspicuous share the smallness of
the end in at least this way: breaking here, breaking through there.
Spirit Still Taking Shape

A student who has mastered clauses knows Latin.
—Karl Ludwig Roth11
Felt myself breathing softly, in and out, seethed quietly. Noticed as well
that I could feel; cried, but heard nothing. Sometimes it’s still like that, so
fleeting and warm, neither here nor there.
When it got lighter there was crawling, or I crouched here and there.
Before the cracks in the red sandstone and the scurrying ants; otherwise
there was nothing. Somehow the cracks got smaller as soon as I grew; my
hand covered too much of them. Other things rose up: bushes, the garden
behind the house, quite overgrown; I dared to go anywhere, the wind in
the leaves. When I closed my eyes, the little black pump could no longer
see me. The bush behind it and a young dog I called Meinetwegen were
my first friends.12 A stand for the washtub had that name too—no, it was
that: “meint” was the long post, “wegen” the crossbeam. Totally clear: the
stand was not only called that, but said so incessantly. The streets always
looked different on the way there than they did leaving; that’s why they
were alive. We ran as far as the bakery and the mean lady’s house, and the
clock in the tower tolled.
Later, fear of being alone, especially when it got dark. White faces ap-
peared behind the doors that were never quite locked. They spied on me,
and their bodies were in rags; behind them was a jingling. The path from
Spirit Still Taking Shape 
the forecourt to the bedroom was loaded; that’s where they came from—
the same forecourt reappeared in the dream. Almost every night the bed
seemed to stand outside, the white, jingling ghost clowns around it. By
day they hung at the bottom of the wall on a washed-out poster; the cir-
cus it announced was long gone. But at night they danced with the serv-
ing girl who was so dutiful by day; on stilts, in brownish gray rags, always
the same steps, back and forth. Impossible to say a word about it; better to
go in the kitchen and sharpen pencils against the mineral deposits. That
helped. Bluish gray strokes; I took the pencils back to bed. On the streets we
would take to school, there was light in the morning. We had little pieces
of wood in our hands that we used to make noise and frighten ourselves.
Boys soon began fighting; under the bush too, there’s no more room.
The Red Window

What one hears about as a child is almost always taking place right
nearby. The mean old lady appeared hundreds of times, in fairy tales too;
she stirred her porridge and stole. Behind the top window of the tall
house on the corner lived Little Muck: for hours we would sit and look up
at the ugly brick.13 Sometimes we’d see a face at the window; on his feet
were surely the huge slippers, surely the little staff in his hand. Once we
asked the mailman about him, but he said nothing and shook his head.
We expected that from adults, when asking about misshapen things; we
knew more certainly that they existed. Brother Lustig roasted a calf in the
city’s woods; left, right, left, right marches the soldier during math class;
Fatme sounded more familiar than Anna.14
Almost like legends were the clickers or marbles we played with; one
likes to have something colorful in one’s hand. They were Arabian stones,
ringed with red or green, sometimes with stars, even with miniaturized
lands; these we carried in our pockets. But it was at six in the evening, out
on the field, I hear the bells ringing in the clock tower exactly. I was gath-
ering pebbles from the Rhine; as I looked right at them in the dusk and
the clock struck, little men were moving there, fleet as shadows. I ran
home, expecting to find friends there—dark, colorful friends who’d come
to take me away. No one was at home. I never saw the little men running
in the pebbles again; the memory of them is acute and sober.
I also had a snake, always in my pocket, next to the cage made from a
hollowed cork, a grate of pins, flies behind the bars. Next to the maybugs,
 Spirit Still Taking Shape
whose heads we would eat “as salad”; they tasted nutty. But the snake was
a little brass casting, a pen holder, with a rough back that went up and
down like a cable car. I prayed to the snake long afterward in bad times at
school and home. With sounds that were always the same, and almost
empty, humming courage to themselves.
It fits that boys see just as precisely as they read literally. Scratched and
dulled, the marbles lay in the window, not marbles at all, but rather bring-
ing that distant land closer, all the more because it lay beneath. In the
apothecary’s store lay a plate with some dried thing labeled “China peel”;
I thought the chunk was a shard of the Chinese wall. Grooved clay heads
and clay piglets on which one can plant grass often stand in florist shops;
these were idols, and the entire store an idol shop, the same one that Abra-
ham’s father ran and that the young Abraham once destroyed; the theol-
ogy teacher told us about it.
Eight years, and the most remarkable thing was the sewing box in a
shop window on the way to school; it stood between skeins and mats, em-
broidered by feminine hands, which could interest no one. But on the box
was an illustration with many dots or flecks of color on the smooth paper,
as though the paint had run. It showed a hut and much snow; the moon
was high and yellow in the blue winter sky; in the windows of the hut
burned a red light. Below the little image stood “Moon Landscape,” and
at first I believed it was a landscape on the moon, a great piece of China
peel, as it were; but I felt utter turmoil looking at it that I could hardly ex-
press, and never forgot the red window. Probably everyone feels that way
at one time, some time, and then later about something else, whether it’s
words or images that affect one. A person starts early with it; if he didn’t
stop just as soon, the image would become more important than himself.
This case is related only very indirectly to the I experience of those years;
it came that same year on a bench in the woods, and I felt “myself ” as the
one feeling, looking outward, of whom I would never get free, as terrible
as he was wonderful, who sits forever in his own room with a globe.
Whom one always has in store, even among friends, and who finally dies
alone; but of course he has the red window, will always stand behind it.
Everyone has a sign from those days that is nothing, neither domestic nor
from nature, and not from the familiar self, but it will cover everything if
one wants. Completely silly stuff that belongs nowhere but among the few
things that would remain after one counted up everything else that there
is. Here it was the window on the box; next to it, beneath, was yet a far
Spirit Still Taking Shape 
more crooked rudder, among the images in the ads of that time; they were
the first gallery. Away with high heels! announced such an ad; an oversize
heel was printed there, and crossed out; it meant nothing to us, but it was
somehow exciting. Or one of us would show off Dr. Retau’s Self-Preserva-
tion, lustfully, and right below, the illustration: Nena Sahib, a voluptuous
woman with eyes black as ink; we thought the book was some sort of In-
dian pornography.
The strangest was a nocturnal still life that would appear from time to
time, an image of laundry all by itself, without any people, that was in-
tended to praise a detergent (children are familiar with kitchen things
anyway). Quietly the basin with the soaking laundry hung in the air, right
behind it a black cellar window with a white grill, and at an angle across it
hung a huge, slender, pale new moon. The moon peered into the window
all night, saying, Soak with Mondo overnight, next day’s laundry duty light.
In this image was music that slept as it woke, and always played the same.
I often held the image up to the light, and feared having to go into the cellar
that I had loved as a small child.
Later there was something of the more cheerful window, the red win-
dow on the box, in the attic room of a much older seventh grader, with
whom I put gunpowder instead of salt on my buttered bread; rather, the
wonder of that red window took on some of the smell in this room where
the older boy paced back and forth, studied, and smoked, manly and
learned. But the room itself meant nothing; the intended essence could
also live in the very different sentences that one read in Christmas books.
Such as, “The icy cold North wind blew across the desolate prairie.”15
There was an uncanny warmth in this cold sentence; a self behind a win-
dow rode with the cowboy through the transfer image that separated won-
drously. In “better” images or books there’s never that window. But of
course, I forgot, the room at Baker Street, where Sherlock Holmes lives, is
sometimes behind it even today: when the rain beats against the windows,
Holmes sits by the chimney with Dr. Watson, and the bell rings. With the
window put on like a mask, one stepped out, finally outward, into the open.
The God of Life

Morning soon ended there, or changed. Twelve years make a boy restless,
masculine, and so even more serious. Lots of coarse boys in the class; school
was also not to my taste. Friends: a brunette boy (we were disobedient,
 Spirit Still Taking Shape
walked in the country and smoked; loved each other, and respected each
other, which one has more need of at that age), a blond boy with poor
color (he’d been stuffed into Bleyle’s suits for boys, but he carried them
with bearing, and in his green eyes lay power; he pressed plants, and lent
us books in which the sea breezes whistled).
We also held stamps, a magnet, and a spyglass. The magnet pulled, and
the glass was a strong man who would transport us to the farthest objects;
we wanted to get away. Back then I would also ask: Why do things weigh
differently?—and wrote it down. I stuck with the balloons from the fair,
which of course are not heavy at all. On the contrary, they rise into the air,
and in fact if one lets them go they rise until the air around them is as light
as the gas in them. They strive all the more, the further from this point they
begin. Cotton and stone, on the other hand, have their consistent densities
where they would be at home, not above but below ground. Which is not
even what matters, for only separation from the same causes the attraction,
makes something nostalgically heavy, as it were. And differently heavy de-
pending on how far things have to go to find the same density; that is
where they strive to be, all the more, the greater the separation. In short, I
myself didn’t like staying home; the room that was “like” me was outside.
Fifteen years: one got even further beyond life, namely, educated. School
of course remained appalling, consuming nine, even ten years of one’s
youth; one did not always attain the class’s standard. Such petit bourgeois,
such fools, hoplites, lesson plans over me; I was their dog, and rebellious.
One, maybe two teachers were fresher, but they could do nothing against
the fustiness of the institution and knew nothing of our young, callow, im-
portant attempts to find ourselves. The way to what was “like” us got ever
colder. We read Social Democratic brochures; quite remarkable images
made it clear that the society we lived in was a deception, and the world a
machine. Only the girls with whom we rode the roller-coaster would dress
themselves up: but a few steps from the gleaming metal bars, the droning
calliope, stood the gasoline engine that drove it all. Here were quantities,
and precise vectors; the true relationship of dream and reality, the former
nostalgic motif of gravity now also began to fade. Or in stereoscopes, which
still existed then, one needed only look under the curtains hanging before
one’s feet: behind was an empty space with a stool in the middle, on it stood
a laughably small yet very precise apparatus that threw the shining images
of Hammerfest or the Holy Sepulcher. Machinery and matter were thus
the crux of the problem, albeit a very masculine and mature one; babies
Spirit Still Taking Shape 
come from women, life comes from carbon, carbon consists of atoms. As
I was being confirmed, and was supposed to say the creed at the altar, I in-
serted threefold I am an atheist!—pronouncing the ei as a diphthong, for
we had only read and never heard the word, in little freethinker’s tracts ti-
tled Strolls with an Atheist and the like.
A text appeared, “The Universe in the Light of Atheism”: “No incorpo-
real being had a hand in it,” “Matter is the mother of all existence,” our
sexual education was complete, the secret of the world was out.16 What
one called God was nothing but the infinite sum of matter, energy, and
(unconscious) reason; all consciousness is mere combustion, like lights in
the night, behind which the dark dynamo stood. Indeed, consciousness it-
self seemed dearly purchased; on one’s youthful bosom, or rather deep
within it, one could feel a peculiar weight, the slight but persistent weight
of life, speaking figuratively, yet not only figuratively. For it was physically
quite exactly focused and palpable; this slight pain—so it seemed—was
the seat of consciousness, or the source. It also heals, but likewise out-
wardly, in outward unconsciousness, above all in natural beauty, especially
inorganic beauty, in the beauty of rivers, mountains, and cliffs. The nat-
ural sciences heal even more exactly; their methods are already unfeeling,
and their object is nothing but dead matter and energy. A strange channel
for the obscure erotic desires (probably) of those days, certainly also for
death wishes, which in puberty are not only physiological but as it were
physical—above all this impatience is a desire to go cold. Perhaps these
connections don’t accord with that time (such things are hard to remem-
ber exactly; there’s been too much maturation); yet my notebooks are still
there, and they have an erotic-antierotic tone that very much suits a boy.
The tracts of my materialist period (the nineties) also diverted the night
of love into the night of matter, where the “transformation of our bodies”
is at any rate certain.17
But now came the age of sixteen; I became much younger, and dreams
meant precisely—everything. I had long ago flunked and was in another
class; school remained just as stupid, but my classmates were better; it was
truly a community. Among us in the new class were grown lads and honest
comrades who took something wild and first-born into the quiet streets, es-
pecially at night; the last in school were the first by nature. On the ships that
came down from Holland, we listened to the sailors tell of snakes they’d
eaten; one of us nearly got a tattoo. They probably often lied, and we too
needed something to go with the Dutch tobacco, with beer and pretzels; we
 Spirit Still Taking Shape
masqueraded in the forbidden taverns as beggars and captains, told of ter-

mites in the wooden leg, of our horse in the attic, of the carriage behind the
Protestant church, above all of the sulfur tanker in the winter harbor, where
Raggedy-Ass served: trite stuff, but well shaken.18 Lonely and solemn strolls
too, “Off in the distance a train whistle blows,/The workers are sounding
their horns”; sometimes we thought we were by the Thames, where Captain
Marryat’s police boats raced, or by the Susquehanna.19
Particularly under a high cloud cover, toward evening, in the autumn,
the barren and smoky plain had everything. And then the fair, twice a year
(oh, what we made of it!); it vitalistically overcame our precocious mate-
rialism, lived or received. A clear feeling for girls displaced our solemnity,
and the booths taught us so much, above all that everything is like this,
with a curtain over the entrance and mysterious inside. From there we
boys drew the energy for which the time had finally come: namely, the fer-
vent dream-kitsch of the nineteenth century, seen naïvely. One drove to
the fairground on a beautiful day; men bedecked with musical clocks or
playing hurdy-gurdies stood along the way. If one came nearer to the ex-
hibits, the wooden horses would do their round, the mirrors would re-
volve splendidly, the silver and gold tassels would sparkle. Dented tin men
cranked their hand mills in the shooting galleries; the round lenses of the
panoramas glinted like portholes, like the wreck of the Grosvenor, and less
warmly; the waxworks stood motionless in the clamor.20 On the whole
fairgrounds there was a music of commotion. Vertically stood the terrible
or lascivious images: the execution of Schill’s officers, or “The Victor’s
Spoils”; Madame sits like a Rumanian at her till with kerosene lamp, tarot
cards, and money; behind the shabby tapestry are the clown ghosts of
childhood, but without fear.21 A gong sounds, and Doktor Faustus ap-
pears in the booth; there was hypnosis too—these are the mysteries of the
South Pacific. There lay the world, or the symbol of the world, from all
the books from before and from now, which one read again and again be-
cause one would forget them like dreams. The light in the booths burned,
and behind the trees it glowed; the Gypsy woman had stolen the king’s
baby; Rumpelstiltskin dwells where the wolves and the foxes say good-
night; the magic horse flies, the magnetic mountain looms, Zaleukos, is
this how you welcome your guest?22 Lazily the sails flapped against the
mast of the brig; meanwhile Kilian sat in his hut, midnight was long past,
and before morning breaks the Yumas must be surrounded; Sam Hawkens,
Old Wabble, Old Death, Old Surehand, Old Firehand were roaming the
Spirit Still Taking Shape 
wide prairie. Nscho-Tschi shone like the sun; Winnetou embraced Old
Shatterhand, and now he was finally recognized again; the blizzard raged,
the hurricane, the monsoon, the typhoon; with a rumble like an
overblown tuba it began, and now the great caravan swung around, away
from Fourche la fave, from Little Rock, from deserted Llano estacado and
the Rocky Mountains, deep into hot, teeming Asia; the way from Bagh-
dad up to Istanbul, Halef riding faithfully at one’s side; the banished Kru-
mir himself our guide across Schott Dscherid, the terrible salt sea. Light
and dark, Omar and Abrahim-Mamur, Schimin the Smith, Busra the beg-
gar, old Mübarak, the Death of Schut and The Empire of the Silver Lion all
met powerfully.23
As that all frothed together, it nurtured and resounded in a boy’s soul,
combined all its desires; ever more strongly did girls, lively banquets, the
Thousand and One Nights shine in. Across the valleys, plains, gorges,
mountains, dangerous cities, there soon glowed the Northern lights of our
first metaphysical notions. In short, there was almost no everyday in those
times beyond school; everything was amplified, or became completely still
in first love, by the fountains of the rococo gardens, in the intoxication of
the first speculative books. We felt ourselves drawn, to the point of pain,
into the beauty of trees, clouds, the night sky, with a sorrow of muteness
before it all that drove us almost to hallucinations. We lads on the shore
truly sensed nymphs, tree gods, on extraordinary evenings when the swells
on the Rhine stood like glass. The red and green lights at port and star-
board on the ships, as they drew red and green through the waters, and
nothing else existed. Fabulously near, as though burned in, Orion stood
in the winter sky; one never tired of seeing this fiery declaration, the three
stars slanting up, the scabbard hanging beneath. The “same” had become
magical; a long gaze would transport us into that constellation.
Here an utterly enchanted essence moved about that was much too hot
to hold. The pubescent feeling for love and for nature often speaks poems,
sometimes concepts; we had no poet among us, and the god of life would
not become conceptual. “In systems,” says my entry,
thoughts are like tin soldiers; one can set them up as one likes, but they will
never win an empire. Our philosophy has always been suspended from gram-
matical hooks or from the systematics of exhausted old men; science takes the
root of life, art raises it to a power, and philosophy? Our blood must become
as the river, our flesh as the earth, our bones like the mountains, our brain like
the clouds, our eye like the sun.24
 Spirit Still Taking Shape
The world was even more pervaded with All-Life in a second manuscript,
which we debated, and which I wrote down:
The essence of energy cannot be calculated, but only experienced in the flesh.
Blood and individuality are the two essences of life; the first creates reality, the
second shapes its values. This philosophy provides an approach to the Renais-
sance, and to the unknown territory beyond the Renaissance: toward German
and Greek antiquity as Weltanschauung. Our philosophy of energy not only
resolves every substance and every element into energy, like science, not only
interprets the Ding an sich as an energetic general will that has as it were
missed its calling, aimlessly flows back into itself and its cycle: rather, the
essence of the world is the urge and the power to shape, toward the unlocked
secret of life at every point; the Ding an sich is objective fantasy.25
Seventeen years: boys of that age hate the Bible, or, when mere mechanics
becomes untenable, take from the Scriptures anything but the Ten Com-
mandments, let alone their opposition to “life.” A sort of Bedouin atti-
tude was affected, was allied to the Teutonic without any perceived leap,
meant the universally buried “religion of nature” that was to be revived—
the thunder deity Jehovah swung Thor’s hammer. Or a precise permis-
siveness was meant, with a magic carpet at the entrance and the cosmic
maiden of objective fantasy within, with a secret that could not be solved
but only named, for it was essence. But later, of course, the red window
returned, from the moon landscape on the sewing box in the display win-
dow; it came almost as a lunar landscape by day. The In-Itself that still lies
within it, or humanity as it still is and ferments, set itself against the
course of the world, which is not yet so Bacchantic, or not only. The gaze
into the red window, the entire human and musical ensemble set with it,
drove out the illusory All-Life of before. Something human, or the dream
of a human cause that has not yet come, entered the world, where the
dream exists as tendency and only sometimes already as testimony. The se-
cret window might thus make one hostile to the world (precisely because
it affirms “life,” this life); it is the collector lens for the utopian material of
which the earth consists. Private collection was never intended, and will
not be continued.
The Motif of Parting 
The Motif of Parting

In parting, the Now that was stays with us, but differently, above all
when it has not been lived out to its end; that is, it haunts us. About this
halfness, this meeting in first bloom, there is a story that not coinciden-
tally dates from the late Biedermeier period, by the provincial writer
Friedrich Gerstäcker.26 A tender, emotional story in the nineteenth cen-
tury’s dim mustiness, with all the Romantic colportage that the motif of
parting demands. Its vagueness attains its truest color in partial sincerity;
parting itself is sentimental. But sentimental with depth; it is an indis-
tinguishable tremolo between illusion and depth. We will retell how the
young artist again and again listens for the bell that is already long gone,
gazes at the broad horizon where everything had been; this love, this girl,
a happiness that never even came to be, but already went under in its first
demure bloom. I know no more beautiful story of parting, its particular
wistfulness, its likely decline, or again the dreamy mellowness of its im-
ages, than this one.
How cheerfully the young lad strode forth! Wide open lay the clear, au-
tumn landscape. Here and there on the horizon appeared a steeple. The
stranger was just coming around a bend in the road toward a birch; under
it sat a farm girl gathering fall flowers.
As she heard the steps, she sprang toward the lad with a cry of joy,
blushed, hung her head, and said, “He’s not coming.” The lad smiled at
her, yet before he could ask, she repeated in the same fearful voice, “Hein-
rich isn’t coming.”
With these words, she walked back down the narrow path leading from
the birch, the stranger at her side, ever more aware of the young girl’s truly
wondrous beauty.
“Is Heinrich your sweetheart, and is he keeping you waiting?”
The girl sighed, and replied with a forlorn expression, “Perhaps he could
not come; perhaps he’s sick, or even dead. I am so unfortunate, sir! You’ve
come through Bischofsroda, haven’t you? Did you hear nothing about
him? Heinrich Vollguth is his name, and he’s the sheriff ’s son. The day is
short, and now I’ll never see Heinrich, not until our day comes again.”
The lad didn’t know what to make of the question.
“Certainly I was in Bischofsroda, but the sheriff ’s name isn’t Vollguth at
all; of course I didn’t meet everyone. I am an artist, and never stay long in
one place; I must take advantage of the lovely autumn days.”
 The Motif of Parting
From the village they were approaching one could now clearly hear the
bell. But it tolled so harsh and tinny, as though it were cracked, and as the
young man looked across the fields there seemed to be a thin fog over it,
despite the morning.
“Yes, our bell sounds bad,” said the girl indifferently. “We should have
had it recast long ago, but there’s never time, and there are no bell-founders
hereabouts. But if you’re a painter, I should bring you to my father, the vil-
lage sheriff. My name is Gertrud, and I’m from Germelshausen. Perhaps
you could touch up the paintings in the church; they look quite sorry.”
They went across moors that seemed to stretch quite far in these parts; fi-
nally some alder hedges came into view before a partly collapsed ring-wall;
behind, the small church, and at some distance the village with its soot-
blackened houses. Gertrud had become ever more taciturn and was now en-
tirely mute as they walked up the village street toward her father’s house.
Amazed, the painter saw the farmers as they walked by in their archaic dress,
all just as still and impassive, without any greeting. And how decayed the
old houses looked! Their windows were often covered only with oiled paper;
the gables and broad-beamed thatch roofs were all shrouded in that thin
moor haze that never lifted, even as he came closer, and the sun shone
through only with a very peculiar grayish yellow.
“It is midday,” said Gertrud, “and folks aren’t much for talking then;
tonight you’ll find them all the merrier. Over there is my father’s house,
and you need not fear that he’ll be unfriendly, even if we don’t waste many
words.”
They knocked, and the sheriff was already at the door, greeted the
painter without any superfluity, led the two inside, and bade them take a
place at the lavish Sunday table. Of course even the sheriff ’s house seemed
derelict: the air in the rooms was cold and stale, the whitewash was flak-
ing away, and often just swept hastily aside. Yet the neatly set table in the
middle stood invitingly, the supper companions smiled warmly, the hearty
meal tasted delightful, and at the end the sheriff brought out a wonderful,
rough cider. Then the farmer’s wife, in a quiet voice, sang a song about the
cheerful life in Germelshausen, and the sheriff brought out a flute; he
played so joyously for the dance that the painter took the blushing
Gertrud and whirled about the room with her, carried away by the girl’s
loveliness and the rising surge of happiness. Gertrud looked at him and
smiled for the first time; but the old man broke off in the middle of play-
ing and pointed out the window, so low that the people outside almost
The Motif of Parting 
leaned into it. A small cortège went by: men carrying the coffin, and be-
hind them, holding candles, a woman with a little girl. It was all very
strange to see: the dark coats, the candles, the grayish yellow sunlight and
the silent, forlorn procession.
Already before, before they entered the village, the painter had sketched
the low steeple; now he added the procession down the deserted street to
his portfolio. Gertrud watched the image take shape, with a wholly enig-
matic expression; at that moment the painter grabbed a new sheet and
wanted to begin, when Gertrud interrupted him and held his arm.
“If you want to draw me, then, I beg you, draw me into the first pic-
ture. There is still room enough; I don’t like standing alone, but in such
serious company no one could think ill of me.”
He granted her this strange favor, and soon the image of Gertrud ap-
peared among the procession like the Virgin in anguished glory over the
dark earth.
Because the painter now wanted to see more of the old village, he rose
and bade Gertrud accompany him. The sun already stood low, and they did
not want to tarry long, for toward evening, the sheriff had said, they would
see music and gay clothing enough at the dance in the inn. The couple strode
along the broad village street; already it was not so quiet as it had been at
midday. Children played in front of their houses, the old folks watched,
and everything would even have had a quite pleasant appearance if the haze
had not grown even thicker, now already mixing with the evening fog.
Gertrud and the painter slowly ascended the rise on which the church
stood, almost outside the village, surrounded by God’s acre, and again the
painter noticed the very antiquated style of the church, shot through with
dangerous cracks; the gravestones roundabout were entirely weathered
and mossy. Only a single fresh grave lay at the edge, where today’s proces-
sion must have ended, but otherwise the churchyard seemed long aban-
doned, lay there in such silence and contented seclusion as the painter had
never felt before. He walked about, seeking in vain to decipher the in-
scriptions and dates on the gravestones, Gertrud next to him in the gath-
ering darkness, wordless and quietly crying, immersed in a silent prayer.
Quite nearby the cracked bell now tolled in the steeple; he had not heard
it since the morning. Gertrud started.
“Now we may no longer mourn; you hear, the bell is ringing out. We
want to go to the dance; this is how our every day ends. Promise me
you’ll stay at my side that long. How I thank our Savior that you have
 The Motif of Parting
come, and that I may go with you; perhaps God has not yet forgotten me
entirely.”
Forcefully she took his outstretched hand and descended the rise with
her friend, down into the utterly transformed village. On the streets was
laughter, about the inn swayed torches and an eager crowd. Quickly the
girls greeted Gertrud and embraced her, and lads strode forward and found
their sweethearts; already the music was stamping and piping within. He
entered with Gertrud; the ardent friend held her in his arms; the couples
whirled in the piping sound of the old dance. One thing only struck the
painter beyond measure: namely, every time the clock from the church
on high struck the hour, the celebration would stop momentarily, the
music would die out, and the dancers would stand immobile. Gertrud her-
self, whom he wanted to question, seemed also to be counting the strokes.
The stroke of eleven was past; more frantic than before, the music burst
out again, transporting the painter, beside himself with happiness, and the
elated girl.
Now the trumpets blew a fanfare for the last dance before midnight.
Gertrud tore herself away, gave her friend a long, pained look, and led
him, astonished, out of the roaring hall, down the path they had walked
at midday, up to the church and even further, up to the outer ring-wall,
into the open field bathed in moonlight.
“Promise me,” cried Gertrud, “please promise me you’ll stay here just a
short while, till midnight. Promise me for love of our Savior that you
won’t take a step, neither to the right nor to the left, until the bell has died
out.” The lad drew his bride to him and kissed her; Gertrud kissed him
back wildly, then tore herself from his arms.
“Farewell; I’ll wait for you before the door of the dance hall. After mid-
night! Think of that, and forget me not!”
Again she stood quietly, embraced her friend, and her soft tread van-
ished in the dark. Dismayed, the youth stayed put, her strange words
echoing; he thought he was obeying a love game. And now he saw how
the night had changed. A sudden wind gusted across the field; the dim
moon disappeared behind a pale, whirling mist. Only the windows of the
dance hall shone warmly, and the wind from that direction carried the
piping and trilling with it, the wedding music where Gertrud waited after
midnight (“Forget me not!”).
Now, finally, the old bell in the church steeple struck, in the middle of
a gust so strong that the lad had to throw himself to the ground so as not
to be flung against the wall. The storm howled by. The time had to be
The Motif of Parting 
past, because the bell had long died out; the painter stood up and looked
for the way back down to the village. But he strayed into moors in every
direction. Dense clumps of alder rose everywhere where he expected the
path; nowhere could he yet detect a light from the village. He worked his
way back into the thickets. At once bog water rose in his tracks; he turned
back, sought the path elsewhere, ended up again and again in the deep,
uncanny hollow. Finally he feared losing his way completely, and stayed
on a rise in order to wait there until the clock struck one, and the stroke
could lead him. But he must have missed the stroke, or the wind that still
blew carried it to the side. Hopeless and exhausted, he finally decided to
await the day. He listened again and again for the old, harsh stroke; the
hollow remained still.
Only toward morning did the lad arise from an uneasy, tormented
sleep; right before him barked a dog, and an old hunter stepped forward
from the brush.
“How good it is,” called the painter, his words tumbling out with relief,
“how good it is to see you! I’ve gone astray, and looked in vain all night.
Won’t you tell me where I can find the way to Germelshausen?”
The old man quickly stepped back, crossed himself.
“God help us! Where are you from?” He looked at the painter, shaking
his head. “Of course I know the way well enough. Yet how many fathoms
beneath the earth the accursed village lies, that’s for God alone to know;
doesn’t concern the likes of us, either.”
The painter thought the old man must be drunk in spite of the early
morning hour, and nodded agreeably. Pulled his sketches from his folder
and showed him the steeple; the old man didn’t know it, claimed never to
have seen it, but grew ever more jovial as he saw that the young man was
neither a vagabond nor a ghost.
“You must have heard something there, sir, and dreamed it. It can be
frightening to lose one’s way in the hollow at night. But do me this favor,
and never again speak that accursed name, especially on the spot where we
stand. Let the dead rest, especially those who have no rest; they appear
now here, now there, as they please.
“In any case, sir,” continued the hunter, and struck a spark for his pipe,
“those are the old stories hereabouts. Look! Right there in the marsh is
where the village you name is supposed to have lain; then it disappeared
in the night; no one knows how or why. Only the legend lives on that
every hundred years, on the day when it sank, it is lifted up into daylight
again; no one should be so unfortunate as to happen upon it.
 Supernaturalism, Stupid and Improved
“But you’re amusing yourself with the likes of us, sir! Go over to Dillstedt,
straight down the road, into a warm bed. If you like I’ll go with you; it’s
not so far out of my way.”
The youth clutched at the air about him; the hunter tried to hold him;
he shoved him and fainted dead away. When he reopened his eyes, he
found himself alone; the hunter must again have been made uneasy by the
feverish stranger. Slowly the painter gathered his pages, which still lay
strewn on the ground. He saw the steeple, the procession with the out-
moded clothing; saw Gertrud sketched onto the same page. He rose and
went his way, toward the main road, and soon reached the crossing under
the white birch where she had sat only yesterday, weaving garlands. Only
there did he stop and look back one last time. “Farewell, Gertrud!” he said
quietly, as great, glistening tears came to his eyes.
Supernaturalism, Stupid and Improved

Whether somehow or somewhere there are still hauntings, we may
leave aside. Wherever such things are reported, however, it’s striking how
inane the uncanny is. How with even the most elaborate shock there’s
usually only something boring behind it—in the event that it’s not im-
proved in the telling. Even so-called second sight, when it relates to some-
thing that does happen, is seldom such that it couldn’t be had more easily
as a very ordinary prediction. And even the unexpected in it is mostly ba-
nal, or it doesn’t concern us. Unless, of course, a poet works on it, some
Poe, some Hoffmann refabulates, transfabulates it. The ghost story with
literary velvet collar has become more hallucinatory than the usual factu-
ally reported haunting. Of which the following, from the unpublished
memoirs of the Viennese performer Girardi, offers a quite charming ex-
ample, subsequently meaningful.27
The case itself begins in a quite everyday way, or perhaps everynight.
Girardi left some friends in a Viennese outer borough, late, but sober.
Outside, in a calm mood, he considered, since the tram was no longer
running, whether he should take an expensive taxi or a healthy walk back
to Hietzing. He decided on the latter, ending up in a quaint, narrow, Old
Viennese alley that he’d never seen before.
It was well illuminated from the windows, and out of many hung invit-
ing young women clicking their tongues at him. Particularly arousing was
 Supernaturalism, Stupid and Improved
“But you’re amusing yourself with the likes of us, sir! Go over to Dillstedt,
straight down the road, into a warm bed. If you like I’ll go with you; it’s
not so far out of my way.”
The youth clutched at the air about him; the hunter tried to hold him;
he shoved him and fainted dead away. When he reopened his eyes, he
found himself alone; the hunter must again have been made uneasy by the
feverish stranger. Slowly the painter gathered his pages, which still lay
strewn on the ground. He saw the steeple, the procession with the out-
moded clothing; saw Gertrud sketched onto the same page. He rose and
went his way, toward the main road, and soon reached the crossing under
the white birch where she had sat only yesterday, weaving garlands. Only
there did he stop and look back one last time. “Farewell, Gertrud!” he said
quietly, as great, glistening tears came to his eyes.
Supernaturalism, Stupid and Improved

Whether somehow or somewhere there are still hauntings, we may
leave aside. Wherever such things are reported, however, it’s striking how
inane the uncanny is. How with even the most elaborate shock there’s
usually only something boring behind it—in the event that it’s not im-
proved in the telling. Even so-called second sight, when it relates to some-
thing that does happen, is seldom such that it couldn’t be had more easily
as a very ordinary prediction. And even the unexpected in it is mostly ba-
nal, or it doesn’t concern us. Unless, of course, a poet works on it, some
Poe, some Hoffmann refabulates, transfabulates it. The ghost story with
literary velvet collar has become more hallucinatory than the usual factu-
ally reported haunting. Of which the following, from the unpublished
memoirs of the Viennese performer Girardi, offers a quite charming ex-
ample, subsequently meaningful.27
The case itself begins in a quite everyday way, or perhaps everynight.
Girardi left some friends in a Viennese outer borough, late, but sober.
Outside, in a calm mood, he considered, since the tram was no longer
running, whether he should take an expensive taxi or a healthy walk back
to Hietzing. He decided on the latter, ending up in a quaint, narrow, Old
Viennese alley that he’d never seen before.
It was well illuminated from the windows, and out of many hung invit-
ing young women clicking their tongues at him. Particularly arousing was
Supernaturalism, Stupid and Improved 
the one in a very narrow house, only two windows, one above the other, a
pale old Austrian yellow around the white window frames; the girl herself
delightful to see. Thanks very much, said the gracious man, some other
time; I’m too tired right now, but tomorrow night, perhaps; I’ll remember
the address. He’d already gone further when she called after him, Hey,
don’t be stupid! Come on, I’ll do it Mexican for you! But the man walked
on into the night, through ever more familiar areas, Rotenturmstraße,
Kärntnerstraße, Ring, home by the Mariahilferstraße. He stopped sud-
denly: What did the girl mean by Mexican? For a long time he stood still
as a ship blown by opposing winds; tore himself away, turned around,
Ring, Kärnterstraße, Rotenturmstraße and so on, until he finally found
the little old alley again, but nowhere was the once-so-striking little house
with the girl in its lone window. Back and forth down the alley, asking the
whores hanging out of every other window about the vanished house. You
idiot, you wanna house or a whore? cried the tongue-clicking women, and
still hurled insults after him as he finally withdrew. Not only shaking his
head, very disappointed: both spirited away, the house and the young whore.
The case itself was really quite silly, and his hard luck would barely have
sufficed for an anecdote at his usual café table the next afternoon or
evening, an all too meager shock, with very little that was not quite canny,
entirely without salt. Until suddenly, already in the middle of Mariahil-
ferstraße, the illumination, the key came to him, the true and only now
complete ghost story, as it were. Thus (we quote verbatim the explanation,
the now truly fabulous elaboration by the actor Girardi):
There is an angel who can no longer stand to see how we botch everything.
Has permission to come to earth every hundred years in the shape of a whore,
to the Viennese alley, to the pretty, otherwise nonexistent, little house. May
only, however, pick up a single man as he passes by, in order to reveal to him
the way to this entirely different happiness. And her coded message is: Hey,
I’ll do it Mexican for you! If no one accepts the call that will be granted only
once, then the angel must disappear again for a hundred years. But no one has
understand the call yet—not I, the last to hear it, and perhaps the last ever.
For if no one goes with her, the angel will say: People just don’t deserve any
better—and never come again.
Thus ended his interior monologue; with a curious regret, the sympathetic
Girardi returned to Hietzing, to his unbewitched house. Yet Nestroy would
have taken pleasure in this little invented postmagic, even if, indeed pre-
cisely because, it didn’t happen on the stage.
 Strange Homeland, Familiar Exile
Strange Homeland, Familiar Exile

The farmer won’t eat what he doesn’t know. Yet there is also a song:
happiness is always elsewhere. An old Persian story, and heretically early
Christian as well, has something deeper to say about it. We see a young
girl there, or rather we do not, for she is confined to the house. Her nat-
ural father keeps her there; from her chamber she can barely peer onto the
street through the cracks in the shutters. One night the girl hears, just be-
low her window, a stroke on the oud, and singing, so strange and yet pri-
mordially familiar, like nothing she has ever heard. The virgin, like Iphi-
genia, still searching with her soul for more than the land of the Greeks,
forgot her fear of her father and opened the door outside to the strange
youth with the oud, the song. But at that moment her father sprang after
her, now no longer just smelling a rat, striking the youth down with one
blow of the axe, seizing his natural daughter, who was nonetheless not his,
as she fell on the dying youth with one utterly foreign word from his song.
His last words were: I wanted to lead you home, where you have never
been. I will never forget you, and I will return for you; take this ring as a
sign of our troth.
Whereupon the murdered youth vanished. The ring, however—so ends
the legend, just as abruptly—is the New Testament.
Something once completely foreign, in other words, is thus interpreted
as what is nearest. Also, of course, as what was always meant, revealing it-
self to the presentiment without which it could never be recognized as
primordially familiar. Of course the blue flower of “The Stranger’s Story”
already applies here, especially as Heinrich von Ofterdingen had never
seen it, but only “longed to see it.”28 What is much more apt here is the
always-moving, indeed almost enigmatically shocking quality of the (in
any case rare) recognition scene, plain in Joseph and his brothers, explo-
sive in Electra’s outcry before Orestes, the still seethingly unrecognized,
finally revealed brother, avenger. In contrast to the Persian legend, of course,
there is in the Biblical recognition scene (albeit not so much in the
Greek) basically more remembrance than presentiment. The leap to what
never was is important, above all to what had been entirely foreign, what
was Marcionitically the most familiar thing to this soul-maiden.29 Hail to
those who will not let this appetite be diverted by the available or illusory
nourishment.
Pippa Passes 
Pippa Passes
It’s terrible to be misled too little, and yet just enough. Not much more
than a twinkling arises, short and sharp, that wounds. It excites and may
well sow something, but only beginnings—nothing that blooms or could
ever come to bloom.
We should be clearer, and recount some stories. From our own experi-
ence, or stories we heard so intensely, they might be our own. A friend
told a story like this, perhaps a quite silly one, a true tram conductor’s
story as they’re called in Munich, like the ones a boring tram passenger
tells about radishes that were too mealy and such, stories that interest no
one but the teller. And because they interest him so much, he can only tell
them badly; his own interest is exactly what he can’t convey, share. Most
dreams belong here, and everything too personal; those are strange stories,
to which one listens strangely.
Enough, already. Our friend sat in the tram car, in Autobus AE bis in
Paris, which goes from the Opéra to Montsouris Park, and across from
him a girl, whom he barely looked at, about whom he noticed only her
peculiar large pale blue eyes, noticed them dimly while talking to his com-
panions. Had to notice, actually, for those eyes watched him steadfastly,
not enticingly; rather, they were round and lonely, truly like stars. This
man cannot tolerate when a woman to whom he is indifferent begins to
love him; he doesn’t know how to say no to women, and so he prefers to
avoid it.
Now chance came to his aid: the man dropped his ticket. He picked it
up from the floor, thereby lightly brushing the girl’s knee—truly so lightly
and awkwardly, so inadvertently in that narrow space, that we need not
expand on the reasons psychoanalytically. Immediately the girl turned
away, and the man later related that he felt utterly Kierkegaardian. A
strange joy came over him that the girl must now have held him for a lout
or some predictable cad and so no longer had to love him.
Soon the tram stopped, as the stars of her eyes now rose again (or per-
haps had never set); my friend stepped off with his companions while the
girl observed, now with a truly mysterious expression, and the tram dis-
appeared in the direction of the park. The man claimed not even to have
watched the taillights, so uninteresting did the matter seem to him, and
so calm did he again feel. But no sooner was he seated at the table than
 Pippa Passes
there came, in the midst of the café, while he was still listening to light
news about the last parliamentary session or the fall exhibition, a crash
that almost buried him: love exploded on a timed fuse. Illusion began to
operate, and the girl within it became the beloved, the one just lost, and
neglected, hopelessly gone, with whom an entire life sank. A beautiful,
long life, never lived yet deeply familiar, which he recalled almost in a hal-
lucination, and which lacked nothing but its tiny beginning.
If we add that the man, by virtue of his considerable imagination, al-
ways fell in love with distant beloveds, pretty or renowned girls that he
had heard about—indeed, even rich, exceptional girls (leaving no doubt
about his will to realization)—or that he once went half insane as a girl of
whom he had only seen pictures and heard stories became engaged, then
one can understand the next few days, which he described, unreservedly
open and agitated, days of wandering, of madly pacing off the tram route,
the often repeated trip at the same time along the same route, the search
for the pearl in the haystack, though he didn’t exactly know that it wasn’t
just a needle. At any rate, the proven, the missed chance existed that it was
a pearl, while women were otherwise so indifferent, as though they were
truly just needles, or some other paillette, worthless, widely available. His
will to discover was just as empty as it was insufferably agitated; his feel-
ings stood like a farmhand on the marketplace whom no one will hire.
That this idolatry subsided after days, weeks, that the mystery woman
slowly faded, goes without saying. That the worshiper type does not have
an exactly firm grasp, likewise goes without saying—although he was
hardly one of those dreamers about “the perfect girl.” The extreme case,
anyway, remains one of youth as such, consists overwhelmingly only of
youthful impetuosity and delusion, flaring and fading, again flaring and
fading, that is the exact worldly correlate of the worst youthful impetuos-
ity, particularly about women. Which is why Schopenhauer too praises as
the joy of old age that it’s beyond everything: see, you haven’t missed a
thing. But of course, age speaks of an entirely different world from that of
youth. In the latter there is much to miss; youth has, above all, as was
shown here, the idolatry of the unknown, wholly without libertinage, and
devout in its way.
Striking, how seldom the joys of the bygone are described, and how
reluctantly. The man on the tram could tell his story, and it seemed not
remotely so familiar as billions of stories of unlucky love. Probably—with
respect to such brief woundings or extraordinary momentary impressions

without consequences—the routine of repression is more strongly formed
in normal persons. La passante is then more easily forgotten, even where
she remains unrepressed; in Baudelaire, Flaubert, and every crown witness
of the lost chance, she never quite emerges into day. About her there is no
concrete, quite properly human suffering, although it moves us. Only
warily, yet almost reverently, like an All Soul’s Day in the springtime, do
we recall it. Here are devilries that can make us reckless, or drunk, or weak
like Offenbach’s Hoffmann in the final act, when Stella comes. If our fate
were more intentional, then it would not sing so bitterly from this almost-
nothing, this almost-everything.
The Long Gaze

Whoever knows the long gaze, silently, in the twilight that reverie
spreads over everything and everyone, when only the beloved’s eyes still
regard us and we see how another sees us, in a past time, a past space that
would be intolerable if it did not again possess the greatest weightlessness,
in the smile of the moment of truth: he has left behind the merely male
orgasm, has reversed the woman and consequently that space of love into
himself that lives not in the brief ecstasies of masculine climax but only in
the “afterglow,” indeed does not even require coitus as its key, and is at all
times a feminine space.
But a man cannot live there long. There is a love that begins with the
great, long gaze, has that gaze wholly on its level, and must fade with it.
Great music understands how to sing that song; the situation in the second
act of Tristan belongs here, the motionless gaze almost without touching. It
is as little a demure substitute for or allusion to intercourse as the love duet
is its music. But it would be truer if Tristan left Isolde afterward, this not at
all subterranean but rather very elevated and outlying mons veneris, where
only the beloved can still breathe, only woman, with the open eye of a com-
pletely undarkened but also opaque ecstasy. A man will soon look timidly
aside, unless he seeks in this silence without windows the space for every-
thing profound and important to him, so that he can stay there. Seldom do
infidelity and the greatest fidelity have a more terrible connection in the
respect to such brief woundings or extraordinary momentary impressions

without consequences—the routine of repression is more strongly formed
in normal persons. La passante is then more easily forgotten, even where
she remains unrepressed; in Baudelaire, Flaubert, and every crown witness
of the lost chance, she never quite emerges into day. About her there is no
concrete, quite properly human suffering, although it moves us. Only
warily, yet almost reverently, like an All Soul’s Day in the springtime, do
we recall it. Here are devilries that can make us reckless, or drunk, or weak
like Offenbach’s Hoffmann in the final act, when Stella comes. If our fate
were more intentional, then it would not sing so bitterly from this almost-
nothing, this almost-everything.
The Long Gaze

Whoever knows the long gaze, silently, in the twilight that reverie
spreads over everything and everyone, when only the beloved’s eyes still
regard us and we see how another sees us, in a past time, a past space that
would be intolerable if it did not again possess the greatest weightlessness,
in the smile of the moment of truth: he has left behind the merely male
orgasm, has reversed the woman and consequently that space of love into
himself that lives not in the brief ecstasies of masculine climax but only in
the “afterglow,” indeed does not even require coitus as its key, and is at all
times a feminine space.
But a man cannot live there long. There is a love that begins with the
great, long gaze, has that gaze wholly on its level, and must fade with it.
Great music understands how to sing that song; the situation in the second
act of Tristan belongs here, the motionless gaze almost without touching. It
is as little a demure substitute for or allusion to intercourse as the love duet
is its music. But it would be truer if Tristan left Isolde afterward, this not at
all subterranean but rather very elevated and outlying mons veneris, where
only the beloved can still breathe, only woman, with the open eye of a com-
pletely undarkened but also opaque ecstasy. A man will soon look timidly
aside, unless he seeks in this silence without windows the space for every-
thing profound and important to him, so that he can stay there. Seldom do
infidelity and the greatest fidelity have a more terrible connection in the
 Reunion Without Connection
same act; a man’s love easily dies out in nothing-but-love, which is every-
thing to a woman. Not through the insatiably sexual woman but through
the insatiably erotic woman does the right man fail. He bears up to her
when such women’s essence is so closely related to art.
Reunion Without Connection

Even what was should not hold us as such. Nothing past should be
sought so faithfully that one goes back, truly back. One often dreams of
it, but one should beware.
The desire for it is depraved, and one will pay for it too. Usually on the
spot, the same spot that one sought and found. People and things have
moved on, even when they look just as they did earlier. The interperson is
gone who formed between I and Thou; this old third party is usually
dead. Memory will not bring him back; he will not eat these preserves. So
former friends look like revenants; their recollection is fitful, seldom com-
fortable, and almost always shallow. Not themselves but only the past is
what they see in a lifeless memory; it never shifts from the spot, it stays
past—in short, it’s over.
More harmlessly confused is the wish to go back into the house where
one lived as a child. The stairs that one almost still knows from crawling,
the window on the last landing where one could see so closely onto the
neighbor’s roof, and in the winter onto the chimney that smoked into the
starry sky; or the balcony in the back with the years scratched into it,
which children apply quite early and remarkably historically. Yet the re-
turn disappoints us here too; life then and life now have no connection,
or merely one in melancholy. Things are all sealed up in pastness, help-
lessly, and don’t look out, or if so then only falsely. Indeed, from the dis-
appointment of the journeyman with staff in hand, whom no one knows
anymore, or the knight who returns from the Holy Sepulcher to find only
ruins, totally unrecognizable, the returnee differs only insofar as he can no
longer even feel like a journeyman, with his journey still within him, but
instead forgets even this, to say nothing of the knighthood of the Holy
Sepulcher; even the life from which he comes now lies in a vacuum. If
things are going rather badly for the revenant and he stands before the
houses of his former glory, where now only strangers live and no one no-
 Reunion Without Connection
same act; a man’s love easily dies out in nothing-but-love, which is every-
thing to a woman. Not through the insatiably sexual woman but through
the insatiably erotic woman does the right man fail. He bears up to her
when such women’s essence is so closely related to art.
Reunion Without Connection

Even what was should not hold us as such. Nothing past should be
sought so faithfully that one goes back, truly back. One often dreams of
it, but one should beware.
The desire for it is depraved, and one will pay for it too. Usually on the
spot, the same spot that one sought and found. People and things have
moved on, even when they look just as they did earlier. The interperson is
gone who formed between I and Thou; this old third party is usually
dead. Memory will not bring him back; he will not eat these preserves. So
former friends look like revenants; their recollection is fitful, seldom com-
fortable, and almost always shallow. Not themselves but only the past is
what they see in a lifeless memory; it never shifts from the spot, it stays
past—in short, it’s over.
More harmlessly confused is the wish to go back into the house where
one lived as a child. The stairs that one almost still knows from crawling,
the window on the last landing where one could see so closely onto the
neighbor’s roof, and in the winter onto the chimney that smoked into the
starry sky; or the balcony in the back with the years scratched into it,
which children apply quite early and remarkably historically. Yet the re-
turn disappoints us here too; life then and life now have no connection,
or merely one in melancholy. Things are all sealed up in pastness, help-
lessly, and don’t look out, or if so then only falsely. Indeed, from the dis-
appointment of the journeyman with staff in hand, whom no one knows
anymore, or the knight who returns from the Holy Sepulcher to find only
ruins, totally unrecognizable, the returnee differs only insofar as he can no
longer even feel like a journeyman, with his journey still within him, but
instead forgets even this, to say nothing of the knighthood of the Holy
Sepulcher; even the life from which he comes now lies in a vacuum. If
things are going rather badly for the revenant and he stands before the
houses of his former glory, where now only strangers live and no one no-
Reunion Without Connection 
tices him, though he knows every doorknob, and the refrain How fortu-
nate we were back then!—then at best he stands there as the lead in a sen-
timental film, who’s embarrassed before himself when he’s worth any-
thing.30 Then the weakness and self-pity are revealed that live in the wish
for such returns. Persons who’ve become nothing special, or nothing ap-
proaching what they had intended, have this drive for reunion in excess—
naturally also its catastrophe, which everyone knows, in particular the ex-
cess. Here reunion takes on something of the faith one really keeps in a
specific way only toward dead things (dolls, above all broken ones; closets;
and other mythical forces), not toward living things, to which one is
bound much more atmospherically.
Above all, reunion with an utterly vanished as well as splendid past has
some of the self-pity that is revealed in the usual sentimentality of such
moments. Only then does the worst catastrophe of all take shape, the
completely airless space: the reunion with ruins, with nothing but what is
sealed up within them, easily becomes a departure from oneself, as from
someone who never became. A dead man has then returned who goes
through these rooms handing letters to others long dead, like the Flying
Dutchman. The suspicion is always at hand, whenever a long past ends in
a historical or domestic reliquary, that it has remained a tomb for mere
velleities—that it doesn’t cook on in one living piece, and above all never
assumed the only decent form for “becoming”: maturity and works.
A test of oneself is therefore to dig out old and still dear things just to
sell them. Books still wrapped in the newspapers from back then, on which
the old date confronts us; antiquities, witnesses to an earlier life that
might still be uneasy yet is just as dead. Separating oneself from one’s past
is a test of one’s relative adaptation to fate, and of the salvaged example;
one finds out then whether one left oneself badly in the past or somehow
faithfully got out of it; whether a past stroke survives in one’s current ac-
tions and has become “something that has become” at another location, so
that it represents no past but rather solidity, salvage, firma in every sense,
and works.
Who thus separates himself can throw away the loveliest reliquary ob-
jects as unthinkingly as Lessing did honor; he has the certainty that he can
pick them up again at any time. In this sense, separation from books, fur-
niture, a beloved past is a mobilization of resources that haven’t been eaten
by rust or moths—in short, a rehearsal, even a double rehearsal, for death.
For in one instance objects move away from us as though we were leaving
 The Muse of Restitution
them; their departure is as though a train on the next track were swerving
away, and we think we’re swerving: the effect is the same. Just this depar-
ture effect reveals what has become melancholy infatuation and what sub-
stantive memory, conservation that needs no more physical return. That
former interperson between friends will also eat none of it, but true old
age and perhaps also true death love this confection and need it. In short:
there simply is no reunion with union. A sentimental reunion is poiso-
nous, not nutritious. The true reunion is none at all, does not reenter the
past or time’s remnants but has what is its own as an integral present—in-
deed, outside of time, as a small, thorough, preserved room where no fur-
niture collides, and nothing is sad.31
The Muse of Restitution

It turned out that the old violinist lived and played after a fashion, for
better or worse.32 Friends the recluse had none; unhappily married, he
kept to himself at home as well. To his chair at the opera house he would
still return somewhat punctually, but utterly morosely. More often he
would drift far away during rehearsals, distracted and as though listening
to something else. At his part he would saw away the more unwillingly,
the more trivial some cliché or other seemed to him, which at that time—
the story is from about , and takes place at the court opera of a Ger-
man capital—would have been Italianate. So the old musician, who
promised to reform yet always showed renewed discontent, was repri-
manded and demoted; his salary hardly still sufficed to keep his wife and
his young daughter from hunger.
Only his wife’s entreaties to the orchestra master momentarily prevented
his dismissal. That his already unsuitable wife thereby became ever more
quarrelsome is no surprise; perhaps only that she provoked even the girl
against him, whom he had loved and once instructed in simpler songs; she
even forbade her to speak with their shabby breadwinner.
After rehearsals, after an evening performance, the musician now locked
himself completely in his room—unnoticed, so he imagined. There he cut
his lonely capers, improvising on the violin, singing too, howling, shout-
ing, stamping deep into the night. The daughter, who had slowly begun
to blossom but remained timid, he would occasionally encounter on the
 The Muse of Restitution
them; their departure is as though a train on the next track were swerving
away, and we think we’re swerving: the effect is the same. Just this depar-
ture effect reveals what has become melancholy infatuation and what sub-
stantive memory, conservation that needs no more physical return. That
former interperson between friends will also eat none of it, but true old
age and perhaps also true death love this confection and need it. In short:
there simply is no reunion with union. A sentimental reunion is poiso-
nous, not nutritious. The true reunion is none at all, does not reenter the
past or time’s remnants but has what is its own as an integral present—in-
deed, outside of time, as a small, thorough, preserved room where no fur-
niture collides, and nothing is sad.31
The Muse of Restitution

It turned out that the old violinist lived and played after a fashion, for
better or worse.32 Friends the recluse had none; unhappily married, he
kept to himself at home as well. To his chair at the opera house he would
still return somewhat punctually, but utterly morosely. More often he
would drift far away during rehearsals, distracted and as though listening
to something else. At his part he would saw away the more unwillingly,
the more trivial some cliché or other seemed to him, which at that time—
the story is from about , and takes place at the court opera of a Ger-
man capital—would have been Italianate. So the old musician, who
promised to reform yet always showed renewed discontent, was repri-
manded and demoted; his salary hardly still sufficed to keep his wife and
his young daughter from hunger.
Only his wife’s entreaties to the orchestra master momentarily prevented
his dismissal. That his already unsuitable wife thereby became ever more
quarrelsome is no surprise; perhaps only that she provoked even the girl
against him, whom he had loved and once instructed in simpler songs; she
even forbade her to speak with their shabby breadwinner.
After rehearsals, after an evening performance, the musician now locked
himself completely in his room—unnoticed, so he imagined. There he cut
his lonely capers, improvising on the violin, singing too, howling, shout-
ing, stamping deep into the night. The daughter, who had slowly begun
to blossom but remained timid, he would occasionally encounter on the
The Muse of Restitution 
stairs and assailed her. Clearly she was in league with that old rat bag of a
wife, was spying at her behest in order to search his room for money.
There he actually found her one evening too, as he came home early,
upstairs; trembling, she sprang from his desk, with its drawers open. The
night before had just borne a strange fruit of which he alone knew, and
which he kept more secret than his missing money. The second act of a
completely inaccessible, unmarketable, hopeless opera was finished; it was
titled Siren.
The girl became even more cautious, staying in his chamber only when
there was certain to be a performance, for many weeks on the lookout for
the unhappy man. Until one day the musician was finally dismissed; he
had refused to play along at rehearsals for the new opera by one of the
fashionable composers he despised. Indeed he had fallen out so badly with
the world that it cheered him not in the least to hear that his own daugh-
ter had been discovered as the new vocal sensation, and would be trained
as a future prima donna on the cardinal’s orders. On the contrary, the
sacked violinist now railed against himself too, the closer the new singer’s
debut approached. After all, his own flesh and blood was supposed to pre-
sent the opera of the composer of the day for baptism. Completely barred
in his chamber, he no longer heard all the rumors circulating outside:
about the young star’s moods, about the endless rehearsals for the new
opera, about open scandals and intervention by the prince himself.
The evening of the premier arrived. The recluse had even draped the
windows of his sanctuary. A stranger comes through the door, presenting
himself as the emissary of the artistic director himself: His Excellency’s
coach is standing before the house to take him to the opera. Even now the
man resists. They arrive at the theater; the opera has begun. Wild, jagged,
deeply familiar music bursts from the hall; the old musician hastens for-
ward—his daughter, as siren, is singing to the sea.
Such a story is rare, yet it does happen, and still moves us afterward. If
I love you, how does that concern you?—This statement is not only inso-
lent; it can be daughterly too. Certainly the nasty old man left the maiden
no choice but not to ask about his love. On the other hand, though, her
father concerned her extraordinarily much; no love could be more selfless.
The girl, as she took the score to herself, copied it, always trembling for
fear of discovery, and kept herself secret and inaccessible until the last mo-
ment. Hardly any beloved could be so maidenly, in the most beautiful
sense, no one so incognito and yet so strong.
 Raphael Without Hands
As beloved, woman has always been celebrated fervently; as good wife,

proudly and gratefully; as mother, reverently. But about daughters there are
fewer good songs than familiar, stale ones. Yet the girl in this story is a spe-
cial muse to the man, not one who brings fire from Parnassus, certainly,
but one who is thoughtful, path-breaking, thereby hidden. It’s already like
a loyal posterity, not like a present, in this girl, and as one who has the right
to be called posterity. An Italian saying goes: tempo é gentiluomo, meaning,
time rights every wrong, even misrecognition. This noble daughter per-
formed her office so graciously that the gentleman isn’t even needed.
Raphael Without Hands

No one began small by himself, at the bottom. We learn to speak as
children, but only as youths do we try it, namely totally. Then comes the
drive to let sap rise into the word, the remarkable drive to say our life, so
momentary and full.
It really grabs one by the throat to be young. Waking up and feeling the
spring that a year ago was still completely different. Back then there were
no girls in it, or only faintly, more in pastel. But now storm winds blow
into the colors, and the world knows no more trifles. One’s head buzzes
with all these high beginnings; they seem important beyond all measure.
The rosy dawn illuminates tremendous things for boys, creates the need
to feel them, paint them, speak them so grandly. To create a work that sets
us into the world, the world into us.
Every young person once burned like this, burned up his beautiful
youth in it. For its beauty is not in its jealousies, rivalries, insults, or evil
triumphs. Thus did Hölderlin call youth in a letter to his brother: “This
time is really the time of sweat, and anger, and sleeplessness, and anxiety,
and storms, and the most bitter ones of one’s life.”33 Its beauty is far more
pure planning for unlimited time, often lyrical, more often gigantic, and
then the oeuvre of a Balzac would not suffice to fill this space.
But then comes the setback, when one writes this fullness down. If the
frenzy lasts beyond the twentieth year, production comes as an overt or
covert vocation. The little dilettante has it easier than the serious one; his
already faded dreams put down faded words, and since absolutely no mea-
sure of cultivation is added, the dream becomes trash (that’s never picked
 Raphael Without Hands
As beloved, woman has always been celebrated fervently; as good wife,

proudly and gratefully; as mother, reverently. But about daughters there are
fewer good songs than familiar, stale ones. Yet the girl in this story is a spe-
cial muse to the man, not one who brings fire from Parnassus, certainly,
but one who is thoughtful, path-breaking, thereby hidden. It’s already like
a loyal posterity, not like a present, in this girl, and as one who has the right
to be called posterity. An Italian saying goes: tempo é gentiluomo, meaning,
time rights every wrong, even misrecognition. This noble daughter per-
formed her office so graciously that the gentleman isn’t even needed.
Raphael Without Hands

No one began small by himself, at the bottom. We learn to speak as
children, but only as youths do we try it, namely totally. Then comes the
drive to let sap rise into the word, the remarkable drive to say our life, so
momentary and full.
It really grabs one by the throat to be young. Waking up and feeling the
spring that a year ago was still completely different. Back then there were
no girls in it, or only faintly, more in pastel. But now storm winds blow
into the colors, and the world knows no more trifles. One’s head buzzes
with all these high beginnings; they seem important beyond all measure.
The rosy dawn illuminates tremendous things for boys, creates the need
to feel them, paint them, speak them so grandly. To create a work that sets
us into the world, the world into us.
Every young person once burned like this, burned up his beautiful
youth in it. For its beauty is not in its jealousies, rivalries, insults, or evil
triumphs. Thus did Hölderlin call youth in a letter to his brother: “This
time is really the time of sweat, and anger, and sleeplessness, and anxiety,
and storms, and the most bitter ones of one’s life.”33 Its beauty is far more
pure planning for unlimited time, often lyrical, more often gigantic, and
then the oeuvre of a Balzac would not suffice to fill this space.
But then comes the setback, when one writes this fullness down. If the
frenzy lasts beyond the twentieth year, production comes as an overt or
covert vocation. The little dilettante has it easier than the serious one; his
already faded dreams put down faded words, and since absolutely no mea-
sure of cultivation is added, the dream becomes trash (that’s never picked
Raphael Without Hands 
up), retains a certain appearance of fullness. There is an underground lit-

erature here that no one knows and that is probably vaster than the visi-
ble; it was created in poignant leisure hours, often after a miserable day at
the shop or the office. Manuscripts pile up in this diligence without effort,
long novels and hefty tomes full of accumulated autodidacticism, in the
style of a provincial newspaper, suspended between Eros and cosmos.
Even madness has a place here: someone wrote a philosophy of the postal
system in three volumes, which was certainly an epochal idea at one time.
In comparison, the better dilettantes lose their voices like a natural singer
after the first solfeggio exercises, as soon as they put words to their plan.
The momentous vision shrivels; the intelligence that is supposed to serve
the work cancels it, and one’s own adulthood turns the planned super-
work into a dwarf. Indeed, even great talents suffer this shrinkage, but of
course they do not despair, or bury the shattered youthful plan; rather,
they know to localize it. When the trembling and all-embracing begin-
ning unintentionally shrinks, they understand how to set it consciously into
something small, into the detail.
Seldom do they really want the work to be as great as it was meant to
be, and might finally become. Instead it begins ten, a hundred paces be-
hind the youthful plan; they refuse to be surprised by a setback but rather
impose it themselves, as a reduction from the very outset. Just as a detour
in life so often turns out not to have been one at all, just as a little offshoot
can provide the revitalizing contribution, so does the plan resign and over-
grow itself at the same time in many first (and many late) masterpieces.
Various examples, various “small” beginnings appear here; they are cer-
tainly alike in one respect, that they are strong enough not to fall through
the door into the house. Cervantes wanted only to mock chivalric ro-
mances in Don Quixote; the mockery became a parody of humanity as
such, and even more its glory. Wagner planned an opera in the Italian
taste, arioso, and as a public fall from grace; this compromise became Tris-
tan and Isolde. Hegel wished only to write a sort of textbook, the progres-
sion of normal consciousness to the philosophical standpoint, and the
Phenomenology resulted. Certainly there are masterworks backed by a
great plan from the beginning; Faust is the example. But here too, there
was no straight line from immensity to immensity; rather, the whole grew
together from parts, occasions, partial experiences from which the work,
beyond the great plan of the “Monolog,” first concretely “began.” “Auer-
bach’s cellar,” the Gretchen tragedy, “una poenitentium,” in fact so many
 Raphael Without Hands
inadvertent inspirations were hardly foreseen; yet they altered the sub-
stantive direction of the original plan, and the original material in it. Usu-
ally the inspiration from which the masterwork commences is no longer,
and in this case more “modest” than, the initial one of the youthful plan;
the details above all, in which inspiration concretizes, come not from a
frenzy but from observation and the mediation of experience. Adulthood
still muffles the distant thunder, and “reason” (if it is not the normal dis-
illusionment) cancels many primitivisms; but here they are placed in the
service of the earlier waking dream, become not a destruction as in the
dilettantes of adulthood but an affirmed detour, out of whose passionate
sobriety the goal now first returns. Out of the irony of a new beginning,
out of the incident and detail beneath the original plan, the work first ap-
pears that sometimes realizes it.
But now, what was the beginning? Was it not just as abrupt as com-
plete, everything at once? What was meant in it does not easily return, yet
always surges forward again, as a dawn that must become loud and clear.
Much is concretely added to it later, often something unexpected, cer-
tainly also new puberty with fresh faces. Yet an early mystery persists after
all this, a red glow at the window of every first conception, itself not yet
adequately manifested, not in any fate, nor in any creation. Mere unspo-
ken intention is of course worth nothing at all; it must everywhere get out
of its beginning, put itself into expression and exteriority—yet just as far
from us be anything already complete! The youth at Saïs, who has noth-
ing if he does not have everything: he stands in no masterwork either, al-
though the masterwork always leads back, is always applied to what never
lets up.34 The potion (not from any witch’s kitchen) is still unknown that
would completely rescue youth beyond age, the beginning beyond the
work, make them visible. Raphael without hands would never have be-
come a great artist but, since he was nonetheless Raphael, perhaps an even
more faithful remembrance of ourselves.
Just Now
When do we ever get out, nearer to ourselves? Does one find oneself in
bed, or on the road, or at home, where things seem better again? Everyone
knows that feeling of having forgotten something in one’s waking life that
didn’t come along and become clear. That’s why it often seems so impor-
tant—something one had just wanted to say, but it slipped one’s mind.
Leaving a room where one has lived for a longer time, one looks about
strangely. Here, too, something stayed back that one was never able to find.
One takes it along nonetheless, and starts with it again somewhere else.
Dark by Us
What we have here and now, we probably notice least of all. If one gets
what one wants, and walks out on the street, sees how a happy man looks
from the inside, then that’s worth a lot, but at the same time something
inside has been repressed. The dream from before that saw happiness
moving before it so vividly, as it truly is, has repressed itself. Now the pay-
check is really here, and so not here enough, stuck in the haze of what
one just experienced, and soon in the water one usually swims in. Suffer-
ing breaks through more strongly, likely because it’s more related to us as
we still are; we never truly have in hand something happy, as we would be,
just for that reason. A red-hot idea, as they say, is usually not a good one.

Just Now
When do we ever get out, nearer to ourselves? Does one find oneself in
bed, or on the road, or at home, where things seem better again? Everyone
knows that feeling of having forgotten something in one’s waking life that
didn’t come along and become clear. That’s why it often seems so impor-
tant—something one had just wanted to say, but it slipped one’s mind.
Leaving a room where one has lived for a longer time, one looks about
strangely. Here, too, something stayed back that one was never able to find.
One takes it along nonetheless, and starts with it again somewhere else.
Dark by Us
What we have here and now, we probably notice least of all. If one gets
what one wants, and walks out on the street, sees how a happy man looks
from the inside, then that’s worth a lot, but at the same time something
inside has been repressed. The dream from before that saw happiness
moving before it so vividly, as it truly is, has repressed itself. Now the pay-
check is really here, and so not here enough, stuck in the haze of what
one just experienced, and soon in the water one usually swims in. Suffer-
ing breaks through more strongly, likely because it’s more related to us as
we still are; we never truly have in hand something happy, as we would be,
just for that reason. A red-hot idea, as they say, is usually not a good one.

 The Fall into the Now
Joy more easily cools off in the Now when it falls in. It is usually happier
beforehand, or afterward, than just when it appears.
The Fall into the Now

We can also happen onto the Here and Now in the strangest ways; it’s
never far from us. I know a little—almost a low—Eastern European Jew-
ish story whose ending is of course remarkably disappointing. The ending
is clearly meant to be a joke, a truly awkward and flat one, unfunny, but a
joke meant only to fill up the hole we’ve fallen into. That hole is the Now
where we all are, and which the story does not narrate away from as usual;
the little trap door thus needs to be built on.
They studied and debated till they were sleepy.1 Now the Jews in the
prayer house of the village conversed about what they would wish for if an
angel should come. The rabbi said he would be happy if he could just be
rid of his cough. I wish, said another, that I had married off my daughter.
Said a third, And I would wish that I had not had a daughter at all, but a
son, who could take over my business. Finally the rabbi turned to a beg-
gar who had wandered in the night before and now sat, ragged and mis-
erable, on the last bench: What would you wish for, friend? God help you,
alas, you don’t look as though you could wish for nothing.
I would wish, said the beggar, that I were a great king, and had vast
lands. In every city I would have a palace, and in the most beautiful a cap-
ital of onyx, sandalwood, and marble. There I would sit on the throne,
would be feared by my enemies, loved by my people, like King Solomon.
But in battle I don’t enjoy Solomon’s good fortune; the enemy breaks
through, my armies are defeated, and every city and forest goes up in
flames. The enemy is already before my capital; I hear the uproar on the
streets, and sit all alone in the throne room, with crown, scepter, royal
purple, and ermine, deserted by my standard bearer, and I hear how the
people scream for my blood. Then I strip down to my shirt and throw off
all my finery; I jump out the window into the courtyard. I make it
through the town, through the commotion, into the open, and run, run
for my life, through my plundered land. Ten days, to the border, where no
one knows me, and I get across, to other people who know nothing of me,
want nothing of me; I am saved, and since last night I’ve sat here.
 The Fall into the Now
Joy more easily cools off in the Now when it falls in. It is usually happier
beforehand, or afterward, than just when it appears.
The Fall into the Now

We can also happen onto the Here and Now in the strangest ways; it’s
never far from us. I know a little—almost a low—Eastern European Jew-
ish story whose ending is of course remarkably disappointing. The ending
is clearly meant to be a joke, a truly awkward and flat one, unfunny, but a
joke meant only to fill up the hole we’ve fallen into. That hole is the Now
where we all are, and which the story does not narrate away from as usual;
the little trap door thus needs to be built on.
They studied and debated till they were sleepy.1 Now the Jews in the
prayer house of the village conversed about what they would wish for if an
angel should come. The rabbi said he would be happy if he could just be
rid of his cough. I wish, said another, that I had married off my daughter.
Said a third, And I would wish that I had not had a daughter at all, but a
son, who could take over my business. Finally the rabbi turned to a beg-
gar who had wandered in the night before and now sat, ragged and mis-
erable, on the last bench: What would you wish for, friend? God help you,
alas, you don’t look as though you could wish for nothing.
I would wish, said the beggar, that I were a great king, and had vast
lands. In every city I would have a palace, and in the most beautiful a cap-
ital of onyx, sandalwood, and marble. There I would sit on the throne,
would be feared by my enemies, loved by my people, like King Solomon.
But in battle I don’t enjoy Solomon’s good fortune; the enemy breaks
through, my armies are defeated, and every city and forest goes up in
flames. The enemy is already before my capital; I hear the uproar on the
streets, and sit all alone in the throne room, with crown, scepter, royal
purple, and ermine, deserted by my standard bearer, and I hear how the
people scream for my blood. Then I strip down to my shirt and throw off
all my finery; I jump out the window into the courtyard. I make it
through the town, through the commotion, into the open, and run, run
for my life, through my plundered land. Ten days, to the border, where no
one knows me, and I get across, to other people who know nothing of me,
want nothing of me; I am saved, and since last night I’ve sat here.
Long pause, and shock as well; the beggar jumped up, the rabbi looked
at him.
I must say, said the rabbi slowly, I really must say, you are a curious per-
son. Why would you wish for everything again, if you will only lose it all
again? What good were your riches and your splendor?
Rabbi, spoke the beggar, sitting down again, I would have something,
actually: a shirt.
Now the Jews laughed, and shook their heads, and granted the king a
shirt; by a joke the shock was overcome. This remarkable Now as End, or
this End of the Now in the words: since last night I’ve sat here, this break-
through of Being Here from right out of the dream. Mediated verbally,
through the intricate detour that the beggar takes from the subjunctive
form with which he begins, through the narrative present, suddenly to the
actual present. Something comes over the listener when he lands just where
he is; no son will take over this business.
The Spur of Work

How easy it is to want do nothing! How hard it is really to do nothing!
Even when need doesn’t drive us as usual. Even on vacation, when we’re
allowed to yawn.
To be perfectly lazy seems both sweet and simple. The older I get, said
a friend, the more I see that the only right thing would be to do no work.
The whole day, he said, he could just lie by a window onto a Southern
coast, and there wouldn’t have to be anything out there, either. A dog will
stretch on some vacant spot, yawn, take a few steps, and lie down again.
A man will come down the steps of the city hall, where he was sleeping,
and slowly cross over the square to fall sleep again on the church steps. A
little beer later suffices, and some bowling, for everything deserves to have
the sun shine on it; it certainly never shines at the office. Just as water al-
most carries us, and only slight movement is needed to keep from going
under, so does or did the earth carry us, and its table is nearly set. For mod-
est wishes, and if people didn’t live in the North, where they don’t belong.
But that, said the friend, not expecting an audience, is how the sweat of
one’s brow came along, and then just sweat. Below the automobiles race,
the telephone rings like Des Knaben Wunderhorn, twelve hours’ work, and
Long pause, and shock as well; the beggar jumped up, the rabbi looked
at him.
I must say, said the rabbi slowly, I really must say, you are a curious per-
son. Why would you wish for everything again, if you will only lose it all
again? What good were your riches and your splendor?
Rabbi, spoke the beggar, sitting down again, I would have something,
actually: a shirt.
Now the Jews laughed, and shook their heads, and granted the king a
shirt; by a joke the shock was overcome. This remarkable Now as End, or
this End of the Now in the words: since last night I’ve sat here, this break-
through of Being Here from right out of the dream. Mediated verbally,
through the intricate detour that the beggar takes from the subjunctive
form with which he begins, through the narrative present, suddenly to the
actual present. Something comes over the listener when he lands just where
he is; no son will take over this business.
The Spur of Work

How easy it is to want do nothing! How hard it is really to do nothing!
Even when need doesn’t drive us as usual. Even on vacation, when we’re
allowed to yawn.
To be perfectly lazy seems both sweet and simple. The older I get, said
a friend, the more I see that the only right thing would be to do no work.
The whole day, he said, he could just lie by a window onto a Southern
coast, and there wouldn’t have to be anything out there, either. A dog will
stretch on some vacant spot, yawn, take a few steps, and lie down again.
A man will come down the steps of the city hall, where he was sleeping,
and slowly cross over the square to fall sleep again on the church steps. A
little beer later suffices, and some bowling, for everything deserves to have
the sun shine on it; it certainly never shines at the office. Just as water al-
most carries us, and only slight movement is needed to keep from going
under, so does or did the earth carry us, and its table is nearly set. For mod-
est wishes, and if people didn’t live in the North, where they don’t belong.
But that, said the friend, not expecting an audience, is how the sweat of
one’s brow came along, and then just sweat. Below the automobiles race,
the telephone rings like Des Knaben Wunderhorn, twelve hours’ work, and
 The Spur of Work
at night streetlamps outside the bedroom window even.2 A world that

needs hunger as a spur to exploitation, exploitation as a spur to work, but
finally earns only in order to work more, and make life even harder. Some
day we’re supposed to work according to our abilities, in order to enjoy ac-
cording to our needs; I would rather have no abilities beforehand or needs
afterward. Thus spoke my friend, and looked irrefutable; yet his life is dif-
ferent, not even unwillingly different. It should be so easy for him to live
in harmony with his teachings. Instead he works all day, sullenly and ad-
mirably, preaches wine yet drinks water.3
Not only because it’s so hard to escape this constraint once we’re in it.
And not only because we in the North have been driven so far away from
indolence that we can no longer even find it. Only after the work is done
is it good for Protestants and Jews to rest; this rest, said Kant, is the only
happiness that does not include the least admixture of disgust. But not
only the North sours our pleasure before business; what else then?—Well,
our Now, our Being Here [Da-Sein] is dark, even under the sun; laziness it-
self isn’t right when lived out radically. Its teaching sounds irrefutable, but
if even hunger and exploitation were eradicated, if the simple South were
possible among us, laziness would yet remain a demon that no one could
withstand; here it shows its affinity to loneliness. Both—laziness like lone-
liness—contain chemically related poisons, although laziness need not be
lonely, and loneliness is seldom lazy. These are poisons of dark Being Within
Oneself [Insichsein].
Its Now, if we do not drive and stir it, easily decomposes. It congeals,
and not even animals, who always act their part, have the stomach for it.
The continuously lazy, like the continuously lonely, remain in different
ways in an intolerably empty existence, anxious and not right with them-
selves. On his entrance man is a seed, on his exit from work a corpse, fac-
tually as well as symbolically; the negative of this plain but inhuman fact
takes effect before as well as after, as an early death frequently swallows up
a meaningless life. Thus idleness contains a sort of embryonic poison,
loneliness a putrescence; both converge in the negativity of the Not Yet
around which we build and are built, without having built over it. Both
taste desperate after a time, even if we do not take our dilettantishly lazy
Sundays or our totally isolated loneliness as the model. No one has ever
stayed quietly on the couch where he calmly lay down. Even if all the re-
sults of his work seem senseless, distasteful to him, given the brevity of hu-
man existence, complete inactivity is still more distasteful. Since all reli-
The Spur of Work 
gions are founded against the insufficiency of mere existence, of mere

creatureliness, none has yet preached inactivity, nor ever could have.
The uncooked life (as my friend understood the dog on the pavement
and the leisurely beggar) has never been attained, not even in the South,
nor among aborigines. If they do not have our rage to work, and their
days (not their celebrations) are more pervaded or as it were inlaid with
calm than ours, still, the Romanticism of inactivity will find no examples
here. No primitive people could stand to remain primitive. Even the Cyn-
ics, with their most radical reduction, brought it down only as far as the
dog, and he was wrong. The “higher” avoidance of work by “privileged
classes” (Athens, nobility, clergy) could not last long, as emptily higher as
it may often have seemed; it would never have overcome the boredom and
the disgust that are the share of an existence without work. Boredom is
the reward that a life without work pays; it is that lonely deadweight from
which one flees into work and society, the Nothing, or rather Nothing
Yet, over which all people live, the bedchamber and yawnchamber of our
all-too-immediate condition, that can easily become a chamber of hor-
rors. Even in the circles of “pleasant days” there was at least a “labor” of
pleasure, even of representation, as provocative or as false as it may appear,
that still gave laziness color, and made it diligent idleness. There was, above
all—separated from it by monastery walls—leisure [Muße], which, how-
ever, when it’s worth something, when something “happened” in it, is not
only not idleness but far more attacks it at its very center, and not only
contemplatively. If work was a flight from idleness, to create or build some-
thing against it, then leisure is the war against it there and then, so that it
will be decontaminated and become substantive. In short, absolute idle-
ness is our enemy dressed as a friend, and only at the very end our friend,
when labor and above all leisure have fulfilled it; in idleness itself is the
spur to work.
Doing nothing is attractive to the extent that no one can hold out
there. It attracts us because we seem to find ourselves there; it is intolera-
ble because nothing there has really been prepared yet. The idler chases
whims; the lonely man has a feeling of falling, or of being spellbound over
a bottomless abyss. Ghosts and the fear of ghosts also have a place in lone-
liness, have had for ages; in company their manifestations vanish, whose
true cause we ourselves are, the imprecise Being of our very selves. Laziness
and loneliness (both lure us, and into nothing good; both lure us as quiet,
or sometimes depth, yet make us intolerable or hard) have a connection
 No Free Lunch
precisely there: they reveal that our basic being [Grundsein] is wrong. In
an acute as well as still open way; only the advancing solution clarifies the
problem as the problem of our human X. Sloth and solitude are the right
and left posts of the door into a house of which so many dream, and
where no one could hold out. Where even many artists, with their voca-
tion, have likewise revolted against every kind of boredom. For leisure’s
flight from work is none at all, as noted, but only another kind of work.
It is war in the enemy territory of idleness itself, an armed attack on the
locus of the problem. The labor of the everyday flees intolerable inactivity
and subjugates the earth (which is otherwise inhospitable or unsuitable)
so that we can be at home on it. The work of leisure (which is not com-
fortable or aristocratic, but the terminal concept of all emancipated labor)
itself makes order in the gloom of existence; there it builds a house for an-
other time. In the middle of existence it builds this house, where not just
the here you may but above all the here you can of inactivity can finally be
our friend (who until now was only disgust or desolation—that is, the
very spur to work). That does not prevent inactivity and loneliness from
having paralyzed even leisure up to now, because of its nearness, because
of its entry into the lion’s den. Dürer’s idly solitary angel of melancholy
pays for her desire by getting it. The temptations of the womb and the
grave appear here within each other again: of the embryo that has it quiet,
of the corpse that has it deep. But only completed work properly gives
birth to us, drives out the poison of being uncooked and perishable. No
work has ever been the right one; no rest could therefore ever last. We are
not here to eat, but only to cook [kochen]; we can eat later, finally. Our
Here and Now tastes bad without activity, not least because it could be so
superb, and isn’t.
No Free Lunch
He who wants to be a sickle must bend himself betimes. As in school
primers, and wherever we learn to be good. To be satisfied with what we
have; unfortunately, even the motif of Kanitverstan belongs here.4 Differ-
ently and at the same time less dubiously consolatory are the little petit
bourgeois stories in praise of work, though they likewise reassure us in our
confinement by denying our envy of wealth. “Johan the Merry Soap Boiler”
 No Free Lunch
precisely there: they reveal that our basic being [Grundsein] is wrong. In
an acute as well as still open way; only the advancing solution clarifies the
problem as the problem of our human X. Sloth and solitude are the right
and left posts of the door into a house of which so many dream, and
where no one could hold out. Where even many artists, with their voca-
tion, have likewise revolted against every kind of boredom. For leisure’s
flight from work is none at all, as noted, but only another kind of work.
It is war in the enemy territory of idleness itself, an armed attack on the
locus of the problem. The labor of the everyday flees intolerable inactivity
and subjugates the earth (which is otherwise inhospitable or unsuitable)
so that we can be at home on it. The work of leisure (which is not com-
fortable or aristocratic, but the terminal concept of all emancipated labor)
itself makes order in the gloom of existence; there it builds a house for an-
other time. In the middle of existence it builds this house, where not just
the here you may but above all the here you can of inactivity can finally be
our friend (who until now was only disgust or desolation—that is, the
very spur to work). That does not prevent inactivity and loneliness from
having paralyzed even leisure up to now, because of its nearness, because
of its entry into the lion’s den. Dürer’s idly solitary angel of melancholy
pays for her desire by getting it. The temptations of the womb and the
grave appear here within each other again: of the embryo that has it quiet,
of the corpse that has it deep. But only completed work properly gives
birth to us, drives out the poison of being uncooked and perishable. No
work has ever been the right one; no rest could therefore ever last. We are
not here to eat, but only to cook [kochen]; we can eat later, finally. Our
Here and Now tastes bad without activity, not least because it could be so
superb, and isn’t.
No Free Lunch
He who wants to be a sickle must bend himself betimes. As in school
primers, and wherever we learn to be good. To be satisfied with what we
have; unfortunately, even the motif of Kanitverstan belongs here.4 Differ-
ently and at the same time less dubiously consolatory are the little petit
bourgeois stories in praise of work, though they likewise reassure us in our
confinement by denying our envy of wealth. “Johan the Merry Soap Boiler”
No Free Lunch 
belongs here, poor but happy, diligently feeding on scraps, while the rich
man, with all his soft pillows, supposedly has nothing to laugh about.5
Another story belongs here even more clearly, based on the principle—
magically adorned, moreover—that ill-gotten gains profit nothing. The
cheerfully industrious life applauds itself in particular here, only this early
bird gets more than the worm. The unspoken meaning is that the rich are so
only because they were diligent and thrifty; otherwise no one would be poor.
The farmer in this story certainly found that out: the rich, though un-
justly rich, goldsmith all the more. This farmer, usually called only “the
little farmer,” met a witch in the forest while driving wood into town. As
thanks for letting her ride along for a bit, she gave him a little gold ring.
This ring, so she said, had a special power; one need only turn it on one’s
finger and a wish (but only this one) would immediately be granted. Af-
ter the farmer had unloaded his wood in town, he went to a goldsmith to
have the ring assayed. The gold itself was of little value, but when the
farmer told him about the witch the smith became especially friendly,
poured wine, persuaded the farmer to stay the night, and as he slept, fab-
ricated an exact copy of the ring in his workshop; he placed it onto the
farmer’s hand, the real ring onto his own.
No sooner was the duped child of fortune out of his house that dawn
than the smith turned the ring, cried that he wished for four hundred
thousand Taler, and at once they began to rain from the ceiling, ever more,
up to his neck, over his head, until the four hundred thousand were com-
plete. In the morning he was found suffocated; his heirs agreed this was too
much of a good thing, so they split the inheritance more prudently.
Meanwhile the farmer had come home and told his wife the story be-
hind the ring. Instantly she wished that a little plot next to their field
would belong to them. The peasant however was for careful deliberation,
for taking time, and drove more wood; from the profits he was able to buy
the plot anyway. And so on, ever new wishes from the wife, ever more
work from the husband, until the couple in their old age became so pros-
perous that they forgot the ring—and finally their sons laid it in the grave
between farmer and wife.
So that was the end of the song, and the pedagogical, the petit bour-
geois moral of the story: a penny saved is a penny earned, ill-gotten gains
profit nothing. It is not that cheap tricks will never work (the magic ring
granted the smith his gold, after all); instead the little man’s smugness and
narrowness will triumph, without any excess, folly, novelty (unless ordered
 No Free Lunch
by the authorities). That is why vagabonds or similar marginal figures ap-

pear in such schoolbooks no more than they are tolerated—very different,
but just as philistine—in the complacency at the regulars’ table.
How truly childishly a different sign affects us! Certainly not from
some motivational reading, an example to all who want to make it in pe-
tit bourgeois life. It was related by the dear Alfred Klabund, on the con-
trary, and is supposed to have happened in August , of all times—in
other words, in the springtime of the War, very unworldly.6
Early one morning, on the marketplace of a small upper Bavarian town,
a covered cart rolled in, a man and his wife at the reins, and came to a
halt. From under the tarpaulin, where something was growling, the man
drew two stakes, nails, and a rope. He wanted to pound in the stakes.
Now a policeman arrived because of the noise; the man showed him his
permit, with a signature from the magistrate authorizing one day of frol-
ics. The permit named Alois Krautwickerl and wife from Straubing, alias
Salandrini the Wizard and the Queen of the Air.7 The policeman cited
them: Did they not know that a war was on, and everything else was for-
bidden? The wizard did not know, did not understand it, and now had to
chase the small bear that meanwhile emerged from the cart back in, and
the festivities that night certainly did not take place. Distress and more
hunger than usual set in.
The hopeless man at last found an unskilled job in a gasworks, his wife
took in laundry from better homes, and only the little bear continued to
crouch in the cart for weeks on end, staring up at the literally ever more
leaden sky. Not to forget, meanwhile, that a classified had appeared in the
town newspaper, stating: Charitable ladies and gentlemen are urged to
contribute scraps for Salandrini the Wizard’s fortune-telling bear. But only
the Wizard and the tightrope-walking Queen of the Air contributed
scraps, from their meager evening meals; the gathering cold in the cart of
course remained. The man was only allowed to bring the little bear into a
corner of the warm gasworks, but one morning it was dead, whether from
hunger or from toxic fumes. The Queen of the Air threw herself sobbing
onto the little carcass, and it looked, said Klabund, like a painting by Pi-
loty. (For younger readers: Piloty was a historical painter around ; his
most familiar painting, in Munich’s Neue Pinakothek, is called Seni by
Wallenstein’s Corpse.)
The fortune telling did finally bring in some money. The bear’s fur in-
terested an apothecary on the marketplace, and he bought it from the wiz-
Ten Years’ Jail, Seven-Meter Train 
ard for a pittance, hung it up in his shop, and when he had guests, would
occasionally point to it with a sort of nostalgia: “Yes,” he would say, “what
a time that was, when I would hunt bears in the Montenegrin hills!” Be-
cause it was spoken by a “Those that have, get,” it should also have found
favor in schoolbooks; a hunter’s tall tale in the parlor is no tightrope
walker’s frolic.
Ten Years’ Jail, Seven-Meter Train

The rougher it is outside, the nicer it is be warm. It would be no fun to
show off one’s money if everyone had it—if there were no misery to gnash
its teeth and watch, as a double contrast. Thin, lonely, life begins at the top.
But it’s no longer the fashion to set off one’s money. Truly set it off
against the poor, so that it glitters like a star in the night. This means: the
utterly ragged, the vast, scabby estate of the past is gone, more so than the
great wealth. More so than even the great knights who scourged the peas-
ants. Some might be capable of it, but calm, public pleasure killing, which
alone makes a lord a lord, has become ever more difficult. The grand peo-
ple of the Baroque had on their tables such angelically prepared, such sub-
tly roasted geese that the birds would still cry out as they were carved; only
before the eyes of the delighted gourmets did they finally die. Beggars in
the dust, the mob before the gates, who would be trampled, human ver-
min in the city’s ditches and caverns, mad hut and torture chamber were as
much a part of the splendor as the torment of the animal to be eaten be-
came the diners’ pleasure. It’s quite significant that the submerged part of
the iceberg must reach into the depths so that the peak can bask in the sun.
Recently, however, a poor woman restored the correct proportion some-
what. Oddly, the reports could not grasp that, instead writing: “A wed-
ding took place in St. Matthew’s yesterday that created a sensation: by its
splendor, which stood in noteworthy contrast to the prevailing misery,
and by a shocking incident that took place after the ceremony.” Whereas
not even the contrast was at all notable—on the contrary, and the inci-
dent? The bride bore a train seven meters long behind her satin gown,
which then finally threw a silhouette again, so becoming completely pure
white. The spectacle in itself, and so all alone, made possible by exploita-
tion, was not enough; rather, the poverty behind it is the foil that wealth
Ten Years’ Jail, Seven-Meter Train 
ard for a pittance, hung it up in his shop, and when he had guests, would
occasionally point to it with a sort of nostalgia: “Yes,” he would say, “what
a time that was, when I would hunt bears in the Montenegrin hills!” Be-
cause it was spoken by a “Those that have, get,” it should also have found
favor in schoolbooks; a hunter’s tall tale in the parlor is no tightrope
walker’s frolic.
Ten Years’ Jail, Seven-Meter Train

The rougher it is outside, the nicer it is be warm. It would be no fun to
show off one’s money if everyone had it—if there were no misery to gnash
its teeth and watch, as a double contrast. Thin, lonely, life begins at the top.
But it’s no longer the fashion to set off one’s money. Truly set it off
against the poor, so that it glitters like a star in the night. This means: the
utterly ragged, the vast, scabby estate of the past is gone, more so than the
great wealth. More so than even the great knights who scourged the peas-
ants. Some might be capable of it, but calm, public pleasure killing, which
alone makes a lord a lord, has become ever more difficult. The grand peo-
ple of the Baroque had on their tables such angelically prepared, such sub-
tly roasted geese that the birds would still cry out as they were carved; only
before the eyes of the delighted gourmets did they finally die. Beggars in
the dust, the mob before the gates, who would be trampled, human ver-
min in the city’s ditches and caverns, mad hut and torture chamber were as
much a part of the splendor as the torment of the animal to be eaten be-
came the diners’ pleasure. It’s quite significant that the submerged part of
the iceberg must reach into the depths so that the peak can bask in the sun.
Recently, however, a poor woman restored the correct proportion some-
what. Oddly, the reports could not grasp that, instead writing: “A wed-
ding took place in St. Matthew’s yesterday that created a sensation: by its
splendor, which stood in noteworthy contrast to the prevailing misery,
and by a shocking incident that took place after the ceremony.” Whereas
not even the contrast was at all notable—on the contrary, and the inci-
dent? The bride bore a train seven meters long behind her satin gown,
which then finally threw a silhouette again, so becoming completely pure
white. The spectacle in itself, and so all alone, made possible by exploita-
tion, was not enough; rather, the poverty behind it is the foil that wealth
 Silence and Mirrors
needs above all for its display, if it wants not only to earn but to put its
earnings on display as glamour. The misery of the Depression that watched
this seven-meter train go by was hardly deep enough for so much wealth
trying to gain the light of day, or rather of night.
Only the shocking incident, as the reporters called it, really added some-
thing, criminally, out of prison. De profundis a white-haired woman
stormed into this pageantry and threw herself in front of the train, al-
legedly screaming, “Give me back my son! Give truth its due! My son is in
prison because of you!” If the train is out of Courths-Maler, the old woman
is from those true regions of misery that were once part of feudalism, and
that now so splendidly disturb the juste milieu of our day, too: a wedding
in Baroque.8
Of the rich we still have enough, yet we lack precisely the picturesque
poor. Of great lords we have enough, yet we lack the properly writhing
worms beneath their feet, the bodyguards of contrast. From the unem-
ployed there comes merely an uneasy—and sometimes very dangerous—
misery, but not the necessary, attuned, corporatively attuned misery that
once made the dungeons below the banquet tables groan, and so left
everyone a place. This, finally, is national: to take from the rich their Jew-
ish haste, to make them a nobility, a brilliant one. This, finally, is nation-
alsozialistisch: to teach the poor to be so, and to remain so, by opening up
their view of the nobles again. When will kings again ride white trotters
across the battlefield by evening light, over the bodies of cripples?
Silence and Mirrors

I have a somewhat touchy friend who sees everyone very clearly, him-
self somewhat less so. Once he criticized a man at his table for all sorts of
indications, with such painful exactitude that he completely spent him-
self. So I asked him how the inhabitant of his own apartment would
appear to him if he didn’t know him, and could merely read him off
his shoes, his clothes. The nervous man’s lips began to tremble; he must
have seen more here than I had, or could have. In content hardly compa-
rable, sublime and yet related, however, is a report by Herodotus, I later
found—and other writers after him, slightly differently but more com-
pactly—of a phenomenon that borders on my friend’s and everyone’s dark
 Silence and Mirrors
needs above all for its display, if it wants not only to earn but to put its
earnings on display as glamour. The misery of the Depression that watched
this seven-meter train go by was hardly deep enough for so much wealth
trying to gain the light of day, or rather of night.
Only the shocking incident, as the reporters called it, really added some-
thing, criminally, out of prison. De profundis a white-haired woman
stormed into this pageantry and threw herself in front of the train, al-
legedly screaming, “Give me back my son! Give truth its due! My son is in
prison because of you!” If the train is out of Courths-Maler, the old woman
is from those true regions of misery that were once part of feudalism, and
that now so splendidly disturb the juste milieu of our day, too: a wedding
in Baroque.8
Of the rich we still have enough, yet we lack precisely the picturesque
poor. Of great lords we have enough, yet we lack the properly writhing
worms beneath their feet, the bodyguards of contrast. From the unem-
ployed there comes merely an uneasy—and sometimes very dangerous—
misery, but not the necessary, attuned, corporatively attuned misery that
once made the dungeons below the banquet tables groan, and so left
everyone a place. This, finally, is national: to take from the rich their Jew-
ish haste, to make them a nobility, a brilliant one. This, finally, is nation-
alsozialistisch: to teach the poor to be so, and to remain so, by opening up
their view of the nobles again. When will kings again ride white trotters
across the battlefield by evening light, over the bodies of cripples?
Silence and Mirrors

I have a somewhat touchy friend who sees everyone very clearly, him-
self somewhat less so. Once he criticized a man at his table for all sorts of
indications, with such painful exactitude that he completely spent him-
self. So I asked him how the inhabitant of his own apartment would
appear to him if he didn’t know him, and could merely read him off
his shoes, his clothes. The nervous man’s lips began to tremble; he must
have seen more here than I had, or could have. In content hardly compa-
rable, sublime and yet related, however, is a report by Herodotus, I later
found—and other writers after him, slightly differently but more com-
pactly—of a phenomenon that borders on my friend’s and everyone’s dark
Silence and Mirrors 
bedchamber, that they found worthy of the following subtlety: as Psam-

metic, the last Egyptian pharaoh, after the disastrous battle of Pelusium,
was led before Cambyses, the Persian victor, he was met along the way
first by his daughter, as slave, and the pharaoh was silent; then by his son,
who was being taken to his execution; the pharaoh remained unmoved.
But as he saw a porter from his army with his hands in fetters, Psammetic
cried out and lamented his fate with great force.
Why does the king cry out, I asked this friend who saw others so
sharply, and why does he cry so late? That there was something here that
concerned us, and very usefully made us notice, was clear. Suddenly the
event, so far-fetched, was in the house, the room where we were living.
The simplest explanation was that the servant was like the drop that brings
sorrow to overflowing. But this was too obvious to be likely; the story is
about a pharaoh, not some ordinary citizen. The pharaoh’s sorrow comes
so late, in another interpretation, because it is blocked, blocked by pride.
Particularly in proud people, after all, the natural intervals between the
stimulus to sorrow, the emotion, and the expression of it are considerably
delayed. If the stimulus is a pot, then even with the usual kind of shock its
cover is not in place but comes only later; the stimulus and the emotion
coincide only afterward. Alteration through such a great shock as the
pharaoh’s is much like a railroad collision, if one may use this anachro-
nism; the wagons have been shoved so far together that with the servant
the son suddenly rises up, and the true song of sorrow breaks into an en-
tirely different rhythm. But this explanation too does not yet seem right,
for it just pushes everything about the pharaoh onto the repressive pride
of a great noble; that would not affect modern readers of his conduct as
peculiarly as it does. This interpretation also makes the servant too acci-
dental, too much a mere moment where the decisive sorrow belatedly, and
syncopically, breaks through.
Is it not likelier, asks a third interpretation, that our own dark Being
Here and Now plays a role here too, especially muffling and obscuring,
concealing, delaying? Such that what moves away from us, or indeed is at
our lowest limit, may sometimes better reflect or betray own condition
than what is much too close, complete with daughter and son? The pharaoh
himself, then his daughter, and even closer to him the heir to his throne,
his son, are his own flesh and blood, his immediate experience, and conse-
quently in a zone of silence; but the servant, as something experienced
quite distantly, something completely alien and yet still connected, breaks
 Ways Not to Be Seen
through that, and the pharaoh cries. Just as anyone would cry, even in fa-
vorable situations, to see another in his place, in his habitat, and so could
connect the intensity of his dark feeling of being with the estrangement of
this view. The servant in fetters, without even any grand gestures, then be-
comes the mirror of one’s own state, which in itself is always critical. No
one should be hailed as fortunate before his death, and certainly not in the
mirror of his death.
Ways Not to Be Seen

When a certain young vagabond wanted to conceal himself especially
well, he went home. No one would suspect him of being there; he could
outlast the search. On the street he would have been more easily recog-
nized, because there he was as, and where, one envisioned him. As an En-
glish ship approached an island in the Fijis for the first time, no one there
saw it, although it was considerably further away than that young man.
But the natives not only did not suspect the ship’s presence; there were
still other reasons it fell outside their range of vision. Thus the islanders,
as the ship anchored offshore because of the reefs about the island, and
sent out a canoe that sped toward the shore with a great heave-ho, saw
only this canoe—as Georg Foster relates, concerning Cook’s ocean voy-
age—but not the ship. For the canoe, sleek as it was, they could still partly
compare to their own crude dugouts, so they still had access to it optically.
The majestic frigate, however, anchored offshore: to that there was no ac-
cess; there was no jack-ladder of comparison. It remained literally below
the horizon, which is the horizon of perception. Which of course has a
parallel in culture, where the annoyed Babbitt stands blind before a work
that goes beyond his range of vision.
Such unseeing can of course be effected very deliberately, insofar as
a gaze is shrewdly satiated before it finishes, finds its target. Thus one
arranged for the very artificial unseeing of certain objects in , as the
Prussians stood before Paris, again a sort of frigate, but a quite extraordi-
nary one, a work of art. We are speaking of the Mona Lisa: she, at least,
should not be plundered. So she was not only brought from the Louvre to
Hôtel des Invalides, but a wall was pierced there, a junk-room set up be-
hind it, with a great deal of scrap and apparently a century of dust on the
 Ways Not to Be Seen
through that, and the pharaoh cries. Just as anyone would cry, even in fa-
vorable situations, to see another in his place, in his habitat, and so could
connect the intensity of his dark feeling of being with the estrangement of
this view. The servant in fetters, without even any grand gestures, then be-
comes the mirror of one’s own state, which in itself is always critical. No
one should be hailed as fortunate before his death, and certainly not in the
mirror of his death.
Ways Not to Be Seen

When a certain young vagabond wanted to conceal himself especially
well, he went home. No one would suspect him of being there; he could
outlast the search. On the street he would have been more easily recog-
nized, because there he was as, and where, one envisioned him. As an En-
glish ship approached an island in the Fijis for the first time, no one there
saw it, although it was considerably further away than that young man.
But the natives not only did not suspect the ship’s presence; there were
still other reasons it fell outside their range of vision. Thus the islanders,
as the ship anchored offshore because of the reefs about the island, and
sent out a canoe that sped toward the shore with a great heave-ho, saw
only this canoe—as Georg Foster relates, concerning Cook’s ocean voy-
age—but not the ship. For the canoe, sleek as it was, they could still partly
compare to their own crude dugouts, so they still had access to it optically.
The majestic frigate, however, anchored offshore: to that there was no ac-
cess; there was no jack-ladder of comparison. It remained literally below
the horizon, which is the horizon of perception. Which of course has a
parallel in culture, where the annoyed Babbitt stands blind before a work
that goes beyond his range of vision.
Such unseeing can of course be effected very deliberately, insofar as
a gaze is shrewdly satiated before it finishes, finds its target. Thus one
arranged for the very artificial unseeing of certain objects in , as the
Prussians stood before Paris, again a sort of frigate, but a quite extraordi-
nary one, a work of art. We are speaking of the Mona Lisa: she, at least,
should not be plundered. So she was not only brought from the Louvre to
Hôtel des Invalides, but a wall was pierced there, a junk-room set up be-
hind it, with a great deal of scrap and apparently a century of dust on the
floor, a clutter of old pews, and more. The new opening in the wall was
cemented over again, not too carefully of course, just as when looters are
actually supposed to be lured by a hastily improvised hiding place. The
ruse came off a few days later: the spiked helmets burst in and in fact did
not find the Mona Lisa. They found instead, in the middle of the room,
the map of Orléans—authentic, by the way—which at that time had not
yet been captured, and they stood there in quiet satisfaction; the raid’s ob-
jective seemed to have been achieved. A few steps away the Mona Lisa
leaned her face to the wall, unseen, saved, as her visitors retreated. Had it
been an image of the Virgin, believers of another age would perhaps have
said that Maria interceded; she saved herself. A cool strategy to make
something unseeable, the same usually used to expose: it diverted the cov-
etous gaze from the main thing by satisfying it prematurely with much
less. Which of course happens often to obsessives, less positively in that
they forget, overlook, the most important thing. Yet on the other hand
Mona Lisas are certainly very rare, and—putting it politely—better a ca-
noe to imitate, or even a blueprint to distract, than nothing at all.
Imminent Boredom
I once knew someone who must have wanted to get outside of himself,
but it didn’t work out. In the attempt to be sociable, he went awry, fell
mute again. Yet in the meantime one would watch curiously: how he
wanted to be lively and yet always ended otherwise.
If one asked him how he’d slept, the answer was: When? Last night? If
one claimed that he looked particularly surly again today, he would feel as
though he deserved it, as though he too had made a certain agreeable con-
tribution to the friendship. His enjoyment did not stem from vanity, but
just from the satisfaction of a desire to be liked. So he would answer, with
his slight smile, You see it too? I saw it already last night in the mirror,
while washing my hands. Or small, very flat, in any case generally unfa-
miliar fish were being served at the inn in Southern France where one had
run into the melancholy Münchner: He bowed far over the plate and
shouted, The Isar has flounder too! Then he started, and said softly, The
Isarlust, I mean. And then, more softly still, Cake, I mean.9 So the fish and
the words that the peculiar man drew from within himself visibly altered
floor, a clutter of old pews, and more. The new opening in the wall was
cemented over again, not too carefully of course, just as when looters are
actually supposed to be lured by a hastily improvised hiding place. The
ruse came off a few days later: the spiked helmets burst in and in fact did
not find the Mona Lisa. They found instead, in the middle of the room,
the map of Orléans—authentic, by the way—which at that time had not
yet been captured, and they stood there in quiet satisfaction; the raid’s ob-
jective seemed to have been achieved. A few steps away the Mona Lisa
leaned her face to the wall, unseen, saved, as her visitors retreated. Had it
been an image of the Virgin, believers of another age would perhaps have
said that Maria interceded; she saved herself. A cool strategy to make
something unseeable, the same usually used to expose: it diverted the cov-
etous gaze from the main thing by satisfying it prematurely with much
less. Which of course happens often to obsessives, less positively in that
they forget, overlook, the most important thing. Yet on the other hand
Mona Lisas are certainly very rare, and—putting it politely—better a ca-
noe to imitate, or even a blueprint to distract, than nothing at all.
Imminent Boredom
I once knew someone who must have wanted to get outside of himself,
but it didn’t work out. In the attempt to be sociable, he went awry, fell
mute again. Yet in the meantime one would watch curiously: how he
wanted to be lively and yet always ended otherwise.
If one asked him how he’d slept, the answer was: When? Last night? If
one claimed that he looked particularly surly again today, he would feel as
though he deserved it, as though he too had made a certain agreeable con-
tribution to the friendship. His enjoyment did not stem from vanity, but
just from the satisfaction of a desire to be liked. So he would answer, with
his slight smile, You see it too? I saw it already last night in the mirror,
while washing my hands. Or small, very flat, in any case generally unfa-
miliar fish were being served at the inn in Southern France where one had
run into the melancholy Münchner: He bowed far over the plate and
shouted, The Isar has flounder too! Then he started, and said softly, The
Isarlust, I mean. And then, more softly still, Cake, I mean.9 So the fish and
the words that the peculiar man drew from within himself visibly altered
 Imminent Boredom
their shape, like deep sea fish, as soon as he pulled them to the surface and
handed them around in the light. Consequently he would take them
back, but of course no longer in their previous form.
One afternoon, after numerous rounds had been drunk, this Münch-
ner, an expert on speechlessness, related a story, abruptly and laconically,
yet with ironic intention. A gentleman who’d been around found some-
thing. It was given to him not on the street but in Brussels, at the theater.
The play didn’t interest him, so he looked for the woman who had already
struck his notice before, in the loge right above him. She was certainly
very pretty, and supposedly, as in a novel, looked back at him, holding a
note in her hand, and waved. The gentleman stood up and left the the-
ater, up the stairs to the next level, to the beautiful woman’s loge. She
passed the note to him with a quick glance, and pulled the door shut
again. The gentleman read the note: that is, he wanted to read it, but he
couldn’t, for he understood nothing in it; the words were completely in-
comprehensible, in an apparently unfamiliar language.
The gentleman stood there, utterly baffled, but the usher was already
beside him, looked at the note sideways, turned away, and said only, Come
with me. The gentleman became rude, the usher ruder, and the gentleman
angry; the usher went to fetch the supervisor. The stranger had already
stopped paying attention and studied the mysterious note: the letters were
written with a colorless ink, round and squiggly; he had no clue. Mean-
while the supervisor arrived, very surprised, but no sooner did he see the
note than he turned, signaled security, and bade the gentleman to leave
the theater. Completely dazed, the gentleman followed the officer down
the steps to the cash register, where his refund lay ready, out the front and
onto the broad, silent plaza. There the gentleman remained for some
time, and could not get to the bottom of the matter.
Finally he decided to hire a taxi to the hotel in order to get an explana-
tion from someone who knew the city, called his manager, and described
the improbable incident. His manager knew the stranger as an honorable
man with fine clothes and refined manners, was appropriately indignant
about the provinciality that predominated here, expounded on the absurd
conditions in this city, especially at the theater. Yet when he himself saw
the note, he chewed over all sorts of words, as though eating something he
didn’t like, and said: That’s just how it is; I, too, would bid the gentleman
to leave this hotel. Indeed I would advise, insofar as the gentleman was of
Imminent Boredom 
course here at our invitation, that he flee Brussels tonight, to France, or

even across the Channel.
The gentleman grew faint, and stumbled out into the fresh air; but
here—thus continued the Münchner, reluctantly—one can easily imagine
everything that would still happen that night, and afterward. The gentle-
man was basically a reserved type, and Brussels was unfamiliar to him;
he’d never harmed a fly, so who would have something against him here?
He only wanted to get away sometimes, out of his lifeless routine, or he
sometimes wanted to recall something from the life that he otherwise
didn’t notice, that he forgot from one day to the next. But it was not from
a need for adventure, nor even from an impulse, that he had fallen into
the hands of this unknown woman—indeed, with that note in his hand,
of the unknown as such. Now he had it in abundance, and in England,
whence he fled, the fantastic story did not improve. Here, too, rumors
spread; acquaintances on the street stood back for a while, business rela-
tionships broke up in England as in France, Germany, even distant, indo-
lent, but superstitious Spain. Yet no one ever explained; the mystery that
everyone understood, or seemed to understand, could not be solved.
Then one morning the gentleman, whose mail now consisted solely of
slanders and threats, received a letter from North America, from an old
business partner, from which he concluded that his misfortune was un-
known over there. Full of a longing to meet impartial people again, full of a
new hope of getting to the bottom of those ciphers, he shipped out to New
York, and hurried immediately to the office of his acquaintance, an attorney
and notary. I have a proposition to make, he said quickly; he locked the
door and lay a Browning on the table. I won’t be caught up in anything
again, he continued, and briefly told his story. Then: I know, Sir, that as
soon as you’ve read the note, you too will forsake my company, and the boy-
cott will just resume. So you may choose: explain the note to me, and I will
give you ten thousand dollars, half of my present fortune. If you treat me as
everyone else has, I will shoot first you, then myself; it’s all the same to me.
The attorney looked at the check, looked at the revolver, offered the usual
cigarette, and spoke: “Of course I will grant your wish. May I see the docu-
ment, please?” The gentleman opened his briefcase, felt about, looked in-
side, found nothing; the compartments were empty. He had lost the note.
So the Münchner told his exceedingly disappointing story; one could
sense his regret at again falling so short. But even if nothing was tangible,
 Imminent Boredom
the conversation continued, politely and thoughtfully. If no one could

look into the note, still the effect was enough. Like the attorney and the
unfortunate gentleman, the unsolved mystery drove the guests on, back-
ward, forward, to the question, What could have been written on that pa-
per? A journalist at once made a prize competition out of it such as the
world had never seen. A novelist, otherwise very imaginative, resorted to
cant, suspected some bizarre sexual proposition; but this structure quickly
collapsed. A philologist retreated to the storerooms of his scholarship,
emerged again with some traveling legend, an old motif, Indian, astral,
that was secularized here. Yet he could not present it, but said only: The
Americans, in their desire to baffle the rest of us, come up with the most
exquisite delicacies.
A metaphysician of the inessential was at the table, otherwise very com-
petent in such matters; this specialist in cracking smaller cosmic nuts ex-
claimed suddenly, to the greatest elation, that he had the solution. But as
one pressed him, it was only that he thought the whole thing just seemed
right. Another thought of Oedipus, who had solved every riddle. Except
that he was the son of Laertes; this the Thebans noticed sooner than he—
he couldn’t read his note because it was much too close. Yet because be-
tween the modern gentleman and Oedipus, between the urban legend
and the great myth, there was no greater similarity than that of parody,
the allusion went nowhere; without this channel between the magazine
story and antiquity, which a Surrealist might have found, he would never
have gone abroad.
The melancholy Münchner said no more, nor would he answer ques-
tions. But had he not perhaps told something, if not about himself, then
about the stranger? About a reserved man who just wanted to recall some-
thing from his unnoticed life, about his awkwardness and his lonely sor-
row? And was not the decipherment of the note actually long ago accom-
plished? Is not the final misfortune of loss just before the goal the very
heart of the matter? Was not the folder empty from the beginning, as the
inexpressible in us that has nothing to say, as depths within us that do not
even exist, as the convoluted incognito of emptiness and ennui? Did not
the gentleman in the story, just like his drably profound narrator, seem
like the distillation of absolute boredom? This, his own sign, he cannot
himself read; he knows it only by its effect on others, as an effect without
a cause, as the escape from this effect without cause. Like the temporarily
attached listeners of his story, he has only a vague curiosity, and an inces-
santly fruitless brooding about the void of his abyss, about the muteness
of his letter.
Yet it should be permitted to hear something more resonant from the
Münchner, the one who had finally become so talkative. There are some
people today, in this increasingly vacant, forlorn bourgeois age, who, just
like the sudden narrator of this shaggy dog story, go about like a child
eavesdropping on adults. These adults all know something that the child
does not. Or there’s something that the adult as adult hasn’t found, that
rather lies in the overloaded gaze when, on leaving a rented room, he looks
about, wondering what he might have forgotten, or what lies in precisely
that overloaded unease when he can’t find the words that were just on the
tip of his tongue, which, precisely by vanishing, seem so tremendously im-
portant. The Münchner, in a not completely eccentric way, found himself
permanently in a kind of adolescence, which is otherwise only sexual but
here is existential. An eccentric who has thus become representative is even
able, with this overloaded anecdote, to stand there as a figure from an un-
written though imaginable novel, like someone keeping his ears open, so to
speak. Since this character is out of action, and alone, his ears are open to
the kind of impression, or expression, of which a more solid citizen knows
nothing, thank God. As when the Münchner, on the occasion of hearing a
phrase in passing without understanding it, admits that an old suspicion
arose in him that there was something particularly important there that he
did not know, whose traces he would find only by accident. Others know
it, he thinks, perhaps everyone knows it, even though they don’t know
what to do with it, and don’t care; I alone don’t know it, and I’m wasting
my life because I don’t know; what can it be? So the note stays lost, sought
by the enfant perdu, without any Lost and Found Office. Of course no one,
speaking of that equally unsatisfying story, should feel too safe from its arc
light, as though exhaled by a death; it is after all hardly agnostic. Of course
Kafka’s surveyor K., if he’d carried around such a public wanted poster,
would also not have recognized himself in it.
Moment and Image

If we’re slack, we really don’t notice what’s happening. This is what oc-
curred to a girl as her friend picked her up; she saw him again after a long
santly fruitless brooding about the void of his abyss, about the muteness
of his letter.
Yet it should be permitted to hear something more resonant from the
Münchner, the one who had finally become so talkative. There are some
people today, in this increasingly vacant, forlorn bourgeois age, who, just
like the sudden narrator of this shaggy dog story, go about like a child
eavesdropping on adults. These adults all know something that the child
does not. Or there’s something that the adult as adult hasn’t found, that
rather lies in the overloaded gaze when, on leaving a rented room, he looks
about, wondering what he might have forgotten, or what lies in precisely
that overloaded unease when he can’t find the words that were just on the
tip of his tongue, which, precisely by vanishing, seem so tremendously im-
portant. The Münchner, in a not completely eccentric way, found himself
permanently in a kind of adolescence, which is otherwise only sexual but
here is existential. An eccentric who has thus become representative is even
able, with this overloaded anecdote, to stand there as a figure from an un-
written though imaginable novel, like someone keeping his ears open, so to
speak. Since this character is out of action, and alone, his ears are open to
the kind of impression, or expression, of which a more solid citizen knows
nothing, thank God. As when the Münchner, on the occasion of hearing a
phrase in passing without understanding it, admits that an old suspicion
arose in him that there was something particularly important there that he
did not know, whose traces he would find only by accident. Others know
it, he thinks, perhaps everyone knows it, even though they don’t know
what to do with it, and don’t care; I alone don’t know it, and I’m wasting
my life because I don’t know; what can it be? So the note stays lost, sought
by the enfant perdu, without any Lost and Found Office. Of course no one,
speaking of that equally unsatisfying story, should feel too safe from its arc
light, as though exhaled by a death; it is after all hardly agnostic. Of course
Kafka’s surveyor K., if he’d carried around such a public wanted poster,
would also not have recognized himself in it.
Moment and Image

If we’re slack, we really don’t notice what’s happening. This is what oc-
curred to a girl as her friend picked her up; she saw him again after a long
 Potemkin’s Signature
interval. On the way home he gave her a belated letter that he’d written.
Whereupon the girl put her friend aside and read the written words,
which were more important to her than the ones he’d just spoken. Inca-
pable of doing the immediate, she took refuge in love as a letter—fled ex-
perience as such, passed in the middle of experience over into something
external to it, into a memory, or something already set, that replaced di-
rect experience. That was easier for her to see than the here and now that
mists over, and that we can never hold on to for long. But when one is
powerfully and personally there, the Now grows empty in a different way.
Why aren’t you taller?—we recall the father who said that to his lost
daughter; some of that belongs here too, to the lived moment where one
sees little just when one is directly in it, without any letter. Of course we
know the will to keep returning to the site of some great happiness. Yet
when the beloved who granted this happiness is far away, lost, or dead, a
peculiar scruple, upon noticing it, turns away from her return. One not
only feels that one’s own existence should not be exploited in this way un-
der the light. Rather, the darkness of the moment just lived immediately
again back there cuts across, temptingly or destructively, a long-preserved
memory. It cuts across the letter in memory that can make immediacy
ever brighter, indeed that lets it mature as an image. For to the extent that
one is worth something, one does not just meet life immediately, but also
holds it together in memory, paces off the frontline of the past as a train
of images. But because one did not have the moment back then, not even
in one’s greatest fervor, its image will not come right. One turns back, and
finds oneself refreshed in what one lived back then, but often less con-
scious of it, poorer in salvaged substance.
Potemkin’s Signature
Prince Potemkin had hours when he would admit no one. His room
would be deathly quiet then; no one knew what he was up to. Affairs of
state idled, and his councilors had a good time. No report took place; the
peak was clouded. Once, however, as an attack lasted an unusually long
time, the most urgent documents arrived. They could be handled without
the president, but not without his signature. His councilors waited in the
antechambers; no one dared to step before the prince for fear of losing his
 Potemkin’s Signature
interval. On the way home he gave her a belated letter that he’d written.
Whereupon the girl put her friend aside and read the written words,
which were more important to her than the ones he’d just spoken. Inca-
pable of doing the immediate, she took refuge in love as a letter—fled ex-
perience as such, passed in the middle of experience over into something
external to it, into a memory, or something already set, that replaced di-
rect experience. That was easier for her to see than the here and now that
mists over, and that we can never hold on to for long. But when one is
powerfully and personally there, the Now grows empty in a different way.
Why aren’t you taller?—we recall the father who said that to his lost
daughter; some of that belongs here too, to the lived moment where one
sees little just when one is directly in it, without any letter. Of course we
know the will to keep returning to the site of some great happiness. Yet
when the beloved who granted this happiness is far away, lost, or dead, a
peculiar scruple, upon noticing it, turns away from her return. One not
only feels that one’s own existence should not be exploited in this way un-
der the light. Rather, the darkness of the moment just lived immediately
again back there cuts across, temptingly or destructively, a long-preserved
memory. It cuts across the letter in memory that can make immediacy
ever brighter, indeed that lets it mature as an image. For to the extent that
one is worth something, one does not just meet life immediately, but also
holds it together in memory, paces off the frontline of the past as a train
of images. But because one did not have the moment back then, not even
in one’s greatest fervor, its image will not come right. One turns back, and
finds oneself refreshed in what one lived back then, but often less con-
scious of it, poorer in salvaged substance.
Potemkin’s Signature
Prince Potemkin had hours when he would admit no one. His room
would be deathly quiet then; no one knew what he was up to. Affairs of
state idled, and his councilors had a good time. No report took place; the
peak was clouded. Once, however, as an attack lasted an unusually long
time, the most urgent documents arrived. They could be handled without
the president, but not without his signature. His councilors waited in the
antechambers; no one dared to step before the prince for fear of losing his
Incognito to Oneself 
position, or being exiled. Until a young scribe by the name of Petukov saw
the great chance of his career. He fetched the sheaf of documents and went
in to the president with one push, without knocking; Potemkin sat in a
corner of the darkened room, hair unkempt, and utterly vacant, chewing
his nails. Petukov set the documents wordlessly before him, handed the
prince a pen, and the prince took his fingers from his mouth, undersigned
decree after decree, with his eyes as though asleep, one after the other. The
scribe burst from the room: Success! The prince has signed everything!—
and held out the documents. Couriers hastened by to carry the decrees to
Moscow, Kiev, Odessa, to the regional governors. Yet before the envelopes
were sealed, an older official took out one of the documents that had come
from his jurisdiction. Started, pulled out the remaining papers, showed
them: they had certainly all been signed. At the bottom of every document,
in Potemkin’s hand, stood: Petukov, Petukov, Petukov. . . .
Pushkin, who tells more or less this story, thereby provides not only the
most uncanny documentation of melancholy, of the relentless brooding
that burrows through the fog, of the mind lost in a nameless twilight, who
takes the name Petukov because there at least something stirs, to that
mind lost under the false sun that can still make any name gray—Petukov
or Potemkin, whichever. Instead, insofar as the story concerns Prince
Potemkin, the luckiest of men, the favorite, insofar as the lucky ones gen-
erally (not only despots) easily become melancholy at the peak of their
lives (the still ambitious or wistful more easily get manic), one can see how
little peak there is above the fog that is man, how his name and character
often lie like an island within it, one perhaps more solidly elevated than
Potemkin’s, but always prone to fog, Hebridean: indeed that this, which
we already call Heaven, even when painted to the dimensions of our hap-
piest days, might in the long run (which is what matters), be really just a
hothouse of images that are still never far above the fog of existence, the
sorrow of fulfillment.
Incognito to Oneself
The incident was minor, but has something in it. It was reported only
as a work accident at a circus encamped on the plaza. The clown was just
supposed to fill a vacant moment, and therefore climbed over the forestage,
Incognito to Oneself 
position, or being exiled. Until a young scribe by the name of Petukov saw
the great chance of his career. He fetched the sheaf of documents and went
in to the president with one push, without knocking; Potemkin sat in a
corner of the darkened room, hair unkempt, and utterly vacant, chewing
his nails. Petukov set the documents wordlessly before him, handed the
prince a pen, and the prince took his fingers from his mouth, undersigned
decree after decree, with his eyes as though asleep, one after the other. The
scribe burst from the room: Success! The prince has signed everything!—
and held out the documents. Couriers hastened by to carry the decrees to
Moscow, Kiev, Odessa, to the regional governors. Yet before the envelopes
were sealed, an older official took out one of the documents that had come
from his jurisdiction. Started, pulled out the remaining papers, showed
them: they had certainly all been signed. At the bottom of every document,
in Potemkin’s hand, stood: Petukov, Petukov, Petukov. . . .
Pushkin, who tells more or less this story, thereby provides not only the
most uncanny documentation of melancholy, of the relentless brooding
that burrows through the fog, of the mind lost in a nameless twilight, who
takes the name Petukov because there at least something stirs, to that
mind lost under the false sun that can still make any name gray—Petukov
or Potemkin, whichever. Instead, insofar as the story concerns Prince
Potemkin, the luckiest of men, the favorite, insofar as the lucky ones gen-
erally (not only despots) easily become melancholy at the peak of their
lives (the still ambitious or wistful more easily get manic), one can see how
little peak there is above the fog that is man, how his name and character
often lie like an island within it, one perhaps more solidly elevated than
Potemkin’s, but always prone to fog, Hebridean: indeed that this, which
we already call Heaven, even when painted to the dimensions of our hap-
piest days, might in the long run (which is what matters), be really just a
hothouse of images that are still never far above the fog of existence, the
sorrow of fulfillment.
Incognito to Oneself
The incident was minor, but has something in it. It was reported only
as a work accident at a circus encamped on the plaza. The clown was just
supposed to fill a vacant moment, and therefore climbed over the forestage,
 Incognito to Oneself
but nothing more came of it. The ringmaster asked him, as usual: What do
you want here? The clown replied that he was looking for Mr. Table
d’Hôte, who, he had heard, was due for dinner at this time. This answer
had been agreed upon earlier, and likewise the question which the ring-
master then asked: But who are you? What is your name? Then something
entirely against the script took place; the clown lost not only the thread but
consciousness, at least of himself. He began to sway, flailed his arms about,
mumbled the same thing over and over in a strange voice: Don’t know,
don’t know, don’t know. The ringmaster now also departed from the script,
quite understandably: But you must know your name, who you are! Asked
several times, to no avail. Yet Nobody was silent; the laughter from the
public, esteemed local gentry, died out. Until the suddenly nameless man
came to, awoke as it were, and back in line, like the public too, that un-
derstands and wants only amusement. The man who’d lost a grip on him-
self, however, now began to scream, confusingly: No! I’m a clown, and my
name is Chuckles! Tears welled; the everyday, or everynight, had him again.
In all this, of course, the clown, who the previous and sudden Nobody
remembered himself to be, belonged to no prosaic occupation, à la judge
or sales manager, whereby he might act important, as though he really
were important. He belonged rather to the itinerants—that is, unsettled
people, seldom respected, who don’t lap much milk and honey. Even so,
they stand, shuffle, leap, tumble, lift weights at the margin of what the
bourgeois calls the performing arts, and avoid any monotony. Yet the tem-
porarily nameless clown made them think, just as if he had come to him-
self as such, and especially as if he had lost himself as someone from this or
that slot. Is the everynight truly his role, into which he’s wrapped accord-
ing to his pass and work permit, and is it ever our true definition, into
which a settled occupation baptizes us, even a not-at-all-badly-chosen one?
Do not the professionally well-accommodated, the well-named as it were,
still have something nameless up their sleeves that was never even sung to
them in the cradle, let alone by their future trainers in useful membership?
Once it was believed that robbers carried children off in order to raise
them, train them, for their gang. The case seems less like an old wives’ tale
when we consider what is hidden from us in ourselves. What has never yet
been accommodated, never had its day in any given name, not in Chuckles
or any other. Don’t know, don’t know: this dimming of the self, suddenly
forgetting one’s “own” identification card, this lapse and its onset were of
course pathological. Yet the eventual, felicitous Aha! at being Chuckles, or
even some other mask before one’s invisible visage is certainly not always
healthier, doesn’t always restore us to identity. The fellow in the circus in-
spired as well as provoked such an insight in nuce, and perhaps some of his
audience understood him, understanding him just when he thought of
himself. How many at least own forged passes, just because they were val-
idated at the registration office?
Motifs of Concealment
Especially before others, we can almost always just show. Sometimes
show through, but it remains doubtful whether this halfness, this becom-
ing, is right. Not only the Now where we always find ourselves is still dark.
Instead it is dark above all because we, as the living, find ourselves in, quite
properly are, this Now. In this and as this dispersed Now lives the still dis-
persed person himself, according to his inner, intratemporal movement.
Out of this always only “momentariness” comes the Manifold, then the in-
dividual particularity that no stranger easily enters, and oneself only inau-
thentically, and rarely. The worse (that is, the more selfish) someone is, the
darker he will be by the same stroke; yet just for that reason, here too, one
can never know, never already see inside, let alone perfectly. If a particular-
ity is significant—not dispersed, but instead gathering existential powers—
it will still be no clearer to others. It likewise has its individual courtyard,
precisely around the “brightness,” in part because no eyes are yet ready for
it, in part because the depths have too few inhabitants to be other than
individual and lonely. That is the true, fruitful incognito, around whose
clearing the whole affair turns; not the false one of boredom, which has
nothing to say. We want to tell some little stories about the true one, mere,
elaborated hints: Chinese, American, Russian-Jewish. Even this little Chi-
nese story could give a lesson in respect before concealment.
Once upon a time, some farmers were caught in the fields by a sudden
storm.10 They fled under a haybarn, but the lightning did not pass; it
struck all around the hut. The farmers realized that the lightning was
meant for one of them, and they agreed to hang their hats outside the
door. Whoever’s hat the storm first carried away should be chased out, so
the innocent would not be destroyed along with the guilty. No sooner
were the hats hanging outside than a gale caught the hat of farmer Li and
even some other mask before one’s invisible visage is certainly not always
healthier, doesn’t always restore us to identity. The fellow in the circus in-
spired as well as provoked such an insight in nuce, and perhaps some of his
audience understood him, understanding him just when he thought of
himself. How many at least own forged passes, just because they were val-
idated at the registration office?
Motifs of Concealment
Especially before others, we can almost always just show. Sometimes
show through, but it remains doubtful whether this halfness, this becom-
ing, is right. Not only the Now where we always find ourselves is still dark.
Instead it is dark above all because we, as the living, find ourselves in, quite
properly are, this Now. In this and as this dispersed Now lives the still dis-
persed person himself, according to his inner, intratemporal movement.
Out of this always only “momentariness” comes the Manifold, then the in-
dividual particularity that no stranger easily enters, and oneself only inau-
thentically, and rarely. The worse (that is, the more selfish) someone is, the
darker he will be by the same stroke; yet just for that reason, here too, one
can never know, never already see inside, let alone perfectly. If a particular-
ity is significant—not dispersed, but instead gathering existential powers—
it will still be no clearer to others. It likewise has its individual courtyard,
precisely around the “brightness,” in part because no eyes are yet ready for
it, in part because the depths have too few inhabitants to be other than
individual and lonely. That is the true, fruitful incognito, around whose
clearing the whole affair turns; not the false one of boredom, which has
nothing to say. We want to tell some little stories about the true one, mere,
elaborated hints: Chinese, American, Russian-Jewish. Even this little Chi-
nese story could give a lesson in respect before concealment.
Once upon a time, some farmers were caught in the fields by a sudden
storm.10 They fled under a haybarn, but the lightning did not pass; it
struck all around the hut. The farmers realized that the lightning was
meant for one of them, and they agreed to hang their hats outside the
door. Whoever’s hat the storm first carried away should be chased out, so
the innocent would not be destroyed along with the guilty. No sooner
were the hats hanging outside than a gale caught the hat of farmer Li and
 Motifs of Concealment
blew it far across the field. Quickly the others threw Li out; in the same
instant lightning struck, for Li was the only just man.
If the good man was concealed in this story, then the bad man is con-
cealed in another story that Richard Wilhelm rendered so beautifully.11 A
sharecropper was riding home from the fields and stopped at a brook to
water his horse. There he saw, not far below, a dragon lying half hidden by
underbrush; flame quietly hissed from his nose and snout. The sharecrop-
per jerked his horse back and raced through the forest so fast the trees
seemed to rush past him, slowing to a trot only as he saw his village. There
the neighbor boy came toward him, a boy of ten years, on the very path
to the brook.
The sharecropper snatched the boy up from the ground, placed him be-
hind on the horse, and told him of the monster, not without looking
about to see if the dragon could still hear him. The boy held fast to the
sharecropper out of fear, and just kept asking: Did the dragon have huge
eyes? And his teeth: could you hear them clicking? And did the flame hiss
as he drank the water? The sharecropper berated the boy; there would be
time for all that when they were under a roof. But the boy would not let
up: Hey, watch this trick! Did the dragon look like this? Angrily the man
turned: the dragon was behind him, and tore him open. That evening the
neighbor boy again sat at the table in his own house, and the palm fronds
before the doors were sanctified again against demons, after the villagers
found the flayed sharecropper.
Another story, conversely on the incognito of the light, goes like this,
without ghosts, with the solemnity of the always possible, and probably
really true. I remember it from a boy’s book, Cooper’s The Spy, and it
comes from the time of the American Revolution, the war between the
blue Revolutionaries and the British redcoats.12 A certain peddler had
long traveled alongside the blue; he was fair, and treasured for his jests. Yet
it began to seem that whenever Birch was around, the English would
break through at some weak position. More and more often, and finally
no doubt: the seeming peddler was a spy, the troops were warned, and a
price was put on his head. The dragoons of Lieutenant Dunwoodie finally
succeeded in flushing out the traitor, hidden in a gorge between the
American and British troops. In his pockets was found an order from En-
glish headquarters itself, that the peddler Harvey Birch should have free
passage next to His Majesty’s troops.
Motifs of Concealment 
Locked in a barn with bag and baggage, a sentry outside, the spy was to
be hanged at dawn. He was granted a chaplain at his own request, who at
the time was squawking about the camp, grim of countenance; he entered
the barn at nightfall to appeal to the sinner’s fear of God and began to
drone the melody of a psalm. Only occasionally could one hear the ped-
dler crying out, or sighing. Toward morning it was quiet; the man of God
opened the door and asked the watch: Good man, does this camp have
the book The God-Fearing Sinner’s Final Hours, or, Consolation for All Who
Must Die a Violent Death? The sentry laughed and shook his head: No,
but that must be a lovely book! The preacher thundered at him: Insolent
sinner! Have you no fear of God? Fetch me my horse; I want to ask the
minister in Yorktown if he has that breviary.
Again one heard the pitiful peddler sobbing and whimpering within;
the watch barred the door, and the minister rode off. But as they dragged
the peddler to the gallows at the break of dawn, the preacher was still not
back. The lieutenant wanted to say the prayer himself, but of course as it
got lighter the man of God was punctually on the spot, too much on the
spot, for one recognized him as the peddler, or rather as the minister
beaten and dressed in the peddler’s clothes, and Harvey Birch had long
since fled to safety.
Months passed in the country. The American army’s main body, under
incomparable leadership, advanced and decisively crushed General Clinton
at Yorktown, and in the joyous October of the year  peace negotiations
began. A free America elected its best man to the presidency. Many of the
undecided now cheered the new republic, the formerly proscribed were re-
stored to their civil rights, and only traitors remained excluded from the
new brotherhood. Birch had disappeared. Only occasionally did someone
claim to hear that he had slunk off to some new settlement in the North or
West, under another name.
Then one evening—since the War of Independence an entire genera-
tion had passed, and Washington rested in the grave—the American Gen-
eral Dunwoodie and his adjutant were riding across the fields near Nia-
gara, where a late skirmish against redcoats from Canada had taken place.
As Dunwoodie turned his horse, he saw to his surprise an injured civilian,
an irregular obviously, or perhaps just a grave robber who’d fallen afoul.
The general dismounted—and saw the long-proscribed man, bloody, and
weathered since the time when a Lieutenant Dunwoodie had caught him
 Motifs of Concealment
and locked him in a barn: the spy Harvey Birch. He gave the corpse a
kick, flipping it over into the mud. A necklace fell from the dead man’s
neck, from which hung a little tin box. The adjutant, on his sign, brought
it to him, and Dunwoodie, to his astonishment, found a note inside, on
yellowed paper; he read it, and his lips grew pale. For on the note was
written, in a familiar hand: “Circumstances on which the good of the na-
tion depended have until now prevented the proclamation of what no one
but I knew. Harvey Birch was known as a spy in British employ, and so he
was able to deceive them, and pass on to me the most important news of
their plans. Even after the end of the War I could not reveal the truth, and
restitute a man who refused any reward, to whom his country owes a pro-
found debt, whom I, with great pride, call my friend. No man can repay
what he has done; his reward is with God. George Washington.”
General Dunwoodie lay his dagger on the dead man’s breast; the spy
was carried to his camp and wrapped in the Stars and Stripes, and laid to
rest under cannon salvoes.
How beautifully this already teaches a boy that others are dark, and no
one can finally be judged. If this story separates what someone is and how
he seems, a Russian Chasidic story extends that powerfully, somewhat in
the same low mode as the vagrant beggar in the Chasidic house of prayer;
we may recall him and his story of the former dream king. We may also
recall the Master of Prayer, who stepped forward so grandly at the con-
clusion. But true greatness here operates secretly and inconspicuously, as
a person and not a spectacle; here follows the Chasidic tale, conceived
more deeply than the day, and deeper than even Rabbi Raphael of Belz at
first understood his strange encounter to be.
Once, as he was dreaming, an angel appeared to him. Whom will I sit
next to on the other side? asked the rabbi. You will sit next to Yitzhak Leib
of Lodz,
⁄ said the angel, and vanished. Now, Rabbi Raphael was famous in
all Israel for his piety and esoteric knowledge. I will sit next to whom? he
wondered. Next to Yitzhak Leib? In my whole life I’ve never heard that
name before.
The next day he had his horses hitched and set off on the long journey
to Lodz.
⁄ It was Friday afternoon when he arrived, and he immediately
called on the head of the congregation. He welcomed the great Kabbalist
with reverences, but of Yitzhak Leib he could tell him nothing. They in-
quired of others together, among the old men, among the young, among
the new arrivals, for a long time in vain, until one or another thought he
Motifs of Concealment 
remembered: Near the town wall lives someone who’s often away on jour-
neys, and never lets himself be seen; we think that’s Yitzhak Leib.
The rabbi had someone point out the way through wooden Lodz, ⁄
which at that time was still a village; the first stars appeared as he stood be-
fore the right door, and he was overjoyed at celebrating the beginning of
the Sabbath with this pious man. But Yitzhak Leib was not at home. He’s
got business, said an old woman in the street, and grinned. Business on a
Friday night?—The rabbi did not know what to think of these words.
Well then, I’ll wait for him in his house.
He sat long by the fire, and thought of his dream, looked at the miserable
gear, and remembered the words of Rabbi Eliezer: it’s easier to save someone
than to feed him. He thought of the Sabbath of the higher realms, and how
he would celebrate it with the one who had come thence. He thought of
Gideon, who had stopped the sun, and of the widow’s pitcher, of David and
Jonathan—as Yitzhak Leib entered, a completely decrepit old man, and,
it seemed, drunk.13 No sooner did Leib notice his guest than he asked
doubtfully if he still wanted to do business with him. No, Yitzhak Leib, I
came to you because—the rabbi got no further, for Leib had already be-
gun eating, without saying the prayer. But Yitzhak Leib, you haven’t even
spoken the blessing yet. The wretched man shook his head, said he’d for-
gotten how to pray, and the rabbi spoke the words for him.
After the end of the meal, and numerous offers from Yitzhak Leib,
none of which was an invitation to eat, when the rabbi did not suggest a
counteroffer, the scoundrel grew angry and threw his guest out of the
house with much cursing. The rabbi stood there on the street, on a wasted
Sabbath, and in his own mirror. So I’m to sit next to this great sinner on
the other side? Truly, my Lord, I must say, you have some strange ideas—
and fainted dead away.
When a man found him it was already day; he was shown the way to
the inn, and ordered the stable hand to harness the horses at once to go
back to Belz. All his honors he would throw off, and chastise himself, that
God might show him his great flaw, and perhaps forgive him. Listlessly he
sat in the carriage and did not notice as it came to a river that was flood-
ing and had almost wrecked the bridge; the wheels only half gripped the
planks. Fortunately they got across; then they heard shouting from the
banks, and he saw Yitzhak Leib, jumping onto the bridge and calling. You
can’t come across, the bridge is cracked, shouted the rabbi. Yitzhak Leib
threw his caftan onto the water and rode it right over the water, right
 Motifs of Concealment
across the river, onto the bank. I liked that prayer, said Yitzhak Leib. I
heard it that way the last time from my father, but you must say it for me
one more time; I have a weak memory and I can’t retain the words.
Yitzhak Leib, said Rabbi Raphael, crying, what could I teach you? Give
me your blessing!
Yitzhak Leib shook his head, laid his hands on the head of the man
bowed down before him, threw his caftan onto the water, and rode it back
across, standing. Rabbi Raphael, however, consoled, rode back to the holy
city of Belz.
If this story is nothing, say storytellers in Africa, it belongs to the one
who told it; if it’s something, it belongs to all of us. But of course no one
has all of it here; the story won’t become clear. It also won’t finish up with
that strange man who expresses himself first wrongly, then only in symp-
toms, and not even in riddles. Neither his features nor his actions show
what is great about Yitzhak Leib, not even goodness in its obvious form.
The fruit that he bears lets him at most suspect, but not know; for his
walking on water is likewise just a symptom, one that in the world of the
Kabbala and elsewhere, as we know, has the highest magical rank, but still
reveals no content.
With the three hermits of Tolstoy’s folktale, who have something in com-
mon with the Chassidic story, and who likewise walk across the sea to a ship
in order to learn the Lord’s Prayer, everything is much more blatant, and
much more predictably decided: “They always smile, and shine like the
angels in heaven.”14 They appear just as one imagines the pious, and they
already stand with Jesus. But in the incognito of Yitzhak Leib, absolutely
nothing is yet habitable, as it were; there is perhaps a key, and the house is
ready, but the key will not turn, will not open the “angel’s door” in the least,
not even halfway; perhaps just because it really is ready. This is Chassidic:
that the zaddikim on whom life depends are hidden, perhaps even from
themselves; they may know that they are great, but they do not feel it.
Above all, concerning our final initiation into ourselves: in very few sto-
ries is the incognito, even of the consummate person, maintained so dis-
quietingly, so extraordinarily conscientiously, against every prior psycho-
logical, social, religious determination. There are certainly stable characters,
dependable visages and lines of vision; but they too never get completely
out of the ultimate undecidedness (that they may also have before them-
selves). They are rounded, but not closed; nothing steps forward from this
strict overtness already closing itself; the great sage also saw his own pri-
mordial moment, that is to say ours, still unrevealed, to say nothing of the
rabbi who at first misunderstood and later sensed it but likewise never knew
it. Sooner or later, says Tolstoy, one will experience all of that: one will know
what people, partial or whole, are about; the concealment will lift that is
always one’s own concealment. The potential splendor will rise that, when
it exists, is always the human splendor, or part of it. Tolstoy means that
the key to us all is death: that would hardly suffice for the purpose.
Just Knock
If we were not at all yet, then we’d also not be there for anyone. But the
halfness in which we are can easily be disturbed from outside. It is too lit-
tle to resist, but not too little enough, and then again not yet collected
enough. In what disturbed us, however, there is already too much dying,
and it disperses us even more than we already are. The knocking that tears
us from our sleep, even out of hard work, not only frightens but stabs and
lames us. Something of death is already audible in these disturbances; hard
work hardly collects enough—on the contrary, it makes us even more vul-
nerable. And being torn away does not always lead to ourselves, discloses
nothing good. Then something untimely can taste good, even if faintly,
and probably falsely, but it’s still here, and it halts. Friends easily become
strange then, of course; it’s revealed what we are and what they are to us
when the disturbing little thump ends. One feels then that one isn’t done
yet, just can’t really stop. In any case, it is not always the expected that
knocks on the door.
The Corner of the Blanket

The same thing was experienced by someone even more directly, and
drove him even further from himself. He had injured himself somewhat
during a solitary excursion, while washing his hands. A piece of rusty metal
went quite deeply into his skin. But the wound didn’t bleed, or rather just
neatly and inwardly, so that no bandage was needed, and his afternoon was
completely uninterrupted. Toward evening the man, unable to think of
anything better, went down to the garden of the pavilion; a summer stock
theater had set up there, a pitiful revue for some idlers. At the moment a
Just Knock
knocks on the door.

Just Knock
knocks on the door.

 Short Excursion
trainer was standing above, and tormenting little dogs, Spitzes and fox ter-
riers, who had to jump through hoops or mince into little houses and
then come out again, or put on nightcaps and get into bed, or sit on a toi-
let, and similar tricks.
Here it should be added that a year earlier the traveler, as untalented in
illness as possible, had nonetheless or therefore acquired a slight infection
in his hand, which had just healed. He knew, then, what infection was—
knew at least the signs, with all his disgust for it. Now the dogs were as-
sembling for an unspeakably stupid march, each with its forepaws on the
back of the poor dog before it; the music grew lively, and the audience
laughed. Then, in the middle of this adorable scene, he felt a violent pain
in his arm, so that the cup of coffee he was holding rattled on its saucer.
The moment might well remind one of wounds, especially on this
evening, before the disgustingly comical stench of the poor animals
nearby; one could easily expire in a place such as this, if one were unlucky.
This minor peril was furnished in just the right way; it could easily re-
mind one of dying, of what is so to speak Saxon, beddish, about dying.15
The vacuity, plainness, paltriness, pastiness up there waved one corner of
the banner of death. Of course the visitor stood only at the beginning of
these feelings, and they didn’t concern him at all, but he followed them as
they followed him, far back, back into diapers and bedpans and female
caregivers all around. Here was a piece of true strangeness: one had been
carried there, and not on an adventure, but the opposite, far away from
one’s people. Petit bourgeois kitsch generally goes quite well with the
deathly pap that children get.
Short Excursion
Someone falling asleep can also become alone, can of course be like
someone traveling. Awake, we prefer to sit with the wall behind us, our
gaze fixed on the locale. But how amazing: when falling asleep, most turn
toward the wall, thereby turning their back to the dark, now unfamiliar
room. It’s as though the wall suddenly attracted us and the room para-
lyzed us, as though sleep had discovered something about the wall that
usually comes only to the better kind of death. It’s as though sleep, like
disturbance and strangeness, also trained us in dying. Then this scene cer-
tainly looks different; it discloses the dialectical appearance of home.
 Short Excursion
trainer was standing above, and tormenting little dogs, Spitzes and fox ter-
riers, who had to jump through hoops or mince into little houses and
then come out again, or put on nightcaps and get into bed, or sit on a toi-
let, and similar tricks.
Here it should be added that a year earlier the traveler, as untalented in
illness as possible, had nonetheless or therefore acquired a slight infection
in his hand, which had just healed. He knew, then, what infection was—
knew at least the signs, with all his disgust for it. Now the dogs were as-
sembling for an unspeakably stupid march, each with its forepaws on the
back of the poor dog before it; the music grew lively, and the audience
laughed. Then, in the middle of this adorable scene, he felt a violent pain
in his arm, so that the cup of coffee he was holding rattled on its saucer.
The moment might well remind one of wounds, especially on this
evening, before the disgustingly comical stench of the poor animals
nearby; one could easily expire in a place such as this, if one were unlucky.
This minor peril was furnished in just the right way; it could easily re-
mind one of dying, of what is so to speak Saxon, beddish, about dying.15
The vacuity, plainness, paltriness, pastiness up there waved one corner of
the banner of death. Of course the visitor stood only at the beginning of
these feelings, and they didn’t concern him at all, but he followed them as
they followed him, far back, back into diapers and bedpans and female
caregivers all around. Here was a piece of true strangeness: one had been
carried there, and not on an adventure, but the opposite, far away from
one’s people. Petit bourgeois kitsch generally goes quite well with the
deathly pap that children get.
Short Excursion
Someone falling asleep can also become alone, can of course be like
someone traveling. Awake, we prefer to sit with the wall behind us, our
gaze fixed on the locale. But how amazing: when falling asleep, most turn
toward the wall, thereby turning their back to the dark, now unfamiliar
room. It’s as though the wall suddenly attracted us and the room para-
lyzed us, as though sleep had discovered something about the wall that
usually comes only to the better kind of death. It’s as though sleep, like
disturbance and strangeness, also trained us in dying. Then this scene cer-
tainly looks different; it discloses the dialectical appearance of home.
In fact a dying man who was saved at the last moment gave an explana-
tion: I turned toward the wall, and felt: what’s out there, what’s in the
room, is nothing, no longer concerns me, but in the wall I’ll find my cause.
Later it seemed to the man as though in statu moriendi an organ of death
had developed; the wall opened up, the almost dying man thought he was
traveling into the wall, and a new eye looked inside, as though smeared
with the dervish’s salve from the Thousand and One Nights, that lets one
see the inside of cliffs and mountains as something sparkling, if not as one’s
own.16 The interior of the wall was small, but his reversed senses saw some-
thing in it that seemed particularly important. Exit, exodus—indeed the
likeness recurs even more strongly outside of bed, or more understandably,
in the outwardly distancing condition of departure. Even everyone’s obvi-
ous inability, even the friendliest and inwardly richest person’s, to converse
from the car down to the platform on leaving, or the other way around, is
due to the fact that the one staying back looks like an egg, the one leaving
on the other hand like an arrow; both already inhabit different spaces,
closed off from one another almost hermetically, with different contents,
curves, and forms. Moreover, the one leaving is usually proud, the one
staying back, melancholy. On arrival both are in the same position and
mood, though with the variation that the guest is still blinded by the new
day, whereas it seems granted to the host to teach him. If one indifferently
watches an arrival, say of a great ship where one isn’t expecting anyone, the
potential emptiness of the disappointment combines with a strange phe-
nomenon that concerns us as well. The pride of departure, in which joy
and pride at dying already resonated, is here clearly fulfilled by some tri-
umph of arrival. Above all when the ship pulls in with music; then, con-
cealed in that kitsch (which is not petit bourgeois) is something of the joy
of a (potential) resurrection of all the dead.
Terror and Hope

We don’t always approach the beyond in such a good mood. Sleep also
knows more dispiriting voids; they are probably those where we fall rather
than radiate. There a thick air is brewing, and it is why the clear air blows
much more seldom here.
An ailing woman dreamed that while she could not move from the spot,
an old woman kept coming toward her, grinning horribly, with hands
In fact a dying man who was saved at the last moment gave an explana-
tion: I turned toward the wall, and felt: what’s out there, what’s in the
room, is nothing, no longer concerns me, but in the wall I’ll find my cause.
Later it seemed to the man as though in statu moriendi an organ of death
had developed; the wall opened up, the almost dying man thought he was
traveling into the wall, and a new eye looked inside, as though smeared
with the dervish’s salve from the Thousand and One Nights, that lets one
see the inside of cliffs and mountains as something sparkling, if not as one’s
own.16 The interior of the wall was small, but his reversed senses saw some-
thing in it that seemed particularly important. Exit, exodus—indeed the
likeness recurs even more strongly outside of bed, or more understandably,
in the outwardly distancing condition of departure. Even everyone’s obvi-
ous inability, even the friendliest and inwardly richest person’s, to converse
from the car down to the platform on leaving, or the other way around, is
due to the fact that the one staying back looks like an egg, the one leaving
on the other hand like an arrow; both already inhabit different spaces,
closed off from one another almost hermetically, with different contents,
curves, and forms. Moreover, the one leaving is usually proud, the one
staying back, melancholy. On arrival both are in the same position and
mood, though with the variation that the guest is still blinded by the new
day, whereas it seems granted to the host to teach him. If one indifferently
watches an arrival, say of a great ship where one isn’t expecting anyone, the
potential emptiness of the disappointment combines with a strange phe-
nomenon that concerns us as well. The pride of departure, in which joy
and pride at dying already resonated, is here clearly fulfilled by some tri-
umph of arrival. Above all when the ship pulls in with music; then, con-
cealed in that kitsch (which is not petit bourgeois) is something of the joy
of a (potential) resurrection of all the dead.
Terror and Hope

We don’t always approach the beyond in such a good mood. Sleep also
knows more dispiriting voids; they are probably those where we fall rather
than radiate. There a thick air is brewing, and it is why the clear air blows
much more seldom here.
An ailing woman dreamed that while she could not move from the spot,
an old woman kept coming toward her, grinning horribly, with hands
 Terror and Hope
outstretched and eyes gaping, ever nearer, murmuring: There’s nothing to

be afraid of, there’s nothing to be afraid of, there’s nothing to be afraid of.
This didn’t even awaken the sleeper; she actually fainted. She ground her
teeth to mush out of fear; for days she felt lamed. Now it is hardly credible
that the piercing horror of such images points to humanly known or even
unconscious disturbances, to sexual or other desires and repressions. In-
stead, nightmares seem to be especially good travelers through caves and
hideaways, providing a postvital fright, a quick and isolated death fright.
The supposition arises: here are the hallucinations of certain sinister-
utopian possibilities of either our incognito itself or of what our incognito
awaits (when it is not positively fortified and cleared). Even the specter in
the aforementioned nightmare seems remarkably true, in the split between
its laughter and hands, its hands and words; the macabre spectacles at the
carnival, the old, derisive, almost cheerfully horrible images of monsters,
can sometimes sing that lullaby. There is no known, immanently adequate
reason for these images; more likely they are mythically reminiscent, but
for that as well they’re too strong, alien, and above all too present.
Far more rarely does joy come out of the beyond to show the way home.
It was there in the simple pleasure in the wall, in the joy of departure, in
the pride on arrival. It is nourished by sources equally as strange as the
nightmare, and likewise has no adequate external cause. The terror of the
nightmare image perhaps corresponds on the other side to the warm,
dreamy kitsch of Hannele Goes to Heaven.17 In the film Hannele walks
across the holiday market, shyly touches the garlands and decorations with
a nameless smile; a street singer plucks a harp, and the miserable child
stands under a light. Impatiently she feels herself called, and the lovely
sprig blooms, the defenseless, downtrodden one; even in the water where
she drowns herself Jesus still calls to her, and her fever dream in the coffin,
when he flies up with every fantastic image of fulfillment, has no likeness
to Hannele’s life as it empirically was. It receives only the fairy tales heard
in it, the one day that shone more brightly, a presentiment of true existence
that floats down to her from distant heavens, a primordially simple antici-
pation of Paradise, or the summons to it. In the end of course we see the
dismal bed again; of the dream there remains merely a benign deception
that won’t cancel the pessimism about this side, the atheism about the
other. Nonetheless—even in the most complete lucidity of disillusion-
ment—an ideal of God, who, seen by day (or by night), has disappeared
from the whole scene (this one, and realer ones), has not wholly disap-
peared, but survives in the smile over the little trinkets that a poor child
could never have, or only by grace of a fever dream that truly hallucinates
angels and saviors out of such a secret core. The winter of the world has no
more refuted this bright core than some springtime could refute the excess
of nightmares or other terrors that are also in this core.
But even awake, many a joy radiates across, without yet lighting any-
thing. Many remember the happiness they felt as boys when they could
give a handyman his tip. The empty house when a stranger rang the bell
already made them happy; just reaching out the window gave a joy to
which even first love could not compare. It was a grand gaiety in little
things, in a hand gesture with something in it, and it had a certain, pre-
cise mysticism, as though something out of a wish dream, or better, had
appeared here. Kant, in his psychological lectures, speaks of the “moral”
organs, and how remarkable it really is that the impractical ability for
moral action should even appear in an organism. But, Kant goes on, just
as the child in the womb already has lungs and stomach, although these
organs are of no use to him in his condition, so does man—even though
surrounded by the wickedness of this world—nonetheless have an organ
of his higher determination, his other citizenship. In any case it requires
strong anticipation (in Kant’s uncritical likeness itself ) to put not only
“disinterested” action into its space, but also the feeling of evidence that
appeared in the tip to the handyman as happiness, as something extend-
ing outside the body, a slight moment of the good death, afterdeath. Here,
too, something grows more tropically than the familiar limits of our sub-
ject (and of the world) would already allow; immoderate fright, like “base-
less” joy, has hidden its cause.18 It is hidden in people, and is not yet out
in the world; joy is out the least, and yet it would be the main thing.
Excursus: Human and Wax Figure

Everything was already quiet below. Evening streets with no pedestri-
ans. Drowsy counter; the rooms above seemed empty.
An hour before closing, the best time for this. The gallery was not at the
fair, but in the middle of the city. In a grimy building from the s, like
those where one had lived as a child. In the lobbies stood ornamental
plants in artificial grottoes; our parents arranged them nicely.
peared, but survives in the smile over the little trinkets that a poor child
could never have, or only by grace of a fever dream that truly hallucinates
angels and saviors out of such a secret core. The winter of the world has no
more refuted this bright core than some springtime could refute the excess
of nightmares or other terrors that are also in this core.
But even awake, many a joy radiates across, without yet lighting any-
thing. Many remember the happiness they felt as boys when they could
give a handyman his tip. The empty house when a stranger rang the bell
already made them happy; just reaching out the window gave a joy to
which even first love could not compare. It was a grand gaiety in little
things, in a hand gesture with something in it, and it had a certain, pre-
cise mysticism, as though something out of a wish dream, or better, had
appeared here. Kant, in his psychological lectures, speaks of the “moral”
organs, and how remarkable it really is that the impractical ability for
moral action should even appear in an organism. But, Kant goes on, just
as the child in the womb already has lungs and stomach, although these
organs are of no use to him in his condition, so does man—even though
surrounded by the wickedness of this world—nonetheless have an organ
of his higher determination, his other citizenship. In any case it requires
strong anticipation (in Kant’s uncritical likeness itself ) to put not only
“disinterested” action into its space, but also the feeling of evidence that
appeared in the tip to the handyman as happiness, as something extend-
ing outside the body, a slight moment of the good death, afterdeath. Here,
too, something grows more tropically than the familiar limits of our sub-
ject (and of the world) would already allow; immoderate fright, like “base-
less” joy, has hidden its cause.18 It is hidden in people, and is not yet out
in the world; joy is out the least, and yet it would be the main thing.
Excursus: Human and Wax Figure

Everything was already quiet below. Evening streets with no pedestri-
ans. Drowsy counter; the rooms above seemed empty.
An hour before closing, the best time for this. The gallery was not at the
fair, but in the middle of the city. In a grimy building from the s, like
those where one had lived as a child. In the lobbies stood ornamental
plants in artificial grottoes; our parents arranged them nicely.
 Excursus: Human and Wax Figure
A lady and gentleman entered. The stairway was white as marble, the
banisters bronzed, red velvet handrails. It was out of some bad dream of a
mansion. A visitor came down the stairs and looked the couple over, but
he held his leg out in the air, would not set it down. He was made of wax,
and the couple going up, the gentleman coming down, exchanged suspi-
cious glances. Around the last landing, and one could look into a great,
brightly lit ballroom. No one, as it were, was in it, but it was filled from
top to bottom with princes, crinolines, uniforms, and giants by the en-
trances. The lady went no further, and her companion also halted, feeling
a malicious pleasure.
They sat down on the steps, and he told her of the fright he’d had as a
boy when he would read of infamous castles where no one lived, but on
stormy nights all the windows were lit. What was there, what sat there,
what was that light, what did it fall on: the sight of this gathering is what
he’d dreamed of, his body stretched up to the sill, his face at the window
of this unspeakable ballroom. Or he told of Ali the Cairene from the
Thousand and One Nights—a long time ago; he was the same age as we
are now—and of the haunted house in Cairo he’d entered; for one year
and a day no one had dared to enter, as whoever spent the night there
would vanish by morning.19 In this house Ali went to bed, and all was
still. Candles glowed on the fine furniture; there was not a shadow in the
room where something could hide. Then, toward midnight, there was a
call from outside, from the other end of the stairway: Ali, shall we come
down? The voices were like children’s, and Ali did not answer. Then his
bed rose up, the door opened, and Ali and bed flew up the stairs into the
hall whence the voices had come. The childish voices were part of it, said
the man, were cloying as chloroform; for true danger may be inanimate,
but is always invisible. In the meantime they had come to the ballroom,
among the rosy and staring assembly.
Most were completely preoccupied with themselves as puppets. Only
some wax figures wearing gabardine jackets bowed and watched the oth-
ers. In front of a lieutenant, the visitors themselves fell silent; he was just
like one of the officers from the old Gartenlaube, at grandmother’s by the
stove.20 They walked across the Christmas fair, in spiked helmet, navy blue,
and epaulettes; they sat bivouacked around the campfire at Mars-La-Tour.
Bourbaki stood next to the waxen lieutenant, and indeed there was an
entire diorama full of Germans and French: Napoleon III and Bismarck
before the historic hut, also historic and Romantic scenes of every kind,
Excursus: Human and Wax Figure 
the Kaiser, the Czar, and King Humbert, the virgin abducted by a gorilla,
Charlotte Corday stabbing Marat in his bath, those tired of life, with
noose or sea, the beautiful witch tied to the stake—patriotic and crimino-
logical exhibits of every kind from the crowd’s view.
The displays themselves were a very complex intersection of the porce-
lain in cabinets and the stations of a Calvary, all dead stuff that is human,
and would be just as terrible if it moved as it is mysterious that it does not.
Its clothing hung from prostheses, from the stuffing sticking out from a
burst seam, but the head was flowering undertaker’s wax; the eyes glittered
and the personality stood firm under the loupe of silence and glass. Into
such a waxworks—the gentleman saw this once at the cinema—a pair of
lovers were locked in overnight; and he told the story now. They sat on a
bench under this dwarf palm. Across from them they had Napoleon’s
coronation in Notre Dame: the Emperor, the Pope, the kneeling marshals.
The lover in the film was just kissing his girlfriend on the bench, and one
got a close-up of their eyes—closing, not closing, open as never before—
when they screamed. For with eyes agape they saw: the Emperor Napoleon
moved, the Pope set down the crown, and the waxen marshals cheered in
the night. Here love was not stronger than death, or if it was, then not
stronger than undeath. As an illusory life that suddenly appears as illusory
death, so the narrator made a joke out of horror, as is only right, and re-
inforced his air of authority. On they walked, past the artificial corpses
and likenesses; their own bodies became strange to them, the dead in bod-
ily form no less strange.
Then there was a call from below, from the register, that it was closing
time. The heart of such a waxworks is called the Chamber of Horrors; in
here one placed the robber and madman on one’s nose as glasses, in order
to see flesh. But it was not the criminals who became visible here, though
they stood in a circle, pale and soon bloody. Instead only their nearness to
anatomy appeared, the edges of the wound and the delirium of the final
torment. A severed head with blood dripping into its beard, a hanged man
who’d bitten through his tongue—all in wax, under glass, behind the
criminals who provided this view. A lot of room on our body for pain,
found the man. Torture has been precisely adapted to it, or the body for
torture, so much more abundantly than for pleasure.
If one could turn the iron widow and the woman on her front half as
high as we can extend her downward, into this hull of flesh, then a moun-
tain of happiness would rise, and we would be the gods who live on it.
 Excursus: Human and Wax Figure
Like gods? asked the woman; they would have to be of glass, and have no
drop of blood in them, they would have to be made of nothing at all in or-
der to be gods. She said this in the anatomical cabinet, where wax became
entirely material, no longer seemingly alive or seemingly dead. Charlotte
Corday no longer eternally stabbed Marat, nor was she condemned to do so
as a “manifestation” in wax, even if she did move; instead the open body it-
self was present here as a thing, and just as irrevocably. In a casket like Snow
White’s, Venus lay without expression, with nightshirt and Caesarean sec-
tion. Severed doctor’s hands still bobbed over her body, with scalpel pointed
downward and blue cuffs; they came out of the air and hovered like butter-
flies over the incision through which one could see the child. But otherwise
Venus became a demonstration, no longer a figure; for the specimens all
around—the putrefaction and hellish color of diseased skin, a demonic
sculpture underneath the healthy one—were no longer those of the famil-
iar, healthy body. First prize in anatomical modeling, said the diploma over
the door—in fact deserved, for no sculptor has yet carved the intestines be-
neath the skin; a bronze Apollo is all surface; portraiture and art history only
move along the body, never here in its depths.
Over the two observers came a disgust otherwise known only to pubes-
cence, this grim stare into the guts next to love, this X-ray vision of blood
and shit next to springtime. Even afterward, even surgeons, when they have
a body cut open before them, isolated, with the patient’s “face” covered, find
no direct path from the bloody to the human phenomenon. What a ma-
chinery they saw again here inside our bag of flesh. A snare for Apollo, and
for Christians a Babel, despite the “sacred head now wounded.”21 What a
good ostrich policy we follow in health, which notices none of this; what
a questionable policy with beauty, that in this clockwork of love sees only
the dial, and then only one time zone. What a profound ostrich policy, but
this, always and truly, is the orgasm that blinds our eyes with desire. Does
blood have any other outlet than into the living, speaking, social human
being (which it does not in fact have), a truly precise one, Dionysiacally
opening, turning? Does the ostrich policy of orgasm, let alone the thrill of
the serial killer, see the body of blood more truly or more futurally than
our gentle, superficial eyes that sail only around the coast of the skin and
shudder when they come into the interior? Here, before this severed heart
with aorta, the aura of a squid, this pumping station of such mysterious
and perishable material, there was in any case only the terror of not seeing
oneself to the extent that one sees the body from the inside. First prize in
anatomical modeling here too, so much organic reason, but no one knows
what’s inside the body of blood, other than the already visible external
person, who of course is only halfway in it, and not even halfway.
Here was no longer Ali’s story, but the haunted house itself, set in the
clear light of day. Their mood was not Greek; the light of the humanistic
world grew faint. The puppets and dioramas along the way back had
transmitted their stare to the world of the living. The gallery closed; the
ornamentals at the entrance got fresh water, and the eternally descending
gentleman on the stairs was dusted off by the attendant.
Nearby: Inn of the Insane

Someone who often went off the beaten path had this to say when asked
about it. (He spoke in images, though not floridly or enthusiastically, as
though trying to prophesy, but rather slightly frivolously, as if wanting to
loosen things up with modest tropes. Far from the usual solemnity with
which fool’s capers are transcribed and the insane scientifically classified, as
though they were monkeys, and the psychiatrist himself, nothing.)
The insane, he said, only want to see a bit of the country. They would
like to take a little stroll outside our village. To the nearest inn, which
they’ve heard good things about. But between the village and the inn
there’s a forest; through this forest go the lunatics. In the forest there’s no
path, only underbrush, fallen trees and such, so that it’s easy to lose the
way. There are cockatoos, parrots, even monkeys, screeching loudly. The
wanderers become dazed; rapt in murmurings and natural spirit voices,
they finally shriek along in fun, in fear, in anger, so that they no longer
know how they ended up in this forest. Indeed, they even forget what
they actually wanted from this stroll. The doctors stand back at the edge
of the village, facing the forest, shouting into it; they call to the lunatics,
they should really come back. The lunatics hear none of this for all the din
in the forest, don’t want to go back, but only to the inn. To the Sign of the
Red Ox or the Merry Silesian or the Trinity, of which only the signs hang
among us, but nothing is fulfilled.
I myself (said the storyteller) have also heard of the inn, and you (turn-
ing to his friend), it seems, no less than I. I don’t go through the woods
myself, but take a little detour around it. Maybe, quite possibly, I set one
anatomical modeling here too, so much organic reason, but no one knows
what’s inside the body of blood, other than the already visible external
person, who of course is only halfway in it, and not even halfway.
Here was no longer Ali’s story, but the haunted house itself, set in the
clear light of day. Their mood was not Greek; the light of the humanistic
world grew faint. The puppets and dioramas along the way back had
transmitted their stare to the world of the living. The gallery closed; the
ornamentals at the entrance got fresh water, and the eternally descending
gentleman on the stairs was dusted off by the attendant.
Nearby: Inn of the Insane

Someone who often went off the beaten path had this to say when asked
about it. (He spoke in images, though not floridly or enthusiastically, as
though trying to prophesy, but rather slightly frivolously, as if wanting to
loosen things up with modest tropes. Far from the usual solemnity with
which fool’s capers are transcribed and the insane scientifically classified, as
though they were monkeys, and the psychiatrist himself, nothing.)
The insane, he said, only want to see a bit of the country. They would
like to take a little stroll outside our village. To the nearest inn, which
they’ve heard good things about. But between the village and the inn
there’s a forest; through this forest go the lunatics. In the forest there’s no
path, only underbrush, fallen trees and such, so that it’s easy to lose the
way. There are cockatoos, parrots, even monkeys, screeching loudly. The
wanderers become dazed; rapt in murmurings and natural spirit voices,
they finally shriek along in fun, in fear, in anger, so that they no longer
know how they ended up in this forest. Indeed, they even forget what
they actually wanted from this stroll. The doctors stand back at the edge
of the village, facing the forest, shouting into it; they call to the lunatics,
they should really come back. The lunatics hear none of this for all the din
in the forest, don’t want to go back, but only to the inn. To the Sign of the
Red Ox or the Merry Silesian or the Trinity, of which only the signs hang
among us, but nothing is fulfilled.
I myself (said the storyteller) have also heard of the inn, and you (turn-
ing to his friend), it seems, no less than I. I don’t go through the woods
myself, but take a little detour around it. Maybe, quite possibly, I set one
 Tableau with Curve
foot in the forest for a short while, or even both when the path is too
rough. You too, in any case (he addressed his listener again, although the
latter didn’t want to know), you’re there more often than I; perhaps you
don’t screech along with the jungle animals in the branches, but you
throw coconuts along with them; at least it looks that way sometimes, or
sounds that way. Yet if we keep to the outside path, we can very well find
the inn beyond the forest. Between apples and oranges, there’s the nub of
the matter. Cooked in fervent love, with the seasoning from our better
dreams. Who the innkeeper is I don’t know, naturally; he probably only
took shape gradually, and is not yet there himself. From there I’ll call to
the lunatics—in short, to the lost souls who race about objectlessly, these
decent and basically very sensible tourists. They’ll hear me, of course,
quite unlike the doctors at their back, whose village no longer interests
them at all. The parrots too will then have nothing more to say, for the
object under their noses, which calls to them, will have a better sound.
What was alive in their capers and their chatter, of course, was not these
themselves, but only the missed goal. So I will drive out the woods by
means of the goal, and “benightedness” by the lights of the inn (its mul-
lions and transoms). Then insanity will be eradicated—a few stragglers
from the first generation excepted, who remain in the forest. The people
of the village will follow too, at least occasionally, as they prefer. To me,
probably, they’ll raise a monument—next to the new highway, in the mid-
dle of the forest, where there are sharp bends. A monument in the shape
of the letter S, or perhaps just a signpost with one arm. Of course without
my head; that, no one will need anymore.
Familiar postscript: the consummate psychologist (or Indologist, phi-
losopher, etc.) will cease to be one in that moment when he is one. He be-
comes an object of psychology (or Indology, philosophy, etc.).
Tableau with Curve

Desperation can easily make one credulous. Thus that poor man, hun-
gry, sick, unemployed, who thought he heard a quite astounding voice in
his sleep. It told him: under the second pier of the old bridge in Prague lay
a treasure that for years had awaited its discoverer. The man, who needed
some consolation, even or especially when being consoled, took the dream
 Tableau with Curve
foot in the forest for a short while, or even both when the path is too
rough. You too, in any case (he addressed his listener again, although the
latter didn’t want to know), you’re there more often than I; perhaps you
don’t screech along with the jungle animals in the branches, but you
throw coconuts along with them; at least it looks that way sometimes, or
sounds that way. Yet if we keep to the outside path, we can very well find
the inn beyond the forest. Between apples and oranges, there’s the nub of
the matter. Cooked in fervent love, with the seasoning from our better
dreams. Who the innkeeper is I don’t know, naturally; he probably only
took shape gradually, and is not yet there himself. From there I’ll call to
the lunatics—in short, to the lost souls who race about objectlessly, these
decent and basically very sensible tourists. They’ll hear me, of course,
quite unlike the doctors at their back, whose village no longer interests
them at all. The parrots too will then have nothing more to say, for the
object under their noses, which calls to them, will have a better sound.
What was alive in their capers and their chatter, of course, was not these
themselves, but only the missed goal. So I will drive out the woods by
means of the goal, and “benightedness” by the lights of the inn (its mul-
lions and transoms). Then insanity will be eradicated—a few stragglers
from the first generation excepted, who remain in the forest. The people
of the village will follow too, at least occasionally, as they prefer. To me,
probably, they’ll raise a monument—next to the new highway, in the mid-
dle of the forest, where there are sharp bends. A monument in the shape
of the letter S, or perhaps just a signpost with one arm. Of course without
my head; that, no one will need anymore.
Familiar postscript: the consummate psychologist (or Indologist, phi-
losopher, etc.) will cease to be one in that moment when he is one. He be-
comes an object of psychology (or Indology, philosophy, etc.).
Tableau with Curve

Desperation can easily make one credulous. Thus that poor man, hun-
gry, sick, unemployed, who thought he heard a quite astounding voice in
his sleep. It told him: under the second pier of the old bridge in Prague lay
a treasure that for years had awaited its discoverer. The man, who needed
some consolation, even or especially when being consoled, took the dream
Tableau with Curve 
seriously, however; upon waking, he readied himself for the journey,

scraped together all the cash in his hovel, set out on the long road to
Prague. There he obtained permission to dig under the pier, or to have
someone dig, since that wouldn’t obstruct the traffic. The effect was and
remained as the bridge attendant predicted: gravel and nothing but gravel.
Until the man told his dream, complete with voice, to the attendant, who
replied, You fell for that? I too once heard a voice in a dream, telling me
that in a faraway city (here the attendant named the very city whence the
man had come) a treasure awaited me, and much more handily than un-
der a pier—right under my stove there, which I was just firing up. Do you
really think I went there, that I would believe such nonsense?
The attendant was indisputably correct; that, the curious gravel digger
had to concede. Encouraged, naturally, that the attendant had named not
only his home town but his street, incidentally and completely unsus-
pectingly. The failed treasure hunter stopped listening entirely, was rather
ashamed before the still homebound, normal bridge attendant; set out,
disillusioned, back home. But once he, this tiny Don Quixote, was back
in his hovel, after all that departure and all this sad return, hungry and
cold, he found no wood to fire up his stove. It made no difference now;
he tore up his floor for the wood and found—tableau with curve!—his
treasure at last. Tableau with a curve that winds back, in other words; here
the story ends, wandering far away, and the good thing lay nearby.
The man could doubtless have had the thing more cheaply, and he prob-
ably told himself so afterward. Yet the question still goes out to the
thoughtful listener to his story (there is supposed to be a Chassidic version,
and a related story appears in the Arabian Nights22): Was the journey to
Prague in vain? Are not so many insights, profits, solutions achieved after,
precisely by means of, remote detours? Which are then no longer detours,
but appear as the true path to the goal, indeed maintain themselves grate-
fully in the goal? To the dull, of course, every detour—in life as in schol-
arship—seems useless and foolish; they get only distraction from it. The
mind that truly seeks treasures will go to the furthest place to hear the
magic word that leads to them, and to find the key to what awaits him
back home. As Thomas Mann said, if Marx were finally to read Hölder-
lin, and Hölderlin especially to read Marx, we’d be in a different posi-
tion.23 Whereas the poor devil who is supposed to have believed in his
dream, and then almost in spite of it found what he sought, provides no
example, certainly, but he might provide a sign, an amusing one besides,
 Some Patterns from the Left Side
that question and answer sometimes don’t grow on the same stalk. This
story, insofar as it has a “Mark!” doesn’t just make one want to travel to
Prague, of course. It also lifts the floorboards in the miserable hovel of its
protagonist, lifts them and raises them up—detour here too, not loyalty
to tradition.
Some Patterns from the Left Side

“Do we really dream,” someone asked, “only when sleeping, and never
when awake? I think it’s always imaging down there; we notice it only
when we’re tired—when someone just stares ahead, and the previous day,
or the next, revolves within him. But perhaps we’re also dreaming when
our foot strangely resists going somewhere, where we then break it. Or
our flesh crawls like an animal’s where something is not right. Quite a lot
crosses over from nightmares; from so-called warning dreams too. With
open eyes one can sense the same dreamy air where something is floating,
perhaps even haunting. If we rinse our face, then of course it’s gone, in-
deed as though it was never there.”
“I wouldn’t say,” remarked Mr. A., “that there’s no such thing, but in
any case it concerns us less than dreaming. Recently I read of the curious
case of a Berlin attorney, a man whom I might nearly believe. He was
standing in his office around eleven o’clock and dictating, when next to
him a flame shot up to the ceiling. The secretary screamed, and as the at-
torney tore open the door the flare sank back into the floor it had come
from; the parquet was completely undamaged, the ceiling sootless. If that
was a waking dream, it was nonetheless dreamed by two, as though it had
really occurred more outside than inside. The article went on: a quarter
hour later a lone agent rang to remind them that the fireman had left.
That made the greatest impression on me: such a roll of the drums, and
so few soldiers behind it, if the agent was actually supposed to be the sol-
dier. How stale that all is, remote from us, and stupid; maybe animals stay
up to date with that sort of thing. But what comes of it humanly really
seems like taking a herring to dinner in a coach and four.”
“If that were only true,” replied Mr. B., “then these things would have
to be at least as laughable as they are uncanny. I have the feeling that the
flame at the insurance company never even arrives, perhaps never even has
 Some Patterns from the Left Side
that question and answer sometimes don’t grow on the same stalk. This
story, insofar as it has a “Mark!” doesn’t just make one want to travel to
Prague, of course. It also lifts the floorboards in the miserable hovel of its
protagonist, lifts them and raises them up—detour here too, not loyalty
to tradition.
Some Patterns from the Left Side

“Do we really dream,” someone asked, “only when sleeping, and never
when awake? I think it’s always imaging down there; we notice it only
when we’re tired—when someone just stares ahead, and the previous day,
or the next, revolves within him. But perhaps we’re also dreaming when
our foot strangely resists going somewhere, where we then break it. Or
our flesh crawls like an animal’s where something is not right. Quite a lot
crosses over from nightmares; from so-called warning dreams too. With
open eyes one can sense the same dreamy air where something is floating,
perhaps even haunting. If we rinse our face, then of course it’s gone, in-
deed as though it was never there.”
“I wouldn’t say,” remarked Mr. A., “that there’s no such thing, but in
any case it concerns us less than dreaming. Recently I read of the curious
case of a Berlin attorney, a man whom I might nearly believe. He was
standing in his office around eleven o’clock and dictating, when next to
him a flame shot up to the ceiling. The secretary screamed, and as the at-
torney tore open the door the flare sank back into the floor it had come
from; the parquet was completely undamaged, the ceiling sootless. If that
was a waking dream, it was nonetheless dreamed by two, as though it had
really occurred more outside than inside. The article went on: a quarter
hour later a lone agent rang to remind them that the fireman had left.
That made the greatest impression on me: such a roll of the drums, and
so few soldiers behind it, if the agent was actually supposed to be the sol-
dier. How stale that all is, remote from us, and stupid; maybe animals stay
up to date with that sort of thing. But what comes of it humanly really
seems like taking a herring to dinner in a coach and four.”
“If that were only true,” replied Mr. B., “then these things would have
to be at least as laughable as they are uncanny. I have the feeling that the
flame at the insurance company never even arrives, perhaps never even has
Some Patterns from the Left Side 
to arrive, or when it does land it is then often quite near us. You specu-
lated that animals stay current with such things, and that’s quite remark-
able; if I understand you rightly, you consider that weird flame as a kind
of instinctual language, almost a kind of transmission within an animal
nervous system. But if one gets into its circuit, one can be strangely fright-
ened by the demonic sounds and images, as by our door. And I know
cases where people, uneasy about a warning, actually arrived at their own
house, mostly at just the wrong moment. I heard a similar story to the one
about the attorney from a Pole, who told me the story about himself; per-
haps he was also lying and had only read it; at any rate, he screamed too,
and the agent afterward was not very comical. Recently, the Pole told me,
he had been at the seaside, where, though he felt better than ever, he had
a very peculiar vision. He stepped from his hotel onto a completely empty
street and was surprised at the great noontime silence, when around the
corner came an automobile of glass, and on it an open casket, likewise of
glass; next to it walked a boy clothed in a sort of starry sky, with many
buttons and polka dots, who asked him, as the wagon halted before the
entrance, if he would please step into the casket. At that moment he heard
his name called behind him, and the apparition disappeared; a young Eng-
lishwoman stood behind him, the same one with whom he’d enjoyed him-
self all these days, and she was now his wife. The first stop on their honey-
moon was Paris, where they arrived toward nightfall, and they were just
about to step into the lift to the dining room when the man pulled his wife
back from the door. He’d seen exactly this configuration in his hallucina-
tion: this face on the bellhop, this uniform. As they went up the stairs they
heard screaming; the elevator cable snapped, and the bodies of the passen-
gers were carried out into the lobby. So the Pole told me, more or less,”
concluded Mr. B., “his fortune in misfortune—I think the hallucination
brought him something quite useful, more than just herrings. It seems to
lie not only in the animal sphere, it’s not just for animals; life and death
are in it too. We have that in common with all living things. Through this
second sight something was detected, and avoided, just as surely as by
means of the fire department; the foresight is of course different.”
“You’ve ignored the dead for too long,” reflected a Mr. C., “that pallor
that wanders in the moonlight. After all, we have premonitions about not
just ourselves but the afterward, or the beyond, or whatever it’s called.
Out of an unfamiliar state where neither humans nor animals live. I ad-
mit that our age doesn’t have it, nor did any prehistory, but it’s precisely a
 Some Patterns from the Left Side
sunken world; prehistory just noticed it better. In this world grew night
terrors, and even today the enjoyment of terror grows, which has no friv-
olity about it, even when it tries to. Instead just this, I think: the human,
the almost warm embrace of a world that will surely be our world sooner
or later. This world, it seems to me, is always around us, even when we
just lap at its edges and no longer know how dark the night really is. The
young still see it sometimes. I’d like to tell one of the strangest recollec-
tions from my life.
“There was once a young man among us, rather fat and wan, whom
none of us thought much of. We were nearly disgusted by him, and he
even called himself syphilitic, but of course one could discuss the strangest
things with him. He spoke as readily of the grave as of the bed, and of the
worms that lift one’s chest as though one were breathing, of the horror that
we will all become. Sixteen years old, we made a jaunt once to a neighbor-
ing town, and a quick death-and-afterlife return. Bourrier—that was the
boy’s name—pulled out a photograph that was supposed to have been
taken of a ghost, and I stayed somewhat back with him. We promised each
other that whoever died first would appear to the other.
“Just a year later my relation with Bourrier cooled considerably; he was
absent ever more often from our class, and fell out of our circle. Then the
teacher told us one morning, very unexpectedly, that one of our class-
mates had died after a long illness, and we were to keep the next day open
to attend his burial. The valedictorian gave a eulogy at the edge of the
grave, about caterpillar and butterfly, which he himself didn’t believe, with
our weak memory; and we shoveled clods over the school friend who had
so often slept with barmaids on the billiard table until Monday morning.
“An unlicensed pub on the way home helped us all forget the burial,
and on the evening of that day (my parents had gone to a ball) I could
stay up as late as I wanted, had the book collection to myself, forbidden
memoirs, Zarathustra and other gods, for which I’d come of age. As al-
ways on such evenings, I sounded out my student years, only I was sur-
prised to find myself glancing from time to time into the darkness of the
next room, distracted and finally strangely sad; listened to the rain that
beat on the panes, to the steps on the street outside, which became ever
quieter, finally dying out in the night. My reverie became ever more soli-
tary, and now a distant memory, an image, shot out of the void: I saw that
spring day again, on the country road to the next town with the late Bour-
rier at my side, and the pledge we’d sworn.
Some Patterns from the Left Side 
“Now I felt myself trembling from head to toe; I was already sur-
rounded, and the time had come, terrifyingly placed into the empty apart-
ment. Behind me was a door into the corridor, through which I would
have to go to my bedroom; next to me was an open door into the dark sa-
lon, where the furniture stood dimly, and only some gaslight from the
street fell on the ceiling. How I got to bed, I’ve forgotten, yet I walked a
different path just afterward in nightmares, the dream path of our rapport
from the shoddy pub back home; it was also an imprisonment on that
path, just as in the room, only the reverse: behind me the street ended at
my heels, and before me it fled in a wide angle to the side, up to my par-
ent’s home. The front door was open too, despite the night—the window
by the stairs, even the doors to the apartments on the first and second
floors, everything wide open in the darkness. I went up to the third floor,
where I should finally be home, yet another stairway led up again. I must
have counted wrong. This door also gaped wide open, thick darkness be-
hind it, and completely strange. Suddenly light fell on the brass name-
plate, but it was not the usual one, but enameled metal as outside a wait-
ing room, and on it stood a name: Bourrier, with a crucifix behind it.
“At the moment I sensed I was being watched from above, and above
me I saw about ten steps going even higher, and at the top stood Bourrier
in a nightshirt, leaning over the railing with a candle, grinning at me. Be-
fore this smile I fell asleep, into the morning hours, and heard a scream
only at the very end—I heard my mother screaming from the stairs, and
as I stumbled out of bed to my parents, we thought we saw a great black
ball fall from the upper story down the stairway, almost hesitantly, but
right down the middle. The doors slammed shut, and we stayed awake till
daylight. I told my dream—it was still more human than that great cru-
dity out there, coming down the real stairway. Only a symbol, as you can
see, yet probably from the grand army; it rides a corpse into our dreams,
and rolls a ball before our feet like the sea a breaker—no more, no less.”
The friends were silent, it was already late, the ball had hit home. Hal-
lucination and mythology seemed to go through each other inextricably
in this man; he might have lived through all that, but the grand army,
and believing all that hellish stuff? Mr. D., who had as yet said nothing,
started up briskly and made a hand gesture as though he wanted to set the
whole beyond on its feet.
“I don’t know,” he said, “but we can be frightened by much less already,
even though it’s from this side. We might not need to go so far across, and
 Some Patterns from the Left Side
the fear is still the same. Just one little incident occurs to me here, but it
shows what living people can do. I too went up my stairs late at night,
not at all sleepy, but a healthy student—even sang something to myself.
There, at the first bend, I felt fabric brush against me, something creased,
now behind me, now before me, now dipping, now fluttering. I hurried
down the steps; the shadow ran and jumped with me, even swaying noise-
lessly before the front door. Finally, I turned the key and threw open the
door; the dancing specter shot up in front of me, and in the torchlight I
saw an old woman’s face, white, and unspeakably distorted, which
screamed like I had never heard before, nor dreamed—piercingly high,
mouth, eyes, body, all gaping.
“Two men came by, and the pub next door still had its lights on. When
we grabbed this being, it still danced in our grasp, and cackled—a mad-
woman, as it later turned out, who had escaped and hidden right in my
hallway. Here she’d gotten locked in, and likely danced about all night,
searching through the darkened house where everyone was sleeping but
she and the student on the stairway. I felt no better, though, even after this
explanation; felt myself, even a day later, seized by an apparition—in fact
I still have every ghost that I dream, hear, and cannot believe, present in
that woman back there. The madwoman was, after all, a greeting out of
the caverns of life, where something’s not right, not out of our dreams, or
some problematic graveyard miasma. Rather, just as I said: it was a local
dream, which nonetheless contained almost everything when it came into
my hallway.
“I learned from it that all the errant stuff in our souls is related; insofar
as it must be the raw fears themselves that are still possible in us and else-
where, and sometimes come out. Merely negative enlightenment won’t
dispel them, as my figura shows; but perhaps light will dissolve them per-
sonally in the half-being that haunts stairways and is usually nocturnal,
terrifying. Things on the stairs too, even in my room, are uncanny when
they shift in the night and show another side, beneath the space of day;
they then become at least a good stage for the ‘parapsychological,’ pre-
cisely for what is unformed, larval, from the left side.
“All of that comes from the human core, and yet concerns it far more
than the skeptic would like or the seer guess. The drifting, gloomy, fright-
ening element concerns it that still lurks there, and is still possible, be-
cause real humanity is not yet in the house. It arises from spasms; medial
forces form crude grimaces, and my madwoman revealed the life and ac-
tivity in the underbrush psychologically. Funhouses too (driven by the

pangs of adolescence), demonic apparitions push it through our outer
border—a deadly production, more our own shortcoming than the one
between heaven and earth.
“My encounter with the madwoman I also posit as ghost story, as a lo-
cal one; it was as clear and dry as a good drama. When the pale hand al-
ways comes only from the other side, it shuffles too many flowers and too
much music into the deck; that dulls the terror and makes it enjoyable,
operatizes it, to say nothing of mythologizing it. In a Pitaval for ghosts,
something I’d very much like to see, that might be different, if only true
incidents were reported: coldly, with all the rancid oil of the thing.24 All
other horror, it seems to me, is more than half the pleasure of the uneasy
listener, and not, as Mr. C. claimed, the dismay of the eventual partici-
pant. A motley field: mysteries for unbelievers, metaphysics for minors;
still, one easily brushes against it, especially at night—if one only knew
just where it lay.”
Here they went their ways, some agitated, the others with much on their
minds. A heckler quoted Mark Twain and said, Now we all had faces as
solemn and mute as the reverse of a headstone. It was Mr. A. who said that,
and added: One could therefore see how little horror and such concerned
us in which there was nothing but itself. When one of the party came
home, he wrote in his notebook, “A haunting is certainly never exact; for it
shows that the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand isn’t doing.”
The Twice-Disappearing Frame

Take me with you: not only children wish it, or say it. Whoever wants
to expand, even change, is susceptible to this wish. Even a glass can then
quietly tempt us to partake in its clarity, to devote ourselves to the wine
therein. Paintings too are glasses, very strangely filled, which our vision
drinks in, into which it penetrates, and sometimes perhaps not only as vi-
sion. So that the border seems to vanish, which is here the frame. Chinese
legends have characters, dying, vanish into paintings, even poems. That is
probably the strangest known sort of wish about and in painting and po-
etry. Such a rich kind of “Take me with you!” story is hardly known
among us even in imitation—with a single exception, which follows here.
tivity in the underbrush psychologically. Funhouses too (driven by the

pangs of adolescence), demonic apparitions push it through our outer
border—a deadly production, more our own shortcoming than the one
between heaven and earth.
“My encounter with the madwoman I also posit as ghost story, as a lo-
cal one; it was as clear and dry as a good drama. When the pale hand al-
ways comes only from the other side, it shuffles too many flowers and too
much music into the deck; that dulls the terror and makes it enjoyable,
operatizes it, to say nothing of mythologizing it. In a Pitaval for ghosts,
something I’d very much like to see, that might be different, if only true
incidents were reported: coldly, with all the rancid oil of the thing.24 All
other horror, it seems to me, is more than half the pleasure of the uneasy
listener, and not, as Mr. C. claimed, the dismay of the eventual partici-
pant. A motley field: mysteries for unbelievers, metaphysics for minors;
still, one easily brushes against it, especially at night—if one only knew
just where it lay.”
Here they went their ways, some agitated, the others with much on their
minds. A heckler quoted Mark Twain and said, Now we all had faces as
solemn and mute as the reverse of a headstone. It was Mr. A. who said that,
and added: One could therefore see how little horror and such concerned
us in which there was nothing but itself. When one of the party came
home, he wrote in his notebook, “A haunting is certainly never exact; for it
shows that the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand isn’t doing.”
The Twice-Disappearing Frame

Take me with you: not only children wish it, or say it. Whoever wants
to expand, even change, is susceptible to this wish. Even a glass can then
quietly tempt us to partake in its clarity, to devote ourselves to the wine
therein. Paintings too are glasses, very strangely filled, which our vision
drinks in, into which it penetrates, and sometimes perhaps not only as vi-
sion. So that the border seems to vanish, which is here the frame. Chinese
legends have characters, dying, vanish into paintings, even poems. That is
probably the strangest known sort of wish about and in painting and po-
etry. Such a rich kind of “Take me with you!” story is hardly known
among us even in imitation—with a single exception, which follows here.
 The Twice-Disappearing Frame
The motif is old, involves a dream come true, and an awakening. Paul
Ernst also knew the story, without a real sense for what it meant.25 It has
absolutely no Chinese rank, but instead restores the normal, as it were.
A young man, it is told, came home from university to speak with his
fiancée, whom he no longer especially loved. After the meal Rudolf sat
alone in his parents’ parlor, staring into space. Outside his fiancée was call-
ing to him; everyone was already set to leave, what was keeping him? But
he had absolutely no desire for an outing, least of all today; the girl, greatly
annoyed, slammed the doors shut. Rudolf no longer heard any of this, be-
cause for the first time in a long while, since his boyhood, he was intently
considering the old painting over the breadboard. There was a rococo gar-
den, with ladies and gallants on the promenade, and in the background,
half hidden by trees, a summer palace with high windows all the way
down to the ground, and gilded grills. At a crossing in the garden stood a
lady all alone; in her hand she held a white sheet, or a white cloth. That
was something Rudolf had never understood, even as a boy: was she read-
ing a letter, or was she holding a handkerchief? Was she crying?
He now stepped right up to the painting, and as he immersed himself
in the colors and shapes, the ladies and gentlemen suddenly walked softly
by him. He himself was walking, sensed the fine gravel on the path, and
walked toward the woman, who stood motionless and watched him. Then
at one stroke he knew, she was reading a letter—his letter; he’d written it
long ago, to her. Have you really come, my darling? she cried, and her
hand fell to her side. I’ve never stopped waiting for you; you wrote me
that you would come, but now everything is good; you are with me. They
kissed and wandered further into the woods.
Evening came, and they returned to the castle, where a joyous feast had
been prepared. The cavaliers and their ladies greeted the returning lord of
the manor, and soon the lovers rested in their opulent bedchamber. Bird-
song roused them from their dreams; many days passed in this way, many
nights beneath the changing moon. Games, feasts, hunts, meaningful talk
hastened the time; youthful joy had finally returned to the long deserted
rooms. Everything is yours, the beautiful lady said, but one door you may
not open, if you, if we, are not to lose everything.
One quiet afternoon the lord stood in a passage, by a window, and
gazed into the garden, where the leaves had begun to change color; it sud-
denly seemed that someone was calling, calling him by a name that he
dimly remembered but that could not be his name. The voice seemed to
The Twice-Disappearing Frame 
come from a room he had never entered; he opened the door. The apart-
ment was completely empty; out of the wall a voice seemed to issue, out of
a painting that hung on the wall. The lord of the manor went nearer and
saw a room in the painting that, like the voice, seemed dimly familiar; the
furniture observed him as though out of another time. The painting de-
picted another painting on a wall in the background, yet the voice came
from the painted door. He listened to it, ever more astonished: Rudolf
stood once more in his parents’ parlor. The door, no longer painted, flew
open, and his fiancée shouted, Are you coming, Rudolf? How long am I
supposed to wait for you? The coach has already left; should I waste my
whole day because of your moods?
The young man jumped slightly; then he took the hand of his fiancée,
and led her before the old painting. Quiet! Don’t you see that she’s crying?
That’s a handkerchief, not a letter. The girl, predictably, didn’t understand
this exclamation. The subsequent carriage party with the dreamer must
have been curious.
So much for the tale, certainly nothing special, but double-doored.
Rudolf ’s last utterance is sentimental, yet the quid pro quo—handkerchief
for letter—belongs to an already artificial structure. But something more
significant belongs to it—namely, a doubly disappearing frame. First the
one on the painting of the castle in his parents’ home, then the one on the
painting of the parents’ parlor, in the forbidden room. Moreover, this cas-
tle, in miniature, is available within itself again, on the painted wall of the
forbidden room.
Apart from the Chinese motif (entering the painting) Japanese nesting
is evident in the reflections of reflections. (Unless one thinks of the “Re-
markable Ghost Story” in Hebel’s almanac, where the same almanac is
hanging from a cord on the chimney, and the gentleman can almost read
the story he’s in the middle of—again with a chimney in it, and the al-
manac, reflected ad infinitum.26) Nonetheless “Rudolf ’s Engagement
Party” lets the Chinese motif of entry predominate, at least at the begin-
ning, in order of course to forsake it more awake than before. Precisely
such that the entry is first carried out and then retracted, in that the frame
pushing forward both ways turns into a sort of revolving door.
Where does it lead? Certainly into a domain of poetic meaning, even if
it still hasn’t been discerned where this domain lies. Here, at least, in the
twisting story of the painting, it throws the visitor back, the only dream-
ingly stirred visitor; the everyday has him again—and that, regrettably, is
 The Motif of the Door
what’s most apt in Rudolf ’s story. Unless one takes the wink he got from
the lady, the waiting painting, at a face value that doesn’t yet exist as such,
that doesn’t yet pay.
The Motif of the Door

Who we are, and when we will truly live, no one up to now has ever
known. Still darker is how and where we go then; the dying depart, as
what? Something decays and crumbles a bit, but that is not the point.
One’s good or bad name enters the memory of a few survivors, rests there
for a while. But people themselves, as the kernel of this reputation, travel
to an unknown destination. Even the nothing that unbelievers inflict is
unimaginable, indeed fundamentally more obscure than a something that
might endure.
When someone walks out the door, one can likewise no longer see him.
He also disappears as if he had died, all at once; the train goes around the
bend. Yet even with long and dangerous trips there remains the important
difference that the living traveler remains on this plane, in fact literally; we
can find him again on our map, without any ups or downs. Yet the dying
man changes levels; either he goes as mere corpse into an inconceivable
nothing where only chemical processes continue, or he rises up, a bird of
the soul, to disappear through an open door on high.27 The door through
which he departs becomes a mouth that swallows him just as solitarily and
emptily as everyone must face death alone; or it becomes the entrance into
a something that we don’t know, and where the body has no more walls.
This latter is “clearly” nearer, although there can be no sort of practical
judgment about it. But the effect that the door evokes everywhere it ap-
pears is peculiar, in art or literature: the wall of sleep and the portal of
death.
It takes very little for such an image to draw one in. One recalls the un-
canny impression that a pure film could make with the door motif.28 It
showed a pretty girl riding with her sweetheart through the country. The
couple sits alone in the mail coach; at the last stop, an old man comes
aboard. He looks steadily at the girl, above all at her friend, tired and
stern, with a hard face. The carriage rolls through a gate into a village; just
under the sign of the inn it halts. The old man follows the lovers and takes
 The Motif of the Door
what’s most apt in Rudolf ’s story. Unless one takes the wink he got from
the lady, the waiting painting, at a face value that doesn’t yet exist as such,
that doesn’t yet pay.
The Motif of the Door

Who we are, and when we will truly live, no one up to now has ever
known. Still darker is how and where we go then; the dying depart, as
what? Something decays and crumbles a bit, but that is not the point.
One’s good or bad name enters the memory of a few survivors, rests there
for a while. But people themselves, as the kernel of this reputation, travel
to an unknown destination. Even the nothing that unbelievers inflict is
unimaginable, indeed fundamentally more obscure than a something that
might endure.
When someone walks out the door, one can likewise no longer see him.
He also disappears as if he had died, all at once; the train goes around the
bend. Yet even with long and dangerous trips there remains the important
difference that the living traveler remains on this plane, in fact literally; we
can find him again on our map, without any ups or downs. Yet the dying
man changes levels; either he goes as mere corpse into an inconceivable
nothing where only chemical processes continue, or he rises up, a bird of
the soul, to disappear through an open door on high.27 The door through
which he departs becomes a mouth that swallows him just as solitarily and
emptily as everyone must face death alone; or it becomes the entrance into
a something that we don’t know, and where the body has no more walls.
This latter is “clearly” nearer, although there can be no sort of practical
judgment about it. But the effect that the door evokes everywhere it ap-
pears is peculiar, in art or literature: the wall of sleep and the portal of
death.
It takes very little for such an image to draw one in. One recalls the un-
canny impression that a pure film could make with the door motif.28 It
showed a pretty girl riding with her sweetheart through the country. The
couple sits alone in the mail coach; at the last stop, an old man comes
aboard. He looks steadily at the girl, above all at her friend, tired and
stern, with a hard face. The carriage rolls through a gate into a village; just
under the sign of the inn it halts. The old man follows the lovers and takes
The Motif of the Door 
a seat at the same table, and drinks to the man. Whereupon there appears
in the lover’s goblet, in the bride-cup from which Lil, the girl, has drunk,
an hourglass; the sand runs through the glass—a bad sign. The cup falls
from the girl’s hand and shatters. She goes to tell the waitress, and comes
back; the table is empty, the hard face is gone, and with him her sweet-
heart. Just a second ago, the other guests tell her, he went out the door
with the old man. Lil rushes to the front of the inn, but no one seems to
have seen the two. Over there, a beggar points, they went over there, and
the night watchman, too, all the way at the edge of town, says they’ve al-
ready gone by.
The girl searches beneath the trees, through the dark meadows for her
beloved, ever further, up to a wall, a high stone wall, along the wall that
seems to have no end, that seems to go in a circle, and nowhere an en-
trance. Then, across the field, in the moonlight, comes a strange proces-
sion: boys, men, and women, young and old, farmers, merchants, knights,
clerics, and kings—figures from all of history, misty and pale, slow of
tread; and in the middle, Lil’s sweetheart. She screams his name, wants to
embrace him and draw him to her. The shade turns his face only slightly
to her, infinitely strange, his weary, shuffling steps barely faltering, and along
with the others the dead man disappears through the wall. Lil swoons to the
ground.
Thus the town’s apothecary finds her, having chosen the propitious
hour of the full moon to collect magical herbs: leopard’s bane and devil’s
bit scabious, Solomon’s seal and centaury. He carries the girl home on his
shoulders; he leaves her alone. He wants to brew her some fortifying tea,
she slumps at his table, retorts all about, saltpeter, sulfur, mercury, and
flasks of poison. Numerous books lie open before her, and Lil’s confused
gaze falls on them, falls on the open Bible, and the heavily underlined sen-
tence: “For love is as strong as death.”29 She reads, understands, assesses it
literally in its magical equation of force and mass. Lil grabs the poison,
opens it, drinks—and in that instant she stands before the wall. With an
incredible motion she runs her hand over her forehead, utter distress and
complete enlightenment, sleepwalking and waking. The wall is no longer
shut, but a glowing gap, a Gothic arch with an endlessly anticipated light
behind leading into the depths.
What happened in the depths could easily be told if the gate were not
brighter than the burial chamber with the many candles, which came next,
or in the resurrection, as usual. But the gate, at least, nearly transforms the
 The Motif of the Door
audience into a congregation (tua res agitur); over the trivial special effects
operated a deeper stage management that, with its simultaneity of exit and
entry, brought the lethal archetype of the portal to awareness.30
Yet just what lies beyond it could hardly have been shown in images,
nor even superior means. The world is full of suffering, and the scanty joy
in it mute; hardly extensible outward, let alone upward. So that place to
where we disappear can also more easily be filled with visions of horror
than with gods of happiness. If the unfamiliar can be envisioned only
“presentiently” (that is, in terms of some fear or joy here that affected us
immoderately, transcendently): then “hell” usually succeeds very abun-
dantly, excitingly and full of variety, while “heaven” remains faint in im-
age and word, quite literally tiresome, indeed dangerously near to the hor-
ror of a bourgeois Sunday. Only to the side does one still sometimes find
other traits, colorful yet modest reflections that extend this motif of the
door slightly, but by those who enter, not by strange, grand, elaborate spec-
tacle. Instructive in this way are Chinese legends, which perhaps deal only
with artists and their transition into a work, yet thereby leave out as much
as put in their very own Orplid of sound and smell.31 Living a philosophy
means learning from it how to die, says Montaigne in a Senecan moment,
almost still magically wise; several Chinese motifs of the end also entwine
the door into the work with the door into death, remarkably, and hardly
by accident, with the greatest didactic seriousness, and hardly artistic there
and then. It suffices to outline them as a game that cannot be intensified
and finally signifies pure desire, but that is nonetheless remarkable as the
possibility of a new flag in the work, not as a desertion from the flag of
this world.
The story of the old painter belongs here, who showed his friends his
final painting: in it was a park, a narrow path winding gently past trees
and ponds up to the little red door of a palace. But as the friends turned
back toward the artist—that strange red—he was no longer next to them,
but within the painting, strolling down the little path toward the fabulous
door, standing quietly before it; turned, smiled, opened it, and vanished.
Or the other story, an adaptation of the same myth that Balász retold in
Seven Legends, the story of the dreamer Han-tse belongs here: the poet who
wrote the book of this beloved, the beautiful Li-fan, who had spurned
him.32 Into The Valley of the Silver Apple Blossom he wrote the girl, wrote
her a lovely lake and a palace of jade, the most exquisite gowns, celebrations,
and playmates, and the moon never set in the valley of the silver apple
The Motif of the Door 
blossom. All this his magical verses dreamed; indeed, he could even sum-
mon Li-fan herself from the book until daylight again drove her away. So
his life was powerfully divided between the sad, aging day and the myste-
rious creature that came to him and always left him. Until that final
morning: his relatives came looking for Han-tse in his hut, for a long time
in vain. They did not find him. Yet on the desk lay his book, opened to a
new, final chapter: “Han-tse’s Arrival in the Valley of the Silver Apple
Blossom.” Thus a poet wrote himself into his own work, “past the wall of
eternal ideograms,” aesthetically truly “productive,” in other words past
even the door of the work (Mahler’s late music sometimes has that effect
in reality).
But if the darkness that awaits us is colored somewhat by such leg-
ends—at least by our dreams, and their hardly obvious or regular adapt-
ability, indeed habitability—and if precisely the most colorful Chinese
flowers grow by the darkness of the final door, as though it were truly our
realest door, these are all only profound legends of a “coming to light”
(Vorschein) from which a sickener hurls us back, even in religious ages,
even from deeper and solider ecstasies than those of artists and poets.33
The homelessness of people on this earth goes on with a few symbols of ar-
rival, without their ever being able to illuminate the door of partial exis-
tence, let alone the fatal door of potential nonexistence, with anything but
dreams. They have not yet drunk blood, certainly never had any worldly-
otherworldly praxis. Still, worldly homelessness with a few symbols of hap-
piness is a good teacher’s college for the real dreams behind the door.34
Half Good
So we hardly have ourselves. But first ourselves, and then things: Who
can find his way through? The cloth around us may still always protect us;
that still goes on. But we warm ourselves pleasantly by the stove—just a lit-
tle closer and we’re singed. Our hands themselves, we have to keep away.
The Next Tree

I know someone who doesn’t like to turn around. When he has to,
though, he usually needs a hold, a target outside. It can be a tree, a
lantern, or a boulder to the right of the path; up to this point, then, the
tree bears the slight injustice, as it were, that something has been inter-
rupted. We use it for our purposes, almost give it up, as though it could
bear it better, indeed do it better than we could. We trust the tree that
much, though it knows nothing of our purposes. Let alone of such silly
ones, and certainly nothing of the more serious ones. The saw too pro-
vides no better view of the tree, only better-furnished ones.

Half Good
So we hardly have ourselves. But first ourselves, and then things: Who
can find his way through? The cloth around us may still always protect us;
that still goes on. But we warm ourselves pleasantly by the stove—just a lit-
tle closer and we’re singed. Our hands themselves, we have to keep away.
The Next Tree

I know someone who doesn’t like to turn around. When he has to,
though, he usually needs a hold, a target outside. It can be a tree, a
lantern, or a boulder to the right of the path; up to this point, then, the
tree bears the slight injustice, as it were, that something has been inter-
rupted. We use it for our purposes, almost give it up, as though it could
bear it better, indeed do it better than we could. We trust the tree that
much, though it knows nothing of our purposes. Let alone of such silly
ones, and certainly nothing of the more serious ones. The saw too pro-
vides no better view of the tree, only better-furnished ones.

 Flower and Unflower
Flower and Unflower

Some can give up their self in something external without losing them-
selves there, without leaving themselves at all. Assuming that they’re on a
good footing with the thing outside, yesterday like today, like tomorrow
especially. When on Monet’s eightieth birthday a photographer came to
him from Paris, the artist replied to him: Come back next spring and pho-
tograph the flowers in my garden; they look more like me than I do. For
others, a familiar old cabinet in the room would have done the same ser-
vice. Then precisely the unflower—something imperishable—would have
belonged in the still life, the stilled life between people and things.
The Leyden Jar

All the more remarkable that we can use what we don’t even know, as
though it were there for us. The engineer Siemens once climbed the pyra-
mid of Cheops; already halfway up he didn’t like the look of his guides. At
the top there was little time to enjoy the view, for the Bedouins took out
their pistols and robbed him. But he had long ago noticed the electric
charge in the desert air, so he very craftily placed his mackintosh under his
feet, held up his moistened finger in the air, and just as the sheik stood be-
fore him, lowered it to his nose. A spark leaped across from the human
Leyden jar. The Bedouins ran away screaming, and even Siemens—once
the laborious descent, alone and without magic, was behind him—mar-
veled for a long time at “his” power. He had certainly proven himself as a
magician, but how does enlightenment become superstition, the times
table a hocus pocus? It laughs at it, and finally looks just like it. The cal-
culated spark jumped just as the conjured one perhaps once did, this time
“good,” another time “bad,” for neither concerns the spark.
The First Locomotive

There is even a wild legend about George Stephenson’s debut.1 He
pulled the first mobile boiler out of the shed. The wheels turned, and the
Flower and Unflower

The Leyden Jar


Flower and Unflower

The Leyden Jar


inventor followed his creation down the evening street. But after just a
few strokes the locomotive sprang forward, ever faster, Stephenson help-
lessly behind. From the other end of the street there now came a troop of
revelers who had been detained by beer; young men and women, the vil-
lage preacher among them. Toward them the monster now ran, hissing
past in a shape that no one on earth had ever seen, coal-black, throwing
sparks, with supernatural velocity. Even worse than the way the old books
portrayed the devil; nothing was missing, but there was something new.
A half mile further the street made a bend right along a wall; into this the
locomotive now rammed and exploded with great violence.
The next day, it is said, three of the pedestrians fell into a high fever,
and the preacher went mad. Only Stephenson understood it all and built
a new machine on rails, and with a driver’s seat, so its demonic power was
put on the right track, indeed almost organically. Now the locomotive
boils as though hot-blooded, pants as though out of breath, a tamed land
animal on a grand scale, who can make us forget the golem.
The Indians saw horses for the first time with the white man, about
which Johannes V. Jensen has remarked, If we knew how they had seen it,
we would know how a horse looks.2 In the preacher’s madness we see how
one of the greatest revolutions in technology looked before one got used
to it and lost the demonism behind it. Only an accident occasionally
brings it to mind again: the crash of the collision, the bang of explosions,
the screams of shattered people—in short, an ensemble that has no civi-
lized timetable. Modern warfare especially did its part; here iron became
even thicker than blood, and technology quite ready to recall the hellish
aspect of the first locomotive. There is no way back, but the crises of acci-
dents (of uncontrolled things) will persist all the longer as they lie deeper
than crises of the economy (of uncontrolled commodities).
The Urban Peasant

I know someone who is cowardly in a beautiful way. Of course with an-
imals he’s fine; with other people he stands up for himself. But like a peas-
ant, although he was born in the big city, he mistrusts machines, the clang
of steel against steel, the fuel explosions by means of which we so gently
move from place to place. He likes to say, The danger of being born in
inventor followed his creation down the evening street. But after just a
few strokes the locomotive sprang forward, ever faster, Stephenson help-
lessly behind. From the other end of the street there now came a troop of
revelers who had been detained by beer; young men and women, the vil-
lage preacher among them. Toward them the monster now ran, hissing
past in a shape that no one on earth had ever seen, coal-black, throwing
sparks, with supernatural velocity. Even worse than the way the old books
portrayed the devil; nothing was missing, but there was something new.
A half mile further the street made a bend right along a wall; into this the
locomotive now rammed and exploded with great violence.
The next day, it is said, three of the pedestrians fell into a high fever,
and the preacher went mad. Only Stephenson understood it all and built
a new machine on rails, and with a driver’s seat, so its demonic power was
put on the right track, indeed almost organically. Now the locomotive
boils as though hot-blooded, pants as though out of breath, a tamed land
animal on a grand scale, who can make us forget the golem.
The Indians saw horses for the first time with the white man, about
which Johannes V. Jensen has remarked, If we knew how they had seen it,
we would know how a horse looks.2 In the preacher’s madness we see how
one of the greatest revolutions in technology looked before one got used
to it and lost the demonism behind it. Only an accident occasionally
brings it to mind again: the crash of the collision, the bang of explosions,
the screams of shattered people—in short, an ensemble that has no civi-
lized timetable. Modern warfare especially did its part; here iron became
even thicker than blood, and technology quite ready to recall the hellish
aspect of the first locomotive. There is no way back, but the crises of acci-
dents (of uncontrolled things) will persist all the longer as they lie deeper
than crises of the economy (of uncontrolled commodities).
The Urban Peasant

I know someone who is cowardly in a beautiful way. Of course with an-
imals he’s fine; with other people he stands up for himself. But like a peas-
ant, although he was born in the big city, he mistrusts machines, the clang
of steel against steel, the fuel explosions by means of which we so gently
move from place to place. He likes to say, The danger of being born in
 The House of Day
Berlin is great, and I’m its victim, am still not equal to the consequences.
This man doesn’t even like riding the elevator, and points to the thin ca-
ble from which the car hangs: When you see something like that, my aver-
sion doesn’t need to be psychoanalyzed. Or two ships collided on the
Wannsee one night. The newspapers quickly understood, for both cap-
tains were drunk. But the doubtful man only shook his head, and said:
This only makes the incident especially mystifying. By day, and sober, it’s
no mean feat to crash on the Wannsee. But at night, when you can’t see,
and drunk! So the accident was for him the successful marksmanship of
two ships against each other, or rather the longing to destroy themselves
as ships; to them it was no accident—quite the contrary. Only thus would
this man conceive the problem: things want to go back to their own lives;
when they succeed, it’s all right for them, catastrophic for us. When the
cat’s away, the mice will play; when the master is out, the servants re-
member that they aren’t servants.
The House of Day

What is least of all ours might be the outer morning, as fresh as it is. It
scatters like tea leaves and is all beautiful surface; everything about it is
blank and outward. A presence that from early on seems to be everywhere
and thus nowhere—that has no house, and where one can go forever
without arriving. There are green shadows, but they say nothing yet.
It’s different in the afternoon, of course, and certainly at night, when
outside too everything comes lower. Or when the land takes part in the
human house, something that once became evident at a friend’s, with a
concord between inside and outside that out there too simulated or pro-
vided a house, our house. It is a recollection that belongs here first as the
apparent or real corrective to a habituation to things without accident,
without infinity or aberration. I had supper once with this man. The plates
were cleared, the farm girl who was his beloved went into the kitchen. We
friends sat silently and smoked our pipes; the tobacco smoke smelled as
when one follows behind lumberjacks, so strong and rich with cinnamon;
outside the broad Bavarian landscape with cumuli motionless in the sky.
A fly buzzed in the parlor; the farm girl clattered the sturdy dishes. A most
cheerful circuit went tangibly between inside and outside, appearance and
depth, power and surface. Listen, said my friend, how well the house is in
 The House of Day
Berlin is great, and I’m its victim, am still not equal to the consequences.
This man doesn’t even like riding the elevator, and points to the thin ca-
ble from which the car hangs: When you see something like that, my aver-
sion doesn’t need to be psychoanalyzed. Or two ships collided on the
Wannsee one night. The newspapers quickly understood, for both cap-
tains were drunk. But the doubtful man only shook his head, and said:
This only makes the incident especially mystifying. By day, and sober, it’s
no mean feat to crash on the Wannsee. But at night, when you can’t see,
and drunk! So the accident was for him the successful marksmanship of
two ships against each other, or rather the longing to destroy themselves
as ships; to them it was no accident—quite the contrary. Only thus would
this man conceive the problem: things want to go back to their own lives;
when they succeed, it’s all right for them, catastrophic for us. When the
cat’s away, the mice will play; when the master is out, the servants re-
member that they aren’t servants.
The House of Day

What is least of all ours might be the outer morning, as fresh as it is. It
scatters like tea leaves and is all beautiful surface; everything about it is
blank and outward. A presence that from early on seems to be everywhere
and thus nowhere—that has no house, and where one can go forever
without arriving. There are green shadows, but they say nothing yet.
It’s different in the afternoon, of course, and certainly at night, when
outside too everything comes lower. Or when the land takes part in the
human house, something that once became evident at a friend’s, with a
concord between inside and outside that out there too simulated or pro-
vided a house, our house. It is a recollection that belongs here first as the
apparent or real corrective to a habituation to things without accident,
without infinity or aberration. I had supper once with this man. The plates
were cleared, the farm girl who was his beloved went into the kitchen. We
friends sat silently and smoked our pipes; the tobacco smoke smelled as
when one follows behind lumberjacks, so strong and rich with cinnamon;
outside the broad Bavarian landscape with cumuli motionless in the sky.
A fly buzzed in the parlor; the farm girl clattered the sturdy dishes. A most
cheerful circuit went tangibly between inside and outside, appearance and
depth, power and surface. Listen, said my friend, how well the house is in
The House of Day 
operation. And we heard the silence, the proper installation, the familiar
comradeship with things that every healthy person senses, the aura around
them, the world of the Tao. So immediately, and nearly outside the lived
moment, so personally at home in it did we enjoy the “land,” and didn’t
even need to move away a stretch to see the full measure of it.
We were of course under a spell, but it seemed a good one—naturally
the human house was part of it, and the day was in the house, filtered, not
the house in the day. Yet as we said, the day as morning has no house, or
when it does, then the inhuman house that a second recollection might
describe, and that was hardly so “well” in operation. The morning has no
house if one just walks through it, but of course it can become a terrible
house if one stumbles radically into its beginning: into the very break of
dawn that still has something about it, not just a blank surface, least of all
the macrocosmic breathing room for which Faust at his desk longs. Life
then hardly circulates in a healthy cosmic rhythm as it did for Goethe; the
Tao of happiness sinks, and nature is no longer a living book, unexplained
yet not inexplicable. In this cosmic house, one could not bathe oneself
back to health. It did not teach us to know our fellows; nor was it an
evening house, with everything meaningfully near. Instead the reverse twi-
light began that was so uncanny in earlier times, the embryonic confine-
ment of the day just before cock’s crow. This was a decisively inhuman en-
circlement, and it happened around four in the morning in June on the
South Italian coast.
Awakened by the early sunrise, I walked out into the open. Not in the
air, but in the landscape, was a torpid heat. The sea seemed stifled, almost
like gruel, didn’t break; the cliffs, usually so forbidding, seemed soft, like
furniture, quite useful. In this space was the mood of a room where some-
one is hiding, or better (since there was certainly nothing frightening here),
where a guest must have moved in without one’s knowing it. A long cloud-
bank hung over the sea on the Southern horizon, very flat; made the space
even lower and almost upholstered. But to the left stood Jupiter, the only
star on this milky skin. Jupiter ascending; a powerful eye that through its
power seemed especially near. Immediately one felt: with this gaze the land-
scape stands in agreement; yes, Jupiter himself had provoked this incon-
ceivable meeting as the guest in this space, or as a controlling god among
his creatures. The star ruled so powerfully that it even dragged the ob-
server down from his contemplative terrace right into the crowded scene,
where there were no more eyes or distances for a standing outside of, let
alone a standing before. Numb and frantic, one could merely take in a kind
 Montages of a February Evening
of resonance or reverberation; it drew one into the ensemble without even

leaving any breathing room for one’s head. The observer became a limb of
this nameless organism, feeling as though inside an animal’s body, a cosmic
animal with Jupiter as its inner eye.3 Here there was only interior and no ob-
verse, only equipment and entrails, no inhabitants but the cosmic body it-
self and its inferior stellar eye. One felt sustained, infused, captivated by the
fluids of a totem that had hardly been made in our likeness. Only gradually
did this mythical state disperse, the day grow brighter, no longer encircling;
or, with the sun rising, one could no longer enter its higher-vaulted house
over the raised steps of day’s door. The single room, indeed single body, had
become floors, finally the shining palace where one could again lose oneself,
with ground floor, mountains, and the vaulted sky, and finally the old,
cheerful morning itself that lives and radiates into the day.
Yet the image persisted of a morning that simply obliterates us and is no
friend to us. What attracts us later in the young day, or is external, or beau-
tiful surface, or even splendid expanse, looked absolutely inhuman in its lair.
The experience was too unique, too much of an “experience” to say much;
since no eye had a place here, there might not even be a proper recollection,
and certainly no concept there and then. It was a very dismal, almost head-
less consciousness, although entirely normal and determined only by the
object of perception. In its breathlessness it perhaps sustained the most
extreme exclusion of reason, was determined purely atavistically, from
places in the world not even colored by any known mythology, let alone il-
luminated by reason. If we may use categories out of Bachofen, then we
must reverse them: here something expansive seemed to have become cav-
ernous, something heavenly become chthonic, full of nearness and embry-
onic warmth, but without bringing, as the chthonic otherwise often does,
anything familiar with it, let alone anything human. The memory of the
mixed emotions of disgust and awe remained: disgust for a Moloch with
stomach acids instead of fire; fear and awe as before the old animal gods.
Montages of a February Evening

Outside the door it’s harsh. No people, frost on the street; the stones are
alone with themselves. Fit well into the cold and the whining of the rails.
Every other sound is muffled, the trees bare again; even the wood wants
 Montages of a February Evening
of resonance or reverberation; it drew one into the ensemble without even

leaving any breathing room for one’s head. The observer became a limb of
this nameless organism, feeling as though inside an animal’s body, a cosmic
animal with Jupiter as its inner eye.3 Here there was only interior and no ob-
verse, only equipment and entrails, no inhabitants but the cosmic body it-
self and its inferior stellar eye. One felt sustained, infused, captivated by the
fluids of a totem that had hardly been made in our likeness. Only gradually
did this mythical state disperse, the day grow brighter, no longer encircling;
or, with the sun rising, one could no longer enter its higher-vaulted house
over the raised steps of day’s door. The single room, indeed single body, had
become floors, finally the shining palace where one could again lose oneself,
with ground floor, mountains, and the vaulted sky, and finally the old,
cheerful morning itself that lives and radiates into the day.
Yet the image persisted of a morning that simply obliterates us and is no
friend to us. What attracts us later in the young day, or is external, or beau-
tiful surface, or even splendid expanse, looked absolutely inhuman in its lair.
The experience was too unique, too much of an “experience” to say much;
since no eye had a place here, there might not even be a proper recollection,
and certainly no concept there and then. It was a very dismal, almost head-
less consciousness, although entirely normal and determined only by the
object of perception. In its breathlessness it perhaps sustained the most
extreme exclusion of reason, was determined purely atavistically, from
places in the world not even colored by any known mythology, let alone il-
luminated by reason. If we may use categories out of Bachofen, then we
must reverse them: here something expansive seemed to have become cav-
ernous, something heavenly become chthonic, full of nearness and embry-
onic warmth, but without bringing, as the chthonic otherwise often does,
anything familiar with it, let alone anything human. The memory of the
mixed emotions of disgust and awe remained: disgust for a Moloch with
stomach acids instead of fire; fear and awe as before the old animal gods.
Montages of a February Evening

Outside the door it’s harsh. No people, frost on the street; the stones are
alone with themselves. Fit well into the cold and the whining of the rails.
Every other sound is muffled, the trees bare again; even the wood wants
Montages of a February Evening 
to disappear. The newer the streets, the better they know how to seem
twice as cold.
One’s breath fogs out here like a completely foreign flag. Overnight the
North wind has moved the city there, whence the wind came. Removed it
like Aladdin’s palace, but the front door suddenly opens onto Greenland.
No more transition, no fog, no overcast sky, no merely passing North, or
the average to which heat usually raises it, but hard, and at home, its very
self. Insistently something is advancing that needs no breath, and would
remain after the last breath went out.
Yet the light doesn’t seem to fit at all. A few weeks before March, and it
hasn’t gone along back to the North. Therefore only stranger, for the sun
shines coldly. The desolate streets channel the icy wind, and it fits them.
Only into the mountains, the high, utterly unfabricated mountains, does
the sun send warmth, bring images of the South into the pure air. Here in
the city, however, these images are estranged; they reveal their South as
merely an association, which is dispensable.
Italian nonetheless the sun, the clouds in the spring night, their pale
pink with gold, floating extraordinarily, and free without struggle: in a
landscape beyond any springtime, in the high-pressure zone over the city’s
Greenland. A little later, a Hesperidean moon, even; with the evening star
very near, it moves into a sky that knows something of the most Southern
turquoise. Delicately the woman in the moon begins to emerge, the girl
in the moon; over a rococo garden, by gentle evening breezes, this sickle
could shine on the song of Susanna. Or she was above the old gardens of
Baghdad, the dancing girl who governed love, palms, fountains, poetry
with her silvery torch (notturna face for Mozart’s Susanna), who indeed
rose from the poetry itself into the sky. Here, however, the Orient rhymes
precisely with the jingling North, and then with the stars that belong
completely to the North. Ice cold remains the polar night, in the old way;
its marvelous jaws eat up the clouds and the woman in the moon.
Does the moon even rhyme? It rhymes with a situation to which nothing
is still accustomed, that shifts its objects. What was familiar, separates; a pro-
claimed landscape appears, the habitual juxtaposition drops out in the
aforementioned night in Berlin . Conversely, very distant elements re-
veal themselves in this stark outlook as assembled, as by the exquisitely
strange syzygies of a poem by Rimbaud. The spring clouds are none at all,
the girl in the moon, who once was the horned Astarte, abandons the spring
night, zephyr, love, and how much more the rural family of the nineteenth
 An Odd Flâneur
century, where she lived with stable connotations; the moon of Baghdad
stands as such, with an unknown goal, over a city endured like the Arctic.
The light above is no longer a comfort, not even a thrilling or melan-
choly contrast drifting along the heavenly paths; this kind of attribution
too has disappeared. A transformed vision notices new ensembles in na-
ture, and not only for vision is the city transported on such nights: Nature
in person wanders out of the appointments of the Romantic century, even
the mythological centuries. There remains beauty, but it upsets us; if it has
nothing clearly before it, then the collapse of the old spheres, the montage
of once impenetrable zones behind it. Ice violins on high evoke a new
sound; the clouds are corals from the ocean floor; death has the brightness
of green turquoise; the girl in the moon, who allies herself with the frost,
shows the ambiguity that, personified as zephyr, she had only with Su-
sanna. Nights like this tear us out of the habit of giving every element of
nature its ready place instead of its carriage. The dislocation of such an
evening is montage, separating what is near, bringing together what is fur-
thest, as intensified in paintings like Max Ernst’s or de Chirico’s.
This shattering in things is certainly objectively there, even if the more
or less accurate sense for it has only awakened now, brought about by the
social earthquake. As we said, artists and poets were the first to register di-
rect connections between things so distant. The gentle cloud of this Feb-
ruary night remains quite objectively in the harsh cirrus ice, and the girl
in the moon, complete with affectionately gazing evening star, not only
belongs to the warm love song of Susanna in the Arabian garden, but at
the same time understands how to put on Old Death as coolly, cheerfully,
and deftly as a new dress. Existence is full of figures, but not organized fig-
ures, with each and every one in its fixed place. Instead an echo of allegor-
ical meaning will still resound everywhere, instructively relaying back and
forth, ambiguously reflective, before a form will stand there: as good
woman who is a good woman; as our day, when (in both senses, a past as
well as an entourage) it has the ambiguous, meaningful twilight behind it.
An Odd Flâneur
I knew someone who knew how to get along without himself. Not that
he had no noticeable self, even, preferably, a rather ghostly seeming self. A
 An Odd Flâneur
century, where she lived with stable connotations; the moon of Baghdad
stands as such, with an unknown goal, over a city endured like the Arctic.
The light above is no longer a comfort, not even a thrilling or melan-
choly contrast drifting along the heavenly paths; this kind of attribution
too has disappeared. A transformed vision notices new ensembles in na-
ture, and not only for vision is the city transported on such nights: Nature
in person wanders out of the appointments of the Romantic century, even
the mythological centuries. There remains beauty, but it upsets us; if it has
nothing clearly before it, then the collapse of the old spheres, the montage
of once impenetrable zones behind it. Ice violins on high evoke a new
sound; the clouds are corals from the ocean floor; death has the brightness
of green turquoise; the girl in the moon, who allies herself with the frost,
shows the ambiguity that, personified as zephyr, she had only with Su-
sanna. Nights like this tear us out of the habit of giving every element of
nature its ready place instead of its carriage. The dislocation of such an
evening is montage, separating what is near, bringing together what is fur-
thest, as intensified in paintings like Max Ernst’s or de Chirico’s.
This shattering in things is certainly objectively there, even if the more
or less accurate sense for it has only awakened now, brought about by the
social earthquake. As we said, artists and poets were the first to register di-
rect connections between things so distant. The gentle cloud of this Feb-
ruary night remains quite objectively in the harsh cirrus ice, and the girl
in the moon, complete with affectionately gazing evening star, not only
belongs to the warm love song of Susanna in the Arabian garden, but at
the same time understands how to put on Old Death as coolly, cheerfully,
and deftly as a new dress. Existence is full of figures, but not organized fig-
ures, with each and every one in its fixed place. Instead an echo of allegor-
ical meaning will still resound everywhere, instructively relaying back and
forth, ambiguously reflective, before a form will stand there: as good
woman who is a good woman; as our day, when (in both senses, a past as
well as an entourage) it has the ambiguous, meaningful twilight behind it.
An Odd Flâneur
I knew someone who knew how to get along without himself. Not that
he had no noticeable self, even, preferably, a rather ghostly seeming self. A
An Odd Flâneur 
streak of vanity too was not lacking, but even that came to life only outside
of him, so to speak. As in the pleasure that came to this Mr. Kähler when-
ever he was suitably dressed, proper to the situation where he presently
found himself among people and things. The I-Thou relationship entered
all his I-It relationships too, full of questions about a person’s proper be-
havior with respect to every kind of externality. In an again completely self-
oblivious effort, intended precisely with the utmost objectivity, adequately
to encounter the respective Not-I. Already beginning in the question, May
I sit as casually across from my wine glass as I doubtlessly may from my
beer mug? Or by the bedside of a sick woman, very restless, almost des-
perately laying the proffered cigarette aside, and later, on his departure,
outside, Please ask your wife to excuse me, but I really don’t know how
one should smoke a cigarette in a sickroom. Or: Would you rather yield
to a car, even with its top down, when it’s empty or when it’s full? Or,
in Kähler’s style: Two officers meet in public, both decorated with high
honors, one’s barely perceptibly higher than the other’s. Question: which
of them may bring up the subject of decorations?
In this way every relationship to other people was like that to things—
and that, precisely, with both on the same level—embroidered with good
manners, correct manners, indeed manners finally made true, proper. Thus
initiating an interaction, friendly while at the same time, in spite of its out-
moded form, thoroughly democratic, without any below-and-above,
above-and-below in this direct visual encounter, one on a fraternal level
with everything.
Eccentric, absolutely; the also comical oddity of daily practicing this as-
sociation of a new courtesy and a proper understanding for his counter-
part is obvious; ultimately Kähler himself even outdid it. When I ran into
him again in the first months of the War in , and saw this otherwise
so tolerant, not exactly patriotic man nearly decorated with the Order of
Merit, he answered my cold stare, after his features were overcome by
growing sorrow: If you don’t understand me, who will? Don’t you see that
this miserable war offered me a unique chance to learn the proper treat-
ment of grenades? I’ve learned it, and it has nothing to do with service to
the Fatherland.
There was nothing for me but shame, as it were, at such a truly Kähler-
ish reunion with, or in, such folly. Nonetheless here too something re-
mained: what comradely relations this absurd man sought, had, with the
most alien things!
 Eating Olives Precisely
In any case, in life it is not always unpleasant to run into such a fellow,
or better, a nonfellow. Kähler died on one of his frequent trips, inciden-
tally among suspicious acquaintances, now vanished. His flâneur’s ars
amandi with everything laid out before perception had already ceased be-
fore that. He left no writings behind; where would he have found and not
stolen the words? and really, what else but good, quiet, attentive manners
in his dealings with all things? The hand here is not just, as I’ve said, the
housewife of the body, but the signpost to the right word, only after
which will things meet our extended index hand, word hand. Not much
more could be done with Kähler, but every attempted interpretation
could include a trace of such extended table manners, bedside manners,
and their courteous attention.
Eating Olives Precisely

A fine palate and a fine mind often go together. The more elegant a sense
for the little things, for the right things, the more literally is it prefigured in
the sense of taste. Through taste, the feeling for nuance has been superbly
advanced. Coarseness has no place in it, though perhaps such absurdity in
refinement that it can admire while it mocks itself. This from an old Chi-
nese story about eating olives, pleasant to hear, grotesquely pointed in all
its attention to detail, a caricature of refinement insofar as it remains com-
pletely irrelevant and yet itself when, in the greatest finesse, it tastes itself.
A dash of it belongs to every feeling for the incidental whose palate is the
least happy when it finds earthworms.
This is supposed to have happened occasionally long ago, far away. It
was an olive feast, yet a very unusual one, as we will presently hear, and
among unusual people. In old Nanking, twice a year, the young literati
would gather and consume, very calmly and tastefully, three olives each—
only a few, in other words, but with a very particular manner of prepara-
tion. The most choice fruits were each sewn into a thrush, the thrush into
a quail, the quail into a duck, the duck into a goose, the goose into a
turkey, the turkey into a piglet, the piglet into a sheep, the sheep into a calf,
the calf into an ox. Then the whole thing was gently turned and roasted on
a spit over a slow fire. Thereafter the ox was thrown away, the calf, the
sheep, the piglet, the turkey, the goose, the duck, the quail; the olive was
 Eating Olives Precisely
In any case, in life it is not always unpleasant to run into such a fellow,
or better, a nonfellow. Kähler died on one of his frequent trips, inciden-
tally among suspicious acquaintances, now vanished. His flâneur’s ars
amandi with everything laid out before perception had already ceased be-
fore that. He left no writings behind; where would he have found and not
stolen the words? and really, what else but good, quiet, attentive manners
in his dealings with all things? The hand here is not just, as I’ve said, the
housewife of the body, but the signpost to the right word, only after
which will things meet our extended index hand, word hand. Not much
more could be done with Kähler, but every attempted interpretation
could include a trace of such extended table manners, bedside manners,
and their courteous attention.
Eating Olives Precisely

A fine palate and a fine mind often go together. The more elegant a sense
for the little things, for the right things, the more literally is it prefigured in
the sense of taste. Through taste, the feeling for nuance has been superbly
advanced. Coarseness has no place in it, though perhaps such absurdity in
refinement that it can admire while it mocks itself. This from an old Chi-
nese story about eating olives, pleasant to hear, grotesquely pointed in all
its attention to detail, a caricature of refinement insofar as it remains com-
pletely irrelevant and yet itself when, in the greatest finesse, it tastes itself.
A dash of it belongs to every feeling for the incidental whose palate is the
least happy when it finds earthworms.
This is supposed to have happened occasionally long ago, far away. It
was an olive feast, yet a very unusual one, as we will presently hear, and
among unusual people. In old Nanking, twice a year, the young literati
would gather and consume, very calmly and tastefully, three olives each—
only a few, in other words, but with a very particular manner of prepara-
tion. The most choice fruits were each sewn into a thrush, the thrush into
a quail, the quail into a duck, the duck into a goose, the goose into a
turkey, the turkey into a piglet, the piglet into a sheep, the sheep into a calf,
the calf into an ox. Then the whole thing was gently turned and roasted on
a spit over a slow fire. Thereafter the ox was thrown away, the calf, the
sheep, the piglet, the turkey, the goose, the duck, the quail; the olive was
Making a Point 
removed from the thrush and brought to the table with the other two, pre-
pared just as fastidiously.
But in the middle of their subsequent intake one of the literati became
painfully quiet, though not just withdrawn into himself; he chewed his
meal very slowly, all tip of the tongue and palate, with his eyes to the ceil-
ing, and said finally: I would hate to admit I’m mistaken: it seems to me
that the turkey for this olive was not quite young. And his friends around
the table praised the not only erudite but unfailing tip of his tongue, al-
though it had broken the silence; praised the tongue as exceptional be-
cause it had discerned the aroma of a juice from the middle (not, say, the
smaller but nearer quail, nor the mighty, all-enclosing ox). So much for
the old Chinese tale, micrologically quite instructive for something more,
where not just olives or playgrounds are in question. There is so much
that’s more important, at least just as important in the world, that’s
spoiled by untasted, undetected turkeys, even by sharks.
Making a Point
One hadn’t gotten to the point where everything had been talked to
death. Rather, in an age before newspapers, if not also before oratorical
overkill, this lovely rebuff took place in Sparta before the council of elders.
A delegation from Mycenae had appeared; their orator talked and talked,
broadly, vaguely, concluded only with effort. The eldest of the gerusia
replied: Your speech was too long. When you were in the middle, we’d
forgotten the beginning; when you were done, we’d forgotten the begin-
ning and the middle. Don’t know what you want; send a new legation.
This legation, only two men strong, actually appeared a few days later;
their speaker: Crop failures, famine, need grain. Sat down. The eldest of
the gerusia: Understood; speech was short, request granted. Would have
been enough to show an empty sack.
Whereby the ceremonies ended, laconic down to the recommendation
of an empty sack as nonverbal sign, perfectly taciturn. Perhaps there’s a
mistrust of all speech here, not just of the bush they’re all beating around;
also against the impertinence and thoughtlessness of calling a thing some-
thing, giving it a name it doesn’t have, not even more or less, if it has a
name at all. The Mycenaean was in any case satisfied to be answered so
Making a Point 
removed from the thrush and brought to the table with the other two, pre-
pared just as fastidiously.
But in the middle of their subsequent intake one of the literati became
painfully quiet, though not just withdrawn into himself; he chewed his
meal very slowly, all tip of the tongue and palate, with his eyes to the ceil-
ing, and said finally: I would hate to admit I’m mistaken: it seems to me
that the turkey for this olive was not quite young. And his friends around
the table praised the not only erudite but unfailing tip of his tongue, al-
though it had broken the silence; praised the tongue as exceptional be-
cause it had discerned the aroma of a juice from the middle (not, say, the
smaller but nearer quail, nor the mighty, all-enclosing ox). So much for
the old Chinese tale, micrologically quite instructive for something more,
where not just olives or playgrounds are in question. There is so much
that’s more important, at least just as important in the world, that’s
spoiled by untasted, undetected turkeys, even by sharks.
Making a Point
One hadn’t gotten to the point where everything had been talked to
death. Rather, in an age before newspapers, if not also before oratorical
overkill, this lovely rebuff took place in Sparta before the council of elders.
A delegation from Mycenae had appeared; their orator talked and talked,
broadly, vaguely, concluded only with effort. The eldest of the gerusia
replied: Your speech was too long. When you were in the middle, we’d
forgotten the beginning; when you were done, we’d forgotten the begin-
ning and the middle. Don’t know what you want; send a new legation.
This legation, only two men strong, actually appeared a few days later;
their speaker: Crop failures, famine, need grain. Sat down. The eldest of
the gerusia: Understood; speech was short, request granted. Would have
been enough to show an empty sack.
Whereby the ceremonies ended, laconic down to the recommendation
of an empty sack as nonverbal sign, perfectly taciturn. Perhaps there’s a
mistrust of all speech here, not just of the bush they’re all beating around;
also against the impertinence and thoughtlessness of calling a thing some-
thing, giving it a name it doesn’t have, not even more or less, if it has a
name at all. The Mycenaean was in any case satisfied to be answered so
 The Reverse of Things
objectively, as it were; withdrew. Since then the empty sack that extrava-
gant speakers especially bring with them has only become full of words
again; indeed the talkers themselves are only the empty sacks of themselves.
Better attention to one’s own chatter, a more eloquent reserve where one
has nothing to say, offer a simple remedy here. There are certain Myce-
naeans who, as they say in Berlin, are one single declaration [Anjabe], for
they never cease declaring themselves [geben immer so an]; only laconically
can one know what one has.4
The Reverse of Things

If we say a cloth is rough, that remains among us, as it were. Only
against our skin is the cloth rough; “for itself ” it might be otherwise, say,
coarsely woven. But if we see a rose as red, then the color is there and then
where we see it, as it were; our perception then seems to have become a
property. As one no longer bound to our skin, it has the same objective
appearance as the coarse weave; it seems red even independently of our vi-
sion. Whether the thing whose property this is is really called rose, truly
also exists as the essence rose: this seems, to respectful consideration, more
doubtful again. Whether the rose knows that it is a rose: this question is
not just a later philosophical joke; rather, it is already familiar to children,
precisely because they are objective and want to take every word at face
value. Quite simply, seen quite childishly: what are objects up to without
us? How does the room look after we leave it?
The fire in the stove burns even when we’re not around. Therefore, we
say, it must have been burning in the meantime, since the room is now
warm. Yet that is not certain, and what the fire was doing before, what the
furniture was doing during our absence, is obscure. No proposition about it
can be proven, and none, even the most fantastical, can be refuted. Pre-
cisely: the mice dance on the table, and what did the table do—what was
it—in the meantime? That on our return everything stands as it was, “as
though nothing had happened,” can be the most uncanny thing of all. If the
servant girls tell of ghosts who throw the logs at each other that are piled up
in the shed: what still thrills children the most is that the next morning the
wood is lying there as before. Or: though all the sails are reefed, the dead
men on Hauff’s ghost ship sail backward; if the sails are nonetheless reefed
 The Reverse of Things
objectively, as it were; withdrew. Since then the empty sack that extrava-
gant speakers especially bring with them has only become full of words
again; indeed the talkers themselves are only the empty sacks of themselves.
Better attention to one’s own chatter, a more eloquent reserve where one
has nothing to say, offer a simple remedy here. There are certain Myce-
naeans who, as they say in Berlin, are one single declaration [Anjabe], for
they never cease declaring themselves [geben immer so an]; only laconically
can one know what one has.4
The Reverse of Things

If we say a cloth is rough, that remains among us, as it were. Only
against our skin is the cloth rough; “for itself ” it might be otherwise, say,
coarsely woven. But if we see a rose as red, then the color is there and then
where we see it, as it were; our perception then seems to have become a
property. As one no longer bound to our skin, it has the same objective
appearance as the coarse weave; it seems red even independently of our vi-
sion. Whether the thing whose property this is is really called rose, truly
also exists as the essence rose: this seems, to respectful consideration, more
doubtful again. Whether the rose knows that it is a rose: this question is
not just a later philosophical joke; rather, it is already familiar to children,
precisely because they are objective and want to take every word at face
value. Quite simply, seen quite childishly: what are objects up to without
us? How does the room look after we leave it?
The fire in the stove burns even when we’re not around. Therefore, we
say, it must have been burning in the meantime, since the room is now
warm. Yet that is not certain, and what the fire was doing before, what the
furniture was doing during our absence, is obscure. No proposition about it
can be proven, and none, even the most fantastical, can be refuted. Pre-
cisely: the mice dance on the table, and what did the table do—what was
it—in the meantime? That on our return everything stands as it was, “as
though nothing had happened,” can be the most uncanny thing of all. If the
servant girls tell of ghosts who throw the logs at each other that are piled up
in the shed: what still thrills children the most is that the next morning the
wood is lying there as before. Or: though all the sails are reefed, the dead
men on Hauff’s ghost ship sail backward; if the sails are nonetheless reefed
The Reverse of Things 
“the same way” the next morning, that increases our horror at night, instead
of refuting it as a dream or whatever else. For many it is an uncanny feeling
from early on, seeing things only when we see them.
The clock strikes six, and schoolboys open their textbooks. Now a train
is leaving Ulm. Perhaps a slave girl is dancing in a harem in Timbuktu.
But where there’s no clock, does everything pretend to exist? The stars
twinkle above the polar ice; do they really twinkle, and as stars? Does one
believe of the dark side of the moon that it has its night, and its rocks? of
Venus, that here potential forests lie beneath the enormous clouds of wa-
ter? even though one doesn’t see them and has only the analogy of the pre-
sent excerpt, which one sees while one sees it? Is it even credible that the
table is necessarily always a table, and does its best to be one—only ac-
cording to its visible obverse, which it turns to our view as soon as we look
at it? The world as mere representation (with totally different continents
from those of observable fact, which at the same time unceasingly crowd
us) is a very natural, entirely prescientific horror; Bishop Berkeley is nowa-
days its primitive stage.
Something else makes things suspect even while they stand before our
gaze. At the theater, if the candles in the last act of Wallenstein are burning
on the table, say, and Wallenstein undersigns the treaty with Wrangel: then
the candles and the table are truly candles and table—they’re not play-act-
ing. They weren’t the same ones, but they were candles and table no differ-
ently when Wallenstein in fact signed himself over to the actual general. Yet
the people presently around the candles and desk—the present actors—are
play-acting; why, then, does no fissure open? Why does the audience, illu-
sion here, illusion there, sense no different levels of sincerity? Do inanimate
objects play-act? On stage does their pretense, far from creating a fissure,
have a homogeneous space?
In any case, no mask can help against the healthy, childlike question,
not even at the great world theater: Don’t utensils, outside of their use, be-
long nonetheless to an oblique world from which they never come to us?
Fruit, roses, forests belong, by their material and by the course of their
lives, to human beings, but the candle of stearin, even of wax, the beauti-
ful cabinet of wood, even of steel, the stone house, the heat from the stove
and even the electric bulb belong to another world, one only interspersed
into this one. The sea, to which we entrust our very different purposes,
and which even serves them, crashes terribly in the night, which is not
night to it; the ray by which light falls onto the desk can find its way in
 Greeting and Appearance
the night where we can see nothing, and makes the way light only when
it travels it, has almost traveled it. Life has settled among and on top of
things, as on top of objects that need neither oxygen nor food, are dead
without decaying, always at hand without being immortal; on the backs
of these things, as though they were the most familiar scene, culture was
established.
That is why the childish impression of Wallenstein’s candle and table can
easily be connected with an entirely different phantasm, with a legend out-
side the theater, from the wide world itself that we inhabit: with the legend
of Sindbad the sailor, and a motif of his unlucky star. Here the hidden face
of things, a still “irrational” life of their own, revealed itself, even threaten-
ingly, as the X that it is beyond the masks of utility. The allegory is power-
ful: after Sindbad suffered a shipwreck, he and a few companions saved
themselves onto a small, fertile island full of fruit trees, coconut palms,
birds, game, and in the woods a spring. But as the survivors lit a fire toward
evening in order to roast their catch, the ground sank and the trees splin-
tered; the island was the body of a huge kraken. For centuries the monster
had rested on the ocean’s surface; now a fire burned on its back, and it dove
under, “so that every sailor drowned in the churning vortex.”
Many such possibilities—and still others perhaps less supernatural, yet
just as explosive—lie in the riddle of how the room looks after one leaves
it. In front it’s bright, or brightly lit, but no one yet knows wherein the
dark side of things consists that we alone see, let alone their underside, and
what it all floats in. We know only the front or right side of their techni-
cal subservience, their benign incorporation; no one knows whether their
(often preserved) idyll, temptation, natural beauty is what it promises, or
pretends to hold.
Greeting and Appearance

How goes it, we ask; all right? Very strange, that we greet others like
this—that we simply assume it’s going well. The answer forestalls that we
should ever hear any different.
Yet we know it’s usually not going so well, not for us. We would find it
hard to take if everyone else were content, just not us. So there is also ab-
solutely no kindness in our anticipatory wish. What, then? In spite of
 Greeting and Appearance
the night where we can see nothing, and makes the way light only when
it travels it, has almost traveled it. Life has settled among and on top of
things, as on top of objects that need neither oxygen nor food, are dead
without decaying, always at hand without being immortal; on the backs
of these things, as though they were the most familiar scene, culture was
established.
That is why the childish impression of Wallenstein’s candle and table can
easily be connected with an entirely different phantasm, with a legend out-
side the theater, from the wide world itself that we inhabit: with the legend
of Sindbad the sailor, and a motif of his unlucky star. Here the hidden face
of things, a still “irrational” life of their own, revealed itself, even threaten-
ingly, as the X that it is beyond the masks of utility. The allegory is power-
ful: after Sindbad suffered a shipwreck, he and a few companions saved
themselves onto a small, fertile island full of fruit trees, coconut palms,
birds, game, and in the woods a spring. But as the survivors lit a fire toward
evening in order to roast their catch, the ground sank and the trees splin-
tered; the island was the body of a huge kraken. For centuries the monster
had rested on the ocean’s surface; now a fire burned on its back, and it dove
under, “so that every sailor drowned in the churning vortex.”
Many such possibilities—and still others perhaps less supernatural, yet
just as explosive—lie in the riddle of how the room looks after one leaves
it. In front it’s bright, or brightly lit, but no one yet knows wherein the
dark side of things consists that we alone see, let alone their underside, and
what it all floats in. We know only the front or right side of their techni-
cal subservience, their benign incorporation; no one knows whether their
(often preserved) idyll, temptation, natural beauty is what it promises, or
pretends to hold.
Greeting and Appearance

How goes it, we ask; all right? Very strange, that we greet others like
this—that we simply assume it’s going well. The answer forestalls that we
should ever hear any different.
Yet we know it’s usually not going so well, not for us. We would find it
hard to take if everyone else were content, just not us. So there is also ab-
solutely no kindness in our anticipatory wish. What, then? In spite of
Greeting and Appearance 
what we say, we don’t want to acknowledge another’s cares, greet them

away, as it were—because we don’t want to bear them? That would be one
explanation, but it doesn’t suffice. For this particular anticipation has par-
allels precisely among things, even more serious ones. Sometimes some-
thing greets us as though from a better world, or shines it forth quietly
and outwardly.
Not for no reason do lit windows already invite us this way; they seem
warm. The set table radiates at evening through strange windows, even
one’s own. Nothing is more remarkable than the gaze from outside into
one’s own room. How everything is protected there behind the glass: the
lamp glows, the armchair resides, the books shine. Or we ride the train
past peaceful houses from which placid smoke rises, past villages and small
towns where there is still a world before the gates, with brooks, an avenue
with sycamores, country homes out of the Biedermeier period behind the
gracefully crumbling wall. If one could live over there in the green shad-
ows, everything would be at its goal, inveni portum, spes et fortuna valete.5
Or one arrives toward evening in the little old town, one has a glass of
wine, and all around, the market square, formed of colorful and gabled
houses: then one hears the wellsprings of happiness surge from balconies
and bay windows that glow from within like dreams, the peace that the
houses breathe out. “But in that house over there,” says the barkeeper,
sits a woman with four children, and the husband ran off the day before yes-
terday. In the corner house—all the way to the right, the one with the green
shutters—lived Wilhelm the tailor; he was known to all the town as a drunk,
and one night when he didn’t come home his wife ran to every single tavern,
and to the police station; he wasn’t there either. Home again, she hangs her
coat in the closet; there hung her husband among the coats, dead since after-
noon. See the house with the bay window in back? There’s still a butcher shop
there, but the butcher Wilker hasn’t lived there in a long time; he lent all his
money to his brother-in-law, that crook. Even now I can’t get my wife to buy
meat there. When she was still a girl, she was sent there one morning; a trickle
of blood ran down the steps, and behind the counter lay the butcher on his
block; he’d cut his own throat.
So spoke the barkeeper, but the bright windows seemed no less warm.
The old square was indeed rent by all these horror stories, truer than the
square itself, about poor folks and their hard luck; yet the beauty re-
mained, even the idyll. A good deed doesn’t leave the house; a bad deed
walks for miles, the barkeeper now says, confusingly. Evil must in fact
 Greeting and Appearance
have walked far; in any case, it had not returned to the green shutters and
the cheerful bay window. Small-town façade and small-town reality were
different worlds, which could not be superimposed, even photographi-
cally, on this “dreamy” square.
Here we do not simply want all to be well, in other words; the windows
themselves seem to promise it. The idyll is clearly ahead of us with its
friendly greeting; its houses ensure a happiness (apart from their beauty)
that they do not in fact have. The cheerful greeting between people, back
and forth, the hasty forecast of well-being, perhaps comes out of mere
convention, which is inert distance; one does not want to be bothered,
nor bother others. The demands that we place on the well-being of others
too are usually quite modest. But in pretty little yards and peaceful houses
there is a first vision of happiness that is not our vision at all, but instead
seems to come from the apparent thing itself. And persists like the image
of one’s first encounter with others, with landscapes, even long after it’s
been corrected. The belief in an idyll remains much longer, above all
much higher; its disenchantment doesn’t even affect it.
It’s all the same what the barkeeper says; we ourselves already know
enough, to no avail, about the misery of small towns. How in a small town
every stroke of fate is surrounded by thunderclaps of gossip, every burst
pipe becomes a catastrophe that carries away the roofs and increases the
suffering by the thousand inquisitive eyes that watch it so maliciously—
first gossip, then suicide, then urban legends of misery down through the
generations. Yet none of this clings to the houses, and just as little to the
mysterious lie of their antiquity, their not only beautiful but good old
days. Behind these windows there once lived no less small-town horror (as
the epigraph often affirms); and the semicircle of houses adorned the
weekly public burning. Even so, sheer idyll predominates. It places itself
(and not only aesthetically) before existing as before past reality. The old
marketplaces offer an exception to every rule of pessimism; they seem like
a forecourt of peace.
But why do we believe it so easily, even enchantedly? Whence the pe-
culiar happy ending of the obverse? Such that we want a thing to begin
well, to look good—not only to end well. Here is a need for comedy, as it
were, for the cheerful façade, not only for the cheerful finale that encloses
the whole world. Indeed the cheerful façade is even stranger than the
usual happy ending, for the sign that beautiful houses set out is somehow
“realer” in appearance than the conciliation of the end or ground into
Greeting and Appearance 
which they are ostensibly built. Then why does this appearance greet us so
pleasantly? Indeed it almost lures us, and even peevish types respond to it.
What is that sweet taste that things give off on travels, where one sees
them on parade? What does the related fraud of antiquity signify—which
is not only beautiful, but which itself traveled to us through the centuries,
and is thus greeted, or greets us through its patina? Schopenhauer once
explained the magic of travel, extremely subjectivistically, as the joy of see-
ing as such: to see is blessed, to be is awful. In the most beautiful places
one doesn’t want simply to see, but to stay; no longer travel, travel on, but
live. Here happiness lures us as existent, as existent on the objective front,
not only as observed. It is not a blessing to see everything, perhaps even
others’ misfortune; what delights us is obviously only the detached façade,
which takes on none of that.
Psychology, then, mere psychology, can never grasp this phenomenon
that could be based at least as much in the objects as in the observer. The
latter must certainly be present, even rapturous (the more he is so, the
more boundlessly will he respond to appearances, above all to bad, merely
emotionally enveiling or decorative appearances); but among things,
façade corresponds to rapture all the better, and empathy then functions
only as the vehicle to it. Even objectively, the face of the water is a mirror
of the heavens above, not the fishy depths below. The sea smiles while the
sharks make other faces, and the fish they devour do not believe in God.
How and still more why does so much good radiate from certain things?
So much pleasant appearance, not only the dazzling one that lures us but
also the dangerous one we have not yet discussed. Tout va bien, say certain
views, as though this auxiliary construction were also not unknown to
things. As though they used this auxiliary construction on their façade, so
courteous and abstract, benign at least there, and not false. The carpet finds
it easier to be colorful than the painting, the painting easier than the house,
the house easier than the life inside; does it then seem, on travels, as though
one were seeing an attempt at a carpet, an attempt with the beautiful
façade that the traveler sees foremost, after all?6 That would be a deception
of the beginning; long live, in any case, its fiery aperitif. But if this also
drives mere psychology out of the glamour of travel, the tout va bien still
humanizes the world too much. The world is not so well ordered, nor in
its being so congruent with thought, let alone with a Couéan conception
of the tout va bien, as though the world were a hypochondriac and heaven
the “Keep smiling!” that it tells itself.7
 Motifs of Temptation
We have described several emotional experiences of things here in this

chapter, purely prescientifically, and perhaps gotten some phenomenology
of thing-aspects from it. From the fire, dubious aspects; from the tree, sor-
rowful; from machines, dark; from my friend’s house, harmonious; from
the house by day, terrifying; from the parable of Sindbad, disillusioning.
But the appearance of the bay-windowed house, which at first corre-
sponds to nothing but itself, shows the whole mixed light where such dif-
ferent attitudes are possible. The mixed light that the world gives, outside
of its X into which technology intervenes; the enigmatic light of natural
beauty in the stricter sense. In appearance, in any case, a promise is made
that need not be kept, and can often lure us demonically into the void,
but that nonetheless, for its part too, sometimes points to a tendency to
tout va bien in things. It contains much: all possible elements and assur-
ances of a still confused journey, and façade music too. In the lasting ra-
diance of the bay-windowed house before the likewise immovable chop-
ping block, the world shows its strange weather, the April of the façade;
there is a sun in these things that makes tides. The visitor, not without
risk, chooses the sun, trusting and hopeful—insists on the appearance
that is also the thing’s, after all. In which, finally, some truth does fall on
the falsely courteous or thoughtlessly casual greeting between people.
From the house on the marketplace, which saw the shameful brother-in-
law and the butcher on his block, but doesn’t believe in them.
Motifs of Temptation
We long for it, and then again we don’t. Want something that means
nothing to us, but then we’re in the middle of it. To others it seems pecu-
liar; to us, perhaps, empty. Yet morosely we go on; we ourselves seem to
be this morose persistence. Finally we turn around, miserably, fallen out
precisely with ourselves. This is how things tempt us when we’re used to
them; we cannot leave them be. They evoke those foolish desires whose
fulfillment gives no pleasure, but whose renunciation hurts. A person
tempts us, a party, a night; we know that such things have always been
petty before, but a lazy urge still makes us snatch at them, and we plunge
again, without ever learning. We aren’t actually weak in the face of these
temptations, but impatient and imaginative; it’s just what they live on.
 Motifs of Temptation
We have described several emotional experiences of things here in this

chapter, purely prescientifically, and perhaps gotten some phenomenology
of thing-aspects from it. From the fire, dubious aspects; from the tree, sor-
rowful; from machines, dark; from my friend’s house, harmonious; from
the house by day, terrifying; from the parable of Sindbad, disillusioning.
But the appearance of the bay-windowed house, which at first corre-
sponds to nothing but itself, shows the whole mixed light where such dif-
ferent attitudes are possible. The mixed light that the world gives, outside
of its X into which technology intervenes; the enigmatic light of natural
beauty in the stricter sense. In appearance, in any case, a promise is made
that need not be kept, and can often lure us demonically into the void,
but that nonetheless, for its part too, sometimes points to a tendency to
tout va bien in things. It contains much: all possible elements and assur-
ances of a still confused journey, and façade music too. In the lasting ra-
diance of the bay-windowed house before the likewise immovable chop-
ping block, the world shows its strange weather, the April of the façade;
there is a sun in these things that makes tides. The visitor, not without
risk, chooses the sun, trusting and hopeful—insists on the appearance
that is also the thing’s, after all. In which, finally, some truth does fall on
the falsely courteous or thoughtlessly casual greeting between people.
From the house on the marketplace, which saw the shameful brother-in-
law and the butcher on his block, but doesn’t believe in them.
Motifs of Temptation
We long for it, and then again we don’t. Want something that means
nothing to us, but then we’re in the middle of it. To others it seems pecu-
liar; to us, perhaps, empty. Yet morosely we go on; we ourselves seem to
be this morose persistence. Finally we turn around, miserably, fallen out
precisely with ourselves. This is how things tempt us when we’re used to
them; we cannot leave them be. They evoke those foolish desires whose
fulfillment gives no pleasure, but whose renunciation hurts. A person
tempts us, a party, a night; we know that such things have always been
petty before, but a lazy urge still makes us snatch at them, and we plunge
again, without ever learning. We aren’t actually weak in the face of these
temptations, but impatient and imaginative; it’s just what they live on.
Motifs of Temptation 
We are particularly tempted by dissimilar beings or unfamiliar things,

by somewhere we are not. Here flow and gleam all kinds of figures, myth-
ically conceived; here flows the water, the will o’ the wisp; here, above all,
the lovely far distance. The forest with its deep green draws us in, looks at
us unfathomably. The Pied Piper of Hamelin calls, and in a deeper myth
the sirens sing: all sorts of grand temptations dispersed into our uneasy
desires, into the idolatry of the unknown, even into the omnipresent un-
decidedness of the world.
But its seed usually sprouts only as deception; beyond the Pied Piper is
only the mountain tomb; beyond the water, especially beyond the sirens’
song, lurk deadly nymphs with eagle talons, and the island is covered with
the carcasses of their victims. It’s urgent to let what is permanently experi-
enceable, mythically conceived in the following still run, to let it run
aground in a number of simple as well as old motifs. These are above all
temptations of things, masked, with different shades of desire and corre-
sponding phases of plunge beyond. Every temptation contains the sireni-
cally conceived imperative to pleasure; only beyond it, after pursuing and
experiencing it, does the subject plunge into its opposite. Into the appear-
ance that does not give what it promises, because it’s too beautiful. The glit-
tering of the wide world, the splendor of women, silk, gems, uniforms—in
short, all the excitement of pulp fiction would serve even better if grouches
hadn’t made this sort of appearance suspicious—for their purposes, which
have no life at all. Instead minor cases are recounted here—children’s and
popular literature about banquets, harems, martial success, fumitory—to
stand in for the temptation of objects in the large. The subject only expe-
riences in temptation what the enticing appearance, the always remarkable
appearance, conceals of evil, a special evil, and not at all what it intends, or
shines on with its tout va bien radiance, as in a hothouse.
It began early for a certain boy. He looked forward to how beautiful the
meal would be the next day. The holiday arrives, all the guests sit about
the table, the children are dressed in white. The soup course is over, and
the great roast appears, an entire haunch of beef on the Tischlein deck
dich.8 His father stands, says a few pleasant words, and begins to carve the
roast. But as he sticks the fork into it, the meat sputters, a little column of
pus shoots out. The animal was sick, and since its haunch was roasted in
one piece the cook noticed nothing amiss. Only the table brings every-
thing to light; the boy sees for the first time beneath the crust. When he
 Motifs of Temptation
hears that one should beware of slimy things, he no longer imagines, as he

did before, that frogs are meant; rather, he knows where and how it is.
Further behind, and yet one can never know that without going back
there oneself.
Or a youth, goes another story, strolls jauntily down the street.9 Then
an old woman says to him: Tarry a bit, my good lad, and follow me; I
want to show you something you’ll enjoy. The youth understands, and
follows her down many streets up to a splendid house where a lady wel-
comes him, richly adorned, young and beautiful. She greets the youth as
her lover returned from a long journey, and draws him onto the cushions
with her. They drink and laugh until the sunlight in the wine rises in their
heads; the youth kisses the rapturous woman and presses against her. Yet
in the middle of the kiss she leaps up, out of the room, down the long,
dark, empty hallway, the youth after her, into rooms along the side from
which her voice seems to sound, back into the hallway, into a new room
where he chases her around tables and cushions, until she flees to a mat-
tress in the darkest corner and stretches against a pillar on the wall. Still in
full stride, the youth trips on the soft rugs, into the hanging lamp over the
fair woman—and the rug gives way, and the lover falls stark naked onto
the bustling marketplace, past the balconies, into the tanners’ bazaar, who
are calling out their prices, buying and selling in the sunshine around
noon. And as they see him, drunk and in such a state, they shout and
laugh out loud, begin beating his naked body with skins; he still cannot
understand what has happened to him, and finally a friend comes along,
gives him clothes and has him taken home.
Thus ends this pastoral, with a trap door into the completely ludicrous;
plunges right out of this tale from the Arabian Nights into screeching real-
ity. It is almost this lover’s good fortune that he guessed nothing about the
woman’s motives during all their flirtations, that he experienced joy and
plunge one right after the other, not simultaneously and ambivalently, like
another fellow whose story we now tell. Here the victim no longer escapes
with just a nasty shock; instead the interplay tickles him to the bone.
This lad was working as a farm hand, didn’t have it easy. One day a troop of
mercenaries drew through the village; they took what they needed and
marched off, yelling. The lad after them, caught up to them in a prosperous
village, went before the commander: the commander told him he could
follow along in the baggage train, where he could put on some weight for
Motifs of Temptation 
the march to France. Before a barn on a hill lay the entire troop, among
barrels of schnapps; up there the lad was taken. The peasant clothing off
and the colorful mercenary’s scarf on; so the lad boasted and drank, or lis-
tened to the coarse battle cries, rumbling about blood and women. But
for a while the commander had been watching him, quite peculiarly, and
bit down his laughter behind his beard.
Now he said something to the mob. Immediately two mercenaries
grabbed the lad, and the whole troop behind them, with the pipers in the
lead, into the barn. The ceremony must still be performed, said the com-
mander, and from his pocket drew a short rope. The half-drunk lad thought
he would be thrashed before his admission, as he had heard, so that his
friends could have some fun and he prove his manhood. He pulled off his
motley himself, so that one could see that he was not afraid, but could put
up with all of war, with all the flesh wounds, as a mercenary should. Now
the commander took the rope and tied one end over a roof beam; on a
signal, the troop rolled an old barrel with cracked staves out of a corner,
and set it under the beam. These men were no mercenaries at all, but ban-
dits, called “cowboys,” with no intention of clashing with an army; in-
stead every one of them had deserted from some regiment. Come here a
minute, my lad, said the commander very calmly, laid the other end of the
rope around his neck, and bade him climb up on the barrel. That thing
could collapse, said the lad, laughing, and climbed up on it, the noose
around his neck. Now the commander pulled his end so hard over the
beam that his body was already pulled upward. The lad cried out, grin-
ning, and stood on his toes, but the commander pulled the rope harder
yet, and the mercenaries laughed. Have I got what it takes? bellowed the
lad, and threw up; thereupon the commander gave the barrel a shove,
sending splinters flying, and the lad jerked in the air, snatched upward,
held on to the rope, swaying. Now, my baggage carrier, laughed the com-
mander, that’s how you get to the heavenly hosts. The lad still tried to
laugh along, gasping and red as a side of beef. But no one was listening to
the jokes that the lad gasped out, believing that he was just being initiated
into the warrior caste; the commander was already out of the barn, and
the cowboys after him. Only the groaning of the casks still pierced the
roaring silence.
Vainly he tried to get his hand inside the noose, pull himself up to the
beam; with his teeth he gnawed at the rope, screamed for help. Then he
let go, the beam creaked, and the lad was still.
 Motifs of Temptation
Now, assuming that there is life after death, and the young mercenary
does awaken, this scalded child should still avoid not so much hellfire as
the heavenly light, so promising. The poor lad may not have had a lucky
star for military service, but certainly a talent for being tickled to death, to
experience what was so to speak equivocal about his friends in the same in-
stant, very differently from the deceived lover with his shock of mere sur-
prise. What the lady alone enjoyed there—the ambient, undivided unity of
pleasure and danger—the excited farmhand himself experienced in the cer-
emony, as someone who had basic problems with the irony of serious
mockery, no longer mock seriousness. The lady from before is a step be-
hind the commander, yet both quite aptly occupy the category of droll
murderer. Likewise, the sirens of legend did not suddenly tear their victims
apart, but probably even more protractedly or ambivalently combined lady
and trap door, invitation and mortal danger, music and slaughter.
What tempts more fixedly than sex and war is what must be beyond all
that beautiful, remote, dead being. Beyond stones, hills, mountains, from
which legend has let more mysterious music ring than the sirens’. A story
of temptation among so many others of this chthonic sort belongs here.
Ibsen relates it as having happened to the Norwegian farmer Lars, also a

woodcarver and fiddler.10 One day this man did not come back from the
path he wanted to take to the mountain pasture. After weeks passed and
simpler means did not work, the pastor had the bell rung at midnight. At
the first stroke Lars stood in the church and replied only curtly, or not at
all. Only by and by did he admit what everyone knew anyway, that on his
way he had been trapped in the mountain by a spell, did not know how it
had happened.
He told of a room full of incredible carvings, but in all the days he was
there no one but a girl showed herself. There he had not stirred the entire
time, until the girl brought him a fiddle such as he had never before held
in his hands, so artfully worked, and ordered him to play. For a long time
he couldn’t bring himself to it, as much as he wanted to; but at his first
stroke the fiddle began to sing by itself, and as he played on, the fairies fell
in with the music as though they were in the room, and sang along. He
himself began to sing as he played, until the stroke of a bell broke right
through; the entire room was full of people, and as he looked around he
was standing in the church.
This story came out very hesitantly, and only many days later; Lars also
never again played as before for the Sunday dances, seemed never to shake
Motifs of Temptation 
off the spell, and showed his face ever more seldom among other people.
Mostly he whittled, and tried to imitate what he’d seen in that room, or
he carved fiddles that were supposed to resemble the subterranean ones.
Day and night he sat in a little garret stuffed from top to bottom with un-
finished carvings and all kinds of strange things whose purpose and use no
one could ever learn. In the end he worked only on a wooden doll with
the fairy’s features; but he could never get it right, kept starting helplessly
from the beginning, whittled just a few strokes, threw the wood away in
order to resume the same ordeal with a new piece.
And so Lars descended into ever more solitary reverie. According to one
report, he wandered back under the mountain; according to another like-
lier report, he was found one warm summer night in his garret, hanged.
In short: for this man too, the illusion was strong at the beginning and re-
ceded terribly; he tried to recreate what had led him astray into the moun-
tain, and he failed, probably not because it was too great for his ability but
because here too was a trap door into bottomless disillusion, a snare over
the void, because the sought-after music, or womanliness, or wisdom of
the mountain’s interior turned to ash on awakening, like Rübezahl’s gold
the next day.11
The fatal madness of farmer Lars is related to the plunge into the tan-
ner’s market, the disappointment of the strangled mercenary (apart from
the madness of infatuation, which might also be in it) in a very high
sphere: in the sphere of melancholy and of chthonic magic, the empty,
Christless brooding downward and inward, the hopeless digging after a
treasure that does not even exist in the temptations of such external depth.
In related tales the victims, spellbound by the prehistory of the mountain,
turn eighty after three days; their life slips away after they listen to a glow
from a mountain cave, buzzing as though “glorying in its wisdom.” The
sage was of course only the fiery-eyed owl, and the wisdom of the cliff was
only the impasse of a great, mad, stereotypical death—as the ground of
mountains and the temptation of nature.12
But not every temptation leads so hopelessly into the void. Instead the
world is on the march in just this mixed light, and the ordeal must first
withstand the splendor, or sometimes divide it. Many an illusion is not yet
an illusion forever; conversely every kind of fulfillment still has potential
illusion in its knapsack. Above all in food, women, war, melancholy, mere
temptation is mixed with the brilliance of the real thing, which seethes
here, and is not yet out: neither as nothing (as with mere illusion and
 Motifs of Temptation
plunge), nor already as something. There are clearly different paths, even
different ends. Mere temptation rouses the desire one will suffer for, that al-
ways demonic craving and curiosity that trusts in the wide road to hell that
so quickly shrinks to a narrow gorge. In the path of substance, conversely,
the bitter toil of the beginning and the surprising salvation of the end pre-
dominate; its signs or its pledges are at first slight and grow only with the
laborious progress, as the ripening and emergence of the thing itself.
But these distinctions are not so clear that one could spare oneself the
path, or the test of the sun that first brings everything to light. Temptation
and substance can appear combined even when under way, on the terms
of a still undecided world that itself is not so neatly sorted that siren song
and Wagner’s, even Bach’s music, or the separate grades of melancholy
could readily be distinguished in advance. The judgment of history has
been fooled often enough; even Socrates and Christ were regarded as de-
ceivers. A dialectic is above all at work here, struggling, observable only in
process, which can bring substance too, very close into the range of temp-
tation, the real into the range of illusion, precisely because neither has yet
been fully decided.
Neither reality nor illusion; often the one merges into the other in this
seething world. The lily’s perfume intoxicates and is still, at the same time,
the image of purity; woman, around whom there is always a seething,
even a phosphorescence, is, like music, the highest as well as the most un-
decided thing in the world. The secret of mountains has not yet come to
light, let alone to night. Even the most obvious deception at least apes its
splendor, or anticipates it with reckless assurance, in a mendacious way
that must even so be inherent in the tendency of life, in its mere but
nonetheless available possibilities. In itself the deception is pointless; there
would not even be a Fata Morgana without palm trees far away in space
and time. In this way the deception can even become a sign, against its
will but not ours; then we no longer drive helplessly into it, even to the
bitter end, but certainly do not fall back completely. Rather, its appear-
ance is there to be defeated, and its reflection concretely to be inherited.
This too has been wonderfully anticipated in a legend (a Greek one of
the kind Aristotle meant when he said that a lover of wisdom would al-
ways be a friend of legends and fairy tales). When Odysseus had himself
lashed to the mast, he still evaded the sirens—capitulated to temptation at
the outset, in other words. But when Orpheus passed by and the sirens
sang, he himself played the lyre. His music forced the sirens to stop and
listen. He not only survived temptation but defeated it, and outdid it with
white magic. The Argos passed by uncaptivated; indeed, the dispossessed
sirens threw themselves into the sea and became boulders. In woman, sea,
rock, in the empty temptation of caves and distances, they have of course
remained, in the entire, still bottomless, at least undecided, ambiguous se-
cret of nature: of her springtime, which is just as external as it is nearly
ours; of her mountain music and her sun, which is as much an unintelli-
gible radiant body around which the earth barely revolves correctly with-
out falling into it, as it—without yet being the human sun—presents the
universally reflective symbol of light.
Staying pure is thus a different thing from being pure. Young people
know that dark, fervent wandering through fields and towns. The painted
ladies glow, and the one hidden among them; the fruitless encounter
ends, the fleeting glance without past or future, without ravishment, los-
ing itself in passing; behind it beckons the homesickness of the dark, deep
dream. It is hardly yet known where the will is driven off the path here,
where the will o’ the wisps begin, or where the paved road of the goal—
discrete, definite, and clear—leads through all this storm-flashing bril-
liance. The sky is still high, and the czar far away: the flight from tempta-
tion is not always the discovery of the light, and certainly not the same as
searching for the light. The complete avoidance of the diffuse phototro-
pism can also be a desertion measured against the existence of the process,
against the necessity to gain from our confused impatience, even from the
caricatures of illusion, the original. In the words of a Chassidic master,
one who keeps the commandments may well enter Paradise, but because
he did not know ecstasy or fervor, he will never feel the ecstasy or the fer-
vor of Paradise. Explanation: only one who tempts, who is tempted, can
be truly pious; he knows the mystical lights through the world, but also
the scars from the illusion withstood on the way there.
Appendix: No Man’s Land

Many are oddly familiar with dead matter. With glass, perhaps fragile,
but clear; with stones, so firm and silent. A youthful feeling draws us to
them, different from the collected feeling of middle age. Like the greed
of old men who have become indifferent to life, and for whom the inert
listen. He not only survived temptation but defeated it, and outdid it with
white magic. The Argos passed by uncaptivated; indeed, the dispossessed
sirens threw themselves into the sea and became boulders. In woman, sea,
rock, in the empty temptation of caves and distances, they have of course
remained, in the entire, still bottomless, at least undecided, ambiguous se-
cret of nature: of her springtime, which is just as external as it is nearly
ours; of her mountain music and her sun, which is as much an unintelli-
gible radiant body around which the earth barely revolves correctly with-
out falling into it, as it—without yet being the human sun—presents the
universally reflective symbol of light.
Staying pure is thus a different thing from being pure. Young people
know that dark, fervent wandering through fields and towns. The painted
ladies glow, and the one hidden among them; the fruitless encounter
ends, the fleeting glance without past or future, without ravishment, los-
ing itself in passing; behind it beckons the homesickness of the dark, deep
dream. It is hardly yet known where the will is driven off the path here,
where the will o’ the wisps begin, or where the paved road of the goal—
discrete, definite, and clear—leads through all this storm-flashing bril-
liance. The sky is still high, and the czar far away: the flight from tempta-
tion is not always the discovery of the light, and certainly not the same as
searching for the light. The complete avoidance of the diffuse phototro-
pism can also be a desertion measured against the existence of the process,
against the necessity to gain from our confused impatience, even from the
caricatures of illusion, the original. In the words of a Chassidic master,
one who keeps the commandments may well enter Paradise, but because
he did not know ecstasy or fervor, he will never feel the ecstasy or the fer-
vor of Paradise. Explanation: only one who tempts, who is tempted, can
be truly pious; he knows the mystical lights through the world, but also
the scars from the illusion withstood on the way there.
Appendix: No Man’s Land

Many are oddly familiar with dead matter. With glass, perhaps fragile,
but clear; with stones, so firm and silent. A youthful feeling draws us to
them, different from the collected feeling of middle age. Like the greed
of old men who have become indifferent to life, and for whom the inert
 Appendix: No Man’s Land
remains but never opens up. We are not also speaking of devices here, for
we animate them, after all, and they seem to acquire something from it.
So they are in any case more dogs than cats; they seem faithful, and so are
we, no more than that.
In contrast, truly alien dead things can withdraw remarkably into them-
selves. Crystals have faces that will not let us go, radial, in little towers that
do not stand near us. Their colors are from a depth where no one sees;
light makes them colorful or dazzling, but they still hold something back.
Only the blue of old enamel has something of this night by day; otherwise
crystals are distant, yet so strikingly near that they have never been felt to
be demonic, in contrast to orchids or snakes. Much coarser, but perhaps
more embracing, enticing, crushing, is the great landscape outside us, es-
pecially where “dead” matter flows in masses, or rises into the sky and
draws our gaze upward. Young people often feel themselves strangely de-
jected before it, not with a feeling of worthlessness before equals or supe-
riors; instead the devaluation strikes everyone, affects the human as such.
Before mountains and stars, our entire striving can seem small; everything
here is turned away even from the human mystery, and the mystery of our
goals. To play human greatness and works off against them seems espe-
cially futile, quite truly out of place; for already the appearance of great-
ness comes from outside, is immediately defeated by the tall mountain, let
alone the infinite universe. The struggles of life then appear like those in
a drop of water; a comet with prussic acid in its tail suffices to dissolve all
the consciousness that glints faintly in its little corner, and it is itself just
one of many riddles, as much in that it is, as in what it sees.
Every trace of our days on earth is framed by an enormous night, back-
ward as well as forward, individually and above all cosmically. An eighteen-
year-old wrote a letter to the cosmos shortly before his suicide—that we
can well understand, given the contrasts between this dwarfish life and the
gigantic silence around nearly everything but a few plants, animals, and
humans. Pan calmly, quietly cast the young man down; his gaze can be
Gorgonian. Certainly we refresh our bodies in him too; on the plane
between the body and the Alps appears a wonderful healthy feeling, as
though they were built for us; expanse cleanses us of the four walls. But all
those lovers of nature are setting out into dead matter; it enters them as
though they were devalued, rigid with intoxication. The spell of merely hu-
man content, the desperate situation, the irresolvable complication: it is
what it is, it does not mask itself, one can rebel against it. Yet the eighteen-
A Russian Fairy Tale? 
year-old was really under a very different spell: that of the starry frame,
not of the content; an enormous Erlkönig beckoned; all of life became
meaningless to him. In particular, the fear here is the reverse of that in the
Erlkönig, namely, attraction: storm, fog, old willows draw us, even the de-
sire to become like river, heath, mountain, sea, death, starry sky, no man’s
land. Human beings have done everything to keep this monstrosity from
swallowing them up. They have flattered it as heathens; as Christians they
have placed a child above it. Nonetheless the huge number stuns, even
when we see through it: the inflation of the light years that, in gold, will not
even buy us a piece of bread; the void that already begins in the thin moun-
tain air, and is alone properly infinite—namely, nothing, over and over.
Someone said to his wise friend: Our talk may be fine and profound,
but how mute are the stars, and how they remain unmoved by us! How
great is the universe and how pitifully the heights of our cathedrals stand
before it. What would the earth itself say if it opened a mouth from Lis-
bon to Moscow, and only a few primal words thundered forth, Orphi-
cally? To which his wise friend replied, as a partisan of culture: A slap in
the face is an argument? And the earth? The earth would probably talk a
lot of nonsense, for it has read neither Kant nor Plato.
A Russian Fairy Tale?

This story was simply made up, doesn’t really seem possible. Not even
in an age when hearts and the like are transplanted. Yet the fabulous ac-
count has a way of sounding ever truer when it doesn’t stay restricted to
its Englishmen, to the report by young scientists who wanted to explore
Indian caves for the prehistoric plant and animal species that might still
live there.
So the explorers sailed along the coast, with varying luck. Until another
cave entrance caught their eye, quite promising; protected from the waves
too. They left their motorboat on the open sea because of the rocks, rowed
to shore, and were received truly prehistorically, by the howling of an in-
credible monster whose sleep had been disturbed. It looked like a Cyclops,
had the same saurian eye in its forehead, the last dinosaur itself. He imme-
diately killed a young Englishman, lay down across the cave entrance, de-
voured his victim as an evening meal. And so on the next day; the end of
A Russian Fairy Tale? 
year-old was really under a very different spell: that of the starry frame,
not of the content; an enormous Erlkönig beckoned; all of life became
meaningless to him. In particular, the fear here is the reverse of that in the
Erlkönig, namely, attraction: storm, fog, old willows draw us, even the de-
sire to become like river, heath, mountain, sea, death, starry sky, no man’s
land. Human beings have done everything to keep this monstrosity from
swallowing them up. They have flattered it as heathens; as Christians they
have placed a child above it. Nonetheless the huge number stuns, even
when we see through it: the inflation of the light years that, in gold, will not
even buy us a piece of bread; the void that already begins in the thin moun-
tain air, and is alone properly infinite—namely, nothing, over and over.
Someone said to his wise friend: Our talk may be fine and profound,
but how mute are the stars, and how they remain unmoved by us! How
great is the universe and how pitifully the heights of our cathedrals stand
before it. What would the earth itself say if it opened a mouth from Lis-
bon to Moscow, and only a few primal words thundered forth, Orphi-
cally? To which his wise friend replied, as a partisan of culture: A slap in
the face is an argument? And the earth? The earth would probably talk a
lot of nonsense, for it has read neither Kant nor Plato.
A Russian Fairy Tale?

This story was simply made up, doesn’t really seem possible. Not even
in an age when hearts and the like are transplanted. Yet the fabulous ac-
count has a way of sounding ever truer when it doesn’t stay restricted to
its Englishmen, to the report by young scientists who wanted to explore
Indian caves for the prehistoric plant and animal species that might still
live there.
So the explorers sailed along the coast, with varying luck. Until another
cave entrance caught their eye, quite promising; protected from the waves
too. They left their motorboat on the open sea because of the rocks, rowed
to shore, and were received truly prehistorically, by the howling of an in-
credible monster whose sleep had been disturbed. It looked like a Cyclops,
had the same saurian eye in its forehead, the last dinosaur itself. He imme-
diately killed a young Englishman, lay down across the cave entrance, de-
voured his victim as an evening meal. And so on the next day; the end of
 A Russian Fairy Tale?
the young scientists was in sight. Then they were helped when the Cyclops,
after killing two men at a stroke, put aside the second (who still showed
signs of life) and, sated, stretched out before the exit and went to sleep.
Along with some little knives and shovels, usually for unearthing and
digging out antediluvian remains, the Englishmen kept a bottle of alcohol
to quickly preserve their finds. This alcohol they now placed before the di-
gesting beast’s maw, and he gulped it all down. Meanwhile, however, one
of the men had trepanned his dying comrade’s skull just before his final
breath and removed the brain. Another did the same to the monster, un-
conscious from the alcohol; they then set the human brain into the empty
cavity. The Cyclops had not even stirred from the spot, the exit remained
blocked, but after some time there came from his maw the same terrible
and yet different howls; instead it almost began to seem that they were
trying to form words. English, almost intelligible, and as it got more in-
telligible it even came out with a distinct Oxford accent.
It was now their companion who was speaking here, so horribly trans-
planted, and they could barely separate themselves from him, even after
he showed them the exit. Until he implored them to abandon him, he
could feel that the old juices in the gigantic animal’s body were beginning
gradually to dismantle its human brain. Only as the words in which their
friend implored them became ever more howling, unintelligible, indeed at
the same time more menacing, and his eyes ever more those of the former
saurian, did the men flee to their boat before the cave, and they reached
their ship out in the deeper water just as they saw the familiar beast dive
after them between the rocks. From the fleeing ship they could still hear
that Cyclopean thing for a long time on the shore, all the more terrible as
they still thought they heard voices like their late friend and colleague’s
surging up, falling back, reviving.
If the young scholars had been solid in more than paleontology, they
could perhaps have remembered the more recent fate of much greater hu-
manum in an undefeated, resurgent basis of reaction.13 But their allegori-
cal thinking didn’t extend that far; how should it, with such a fictional in-
cident, and from something so prehistoric? Yet if one weren’t near the
coast of India but instead before the time-honored stake where Jan Hus
ended up, and in Siberia as a whole, then one would already know better
what new wine in old skins can mean.14 When they later consulted their
sextant more precisely, and the kopecks had dropped, they saw that they
had been along not just the Indian coast.
The Clever Way Out 
The Clever Way Out

The weak like to crawl, or flee to the side. The strong make room, yet it’s
often not as new as the narrow gap to the side to which another escapes.
What’s mousy about it can be disgusting; what’s rabbity can be dubi-
ous, pathetic, ignoble. Stuffy holes are plenty, and already familiar; even
the feint right or left changes only the direction, not the field. There are
bad forms of this method (above all feminine and Jewish); here, however,
we have in mind—against the spell of the situation, imminent destruc-
tion, things—truly new discoveries, small continents to the side that only
the weak can find. Berries of wit (in the older sense) then grow there,
which, even picked later, as wit in the newer sense, can seem liberating.
Unfortunately wit has the property of being good only in the raw; spoken,
it can often be splendid, but when written (that is, cooked) there’s often
almost nothing left. It doesn’t allow itself to be prepared in writing, or
only à la tartare, as it were, with exotically piquant ingredients and
Baroque circumlocutions, something of which Kleist was a master. Yet the
landscape of the way can still be described, and its flora depicted well
enough that an imaginative person can recall the raw form.
With women, we said, the way out is often bad. The wife’s disingenu-
ous question when the soup was too hot (Would you rather I served it
cold?) is worthless. Yet with a different woman one begins to take notice,
with the wit of the adulteress caught in the act who nonetheless denies it.
Who says to her furious husband, her naked lover next to her in bed, If
you trust your eyes before you trust me, where is your love for me? This
woman knew how to select an illustration of her argument quite origi-
nally, quite bafflingly. Her husband will never get around this corner
again; even in calmer moments he’ll be unable to follow her.
The Jewish way out is more common; even in its lowest form it leads
rightly to the side. It isn’t as silly or as inscrutable as feminine wit, but in-
stead frivolous, formalist, shrewd; it can however, by the light of its good
sense or the darkness of its faith, bring us into a meaningful aside. Here
especially we find (though with backgrounds) colleagues of the clever,
more than clever adulteresses and the other inhabitants of their land.
A story belongs here, or rather the account by the very man who trav-
eled through Northern Siberia; he told of wolves, of weary horses, break-
ing through the ice, his whole sled into the lake. And then? ask the en-
tranced listeners, as the man stops talking, can’t get the words out. His
 The Clever Way Out
mouth is full of water, he should have drowned by now—Then? says the

traveler, exhaling: God help me, the whole story is a lie.
Thus the liar pulled back, but no dreamer has ever awakened more
beautifully, either; no lie’s legs were ever prayed back to health and length
better than this. Does not God here become the father of liars, indeed of
lies, but also of the end of the lie that the labyrinth is true? And now we
should hold up to it the other, more reversed story of a way out, of the
rabbi who praised God’s works, and how perfectly everything on this earth
was disposed, how beautifully and wisely. Then a hunchback came up to
him after the end of the sermon and said: Rabbi, you spoke so wonder-
fully of God’s works, and how beautiful everything is, how profound and
wise. But look at me: am I that beautiful and profound and wise? The
rabbi did look at the man, and replied: For a hunchback you are beauti-
ful, profound, and wise enough.
So the rabbi takes nothing back, for a hunchback is a created form,
which is perfect when it is as it is. The rabbi took much back, back into
God himself, who created perfection only dimly, in rations, but lets us
sense by the hunchback’s indignation what he held back. One shouldn’t
press wit all that far, nonetheless: in this joke, and thousands of others,
there are philosophies that have never been thought of. In them there is
only a small way out, mauschelnd, and too absurd ever to become the
king’s highway of a creative thought, but not too insignificant.15 Their pe-
culiar, wittily serious novum distinguishes this kind of way out from the
unproductive way out through foolishness, or the purity of foolishness,
which is wit only to others, while of course confusing them.
This is the way in the story of a monk, for example, a very pious and
simple man, only one whose urges gave him great trouble. Flagellation
and chastisement did nothing; then one night a woman slipped into his
cell on the pretext of confession, a whore known throughout the town, in
the transition to a nun, thus perfect for the job. As the brother awoke to-
ward morning from the kind of slumber he had not enjoyed since child-
hood, so sweet and so rich, with a serenity filled with nothing but pious
thoughts, he threw himself to the floor and thanked God for finally show-
ing him a means to be rid of his torment.
The teller of this very old anecdote adds that the prior, upon hearing of
the matter—and also that the monk had broken his vows out of the
purest foolishness, indeed had confused the Gospels—pardoned him and
prayed for him: that he might enter Paradise with the asses.
The Clever Way Out 
How different again, how cunningly serious, when feminine and Jewish
evasion go together! The Eva of whom the last story tells in this connection
was the second, very young wife of a rabbi who had remarried in old age.
After many years of happy marriage, the rabbi fell sick for the first time
in his life, and said to his young wife: I won’t rise again from this bed,
Hannah. Sooner or later the Angel of Death will come and take me to
my ancestors. Hannah sobbed, and cried: Don’t say such things, my rabbi,
I won’t hear them. I will lock all the doors and windows against the Angel
of Death. Or if he does come, I will say, Angel of Death, let my rabbi live,
and take me instead.
The rabbi took her hand: You will not say that, Hannah; you will not
sin against your own young life. But as Hannah would not cease lament-
ing and swearing, the rabbi said no more, and simply turned toward the
wall, as though from great weariness, and shut his eyes. His young wife
kept watch over him until evening, when she went into town to shop; and
no sooner was she out of the house than the rabbi rose and went into the
kitchen, where two geese were being fattened behind a screen. He opened
the gate, strewed breadcrumbs from the screen across the floor into the
bedroom and up to the bed, and lay back down just at the right moment,
as Hannah came through the door and into the dark room to the sleeping
invalid. All of a sudden one could hear the strangest sound coming from
the kitchen, a tapping as though of quiet, hard, inhuman feet; even the
rabbi started. Do you hear? he said to Hannah, Do you hear the Angel of
Death, how he comes?
Hannah trembled. Now the steps were already at the door, in the room,
now right by the bed, where Hannah sat. And as the tapping brushed
against her feet, she screamed and pointed to the rabbi: Angel of Death,
here he lies!
Now the rabbi struck a match, the geese pecked away, and the rabbi
spoke: Well, my Hannah, what did you say? Did you say: Angel of Death,
take me in his stead, let my rabbi live, the light of my eyes? Hannah
looked at the geese, at her husband, and replied: If it had been the right
Angel of Death, I would have said it, too. But you can’t expect me to say
it to a goose.
And this is also a proof, concluded the storyteller to whom we owe this
story, very unexpectedly, that Jews should have nothing to do with animals.
In another version, Hannah is supposed to have said: Do you want to em-
barrass me in front of this goose? The crisis wasn’t there for this woman.
 Disappointment with Amusement
If there were no ways out, where would the weak go, who were so witty?
Since they are ways out, they go in very different directions, though always
into a third term, even where every escape seems blocked. From now on,
said a Chinese sage, whose servant one morning wove his braid out of three
hairs, and after a time it happened that another hair fell out in the servant’s
hand, and then another; he threw himself to the ground before his master,
yet the sage said calmly, From now on I’ll wear my hair down.
Between the words of Hannah, the Christian harlot, the traveler in
Siberia, the rabbi and the hunchback, and finally the Chinese sage, there
are certainly few, or still very few, contentual connections. As deed, the
daring of the weak is not worth very much, and as idea it’s often frivolous;
nor do the weak conceal themselves in the most attractive form, and the
bosom of Abraham looks different.16 Yet there is an “Open, Sesame!” and
it shows itself too: the search for a way out, as twisted as it may be, is still
met in the world, as iron as it is, by something undecided, something
porous and sawn through in places. The beautiful appearance, the dark
ground: but to the witty man that’s never the end of the matter, and wit
as a whole—which is the point here—is not itself witty only in the frivo-
lous sense. “God help me, the whole story is a lie”: not a bad motto for a
liar; not a bad motto if better men were to say it. One must be both witty
and transcendent, in order to be either.
Disappointment with Amusement

One expected something different, and usually more. When it’s less,
that’s annoying, but not always; it still offers something when it doesn’t re-
ally matter. Or when it’s really harmless, like a joke, which after all can
also amuse when it falls flat—when it sets mountains in motion, as it
were, only to bear a mouse.
As happened, for example, with that scene at the circus, lots of big
words, expectations ever rising. The ring was cleared and nothing less was
announced than the battle steed Bucephalos. That was also the name of
Alexander the Great’s personal horse. The mighty steel cable was already
auspicious by which the ringmaster tried to drag the stallion into the ring.
Only tried, of course; the stubborn, unseen something on the other end
dragged him forward by the cable, outside, from where one could hear
 Disappointment with Amusement
If there were no ways out, where would the weak go, who were so witty?
Since they are ways out, they go in very different directions, though always
into a third term, even where every escape seems blocked. From now on,
said a Chinese sage, whose servant one morning wove his braid out of three
hairs, and after a time it happened that another hair fell out in the servant’s
hand, and then another; he threw himself to the ground before his master,
yet the sage said calmly, From now on I’ll wear my hair down.
Between the words of Hannah, the Christian harlot, the traveler in
Siberia, the rabbi and the hunchback, and finally the Chinese sage, there
are certainly few, or still very few, contentual connections. As deed, the
daring of the weak is not worth very much, and as idea it’s often frivolous;
nor do the weak conceal themselves in the most attractive form, and the
bosom of Abraham looks different.16 Yet there is an “Open, Sesame!” and
it shows itself too: the search for a way out, as twisted as it may be, is still
met in the world, as iron as it is, by something undecided, something
porous and sawn through in places. The beautiful appearance, the dark
ground: but to the witty man that’s never the end of the matter, and wit
as a whole—which is the point here—is not itself witty only in the frivo-
lous sense. “God help me, the whole story is a lie”: not a bad motto for a
liar; not a bad motto if better men were to say it. One must be both witty
and transcendent, in order to be either.
Disappointment with Amusement

One expected something different, and usually more. When it’s less,
that’s annoying, but not always; it still offers something when it doesn’t re-
ally matter. Or when it’s really harmless, like a joke, which after all can
also amuse when it falls flat—when it sets mountains in motion, as it
were, only to bear a mouse.
As happened, for example, with that scene at the circus, lots of big
words, expectations ever rising. The ring was cleared and nothing less was
announced than the battle steed Bucephalos. That was also the name of
Alexander the Great’s personal horse. The mighty steel cable was already
auspicious by which the ringmaster tried to drag the stallion into the ring.
Only tried, of course; the stubborn, unseen something on the other end
dragged him forward by the cable, outside, from where one could hear
only stamping and angry whinnying. One, two, then three particularly
brawny men came to the ringmaster’s aid, pulled expertly at the cable, in
vain, could only bring the cable to a standstill. Until a fourth came along
and grabbed the cable, a very heavy boxer, come to help them from the
next number, and now he finally moved the cable from a standstill and
pulled it ever more back.
A final tug, all together, one could hear the clatter of mighty hoofs
outside, triumph—and a wooden horse was visible at the end of the ca-
ble, rolled into the ring on its four wheels. The audience now laughed
with relief at this great sight gag, laughed wholeheartedly, as we like to
say. And not at all so disappointed at such a Bucephalos at the end of the
tether. Even objectively, it was rather relieved by the humor, perhaps also
because anticipation is not only joyful, but much more often fearful—
and look, there was nothing to it! At least not in fairy tales; or even when
something less childish comes, does not come out like a wooden horse,
nevertheless fairy tales, the circus, all the way up to farce, all mean that
the soup is always cooler when you eat it than when it was boiling.
Whereas in the life as we still have it, the cooks in charge expect us to eat
the soup even hotter.
The Invisible Hand

One day, maybe, it will be better outside too, all the way outside. Then
hard things will come back to us, or we to them, either way. By themselves
they stand askew or confused to us, but one good grip and they fit right
into the position that believers mean. A story about it gives us something
to think about: what befell Herr Schotten from Mainz more than a hun-
dred years ago.
He was a man like others, who did quite well for himself. Dealt in silk,
and once a year took a trip, including a small detour. He never failed to
spend some days in pious discussion with the rabbi of Michelstadt. The
latter was known as a miracle rabbi, and was called Baal Shem, of whom
there were many near the end of the eighteenth century, in Germany too.
Now as Herr Schotten visited the Baal Shem again before making a busi-
ness trip to St. Gallen, and the coach stood outside, he said: Rabbi, I have
the strangest feeling; I don’t want to go on this trip. Whether I had a bad
only stamping and angry whinnying. One, two, then three particularly
brawny men came to the ringmaster’s aid, pulled expertly at the cable, in
vain, could only bring the cable to a standstill. Until a fourth came along
and grabbed the cable, a very heavy boxer, come to help them from the
next number, and now he finally moved the cable from a standstill and
pulled it ever more back.
A final tug, all together, one could hear the clatter of mighty hoofs
outside, triumph—and a wooden horse was visible at the end of the ca-
ble, rolled into the ring on its four wheels. The audience now laughed
with relief at this great sight gag, laughed wholeheartedly, as we like to
say. And not at all so disappointed at such a Bucephalos at the end of the
tether. Even objectively, it was rather relieved by the humor, perhaps also
because anticipation is not only joyful, but much more often fearful—
and look, there was nothing to it! At least not in fairy tales; or even when
something less childish comes, does not come out like a wooden horse,
nevertheless fairy tales, the circus, all the way up to farce, all mean that
the soup is always cooler when you eat it than when it was boiling.
Whereas in the life as we still have it, the cooks in charge expect us to eat
the soup even hotter.
The Invisible Hand

One day, maybe, it will be better outside too, all the way outside. Then
hard things will come back to us, or we to them, either way. By themselves
they stand askew or confused to us, but one good grip and they fit right
into the position that believers mean. A story about it gives us something
to think about: what befell Herr Schotten from Mainz more than a hun-
dred years ago.
He was a man like others, who did quite well for himself. Dealt in silk,
and once a year took a trip, including a small detour. He never failed to
spend some days in pious discussion with the rabbi of Michelstadt. The
latter was known as a miracle rabbi, and was called Baal Shem, of whom
there were many near the end of the eighteenth century, in Germany too.
Now as Herr Schotten visited the Baal Shem again before making a busi-
ness trip to St. Gallen, and the coach stood outside, he said: Rabbi, I have
the strangest feeling; I don’t want to go on this trip. Whether I had a bad
 The Invisible Hand
dream, or I’m tormented by some other premonition, but I feel as though

I won’t come back safe and sound.
The rabbi looked at Herr Schotten strangely, shook his head, and said
nothing. Rabbi, began Herr Schotten again, grant me this favor, and give
me a talisman, so that I can travel in peace.
The rabbi still said nothing, and did not stir from his spot, looked about
with pursed lips, awkwardly and almost nervously; the table had already
been cleared, only a burned-out candle still stood on it. Take this if you
like, said the rabbi finally; we should thank G-d for whatever he sends us.
Herr Schotten carefully wrapped the candle, and the Baal Shem gave
him a blessing to take on his trip, which began well. In St. Gallen, Herr
Schotten immediately sought out his usual lodgings at the Golden Grape,
where he liked to meet his business associates, Herr Bacharach from
Coblenz and Herr Goldstikker from Frankfurt. But the entire inn was oc-
cupied, and Herr Bacharach had already checked in at the Half Moon;
Herr Goldstikker had not even arrived. Herr Schotten went to the Half
Moon, where the innkeeper immediately welcomed him with a greeting
from Herr Bacharach; the latter had already gone to bed but was expect-
ing Schotten in the morning.
The houseboy showed Schotten to his room, up many stairs to the top
floor, set the lamp on the table, and bade the gentleman goodnight. The
silk merchant was about to go to bed when his ears caught a strange sound:
what? Had the houseboy turned the key? Herr Schotten tried the door. It
was locked from the outside. He went to the window. It was swollen shut,
the panes barred. And now he also noticed the oppressive air in the room,
the rank smell, and started in utter terror: this was the smell in his dream—
the whole room, just like this, he’d already seen it in his dream.
The smell seemed to come from the bed. Herr Schotten turned around,
but now he could barely still see the bed in the murky light, the stump of
the candle barely still flickered on the table, a few drafts and it burned
out. Herr Schotten fumbled on his chest for the Baal Shem’s candle, held
it up to the guttering wick; the light shone brightly. Now Herr Schotten
stepped forward. Under the bed there was no one; he threw the covers aside,
nothing. The mattress: it was set on loose floorboards, across a trench, and
in the trench perhaps a dozen fresh corpses; on top, with newly smashed
skull, Herr Bacharach from Coblenz.
For a long time Herr Schotten sat gasping, and his body trembled. He
spoke the prayer of rescue from mortal danger, and the candle of the Baal
The Invisible Hand 
Shem burned brightly. Finally he understood the rabbi, and knew what to
do. He dragged his dead friend from the trench, onto the bed, under the
covers, as though sleeping; he himself crawled into the grave among the
bodies, his head above. Many hours, nothing stirred.
Now the key turned quietly in the lock, and men crept past the bed;
with three, four blows of the axe they split Herr Bacharach’s skull for the
second time, dragged the chest in front of the door, and again locked it
from the outside. Definitely the houseboy, perhaps also the innkeeper:
Herr Schotten thought he could hear them among the voices. Finally he
crawled out of the crypt to the barred window, where, after great effort, he
was finally able to pry a pane out of the caulk. There he awaited daybreak
outside, peered out carefully to see if someone might show himself on the
little alley behind the inn. Market folk appeared first, and Herr Schotten
wanted to call to them, but the innkeeper might hear him, and perhaps
there were accomplices among the people down there.
Then as the clock struck six in the morning sun, Herr Schotten saw
Herr Goldstikker from Frankfurt turning the corner toward the house of
murder, to visit his friends in the trade. Herr Schotten called only a few
words to him in the sacred language, so that no one else would under-
stand him, and his friend turned around. Minutes passed, the room grew
light, and the police arrived. Up the stairs, the door was crashed, and Herr
Schotten stepped out, so that the innkeeper and houseboy were stopped
in their lies.
He remained in the city just long enough to give testimony; five weeks
later he stood again in the Baal Shem’s chamber—You are surprised to see
me, Baal Shem, with gray hairs?—and told of his rescue. But why should
I tell you all this? You already knew just what you were doing when you
gave me this candle. Otherwise I would be lying next to poor Bacharach,
and you would be saying a prayer for the dead.
The rabbi took the candle, set it without ceremony back in its stand on
the table, and said: I know only that the Lord can save whom he will. The
candle helped you, like the sacred tongue, and yet remains a candle; the
sacred tongue helped you like the candle, and always remains a miracle.
God does not make it easy to know what we should thank him for.
As we said: one day, maybe, it will be better outside, all the way outside.
The story is bloody, but there’s a light in it; the candle glowed, and
burned correctly. The rabbi made absolutely nothing of it, neither of him-
self nor of the candle. He did not claim to be magical or prophetic, and
 The Invisible Hand
he certainly did not revere the accidental, albeit meaningfully accidental

candle as a talisman. This apparently supernatural story is ruled by a pecu-
liarly austere spirit; indeed, the quiet rabbi, next to the superstitious Herr
Schotten, is almost a skeptic, and in any case a very inscrutable ironist. The
Baal Shem of Michelstadt is enlightened, and it is the particular, decisively
Jewish kind of enlightenment that doesn’t doubt, say, that there are ghosts,
but does not acknowledge that they should come before people and their
undemonic God. So there is in this horror story a remarkable twist that
undoes it, or rather a moment that is still alive today, already familiar to
every businessman: the invisible hand. The practical intuition that does
not massively shift things but only twists them the right way a little, and
puts them in place, with this organ’s quiet sense of touch. It lets itself be
guided by fortune, by the same fortune that is buried, yet is the believer’s
obscure foundation in his world.
Here is no technology in some quantifiable sense, but also no old magic,
into which technology otherwise often extends. When the rabbi, awkward
and quite instructively nervous, reaches into the things of this world in or-
der to break off a talisman, he is hardly trusting in cosmic powers and
laws that already inhere in the world. Instead he is testing a strange, al-
most messianically selective hand so as to bring things out of their disper-
sion, and briefly make them Edenic, as it were. Then of course the candle
must serve us; it always fits the needs of the situation, whatever it may be,
in a reversed, fortunate irony of fate—so the candle would have burned in
Paradise, not as a thing but as a good.17
So acted the rabbi, and finally Herr Schotten, as he used the candle cor-
rectly, and even made of the sacred tongue at the necessary moment a
password. He pointed up only this about it: that no vendor would under-
stand it. Here the means are consecrated or defiled, depending—strangely,
in this uncertain world. No thing is bad in itself, none already good. It all
depends on the grip that guides it, that even sometimes penetrates into
the darkness, distortion, and uncertainty of the backgrounds.
Another rabbi, a true Kabbalist, once said: To bring about the kingdom
of freedom, it is not necessary that everything be destroyed, and a new
world begin; rather, this cup, or that bush, or that stone, and so all things
must only be shifted a little. Because this “a little” is hard to do, and its
measure so hard to find, humanity cannot do it in this world; instead this
is why the Messiah comes. Thereby this wise rabbi too, with his saying,
spoke out not for creeping progress but completely for the leap of the
lucky glimpse and the invisible hand.
Tales of White Magic 
Tales of White Magic

Should one act, or think? One could also ask if the thinker even does
anything. He detaches something from what is, in that he writes. He tries
to make certain things clearer, in that he shows where they’re going.
This is the window that thought must absolutely break through, so that
things will truly be changed, people truly set right, or finally set themselves
right. No dog, they say, will get up from the hearth for philosophy. But as
Hegel observes, that is really not its task. Furthermore, philosophy could
exist without this task, but not even the task could exist without philoso-
phy. Thought itself creates the world where something can be transformed,
and not just botched. Once this tendency was expressed as the claim to
magic; the Faust legend is the last manifestation of that. The sense of such
an ultimate office of wisdom often echoes in fairy tales. In them there lives
(not only in the pranks of Kasperle, Clever Hans, or the soldier who tricks
the devil) an antimythical streak, or the will to lift the enchanted world
back into our hinges.
Our first selection is German, received from the enlightened hands of
Musäus. Then a tale from the Thousand and One Nights, and there too
the true material of the excitement, the meaning, the almost theological
action, is again evident. The German fairytale in Musäus’s retelling in-
cludes many lovely and parallel flourishes that nevertheless obscure the
surplus value, the allegory; therefore, for the sake of other lines that flow
there, it must pragmatically be altered.
There once lived a king, the story goes, in quiet isolation.18 No pauper
left his house unfed, yet they were almost the only guests at the castle.
Gradually three lovely daughters grew up, who spun and sang and kept
house with the maids.
Now, one fine autumn morning the king set off on the hunt, took the
usual path through the forest. Yet he had barely gone a few paces when a
huge bear reared up before him, shattered his hunting spear with one
blow, and demanded the oldest daughter; he would come for her the next
morning. No sooner had the helpless man stood up again than a mighty
falcon swooped down from the treetops, drove his talons into the king’s
shoulder, and demanded as ransom the second daughter; he would come
for her the next morning. The king was leaving the forest when his foot
disturbed a pile of dead twigs beneath the last tree; a snake emerged, hiss-
ing, and encircled his body in an instant; the head, tongue flicking, was
about to bite, when the spellbound king himself called out the name of
 Tales of White Magic
his youngest daughter, buying his freedom at this great price, and the next
morning the snake would come for her.
The king raced back to his castle, ordered the drawbridge pulled up,
and meticulously sealed every entrance; his daughters he locked up by the
spinning wheel, the hearth, the youngest in a chamber in the keep, high
up by the battlements, with thick walls. But no sooner did morning break
than a grand train of knights thundered up the rise and dismounted be-
fore the gate. The bolts were drawn back, the drawbridge came down,
three young knights entered the castle, and turned back, the trembling
girls in their arms. Before the king and his men could even stir their limbs,
the splendid cavalcade had already thundered down the slope and disap-
peared into the distance, toward the enchanted forest.
From that time on the king, utterly broken and tormented, spent nearly
every day in penitence and prayer, locked in the castle chapel, taking only
slight pleasure in playing with his son Reinald, who had been born to him
shortly after the disappearance of the three princesses and had cost his
mother her life. The boy was now left to himself and dreamed of what he
had heard, and what his father did not order to be kept secret from him.
As he grew to manhood, the house grew ever more silent; the young no-
ble was driven to find his stolen sisters and free them. In vain the old king
sought to hold him back; he saw his unbreakable will, tried to force on
him at least an entourage, horses, squires, porters. Yet the prince sensed
that perils of a higher sort had to be faced here, and so he went, free and
alone, on a beautiful spring morning, into the enchanted forest.
He penetrated deep into the wilderness, tangled vines everywhere block-
ing his way. Often he had to cut a path with his sword, but finally the ter-
rible woods opened up, and the prince entered a long, still valley, toward
a hut in front of which three women sat spinning. The women shouted as
they spied the knight: Young man, what misfortune brings you into this
forest? Here live three terrible creatures, the bear, the eagle, the snake; at
nightfall they return, and you will never see morning if they find you here.
Then the prince knew where he was, and told his sisters who he was,
and that he had come to break the spell they were under. The women
stared at the knight in silent wonder. Then they embraced their brother,
kissed him again and again for joy; but their knees trembled at the clear
danger. It was the spell that held not only his sisters but—as Reinald
learned in the still valley—their husbands as well, such that every second
day the bear, eagle, and snake would take human form again as noble and
Tales of White Magic 
grand knights; in this form they had celebrated the wedding, and the wed-
ding night. Yet on the following day they would have to assume animal
form again; thus they had met the old king and today would meet Prince
Reinald.
Dusk had already broken; every footfall in the forest meant certain
death. Trembling, the women prepared a hiding place for their brother in
the furthest corner of the hut, behind pungent roots and herbs. When
darkness fell, the animals returned; the prince heard them howling and
screeching. Close by the bear groped with his paws in the shallow root
pile, the sisters cajoled and sang; it grew silent in the musty room, and the
prince fell asleep.
As he awoke and sat up to peer out of his hideaway, he found himself
on soft pillows, well rested. The morning sun shone cheerfully into his
richly decorated chamber. At the bedside stood a page, who held out mag-
nificent clothes to the prince. Astonished, he went out the door into a
great hall, and now saw his sisters surrounded by nobles in waiting, her-
alds, and foot soldiers in great number, and at their side three knights of
royal visage, who embraced Reinald and bade him a brotherly welcome.
But how the prince was amazed as he stepped outside and saw the utterly
changed landscape: in place of the hut stood a summer castle, at a great
distance he saw the mountain fortress of the knight of the white eagle,
and somewhat lower the knight of the snake showed him his water castle
by the sea. As Reinald saw all this and understood the spell he had sus-
pected ever since his childhood in the forest, he could not rest until he
discovered from the knights the secret of their enchantment, and the key
that would break it. His pleas to reveal the secret were more ardent and
persistent than the fraternal misgivings of the knights. Thus he soon knew
which path he must take, and by the setting sun he took his leave in order
to set out against the spell.
Seven days he wandered through the endless forest, always toward the
East, where he would find the key, until on the eighth day the trees cleared
and Reinald saw a cliff before him, a portal hewn into the cliff side, and be-
fore it a monster with the body of a serpent, eagle’s wings, and the head of
a bear. The prince strode toward the mute structure and the ceaselessly
watchful chimera, which, as it spied him, roared up to tear him apart from
the air. But as Reinald drove his first stroke overhead at the bear’s throat, the
sword went right through, as through air, and the chimera hung there mo-
tionless; as the prince leapt forward to take his second stroke, the monster
 Tales of White Magic
slowly began to dissolve into a silhouette, demonized again as he stepped

back, disappeared entirely as he stabbed into the fog, and the door in the
dark portal sprang open by itself.
A winding stairway lay behind it, and Reinald descended into a long
passage leading to a vast, candlelit hall. The hall was utterly empty; only a
half pillar stood in the middle, and on it a stone tablet inscribed with
some mysterious characters. Reinald had not been afraid of the chimera
outside, but here was its gaze, and a nameless fear overcame the brave
prince in that gaping hall. A spirit lived here, of an intensively creative
power of evil; Reinald sensed that the tablet was engraved with a talisman
that contained all the magic of the forest. With all his might he grabbed
the tablet and hurled it from the pedestal onto the floor, where it landed
silently and shattered. Shouting, Reinald fled the hall, stumbling up the
stairway to the door, which stood wide open, past which lay the bright sky
and the soaring treetops of the deserted forest.
But as the prince emerged there, shouts of joy rose from the green
depths; not long after, three squadrons broke through the edge of the for-
est, at their head the knights with Reinald’s sisters. Rejoicing, they rode to
the castle of the old king, who folded them in his arms and saw all wrongs
forgiven. Prince Reinald, however, took his leave of them all and departed
for the Holy Land, where he vanished. Only a pilgrim who had traveled
all over claimed to have last seen him as a Knight Templar in furthest Asia,
under Prester John.
Where he vanished—in fact Reinald had to go even further. First he fell,

and animals became human, of material that decays; the world remains,
the usual spell remains that no one hears because it’s always there. But al-
chemically there emerges from chivalry another, an Oriental fairy tale,
from its inception a philosophical fairy tale, that not only destroys charac-
ters but indicates the sphere of the philosopher’s stone itself.
A beautiful lady, it is told, was alone in her garden, planting flowers.
Her lord, Prince Bahman, had ridden off on the hunt and would not be
back before nightfall.19 Then an old woman came to the door, a hermit
and devout. The princess bade her enter and say a prayer with her, as it
was the prescribed hour. The woman saw the splendid garden with amaze-
ment, admired everything, and said, Certainly, noble lady, this garden lacks
only three things: if you had them, it would be complete. She stopped, but
as Princess Parizade implored her ever more strongly to name these things,
Tales of White Magic 
the devout woman went on hesitantly: I speak of the golden water, of the
talking bird, of the singing tree. Twenty days’ journey from here, in the land
of Hind, is where they can be found. Who would seek these three things
must ask the first man he encounters on the twentieth day.
After the devout woman had gone, the princess fell into a disquiet as
never before, and a perplexity. She was greatly startled when she heard the
tread of the prince returning from the hunt. But no sooner had she told
her beloved her wish than he too began to grieve as though over a loss,
and swore that he would win the three wonders.
Sleepless he spent the night; at the break of dawn he set off. Tenderly he
took leave of his beloved, rode into the dawn toward the land of Hind, ac-
companied only by his personal slave. They met ever fewer people, and fi-
nally they encountered no one in the deserted valleys and steppes, on the
dusty caravan routes where the desert began, and the mountain passes up to
the snowy peaks, until on the morning of the twentieth day the prince saw
a dervish, mutely withdrawn into himself at the side of a mountain path,
and he now understand the old woman’s words. He bowed deeply and
hailed the saint with a pious salutation, yet the dervish did not answer. The
prince called down Allah’s blessings on him, yet the dervish did not even
thank him; he beseeched him for a blessing, but the dervish gave no sign
that he even heard or saw the prince. The prince was uncertain if he should
ask the marabout, who was with Allah, for the way. Then the dervish an-
swered by himself, in a flat voice and as though from a great distance:
Turn around; do not ride up the mountain. A confusion of voices will strike
your ears that will fill you with terror, or deafen you. Beware of turning your
head, and again I say beware! If you nonetheless attain the peak, you will find
yourself on the cliff with the talking bird. He will show you the way to the
golden water and the singing tree. The way is dangerous, and the black stones
are death. If you do not return that day, you will never return.
The dervish fell back into his trance, yet the prince, with no desire to pen-
etrate the meaning of these mysterious words, suddenly sat up, com-
manded his slave to wait for him one day, and raced away over the shift-
ing debris, up the desolate mountain.
It was deathly still, and the further the knight went the more heavily
the mountain was strewn with boulders, black and strange in shape. The
peak was already visible, and the man’s heart felt no fear. Then there sud-
denly rose in a flash, roundabout the path and behind him in the deathly
 Tales of White Magic
quiet air, a whistling and hissing as though the air were full of snakes and
worms, with a screaming confusion of voices, as the dervish had pre-
dicted. The doughty prince rode forward and would not hear the magical
cries that called him by name in vanished voices from his childhood, the
voices of friends; he remained deaf to the iron chariot that seemed to roll
right next to him. Already he sensed the whinnying of the racing horses;
the whip cracked next to his face, and angrily the prince whirled about as
though he had been struck by the whip. Yet just as he was turning his
head to the side he thought of the dervish’s mysterious words—in vain.
Night fell, and the prince turned suddenly to black stone.
A day or two the slave waited; then he rode back as his master had com-
manded. The princess heard the news of his certain death as the slave re-
peated the words of the dervish, and she mourned in deepest sorrow. But
soon she began to doubt, out of a love that would not die, and she resolved
to go forth herself to search for her beloved. Unaccompanied, she set out
on the path her beloved had taken, considering the words of the dervish
well, long and precisely. On the twentieth day she too saw the saint; dis-
mounted, bowed deeply before him, who silently raised his hand; and
strode without a question up the path to the screaming mountain. But the
princess heard no sound in her deep melancholy, her bitter longing for the
beloved whom she had sent to his death; sorrow, regret, boundless love let
her hear nothing else—only this one thing, at which she herself screamed,
that she found by the talking bird. Already she could see the bird in a cage
on the highest peak. The princess snatched the struggling animal. Then
complete silence fell, and the bird said: O brave lady of noble birth, be of
good cheer; no evil shall befall you. I shall obey your commands on my
very life; tell me what I should do that I may fulfill your wishes. The
princess replied: I want to hear of my lord and husband whether he is alive
or dead, and where I can find him. The talking bird answered: Your word
is my command; take this flask and go to the other side of the mountain.
There fill the flask with the golden water, and you will see the branches of
the singing tree over the water. Sooner you cannot find your beloved, for
he is neither alive nor dead.
The princess followed the bird’s directions and soon stood under trees
and bushes before a small, remarkably pretty domed house; there a foun-
tain flowed with drinkable gold, over the dome arched a tree with a lumi-
nous crown, and all its branches sang. Princess Parizade filled her flask to
the brim from the magical fountain and broke a twig from the tree, so
Tales of White Magic 
that she now possessed all the three wonders of which the old woman had
spoken, but she cared for nothing, and longed only to see her beloved.
Then the bird spoke again: O great lady, go down the mountain again,
sprinkle a little of the golden water on the stones that lie about there, and
by its magic they will all return to life, your beloved along with others.
Now the princess finally turned back, poured some of the water onto
each stone, onto the dark debris all over the path: and as the first drop fell,
the men who had been stone arose, the beloved whom she had almost lost
stood and embraced her; the valley was full of people come back to life.
Some had slept for many centuries, others only a few days. All ages and all
history stood on the dreamless mountain, but now they were all equals by
Allah’s grace, and heaped praise and honor on the princess’s head.
She led the awakened men, triumphing in their new life, down the
mountain to the holy dervish, and past him. But as they came to his site,
the dervish had disappeared, and only the water in the flask churned. Of
the awakened men, everyone now went down the road by which he had
come, one this way, another that way, but the prince and princess went
their way, arriving at the palace with their treasures on the twentieth morn-
ing. They gave the talking bird a home in their garden. The magical brook
sang in the pool into which they poured it; it began to jet and spray by it-
self, and thus the flow of the water remained unbroken and unchanging.
The strange twig sent out roots, sprouted new branches and buds, sud-
denly became like the tree of life in the magical forest garden itself; its
singing echoed the bubbling of the fountain, the bird’s tales of the moun-
tain journey of the heroes and the perils they withstood.
On the seventh day Princess Parizade remembered the holy woman and
had her summoned, led her to the treasures. The good woman stood in
utter amazement, threw herself to the ground, and spoke the sura: “The
water sent from heaven, with which we awaken our lands, in this measure
you will one day go forth, on the day of reckoning, from your graves.”20
The princess bade the good woman spend her last years with them, and
they remained united in the manner of their praying. For a long time they
heard the splashing of the water, the singing tree, the legends told by the
bird, until one day death came to them too, and took them from all
earthly consolations to the fullness of Paradise.
Should one act or think? was the question. We have heard some fairy tales
where white magic was used. That is no longer possible for us, yet we remain
 Tales of White Magic
in the old realm of transformations, with other means. In these fairy tales,
one thinks in order to act, to thereby alone do the right thing; thought
goes before action, action proves thought. Therefore when metaphysical
thought above all bears none of the water of life with it, of which the Ori-
ental fairy tale so wonderfully reminds us, then it is useless, for it can’t be
used for anything. From this standpoint the Oriental tale, because the
princess goes further forward than Prince Reinald, would finally need a
remembrance of the origin, or rather the new dream where it still lives de-
spite its ancient language and provenance. The Thousand and One Nights
exists or existed in many versions, after all, already mixing the speech of
simple camel drivers with the declamation of rhapsodies at the Caliph’s
court, and sometimes a significant alchemical tradition. “The Story of the
Two Sisters Who Were Jealous of Their Younger Sister,” as the story we
have retold is called, refers unmistakably to this tradition.
There are much lighter tendencies in the original, however; the sister
princess (for here she is the sister of two brothers, to whom the same thing
happens on the mountain) in her colorful dress stuffs cotton in her ears so
that she only now and then hears an echo of the deadly voices, and ad-
vances unhesitatingly where so many brave knights had foundered before
her. Even the dervish must laugh heartily here when he hears of this fem-
inine wile, and truly, in the original of this story, it belongs among all the
cheerfully exact, evasive tricks that are played on the foolish devil in so
many fairy tales, by means of which the new, slender power of freedom
and human understanding might not conquer the principle of evil but
nevertheless escape from it to unfamiliar regions inaccessible to the an-
cient forces. Meanwhile the strange, ironically submissive motif of stop-
ping one’s ears, familiar from the saga of Odysseus, is obviously in a dif-
ferent category from the mere tricks, in themselves meaningless, used by
children and soldiers against witches and stupid devils. In fact, in the Ori-
ental fairy tale of rescue, the evil power is not evaded somehow subjec-
tively, with stopped ears, but overcome substantively, Orpheus-like, indeed
Orphically. Here, then, right between comic hero and alchemy, sounds a
fairy tale in the highest style, turned toward the epopœia of salvation; there
is a creatively constitutive, not merely cunning power in the princess’s deaf-
ness, in her profound deafness for love, that is more rigorously directed,
more radically anamnestic, than the power of the mere will to possess, let
alone the empty curiosity that exposes all our creaturely vanity. The ad-
venturers before her, as well as Prince Bahman, knew only this grasping,
this curiosity, at most a still noble but almost purely theoretical interest in
Tales of White Magic 
the old woman’s story; the bird, the fountain, the tree, these close relatives
of Novalis’s blue flower, they longed only to see, to own. Princess Parizade,
however, no longer remembers her initial curiosity, nor any merely abstract
or somehow inexpressible desire with its endless uncertainty of purpose,
meaning, or content. Her heart is full of the concrete will of a restorative
love, and in this integrity the mysterious voices do not frighten her; she is
deaf to any of the temptations of mere curiosity, indeed of the terror of the
desire to know.
Love here becomes the essential instrument of discovery, or in a rabbinic
metaphor quite applicable to the princess: “Someone who has wisdom
without charity is like a man who has the key to the innermost chamber,
but has lost the key to the outer one.” The princess was as far from any
merely intellectual curiosity as the dervish; so she was also spared the vain,
aimless looking about that lulls and kills as it did Lot’s wife, and that in
every myth of fatal enchantment leads to death or petrifaction as the pun-
ishment for curiosity and the forgetting of Jerusalem. An element of Eve
herself is reversed in the princess, for this fairy tale is fulfilled not only by
death as the wages of sin, but also by the antideath of white magic—in
short, by the ransom of knowledge, by the water of life as such, against the
pillars of salt and stone behind.
Nonetheless, even here, after such great signs, two people come to the
end within a coherent everyday. As in the quest of Prince Reinald, in the
(much more profound!) quest of the princess it is still only the previous
form that is regained from the spell. Here is what is ultimately still prob-
lematic in the conclusion of both stories, even the positively magical and
Oriental story. Bird, tree, and fountain become merely the garden orna-
ments of a comfortable life, unless the sisters in the original were to rec-
ognize themselves as abandoned princesses, unless the talking bird were to
lead them back to the sultan, their father. But whether the sura on the wa-
ter of life or the return to the father appears, all that is only an allegorically
simple, elegantly inadequate, impersonally sincere circumlocution of the
ultimate meaning posited here. For the three treasures, the talking bird
like the golden water like the singing tree, are alchemical symbols of the
purest kind. Consequently they would be committed to the creation of a
second life, something truly different and wonderful, which is not merely
retrieved from stone and restored to a prince but is obliged to overcome
precisely the illusion of change and the death at its end, to execute the real
sonhood of the highest king, indeed the becoming like Allah and beyond
Allah. The original leads only up to the sultanic threshold, in spite of all
 Tales of White Magic
the identifiable mystical meaning; in the original too, the bird brings
them only as far as their royal inheritance, which still belongs to this
world. The water of life that is the greatest of the three treasures concludes
its transformations by turning stones back into the human beings they
once had been. It does not transform the regained prince, let alone the
stones that were never princes; the mountain as a whole still remains sealed.
In its basin it forms geometric shapes from mere “nature,” and makes only
itself like itself. Such transparent unknowing consequently grounds what is
still problematic, obviously incomplete, in fact significantly unsatisfying
about the end of this little story of salvation: with death still in view as
though nothing had happened, nothing yet. The fountain might yet leap
up differently, the singing tree contain the music of other spheres; the talk-
ing bird in the legend means the answer that will make us all whole, and
every stone free. The princess found the prince again, anyway, and at the
end perhaps the abundance of paradise (which is likewise already there for
her, complete); yet the water of life means more.
Coda: How much the water of life means something else can be mea-
sured wherever it seems to have washed away the here and now. At least
with images and visions that are lived as though they were already beyond,
and told of what awaits us. In his “Voyage to Hades” Schubert sings, in a
pale and solemn voice—as quietly shattered as though he were still at the
spot—these words: “Already I see the pale Danaïds, accursed Tantalus.” If
we take this case as real—that after death or at the end of time we will
truly see the Danaïds—they will then exist not only as though one ex-
pected them (“already I see”); rather they and what is related to them, as
well as the brighter places in Greek mythology, will be the only thing that
remains. Then the sagas of antiquity will also be the most exact guide
through the world to come, or for Christian believers, the legends of heaven
and hell—in the event that the myths of Valhalla, against all expectations,
were not the better cicerone—or the Islamic Paradise. In this case, how-
ever, it is not the choice Schubert gives us but he himself that is blasphe-
mous; worse yet, to the point of inconceivability, absurd as blasphemous,
for what would in fact be or happen if one really saw Danaïds and ac-
cursed Tantalus or demon armies and the heavenly host at the end, as real
as trees are here, and realer? The shock would be unspeakable; even be-
lievers (and they in particular) would be driven crazy by finding the cate-
chism, and greater yet would be the horror that this was already the end
of it. The nowadays massive unbelief in things unseen (or rather the still
unseen) is certainly as mad as the massive belief in heavenly flesh and
Wonder 
blood; but in the latter there is still a dissatisfaction with spatial thinghood
again—indeed, a sense that the images of the final awakening, in short the
true water of life, could not be the Danaïdean sieve or Olympus or a
crown if there truly is such an awakening, and if it will be the last.
Sheer amazement at the unseen today shows us more profoundly what
would happen metaphysically if the living and dead fields were awakened;
these lights are of course always momentary or incidental, show the un-
reified, unenchanted, final homesickness in everything, and have no great
site. Bahman the mere prince is not there, not even as prince, anymore
than the palace to which the lovers and their partial water of life and su-
perficial garden treasures go back, just go back. The vision of such things,
even of divine things, does not yet concern the last thing in us, or no longer
does. Yet—a garden of what now and again amazes, even shatters us, and
what the princess herself had as it sounded so restless and severe from the
old woman’s words: of this, even unbelievers in the traditional end could
believe that it was still there within people and stones, questioning every-
thing, solving everything, and unfound.
Wonder
“Just think! Now and then I see the blue fly. I know, it all sounds so
paltry, I don’t know if you can understand.” “No, no, I understand.”
“All right! And now and then I see the grass, and maybe the grass sees
me, too; what do I know? I look at a single grass blade; maybe it trembles
a little, and it seems to me, that’s something; and I think to myself: here
this blade of grass stands and trembles! And there’s a fir I observe, and
maybe there’s a twig on it that makes me think. But now and again I
meet people on these heights, that happens. . . . ” “Oh, yes,” she said,
and stood up. The first drops of rain began to fall. “It’s raining,” I said.
“Yes, just think, it’s raining,” she said, too, and was on her way.
—Knut Hamsun, Pan
Yes, just think, it’s raining. She who felt that, suddenly wondered at it,
was far back, far ahead. She actually noticed very little, and yet she was
suddenly before the kernel of all questioning. In our youth, of course, we
often feel so empty and pure. We look out the window, go, stop, fall asleep,
wake up; everything’s always the same, seems to “be” only within this same
dull feeling: how uncanny it all really is, how overwhelmingly strange it is!
Wonder 
blood; but in the latter there is still a dissatisfaction with spatial thinghood
again—indeed, a sense that the images of the final awakening, in short the
true water of life, could not be the Danaïdean sieve or Olympus or a
crown if there truly is such an awakening, and if it will be the last.
Sheer amazement at the unseen today shows us more profoundly what
would happen metaphysically if the living and dead fields were awakened;
these lights are of course always momentary or incidental, show the un-
reified, unenchanted, final homesickness in everything, and have no great
site. Bahman the mere prince is not there, not even as prince, anymore
than the palace to which the lovers and their partial water of life and su-
perficial garden treasures go back, just go back. The vision of such things,
even of divine things, does not yet concern the last thing in us, or no longer
does. Yet—a garden of what now and again amazes, even shatters us, and
what the princess herself had as it sounded so restless and severe from the
old woman’s words: of this, even unbelievers in the traditional end could
believe that it was still there within people and stones, questioning every-
thing, solving everything, and unfound.
Wonder
“Just think! Now and then I see the blue fly. I know, it all sounds so
paltry, I don’t know if you can understand.” “No, no, I understand.”
“All right! And now and then I see the grass, and maybe the grass sees
me, too; what do I know? I look at a single grass blade; maybe it trembles
a little, and it seems to me, that’s something; and I think to myself: here
this blade of grass stands and trembles! And there’s a fir I observe, and
maybe there’s a twig on it that makes me think. But now and again I
meet people on these heights, that happens. . . . ” “Oh, yes,” she said,
and stood up. The first drops of rain began to fall. “It’s raining,” I said.
“Yes, just think, it’s raining,” she said, too, and was on her way.
—Knut Hamsun, Pan
Yes, just think, it’s raining. She who felt that, suddenly wondered at it,
was far back, far ahead. She actually noticed very little, and yet she was
suddenly before the kernel of all questioning. In our youth, of course, we
often feel so empty and pure. We look out the window, go, stop, fall asleep,
wake up; everything’s always the same, seems to “be” only within this same
dull feeling: how uncanny it all really is, how overwhelmingly strange it is!
 Wonder
Even that formulation is already too much, looks as though it were only
being that is not quite canny. If we try to imagine that nothing were, how-
ever, that is no less mysterious. There aren’t the right words for it, or we
turn our initial wonder around.
So above all later, just when one questions more precisely, seemingly, and
notices. When one claims to know why a flower blooms, and the truly des-
perate even visit fortune tellers and speak of elves who bring about (or are)
this blooming. Science especially debilitates our questioning, our bottom-
less wonder; “explains” how this or that came to be, how this becomes that;
does its abstract race with post hoc and propter hoc. Theosophical stopgaps
resort not only to elves, to archangels, to all sorts of grandly named forces;
the rosy dawn of the trembling beginning becomes the cheap gravy of in-
ept fabulation. Yes, even given elves, archangels, hypothetically if unwill-
ingly: are they really anything but another way of being next to, above,
this one? Would it not be just as dark if they existed, like the blade of grass
or the branch of a fir? Doesn’t the branch still give us so namelessly much
to think about, this bit of everything that we cannot name? Does it not,
with its “being,” extend just as well into the “nothing” where it would not
be, or would not be so, and that makes it doubly strange? Does not the
question of simple wonder likewise lead into this nothing where it hopes
to find its everything? With a shock at how dark and uncertain the
ground of the world is, with the hope that just for this reason everything
can still “be” otherwise, be so much our own “being” that no question is
still needed, but instead the question is completely posed in this wonder
and ultimately becomes happiness, an existence like happiness. Philoso-
phers are somewhat more concerned here than real or occult science; since
Plato, wonder has been for them a done deal, or the beginning: But how
many of them have kept the direction of the beginning? Almost no one
kept up his questioning wonder past the first answer. No one measured
the problems that concretely arose against this wonder; no one grasped
them as its refractions or transformations. It was especially hard to hear in
wonder not only the questions but also the language of an answer, a res-
onating self-wonder, this seething final state within things.
Yet the beginning could never quite be expelled from philosophy; it
echoes significantly in the great systems, which separates the metaphysi-
cians from the actuaries of cosmic explanation. It also ties philosophy again
and again to youth, makes metaphysics at every point impatient again,
conscientious—the wisdom of age in the early, unerring freshness of ado-
lescent, primordial wonder. So we might surely meditate on the few casual
Dead and Usable 
words between a girl and a boy, from time to time, as a sort of morning
exercise of instinct. Then the many great riddles of the world will not en-
tirely conceal their one inconspicuous mystery.
The Mountain
One summer’s day in the year , reports a local almanac, a hunter by
the name of Michael Hulzögger went into the forest on the Untersberg.
He did not come back; nor was he seen anywhere else. It finally seemed as
though he had gone off the trail or fallen down a rock face. After several
weeks his brother had a mass said for the missing man, on the Gmain,
where there was a pilgrimage church near the mountain. But during the
mass the hunter entered the church to thank God for his miraculous re-
turn. Of what he had experienced and what he had seen in the mountain
he spoke no word, but remained quiet and solemn, and explained that
people would hardly learn more from him than what Lazarus Gitschner
had already written about it; nor did his grandchildren and great-grand-
children learn much more.21 This Lazarus Gitschner, however, had seen
no more than a tunnel under the mountain, the Kaiser Friedrich who
used to appear on the Welserberg, a book of prophecies, and whatever else
was already part of the legend.
Nothing more could be got out of the hunter; indeed, in a great change
from his earlier personality, he soon grew entirely mute. Archbishop Fir-
mian of Salzburg had also heard of the hunter’s mysterious disappearance
and return, and sent for him. But Hulzögger again remained silent before
the prince of the Church. To every question he replied that he could and
would say nothing; only confession was permitted. After confession the
bishop laid down his robes and remained silent until his death. It came
soon for both; it is supposed to have been peaceful.
Dead and Usable

If everything were alive, nothing around us would last. It would all wilt
like flowers, would decay, going the way of all flesh. There would be no
stones to build strong, lasting buildings; no bronze for sculptures; no books
The Mountain
Dead and Usable

The Mountain
Dead and Usable

 The Pearl
could be printed on paper, to be carried through the centuries. One could

object that even wood, this beautiful and so very durable material,
nonetheless once belonged to a tree and was therefore alive before it was
felled. The same holds for sheep, of which good and particularly durable
parchment, especially such colorful and lastingly pleasing woven rugs, are
produced, which would not exist without a previous life beneath the pelt.
Yet these materials also seem permanent only after the deaths of their
bearers, and no longer have any of that earlier life. Anyway, what mostly
surrounds us is still so-called dead matter, usually without ever having
lived, and grandfather’s staff remains longer than he does, to say nothing
of the mountain he climbed. What is really in the stone remains to be
seen, will certainly not come forth on its day if we ourselves do not go be-
hind it. There is much gold that glitters and has never been dug up.
The Pearl
On the way from the inside out, and back, nothing should be passed
over. And the advice—let everything go, and it will all come back to
you—is false not only inwardly but actively too. A king, says an Indian
legend, lost a very beautiful pearl; he ordered the entire land to be
searched for it. Soldiers and Brahmans, all were set on the march together,
in vain; the pearl did not return. Until one day the king found it him-
self—as we said, on the path of unintentionality. The inactive man, in
other words, who had perhaps forgotten his desires, and who was no
longer driven to fulfill them, saw them fulfilled.
So much for this fable that abandons all temporal striving, just as if the
outside had already come so far that it gives us what is ours all by itself.
And grants it only then when we do nothing for it; which is definitely too
good to be true, and too sterile to bear fruit. Similar things have also been
claimed not only for action in time but for the spatialization of the out-
side in and of itself, and its dispersed juxtaposition, as though it were not
a dispersion. Thus there is the story of a very wise man for whom the
world had so achieved itself, and was out of the cutter of multiplicity, that
he now and again had to put on eyeglasses, or else he would see all things
as a unity. Then again, this pearl is also never a gift, of course, if only be-
cause there would no longer be anything next to it but this unity. At least
in the mystical view, which can certainly display the most banal offshoots
 The Pearl
could be printed on paper, to be carried through the centuries. One could

object that even wood, this beautiful and so very durable material,
nonetheless once belonged to a tree and was therefore alive before it was
felled. The same holds for sheep, of which good and particularly durable
parchment, especially such colorful and lastingly pleasing woven rugs, are
produced, which would not exist without a previous life beneath the pelt.
Yet these materials also seem permanent only after the deaths of their
bearers, and no longer have any of that earlier life. Anyway, what mostly
surrounds us is still so-called dead matter, usually without ever having
lived, and grandfather’s staff remains longer than he does, to say nothing
of the mountain he climbed. What is really in the stone remains to be
seen, will certainly not come forth on its day if we ourselves do not go be-
hind it. There is much gold that glitters and has never been dug up.
The Pearl
On the way from the inside out, and back, nothing should be passed
over. And the advice—let everything go, and it will all come back to
you—is false not only inwardly but actively too. A king, says an Indian
legend, lost a very beautiful pearl; he ordered the entire land to be
searched for it. Soldiers and Brahmans, all were set on the march together,
in vain; the pearl did not return. Until one day the king found it him-
self—as we said, on the path of unintentionality. The inactive man, in
other words, who had perhaps forgotten his desires, and who was no
longer driven to fulfill them, saw them fulfilled.
So much for this fable that abandons all temporal striving, just as if the
outside had already come so far that it gives us what is ours all by itself.
And grants it only then when we do nothing for it; which is definitely too
good to be true, and too sterile to bear fruit. Similar things have also been
claimed not only for action in time but for the spatialization of the out-
side in and of itself, and its dispersed juxtaposition, as though it were not
a dispersion. Thus there is the story of a very wise man for whom the
world had so achieved itself, and was out of the cutter of multiplicity, that
he now and again had to put on eyeglasses, or else he would see all things
as a unity. Then again, this pearl is also never a gift, of course, if only be-
cause there would no longer be anything next to it but this unity. At least
in the mystical view, which can certainly display the most banal offshoots
The Pearl 
in the pensioned longing for quiet, or the return of the eternally same.
Yet how mockingly often, and then again how variously, does the desire
for an end of striving, of diffusion, of distraction, find itself fulfilled not
by the One but by the monotone—in other words, not denied but be-
trayed. We see it here, too: just as there is no true way without a goal,
there is no goal without the power of a way toward it, indeed one pre-
served in the goal itself. So we should look around here and now, with
actively set time in actively reconstructed space; the traces of the so-called
Ultimate, indeed even of a hospitable Becoming, are themselves just the
imprints of a Going that must still be gone into the New. Only very far
beyond will everything that one meets and notices be the Same.
Notes
Situation
. Je suis pauvre: “I am poor”; Que voulez vous . . . : “What do you want, sir?
Poverty, it’s already halfway to filthiness.”
. The royalist opponents of the French Revolution took the Bourbons’ white
lily as their symbol. Opponents of the Russian Revolution were thus “Whites.”
. Nana is the Second Empire courtesan of Émile Zola’s (–) 
novel of the same name.
. Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (–) is France’s most famous gas-
tronome. His  Physiology of Taste was translated into English by M.F.K. Fisher.
. Bloch uses a German idiom for stinginess: Bei ihnen ist Schmalhans Küchen-
meister (“Even their cook is starving”).
. Caliph Stork is the hero of Wilhelm Hauff ’s (–) fairy tale of the
same name.
Fate
. Ferdinand Lassalle (–) was a German socialist politician with an ex-
travagant lifestyle. He challenged a romantic rival to a duel and was killed.
. Lucus a non lucendo is a byword for a perhaps deliberately illogical etymol-
ogy or other explanation.
. Wenzel Strapinski is the poor tailor of Gottfried Keller’s (–) novella
“Clothes Make the Man.” Others mistake him for a Polish noble because of his
waistcoat.
. This story appears as “The Master of Prayer” in Martin Buber’s  col-
lection, The Tales of Rabbi Nachman.
175
 Notes
. The German woodsman hero of many Karl May (–) adventure

novels.
. In Austrian folktales the good Kaiser Josef goes incognito among the sim-
ple people and then brutally punishes his advisors upon learning that they con-
ceal the people’s sufferings from him.
. Florestan is unjustly imprisoned and rescued by his wife, disguised as the
young man Fidelio, in Beethoven’s opera of that name.
. Bloch’s source, Vom Zufall, could not be located. In any case the story is
Arabic, from the Thousand and One Nights, st night.
. Friedrich Schiller’s poem “Der Ring des Polykrates” was the subject of a
commentary by the poet and philologist Wilhelm von Scholz (–).
. The rustling of the rat is an allusion to Goethe’s poem “Hochzeitlied”
(Wedding Song).
. Karl Ludwig Roth (–) was a Latin philologist and educator.
. Meinetwegen has a range of meanings, from “on my behalf ” or “for my
sake” to “for all I care” or “Suit yourself!” The child Bloch may be pointedly in-
different to any of the meanings, or he may be playing the meanings against the
word’s purely aural qualities.
. Little Muck is a dwarf from Nicaea in Hauff ’s fairy tale, with magic slip-
pers and staff; neighborhood boys tease him shamelessly until they learn of his
legendary past.
. Lustig and Fatme are also title characters in Hauff ’s tales.
. Bloch seems to be quoting from James Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie,
chapter .
. Bloch wrote “The Universe in the Light of Atheism” in , at the age of
thirteen. It has not been published.
. Likely an allusion to Philippians : – and passim: “But our citizenship
is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ,
who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will
transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.”
. Perhaps an allusion to the American ditty “The Raggedy-Ass Marines.”
. The source of the doggerel about worker’s trumpets is unknown. The
British captain Frederick Marryat’s (–) novels exploit his naval experi-
ence. The Susquehanna figures in many of Cooper’s novels.
. The Wreck of the Grosvenor is a maritime novel by W. Clark Russell
(–).
. Ferdinand von Schill (–) was a Prussian officer who led his irreg-
ulars in a rebellion against Napoleon in . He was killed in combat. The exe-
cution of his officers remained a favorite subject of nationalist political caricature.
. From Hauff ’s “The Legend of the False Prince.”
Notes 
. The entire sentence is a montage of names from May’s works. Nscho-
Tschi is the name of the Apache woman (supposedly “Beautiful Day”) who mar-
ries May’s Old Shatterhand in Winnetou, book IV.
. From “Eine Renaissance der Sinnlichkeit” (A Renaissance of Sensuality),
one of Bloch’s juvenilia.
. From “Über die Kraft und ihr Wesen,” (On Energy and Its Nature), an-
other of Bloch’s juvenilia.
. Friedrich Gerstäcker (–) is still known for his extensive travel diaries.
. Alexander Girardi (–) starred in the premiers of several Strauss
operettas and lent his name to the Girardi hat still worn in Austria. He is still fa-
mous as a Viennese character and flâneur.
. Heinrich von Ofterdingen, novel by Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg),
–.
. Marcion of Sinope (c. –c. ), early Christian writer often counted as
a heretic and Gnostic.
. Wie wir einst so glücklich waren: the epigraph to Goethe’s First Roman Elegy,
an apostrophe to Rome itself, here more likely just a stock phrase.
. At preserved Bloch writes “eingekocht”, quite literally as of jam or preserves.
. Here Bloch retells an episode from Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s (–) 
novel Zanoni.
. Letter of July , .
. A reference to Novalis’s “Die Lehrlinge zu Saïs” (“The Novices at Saïs”).
Existence
. This was a favorite joke of Franz Kafka’s, and Walter Benjamin retells it in
his essay on Kafka.
. Des Knaben Wunderhorn (literally “the boy’s magical horn”) is the epochal
Romantic anthology of German folk verse.
. From the German idiom for hypocrisy, “to preach water yet drink wine.”
. A story from Johan Peter Hebel’s (–) Der Rheinische Hausfreund,
in which a visitor to a Low German area is told “Kanitverstan” (“I don’t under-
stand”) when he wants to know who owns a certain business, who lives in some
great house, and finally whose funeral is passing by; he concludes that all Kan-
itverstan’s great wealth could not save him from death.
. A popular ballad by Friedrich von Hagedorn (–).
. Alfred Klabund (–), German poet, novelist, essayist, translator, pacifist.
. Krautwickerl: cabbage roll.
. Hedwig Courths-Maler (–), in whose romance novels virtuous pe-
tit bourgeois women finally marry rich or aristocratic men.
 Notes
. The Isar runs through Munich; numerous cafés and inns on its banks are
called Isarlust.
. Bloch’s retelling of “Wer ist der Sünder” (Who Is the Sinner?), number 
in Richard Wilhelm’s (–) anthology Chinesische Volksmärchen (Chinese
Fairy Tales). Wilhelm, a Protestant missionary in China, is also famous for his
translations of the Tao and the I Ching into German.
. Bloch’s retelling of “Der Rossberg-Geist” (The Demon on Horse Moun-
tain), number  in Wilhelm’s anthology.
. Bloch is quoting, from memory, James Fenimore Cooper’s  The Spy: A
Tale of the Neutral Ground. In the original, Washington’s note reads: “Circum-
stances of political importance, which involve the lives and fortunes of many,
have hitherto kept secret what this paper now reveals. Harvey Birch has for years
been a faithful and unrequited servant of his country. Though man does not,
may God reward him for his conduct!”
. ”The widow’s pitcher”: see  Kings .
. Bloch is referring to Tolstoy’s “The Three Hermits: An Old Legend Cur-
rent in the Volga District.”
. ”Saxon” here seems to be pejorative, perhaps because the Saxon dialect has
been consistently mocked as awkward for centuries.
. ”The Story of the Blind Man, Baba Abdullah,” from the Thousand and
One Nights, th night.
.  film by Thea von Harbou (–), based on the play by Gerhart
Hauptmann (–).
. Bloch uses tropisch and triebhaft to correspond to Lichttrieb, “drive to the
light” or “(photo)tropism.”
. ”Ali the Cairene and the Haunted House in Baghdad,” from the Thou-
sand and One Nights, th night.
. Die Gartenlaube, published from –, was Germany’s first success-
ful mass-circulation journal, emphasizing sentimental, moralistic, and national-
istic content.
. An allusion to Paul Gerhard’s  poem “O Haupt voll Blut und Wun-
den,” set to music by J. S. Bach. Gerhard’s poem is based on Bernard of Clair-
vaux’s  Salve caput cruentatum.
. ”The Ruined Man Who Became Rich Again Through a Dream,” from
the Thousand and One Nights, st night.
. From Mann’s  essay “Goethe und Tolstoi.”
. Francis Gayot de Pitaval (–) was a French attorney who, between
 and , published popular collections of true crime stories; a “Pitaval”
designates such a collection.
. Paul Ernst (–), Neoclassical writer, essayist, playwright, and
journalist.
Notes 
. See note , on Hebel, in this section.

. A reference, frequent in Bloch, to the ancient Egyptian image of the de-
parting soul.
. The film is Fritz Lang’s  Der müde Tod (The Weary Reaper), released
in English as Destiny. It stars Lil Dagover; the characters are not named.
. Song of Solomon :.
. From Horace’s Epistulae, book , number : Nam tua res agitur, paries cum
proximus ardet (“For it is your business when your neighbor’s house is on fire”).
. The mythic land depicted in soprano Lotte Lehmann’s (–) 
novel Orplid, mein Land (translated as Eternal Flight).
. Béla Balász (–), Hungarian writer best known for the libretto to
Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle.
. The sickener mushroom, or Russula emetica.
. Realträume, dreams based on (potential) reality, as opposed to Wun-
schträume, wishful dreams or delusions.
Things
. George Stephenson (–) is credited with the invention of the steam
locomotive.
. Johannes V. Jensen (–),  winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
. An allusion to the “makanthropos,” or macrocosmic man.
. Bloch spells Angabe as it would be pronounced in the Berlin dialect,
though Berliner impudence is more important here than Berliner pronunciation.
. ”At its goal” is a characteristic phrase for Bloch. The Latin phrase is com-
monly inscribed above doors and means, “I’ve found a haven; greetings, Hope
and Fortune!”
. Bloch takes “carpet” as an aesthetic term from Georg Lukács’s  Soul
and Form. It appears in Bloch’s  Spirit of Utopia (q.v.).
. Emile Coué (–), French psychotherapist whose therapy of auto-
suggestion (“Day by day, in every way, I am getting better and better”) was in
vogue in the s.
. ”Tischlein deck dich” is both a dumbwaiter table and the incantation from
the Grimm’s fairy tale about the table that magically sets itself.
. ”The Barber’s Tale of His Second Brother,” from the Thousand and One
Nights, st night.
. This is one of countless Norwegian tales in which a supernatural being
teaches someone the tuning for the Hardanger fiddle, yet not the technique.
. Rübezahl is a mountain gnome, familiar from folktales and from Johann
Karl August Musäus’s (–) more literary renderings. The treasure he be-
stows turns to dry leaves the next day.
 Notes
. Perhaps only incidentally, Bloch seems to be alluding to Jeremiah ::

“Thus saith the LORD, Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, neither let
the mighty man glory in his might. . . . ”
. Bloch uses the term Reaktionsbasis, coined by biologist Jakob Uexküll
(–) to designate an organism’s “context-dependent behavioral disposi-
tion.” The term was adopted by Reichian and Gestalt therapy to describe neurosis.
. Bloch is possibly alluding to the discovery in Siberia of the remains of a
large number of woolly mammoths, described in Baron George Cuvier’s (–
) Essay on the Theory of the Earth as evidence for the extinction of species by
geological “revolutions.”
. The untranslatable infinitive mauscheln (from the Yiddish Moishe) desig-
nates the accented German spoken by Jewish traders, and their supposed busi-
ness practices; the term itself obviously has anti-Semitic uses.
. Luke :–: “And it came to pass, that the beggar died, and was carried
by the angels into Abraham’s bosom: the rich man also died, and was buried; and
in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and
Lazarus in his bosom.”
. Bloch is here alluding to Romans :: “And we know that all things work
together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according
to his purpose.”
. ”Die drei Schwestern” (The Three Sisters), from , by Johann Karl Au-
gust Musäus –).
. The story comes from the Thousand and One Nights, st night.
. Likely the forty-first sura: “Among His proofs is that you see the land still,
then, as soon as we shower it with water, it vibrates with life. Surely, the One
who revived it can revive the dead. He is Omnipotent” (:).
. The storied Untersberg is near Salzburg. Lazarus Gitschner’s account dates
from the sixteenth century.
M E R I D I A N
Crossing Aesthetics
Jacques Derrida, H.C. for Life, That Is to Say . . .

Ernst Bloch, Traces
Elizabeth Rottenberg, Inheriting the Future: Legacies of Kant, Freud,
and Flaubert
David Michael Kleinberg-Levin, Gestures of Ethical Life
Jacques Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy
Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason
Peggy Kamuf, Book of Addresses
Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to
the Romans
Jean-Luc Nancy, Multiple Arts: The Muses II
Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics
Jacques Derrida, Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2
Maurice Blanchot, Lautréamont and Sade
Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal
Jean Genet, The Declared Enemy
Shosana Felman, Writing and Madness: (Literature/Philosophy/Psychoanalysis)
Jean Genet, Fragments of the Artwork
Shoshana Felman, The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with
J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages
Peter Szondi, Celan Studies
Neil Hertz, George Eliot’s Pulse
Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come
Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb, Regions of Sorrow: Anxiety and Messianism in
Hannah Arendt and W. H. Auden
Jacques Derrida, Without Alibi, edited by Peggy Kamuf
Cornelius Castoriadis, On Plato’s ‘Statesman’
Jacques Derrida, Who’s Afraid of Philosophy? Right to Philosophy 1
Peter Szondi, An Essay on the Tragic
Peter Fenves, Arresting Language: From Leibniz to Benjamin
Jill Robbins, ed. Is It Righteous to Be?: Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas
Louis Marin, Of Representation
Daniel Payot, The Architect and the Philosopher
J. Hillis Miller, Speech Acts in Literature
Maurice Blanchot, Faux pas
Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural
Maurice Blanchot/Jacques Derrida, The Instant of My Death/Demeure:
Fiction and Testimony
Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System
Emmanual Levinas, God, Death, and Time
Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia
Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy
Ellen S. Burt, Poetry’s Appeal: French Nineteenth-Century Lyric and the
Political Space
Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas
Werner Hamacher, Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from
Kant to Celan
Aris Fioretos, The Gray Book
Deborah Esch, In the Event: Reading Journalism, Reading Theory
Winfried Menninghaus, In Praise of Nonsense: Kant and Bluebeard
Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content
Giorgio Agamben, The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics
Theodor W. Adorno, Sound Figures
Louis Marin, Sublime Poussin
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience
Ernst Bloch, Literary Essays
Jacques Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis
Marc Froment-Meurice, That Is to Say: Heidegger’s Poetics
Francis Ponge, Soap
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life
Emmanuel Levinas, Of God Who Comes To Mind
Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus
Werner Hamacher, pleroma—Reading in Hegel
Serge Leclaire, Psychoanalyzing: On the Order of the Unconscious and the
Practice of the Letter
Serge Leclaire, A Child Is Being Killed: On Primary Narcissism and the
Death Drive
Sigmund Freud, Writings on Art and Literature
Cornelius Castoriadis, World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society,
Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination
Thomas Keenan, Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in
Ethics and Politics
Emmanuel Levinas, Proper Names
Alexander García Düttmann, At Odds with AIDS: Thinking and Talking
About a Virus
Maurice Blanchot, Friendship
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Muses
Massimo Cacciari, Posthumous People: Vienna at the Turning Point
David E. Wellbery, The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the
Beginnings of Romanticism
Edmond Jabès, The Little Book of Unsuspected Subversion
Hans-Jost Frey, Studies in Poetic Discourse: Mallarmé, Baudelaire, Rimbaud,
Hölderlin
Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field
Nicolas Abraham, Rhythms: On the Work, Translation, and Psychoanalysis
Jacques Derrida, On the Name
David Wills, Prosthesis
Maurice Blanchot, The Work of Fire
Jacques Derrida, Points . . . : Interviews, 1974–1994
J. Hillis Miller, Topographies
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica Ficta (Figures of Wagner)
Jacques Derrida, Aporias
Emmanuel Levinas, Outside the Subject
Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime
Peter Fenves, “Chatter”: Language and History in Kierkegaard
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom
Jean-Joseph Goux, Oedipus, Philosopher
Haun Saussy, The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence

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Traces

Flower and Unflower* 

Even during pauses—while counting, say—many hum something we can’t

Even during pauses—while counting, say—many hum something we can’t

Lamp and Closet

Lamp and Closet

Learning Good Habits

Learning Good Habits

Learning Good Habits

He sat with a green schnapps, occasionally reading. The café at this

The Useful Member

The Useful Member

Bread and Games

Bread and Games

in whom poverty is supposed to be a great inner radiance, always build

in whom poverty is supposed to be a great inner radiance, always build

to the old bourgeois who would so disappoint. In the triumph of the

head, that someone’s plans should be fortunate, another’s unfortunate,

head, that someone’s plans should be fortunate, another’s unfortunate,

Rich Devil, Poor Devil

The Kitten as David

The Kitten as David

siderable trips, buying souvenirs indiscriminately, some as good as a leop-

siderable trips, buying souvenirs indiscriminately, some as good as a leop-

Occasionally a flicker, though it would not burn; too nervous. Or it lit no

compensated, to everyone else’s shame. Even boys, I remember clearly,

Scribe at the Mairie

Scribe at the Mairie

The Beautiful Appearance

The Beautiful Appearance

he appeared in illustrated weeklies, and he invested his compensation in

The Rococo of Fate

The Rococo of Fate

therefore, is the second, the more qualitative kind of smallness, namely

Spirit Still Taking Shape

Spirit Still Taking Shape

The Red Window

The God of Life

masqueraded in the forbidden taverns as beggars and captains, told of ter-

The Motif of Parting

Supernaturalism, Stupid and Improved

Supernaturalism, Stupid and Improved

Strange Homeland, Familiar Exile

respect to such brief woundings or extraordinary momentary impressions

The Long Gaze

respect to such brief woundings or extraordinary momentary impressions

The Long Gaze

Reunion Without Connection

Reunion Without Connection

The Muse of Restitution

The Muse of Restitution

As beloved, woman has always been celebrated fervently; as good wife,

Raphael Without Hands

As beloved, woman has always been celebrated fervently; as good wife,

Raphael Without Hands

up), retains a certain appearance of fullness. There is an underground lit-

The Fall into the Now

The Fall into the Now

The Spur of Work

The Spur of Work