When the ex-chancellor Willy Brandt took his place at the podium as chairman of the Social Democratic Party, István stood up and announced, looking to the right and left to appraise the effect of his words, that he was not willing to listen to this man who had knelt down, who had prostrated himself in the dirt before the communists, no, he, István, having suffered under that system, did not have to put up with this, no one had the right to demand it of him, and he strode toward the exit with an expression of scorn. Kraft sank into his seat, his ears burning with shame, and let his companion leave. The significance of Brandt’s genuflection in Warsaw was one of the few points on which they had never been able to agree. Kraft had a vivid memory of sitting in front of the television as a twelve-year-old and watching the man who now stood at the podium sink to his knees in a dark coat and kneel silently with hands joined for a half minute and the boy had a strong intuition that this gesture of humility had something to do with his father, an SS officer and leader of an Einsatzgruppe who was taken prisoner by the Soviets in the summer of ’41 on the western shore of Lake Peipus and spent the next fourteen years in a prison camp in Arkhangelsk before he was finally released in the fall of 1955 with the very last prisoners and mistakenly taken by the Red Cross not to Hamburg but to Munich, where he seized the opportunity to make up for the fourteen lost years and, even though he set an impressive pace in every other respect, it took him a full two years to decide to look in on his wife in Hamburg, a young woman he had married on his first leave but returned to find as a childless spinster who’d waited for him all those years in her garret apartment, which didn’t prevent him from conceiving a son with her before disappearing for good three days later. Richard Kraft, who had inherited nothing from his father aside from his family name, gray eyes, and curly hair, and who, because of his sketchy knowledge of history, didn’t know how to interpret the chancellor’s gesture at the time, and so succumbed to the mistaken notion at the sight of the kneeling man that the latter was asking Kraft’s pardon for his father’s absence, and indeed because he was a child as thirsty for knowledge as he was solitary, he wanted to understand the situation better, so with his savings he bought a copy of Der Spiegel with a picture of the kneeling chancellor on the cover. A reporter who had witnessed the scene in Warsaw recounted it with emotion: He kneels down not for his own sake. The boy felt somehow validated. He’d had a sense that the chancellor was not kneeling down for himself, no, he was kneeling for the boy’s father, but reading further he no longer understood what the reporter was writing about. He, someone who need not kneel, kneels for all those who should be there on their knees, but are not—because they do not dare or cannot or cannot dare kneel. Thus he acknowledges a burden of guilt which he himself does not bear, and he asks for forgiveness which he himself does not need. He kneels for Germany. What guilt was this? And why was this chancellor not part of that Germany that was guilty and therefore someone who did not need to kneel? And what about Kraft’s father? Was he someone who should be kneeling, and was it because he wasn’t that the chancellor had to? Kraft had no one who could give him any answers, but he knew where answers could be found, so he went to look for them in the public library, which turned out to be a complicated endeavor since the league of German historians had up to that point neglected to devote themselves to the subject of guilt with due scholarly rigor. Kraft found answers in the novels of Seghers, Grass, and Becker, and in Celan’s poetry and Bachmann’s stories.
The chancellor, Kraft learned, actually had fallen to his knees on behalf of his father and had also fallen to his knees for him, the son, since the sins of the fathers and the iniquity of the entire country were so abysmal that they were visited on all sons like a hereditary illness. And so it was the gesture of humility made by this old man standing at the podium that had politicized Kraft and awoken his interest in history and literature.
Brandt spoke for a long time, a very long time, and despite the fact that the man meant a great deal to him, Kraft was about to get up and join his friend in the lobby, but then the debate heated up, indeed, there was veritable turmoil in the auditorium after the recently ousted ex-minister Baum had spoken. István had returned to his seat for the speech and had immediately denied Baum’s right to call himself a liberal after he, now a simple member of parliament, had voiced his confidence in the current chancellor, proof that he completely misunderstood the true liberal spirit and was fundamentally unfit to take the sacred word liberty in his putrid mouth; a verdict with which Kraft eagerly concurred, happy to reestablish harmony with his friend.
Then Dr. Hamm-Brücher, a tall, elegant woman in a severe black-and-white-striped skirt suit and a tie-neck blouse with her snow-white hair pinned up, denounced her own party’s attempted putsch as the opprobrium of democratic decency, a remark István scornfully dismissed as whining prattle, besides, she reminded him of his grandmother, who reminded him in turn of his mother, and that said it all. Kraft wasn’t sure what exactly that said, but he secretly wished Dr. Hamm-Brücher reminded him of his mother, which was not even remotely the case, as Josephine Kraft probably had no idea what “opprobrium” was and in any case she’d never shown the slightest interest in “democratic decency” nor owned an elegant skirt suit.
The secretary-general of the Christian Democratic Union, who followed this distinguished figure, condemned her words as an attack on the constitution, inciting a commotion. At any rate, the CDU man’s provocation didn’t lack for effect and Kraft had the pleasure of enjoying one last appearance by Chancellor Schmidt, who proved his statesmanliness once again when, interrupted from the floor, he shouted that for the time being he still had the right to speak. István gaped at the theatrics, filled with delight. Kraft felt a certain amount of unease, but suppressed it and tried to share in his friend’s enjoyment; yet when, at last, the prospective chancellor stood at the podium, trying to mask the clumsiness of his appearance, his thinking, and his language with dynamic gestures, Kraft suddenly felt as if he had eaten too much of some heavy peasant dish and, even worse, that he would be served nothing but such heavy fare for a long time to come.
* * *
On the trip home, the Hungarian student Pánczél dreamed of rockets, of Pershing, and of cruise missiles aimed at his former homeland. Now that the timid SPD, infiltrated by naïfs from the peace movement, had been relegated to the opposition and the libertarians could push around the newly anointed Christian Democratic chancellor, it was just a matter of time until the Americans were allowed to station their recently developed Pershing II and cruise missiles in the Federal Republic. István had studied the technology of the new weapons in depth and had become convinced that a new chapter in the annals of nuclear strategy had begun and that, as a result, the prospect of world annihilation, which he found interesting at least with regard to certain game-theory considerations, was not now an inevitability but simply one of two extant possibilities because these much more precise new weapons could execute surgical strikes that would excise the tumor of communism from the healthy body of the nation, an option he envisioned as a scenario in which the Széchenyi thermal baths in Budapest, or more exactly, the outdoor pool framed by the baths’ florid neo-baroque architecture, played a central role: In István’s fantasy, the central pool was filled with the portly bodies of the socialist cadres, dipping their short peckers in the sulfurous water and patting each other on their hairy backs. Then he would launch one of those splendid rockets, armed with an atomic warhead. From Bavaria it would skim the treetops, fly over Salzburg, covering the breadth of Austria at a furious pace and crossing the Hungarian border under the radar, then it would detonate exactly in the central pool of the Széchenyi thermal baths. Neutron bomb: a clean solution. The architecture he admires remains intact but the water in the sky-blue basin boils, the Party officials who had been smirking a moment before sit screaming in the simmering brew, shreds of their skin already floating on the bubbling surface, a giant cloud of steam rises from the pool and slowly drifts away. A d
ry basin remains with the motionless red bodies of the despicable brood lying like boiled crabs on the bottom of the pool, while outside the baths, outside the radius of this targeted blast, the common people are already getting heroically back on their feet. This was the scenario he played out in his mind again and again, enriched with new details each time, that helped him endure his return through passport control and the zone and brought a rapturous smile to his lips despite the tracts of socialist desolation outside the train window.
Kraft let him dream. He himself was downright taciturn since leaving the Parliament Building. After more than five hours of debate, the motion was finally put to a vote, and Kraft, feeling exhausted, had left the visitors’ gallery to smoke a cigarette outside, while István watched every single one of the 495 members of parliament walk up to the ballot box and cast his or her vote. Shortly after 3:00 p.m., the president of the Bundestag announced the tally, then addressed Deputy Kohl and asked if he was willing to accept his election to the presidency. Mister President, I accept the election, Kohl replied, stretching to his full height, whereas Schmidt sat immobile as a statue among the members of his group before finally rising to congratulate his opponent. But it wasn’t this gesture that impressed Kraft the most, rather it was what he noticed in a brief sidelong glance at Kohl’s family. Hannelore Kohl had not applauded, she had not smiled, she had merely stared impassively at the massive back of her husband, who was now chancellor of the Federal Republic. Their sons, young men in blue suits, sat motionless beside her. One bit his lips, the other shook his head slightly in disbelief, and for a brief moment twisted his mouth beneath the down of his nascent mustache into a bitter, ironic smile.
Kraft would very much have liked to have known what knowledge provoked this reaction in the young man. Gazing out into the autumn landscape of Saxony-Anhalt, he recalled the young man’s face and imagined him saying to himself, That’s all we needed, and to the members of parliament, You’ll soon see what you’ve gotten yourselves into. Kraft worried that at the very moment of their patriarch’s greatest triumph, the entire Kohl family had withheld their confidence that his character was suitable for the office he had just attained.
* * *
Kraft’s worries soon proved to be not entirely unfounded. The promised intellectual and moral turn never came. By and large Kohl’s government followed Helmut Schmidt’s program, albeit without his elegance. The count’s plan, which had so enthralled our two young freethinkers, disappeared into a drawer and was only dug up again twenty years later by, ironically enough, a social-democratic government. The economic liberals remained junior partners just as they had been in the old coalition. Neither Reaganomics nor Thatcherism found their way into the Federal Republic. The NATO Double-Track Decision was, indeed, implemented, and István got his missiles, but their deployment expanded the peace movement’s ranks to unexpected numbers and led to the rise of a new party that struck Kraft and István as suspicious and frivolous. In the end, it wasn’t Kohl’s character that proved to be the real problem; it was, rather, his inadequate intellect, which tormented them deeply and led them to agree on the view of his election as an operational glitch in democracy that would soon be corrected: a misapprehension, as the next sixteen years would show.
* * *
This much, however, is certain: a turn was effected on the Grunewaldstraße sofa. The Knight Rider videocassettes remained with Gustl Knüttel’s fiancée, the ironing board and the shoe-shine box experienced a period of intense activity, and the two friends dove into their studies with élan and enthusiasm.
The wounds Ruth had inflicted on Kraft healed and in the spring he had recovered sufficiently to blather with amorous intent—seated at a cafeteria table in a Basel pharmaceutical company that had put its auditorium at the disposal of a seminar financed by the Mont Pèlerin Society for the younger generations of Europe’s economic liberals, to which he and István had been invited—at a doctoral student in biology from Lörrach doing research on the genetics of yeast in the pharmaceutical company’s laboratory; even though, as a wistful Kraft had to admit, her hips were hardly of Lambsdorffian dimensions.
chapter seven
I’m gonna have to science the shit out of this!
—MARK WATNEY
Kraft stands up, brushes the grass from the seat of his pants, and slinks back to the tower with a heavy heart. He tacks across the lobby and sneaks into the reading room behind the back of a security guard in a red jacket. He can already hear the vacuum cleaner in the distance and, feeling as if it’s sucking the last bit of life force from his body, he can’t keep from his mind the image of Heike unwrapping a chicken breast from the butcher paper and, because of her fear of germs—one of the few things they still share—using an appliance purchased for just this purpose to suck all the air out of the storage bag so that the plastic seals itself tightly around the meat. Kraft feels his own chest tighten.
He quickly packs up his things, escapes the coolness of the reading room, and goes outdoors, where everything is as usual. Latinos weed the flower beds on their knees, professors hurry to lectures and seminars in black Reebok classics, sand-colored chinos, and plaid button-down shirts, and all around him is a throng of calves, thick and thin, hairy and silky smooth, muscular and anorexic, male and female legs, all of them in shorts and most of them pedaling; a repugnant parade of legs, Kraft finds, all the more so as most of them, to make matters even worse, display their bare feet in flip-flops, although only very few feet are worthy of being shown. With regard to feet, Kraft is strict and fastidious. In fact, as far as he’s concerned, male or female, they all belong clad in solid and elegant and certainly well-kept shoes, all of them hidden from sight unless it’s a question of baby feet, then he’s willing to make an exception, or if one happens to be engaged in an interaction of a sexual nature with the feet’s owner, then in such cases, yes, in such cases Kraft is oddly enough able, albeit only in those rare moments when he can really let himself go, to thrill at the sight of feet and lick and suck on them with quiet passion and considerable stamina; in better days, he even used to nibble occasionally on Heike’s bunions with a mixture of tenderness and unbridled desire. But at the moment, he would rather not think of his girls’ baby feet or Heike’s bunions, so he pictures one of the students exuberantly cycling past slipping off the pedals because of his completely inappropriate footwear and getting his toes caught in the glittering spokes. With that, Kraft loses control of his imagination and conjures up a complete bloodbath, lets the student with half-severed toes crash for good measure, cracking his gleaming white teeth, which leads to a massive pileup of dozens of bicycles colliding and young bodies hurtling onto the hot pavement with shrieks of pain, gashing open their flawless knees, scraping their taut thighs, and, here they have only themselves to blame, twisting their ankles terribly in their idiotic flip-flops, so that Kraft believes he can even hear the pop of snapping ligaments.
It is hardly surprising then, that a few minutes later he stands feeling queasy and indecisive in front of the lunch buffet in the Arbuckle Dining Pavilion, leaves the grilled turkey legs and burritos untouched, hesitates over the sushi as well, and finally serves himself a small helping from the salad bar. Carrying a few leaves of iceberg lettuce crowned with four pale strips of chicken breast and a dollop of Thousand Island dressing along with a can of Diet Coke, he looks for a free table in the Knight Management Center courtyard, which, as Ivan has explained to him, was generously endowed with several hundred million dollars by Nike co-founder and Stanford business school graduate Phil Knight, and because there are no free tables, he asks two young men if he can join them. They have no objection and continue their conversation without paying him any attention. While he pokes desultorily at his salad, pushes the chicken breast to the edge of his plate, and swipes at the screen of his new gadget, he can’t help but overhear the loud conversation at his table and soon he is listening closely, only pretending to look at his phone.
It’s been a good year,
one of them says, a great year, fantastic. He has a square jaw, as big as a night-table drawer, out of which gleam an extravagant number of teeth. I’m doing well, I’m doing well, he repeats again and again. And his tablemate, a curly-haired young man in a light blue dress shirt replies: Good for you, bro, good for you, you deserve it. Kraft has the impression that he is sincere and genuinely pleased for his friend. The square jaw of the man in the pink polo shirt glows with a smile that rivals the California sun, but then his smooth-shaven face suddenly darkens. He’s still bothered by the fact that he’s not able to measure his success precisely. Here, too, his friend seems completely in sync and dons an expression of profound dissatisfaction. It is, indeed, an immensely frustrating problem that keeps him up at night, too. From the rest of the conversation, Kraft gathers that this difficult problem will one day solve itself when they enter the phase of earning money because then key parameters will be at hand and direct comparisons easily made. But in the current phase, it’s agonizing that there are no measures available to calibrate your own success. It might be worth developing an app for that, Curly Hair muses, folding his pizza slice in two, it’s worth considering. For a moment, Kraft has trouble following the conversation. There’s talk of algorithms to be developed, of implementation, resiliencies, and parameters, of input and output, of scales and the reduction of complexity, but Kraft is pretty sure they’re still talking about a way to precisely measure Square Jaw’s success. He finds this bewildering. Naturally, when he was their age, he also thought a lot about his success and how it compared to this or that person’s, but it soon became clear to him that it was a question that couldn’t be answered because success never came without its mirror image. There is always the success others attribute to you and the success you attribute to yourself and the more you try to bring them into alignment, the more obvious it becomes that you have no idea how successful other people think you are. This is something you will never know because you have to factor in lies, malice, and envy, and that’s precisely why the only thing you can do is rely on your own feelings, and these swing wildly, as Kraft has understood since puberty, between self-loathing and delusions of grandeur. To think these two halfwits actually believe they could tackle this fundamental aporia with an app. Deluded, Kraft thinks, quantitatively deluded.
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