Kraft

by Jonas Lüscher

  And so he wasn’t surprised then that the question of freedom also turned out to be complicated. Kraft and Pánczél argued for freedom with the combined forces of their intellects and yet were met only with incomprehension by their fellow students, the result, quite simply, of the fact that they all felt quite free already, whereas Kraft and István, in their fury, appeared anything but free. Besides, and this was completely obvious, they were in a tough spot for their crusade—in West Berlin … at the Free University … in the early 1980s. They were like refrigerator salesmen in Greenland.

  Why then, since Kraft understood all this—unlike István, who didn’t seem to appreciate the context—why then didn’t he just relax and enjoy the freedom he had? Because that was no longer possible. He was a seer, he had perceived the nature of things in their irreducible complexity, but his insight was not of the kind that would have allowed him to don the priestly robe of purity and unambiguity that promises inward peace. Quite the contrary, he had fully grasped that there is nothing outside of history, that nothing and above all no one possesses an immutable nature. He knew that nothing is ever simple, not ever. He was lost for all eternity.

  He could not simply deny this. That would mean intentionally abandoning his knowledge, and this was an act he was utterly incapable of committing; it would merely have led him into a new kind of misery because, in the circumstances, knowledge was all that was left to him. He had known for a long time that there was no escape for him, but he had developed a tactic—as long as you talked about things, you still had a chance. As long as you were busy describing something, as long as you were still developing your ideas, as long as you were offering arguments pro and contra, as long as you were drawing conclusions and weren’t bothered with the fact that on closer examination your premises turned out to be less than clear, then things were still undecided and had not yet come to their inevitable, always inexplicable and unbearably contradictory and vague end. This is why Kraft talked and argued incessantly, why he always disagreed and tried to formulate a more precise description than what had come before; this is why the young Kraft—and, we have to admit, sometimes the older Kraft too—was a blatherer. As long as you were talking, things remained simple—why did no one seem to understand this except for him?

  It was this exceptionalism that widened the distance that had set in between Kraft and Pánczél in the months after the chancellor’s ouster in Bonn and was reinforced by their disappointment at the fizzling of the so-called turn. Their great, unconditional love was over, the love that had driven Schlüti, the third wheel, crazy at first and then finally out of the Grunewaldstraße flat. As before, they still stood side by side in their fight for liberty and against big government, in support of nuclear deterrence, low taxes, personal responsibility, investment incentives, and privatization—but they began dividing up their tasks.

  István focused on questions of defense policy and strategic studies, especially of the nuclear variety, in other words, on that branch of science he referred to, with a dramatic roll of his one good eye, as the Strangelovian Sciences, a little ironic joke that he failed to notice nearly upset the balance of terror among his fellow students, even though, by then, they should have been used to his rhetoric.

  István thus became representative of that strange species who called themselves “defense intellectuals” to differentiate themselves from the dim-witted generals whose twitching index fingers were forever hovering over the red button. In doing so, István subordinated his thought completely to the Cold War rationality, which differed in several essential ways from all the other rationalities to which humanity had hitherto committed itself, first and foremost, namely, in the fact that it was seen as perfectly reasonable to always take into account the complete annihilation of humanity, the ultimum malum, so to speak, which had the terrifying effect of making talk of the ultima ratio seem entirely mundane. As a result, the experts, among whom István now counted himself, constantly had to point out that there was a fundamental, even transcendental difference between the ultima ratio regum, the final resort of kings, which phrase Cardinal Richelieu had engraved on the barrels of cannons during the Thirty Years’ War, and the discretionary power of a handful of heads of state and party leaders over their nuclear arsenal. But because this ultimate evil that could be visited on an entire species through the decision of one single man now existed and had been brought into existence with the assistance of the natural sciences, these defense intellectuals were convinced that it was possible to control it using methods developed by those same natural sciences, and therefore took pains to keep their strategic thought strictly formal and independent of any particular individual or context, that is, to rely on algorithms that functioned as a set of inflexible rules and would lead to a necessary solution. By separating out all cultural and historical connotations together with their peculiarities, the most optimistic of the defense intellectuals hoped the rules could be applied mechanically and all decisions be left to computers.

  Which is why István was convinced that this rationality would prevail over simple reason and thus serve as a guarantee for peace. With the conviction of a prophet, he harangued his fellow students, especially the female ones, and, deploying his well-stocked and detailed knowledge, he presented thoughts based on game theory, carried on about first- and second-strike capabilities, the Nash equilibrium, and the nuclear triad; he weighed megatons against megadeaths, and spoke easily of unspeakable things, until the opposition had no alternative but to shout Petting statt Pershing! * an argument István countered by saying he didn’t see what was wrong with Petting AND Pershing, besides the fact that, in bed, he was a regular long-range missile and always ready to prove this. Kraft, who had witnessed many of these encounters, feared for István’s other eye each and every time.

  Kraft devoted himself entirely to discussions of supply-side economic policies and told everyone willing to listen—and even those who weren’t—how best to handle the sharp-edged implements of investment incentives: deregulation, privatization, and tax reduction. A drastic Anglo-Saxon remedy straight out of Margaret Thatcher’s handbag, a remedy that, naturally, nations could only afford if they kept their public-spending ratio to a minimum and took a scythe to welfare assistance. Laissez-faire, laissez-faire…, Kraft liked to repeat in a worldly tone, feeling like a rebel. Deep down he was an anarchist, a punk, he would say to himself, but with a higher level of hygiene, better taste, and good manners … All bullshit, as he knew perfectly well; it wasn’t that simple, nothing was, and besides which, his reputation as a man with a heart of stone beating under his perfectly pressed shirt, a consequence of his political opinions, bothered him. In the meantime, he no longer found it particularly appealing to be considered the most promising of all the promising students on account of his eccentricity, because he had come to realize that it only made him attractive to a very small group of women, who were much too eccentric for his own basic tastes, which is why, since Ruth Lambsdorff’s rejection, he had developed a vain craving for admiration that now prompted him at every opportunity—citing Reagan’s young budget director as his authority—to extol trickle-down theory, which is essentially a synonym for supply-side economics and demonstrates that when prosperity is poured over the top economic performers with a watering can, it will trickle down to the less prosperous and ultimately improve everyone’s lot, simultaneously demonstrating that reproaching economic liberalism as coldhearted is completely unfair, because it’s clear that it is, in truth, a profoundly social project. This splendid mechanism has been known since the days of Adam Smith, and Kraft just doesn’t get why so many people refuse to understand it despite the simple beauty of this physics-based metaphor, vividly reinforced by daily experience when water from the showerhead pours down on their heads, flows down their bodies, and pools around their toes. Maybe Kraft would have better understood his interlocutors’ apparent obtuseness if he had deigned to read the works of J. K. Galbraith, the leftist economic liberal and proponent of
demand-side economics who had pointed out that, when he was young, trickle-down theory was known as the “horseshit theory”: “If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.” But Kraft didn’t read that sort of book, which is why he sang the praises of the prosperity that would soon fall on everyone like a warm tropical rain from the seventh heaven of the free market, and why he was soon known throughout the Free University as the rainmaker, which, in turn, understandably, ran against the grain of his craving for admiration; it wasn’t simple … nothing was … no, not simple at all.

  chapter eight

  An analysis of other ergosterol mother liquors for the preparation of a new base material was in progress when we were forced to interrupt our work in the state just described following the complete destruction of all material in an air raid.

  —HILDEGARD HAMM-BRÜCHER

  Nor was anything simple with Johanna, the doctoral student in biology whom Kraft had approached in the cafeteria of a Basel pharmaceutical company with the words and love never ends, grinning conspiratorially at her over his plate on which grilled slices of banana and canned pineapple chunks swam with strips of turkey breast in a bright yellow sauce surrounded by a ring of rice. Not surprisingly, this provoked no small level of irritation in the young woman, which feeling required a considerable amount of energy and a nearly endless flood of words from Kraft to defray, since she didn’t know this romantic vow was the epigraph of Ödön von Horváth’s Oktoberfest play Kasimir and Karoline, and Kraft was equally clueless that the dish the cafeteria cook had recommended to him as Rice Kasimir with the rasping K of the region was actually called Rice Casimir and therefore—but certainly for other reasons as well—he had a lot of explaining to do, and their first conversation was, accordingly, very confused.

  No, nothing was simple with her either. And not only because their first exchange was a difficult one. Kraft was lucky in that Johanna never stayed irritated for long, she didn’t have the time, and we can assume that by the end of their first meeting she had already forgotten its strange beginning even though this initial encounter only lasted as long as it took to shovel the rice dish into her skinny body with the help of a spoon she held in her fist as if she had only just learned how to eat with silverware the day before. She was sorry, she told Kraft, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, she had to get back to her yeasts, but he could wait for her outside laboratory building B at quarter past nine.

  Kraft had no idea what to expect when they met at the arranged time and place and so imagined a whole range of possibilities and, having arrived at laboratory building B fifteen minutes early, he had time enough to wonder which part of their brief lunchtime conversation could possibly have induced Johanna to want to see him again; a mystery he would never even come close to solving.

  At quarter past nine on the dot, Johanna appeared on the stairs in a white lab coat that hung loosely from her narrow shoulders. This outfit puzzled Kraft because it didn’t fit any of the scenarios he had imagined, but Johanna had no intention of going anywhere with him. She just wanted to smoke a few cigarettes with Kraft right there, outside the door, before going back to her strains of yeast. And that’s exactly what happened. Kraft didn’t even try to persuade her to hang her coat up and leave her sac fungi in their petri dishes to their own devices for a few hours—in other words, to their tireless asexual reproduction and the transformation of sugar into alcohol, so that the two of them could pursue similar ends, that is, to turning alcohol into sugar and giddiness before devoting themselves to sexual reproduction. But no, they did what Johanna had intended, the first instance of a pattern of behavior that would define their relationship.

  Kraft smoked two cigarettes as Johanna smoked three, each facing the other and saying almost nothing since she had the habit of smoking like a Calabrian street paver with the cigarette wedged in the left corner of her mouth, which allowed her to rub her always cold hands together but at the same time considerably hampered any conversation. Kraft was briefly tempted to remark on the meteorological phenomenon causing the cold snap they were suffering and its designation as a Schafskälte or “sheep’s cold snap,” about which he had just read a clever commentary in Die Zeit, but he had the feeling Johanna wasn’t interested in commentary, so instead he stared silently at the growing worm of ash on the end of her cigarette, which gradually bent toward the ground and eventually fell right onto her canvas shoes, completely unnoticed by Johanna and without dirtying her lab coat, which in turn drew his attention once again to her body’s apparently deficient motherliness. For a painful moment he thought of Ruth and how, even though he had never seen her smoke, she would have brushed cigarette ash from her opulent bosom with an energetic gesture. Johanna stamped out her last cigarette, took three steps toward Kraft, and, while he was struck by the faint smell of freshly opened champagne coming from her short hair, he felt her cold hands on his neck, pulling downward as she rose onto her tiptoes.

  But it wasn’t the memory of this kiss, which left him somewhat confused and with a persistent erection, that ultimately prompted him to undertake the long train ride from Berlin back to Basel two weeks later, taking Johanna up on the invitation she had extended after licking her lips and before disappearing into laboratory building B. He should come back the weekend after next, she had said over her shoulder, when she’d have concluded a series of experiments and would have more time.

  Over the following days, Kraft spent many hours on the Grunewaldstraße sofa, mulling over her offer. What made him hesitate wasn’t the lack of anything maternal about Johanna; she was no Ruth Lambsdorff, that was true, but the alluring contrast between her decisive manner and her delicate body, her short-cropped hair, and her fine, almost boyish features at least caught his interest. István, whose advice he had sought, concluded, once Kraft had assured him that she was definitely not a communist, but seemed, instead, to have no interest at all in politics, that there was nothing to think about: her kiss pointed to only one conclusion, that a weekend with her promised to be a satisfying experience well worth the cost of the train ticket. But for a long time, Kraft was still not sure he should make the trip because he couldn’t imagine what she wanted from him or what she saw in him. And for Kraft, that was a remarkable question. A completely new question, an unheard-of question. Not once had he asked himself—unlike we, ourselves—what Ruth had wanted from him or saw in him, preoccupied as he had been with what he wanted.

  It would be easy to assume that Kraft had learned something from the debacle with Ruth and evidently become a better person, or at least a better man, but here too things just weren’t that simple, and to do justice to Kraft—at least the Kraft of those days—we have to admit that this simply wasn’t so—not at all—even if this means rejecting an edifying narrative, that of the young man who has learned a lesson in humility and who tries from then on to see beyond the horizon of his own sensitivities, even if this, in turn, puts Kraft in a far from flattering light. We must, therefore, also take into account the possibility that his efforts to find out what Johanna wanted from him had little to do with finding out anything about Johanna, and much more with finding out something about himself; a very obvious possibility if we consider that at the time Kraft was prepared to embrace contingency with an entirely new fervor and to banish his craving for security and clarity to the deepest recesses of his unconscious, which, of course, caused it to surface all the more vehemently and manifestly in his consciousness, only to be denied and repressed anew in a self-reinforcing feedback loop. It was thus a profoundly unsettled, even downright unhinged Kraft, a Kraft on a quest, who set out early for the long journey to Basel two Saturdays later and embarked on the return journey even more unsettled and unhinged at noon on the Sunday.

  He had not found an answer, but István’s prognosis at least proved correct; the kiss was a promise Johanna kept without hesitation and in roughly the same way as she ate: voraciously, avidly, insatiably. She grabbed the spoon in her fist,
so to speak, took stains on fabrics in stride, and, most gratifyingly, didn’t give a damn about good manners at table or in bed. Nonetheless—and this is a clear sign of how thoroughly unhinged Kraft was—by the time he arrived at Bahnhof Zoo on Sunday night, Kraft wasn’t sure if it had really been worth the cost of the train ticket since he was no closer to the answer he was so desperately seeking.

  At first his impending exams kept him from brooding. On Monday morning he found a seat in the university’s reading room and started studying. In the afternoons, around three, he’d be overcome with hunger and against the rules would secretly take bites from yeast rolls he’d smuggled into the library. Pretending he was looking for something under the table, he would stick his nose deep into the bag from the bakery and the scent would set off echoes of his night with Johanna, which would in turn spark a sudden desire for maternal love and an equally sudden libidinous desire that led him to search the library’s shelves and leaf through the clips in the Munzinger Archive with clammy fingers, looking for Hildegard Hamm-Brücher’s biography. In his despair and in violation of his principles, Kraft was immediately inclined to interpret as an omen the fact that this elegant woman who had so impressed him the previous autumn with her use of the term opprobrium had written her thesis on the mother liquors of yeast in the technical extraction of ergosterol. The yeast researcher Johanna was the one for him, he decided, and he was able to think himself so thoroughly into this love that he was replete with it when, two weeks later, he stood outside laboratory building B again, waiting for Johanna and then, his heart racing, was able to confess this love to her. Johanna put her cold hands soothingly on his burning ears and said, but of course, Richard, we love each other, and for her that was enough said on the topic for years to come.