Kraft

by Jonas Lüscher

  We can summarize things as follows: Daniel did not need a father, which Kraft willingly conceded—and he paid.

  For a while he had tried to share at least in the most important events in his eldest son’s life. He traveled to Berlin and sat next to Ruth in the front row at Danny’s composition diploma recital at the Berlin Conservatory, for the premiere of a string quartet he had composed. Because Kraft arrived late, he sat on the last bench of the Lutheran church when his son married an evangelic pastor from Cottbus, and he even attended the baptism of his first grandchild in a run-down farmhouse in Brandenburg, where Danny had turned a shed into a small recording studio in which he composed advertisement jingles for a small fee and composed on the side his great concert cycle on the relationship between humans and animals, while his wife organized the Christian resistance out of the parish hall against the neo-Nazi settlers who were moving into the village in large family groups, taking up organic farming on their cheaply bought land, celebrating heathen fire rituals, and declaring the village a “nationally liberated zone.” This environment depressed Kraft so deeply that he didn’t show up for his second grandchild’s baptism, but instead deposited an obolus in an account in the baby’s name with the Oder-Spree Savings Bank, something he has done every two years each time yet another birth announcement decorated with a Taizé cross arrived in his mailbox.

  Still, no one has to go hungry at the Krafts’, not at all. But Kraft himself has to concur with Heike’s assessment: a divorce with all the costs entailed in establishing a second household isn’t feasible in their current situation, certainly not without a reduction in their cost of living, and she is not remotely prepared to agree to a change in lifestyle. So Heike is right: Erkner’s million is the only solution. Kraft knows this, but he is revolted to find that freedom comes with a price.

  * * *

  Kraft gets a ham sandwich and a can of Diet Coke in the Green Library café and runs into Bertrand Ducavalier and his perpetual good humor. Ducavalier beams at the sight of Kraft and insists on joining him on his bench. They haven’t seen each other since Bertrand turned his back prematurely on Paris and most particularly on the Rue d’Ulm a few years earlier and withdrew to his family’s vineyard in Burgundy, where he watches his sister practice viticulture and leads the life of an independent scholar.

  Ivan told Kraft that it had taken all his powers of persuasion to lure Ducavalier to Erkner’s conference in California, but of course Kraft knows how much Bertrand enriches every conference he attends. Kraft can only agree, after all, he not only values Bertrand’s lectures and conversational contributions, always a breath of fresh air in the bleakest conferences, but also his qualities as a dining companion. Bertrand has always been able to find the one good restaurant in even the strangest cities, and when there isn’t a single good restaurant, then the least bad, and you can be sure that even there he will put together a wonderful evening, because his savoir vivre doesn’t have the slightest trace of pomposity. He doesn’t need a rare wine—although he’s naturally able to find the best (not necessarily the most expensive) bottle in the longest of wine lists—and if there’s only a house wine, then a few carafes of it will do. There’s no need for extravagant dishes either, yet he is nonetheless able to turn any evening into a banquet and a feast. Kraft knows why that is: Ducavalier’s savoir vivre is not inborn—Kraft doesn’t believe in that kind of thing—but is something that was inculcated in him from day one, he was immersed in it his entire childhood and adolescence; it became second nature, but because he’s an intelligent and thoughtful man, he also knows that it is a privilege he has done nothing to earn, it was endowed on him at birth, and that is precisely why he has such a relaxed approach to it. It’s also why Kraft can deeply envy his ease and his savoir vivre and admire it at the same time, something he’s otherwise only able to do with dead men or Margaret Thatcher. He admires Bertrand’s charm, his somewhat threadbare elegance, which always seems fortuitous. His white shirts made from fabric both sturdy and soft that look like he must have inherited them from his father. His always rather worn shoes, rarely freshly polished, still look more elegant than Kraft’s carefully waxed Budapesters. What he admires most about Bertrand, however, is that for all his ease and suavity in matters of lifestyle, he still remains an inveterate leftist and outspoken polemicist.

  Kraft recalls that evening in Sarajevo, when several participants of a conference had happily followed Bertrand into a cellar restaurant; after a lengthy meal, he had pulled a cigarette from his shirt pocket and explained why he had decided to leave the École Normale Supérieure on the Rue d’Ulm. He had finally understood that he, a scion of a family as old as it was rich, who had of course been educated in the very best schools and who had resolutely carried the banner of the working class on his predetermined march through the institutions, was part of France’s problem and could not, as he had long been convinced, also be part of the solution, and he was therefore going to retire to his family’s vineyard at the end of the semester. The French left was guilty of two misdeeds—no, it would be more accurate to call them sins. Firstly, they’ve never seriously attempted to reform France’s elitist and neo-feudal educational system—a system of which he himself was, as a graduate of two of the Grandes Écoles, a beneficiary; and as a professor at the Rue d’Ulm he bore some responsibility by training students, year after year, to be a part of this same elitist circus. But now that Hollande, the saddest of those clowns, had stepped into the ring as president, Ducavalier could not and would not take part any longer. It was certainly easy to dismiss Bertrand as an aging cynic resting on his inherited wealth and watching, wineglass in hand, as things went to hell. But Ducavalier saw it as an exercise in humility: admit to being part of the problem, and then, that done, just keep your mouth shut.

  In the second place, Ducavalier continued his exposition in Sarajevo as he crushed out the cigarette held in his elegant fingers with yellow fingernails, the left had shamelessly thrown itself into the arms of neo-liberalism and betrayed the working class by declaring the concept of the class struggle obsolete, an attempt to deny the existence of those they were supposed to be protecting, since there are still more than enough people in our societies for whom belonging to the working class is simply a reality—it’s no wonder, he added, that those parties that are at least willing to admit that the struggle isn’t over are experiencing a boom right now, even if they systematically and deliberately identify the wrong adversary. The first signs of this betrayal were already evident in the ’80s under Mitterrand, then in the ’90s in Clinton’s America, followed by Tony Blair, that midget, and his despicable German sidekick, Schröder.

  Here Kraft had to contradict him, didn’t Schröder and his reforms put German industry back on solid footing and isn’t Germany in such a strong position today because of him? Oh, Schröder … Ducavalier exclaimed, don’t start in with the Agenda 2010. Treason, it was treason, and just look at the state of social democracy in Germany today! They had all drunk a great deal, their discussion progressed in broad strokes, the details becoming increasingly scarce in the alcohol-induced haze. I’ll tell you how things were with Schröder, Bertrand grumbled, a fresh cigarette between his lips: the moment he became chancellor, he realized there were others who had even more power, the people in the upper echelons of Deutsche Bank, the chief executives at Siemens, Porsche, and Thyssen-Krupp, and above all, they had more money. Poor Gerhard couldn’t stand it, he suddenly felt very small, so he cozied up to them, so that they’d at least include him in their arrogant jockeying to show who’s got the biggest balls. No, I’m telling you, Bertrand announced confidently, for an entire generation of Germans, Schröder is the political disappointment of their lives. Imagine, you grow up in Germany and all you know is Kohl—sixteen years of Kohl. But don’t try to tell me, Kraft, my friend, that you wouldn’t have suffered. Sixteen years of shame and anguish and then comes Schröder and it’s as if someone finally opened a window and let in some fresh air. Then he betrayed
them, all of them … the Genosse der Bosse, the bosses’ comrade, a nickname that, thanks to Ducavalier’s German, nurtured by his reading of Husserl, and his French accent, expressed the deepest disgust. The greatest disappointment of their political lives, for an entire generation. I don’t understand, he exclaimed, why no one assassinated him … they’re not angry enough, these young people … someone should have cut his throat, and Ducavalier flailed a butter knife through the cigarette smoke to illustrate his point.

  He wasn’t entirely wrong, Kraft felt, because Schröder was a difficult figure for him too. Of course, it had been disconcerting that it was a social democrat, of all people, who had, so to speak, pulled the revered count’s plan from the desk drawer to which Kohl had relegated it after wholeheartedly trumpeting an intellectual and moral turn, but Kraft could ultimately accept this. What weighed more heavily on him was that the kind of thinking with which he and his sidekick István were once able to send their fellow students into a rage had, in fact, as Bertrand claimed, shifted over the years to become centrist and then even farther to the left. Kraft had lost his distinguishing characteristic. His opinions were no longer remarkable among his fellow social scientists. To be sure, there still weren’t many who openly expressed their views as economic liberals, but when Kraft did so, it was as if he were publicly admitting to consuming pornography—it was, in other words, a completely superfluous admission: no one was ashamed of consuming pornography any longer, but, really, there was no need to talk about it.

  The precipitous fall of the center-right, economic-liberal Free Democratic Party was another source of anguish for Kraft—seeing the party leadership devolving upon one ridiculous figure after another until, at some point, the helm was taken by two lads who reminded Kraft uncomfortably of István and himself in younger years and steered the once proud party into irrelevance. Even Dr. Hamm-Brücher had had enough after forty-five years and quit. She resigned her membership on the very day the twins were born and Kraft felt strangely affected.

  No, for some time now there been no joy for Kraft in waving the banner of freedom or lending his voice to the song of privatization through deregulation or to the chorus of praise for the rainmakers …

  * * *

  And how are you planning on defending optimism? Kraft asks Bertrand. I’m not, Ducavalier says with a laugh, and taps a cigarette from the pack. He will do the opposite. He has come as a prophet of doom. Someone had to play the role, and he’s the perfect man for the job. For most of the people delivering papers here, a million dollars is simply too large a sum of money—you can’t blame them for going about the thing pragmatically. He, however, can afford to play the dissident and forgo the million.

  That will be my sacrifice, and as you can see, my dear Richard, it will hardly be a real one. That is the bane of my existence: I never can manage to make a legitimate sacrifice.

  What he plans to do, Ducavalier tells Kraft, is to take on the task of explaining why almost everything that is, is bad. A rather easy task, he adds, and gives a brief overview of the coming apocalypse: the impending collapse of the European Union; the return of nationalism; the new acceptability of open racism and bigotry; the democratically elected despots who turn their countries into dictatorships with their peoples’ consent—a process that makes one doubt the usefulness of democracy itself; the rising tide of anti-intellectualism, for which the intellectuals themselves are responsible, and the accompanying legitimation of ignorance; the openly expressed longing for strongmen; the moral bankruptcy of the economic elite who behave like unrepentant secondhand-car dealers; the threat of a new economic crisis against which the central banks will be left with no possible recourse, since they can’t devalue money any more than they already have, as a consequence of which they’ve already shot the last arrow in their quiver; a free trade policy combined with a protectionist system of subsidies that drives millions of poor people from the south to the north; the stagnation of economic growth despite the digital revolution; the lack of alternatives to capitalism even though capitalism leads inevitably to an ever greater disparity in wealth that will in turn cut the system’s legs out from under it in the near future; the millions of surplus young men in China and India who are badly educated, sexually frustrated, and without hope of a future, a problem that will be most elegantly solved with a war of aggression … And, although he is of course aware that it is an unacceptable if terribly effective simplification, he will give his explanation theoretical and narrative weight by using a cyclical philosophy of history that will allow him to evoke in his conclusion a return of the conditions that existed during the Weimar Republic, thus conjuring a third world war that will hover implacably over the assembly. Et voilà, Bertrand says … all that is, is bad.

  Kraft pulls a lettuce leaf from his ham sandwich. You forgot climate change, he says to Ducavalier.

  Eighteen minutes, my dear Kraft, you’ve got to set some limits. Eighteen minutes is not enough to describe the world’s depravity in full.

  * * *

  Kraft uses the hours remaining before the conference to tinker with his PowerPoint presentation. Pragmatically, but cheerlessly, he inserts one bullet point after another: God, who created the best possible world, the necessity of evil, the weaknesses of the individual that guarantee the cohesion of the Great Chain of Being, the elegance of the whole system—writing this, he thinks of Herb, whom he had denigrated as an apostle of the system and whose cocoa he drank so gratefully. Kraft is but a shadow of himself at this point, he’s had to eat a lot of crow on this trip. Now he can see it all through to the end and thus definitively turn his back on himself. And so he launches into a point-by-point misuse of Vogl’s oikodicy, then begins to praise technology until his systematizing leads him to the technological Singularity. And suddenly he understands why Erkner feels such longing for that moment and it now seems perfectly logical to Kraft that artificial intelligence should become man’s equal and then surpass him, which will entail a rapid acceleration of technological development in a direction no one is now in a position to depict and a merging of man and machine, thanks to which man will be able leave behind his biologically limited existence and exist in timeless substrate.

  All narrow-minded objections critical of modernity shrivel to the status of dejected nitpicking in the face of this vision’s redemptive dimensions. To be sure, at the moment AI can’t even tell the difference between a picture of Nicki Minaj’s behind and the real thing, but isn’t that the wrong way to look at it?… a typical European objection … indulging in pessimistic pettiness instead of recognizing all that is already possible, how quickly progress is being made, how the recently unthinkable already appears mundane, and if you add in exponential development, don’t we have legitimate grounds to extrapolate such fantastic expectations?

  No, Kraft doesn’t want to resist any longer, the Singularity is unavoidable and now that he’s accepted this, he also understands that, faced with the dimensions of the coming change, there’s no point in regretting that everything he knows, his entire world—material and nonmaterial—will go the way of film and vinyl records and at best survive merely as the eccentric hobby of men spoiled by affluence. And his own fears are just as insignificant, because they are centered on irrelevant categories. Machines that are superior to man in intelligence, apocalypticists warn us, will treat us as slaves or a source of food, at best as pets … That’s nonsense. As if concepts from the old order would play any role whatsoever in that new world.

  Our man Kraft has the feeling that seeing things from this perspective relieves him of a heavy burden. He’s overcome by a feeling of purity he knows only from that rare and precious daydream in which the ultimate truth appears to him as a piece of silver, gleaming like a mirror and as hard as diamond. But now he knows that he won’t have to lay that truth bare by scraping away with argument after argument, with merciless reflection, all the rotting organic dross and excrement that cling to it. No, this silver thing waits at the end of history, because
history—it is now entirely clear to him—will come to an end and a new history will begin, a history in which humans can watch, from the comfort of the passenger seat of evolution, where the journey leads. Whether he is a fox, hedgehog, or porcupine, man will be able to be whatever he wants and he will want to be something that we, at present, cannot even imagine.

  * * *

  For a while, Kraft searches for a fitting image with which he can conclude his presentation. He clicks through pictures of sunrises and lights at the end of tunnels, gets lost in NASA’s photo archive amid images of launching rockets and the nebulae in distant galaxies, and finally decides on a photograph of the Blue Grotto of Capri, in the center of which a smooth, white expanse of light dispels the darkness.

  He skips the early-evening reception in the courtyard of the Hoover Institution where Erkner welcomes the conference participants.

  chapter fifteen

  Heile, heile Gänsje

  Es is bald widder gut,

  Es Kätzje hat e Schwänzje

  Es is bald widder gut,

  Heile heile Mausespeck

  In hunnerd Jahr is alles weg.

  Don’t cry my little gosling

  All will be well again,

  The cat has got its tail

  All will be well again,