Not far from the cafe was a U-Bahn exit that I could easily see into if I tilted back slightly in my chair, leant my shoulder against the window and looked down the street to the left. It was a pose Feuerbach referred to as ‘snoozing’; when he came in he’d greet me by rapping his knuckles much too hard on the plastic table, and I’d pretend to be startled. Usually I’d already seen him through the window; he stood out, the way his long strides put him at the forefront of a wave of humanity pouring from the gloom of the U-Bahn, or perhaps it was also his disbelieving face that struck me, in some uncalled-for fashion singling him out from the lethargic look of the crowd.
Floods of people mounted the stairs from the tunnel at several-minute intervals whenever a train arrived below. I seemed to hear the trains’ distant rumble even up in the cafe, detecting it in the faint jitter of the coffee cup on the table, in the barely perceptible tremor of the windowpane beside me — and then the people came, always twice as many from the city centre as from the zoo in the suburbs. . each afternoon the tunnel disgorged mindboggling throngs which dispersed as expected on the broad pavement.
What if they suddenly massed together, ceased to disband, took over the street? There were certainly enough of them, in their multitudes they could easily halt the capital’s self-centred rotations. . what if they suddenly grasped what they revolved around — life — in its progressive debasement, and chose to ignore it!
And ceased to disperse? — I lived in a world of the imagination. . time and again my reality turned fantastic, anomalous, and from one moment to the next the only tranquillity left me consisted in a barely tenable simulation. No wonder; we lived under constant pressure to take into account behaviour which might not even exist. We lived in a dichotomy: we were perpetually conducting intelligence, investigations to clarify how far reality had already approximated our imaginings. . but we couldn’t let ourselves believe that our imaginings might actually come true. No, we disbelieved our own imaginings, for we conducted constant investigations clarifying — for ourselves! — that there was no reason to believe them. But it was difficult to investigate without imagining what this investigation was supposed to ascertain and if necessary prevent, if possible nip in the bud, as was our explicit aim. Thus it was necessary to simulate that the budding reality conformed with our imaginings. . at what point, I asked myself, would we have outstripped our ability to decisively categorize the things we clarified: as still belonging in the realm of simulation, or already as budding reality? The words ‘still’ and ‘already’ conveyed the crux of it: Could the simulation become reality, and where was the transition? Could what was still a simulation already have made the transition to reality before we had clarified it and brought it to light? If simulation could become reality, reality could answer us with simulation. If we had to concede this, we were probably lost. . and so we couldn’t believe it.
So: we could believe nothing, for what we did not believe did not occur. It could not occur: from sheer disbelief. . this we knew, with adamant certainty. It lay deep in the consciousness of each of us, there was no deeper layer of our consciousness than disbelief. With our scepticism we emerged in a straight, purposeful line from the Enlightenment. . and now and then someone went so far as to call disbelief the tenet of our faith. Disbelief was deep-seated, it was the growling coffee grounds in our guts. . hah! Maybe we drank too much coffee as we pondered; we were Nestlé’s best customers, someone had said. And when we transitioned to conviction we drank champagne with beer, which made us jovial and disbelieving.
So: there was no God, there were no phenomena, there was no subconscious, there was no turning back. . this, if we liked, was the creed behind the cant. — Nothing could happen that we didn’t believe, because we didn’t believe it. . and already we were indispensable. Before all the world we could have pointed at what didn’t happen. . because we didn’t believe it. Once again: all we believed in was our disbelief. All the intelligence we conducted, never flagging, tirelessly vigilant, consisted of conveying the belief that nothing could happen, nothing, to that end we couldn’t be wordy enough. Even if everyone knew it already, in the course of our investigations we had to re-convey and reaffirm that the people out there on the pavement were doing no more than coming out of a U-Bahn tunnel, walking along and going back down into the next U-Bahn tunnel. We unbelievers believed firmly that nothing dubious could occur, that they weren’t massing together on the pavement, even if they came in groups, in many groups, in crowds, in multitudes and cohorts. — That changed only in winter, the pavements emptied when darkness fell, there was nothing but the cars on the lanes of the street. .
We could have pointed right at the calm and cool-headedness that prevailed among us. . but sometimes the too-oft repeated phrases seemed to undergo a strange reversal, and the cafe was too close to the U-Bahn for my liking. It happened that I spent hours unfolding my thoughts, ceaselessly, far from drawing conclusions, staring through the curtain: everything outside was grey, and I thought and thought about the people. — The people. . I thought when the streetscape came into focus once again, there are more and more people out there. — With a sense of vertigo I saw them climb up from the tunnel, wave upon wave, and scatter on the pavement; now, in the afternoon, the intervals between arriving trains were quite brief, and the crowd poured forth with barely an interruption. What if they suddenly ceased to disperse. . and all of them suddenly came into the cafe. What an idea, to see hundreds of people crowding in, the cafe bursting at the seams! To see the tables swept clear of us, us pushed to the back wall, already pushed behind the bar. . soon still more would come, another train was arriving. We’ve done them no harm, really. .
Once, I recalled, I’d joined the annual march to the Memorial to the Socialists.2 That is, I wasn’t in the midst of the demonstration, I was one of the escorts strolling casually along beside it, and it seemed to me that these escorts were observed still more keenly — by the closely spaced kerbside cordon of double sentries, who went unrecognized — than the demonstration itself as it surged sedately onward. Progress was slow on the main street, much too slow for me. . I shivered; the January day was frigid, and I was growing increasingly nervous — I’d have liked to spur them on, this lame herd, I’d have liked to yell and swing a stick and set them trotting. . by the time we reached the cafe I’d had enough, I pushed my way through the rubberneckers on the kerb and went into the packed cafe. Immediately I ran into Feuerbach, who like me had only found standing room. — Get out! he hissed at me. They’re already skipping off to the U-Bahn out there and you come in here to sit on your hands! — What am I supposed to do? I said, Send them back? — I left the cafe again and saw that Feuerbach was staring after me, leaning in the doorway. Unable at first to get through the cordon to the street, I walked along on the pavement. A few hundred yards away, at the next U-Bahn entrance, I saw that he was right, droves of people really were vanishing into the underpass; they hurried down the stairs, giggling and looking triumphant as if they’d snuck out of a bar without paying. Of course no one cared about them, even our boys lounging against the tunnel wall yawned jadedly. But I was unnerved, sensing that this child’s play could turn serious if only enough of them came together in one place. As a rule I dreaded crowds. . when I pictured them swarming the platforms in the gloom down below, storming the arriving trains in their mushy sense of community, reinforced at each station by new masses all the way to Alexanderplatz. . I was glad to be elevated from their midst, by a terse, unremarkable agreement. In crowds, amid the attraction they exerted, it was ultimately hard for me to maintain the distance I needed; my ability to accurately assess people vanished on a regular basis when there were more than ten of them in one place; I stopped registering the details and distinguishing their voices; it wasn’t long before I heard them speak in chorus. . in fact, they even thought in chorus, their gazes merged into one single gaze, soon they moved in one direction only. . it was easy to be gripped by their excitement, and already you’d joined them, for better or worse, and that was somehow liberating. Perhaps it was because they were held together not by commands but by the melody of the chorus.