He read the piece of paper over and over again, thoughtfully, while she said to him, maybe it’s only now dawning on you how exceptionally unusual it is to simply throw the two of us into this room through the window, without ever making it clear to us what the two of us should actually be doing here. .!
Thanks to the selfless initiative of Herr Karl, one has at one’s disposal one’s whole life long a universal historical work that displays such obsessively detailed accuracy that one inevitably, unquestionably, has to equate it with the history itself, which is why all the various scholarly approaches to history succumb to an increasingly unhappy decline, from which they are hardly ever permitted to be rallied and brought back again because, for centuries, all scholars have been voluntarily condemned to do nothing but read the already available historiography more closely, since it is no longer possible to differentiate between the history and the historiography, and usually, even before the actual occurrence of a historical event and the details of its progress, the historiography had already reported on it more exactly and in greater detail than would the history itself, which then went on to prove itself incapable of expanding on the former, and for that reason, precisely for the sake of scholarly certainty, one turns to the former, namely the historiography that fully surpasses history for clarity, so, once again, the historiography, for its part, consists of a still more exactly amplifying, substantially more detailed, incredibly more extensive historical view of the universal historical work mentioned above, which we continue to have at our disposal our whole life long thanks to the selfless initiative of Herr Karl.
A long time before that, Karl had decreed that everyone should learn to write, so that no one would start any unnecessary fussing and so make history anymore, but rather just write history down, with each person exactly determining his own place in the course of history, so as not to keep coming back with more useless histories afterward. Soon thereafter, no one made history anymore, because everyone was just writing history, without fussing with other histories and thereby unnecessarily making history again. All the books and documents that have been produced and are being produced are collected for Karl and arranged in his library, which is said to have long since surpassed the size of the one in the capital city of the land. Karl has at his disposal such an extensively exact historical work precisely because no one is making history anymore, but rather just writing histories so as not to make history, and because in this manner the passage of time itself gradually became a historiography in which for a long time now no one has made history, history itself today and tomorrow will be nothing other than a history of historiography.
Well, all right, he thought. So be it. But not even he wanted to or should stand for or put up with everything. Not even from her, no, he didn’t mean her, but rather her story at this point, that didn’t suit him. To think that Herr Karl, of all people, had to turn up again, what business did he have here again, no, he, of all people, was not needed here now, she should stop going on at him about her Karl, should spare him. I will now so thoroughly spoil this Karl for her, he thought, that she won’t mention him to me again for a long time, maybe never.
Please listen to me very carefully now, he said, unfortunately I can no longer spare you the truth about Herr Karl. I know that you have started to hold him in particular in extraordinarily high esteem — although you don’t know him personally, not a bit, but who knows, maybe you’ll happen to run into him someday, or he into you — and sometimes I understand it, but not always. I also know that it’s his obvious seriousness and his strict determination that appeal to you, because you yourself are serious and determined when you want to achieve something, that’s why you always achieve what you think you wanted to achieve, even if you’ve often achieved something else entirely, which you then confuse with what you had really set your mind on achieving. But I hope that Herr Karl’s seriousness and determination and then your seriousness, your determination, do not stem from the same roots, which would drive me to despair. Did you know that a long time ago he fought an entire people with such determination and cruelty that he almost exterminated them? You maintain that, in reality, from back then until today, nothing has ever slipped from his firm grasp, because he’s still alive, which I’ll gladly believe from now on, because that gives me insight into many things I hadn’t been able to understand before; but did you also know that from that time to the present day and beyond, he has been fighting on with ceaseless, indeed escalating, violence because he still has not succeeded in wiping these people off the face of the earth? I don’t know the reason for his profound hatred, such reasons can change over the course of time, can be exchanged for others, or new ones can be added; in any case, at least back then, these people he blamed for absolutely everything were called Saxons, though what exactly they were supposed to be guilty of I don’t know, probably he doesn’t either, nor do they, but one day things got started, and violently, yes, albeit causing strange transportation problems, because all of a sudden there were no new carriages to be had, slowly but surely the old ones had rotted, decomposed, broken down, fallen apart, but there weren’t any new carriages anywhere, in spite of the ever-more-urgent repeat orders placed with all the carriage works; they, however, offering the most threadbare excuses, pretended to even their most loyal customers that they were having problems with their suppliers, and so they sent their customers to the competition for the time being, where they heard, in turn, the very same story, and sometimes the carriage makers told the customers who were putting pressure on them that they would gladly sell them any number of carriages, as many as they wanted, but without wheels, just the carriage frames, but what were the people supposed to do with carriages that had no wheels, well, people with a lot of money, who could afford that sort of thing, had the carriage frames converted into sedan chairs, and for a while back then it became fashionable to be carried through the country in such carriage frames, as if wheels had been forgotten, as if the wheel would have to be reinvented, just because Herr Karl had completely bought out the entire production of wheels made by all the carriage works on the continent several years in advance, had had them bought out, whereupon all the wheels manufactured anywhere had to be delivered exclusively to him, and if anyone dared to withhold so much as a single wheel from him, oh, there were horrible, inevitable consequences as a result; soon everyone was suspicious of everyone else who dared to turn up anywhere with anything that even resembled a wheel, however ridiculous, it automatically had to be sent to Herr Karl, and within seconds one had been reported for wheel embezzlement, condemned, etc. . back then, there was nothing around that did anything even resembling rolling; instead, people only walked or were carried, because little by little, Herr Karl wanted to break every Saxon he came across on one of those wheels, carefully tying him onto and into it. . this immense number of wheels, which Herr Karl, as described, had set aside exclusively for use on his Saxons, would presumably still suffice today to equip all the public means of ground transportation in the entire world. . and then those legendary boundlessly deforested woodlands, all just to make stakes, so that shortly afterward entire countries were mercilessly reduced to karst, producing countless stakes, enough for the erection of a completely new Venice, but it was definitely not up to us to save that city, quite the contrary, it would have saved us, but its stakes had been lost forever, irretrievably, used up by Herr Karl just to be able to impale every Saxon he encountered without delay. . over the centuries, of course, they became accustomed to being persecuted by him, and became ever more cunning in their attempts to hide from him: for example, they often changed their white skin to red, black, yellow, green and whatever else came into fashion, or else they gave themselves all kinds of complicated names, often to the point of being un-pronounceable, impossible for anyone to remember, but Herr Karl used similar methods, by assuming the most baffling of inconspicuous disguises, he changed, exchanged his identities whenever and as often as he felt necessary: for example, he came as a pilot throwing gifts to them from the most unexpected airships, gifts designed to bring them misfortune, such as clothes and blankets to protect them against unpredictable periods of cold, but these materials bore the seductively colorfast ornamentation of the black pox, against which Karl’s own medicine men prescribed them the blessings of firewater, which was in turn supposed to make them all die of hepatitis, those who hadn’t already inadvertently found their security in the warmth of the plague, that is; then, after he had also driven them out of their prairie hunting grounds and the buffalo grazing pasture lands in the west, had driven them out of their tent villages, burned to the ground, where they had initially thought themselves safe, their heads hidden behind the most gloriously colorful birds’ feathers, he had them mothballed, penned in on reserves, and most recently, disguised in the slick tropical operetta uniform of a field marshal of the international Telegraph and Telephone Company, he hadn’t even shied away from having the breasts of their women connected to his field telephone network as amplifiers, whereupon he gave his sergeants the order to turn the cranks of all the telephones as quickly and as vigorously as possible all at once, he wanted to hear them really ringing across the fields at last, and naturally all the telephones in the entire country rang, but above all it rang in the heads of the women, as loudly as if they were locked inside gigantic church bells, so that these pitifully violated figures of misery were neither able to hear nor understand the shouts and increasingly angry demands of the sergeants who were torturing them, saying that they should now confess at last and name every name, but what could they have been supposed to confess, since they had never done more than be anxious and naïve, and which names should they have named, since they didn’t even know their own, at best perhaps they would still have been capable of an implied statement before they began to lose consciousness, because their breasts would soon be completely charred if they were to remain in use any longer as wall-socket connections in the field telephone network of the military secret police. .