(KILB has placed his hands underneath his armpits and is producing farting noises.)
LUTZ
All I have to say against the consumers is that they aren’t informed. Why don’t they read the business sections in their papers which publicize the Good Housekeeping tests? Why don’t they join the consumer councils? No wonder they can’t tell the products apart. Did you ever watch the faces of housewives during a sale? A mass of mindless, dehumanized, panic-stricken grimaces that don’t even perceive each other any more, staring hypnotically at objects. No logic, no brains, nothing but the seething, stinking subconscious. A happening at the zoo, gentlemen. No awareness, no life, no feeling for quality. I know whereof I speak.
KILB
(Interrupts them.) Fire!
QUITT
(Ignores him.) And whereof are you speaking?
LUTZ
You know very well. We stopped production just now. Our quality product had no chance against your mass-produced one. Your brand is a household name, even our packaging, a three-dimensional picture on a hexagonal cover, was too revolutionary. Consumers are conservative, their curiosity about progress is fly-by-night. That was our first fire — I mean fiasco.
(Looks at KILB.)
QUITT
When your product came on the market, I immediately put ours on the steal-me list.
KOERBER-KENT
Please explain.
QUITT
The steal-me list is a full-page ad which we publish once a week in the major newspapers. It lists the ten products of ours that are shoplifted with the greatest frequency. Simultaneously we send this list as posters to the trade. There they construct a kind of altar display of the listed objects and the poster with the legend SHOPLIFTERS’ HIT PARADE is hung above it. This boosts sales. I immediately put my product at the top of the list and left it there, until Lutz gave up. I must say I’ve grown fond of it in the meantime and look at it in its plain square package with genuine affection. Still, I’m going to stop production on it.
LUTZ
What do you mean?
QUITT
It was a losing proposition for a long time. I just didn’t want you to get a swelled head.
VON WULLNOW
Marvelous, Quitt! That’s the old school spirit, but I can see now how important it is that we reach an agreement in time.
QUITT
Otherwise why would you be here?
VON WULLNOW
Businessmen are people who get things moving, as Schumpeter says. Let’s oil the machinery of the world.
KILB
Someone’s coming.
VON WULLNOW
(Doesn’t hear him.) This is an important day. For the first time we want to give up our atomization. We’ve been lonely long enough. We planned in loneliness, in sad isolation we watched the market, helplessly each of us set his price by himself, hoping for the best. Despising everything that was alien, each of us on his little island watched the other’s advertising campaigns. We did not recognize our mutual needs, were even proud of our individualism. That has to change; we can’t go on like this.
(PAULA TAX hurriedly enters.)
QUITT
I was just thinking of you, Paula.
PAULA
And?
QUITT
Nothing bad.
VON WULLNOW
Have a seat. (To the others) I always find it embarrassing to say to a woman, Sit down. (To PAULA) All of us were thinking of you. Even the Vicar-General, I think?
KOERBER-KENT
(Jokingly) Now I know why I felt the whole time as if a door had been left open somewhere.
KILB
Your signet ring is tarnished, Monsignore.
KOERBER-KENT
Continue, my friend. (KILB remains silent.) He’s never got more than one sentence in him. The habit of quick interjections has ruined him.
(PAULA has sat down. She is still wearing riding clothes. QUITT’S WIFE comes in again. She pretends she is looking for something. PAULA loosens her scarf and shakes her hair. QUITT’S WIFE stomps her feet. As she walks on, the heel of her shoe gets caught in a crack in the floor. She hops backward, slips back into the shoe, and tries to walk out with measured steps. KILB barks after her and she disappears with a scream.)
QUITT
Perhaps the reason for the nausea is that only a minute ago you could have held an entirely different opinion of the matter, and in that case the story would have taken an entirely different turn.
PAULA
You look at me as if I should ask, What does this mean?
QUITT
Please remind me later that I must still explain something to you.
PAULA
When?
QUITT
Later.
LUTZ
I don’t want to be pushy. There’s a lot at stake today. I wouldn’t have been able to fall asleep last night without my autogenic training. I usually think of the ocean when that happens, but even that sparkled for a long time like freshly mashed spinach from my new freezer package, and the moon above had been crossed out with a felt pen and a smaller one circled in beside it.
VON WULLNOW
All right, let’s get down to business. I assume, if not our conversation, then what we mean by it is ears only. In any event, you have my word of honor. (He takes a look around.) The Vicar-General swears on this, doesn’t he? Lutz promises, or no? And Quitt? Nods. Mrs. Tax’s thoughts are still nudging her horse with her thighs. And our guest of honor? (He nods briefly toward KILB.)
QUITT
Hans.
(HANS appears at once, frisks KILB, shakes his head—“no microphone”—and withdraws again. KILB thereupon takes his stool and sits down with the others, assumes the pose of a kibitzer.)
VON WULLNOW
We’re no sharks. But we’ve learned that free enterprise is a dog-eat-dog business. Public opinion regards us as monsters belching cigar smoke. And in the often so poetically quoted moments of those overly long cross-country trips we see ourselves like that: we’ve become what once we didn’t want to become at any price. Don’t shake your head, Vicar-General. You know that’s not the way I mean it. No, we aren’t just the bad guys in a game: we really are bad. Even as a gourmet, my face has slowly but surely become less and less soulful — although for a long time I hoped for the opposite. Just take a look at your colleagues business-lunching in the three-star restaurants, Lutz: their jowls register a lifelong sellout. A lifelong circus, not just twice a year like the housewives. Still, it is premature undialectical impressionism, as Mrs. Tax would surely say, trying to dump on us. After all, we didn’t become monsters because we relished it. My primal experience is the thought: There’s no such thing as a human being who becomes inhuman of his own accord. That’s what I tell myself whenever I have to put myself together again after having done something I actually abhor in my heart of hearts.