Krause

Krause is a grey-haired former senior teacher whose account to Georg turns a catalogue of losses into an argument for survival without heroic precedent. Morphine dependence cost him his school position and shaped his wartime experience; his wife and child left for West Prussia, and his response included a wound to his own arm. Yet he rejects both guilt and the claim that fate has mastered him. His story gives no simple lesson: Krause openly calls himself no example, even as he urges Georg not to mistake another person’s disasters for a life that must be repeated.

Identity and Background

Before the war, Krause was a senior teacher. He also says that he injected morphine: when he was called up, the authorities took away his syringe and morphine, but he still had a small supply of drops. He lasted two days before being sent to a psychiatric asylum and was later released. The school then dismissed him because of his morphine use. His account makes clear that his loss of professional standing followed a long-standing dependence, rather than a single wartime crisis.

Krause describes morphine as something that initially intoxicated him but eventually ceased to produce that effect. He presents this change without claiming recovery or offering a program for escape. His language is practical and unsentimental: the drug remains part of his history, while the diminished pleasure it once gave him is simply another fact he has had to accept.

Family Rupture and the Wound

Krause recalls discovering that his wife and child were gone and that only a letter remained. They had gone to stay with her mother in West Prussia. He describes the episode as a collapse of his life as husband and the source of shame, then recounts cutting his left arm in what could appear to be a suicide attempt. His own retelling immediately undercuts the drama of the gesture: he thought a tendon was the pulse and admits that he did not understand anatomy, though he had once known Provençal.

The wound did not kill him, and Krause refuses to treat the episode as proof of an irreversible catastrophe. He says that he survived, as did his wife and child; his wife later had two more children in West Prussia. He describes this survival with the odd image of having operated at a distance, turning family separation into a fact he can narrate rather than a continuing verdict on his life. He says he never regretted what happened and does not feel guilty, insisting that a person must come to terms with the facts and with himself.

Survival, Place, and Perspective

Krause’s defiance is not a claim that he has overcome every consequence. Georg points out that Krause is a wreck and recalls that he has had to go hungry while giving private lessons. Krause accepts that he is no model for Georg, but refuses to let hardship become a standard by which another person must measure his future. His distinction is between recounting misfortune and recommending it: he can tell his story without presenting it as a path to follow.

Instead of offering a general theory of how to live, Krause names what remains dear to him: Rosenthaler Platz, the copper on the corner of Elsasser Strasse, and billiards. Those attachments are modest beside the loss of his post and family life, but their very ordinariness gives his survival a local, material scale. He also rejects the idea that destiny should be boasted about. Calling himself an opponent of fate and a Berliner rather than a Greek, he resists turning adversity into a grand, fixed design.

The Conversation with Georg

Krause speaks to Georg over tea, advising him to drink or eat and not to talk as though Krause knows nothing of his troubles. The older man drinks slowly, watching the tea, then pushes aside Georg’s attempt to cover the glass and adds rum from a small flask. When Georg says he has to leave to walk off his anger, Krause invites him to stay, drink, and play billiards, while warning him not to become confused about the matter. The exchange moves between concern and provocation: Krause offers company, but does not pretend that his own past makes him an authority on how Georg should live.

Their disagreement sharpens when Georg says he wants no life like Krause’s. Krause answers with an image of a fly under a microscope, which can mistake itself for a horse, and asks Georg to consider the difference between how a life looks from within and how it appears from outside. He then turns the question back on Georg, invoking the young man’s respectable position as a footwear sales representative before asking him to explain his own trouble. The reversal prevents Krause’s confession from remaining a one-sided display of suffering: Georg’s difficulties, not Krause’s history alone, become the subject of the conversation.

Krause’s mixture of bleak biography, humor, and ordinary affection makes him neither a triumphant survivor nor a cautionary emblem. He speaks of dismissal, separation, morphine, and a near-fatal wound, but refuses to let those events dictate a single meaning for his life. His insistence that he is no example complicates the advice he gives Georg: survival may be demonstrated, but it cannot be prescribed as a neat moral.