Das Leben ist eine schlechte Angewohnheit

“Das Leben ist eine schlechte Angewohnheit” is a chapter-title expression that recasts life as a bad habit: something endured through repetition rather than chosen with confidence. Around it, the novel places Jakob Fabian’s reflection on persistent poverty beside arguments about industrial technology and scenes of unemployed people seeking assistance. The phrase gathers these distinct pressures into a bleak image of habitual survival.

The Expression and Its Setting

The words appear as one of the headings announcing the chapter that begins with Fabian at work in a cigarette factory. He is preparing a sales competition designed to move a large volume of specially packaged cigarettes by inducing customers to buy additional packs. The juxtaposition is pointed: life is named as a bad habit just as Fabian is occupied with the mechanics of commercial persuasion and increased sales.

The chapter’s heading also resonates with an earlier, more personal account of habit. Walking through the city, Fabian recognizes the house where he had lived as a student and remembers his poverty during the inflation winter. He had sat there in his coat, unable to afford heating, while working on a lecture about Schiller’s moral-aesthetic system. His poverty, the narration observes, had become a bad habit, like slouching or biting one’s nails. The chapter title broadens that comparison from Fabian’s recurring material condition to life itself.

Economic Crisis and Repetition

The expression’s fatalism is set against scenes that explain how precarious life is produced. At a gathering, Malmy describes a state that supports large landowners and heavy industry while workers’ wages are pressed down, mass purchasing power declines, and capital leaves the country. He presents these arrangements not as isolated mistakes but as a system whose apparent madness has a method.

Malmy extends the argument to technology and overproduction. Production rises while the workforce is reduced; in America, grain and coffee are burned to prevent prices from falling, while French winegrowers complain that the harvest is too abundant. The grotesque imbalance is that food can be destroyed amid hunger. His speech makes the phrase’s bad habit social as well as personal: repetitive economic arrangements continue even when their consequences are plainly destructive.

Work, Displacement, and Relief

An elderly inventor gives this contradiction a personal history. His machines enabled the textile industry to produce five times as much cloth per day as before, but increasing productivity also reduced the number of workers employed. In Manchester, he saw police charge locked-out workers and a little girl trampled by a horse; he came to believe that his inventions had helped put workers out of existence. After his family placed him under supervision, he began giving money away and left home; by the time he tells Fabian his story, he has been missing for six months and is wandering Berlin like a tramp.

Fabian’s own attempts to register for assistance show how unemployment becomes a sequence of administrative misdirections. After spending two hours consulting three officials, he is sent to the wrong office, where he finds unemployed nurses, kindergarten teachers, and shorthand typists. A further referral takes him to the correct branch for office workers, where people present stamped cards for their required verification. The process makes hardship routine and procedural: each unemployed person moves through the queue and receives a mark of continued registration.

At another office, Fabian encounters a small man who has calculated that his crisis benefit amounts to 24.50 marks, or 2.72 marks per family member per week and 38 pfennigs per person per day. The man says his wife cannot even give the children a piece of bread to take to school and warns that, if conditions continue, he may begin breaking into houses. A short-sighted young man replies that even stealing requires practice and mentions his own year in prison. The scene turns the title’s metaphor into a material pressure: survival repeats under conditions that leave the unemployed with little choice and make desperation itself part of daily routine.

Narrative Significance

Across these episodes, habit is not merely a private weakness. Fabian’s recurring poverty, the inventor’s remorse over labor-saving machines, and the benefit claimant’s arithmetic show people caught in patterns larger than individual will. The chapter title’s bleak compression does not erase the causes of hardship; the surrounding narrative names them—increased productivity, falling purchasing power, unemployment, and inadequate relief. By calling life a bad habit, the novel gives those conditions an intimate, unsettling form: what society reproduces becomes something individuals are made to endure again and again.