Der Globus hat die Krätze

“Der Globus hat die Krätze” is the impoverished inventor’s compact image of a world afflicted by pervasive disorder. Spoken amid discussion of machines, unemployment, and the inventor’s own responsibility for workers’ displacement, the phrase makes social crisis sound like a bodily disease: not a local blemish, but an infection covering the globe.

The Inventor’s Diagnosis

The inventor gives the expression its immediate force after declaring that he loves life, especially since becoming poor, and explaining that daily thoughts of death make him value it more. When Fabian asks about people, the old man answers with the phrase. The contrast is stark: affection for life coexists with contempt for humanity, and Fabian observes that the two rarely end well together. The remark therefore works both as a bleak verdict on people and as a turning point in the conversation, after which Fabian leaves the old man and goes to the district employment office.

The diagnosis has a concrete history behind it. The inventor says that his machines enabled the textile industry to produce five times as much cloth each day, while the number of employed workers fell. He calls those machines cannons that put armies of workers out of action and destroyed the livelihood claims of hundreds of thousands. In Manchester, he saw police charge locked-out workers and strike them with sabres; a little girl was trampled by a horse. He blamed himself, began giving money away, and rejected further involvement with machines. The globe-wide complaint thus grows out of a specific account of technological productivity, mass unemployment, and violence against workers.

A World Marked by Crisis

The expression resonates with the novel’s larger picture of social breakdown. The author’s preface describes mass unemployment, the psychological depression following economic crisis, the desire to numb oneself, and the activity of unscrupulous political parties as signs of an approaching catastrophe. It also identifies an epidemic-like paralysis of the heart: a society that fails to respond while danger gathers. In that context, the inventor’s diseased globe is not simply a misanthropic flourish; it compresses economic and moral sickness into a single, grotesque image.

Other scenes give that diagnosis political and bodily dimensions. At Weddingplatz, workers and police converge as songs turn to angry shouting, mounted police charge, shots are fired, stones fly, and a policeman is stabbed. Fabian walks away through the crowd, while only a few streets later the noise has receded and apparent order returns. The abrupt distance between street violence and ordinary calm echoes the expression’s scale: widespread affliction can be treated as though it were merely somewhere else.

The war’s aftermath supplies another image of a world that continues to injure people long after the fighting. Near the Märkisches Museum, Fabian recalls mutilated soldiers kept alive in isolated institutions, some fed through glass tubes inserted where their mouths once were. Their families have been told they are missing; fifteen years later, wives have remarried, while the men persist as photographs at home. Fabian’s bitter questions about when another war will come connect the damaged bodies of the past to the possibility of renewed disaster.

Satirical and Moral Force

The phrase belongs to a book its author explicitly describes as satire rather than a photographic album of city life. The preface says that the novel exaggerates: the moralist holds up a distorting mirror, using caricature to force attention where an ordinary reflection may fail. In that framework, the globe covered in scabies is an intentionally grotesque diagnosis, making collective disorder visible through an intimate and repellent bodily image.

The expression also sits beside the preface’s insistence that the book is moral rather than immoral: it was meant to warn Germany and Europe of the abyss toward which they were moving. The inventor’s diagnosis links that warning to the consequences of economic arrangements that raise productivity while eliminating workers, and to a society that can normalize both the hardship and the violence those arrangements produce. Its bluntness refuses consolation; the world’s condition is not presented as a private misfortune that can be cured one person at a time.

That refusal is sharpened by the inventor’s own contradiction. He loves life more intensely in poverty and thinks often about death, yet answers a question about human beings with a verdict of universal affliction. Fabian recognizes the strain in that position but does not turn the conversation into a cure or reconciliation. The expression remains a diagnosis, not a remedy—a small, bitter sentence carrying the novel’s larger warning about a society whose sickness is visible, consequential, and too readily endured.