The Erzgebirge is the imagined destination of Jakob Fabian’s possible retreat from Berlin: a familiar, affordable mountain landscape where he hopes to recover a sense of direction without surrendering his conscience for a job. In his plans, it is both refuge and waiting place, and the tension between those functions exposes his difficulty in deciding whether to withdraw or act.

A Familiar and Affordable Landscape

Fabian recalls the Erzgebirge from school excursions. Its mountain ridge, peaks, forests, mountain meadows, lakes, and poor, hunched villages are not an unknown wilderness but a place he has already encountered. Against the prospect of traveling to the South Seas, the mountains offer a cheaper alternative—one that his remaining money might make possible.

The practical scale of the plan matters. Fabian thinks the thousand marks left to him by Labude could sustain him for half a year or longer; perhaps even five hundred would suffice, leaving the other half for his mother. The retreat is measured against both limited means and family obligation, not presented as an escape financed by abundance.

Refuge from Compromise

At the Café Limberg, Fabian considers whether to accept a position at the right-wing Tagespost and help it expand. He recoils at the possibility of dulling his conscience day after day for two hundred marks a month. The Erzgebirge becomes the alternative: rather than take the job, he could use Labude’s remaining money to travel there and stay at a quiet farmstead.

Fabian hopes that mountain solitude might help him come to himself, perhaps become something like a man, or discover a goal worth the effort. Yet each hope is qualified rather than assured. He can walk only as far as his sick heart allows, and the imagined landscape offers no guarantee of revelation or purpose.

Waiting and the Unresolved Return

Fabian imagines listening to the times from the mountains until he hears a starting signal meant for him and others like him. The retreat is therefore not simply a decision to abandon the world: he pictures himself waiting for a moment when he can join its struggles and work. He recognizes, however, that leaving Berlin may amount to flight, and questions how long he has been waiting and whether he was born to watch rather than participate.

The Erzgebirge remains a plan, not a narrated arrival. As Fabian leaves the café, the possibility of going there stands beside his unresolved desire to act; the landscape gives that hesitation a concrete form, a place of temporary distance from the present rather than a settled answer to it.