Es ist richtig, das Falsche zu tun

“Es ist richtig, das Falsche zu tun” is a bitterly ironic expression of a society that knows its arrangements are false yet treats cooperation with them as the sensible course. In the newspaper office, Malmy uses the phrase to condemn this logic; elsewhere, his confession and the fabricated report about unrest in Calcutta show how it operates in practice. The novel’s satire makes the phrase less a moral rule than an indictment of the excuses that let dishonesty and inaction feel correct.

The phrase in the newsroom

The expression appears as a chapter heading alongside “Vierzehn Tote in Kalkutta” and “Die Schnecken kriechen im Kreis,” setting a world of manufactured news and stalled movement against the prospect of doing the wrong thing. Its most direct formulation comes from Malmy during a speech in which he points toward a heavy man who has fallen asleep and asks whether anyone should risk their head for people like him. His answer is that the lying will continue: “Es ist richtig, das Falsche zu tun.” The words sound like a justification, but the scene makes their bitterness clear. The phrase names the cynical conclusion produced when speaking honestly seems futile and no one wants to bear the cost of change.

A system sustained by knowing complicity

The chapter gives that cynicism a concrete setting in the newspaper office. A report claims that street fighting in Calcutta left fourteen dead and twenty-two injured, although Irrgang objects that no unrest took place. Münzer dismisses the objection: unless a report can be disproved promptly, he says, it counts as true. The invented deaths are not merely an isolated falsehood; they show how the paper turns the difficulty of checking a claim into permission to publish it. The phrase’s apparent logic is thus embedded in editorial practice: what is false becomes usable because it serves the machinery of the paper and is unlikely to be challenged in time.

Malmy makes the same compromise personal. Asked by Fabian what he does besides disapproving of a colleague’s indifference, he admits that he lies too. He understands that the economic system is wrong, he says, but serves it with devotion; inside that system, mistaken measures become “right,” and correct ones “wrong.” Münzer calls him a cynic. Malmy corrects the diagnosis: he is a coward, and his character does not measure up to his understanding. His admission gives the phrase its human dimension. Knowledge alone does not produce resistance; Malmy recognizes his complicity while conceding that he does nothing to undo it.

Satire, paralysis, and moral responsibility

Malmy’s speech broadens the accusation beyond one newspaper or one editor. He compares the world’s illness to paralysis and mocks the mild remedy of chamomile tea: a treatment that does no harm, but also does no good. The image connects public passivity to the phrase’s false practicality. People want conditions to change without changing themselves; meanwhile, money is shifted from places where there is much to places where there is little, and debts and transfers continue while improvement never begins. The repeated preference for remedies that are harmless but ineffective turns inaction into a kind of collective policy.

The novel’s preface describes the book as satire, a distorting mirror held up to its time, and presents the moralist’s task as warning against a looming abyss. Read in that light, “Es ist richtig, das Falsche zu tun” is deliberately unstable: it states the perverse rule by which a corrupt system protects itself, while the surrounding scenes expose the rule’s cost. The report’s fabricated deaths, Malmy’s confession, and his speech against a society unwilling to change all show variations of the same contradiction. The phrase does not absolve its speakers. It reveals how a person may recognize the wrong and still help it continue.