Fabian loses his job at the cigarette factory

Fabian loses his job at the cigarette factory before the novel’s opening scenes, but the dismissal keeps shaping what follows: he hides it from his mother, searches for work through an ineffective bureaucracy, and discovers that the factory has appropriated a project he prepared. The loss links private shame and financial pressure to the book’s wider indictment of a society in which production can expand as employment contracts, while institutions treat the resulting hardship as a problem of paperwork and individual endurance.

The dismissal and its concealment

Fabian’s mother visits him, and he sends her away believing that he is still going to work. He runs from the house while she watches from the window, then slows and stops once it is out of sight. He recognizes the scene as a cruel little performance: he has no work to go to, but must pretend otherwise because he cannot bear to tell her he has been dismissed. She has spent her life saving for him, and even the suit he wears is the only one he has bought for himself in thirty-two years. His deception protects her from the immediate knowledge of his unemployment while deepening his own sense of obligation and shame.

That pretense is sustained by routine rather than hope. Fabian waits at the factory to meet his mother after the working day, keeping up the appearance of an employee even as the office empties around him. He hides in a window recess and watches the clock, drawing close to the frame whenever he hears footsteps. The scene makes dismissal a social absence that he must actively disguise: to his mother, he still has a workplace and a day’s work, although he is only waiting for her to arrive.

The factory claims his work

While Fabian waits, he overhears Direktor Breitkopf discussing a competition project with Fischer. The director plans to report it at the management meeting and says Fischer will be recognized for it; Fischer admits that he inherited the proposal from Fabian. Breitkopf treats the transfer as ordinary property, brushes aside the possibility that it should trouble Fischer, and says he will dictate an effective presentation based on Fischer’s material. The project Fabian made is thus converted into a means of advancement for someone else, while the dismissed worker is absent from the official account of its authorship.

Fabian steps out of hiding just as Fischer quotes Schiller’s line about the master always having to toil. Fischer jumps in alarm; Breitkopf fingers his collar. Fabian tells them he is less surprised than they are and leaves. His brief appearance does not restore his position or reclaim the project, but it punctures the ease with which the men have arranged to pass off his work. The factory’s treatment of him is not only a loss of employment: it also strips him of credit for a piece of work it continues to find useful.

Searching for work and relief

After leaving the factory, Fabian tries to find other employment. He eats a sausage with potato salad at a tavern, reads the newspapers posted there, notes job advertisements, buys writing supplies from a shabby stationery shop, and sends four applications. Only then does he make his weary way back to the cigarette factory to meet his mother. The sequence gives his search a concrete, repetitive rhythm—small expenditures, public notices, letters, and travel—without suggesting that any application will produce an answer.

His attempt to register for support is equally laborious. After spending two hours going through three officials, he is told that he has come to the wrong office and must visit a western branch assigned to clerical employees. The information sends him to the wrong place, where he finds unemployed nurses, kindergarten teachers, and stenographers and stands out as the only male visitor. A few streets away, he locates the correct office in premises that still resemble a cooperative store. Applicants queue at the old counter, present their stamp cards one by one, and receive the control mark required for their registration. The contrast between the orderly procedure and the misinformation that sent Fabian there makes institutional access feel like another cost imposed on the jobless.

The sequence continues through a second referral. At the first office, Fabian is told that propagandists do not belong there and is directed to the branch for professionals, scientists, and artists. He takes a bus to Alexanderplatz and finds a mixed company that may include doctors, lawyers, engineers, agricultural experts, and music teachers. There he hears a small man calculate his relief precisely: 24.50 marks, amounting to 2.72 marks per family member per week and 38 pfennigs per person per day. The man says his wife cannot even put a piece of bread in the children’s schoolbags and fears that, if matters continue, he will begin breaking into places. His neighbor, a bespectacled young man, replies that even stealing takes practice; he has served a year in prison. These encounters place Fabian’s dismissal among sharply different forms of educated unemployment, subsistence, and desperation.

Economic crisis and the meaning of work

The novel’s account of unemployment is framed by a wider critique of economic priorities. Malmy describes a state that supports unprofitable large estates and heavy industry, while the latter sells abroad at a loss and charges domestic buyers more than the world-market level. Raw materials remain expensive, manufacturers press down wages, taxes further weaken mass purchasing power, and capital flees across the borders. His argument connects the pressures on workers to a system whose policies preserve powerful interests while undermining the demand that might sustain employment.

Malmy also identifies the contradiction between technical capacity and human need: machinery multiplies production while reducing the workforce. Grain and coffee are burned in America to prevent prices from falling; French winegrowers complain of an overly abundant harvest, even as other people have nothing to eat. The abundance of goods and the scarcity of livelihoods are not separate problems in this account. They are opposing effects of an economic order that can produce more while leaving masses without purchasing power or work.

The inventor Fabian later meets describes the same contradiction through his own history. His machines enabled the textile industry to produce five times as much cloth per day as before, and many people—including himself—made money from them. He had thought he was inventing peaceful machinery; only afterward did he understand that the machines functioned like cannons against workers, reducing the number of people employed and destroying the claims of hundreds of thousands to a livelihood. In Manchester he saw police charge locked-out workers with sabres, and a little girl trampled by a horse; he concluded that he was responsible. His account gives unemployment a material cause and a moral dimension: productivity is celebrated as progress even when workers bear its human cost.

Consequences and narrative significance

Fabian does not tell his mother that he has lost his job. When she asks whether he is going to work, he instead says that he has retired and will appear in the Finance Ministry’s deficit from the first of the next month as an unforeseen expense. She asks whether he is without a position. He nods and offers her eighty marks for the coming month. She accepts the money quickly and remarks that it was not so urgent. The exchange makes his unemployment inseparable from care: he has little security himself, yet still gives his mother money and tries to shield her from the truth about his circumstances.

The dismissal consequently alters the terms of Fabian’s daily life without turning him into a successful job seeker or a political organizer. He keeps applying, registers where the officials send him, and observes the other unemployed people he encounters; meanwhile, the factory has already reassigned the credit for his work. This gap between individual effort and institutional outcome is central to the episode. The bureaucratic queues, the factory’s appropriation, and the relief-seeker’s arithmetic show unemployment as more than the absence of a post: it is lost income, misdirected time, diminished recognition, and dependence on procedures that cannot answer the economic crisis producing it.