Fabian rejects a job at the Tagespost and considers retreating to the mountains

Jakob Fabian rejects a possible job at the right-wing Tagespost and considers leaving Berlin for the Erzgebirge. The choice brings into focus the conflict that has shadowed his unemployment: whether to earn a living by adapting his abilities to an existing political and commercial order, or to refuse that accommodation without yet knowing how to take part in changing the world. The mountains promise time and distance, but Fabian recognizes that withdrawal may be another form of waiting.

The Newspaper Offer

Fabian comes to the newspaper through his former classmate Holzapfel, now an overworked employee who is drinking beer while correcting copy. Having heard that Fabian needs work, Holzapfel suggests that the paper might use him for a second theatre review. Fabian then meets Director Hanke, who explains that there is no regular vacancy. He offers Fabian a trial of fourteen days at his own risk: if the feuilleton editor rejects his contributions, Fabian will have no position; if they are accepted, the paper might employ him as an external contributor.

Fabian does not simply accept the literary opening. He says he would rather work in propaganda and outlines a more ambitious advertising operation: a service to advise advertisers on persuasive copy, organize campaigns, increase circulation, and stage competitions and public entertainments with major advertisers. Hanke listens, but warns that the paper’s principal shareholders do not favor methods associated with Berlin. He nevertheless agrees to consult the advertising chief and asks Fabian to return the following day with sample work and references. The opportunity remains contingent, provisional, and subject to the approval of people whose interests Fabian’s proposed methods would serve.

The salary exchange sharpens the mismatch between the paper’s business and Fabian’s circumstances. Hanke cautions him not to expect a fantastic sum, observing that two hundred marks is a great deal of money. When Fabian asks whether he means for employees, Hanke answers that it is a great deal for the shareholders. The joke gives Fabian a concrete measure of the institution’s priorities even before he has decided whether to join it.

The Moral Cost of Employment

After the interview, Fabian sits in Café Limberg with a cognac and examines what he is contemplating. He calls the plan absurd: he would be helping a right-wing newspaper expand, while pretending that propaganda could interest him independently of the purposes it served. The danger, as he frames it, is not merely taking a job he dislikes. It is numbing his conscience day after day for two hundred marks a month and persuading himself that the political character of the work makes no difference.

His thoughts turn to his mother, who would be pleased to see him become a useful member of society. Fabian recoils from the phrase as applied to the existing society, which he regards as exhausted and compromised. Earning money is not, for him, the overriding good; he concludes that he is not yet so morally depleted that he can accept the position without protest. He decides to hide from his parents that the Tagespost might take him on, because he does not want to describe the prospect as a respectable solution when he has already rejected its terms inwardly.

Once he resolves to refuse Hanke, Fabian feels relief. That release confirms the decision’s immediate personal force, but it does not resolve what should follow. His refusal is an act of resistance to a particular bargain, not yet a program for political or professional action.

The Mountains as a Provisional Answer

Fabian considers spending the remaining thousand marks left by Stephan Labude on a stay in the Erzgebirge. The money, he thinks, could support him for six months or longer; perhaps he would need only five hundred marks and could leave the other half for his mother. His plan is precise enough to imagine—walking the mountain ridge and visiting familiar peaks, forests, meadows, lakes, toy-making towns, and poor, hunched villages—but its purpose remains uncertain. The landscape is known to him from school excursions, and its relative cheapness makes it an alternative to distant travel, not an elaborate adventure.

He wonders whether solitude might help him recover a sense of direction, or make him something more like a man. His repeated uncertainty matters: the mountains might offer a goal worth the effort, but Fabian cannot claim to have found one before he goes. He imagines listening to the times from the mountains until he hears a starting signal meant for him and for others like him. Retreat is thus not presented as a settled renunciation of public life; he hopes to return to it able to recognize an occasion for action.

Waiting, Action, and the Unresolved Ending

Fabian’s imagined departure carries a double meaning. He thinks that while he is away the world will move a step forward or two steps backward, and that either change might leave him better prospects than the present situation. He no longer wants to stand aside like a child watching dirt, but he does not know where he could put his hands to work or with whom he could join forces. The gap between refusing complicity and finding an effective alliance remains open.

As he leaves the café, he asks himself whether the plan is simply flight. If anyone who wants to act can find a place to act at any time and anywhere, then the mountains may not be necessary; perhaps he has spent years waiting for a reason to move. He even considers the possibility that he was born to be a spectator rather than the actor he still believes he might become. The episode therefore ends not with a secure escape but with Fabian examining the habit of postponement that makes escape attractive.

The narration holds that doubt beside an ordinary street scene. Fabian pauses at shop windows displaying clothes, hats, and rings, yet sees nothing; a corset shop brings him back to the present. He reflects that life remains one of the most interesting occupations despite everything, notices that the Baroque buildings of Schloßstraße still stand although their builders and first tenants are long dead, and feels fortunate not to have turned back. He then walks over a bridge. The small forward movement does not prove that the mountain plan is right or that he has become an actor, but it leaves his decision suspended between retreat and the possibility of continuing onward.