Kasernen- und Gehorsamsgesellschaft

Kasernen- und Gehorsamsgesellschaft is the novel’s image of a society organized like a barracks: authority descends through fixed ranks, daily life is regimented, and obedience is taught as character. Jakob Fabian encounters its clearest form in the school where he grew up, but the pattern reaches from military training and devotional ceremony to political violence and the treatment of children. Its continuity is the point: institutions keep drilling their routines even as the society they claim to order loses its direction.

The barracks beyond the barracks

Fabian’s memory makes the concept concrete in a landscape of military and educational buildings. Walking past a garrison church and the barracks, he recalls standing there at seventeen among thousands of soldiers, dressed in uniform and prepared to hear what the German God had to tell his armies. The former artillery barracks summons a timetable of service roll calls, gun drills, night marches, war-bond lectures, and pay distribution. Military discipline is not an isolated episode in his past; it has supplied the forms through which institutions organize bodies and time.

He remembers the surrounding city as a continuous chain of such institutions. The school and cadet academy stand alongside the hospital and church as buildings that, at the city’s edge, had each been a kind of barracks. This retrospective description links schooling and religious observance to military culture without claiming that they are identical. The shared structure is one of command, regulated conduct, and preparation for a prescribed role.

The school’s machinery of obedience

The former school preserves its imposing architecture: a large grey building with pointed slate-roofed corner towers, a director’s apartment set apart by white curtains, and plain dark windows behind which classrooms, dormitories, and other communal rooms are arranged. Fabian enters and hears lessons, choral singing, and piano playing. The familiar details do not simply restore childhood; they show how authority was built into the institution’s physical and daily order.

The routine unfolds as a repeated chase through rooms and duties. The caretaker rings the bell; pupils move from dormitory to washroom, lockers, dining room, classroom, recreation, garden work, football, homework, and back to bed. The youngest pupils repeatedly set the tables, while older students receive limited privileges, including two extra hours awake and cigarettes in the park. Generations of pupils change, but the sequence remains. Fabian recognizes the same teachers and nicknames, and concludes that only the year groups have turned over.

The school’s ceremonies join discipline to patriotic and religious instruction. In the assembly hall Fabian remembers morning and evening devotions, organ music, the Kaiser’s birthday, Sedan Day, the Battle of Tannenberg, flags in the tower, examinations, and speeches accompanying the departure of conscripts and the opening of courses for war veterans. The language of unity, justice, and freedom seems to have lodged in the room’s atmosphere. At the same time, ordinary controls reach into leisure: pupils have only designated hours outside, and when that privilege is withdrawn, the inspector can make them cut newspapers into toilet paper.

The dormitory makes obedience visible as arrangement. Iron beds stand in a long line; nightshirts hang on the walls in military alignment. Older pupils sometimes leave the park at night and slip into the beds of younger boys, who remain silent. Even this remembered breach occurs inside a world where order must be maintained. Fabian’s view is not uncomplicated nostalgia: he admits that some of it had been enjoyable, but only despite the lies and concealed violence he associates with the institution’s education of whole generations into obedient state officials and narrow-minded citizens.

Childhood, authority, and memory

The discipline of the school is set against Fabian’s private childhood vulnerability. A visitor’s worn cape recalls the uniforms worn on Sundays when pupils marched to church, and the clothing suddenly brings back the director’s morning ritual and Fabian’s own clandestine departures from the institution. He remembers running through dim streets, past barracks and across an exercise ground, then climbing to his mother’s door to ask whether she was feeling better. The memory reveals what the institutional routine cannot contain: a child’s attachment and worry surviving within an environment built to regulate him.

On his return, the school’s old vocabulary persists. Two younger pupils pass him; one tells Heinrich to go to the Stork and collect the exercise books. Fabian recognizes the nickname and thinks that nothing has changed. The students are replaced, but the teachers, labels, and timetable endure. The repetition gives the school’s continuity an impersonal force: obedience is not only imposed by an individual authority figure but reproduced as an ordinary schedule, inherited from one cohort to the next.

Fabian also remembers looking from the dormitory window toward the town and searching for the house where his sick mother lay. He recalls pressing his head against the glass and suppressing his tears. The same passage measures the human cost of the years: a few classmates had shot themselves, more had died in the war, and later deaths had left half the class dead. The school survives in memory as a place of routine and formation, but that continuity stands beside the losses of the men it helped prepare for adult life and war.

The system beyond the school

The novel extends the image of command into its political present. In a street shooting, Stephan Labude runs toward the violence after shots and a cry are heard; Fabian follows despite his aching heart. A wounded man explains that an argument began when someone drew a swastika on a tavern table, continued with blows and insults about the International, and ended in a shooting. The scene shows political affiliation turning conflict into bodily danger. Fabian tries to disarm the opponents and argues that preserving intolerable conditions by cold dictatorship is a sin, while neither party’s slogans offer a sufficient account of what it is fighting for. The exchange exposes a society in which rival camps reproduce coercive confrontation rather than escape it.

At Weddingplatz, the same political crisis takes the form of a mass confrontation between workers and police. The police block Reinickendorfer Straße as workers approach; mounted officers wait behind the cordon, while uniformed proletarian policemen face civilian workers. Songs give way to angry shouting, and the police advance before the groups collide. Officers strike, horses charge, shots break windows, stones fly, a police sergeant is stabbed, and reinforcements arrive in trucks. A second police line closes the route and clears the square as workers flee and regroup at its edges. Fabian pushes through the crowd and walks away; a few streets later, the noise has receded and the surroundings seem orderly. The abrupt contrast makes order look less like reconciliation than the temporary appearance left after force has dispersed its visible opponents.

The novel also connects discipline to economic organization and technological change. Malmy describes a state that supports large landed estates and heavy industry, while manufacturers sell abroad at a loss and charge domestic prices above the world market; costly raw materials, suppressed wages, taxes that spare the wealthy, and capital fleeing across borders deepen the pressure. He then describes production multiplied by technology while the labor force is reduced and mass purchasing power declines. His examples are deliberately stark: grain and coffee are burned in America because they might otherwise become too cheap, while French winegrowers complain that their harvest is too abundant. The juxtaposition of surplus and hunger gives social order an economic contradiction: production increases, yet the means of living remain unequally distributed.

An inventor gives that contradiction a personal history. His machines let the textile industry produce five times as much cloth per day, and many people—including himself—made money from them. He came to see the inventions as cannons against workers: productivity rose as employment fell, destroying the livelihood of hundreds of thousands. In Manchester he witnessed police riding at locked-out workers and striking them with sabres; a little girl was trampled by a horse. He blamed himself, began giving money away, and rejected further work with machines. His family placed him under legal supervision; he left, and after half a year missing in Berlin learned from a newspaper that his daughter had given birth. The episode ties technical progress to coercion without reducing the inventor’s account to machinery alone: private wealth and family authority also constrain the life he tries to choose.

Children as subjects of discipline and violence

Children recur as more than symbols of innocence. In a department store, a little girl is accused of stealing an ashtray and a seller grabs her shoulder while ordering that she be taken to the director. The child weeps. Fabian intervenes, orders the seller to let go, strikes her fingers so she releases the girl, and draws the child to his side. His question about why she chose an ashtray rather than something else registers the immediate incident, while his physical intervention interrupts the store’s automatic movement from accusation to punishment.

The inventor’s account of mechanized production is rendered again in a stark industrial vision. He leads Fabian to a machine as huge as Cologne Cathedral, where half-naked workers shovel hundreds of thousands of small children into a vast, red-hot cauldron. At the far end, living men and women tumble onto a shining surface and stare at their unreachable reflections. The scene gives social and industrial processes a monstrous scale, making children’s vulnerability part of the same spectacle as adult alienation. Its imagery is not a literal account of factory practice; within the encounter, it is the machine’s grotesque representation of a society that consumes human lives.

Later, the girl from the department store takes Fabian’s hand amid a vision of gunfire, corpses, burning roofs, and fighting crowds. When she asks why people are doing this, he replies that they want to build new houses. He carries her down the stairs over the dead. The answer is bitterly compressed: destruction is presented under the promise of rebuilding, while the child—first exposed to punishment for a stolen object, now present amid mass death—makes the human stakes of that promise difficult to ignore.

The failure of inherited direction

When Fabian revisits the school, the old director urges him to shape and round out his character, invoking history and the classics as reasons to do so. Fabian answers that he would be without a profession even if he were practicing one: humanity, except for pastors and teachers, no longer knows where its head is. The compass is broken, he says, but the school does not notice because it continues to carry its pupils from one grade to the next in its familiar lift. The image joins the novel’s criticism of institutional routine to its larger account of political and economic disorientation.

The director is appalled and insists that there is an assignment for Fabian: he should go and form his character. Fabian looks at the self-satisfied man and leaves. His refusal does not offer a replacement institution or a program of reform. Instead, the scene exposes the distance between a school confident in its inherited methods and a world in which those methods cannot supply a reliable moral or social compass. Kasernen- und Gehorsamsgesellschaft names that distance: obedience remains teachable and repeatable even when the direction it serves has become untenable.