Kreuzberg is the setting for a chance meeting that turns an ordinary public bench into a place of social reckoning. As Fabian rests on the hill, an elderly inventor explains how machines that once brought wealth and productivity also helped deprive workers of their livelihoods; the scene joins the landscape of Berlin to the costs hidden behind industrial progress.

Setting and Public Space

Fabian climbs slowly to the plateau of Kreuzberg and sits on a bench recommended for public use. A sign instructs citizens to protect the grounds, bearing the magistrate’s signature. Fabian reflects on the warning’s double meaning, while studying a tree whose bark is scored with vertical folds. Even the trees, the scene suggests, seem burdened by trouble.

Two schoolboys pass the bench. One asks whether their situation should be accepted; the other replies that nothing can be done against the people responsible. Their brief exchange, which fades before Fabian can hear more, gives the public setting a political undertone: frustration is voiced, but no remedy follows.

The Inventor on the Bench

An old man approaches in a faded greenish cape, a stiff grey hat, and carrying a badly rolled umbrella. After sitting beside Fabian, he draws circles in the sand with the umbrella tip, transforming them into a complicated mechanical design of gears, lines, curves, and formulas. He asks whether Fabian understands machines. Fabian says he does not, making light of his own inability to grasp mechanical and electrical devices.

The stranger identifies himself as an inventor and an honorary member of five scientific academies. His machines helped the textile industry produce five times as much cloth per day as before, and many people—including himself—made money from them. But he came to see the other side of that achievement: rising productivity and capital had coincided with a shrinking workforce. He calls his peaceful machines cannons because they put whole armies of workers out of action and shattered the means of existence of hundreds of thousands.

Industrial Progress and Its Human Cost

The inventor connects his reckoning to a specific memory from Manchester. He saw police ride against locked-out workers and strike them with sabres; a little girl was trampled by a horse. He says he was responsible. At Kreuzberg, that confession makes the invention sketched in the sand more than an ingenious design: it stands for a technical advance whose benefits and harms are unevenly distributed, and whose victims are absent from the calculations that made it profitable.

After returning from Manchester, the inventor says, his family placed him under guardianship. They objected to his giving away money and declaring that he wanted nothing more to do with machines. He left, while his family remained in his house on Lake Starnberg. He has been missing for six months, and only learned from a newspaper that his daughter had given birth and made him a grandfather. Now he wanders Berlin dressed like a tramp, a reversal from rich man to poor one that he regards with striking equanimity.

Shelter, Wandering, and Significance

The inventor describes a life of improvised shelter: he once taught physics at a private school, but his lessons became a course exposing the wonders of technology, which displeased both pupils and the director. He then spent a quarter of a year warming himself in post offices. With warmer weather, he sits for hours at railway stations watching people depart, arrive, or remain behind, and says he is glad to be alive. His account gives the Kreuzberg conversation a wider geography of displacement, linking industrial dislocation to his own unsettled existence.

Fabian writes down his address and offers the inventor a place to sleep on his sofa if a doorman turns him away from a staircase. The offer makes the bench encounter briefly practical: Fabian cannot undo the inventor’s past or resolve the consequences of his machines, but he can offer shelter. When the inventor asks Fabian’s occupation, Fabian answers that he is unemployed and walks back toward Berlin’s streets. The meeting thus closes on an understated parallel between the inventor’s history of making workers redundant and Fabian’s present lack of work.