Optimismus ist Pflicht

“Optimismus ist Pflicht” (“Optimism is a duty”) is presented as a political slogan, then set against the material and bureaucratic realities of unemployment. Its force lies in that contrast: compulsory optimism sounds like an answer, while the novel’s scenes show people confronting shrinking purchasing power, lost work, and an assistance system that repeatedly redirects them.

The Slogan and Its Immediate Setting

At a newspaper office, Münzer rings for the messenger and announces, “Optimismus ist Pflicht, sagt der Kanzler!” A colleague silently places a ten-pfennig coin on the desk. The gesture turns the grand appeal into a small, concrete exchange: the political phrase is performed as a joke, and the coin supplies a dry counterpoint to its asserted certainty.

The slogan belongs to a wider argument about economic contradiction. Malmy describes state support for large estates and heavy industry, the pressure of taxes on mass purchasing power, and capital leaving the country. He then links technological expansion to the destruction of jobs: production multiplies as the “Arbeitsheer” is reduced, while the masses’ purchasing power suffers. His examples sharpen the absurdity he sees in the system—grain and coffee burned in America to prevent prices from falling, and French wine growers distressed by abundant harvests while others go hungry. In this context, optimism is not a neutral encouragement; it is a demand placed beside evidence of economic distress.

Machines, Employment, and Responsibility

The same conflict reappears in the account of an elderly inventor whom Fabian encounters. The inventor says that his machines enabled the textile industry to produce five times as much cloth each day as before, and that many people, including himself, profited from them. But he came to see those inventions as weapons against workers: productivity rose while the number employed fell, and he describes the machines as having thrown whole armies of workers out of action.

His recollection of Manchester gives the economic claim a human consequence. He saw police ride against locked-out workers and strike their heads with sabres; a little girl was trampled by a horse. He believed himself responsible. After returning, he says, his family placed him under supervision because he began giving away money and wanted nothing more to do with machines. He left; while living apart from his family, he learned from a newspaper that his daughter had given birth, making him a grandfather. His history complicates any easy faith in technical progress: increased output and private profit coexist with unemployment, violence, and an inventor’s belated sense of culpability.

Unemployment as Administrative Procedure

Fabian’s search for assistance turns the general crisis into a route through offices. After speaking with three officials over two hours, he is told that he has come to the wrong place and must apply at a western branch for office employees. He takes a bus to Wittenbergplatz, only to find that the information was wrong; the office is crowded with unemployed nurses, kindergarten teachers, and stenographers, and his presence as its only male visitor draws attention.

A few numbers farther along, he finds the correct branch in a shop that resembles a consumer cooperative. Unemployed clerks line up before the former shop counter, present their stamp cards, and receive the required verification mark. The queue makes relief visible as a repeated administrative act, not a resolution of unemployment. Fabian notices the visitors’ careful, sometimes elegant clothes and imagines that the required morning visit may be joined to a stroll past the Kurfürstendamm shop windows. Their appearance cannot disclose whether they cannot afford to buy or simply choose not to. They leave holding themselves with the seriousness of people emerging from a dental clinic.

The office’s notices mix practical information with prohibitions. Armbands and transferred tram changeover tickets are forbidden; political debate is forbidden; notices also announce where a nourishing thirty-pfennig meal is available and which appointment days or referral addresses have changed. The repeated movement between what is forbidden and what is announced gives the waiting room the rhythm of regulation and redirection. When Fabian finally presents his papers, the clerk says that propagandists are not usually handled there and directs him to an office for independent professions, scholars, and artists.

Repetition, Contradiction, and the Slogan’s Irony

Fabian travels by bus to Alexanderplatz and reaches another branch near midday. Its mixed clientele may include doctors, lawyers, engineers, agricultural graduates, and music teachers. A small man says he receives 24.50 marks in crisis assistance: divided among his family, that amounts to 2.72 marks per person each week and 38 pfennigs per person per day. He has calculated the sums during his “chronische Freizeit” and says that, if matters continue, he may start breaking in. A nearby young man, who has spent a year in prison, replies that even stealing must be learned.

The small man’s distress becomes more specific when he says his wife cannot even put a piece of bread in the children’s school lunches. Another visitor jokes that free drawing courses teach the unemployed to paint apples and beefsteaks and supposedly feed them through art education; the small man answers that he is a draughtsman himself. The exchange exposes the gap between official provision and need without turning the people waiting into abstractions: their training, family obligations, and calculations remain distinct, even as they share the same economic predicament.

When Fabian cautiously asks whether he can be processed, an official demands his regional employment-office identification and tells him he must register there first. Fabian says he is now going back to where he began his tour five hours earlier, but the official has already disappeared. Against these repeated journeys, the slogan’s imperative to be optimistic reads as deliberate irony. The words promise a posture of confidence; the scenes supply the actual terms of the day—bus rides, wrong addresses, stamped cards, low benefits, prohibitions, and another referral back to the starting point.