Thomas Bernhard

The Cheap-Eaters

Translatedfrom the German

by Ewald Osers

Quartet Books
 First published in Great Britain by Quartet Books 1990
· A member of the Namara Group
27/29 Goodge Street, London WlP lFD

Translation copyright© Ewald Osers 1990

Originally published in German,
copyright© Suhrkamp Verlag 1980,
under the title Die Billigesser

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Bernhard, Thomas 1931-
The cheap-eaters.
I. Title II. Die Billigesser. English
833. 914 [F)

ISBN 0-7043-2766-X

Typeset by MC Typeset Ltd, Gillingham, Kent

Printed and bound in Great Britain
..

at The Camelot Press, Trowbridge, Wiltshire.

. . .

••

.
.:·

..
We look for the design of the world­
we ourselves are that design

Novalis
On his walk to the W ertheimstein Park, taken
for weeks in the early evening, but for the past
three days regularly also before six o'clock in
the morning, for the purpose of his research,
where, in view of the ideal natural conditions
prevailing just then in the Wertheimstein Park,
he had, as he explained, after a long time been
able to return from a totally useless way of
thinking about his Theory of Physiognomy to a
serviceable, and ultimately even extremely use­
ful way of thinking and hence to the resump­
tion ofhis essay which had for a very long time
been put aside because of his inability to con­
centrate, an essay on the successful completion
of which eventually depended a further essay,
and on the successful completion of that actu­
ally yet another essay, and on the successful
completion of these three essays, which had to
be written at all costs, depended a fourth essay
on physiognomy, upon which, as a matter of
fact, depended his future scientific work and, in
consequence, his whole future existence, he
had abruptly and all of a sudden gone, not, as
was his habit, to the Old Ash but to the Old

1
Oak, and, in consequence, come upon what he
called the cheap-eaters, with whom he had for
many years on weekdays, that is from Mon­
days to Fridays, eaten cheaply at the Vienna
Public Kitchen, at the so-called VPK, more
particularly at the VPK in Doblinger Haupt­
strasse. He might quite automatically, as on
previous days, have gone to the Old Ash and
not to the Old Oak, but suddenly he had gone
not to the Old Ash but to the Old Oak, for if,
Koller said, he had gone to the Old Ash on the
day in question he would possibly not have
come across the cheap-eaters but across some­
thing quite different, just as he would certainly,
if he had taken a different route that day, that is
to the Old Oak and not to the Old Ash, he
might have come up against a different, indeed
possibly an entirely opposite subject, upon a
totally different one, he said, from that which he
had in fact come to because he had chosen that
route and not a different one, and thus on the
day in question he had come across the cheap­
eaters because he had gone to the Old Oak and
not to the Old Ash. What at first he was bound
to perceive as an improper interruption of his
thoughts, which for days had again been fully
concentrated on the theory of physiognomy,
his recollection, and the thoughts resulting
from that recollection, of the cheap-eaters
whom he had forgotten for many years, his

2
suddenly downright obsessive occupation with
Einzig and Goldschmidt, Grill and Weninger,
had all at once and in fact quite unexpectedly
proved not only useful to his theory of physi­
ognomy, but positively decisive and perhaps
even providing a fundamental clarification of
essential aspects of this work, the work he had
been intensively engaged upon, uninterrupted­
ly, for nearly sixteen years. His glance at the
cheap-eaters, at first perceived by him as a
barely excusable diversion from his proper
task, had all of a sudden been no less than the
very opposite, that is a glance into the core of
his theory of physiognomy, promising nothing
less than the fulfilment of his life's work. As a
result of suddenly, on his entirely unpremedi­
tated road to the Old Oak and not to the Old
Ash, being confronted with the gentlemen
Einzig and Goldschmidt, Grill and Weninger,
and with a far greater and indeed fiercer intensity
in his mind than in reality, he had all at once,
and with the same suddenness and the same
intensity, had an opportunity to resume his
work, that is his theory of physiognomy, at the
exact point where it had, against expectation,
come to a halt the previous day. Now, utilizing
that unexpected impulse, he, Koller, intended,
as part of his fairly well advanced theory of
physiognomy, to write an essay about the
cheap-eaters, under the title The Cheap-Eaters,

3
and that essay was of fundamental significance,
of the greatest importance, to his theory of
physiognomy. His, Koller's, glance had fallen
on the gentlemen Einzig and Goldschmidt,
Grill and Weninger as The Cheap-Eaters at the
precise moment which today, without further
ado, he could describe as the crucial moment for
his theory of physiognomy. For years he had
no longer thought of the cheap-eaters, and
naturally he had not for a single moment
thought that the cheap-eaters could one day be
of the slightest scientific value to him for his
work; if such a thought had ever struck him he
would undoubtedly have drawn on the cheap­
eaters for his physiognomical reflections at a
much earlier point in time, but as it was, he,
Koller, had pushed the cheap-eaters, like every­
thing else that was inessential or irrelevant to
his researches, out of his conscious mind and
had eventually, in consequence, forgo.tten
them; he was bound therefore, at this moment
in the Wertheimstein Park on his way to the
Oak and not to the Ash, to have been the more
surprised that, of all subjects, the cheap-eaters
should now provide clarity to him with regard
to the theory of physiognomy. He, Koller, had
once more been confirmed in his certain belief
that to rule out coincidences was nonsense,
because surely it had not been a coincidence
that, sixteen years before, he had come upon

4
the cheap-eaters at the very moment of which
he could today state that it represented the
essential, and hence the decisive, intellectual
turning point of his life, and moreover on the
exact day when, after the amputation of his leg
seventeen weeks earlier, he had been dis­
charged from the Wilhelmine Hospital and had
returned to his flat on Krottenbachstrasse, hav­
ing lost his left leg for good through, as he put
it, that equally fortunate and unfortunate dog bite
and, more probably, or quite certainly, as he
said to me, through the fault of the medical
profession. That day, while on his way to the
VPK, and, as he remembered exactly, outside
the post office in Pyrkergasse, he had for the
first time come up against the theory of physi­
ognomy, even before, on entering the VPK a
few minutes later, coming across the cheap­
eaters, and ultimately he owed his theory of
physiognomy solely to what I called his life's
misfortune, to the circumstance which he very
often, in conversation with me, called his life's
good fortune, that the dog of the glass manufac­
turer Weller on that, from my point of view
unfortunate but from his point of view quite
often fortunate, thirty-first October, had bitten
him in the leg, which resulted in his leg having
to be amputated, which in turn resulted in
Weller being also obliged, additionally to the
pension which he is compelled to pay him on

5
the first of every month, to pay him the sum of
two hundred thousand schillings, which had led
him, Koller, who had initially been interested
in a purely scientific career, to all kinds of philo­
sophical ideas and eventually to the theory of
physiognomy. He therefore owed his theory
of physiognomy solely to the circumstance
that on the fortunate-unfortunate thirty-first
October sixteen years ago, he had gone to the
Tiirkenschanz Park and not turned back earlier,
as well as to the fact that the glass manufacturer
Weller had also gone to the Tiirkenschanz Park
at the same time and that the Weller dog had
torn free from the Weller leash and had
pounced on him, Koller, and bitten him. If he,
Koller, had not chosen to walk to the Tiirken­
schanz Park, if for instance he had gone to the
Wertheimstein Park instead, and if Weller had
not gone to the Tiirkenschanz Park at the same
time as Koller, for Weller too did not always go
to the Tiirkenschanz Park but very often also,
like Koller, to the Wertheimstein Park, and if
the Weller dog had not at just that moment tom
free from the Weller leash when he, Koller,
was passing Weller, he, Koller, would never
have come to the theory of physiognomy,
or indeed to any of the philosophical ideas
which had occupied him over the past sixteen
years, and above all not to the theory of physi­
ognomy, on which he had been principally

6
concentrated these past sixteen years. Quite
apart from the fact that the two of them, Weller
and Koller, might have gone to the Wertheim­
stein Park on the day in question, and not to the
Tiirkenschanz Park. He, Koller, said that on
the day of his discharge from the Wilhelmine
Hospital, described by him as ugly and danger­
ous, he had to go to the VPK to come up
against the theory of physiognomy, and he
probably also had to meet the cheap-eaters
solely to this end. He, Koller, had always said
that he owed the theory of physiognomy to the
glass manufacturer Weller and to the Weller
dog and to all the causes and effects of the
Weller dog's bite and quite certainly also to the
circumstance that on the very first day of his
discharge from the Wilhelmine Hospital he had
gone to the VPK and come across the cheap­
eaters. All the circumstances connected with
the dog bite would be the subject of an essay he
intended to write, focused exclusively on that
dog bite. Now, however, he was concentrating
solely on the cheap-eaters who, of their own
accord, had taken centre place in his theory of
physiognomy. For days now he had had no­
thing other on his mind than the cheap-eaters
and he was merely waiting for the moment
when he would be able to sit down and write
The Cheap-Eaters. Once he had written The
Cheap-Eaters he would have written the most

7
important chapter ofhis Theory of Physiognomy,
which, after all, he had had completely ready in
his head, with only the cheap-eaters missing so
far. Because he, Koller, on that first day of
being discharged from the Wilhelmine Hospital
did not know where to go to eat, he had
immediately, and under the understandably
most difficult circumstances, gone to the VPK
and there come up against the cheap-eaters.
Now the cheap-eaters, about whom he had
totally forgotten for such a long period, were
all of a sudden back in his mind because he had
gone to the Old Oak and not to the Old Ash,
and for days now the cheap-eaters in his head
had no longer let him be. On the way to the
Old Oak the cheap-eaters had all of a sudden
forced themselves into his thoughts and had,
little by little, absorbed his entire thinking and
totally excluded any other thoughts from his
head. His whole mind was suddenly taken over
by the cheap-eaters, which was due to the fact
that he had all of a sudden abandoned his habit
of going to the Old Ash and had instead gone
to the Old Oak. What a lot I owe to the
Wertheimstein Park!, he said, though of course
also to the Tiirkenschanz Park!, but as regards
the cheap-eaters and the theory of physiog­
nomy, everything, needless to say, to the Tiir­
kenschanz Park and the Wertheimstein Park.
He had not been going to the Tiirkenschanz

8
Park for many years because with his artificial
leg that was too troublesome, and indeed basi­
cally impossible, as the Tiirkenschanz Park was
situated on much too high ground for his
pitiable condition, whereas the Wertheimstein
Park was ideally situated especially for his
pitiable condition. For years he had been with
the cheap-eaters, eaten with the cheap-eaters
more cheaply than anywhere else, and indeed
more cheaply and better than anywhere else,
because at the VPK he, Koller, had always
eaten cheaply and well, and nowhere could he
have eaten better or more cheaply still. He
actually owed to the VPK nothing less than the
fact that he was then still alive - that I actually
still exist!, he had once exclaimed in my pres­
ence - and that he had survived so many
ghastly Viennese years, and if there was any­
thing in the world that he had to be grateful to,
then he had to be grateful to the VPK, because
he certainly owed his existence to the VPK, and
this meant both his bodily existence and his
spiritual existence, and that he had altogether
come through to the present day and to this
hour, as he put it, and he was not exaggerating
his sentiments when he said that without the
VPK, and without the circumstances in the
VPK, he would quite certainly have long
starved physically and intellectually, and he
would long have ceased to be around, let alone,

9
as he put it, under conditions which enable me to
write the essay which I am writing at this moment,
that is the theory of physiognomy, I would quite
certainly have gone under in the earlyfifties and gone
to the dogs during that worst of all periods, from
which I was saved solely by the VPK, shielded by
the VPK from dying of hunger or thirst, and
snatched from deepest despair, and I may, without
the least inhibition and without hesitation, describe
the VPK as the real saviour ofmy life and ultimately
the preserver of my life. He had not the slightest
reason to conceal what he was reminded of
almost every day of his life. Quite apart from
the fact that it was at the VPK that I came upon
the cheap-eaters, Koller said. No sooner had he
been discharged from the Wilhelmine Hospital
than he had made for the VPK and there come
upon the cheap-eaters; I can still hear, Koller
said, how I addressed the cheap-eaters and
asked their permission to sit down at their
table, and naturally they immediately made
room for me, Koller said. They, the cheap­
eaters, had instantly understood that he, Kol­
ler, was a person who had to be made room for
instantly, even though they could not im­
mediately have realized the full horror of my
situation, Koller said, only that I had an arti­
ficial leg, a prosthetic leg, and that I was not
yet as good at managing my prosthetic leg as
would have been necessary in order to attract

10
less, or indeed no, attention; but naturally I had
attracted the attention of the cheap-eaters first
by my artificial leg, which, as a matter of fact, I
quite naturally, on that first day of my dis­
charge from the Wilhelmine Hospital, was not
yet able to manipulate correctly or in the re­
quisite inconspicuous manner, Koller said; after all,
he had only been discharged from the Wilhel­
mine Hospital that morning and had taken his
first, as he put it, steps into freedom to the VPK,
for where else should I, who was again on my
own and helpless, have gone at the moment
when I felt hungry except to the VPK? The
cheap-eaters had made room for him in the
most obliging way and had invited him, with
the greatest respect, to take a seat, and had
immediately offered him the best place and the
best chair, the so-called window place and the
so-called window chair. Naturally, he had not
expected so much courtesy, he had not been
prepared for that, but the cheap-eaters were so
courteous to me, Koller said, that I could not
suppress my astonishment. For the first time,
Koller said, since my discharge from the
Wilhelmine Hospital, I was confronted with
the public at the VPK and the cheap-eaters
were the first people I got talking to on leaving
the Wilhelmine Hospital, after they had let me
sit at their table, at their regular table, Koller
emphasized, which was said to have been their

11
regular table for ten years. For so many years,
he had then reflected, he had been to the VPK
without taking any notice of the cheap-eaters,
because they had not attracted his attention and
had not seemed important enough for his atten­
tion, but now, on his return to the VPK, he had
noticed them at once. He might have sat down
at a number of other tables, several other
places, as he immediately observed on entering
the VPK, had been free, but he had immediate­
ly, without hesitation, made for the table of the
cheap-eaters; I was, Koller said, instantly, and
while still in the doorway, attracted by the
cheap-eaters, I had to go to their table and to
none other, almost as a matter of course to their
table and none other; the table of the cheap­
eaters at that moment seemed to me the most
suitable table, whereas I immediately got the
impression that all the other tables were totally
unsuitable to me in my present situation, that
most difficult situation imaginable, Koller said;
at this and at no other table, he had thought,
would he sit down, and he had resolutely made
for the cheap-eaters' table and sat down at the
cheap-eaters' table. The cheap-eaters had
attracted him because from them, unlike from
the other people at the VPK, he could from the
outset expect understanding of his situation,
which he had instantly realized because they
had given him the impression that, if he sat

12
down at their table, they would let him be,
which in fact had been a correct assumption, as
they had in fact let him be, even though they
had, with their eyes, examined his artificial leg,
clumsily covered and concealed as it was under
his long trousers, and no doubt wondered
about it, which of course Koller had im­
mediately noticed. But their curiosity, Koller
said, had not been the usual common, mean
and repulsive kind, with which . people like
himself were faced everywhere constantly and
to which they were helplessly exposed in the
meanest and most shameless manner. Never
before had he, who until his discharge from the
Wilhelmine Hospital had always only been
among his own kind, and, in consequence, had
always moved in the most inconspicuous man­
ner, fully realized that he was a cripple, and
what it really meant to be a cripple. The public
had reacted to this fact, that is to his artificial
leg, in the vilest manner, by reacting as it has at
all times reacted to cripples, and it is well
known how it reacts to cripples, Koller said.
But for his first encounter he could not have
chosen anybody better than the cheap-eaters,
Koller said. At that first meeting he did not yet
have to explain to them about how he became a
cripple or about his life generally, Koller said,
because they gave him no opening for any such
explanation; while they were eating and while,

13
during their meal, they were naturally watch­
ing him intently, and above all watching his
artificial leg, and, still eating and in silence,
subj ecting it to a truly thorough and not at all
squeamish scrutiny, they had asked no questions
but, on the contrary, allowed him to eat his
entire meal, his first meal in freedom, leaving
him in peace, so that, during that very meal, he
had decided to sit down at their table again on
his next visit to the VPK, that is on the
following day at the same time, just before
twelve noon; while still eating his meal, which,
owing to the difficult circumstances of his
disability, had naturally been protracted, he
had chosen the cheap-eaters' table also for the
future. He, Koller, was already, though at first
only secretly and to himself, regarding the
cheap-eaters as friends. Naturally, Koller said,
everything might have taken a different turn ifl
had not sat down at the cheap-eaters' table, but
I did sit down at the cheap-eaters' table and not
at another one. The cheap-eaters' table had
seemed to him, as soon as he was inside the
door, to be the only possible table for him, and
that the cheap-eaters' table was in fact the most
suitable table for him had been confirmed very
soon after he, Koller, had taken a closer look at
the cheap-eaters sitting at the cheap-eaters'
table. But even before he had been able to
subj ect the cheap-eaters to a physiognomical

14
examination, he had already made up his mind
to sit down at the cheap-eaters' table whatever
happened, Koller said, he would have sat down
at the cheap-eaters' table even if the cheap­
eaters had not invited him to sit down at their
table at all; unshakably determined to sit at
their table he had entered the VPK. At that
point he could not have had any idea of the
cheap-eaters, because at the moment of his
entry to the VPK, of which, apart from a
kitchenhand, no one had taken any notice, he
had seen the cheap-eaters for the first time,
since those nine or ten years earlier, when he
had been at the VPK and when the cheap-eaters
had also been at the VPK, he had taken no
notice of the cheap-eaters and, for that reason,
had now been unable to remember them. Just
as the cheap-eaters had not been aware of him
until that moment. But he had been attracted
by the four men at the corner table, that is by
the cheap-eaters, in a downright compulsive
way and they had undoubtedly facilitated his
reappearance at the VPK, and their behaviour,
which was in line with their age and degree of
intelligence, had certainly saved him from what
he called a torture of embarrassment by making
no kind of ado about his appearance with an
artificial leg. He had undoubtedly given his
confidence to the cheap-eaters as soon as he
stepped into the VPK and that confidence had

15
not been betrayed by the cheap-eaters, who
had, when he sat down at their table, behaved
just as he had expected them to. Undoubtedly,
while entering the VPK, he must have made an
awkward and pitiful, perhaps even, as he be­
lieved, a ridiculous, indeed a repulsively ridicu­
lous, impression, but surely only on the kitchen­
hand, who was the only one to see him enter
and who in fact recognized him and who was,
naturally enough, surprised to see him, for the
kitchenhand undoubtedly realized that Koller
now, after such a lapse of time, had actually
entered the VPK as a different person from
what he had been in the past, before his
amputation, and the kitchenhand had instantly
turned his whole attention to Koller's artificial
leg, Koller said, because the kitchenhand had
stood at the food counter facing the entrance
and was bound to see Koller entering the VPK,
and he was of course bound also instantly to
notice a change in Koller, though at first he was
unable to explain it to himself; during that
moment the kitchenhand, observing Koller,
was bound to think that something about Kol­
ler had changed - but what had changed - that
he had not of course immediately realized; that
he had realized only at the moment when his
gaze had turned to Koller's legs, and above all
to Koller's left leg, to his artificial leg. The
kitchenhand had nodded to Koller as Koller

16
entered the VPK, stopping in the doorway,
nodded to him briefly and, according to Koller,
nodded to him in such a way that Koller was bound
to feel at once that the kitchenhand realized that
something about Koller had changed in the
meantime, and naturally the kitchenhand, in
line with his youthful years and his high degree
of alertness, had been able at once to observe
what had changed about Koller, because he had
seen the artificial leg, not to mention the
crutches, although Koller, as he entered the
VPK, had dragged these behind him so that
they could not be seen at first. Immediately
after the kitchenhand had nodded to Koller,
Koller had taken a few steps towards the centre
of the VPK and then the kitchenhand had
clearly realized that Koller, re-entering the
VPK now, had an artificial leg, and the kitchen­
hand had thereupon turned his whole atten­
tion to the floor and hence to Koller's artificial
leg, and persisted with that observation as long
as he could, up to the moment when Koller,
with a gesture of his right crutch, made the
kitchenhand understand that he had no wish for
such an intensive and inconsiderate and primi­
tive observation of his artificial leg, and hence
of his misfortune. He, Koller, however, had
not been surprised by that long and intense
observation by the kitchenhand, since the
kitchenhand had remembered Koller with two

17
sound legs and, at Koller's more or less abrupt
appearance, must have been shocked by the
change in Koller, that is by Koller's artificial
leg, and must, for quite a while, have been
preoccupied by this terrible news about Koller,
for when Koller had entered the VPK in the
past he had entered the VPK with a light step
and very briskly, whereas now he entered the
VPK in such a shocking and pitiful manner;
some months ago still in perfect health and in
no way handicapped, and now, as Koller him­
self said, handicapped in the most terrible and
perhaps the most ridiculously repulsive way.
The kitchenhand had instantly registered Kol­
ler's entry into the VPK with the acute presence
of mind of his age, the only one to do so, as he,
Koller, had immediately established, which, of
course, had been agreeable, because while still
in the street outside the VPK he had been afraid
of his appearance in the VPK, afraid that the
people would immediately recognize him as a
cripple and stare at him and for a long time not
let him out of their perfidious sight, that they
would turn his VPK reappearance into some­
thing horrid, which, however, did not happen
owing to the fact that all those in the VPK,
with the exception of the kitchenhand, were
turning their whole attention to the food coun­
ter opposite the entrance, where dozens of
helpings were just being dished out, or more

18
accurately, Koller said, at the moment I step­
ped into the VPK the soup was just being
dished out, and in point of fact Koller had been
able, entirely unobserved and hence entirely
undisturbed by the VPK guests, who of course
were fully concentrating on the soup just being
dished out, to enter the VPK, so that he was
spared the horror of his reappearance in the
VPK, which he had dreaded. No sooner,
however, had he directed his steps, moreover
as quickly as he could, towards the cheap­
eaters' table and, as mentioned above, behind
the backs of the VPK guests though in front of
the eyes of the kitchenhand, than he had been
spotted by the cheap-eaters, who at that mo­
ment were being supplied with soup, and, even
before he had actually asked the cheap-eaters,
was invited by the cheap-eaters to sit down at
their table; the cheap-eaters had invited him,
Koller, in the most obliging manner to sit at
their table, they had jumped up from their seats
and made room for him by moving together
more closely and, as though that was a matter
of course, made him sit at the best place at their
table. The clumsy business of his sitting down
had, naturally, induced the cheap-eaters to
utter a few courtesies, to which, however, he,
Koller, had not responded, he had sat down
and stretched out his artificial leg as fully as
possible, in order thus to relax after this - for

19
his condition - excessively long journey from
the Krottenbachstrasse to the VPK on Doblin­
ger Hauptstrasse, and also by leaning right
back and bringing his artificial leg into a resting
position, all of which, naturally, had compelled
the cheap-eaters to show even greater interest
in his disability and to turn their attention even
more thoroughly to his artificial leg, while he
was attempting, using both his hands, to lean
his crutches against the wall behind him,
which, naturally enough, he did not succeed in
doing; out of sheer fear that the crutches might
fall over, that is fall to the floor, he had leaned
the crutches against the wall so carelessly that
in fact they immediately fell down, which in
turn had caused all four cheap-eaters to leap up
from the table in order to pick up the crutches
for him, Koller, from the floor and lean them
back against the wall, which, quite naturally,
was bound to attract the attention of everyone
present at the VPK, and which they, the cheap­
eaters, did not at once succeed in doing because
they had all pounced so quickly and incautious­
ly on Koller's crutches; several times they, the
cheap-eaters, dropped Koller's crutches back
on the floor, which was bound, eventually, to
attract maximum attention throughout the
VPK, and the cheap-eaters had time and again,
with loud, but to him, Koller, incomprehen­
sible, exclamations been compelled to bend

20
down to his crutches to pick up those crutches
and stand them back up against the wall, which
eventually, after a good deal of time, they had
succeeded in doing, though not without their
downright criminal clumsiness, Koller said, totally
exhausted, their hands so long on his crutches
until finally the crutches remained leaning
against the wall and they themselves could sit
down once more. While they were busying
themselves with his crutches he had been able,
at leisure, as he pointed out, to observe the
cheap-eaters quite closely, and first of all to
subject their physiognomies to a preliminary
detailed scrutiny, though at first, in the dense
kitchen vapours of the VPK, they had been
more or less blurred to him. He, Koller, had
introduced himself to the cheap-eaters, and the
cheap-eaters had introduced themselves to him,
though he had forgotten their names even at
the moment of introduction. He had no mem­
ory for names, never had had any memory for
names. As a result of the cheap-eaters' repeated
and, as Koller expressly stated, frantic bending
down for his crutches the cheap-eaters had been
totally out of breath and had taken a while to
calm down. Although their main course had
already been placed on the table, they were still
spooning up their soup at the slow pace caused
by the incident triggered by him, Koller,
namely that his crutches had fallen to the floor

21
and they had been forced to pick them up,
while continuing to look down at their soup
bowls without even once glancing up at him,
Koller. This had given him more time to study
their physiognomies, and even at the first con­
tact with the cheap-eaters he had realized the
importance of his encounter with them for his
theory of physiognomy. Undoubtedly, that
had been his first thought, they had always
specialized in eating whatever was the cheapest
dish at the VPK and, in line with that thought,
he had, as a matter of course, labelled these
people at the corner table the cheap-eaters, and
thus, from the very start, they had always been
the cheap-eaters to him; they had always eaten
the cheapest dishes to be found at the VPK, he,
Koller, had not been mistaken, they had always
on principle eaten the very cheapest dishes
during the time he had frequented the VPK,
and, like himself, they had never and under no
circumstances ever chosen any but the cheapest
category of dishes, although, as was customary
at the VPK, there was always the choice of four
categories of dishes; even before he had sat
down at the cheap-eaters' table he had had this
impression of the cheap-eaters' persistent con­
centration on the cheapest dishes at the VPK;
this he had been able to read at once for his
own purposes from the very way the cheap­
eaters held their bodies and moved their bodies,

22
subsequently also from the way they held their
minds and moved their minds; they had been
cheap-eaters born and personified, just as he
himself was a born and personified cheap-eater.
Time and again he described their physiog­
nomies as the physiognomies of born and
personified cheap-eaters. The cheap-eaters had
not only mostly, but in fact always, chosen the
cheapest dish, that is the first category, never
the second, the third, let alone the fourth, they
would have been quite incapable of that, Koller
said. Only the circumstance that he himself,
like them, was a so-called consistent cheap­
eater had ultimately and eventually prevented
them from banishing him one day from their
table, that is from the cheap-eaters' table. As it
was, he had, in their eyes, fulfilled the basic
prerequisite and justification for sitting at their
table, at the cheap-eaters' table, from the very
beginning, in that, to them, he was clearly a
dyed-in-the-wool cheap-eater, a fact of which
there was no need to convince them by any
further behaviour patterns. Presumably, Koller
said, the cheap-eaters had, for their part, real­
ized immediately that he himself, just like
them, was to be counted among the cheap­
eaters, and had, from the outset, and at first for
this reason alone and perhaps only secondarily
because of his disability, that is on what Koller
called health grounds, made room for him at

23
their table and, as it were, accepted him in their
midst. But surely, Koller said, he had at first
been allowed to sit at their table on probation
only, even though they realized at once that he,
like themselves, was to be counted among the
cheap-eaters, that he, like themselves, was one
of those who ate cheaply on principle and who,
on principle, attached importance to eating
cheaply, which does not mean that those
people eat less well than others, on the con­
trary. Cheap-eaters are cheap-eaters by convic­
tion, Koller said, by nature, and the cheap­
eaters at the VPK would of course not have
tolerated anyone but a cheap-eater at their
table. The moment he sat down at their table he
had sensed that he would sit at their table not
just that one day, but at least for some time to
come, even though he could not have known
that he would sit at their table for so many
years to come. His place at the cheap-eaters'
table that day had been regarded by him,
Koller, as a permanent place for himself, and
had been taken possession of by him as such a
permanent place. Undoubtedly, Koller said, I
had taken up a permanent place. A further
advantage of the cheap-eaters, one that was
obvious from the very beginning, was that
they, from the outset, displayed no pity for
him, only interest, for he detested pity, but there
was no objection to interest. Instinctively,

24
the cheap-eaters had assigned a task to him at
the very moment he sat down at their table,
even though he could not have known what
task that would be. It had been possible, Koller
said, to read in the faces of all four cheap-eaters
that they could use someone like him at their
table: at least an enrichment, in a manner of
speaking, and a welcome change had come to
their table as he sat down. It was possible,
Koller said, that at the moment of his reappear­
ance at the VPK they had come to a final stop
of their VPK existence and had long been
waiting for something new at their table, for
something that would regenerate them, and
possibly for such an appearance, that is for a
person like Koller, who, because of his outer
self and because of a highly personal inner self,
extremely inadequately concealed by that outer
self, had naturally brought to their table some
novelty, no matter what but an obviously
expected one, and was therefore very welcome
to them. Not for nothing had they, upon
seeing him, Koller, instantly jumped to their
feet in order most courteously to make room
for him, and their efforts with regard to his
crutches had likewise, naturally, not been en­
tirely without reason, and it would be a mis­
take to explain their behaviour solely by his
disability or by the fact that he had been seen to
have an artificial leg and hence by his obvious

25
helplessness. Quite probably, Koller said, they
had been waiting for days, if not for weeks, for
such a moment, for a person exceedingly wel­
come to them to enter the VPK and sit down,
of all places, at their table, for a VPK guest who
was agreeable to them and who would save
them from their undoubtedly prolonged
monotony and lethargy, and a cripple of their
own age and, moreover, a cheap-eater, must
have been exactly what suited them. He, Kol­
ler, was under no deception if he asserted that
the cheap-eaters had been waiting for him,
even though they had known nothing about
him, though they had not been able to know
anything about him, they had long been pre­
pared for him; he, Koller, did not think this an
absurd idea: he had instantly established this in
their physiognomies. Seen like this, it had not
been a coincidence for the cheap-eaters either
that, on the day he was discharged from the
Wilhelmine Hospital, he had sat down at their
table. The vacant place at the cheap-eaters'
table, Koller said, had been vacant for years
because the cheap-eaters had always been able
to reject and rebuff any attempt, no matter
from what quarter, to take that place, and
because eventually, profiting from their - with
time - very effective privileges and hence in­
struments of power in the VPK, they had
managed to keep that place vacant over four or

26
five years for him, Koller, and for no one else,
as he had long believed and now knew, and he
could go so far as to maintain that the cheap­
eaters had over those four or five years only
waited for him, Koller, to enter the VPK and to
assume the place defended by them, but natur­
ally they had had to await all incidents and
events concerning him and hence also the
changes during those four or five years, until
for both him and them the time was ripe for
him to sit down at their table. Naturally, the
cheap-eaters had not acknowledged him as the
fifth cheap-eater from the very first moment,
he had been obliged, gradually, to prove him­
self an equal as a cheap-eater. I was struck by
the acuteness of his recollection with which he
was able to report, or to use his phrase, adum­
brate to me alone his reappearance at the VPK
on Doblinger Hauptstrasse, seeing that this
reappearance at the VPK was now more than
sixteen years behind us, even though, as a
result of his so-called physiognomical studies,
he was bound to have an especially acute recall
and, above all, must have more particularly
remembered the facts relating to the theory of
physiognomy and, to a much greater extent,
the peculiarities of the persons and personalities
communicated to me by adumbration, as well
as their indirect and direct connections. And
the attempt I am making here can again consist

27
only of my recollecting his relevant recollections
and of my adumbrating his adumbrations.
I had spent a lot of time with him recently,
and during that recent time he had talked
chiefly about the cheap-eaters and about how
important the cheap-eaters were for his theory
of physiognomy, which was now fairly far
advanced; how far he did not disclose. Most of
all, however, he had talked about the cheap­
eaters, to whom he intended to devote an entire
chapter of his theory of physiognomy, which,
naturally enough, now encouraged me to write
about the cheap-eaters, whom I never knew
personally at all and whom I briefly glimpsed
only once, to make this attempt solely for the
purpose of clarifying for myself what Koller
had told me, in other words to recollect again
what he recollected, which I now have the time
and the undisturbed leisure to do. He had
repeatedly and very forcefully related to me the
incident when, on that certain day which proved
crucial for him and for his theory of physi­
ognomy, in the Wertheimstein Park, where
during the past year I very often used to accom­
pany him because my interest in his observa­
tions had been growing all the time, he had
gone not to the Old Ash but to the Old Oak,
relating this to me in his typical and invariably,
if not philosophical then at least philosophiz­
mg, manner and with his characteristic

28
mathematical thoroughness, which he had
acquired over the years, just as in his presence I
had always felt that over the past years he had
altogether worked himself through to a mathe­
matical way of thinking, in which he continu­
ally and indeed ceaselessly, and no matter in
what context and with regard to what subject,
he had trained himself; I certainly nearly always
had the impression that whatever seemed to
pass through his mind could, for him, be
deciphered and resolved only in a mathematical
way. The fact that, as a result of the Weller
dog's bite, he had been snatched from his, until
then, probably predetermined career and, for a
relatively prolonged period, been condemned
to physical inactivity, was bound, almost auto­
matically and in fact entirely logically, to man­
oeuvre him into an increasingly philosophical
way of thought, naturally by the roundabout
route of, initially, philosophical speculation,
which, at the moment when he was forced to
regard his disability as permanent, naturally
turned into philosophy and thereupon, logical­
ly, into a mathematical decipherment of that
philosophy, without him becoming aware of
this chain of events in his mind in all its
implications. Whenever during that recent
period I accompanied him to the Wertheim­
stein Park he had found it impossible when
near the Old Ash, or when near the Old Oak,

29
not to revert to the circumstance that on that
day in question, for whatever reason, he had
gone not to the Old Ash but to the Old Oak, as
though ultimately and finally everything that
followed upon that decision was based upon
that decision, and I always felt that his thinking
altogether was divided into thinking before that
incident, when all of a sudden he had gone to
the Old Oak and not to the Old Ash, and into
thinking after that incident, which invariably he
also put into words and which at first always
used to irritate me somewhat but eventually
and finally ceased to bother me, because all of a
sudden, with regard to him, it seemed to me
plausible. Before the incident, he very often
said, expecting me to know what incident he
was referring to, he had been in this mood or
that, after the incident in this mood or that, and
above all, as he very often said, his way of
thinking before the incident had been totally
different from after the incident, which prob­
ably was altogether the most important inci­
dent of his life, as I more and more clearly saw
and realized and was forced to realize. All
threads, all connections in his mind, had linked
up together in the Wertheimstein Park as if at a
centre of his thinking, and everything in him
was based on that, I believe. The Wertheim­
stein Park had, from that incident onwards,
become the absolute switchboard of his thinking,

30
regardless of where he happened to be at any
time after the incident. He once hinted to
me that even his dreams had become unthink­
able without the Wertheimstein Park from the
incident onwards and that all his dreams could
always be reduced to the Wertheimstein Park
exclusively; naturally he had very often mis­
trusted this circumstance but he had invariably
come up against this fact whenever he took the
trouble of pursuing such a dream, just as
whenever he had pursued no matter what
business, that business too had proved reduc­
ible to the incident in the Wertheimstein Park,
and it had become a matter of course for him to
pursue anything of any importance and to
reduce it quite unquestionably to the Werth­
eimstein Park. This procedure, which was
possibly crazy but very probably conducive to
sharpening his thinking, of resolving every­
thing he was about to think and first of all
reducing it to the W ertheimstein Park, and
only thereby really clarifying it, was bound to
benefit his scientific work, and he himself was
aware of the usefulness of his exercise, since the
progress made by his thinking in consequence
was very clearly to be seen in his observations,
that is the great advance which he had made in
recent years on the basis of this possibly absurd
method. Discourse with him and conversation
generally had thus, with time, reached a very

31
high degree of difficulty, but for that very
reason had become the more refreshing.
Admittedly, any outsider suddenly coming
into contact with him must have thought he
was dealing with an advanced lunatic, and I
myself felt bound to think so for a long time,
but years of contact with him and with his
thoughts taught me that this was not so. Sud­
denly I was made to feel ashamed of my
doubts. When, after a certain but no longer
accurately definable time, my eyes were
opened, it was I who had to be his disciple and
riot, as I had believed for far too long, the other
way round. The incident had liberated him, and
from the incident onward he had been able to
assert his will and to count on what he called its
intellectual consequences. For a long time I had
believed that I was the one from whom he was
profiting such a lot, who was helpful to him in
every respect in his helplessness and was a
support to him, until I discovered that this was
true in reverse order, for in truth it was he who
had been more useful to me than I to him,
certainly in what he called the intellectual respect.
But there is no room in these papers for a
further or more detailed exposition of this
relationship. To me it had always been of the
greatest interest to watch how he was able,
from day to day and from subject to subject, to
advance in his thinking with greater clarity and

32
with less ado, how he was persistently able,
with the greatest honesty and simultaneously
ruthlessness, to derive a profit from this
method peculiar only to him and hence from
his type of thinking. And that such a procedure
had been possible for a person who had not
exactly been pampered by nature. If I ever
admired anything then it was the mental atti­
tude of that man, who, of the two alternatives
open to him after the dog bite and after the
amputation of his leg, the one being to give up
and the other to squeeze the greatest possible
intellectual capital out of his misfortune, had
decided in favour of the second, of squeezing
out the intellectual capital. After all, we en­
counter almost exclusively persons disabled by
nature, that is through their misfortune, who
have given up, and there are very few of whom
we can say that their misfortune has led them to
triumph, to intellectual triumph, as Koller once
said. In Koller I was able, gradually, to study a
person on whom, and in whom, eventually,
and altogether exclusively, an interest in think­
ing could be observed. It has to be said that
relations with such a person are naturally im­
possible in the long run. We can approach such
a person but, as we come into contact with
him, we are repulsed. Such a person quite
simply does not tolerate us and repulses us.
This quite simply explains the fact that such

33
persons, who are concerned solely with their
thoughts and indeed exist only through their
thoughts, find themselves, progressively, in
total isolation, in which they think and inten­
sify their thoughts and ignore anything outside
their thoughts until they are crushed and stifled
and destroyed by that passion . We are familiar
with examples. Koller practised such a fatal
procedure in exemplary fashion. Eventually
everything in and about him was only thought,
and insufferable. I had approached him, but he
had repulsed me, I continually approached
him, but he always repulsed me. But we'll
leave that aside. Basically, at least from that
incident onward, from the dog bite, he had
divided the substance needed for his life into
useful and useless, into substance useful for his
mind and for his thinking and into substance
useless to his mind and to his thinking, allow­
ing the useful into his mind and into his brain,
but not the useless. From that incident onward
he only knew this and no other mechanism of
processing his life. His disability had given him
the justification for the continuous and uninter­
rupted and lifelong practice of that mechanism,
nature in the shape of the Weller dog had
enabled him to turn the misfortune of the dog
bite into his good fortune and into his sole
intellectual subject and, at the same time, intel­
lectual universe and hence intellectual triumph,

34
he said. Before that incident he had always
repulsed me, who had been at primary and
grammar school with him, after that incident he
had always attracted me whereas he had been
repulsed by me. I might say that now, after that
incident, he did not allow me to make use of
him. He now had no intention of sharing with
me. Now, after that incident, which, however,
had not yet become the incident for him, as he
realized only very much later, he had enjoyed
all those opportunities which I had not enjoyed
either before that incident or after that incident,
all the intellectual opportunities which suited
him. The dog bite had wide opened up to him
that way of thinking, his thinking, which until
then had been shut to him. Now, naturally
enough, he wished to take over that thinking
on his own and extend it for himself to the
extreme limit. And at precisely that extreme
limit (of his thinking) he had, finally and at the
crucial moment, been confronted with the inci­
dent to which all other, previous, incidents,
including that to him until then most important
incident, that of the Weller dog biting his left
leg, were related, that is his going to the Oak
and not to the Ash at the very moment which
in fact became for him the intellecutally decisive
moment. The moment, of course, when he
came upon the cheap-eaters, upon and subse­
quently right into the centre of his theory of

35
physiognomy, which from then on he de­
scribed exclusively as his life's work and no
longer merely as his life's task. I myself have
always been a VPK regular, but never a total
cheap-eater, because I have never and nowhere
eaten cheaply on principle, not even at the
VPK, and I had no right ever to call myself a
cheap-eater, and besides I had always gone to
the VPK in Herrengasse and never to the VPK
on Doblinger Hauptstrasse, because it had al­
ways been too troublesome to me to get to the
VPK on Doblinger Hauptstrasse, but I have
easily and thus without any trouble, and indeed
very often, been to the VPK in Herrengasse
because I am always more often in the Inner
City than in the Nineteenth District, in contrast
to Koller who, if only because of his disability,
almost never went to the Inner City and always
almost exclusively kept to the Nineteenth Dis­
trict, which however does not mean that, like
him, I did not feel at home exclusively in the
Nineteenth District, just as I invariably, when
asked, instantly and naturally answer that I am
at home in the Nineteenth District; if indeed I
am at home anywhere in the world then it is in
the Nineteenth District, which is more familiar
to me than any other, and in fact there is no
spot, however unknown, in the Nineteenth
District, that I am not familiar with, and I am
familiar with virtually everything in the

36
Nineteenth District, and the Nineteenth Dis­
trict has always been my favourite district;
Koller too had time and again stated that the
Nineteenth District was his favourite district
and none other, even though, unlike myself, he
only came to the Nineteenth District much
later than me, only upon starting grammar
school, the Gymnasium in Gymnasiumstrasse,
where I first met him. Strictly speaking, I first
met Koller not at the Gymnasium but in the
pharmacy in Hasenauer Strasse, where I had
gone to collect a medicine prescribed for my
chronic sore throat, admittedly on my way to
the Gymnasium but nevertheless at the phar­
macy, which Koller and his mother had entered
ahead of me, also for the purpose of collecting a
prescription, though of course I no longer
remember now what medicine Koller had col­
lected then, but I assume that it was medication
for the continuous inflammation of his eyes,
from which he has suffered as long as I have
known him. Even then I had noticed Koller's
eye inflammation, caused by his (as he then
called it) scientific reading, which occupied him
day and night and, naturally, strained his eyes
more and more as time went on and produced
his chronic eye condition; this reading, which,
as I remember, was, even during those years
at the Gymnasium, what is known as natural sci­
ence, whereas I at that time was concerned very

37
little with literature, and hardly at all with
scientific literature; in contrast to him, who
from the outset was obsessed by literature, I
had a downright dislike of books, no matter
what books they were, a still intensifying, and
eventually quite pathological dislike of any­
thing written or printed, and therefore, in
contrast to him, scarcely opened myself to
what is called the world of the intellect, on the
contrary resisting that so-called world of the
intellect with all the means at my disposal, and
hating the Gymnasium and anything connected
with school education; the very last thing
would have been for me to open myself to the
world of the intellect when I even abhorred the
Gymnasium, which I had only reluctantly
agreed to attend. My parents wanted to force
me into what they called the world of the
intellect, but I did not, for a moment, comply
with their wish, which was bound eventually
to make them resent me and, in point of fact,
make them bitter towards me in the course of
my secondary-school years, while Koller's
parents never had to exert even the slightest
pressure on Koller in that direction, because he
himself, with all the means at his disposal, had
hurled himself into what he called the world of
the intellect, that is into the world of writing
and books. That was the most conspicuous
difference between Koller and myself, that he

38
not only had a liking for the world of the
intellect and had entered that world of the
intellect unreservedly and passionately while I
really hated the world of the intellect and for so
many years resisted that world of the intellect,
certainly resisted it while I was attending the
Gymnasium and a good while beyond. Koller
had wanted to conquer the world of the intel­
lect by himself, I had no kind of interest in that,
to me all efforts in the direction of the world of
the intellect had always seemed too pathologi­
cal and contrary to my nature, whereas for him,
Koller, they were not only right but an existen­
tial need. Nowadays I wonder whether even
then, during those years at the Gymnasium,
everything within Koller had not prepared
itself for the fact that he, Koller, the exclusive
man of intellect, as I have always called him,
would one day, or literally overnight, have to
exist solely with that world of the intellect, of
course it is easy to conceive such an idea in
retrospect when it has long been confirmed.
The fact is that Koller had very early, probably
a long time before his Gymnasium years, chosen
the road of the intellect, while there was no
question of that in my own case. To me he had
always been the man of intellect and the man
with eye trouble, while I had always been
described by him as the man of sentiment and
the man of action, very often and at delicate

39
points of our contact as the healthy one, while he
described himself as the sick one, and very often
as the mentally sick one, which term, however,
he had always understood as a distinction over
such people as myself, who had always seemed
to him ordinary and who, ultimately, had
remained incomprehensible; by using the term
the mentally sick one for himself he had always
held a lever of power in his hand (and in his
head), which he might use ruthlessly against
me from time to time. Even at the Gymnasium
he saw himself as the man of intellect and as the
mentally sick, and hence more distinguished
than myself. All his life he despised people who
could not, like himself, boast of an eye com­
plaint, and indeed, in retrospect, everything in
him has been so planned that, in addition to his
eye complaint, he must inevitably move up into
that higher state of being a cripple, and the fact
that one day he lost his left leg, and moreover
in such a significant manner through the Weller
dog at the Tiirkenschanz Park, where his world
of the intellect, as he once put it, culminated in
the most natural, yet at the same time most
complicated manner, subsequently proved en­
tirely natural and logical. The fact that he had
suffered with his eyes since earliest childhood
and that he subsequently, as a grown man,
additionally became a cripple in effect lent him
what he called a superior consecration of the

40
intellect and a dignity of the intellect which
none around him could ever again overlook.
From the moment of his disability those
around him were kept down and indeed
oppressed by his contempt and were unable to
escape his contempt no matter what they did.
He had always despised people who had none
of what he called lifelong sacred illnesses and
always placed them in a very low category,
contact with whom, and especially intellectual
contact, was for him a demeaning, if not a
dirty, and always at the very least a character­
weakening business. He felt sorry for the so­
called healthy ones, because, in his view, they
never emerged from the lowlands of absolute
mental dullness and because they were con­
demned to remain in their common mental
dullness all their lives, no matter who they
were or what they did, and he despised them
quite openly and always seemed to derive
enjoyment from his contempt of those miser­
able, worthless, mind-destroying creatures, as he
actually once remarked to me. Probably, he
once said to me, thanks to the Weller dog I had
the crown of my existence placed upon me, on
the day in question, he said, I had actually gone
to the Turkenschanz Park for my coronation,
to be crowned by the glass manufacturer Wel­
ler. On that thirty-first of October my life's corona­
tion took place, he once said to me. He could

41
have hoped for no greater distinction that that
crowning of his existence by the Weller dog at
the Tiirkenschanz Park. Very few, he said,
were granted such an exceptional coronation,
but naturally even he, at the moment of that
coronation, had failed to realize the full extent
of such a distinction; to realize this, some time
had to elapse, but then the person so disting­
uished in such an unusual manner would stand
there in his glory, amazed. The most pitiable
person, he said, was suddenly triumphant over
the others, who did not see the crown upon his
head because they were too stupid to do so, and
simply too ordinary and also too common, in
fact anything but men of intellect. It now seems
to me as if everything in Koller had been
developing towards a goal, and his whole life
towards nothing other than his idea and his
science, at first towards the idea and then
towards science, finally only towards science,
his natural science, his study of physiognomy,
without himself initially being within that
awareness, aware of this sole and all-excluding
willpower. From the beginning his nature had
been different from mine, which he had not
even once been willing or able to accept, be­
cause, as he once put it, he had to decline such
humiliation for himself. The intellectual nature
in him had, from the beginning, ruled out any
road other than the intellectual road, as he

42
himself realized very much later, when there
could have been no longer any return for him
from that intellectual road. I do not believe
either that it was a coincidence that I first met
him at, of all places, the pharmacy in Hase­
nauer Strasse, a circumstance which he was
convinced was the diametric opposite of coinci­
dence, that is a precisely precalculated point in time
and intersection of our existences, and he had very
often linked his thoughts and oriented his
speculations to the circumstance that the
pharmacy in Hasenauer Strasse had been our
first point of contact. He very often enjoyed
tracing his own path and his own origin as far
into the past as possible and back again, and
trying the same experiment on my existence in
order from time to time to prove to me, and to
himself, that both his and my existences had
developed with complete mathematical accu­
racy and logic; ultimately he invariably only
wanted to prove to me how unsatisfactory my
result was in contrast to his own, never omit­
ting to point out that his development had been
an intellectual one, while mine had been a
development diametrically opposed to an intel­
lectual one, and that he was naturally compel­
led to assess his own intellectual development
very highly, while mine, from his point of
view unintellectual, had to be assessed very
lowly and derogatorily, and he never refrained

43
from making this clear. I always only saved
myself from this depreciation of my existence
by quite simply, from time to time, breaking
off contact with him. Thus there have often
been months, and even years, between our
encounters. Sometimes I felt that I had neither
the nature nor the strength to let myself be
destroyed by him, who in fact was naturally
superior to me. My relationship with him had
always gone very far, but never so far that I
would have given myself up, even though very
often it looked as though he demanded that I
gave myself up and totally submitted to him.
Thus my relationship with him also was a
continuous effort not to be subjected and des­
troyed by him, because such people as charac­
ters demand nothing less than that a person
subject himself to them unconditionally, sur­
rendering himself and consenting to his own
annihilation, and thereby annihilating himself.
Very often I had resolved to withdraw from
him completely, to part from him for good,
but time and again certain strange logical cir­
cumstances had prevented this, though ultimate­
ly, as I believe, always circumstances that were
purposefully logical to him rather than to me.
At times, and repeatedly, I had been afraid of
him, always a well-founded fear, though today
I can no longer fully explain it to myself. The
moment when I first met him in the pharmacy

44
in Hasenauer Strasse had caused me, for what­
ever and for however many reasons, to surren­
der myself to him, this was obvious at a very
early stage. He depended on a person who was
subject to him; this inevitably bound, indeed
chained, me and my existence - not perhaps
wholly but certainly to a high degree - to his
existence, because that willpower emanated
from such a strong and unconditionally demand­
ing character like Koller. In point of fact, the
initiative of our relationship almost invariably
came from me, and on the first day at the
Gymnasium Koller flatly rejected my request to
let me sit next to him - instinctively, as I now
realize. Thus snubbed by him and sitting two
rows behind him, I could not of course, at the
time of this brusqueness, have any idea about
its causes and for a long time suffered from the
fact that he had rejected me, indeed suffered for
several years. All the time that I knew him I
always hoped to stand to him in a closer than a
merely superficial relationship, in some deeper
shared confidence, but his nature did not allow
him to comply with my request, which poss­
ibly even seemed to him an improper sugges­
tion; while I continually attempted an
approach, quite openly showing my wish to
attach myself to him also in a deeper intellectual
relationship, and while he did all he could to
thwart all these attempts and wishes on my

45
part, relations between me and him could never
be those desired, deeper ones than they were in
the nature of things, given the many years of
our contact. He had been reluctant to let me
share in his thinking, and he let me participate
in his experiences only to a certain degree, one
that was not harmful to him in any way. At the
same time he did not have a closer or more
intimate relationship with any . classmate at the
Gymnasium, or, as I happen to know, with any
person other than me, this, though he never
said so in so many words, he repeatedly admit­
ted. He became estranged from his parents, as I
happen to know, at a very early stage and he
was not a person whom others might approach
in a natural manner, all his life he himself was
the main obstacle to all human relationships
and his existence was based on this fact, the
contrary would inevitably have weakened him
incurably and painfully and ultimately des­
troyed him. He had been disposed by nature to
follow an intellectual road, as he himself called
it, and that meant nothing less than that he had
to follow it entirely alone. But he was born to
live and exist for this highest of all degrees of
difficulty. I have never since come. across an
instance of greater logic or consistency in that
respect. He must have had the impression, all
his life, that he had to sojourn in a world which
contained nothing but failures, who had failed

46
in the face of the first major degree of difficul­
ty, either because they were not destined by
nature for such an intellectual road, that is for
such a degree of difficulty of living and ex­
isting, or because they had not considered
exposing themselves to such an intellectual
road, that is to such difficulties of living and
existing. In so far and because he was very well
aware of how these matters were interrelated,
he was entitled to follow his intellectual road,
and he followed it, and followed it more con­
sistently than anyone else. The world around
him, of course, had been a lifelong accusation
to him, but the world around him never
bothered him in that respect, and hence the
accusation never bothered him; all his life he
had felt responsible only to himself, and all his
life he exhibited, with regard to himself, a very
high so-called sense of responsibility, this he
proved daily and indeed ceaselessly in all his
actions and utterances. It is hardly surprising
that such a person must every other moment
come to the extreme limit of what is bearable,
both to himself and to others. For years the
cheap-eaters had been his only contacts, but
even the cheap-eaters had, naturally, come no
closer to him than the limit which he had
erected against them, and hence against him­
self, for the sake of his science, his natural
science, and finally just his physiognomy, at

47
the exact point where he wished to remain
absolutely undisturbed and on his own, and the
cheap-eaters, while he was in contact with
them, had ultimately, for many years, though
still unconsciously, been nothing other than
material for his thoughts, that is for his science,
material for his intellectual and scientific pur­
poses, quite simply nothing more, all those
years, than scientific material demanding his en­
tire interest, material that had become obvious
and clear to him at the moment when all of a
sudden in the W ertheimstein Park he had gone
not to the Old Ash but to the Old Oak, at the
moment of the incident to which, after that
incident, everything else had related. At the
very point when, instead of advancing, he had
all of a sudden been faced with nothing but
hopelessness (in his mind) with regard to his
science, the cheap-eaters had come to his aid on
his way to the Oak (and not to the Ash) and
had thereby saved his work and hence himself.
Naturally, before the incident, he had been
quite unable to perceive the real significance of
the cheap-eaters, they had been to him no more
than a daily sanctuary among other human
beings, from whom he had long separated, con­
sistently separated for many years, for the sake
of his science, from which, and from no other
source, he had always derived his existence.
For many years the only people he tolerated

48
had been the cheap-eaters, no one else, even
I had lately avoided him, and only on the
way to our taverns, he to the VPK on Doblin­
ger Hauptstrasse and I to the Divine Eye on
Nussdorfer Strasse, would we ever meet,
almost always at the same spot, where our
paths crossed. We would then stop and have
some conversation, but in the nature of things
this would only be a so-called physiognomical
conversation, which, whenever we met, would
be picked up by him, Koller, and continued
precisely where it had been cut short by him,
Koller, at our last encounter. For a while he
would talk about his theory of physiognomy
and then abruptly break off our conversation,
which of course by then consisted only of him
talking at me and me standing there silent, as
brusquely as ever, without bothering about
me. He would quite simply turn on his heel and
move on. He no longer even took the trouble
to utter a word of farewell. I was by then used
to being ill-treated by him in this manner.
There had been times, of course, when I
dreaded an encounter with him, and I quite
deliberately avoided him whenever I no longer
felt strong enough to encounter him. He had
always demanded more than I was able to give
him, just as from everyone else, whom,
however, he had progressively dropped or who
had dropped him. I myself, however, never

49
 .
thought for a moment of withdrawing myself
from him totally, which probably I would not
have been able to do because, after all, I under­
stood him and because, even though he was
intolerable and insufferable, he had been close
to me. Not until this past week had he appeared
to have drawn closer to me, and a few times we
had sat together at the Divine Eye, but he,
while I was eating at the Divine Eye, had of
course only drunk a glass of beer because he
had eaten earlier at the VPK, and although I
had always wanted to pay for his drink he had
never allowed me to. There, at the Divine Eye,
he had then explained to me the cheap-eaters as
the central chapter of his theory of physiog­
nomy. It was his habit and a matter of course to
him to sit with his back to the wall, and always
with his back to the wall in such a way that he
could view the whole room, he absolutely
tolerated no other place than one from which
nothing could escape him in the room where
eventually, and laboriously as always, he had
come to sit down, and we naturally sat in such
a way at the Divine Eye that he could not miss
anything, which in fact was not easy at all
because the Divine Eye was always full.
Evidently he had suddenly taken a liking to
meeting me at the Divine Eye in order to
explain the cheap-eaters to me, for it had been
he who initiated these meetings at the Divine

so
Eye. And I had no objections to these meetings
at the Divine Eye because I too was interested
in the cheap-eaters, and the manner in which
he, Koller, expounded the cheap-eaters to me
had, all of a sudden, once more become that
fascinating manner I used to admire in him in
the past. It was as if he had suddenly found a
subject again which captivated him beyond all
others, and in effect he had suddenly found his
subject owing to the fact that on the day in
question he had gone to the Old Oak and not to
the Old Ash, that subject being the cheap­
eaters, about whom, naturally, he now had to
talk and talk because, as he once said himself,
thinking and being silent about them would
probably have soon driven him mad, and I had
been welcome to him as a listener. He needed
people around him in order to be alone, just as I
do, and the Divine Eye had always been ideal
for me, as had the VPK for him, for the
purpose of being alone, more ideal than the
cafes which in themselves are ideal for being­
able-to-be-alone, and I have probably always
gone to the Divine Eye for the same reason as
he to VPK on Doblinger Hauptstrasse. For a
long time the Divine Eye had been the venue
without which I was unable to exist, just as he,
Koller, was unable to exist without his VPK,
even though in actual fact he really detested the
Divine Eye just as much as I detested the VPK

51
on Doblinger Hauptstrasse, he could never be
convinced about the Divine Eye just as I could
never be convinced by his VPK, where I should
never have found anything which made the
Divine Eye an existential necessity to me, j ust
as he had never found at the Divine Eye that
which had become, as it were, his daily need at
the VPK. Once he actually said that he was a
VPK person to the ultimate degree, while I was
a Divine Eye person to the same ultimate
degree, and it was obvious that he assessed the
so-called VPK person very much more highly
than the so-called Divine Eye person. How­
ever, during this past week of our relationship
these reflections had no longer been of any
significance. He had entered the Divine Eye not
only without resistance but with conspicuous
pleasure, each time he had encouraged me to
take him along to the Divine Eye. Possibly he
had suddenly come to like that self-denial
which enabled him to enter the Divine Eye,
moreover along with me, that was what it
looked like. The reason, of course, was instant­
ly obvious: at the VPK there was no one whom
he could lecture on the cheap-eaters, because to
lecture on the cheap-eaters to the cheap-eaters
would indeed have seemed to him the peak of
absurdity and would indeed have been totally
impossible, hence, not having anybody else for
this to him vital purpose, he must have hit on

52
me, and that was what made him practise the
self-denial of entering the Divine Eye along
with me in order to lecture to me on the
cheap-eaters, he simply had no alternative,
because he realized that he could not now
dispense with a person for his lecture on the
cheap-eaters and that, basically, I was the ideal
person and listener, no one else would have
ultimately been suitable for it, no one else
would have made himself available to him for
this discourse, no one else would have agreed
to his experiment. The high degree of self­
denial on his part is readily perceived if one
bears in mind the dislike which, for so many
years, he had entertained for the Divine Eye
and which he had always displayed quite open­
ly, if only for the purpose of offending me.
Because for many years I had encouraged and
invited him to come with me to the Divine
Eye, and he had refused and by his refusal
always also mocked me. He had always hated
the Divine Eye and had always included in that
hatred all the people who went to the Divine
Eye, logically therefore also me, and with the
same intensity with which he loved his VPK.
But now he had to bring himself to enter the
Divine Eye, of which he had once said that he
would never in his life and under no circum­
stances ever enter it, because it was repulsive to
him more than anything in the world, yet the

53
suggestion one day to go to the Divine Eye had
not even come from me but from himself, I
could hardly believe my ears when he express­
ed the wish. The people at the Divine Eye had
of course recognized him, because he was a
familiar figure to all of them, even though they
could not know much about him, because in
the entire Ninth District he was altogether
easily one of the most conspicuous figures, one
of three or four cripples who moved about the
Ninth District by day and who attracted gener­
al attention to themselves, one of three or four
extraordinary celebrities in the Ninth District,
so to speak, who could be recognized from afar
by being cripples and by the manipulation of
their crutches, though Koller was certainly the
most conspicuous of them all. Thus everyone
at the Divine Eye had immediately turned their
heads towards him as I entered along with him
for the first time, and it was obvious that they
had recognized him and also that they realized
very well that he was a VPK person and not a
Divine Eye person, and they were utterly
astonished to see the VPK person Koller enter
the Divine Eye and actually settling down at
the Divine Eye. That they would have never
thought possible. Naturally they could not
suspect the reason for this totally sudden extra­
ordinariness. The waiter had been more cour­
teous to him than I have ever known him to be

54
before and actually hung up Koller's crutches
for him on the wall, well aware of the fact that
if he leaned them against the wall they would
fall down again instantly, and he had most
carefully pushed a chair under Koller and
spread a fresh tablecloth for him, which had
never happened before at the Divine Eye, even
though the waiter, as soon as Koller entered the
Divine Eye, realized that Koller would not
order anything to eat but would merely drink
something. As a VPK person Koller could not,
at the Divine Eye, let himself be humiliated to
the extent of ordering something to eat at the
Divine Eye. Similarly he would have had to
take it as a humiliation to have the glass ofbeer,
which he had ordered, paid for by me, this he
had made clear immediately he sat down, that
he would himself pay for his glass of beer, and
on that condition alone had he come along with
me to the Divine Eye, about which he had
always commented in anything but positive
terms. Of course he had only entered the
Divine Eye with circumspection. While sitting
down and while, as mentioned before, the
waiter was pushing a chair under him, he had
established that the table was wobbly and he
had, for an appreciable time, accusingly though
scarcely perceptibly, rocked the table, so that
the waiter, having pushed a chair under Koller,
had been obliged to slip a beer mat under one of

55
the table legs, and to that end the waiter had
been obliged to bend down, and bend down
until eventually the table, ceaselessly rocked
one way and the other by Koller, wobbled no
longer; Koller had evidently enjoyed, even
before launching out on his lecture on the
cheap-eaters, to establish, and draw attention
to, a number of more or less serious shortcom­
ings at the Divine Eye, one after another, and
he had made a start on this by drawing the
waiter's attention to the wobbly table, but the
moment the waiter had straightened up again
Koller had pointed out to him that the pictures,
which hung on the wall of the Divine Eye,
were all hanging crookedly; he, Koller, natur­
ally did not expect the waiter immediately,
during Koller's presence, to straighten up all
those crooked pictures, representations of
mountain villages and of peasant types in those
mountain villages, he, Koller, made no such
demand at all, but in the long run, he actually
said in the long run, these crooked pictures on
the wall would get on his, Koller's, nerves, all
his life he had detested crooked pictures and
always avoided rooms with crooked pictures;
to me, once the waiter had gone, he then said
that there were in fact two categories of people:
one would feel nothing upon seeing crooked
pictures, while the other would despair, and
one could instantly spot whether a person

56
belonged to one or the other of these two
categories, the one who does not mind crooked
pictures on a wall, or the other, who is even­
tually driven insane by the fact of pictures
hanging crookedly on a wall, and he, Koller,
belonged to that second category, but naturally
he was not entitled to demand, especially at the
Divine Eye, that the waiter straighten up the
pictures. He next found fault with the foul
atmosphere at the Divine Eye, which, in a
manner typical of the Divine Eye, contrasted
with the exceptionally good atmosphere at his
VPK, the Divine Eye staff did not air their
place all day, he said, while the VPK staff
frequently aired theirs, but then this bad anti­
intellectual air, this anti-intellectual lack of
oxygen, which was typical of the Divine Eye
crowd also suited the Divine Eye crowd. In
such a foul air, he, Koller, said, thoughts were
being stifled at their very emergence, and quite
certainly could not develop, and the primitive
person was not aware of this and felt comfort­
able at the Divine Eye because he was not even
conscious of the anti-intellectual nature of the
Divine eye atmosphere. He, Koller, had to do
his utmost to pull himself together in order to
be able to develop any ideas here, at the Divine
Eye, but ultimately this did not cause him any
difficulties because he was entirely aware of the
actual conditions at the Divine Eye, unlike the

57
Divine Eye crowd, who were never aware of
the conditions prevailing here, at the Divine
Eye, a fact which these people proved by their
very presence at the Divine Eye. He had en­
tered the Divine Eye for my sake, he said. I had
to think, inevitably, that for a long time, over
so many years, he had always only done any­
thing for his own sake, hence, contrary to his
assertion, he had now entered the Divine Eye
along with me for his sake alone, and indeed he
suddenly behaved as if he had forgotten that it
had been his suggestion to me, and not mine to
him, to go to the Divine Eye, but naturally I
could not believe that he had forgotten it, for
naturally he had not forgotten it. Anything,
once in contact with him, was instantly sub­
ordinated to his purpose, and to be continually
aware of this was of course an advantage to me.
He had taken only a single gulp of his beer and
had leant back and stretched out his artificial
leg, and had at once been in the midst of his
subject, his physiognomy, naturally by then
exclusively about the cheap-eaters. As I
observed him, leaning back at first in complete
silence, withdrawn into himself and exceeding­
ly tense, reassuring himself on whether I was
really worthy, and at the same time capable, of
following his expositions which were about to
be made, and whether I had actually and truly
understood everything he had so far explained

58
to me about his life's subject, physiognomy, a
man past forty and, strictly speaking, long
departed from the world and withdrawn into
his most personal thoughts, that is on his life's
subject, which meant everything to him while
everything else really meant nothing any long­
er, I was compelled to reflect that it did not
seem to be such a very long time since he had
entered the Gymnasiumstrasse pharmacy, his
mother holding his hand, to collect a prescrip­
tion for his chronic eye inflammation. The
youth that he was then had, about him and
within him, all the advantages which nature
might bestow on a young person, and, taken all
in all, he had seemed to me a very successful
example of a young, and indeed a really attrac­
tive and fortunate, person, who instantly
attracted me in the most unique and definitive
manner. I had regarded myself as far less
favoured by nature and far less fortunate, even
though I was certainly aware of my good
points. In Koller, however, I had from the start
admired the person fortunate by nature, in
whom everything was disposed in the most
natural way and for whom there was nothing
but the fairest prospect for the future. I was
holding as many trumps as possible in my hand
(and in my head) , but Koller seemed to be able
to outtrump me and indeed do everything that
was desirable. I envied that person from the

59
very first moment, and of course he was bound
to notice that. I have often thought that, if he
had not existed, I would undoubtedly have
been top of the form; as it was, I always had to
come second, all the time I knew him. Natural­
ly there was a time when I tried to overtrump
him, but very soon, and then permanently, I
gave up that (from the outset pointless) attempt
and reconciled myself to the fact that, from the
moment he entered my life, I had to be the
number two. Had I not encountered him, had I
not, on that first day at the Gymnasium, gone to
the pharmacy, I now believe that, probably all
my life, I would have been top; as it was I lost
that chance forever through the circumstance
that I entered the pharmacy in Hasenauer
Strasse at the same time as Koller, for his part,
entered the pharmacy. His presence, from my
point of view, very soon only had the task of
weakening me, while he himself, through the
fact of my existence, was able to intensify
himself more and more, and to the extent that I
was being weakened by him he was able to
strengthen himself through me and, by being
in the position at a very early stage to realize
this process, to do so with the greatest matter­
of-factness, ruthlessness, as I now realize, and
determination. From the beginning it had been
an interaction between the two of us, from
which he profited to the highest degree, while

60
I, in the same proportion, was being weakened
by him and indeed oppressed. During those
very few moments when, that time at the
Divine Eye, he assured himself of my atten­
tion, of my perceptive capacity, for which he
needed but a single glance at me, cast by his
acute mind, I became fully aware of my posi­
tion with regard to him, in those few moments
all those years from starting at the Gymnasium
to the present day, as I was sitting facing him in
exactly the same situation as then, to surrender
myself totally and utterly to his ruthlessness, as
always, to his experiment of misusing me for
his scientific purpose, with all the important
and crucial images illustrating our relationship
passing before my mind. I had no need, that
time at the Divine Eye, to question why, what
in other words was the reason for nature to
turn the young man he had been thirty years
ago into what he was for me now, at the Divine
Eye, to turn the handsome, in every respect
attractive and enviable, person into this abso­
lutely repulsive cripple and person of the spirit.
Pitiable, and simultaneously repulsive, as his
appearance now was, it was more than obvious
that he had prevailed. He was even more able
now to be triumphant, and, as he probably also
realized, with good reason. After all, long
before the Weller dog had bitten him in the leg
and suddenly made him a cripple, he had

61
secluded and isolated himself; the fact that the
Weller dog bit him had only confirmed him in
his own resolution to seek seclusion and isola­
tion, for the sake of his thoughts. It would not
be an absurd idea to assert that he wanted to
provide also a clearly visible sign of his own
uncompromisingly adopted decision to submit
totally, even then, to his, more than anything,
physiognomical thinking by consenting to such
a mutilation as the way they actually mutilated
him, or, to put it with some exaggeration, that
he disfigured his body and subsequently quite
simply more or less destroyed it for the sake of
his spirit, because in him, Koller, it was more
clearly obvious than in anyone else that he truly
was his own work, in every respect. For his
mutilation and disfigurement, and his repellent
aspect eventually quite natyrally stemming
from that mutilation and disfigurement, had
also been his instruments of power, and prob­
ably his most important ones, which he em­
ployed always and everywhere and which he
had never been ashamed to employ even where
it was in fact improper and vile. I would go as
far as saying that he had actually attracted the
Weller dog at the Tiirkenschanz Park by his
willpower, and possibly moreover considered
the consequences of an actual bite by the Weller
dog, before the Weller dog had even pounced
on him, and smce, as he repeatedly said,

62
coincidence must be ruled out, the Weller dog's
bite must have had its place in the Koller con­
cept even before it was in fact executed. After
all, Koller once said that the Weller dog's bite
had in fact been his, Koller's, doing, and I
would not wish to doubt the serious nature of
that remark in particular. The glass manufacturer
Weller had proposed a settlement, but Koller
naturally had let the matter go to court and,
just as naturally, had won the action, moreover
completely and down to the last detail to his
own, Koller's, advantage. This he, Koller, had
very often pointed out, and not without pride.
Koller had so invested the two hundred
thousand schillings which Weller had to pay
out to him that the value of this amount never
in fact declined, and it was of course, as he
called it, his principal support, but he had never
touched that two hundred thousand. But even
if I allow for all that, I am still bound to think
that basically he was a pitiable person, also a
pitiable person. He was his own product just as
he was the product of his upbringing, of his
parents, whom actually he never acknow­
ledged as his parents, he had always refused to
talk of parents, and when he spoke of his
parents he had never said mother or father,
although of course his mother was his mother
and his father his father. He despised the
parental concept, he hated anything to do with

63
family, naturally, and theyword origins actually
always nauseated him. He had always found it
impossible to enter into a family, he never did
so all the time I knew him. He despised like
nothing on earth any so-called sense of belong­
ing together. He dreaded the mass in every
respect. An outsider, he had isolated himself
even while still at the Gymnasium and not
allowed himself to be lured into any kind of
community. As for so-called school outings, he
had always been a reluctant participant, he had,
to the best of my memory, finished the Gymna­
sium only under constraint because, as he very
frequently said, it had been directed totally
against his nature and, above all, against his
head. He had had to expend a high proportion
of his energies on resisting the Gymnasium and
its mechanism of destruction, resisting school
as such, which, opposed to the nature of each
individual, existed solely to undermine and
destroy the nature of each individual and pro­
gressively annihilate it. He had always de­
scribed the teachers and professors as mere
henchmen of that nature-undermining and
nature-destroying and nature-annihilating
machine by which ninety per cent of intelligent
mankind was annihilated every year. Unless a
person used a major part of his energy, and at a
very early stage, to oppose mass insanity, he
must unavoidably become a victim of stupidity,

64
he said. In order to survive, however, one
always had at the same time to cope with
history as a mass and with the present as a
mass, and only very few succeeded in doing
that. The individual, strictly speaking, always
had everything pitted against him and he al­
ways had to cope by himself against everything
in a process which, naturally, would always
only be a lethal process. Life or existence, he
said, was nothing but a ceaseless and actually
uninterrupted desperate attempt to save one­
self, in every possible respect, to save oneself
from everything right into the future, which
time and again opened up only that same
infinite lethal process. The mass, after all,
rejected even thought, not to mention think­
ing, because otherwise it would be instantly
destroyed and we would be dealing with a
totally mindless mass which, basically, was
against nothing except always against thinking.
Once born, he had been compelled to sever
himself from his so-called parents and from
that whole humanity sticking to those parents,
step by step but consistently and eventually
definitively, if he was not to be mortally
ashamed confronted with his own mind. Sit­
ting now at the Divine Eye, facing him,
observed by him and, as I realize, actually seen
through by him, I was able, in the span of a few
brief moments, to trace his development and I

65
was shocked by the cruelty of the logic of that
development. At the same time he was prob­
ably aware of my position and clear about
which way I had developed, but this has no
place in these notes. In the same measure that
he had withdrawn from the world and hence
primarily from society, having quite simply
denied himself to it, I had been drawn into that
world and into that society; I have long, in his
presence, been exposed to the accusation of
having yielded to that world and to that so­
ciety, through intellectual weakness, actually
also through spinelessness, of having been
absorbed by it, and ultimately sucked in by it,
and, as he once put it, destroyed by it in the
meanest manner; that accusation I have not
been able to escape since. The mere fact that I
embarked on my occupation (as a bank em­
ployee), or indeed any occupation at all, was
something he was never able to forgive, but he
also said on one occasion that, just as his
development had been predictable and in itself
logical, so had mine, even though in an exactly
opposite direction. On the other hand, he once
talked about this, and indeed at great length,
and I had the impression that he was expound­
ing to me a downright essay on the subject,
that he himself would have been too weak for
my development, just as I always had to think
that I was too weak for his development. From

66
the instant of birth onwards, he said, he had
taken up the struggle against the mass, whereas
I had betrayed myself to that mass at that very
same instant of my birth. Ninety-nine per cent,
he said, betray themselves to the mass at the
instant of their birth. The man of intellect,
however, had to take up the struggle against
the mass, at any rate, at the instant of his birth,
confront the mass, take issue with the mass,
that alone legitimated him as a man of intellect.
Whoever yielded to the mass, if only on a
single point, had already surrendered himself as
a man of intellect and was no man of intellect.
That a man of intellect, by the nature of things,
always had the mass ranged against him and
therefore unavoidably, put bombastically, all
mankind - that was obvious. But it was equally
obvious that only a very few ever took up the
struggle against the mass and against mankind,
and even of these very few most failed from the
outset. But even to remark on that struggle
against the mass was something monstrous
and, for a while at least, what qualified a man
of intellect. Ultimately they all failed, even
those who struggled against the mass and hence
against stupidity all their lives, even those few
would one day be devoured by the mass and
made common by it, though the mass now and
again erected monuments to them or concreted
memorial plaques into the walls of their

67
houses, he said. All of them, including the ones
who fought against it and who thereby fought
against stupidity, had after all come from that
mass and it was therefore only logical and also
natural that they should be devoured again by
that mass. He, Koller, however, demanded
nothing more on his road from the mass back
into the mass than that he might make this
lifelong detour in the frame of mind appropri­
ate to him. His so-called parents, he said, had
never had any claim to him, they had even,
throughout their lives, avoided a sense of guilt
at having procreated him and had thereby
committed a double parental crime: the first of
having made him, and the second of having
suppressed what he called their natural crime.
They had succeeded in the experiment to make
him, he said, but now he was having his
revenge on them for having made him the
instrument of the meanest, if the most natural,
experiment by exposing them by his own
development and by condemning them, time
and again, all his life and ceaselessly. As he was
entitled to his own development, he was also
entitled to be against the mass, to be against
everything ifhe felt like it, and he did feel like it
continually and ceaselessly, he drew his exist­
ence from nothing else. His parents' crime
against him had given him the opportunity of
creating for himself the exact existence that was

68
appropriate to himself, and he had in fact
created the existence appropriate to himself.
Likewise he was not accountable to anyone and
he always kept only to his own and to no other
laws. Naturally a person such as he must find
himself in all kinds of conflicts every other
moment, which surely was only natural and
consistent. He was, he once said, obsessed by
himself and had to cope with the consequences
of that, and, even though he continually and in
fact ceaselessly was coping with the conse­
quences of that, he still always remained him­
self, and so forth. Naturally he could never
have been anyone else, just as I could never
have been anyone else, because we know what
history is, he said. Actually, he had never
wished to be anyone else, whereas I have very
often wished to be someone else. I have very
often wished to be him, but he had never
wished to be me. He had remained himself all
his life, I believe, as I have remained myself,
but he had always remained himself more
consistently though just as logically as myself.
He had never actually been a victim of his
insecurity, whereas I have very often been a
victim of my insecurity. Now, facing him at
the Divine Eye I realized once more, and very
clearly, why I, with regard to him, had natural­
ly always been the number two. The defeated
was facing the man who was no longer very far

69
from attaining the real goal of his life. I could
still hear the sentence with which he had en­
couraged me to go at once to the Divine Eye
tavern, a sentence which mentioned an initia­
tion into a matter more important to him than
anything else and of a more or less philosophi­
cal nature, the sentence he had spoken to me
after having called me across to him from the
opposite side of the street, his right crutch
raised high, and I, as always, had instantly
obeyed him, I had automatically, as I am
compelled to think now, obeyed his command
to cross the road and then go to the Divine Eye
along with him; often during the many years of
our being together, I had intended to disobey
his commands, no matter for what, and time
and again I had obeyed his commands,
moreover instantaneously, I had had no choice,
his commands quite simply had to be im­
plemented, I had been unable to escape his
power of command. It was a case of explaining
to me the central point of his essay on physiognomy,
he had kept that essay to himself quite long
enough, the moment had arrived when he quite
simply could not restrain himself any longer, at
the very moment when he intended to seek me
out for the purpose of explaining to me the
central chapter of his physiognomy I had
crossed his path, he was just then thinking of me
and it was of course no coincidence that I was

70
now, at that moment, standing by his side, the
whole matter was so important to him that he
might even decide to accompany me to the
Divine Eye, even though he had once sworn to
himself never to enter the Divine Eye in his life,
the cheap-eaters were more important to him. I
had in fact been on my way to the Divine Eye,
later than usual, and I was therefore entitled to
say to myself that he was coming to the Divine
Eye with me and not I with him, although of
course he was of the opinion that I was going to
the Divine Eye with him, and that even after I
had enlightened him on the fact that I had in
any case been on my way to the Divine Eye, I
had only been held up by an acquaintance, a
businessman from Paradisgasse, whom he did
not know, otherwise I should have long been
sitting at the Divine Eye, and would he, Koller,
mind if, during the time that he delivered his,
to him so important, philosophical explana­
tion, I got on with my meal, I had said to him,
and he had agreed; never before, I thought
then, would he have agreed to such a presump­
tion, that is that he would have a philosophical
discourse with me over a meal, but he had
probably had no choice and had been forced to
agree, and so, without further argument and,
as it seemed to me, much too rapidly for his
condition, had walked down Billrothstrasse
and entered the Divine Eye. On entering the

71
Divine Eye he had remarked several times that
the fact of his entering the Divine Eye was a
low memorable event, which, however, he per­
mitted himself for the sake of his physiog­
nomy. I was not to conclude from the fact that
he had now entered the Divine Eye along with
me that he now approved of the Divine Eye, he
had not changed his opinion of the Divine Eye,
circumstances had compelled him to enter the
Divine Eye, my sudden appearance, the fact
that I had been on my way to the Divine Eye
and that he had not been able to postpone his
lecture to me any longer, it naturally had cost
him the greatest self-denial even to think of
entering the Divine Eye, to settle down at the
Divine Eye among all these dull-witted, anti­
intellectual carnivorous and herbivorous Di­
vine Eye people whom he justly despised. Just
now, however, he had arrived at the point at
which he had to disclose to me his information
on the cheap-eaters, then and not a moment
later, and, just as if every minute, if not every
second, mattered to him, he had actually pushed
me into the Divine Eye, indeed he had placed
his right crutch into my back as we were
entering the Divine Eye as if afraid we were
entering too slowly and that he might in the
meantime lose some of the intensity of his wish
to lecture me. Of course, the crowd at the
Divine Eye had made room for us, wherever a

72
cripple appears room is made for him, and
Koller's appearance at the Divine Eye had
produced, upon everybody at the Divine Eye,
such an obliging effect, in every way, which
naturally meant that room was made for him
and also for me as a matter of course. To
explain the cheap-eaters to me at the Divine
Eye, of all places, he was bound, these were his
own words, to feel was a case of sacrilege. But
he would have no opportunity of communi­
cating and expounding the cheap-eaters to me
at any later time, that is not at the Divine Eye.
Having sat down he was, naturally during
those first few moments, in no condition to say
anything, because the walk along Billroth­
strasse down into Nussdorfer Strasse and into
the Divine Eye was bound, in the end, to exhaust
even him who, despite his artificial leg, had
chosen a disproportionately rapid pace and he
was obviously embarrassed at me, now that he
had settled down, observing him in his exhaus­
tion, because of course he was a person who
could scarcely tolerate such observation and I
did not restrain my observation of his exhaus­
tion, on the contrary I utilized this observation
for my thoughts about him. By the time I had
ordered my food, not the cheapest since I was
now with him, the VPK person, at the Divine
Eye, he had recovered and his observation of
my person had quickly become more intense

73
than my observation of his person, and our
actual relationship was thus restored. By way
of introduction, as it were, he had again spoken
of his experience, of the fact that suddenly,
while in the Wertheimstein Park, the most
beautiful and the most important of Vienna's
parks, he had not, as had been his habit, he
said, gone to the Old Ash but to the Old Oak
and had thus, in this manner typical of his
thinking, come upon the cheap-eaters, that he
had all of sudden thrust into the centre of his
philosophy. I was the only and in fact the most
suitable person, and of course character, he
said, for his lecture. Surely I was aware, he
said, that he kept up with a few others from our
common school and university years, but none
of these was suitable for this purpose. It was of
course clear to me that, contrary to his own
statement, he had not, over the past few years,
kept up any contact whatever with the school
and university colleagues he had mentioned,
because for a long time, indeed for many years,
he had not kept up any contact with any human
being whatever, apart from the cheap-eaters,
whom he had seen every day at the VPK on
Doblinger Hauptstrasse but who, when all was
said and done, were only thought material, that
is philosophical material for him and no partners
in this respect. He had never, he said, talked to
any person as he was talking to me, surely that

74
must make me think that I occupied a very high
point on his scale. And about the cheap-eaters,
which were something entirely new for him
too, he had not so far spoken to any person at
all. For years I have been with the cheap-eaters,
and more intensively together with them than
with any other person, and in point of fact
more regularly than with anything else, he
said, and all of a sudden these cheap-eaters,
whom I never assumed would mean to me
more than my daily more or less welcome,
more or less irritating or attractive or unattrac­
tive fellow-eaters, these very cheap-eaters are
now the most important thing in my intellectual
work. He had been more surprised than anyone
else at failing, for so many years, to recognize
the true value of the cheap-eaters, because over
the years he had been with them he had been
convinced of their common mediocrity and (to
him) so-called intellectual worthlessness. Pre­
cisely that mediocrity and insignificance and
so-called intellectual worthlessness, however,
had attracted him. If he had assessed them as
anything but quite common and hence insigni­
ficant and worthless to him, and therefore
mediocre, they could of course never have
attained the significance and the importance
which they now had for him. Even now Koller
could not refrain from pointing out that he had
not come upon the cheap-eaters by coincidence.

75
First of all, he said, before starting on his
lecture proper, he wanted to introduce the
individual cheap-eaters and for the first time he
uttered the names Einzig and Goldschmidt,
Grill and Weninger, not without having first
established if I did not by any chance know,
possibly be personally acquainted with, any of the
cheap-eaters, to which I replied in the negative.
After all, he said, it was possible that I knew
one or the other of the cheap-eaters, though
this would have been hardly likely, seeing that
the cheap-eaters were, as he said literally, the
most inconspicuous people. As I did not know any
of the cheap-eaters he had an even better prere­
quisite for his further discourse than if I had
known one of the cheap-eaters, which might
easily have been the case as the cheap-eaters
came from the Nineteenth District and,
moreover, were resident in that area of the
Nineteenth District which was more familiar to
me than any . other, and I had indeed been
astonished that I did not know any of the
cheap-eaters because I had always been under
the impression that I knew most of the people
in the Nineteenth District, if not personally
then at least, as the saying goes and is always
being said, by sight. And I do not know
anybody who walks more observantly through
the Nineteenth District than myself. For dec­
ades I used to investigate my favourite district

76
with the greatest attention, its streets, its av­
enues, its squares, its parks, its people. No place
in the world is more familiar to me. If I have
felt at home anywhere in the world, then I have
always only felt at home here in the Nineteenth
District. This is where I grew up, this is where
I belong. Except, of course, that I had always
been interested in something different from
him, that I had always also seen something
different from him, as he was bound to believe,
in order to assert himself, only the surface. But
that, in the nature of things, he penetrated
more deeply into everything than I did I cannot
deny, he always had different prerequisites and
different objectives from me, my interests were
confined within narrow bounds, my obj ectives
were never so far-reaching. Besides, I had not
chosen a scholarly road but, as he had always
called it, an ordinary, mediocre one, while he
had from the outset been destined for a so­
called extraordinary one. His existence,
moreover, had always been a much more peri­
lous one, the abysses into which he gazed had
undoubtedly always been deeper, the heights at
which he existed always much higher, most of
the time no doubt vertiginous, for which I
lacked all prerequisites. Even now, sitting
facing him at the Divine Eye, I could not close
my eyes, did not wish to close them, to those
facts because those facts had continually been

77
ever-present to me in his company and had been
the most striking characteristics of our relation­
ship. The line drawn for me by nature had
always been described by him as a simple line,
while the one which he had drawn for himself,
and moreover against nature, and ultimately
even against his own nature, as he once re­
marked, had been a complicated one. From the
beginning, he said, his intellectual capacity,
whether inherited or not, had been greater than
mine, and he had been able, in the course of
time, to increase that intellectual capacity in a
way to suit himself, by always working to­
wards the increase of that intellectual capacity
he had, step by step, acquired the skill of
increasing that intellectual capacity, and even­
tually perfected that skill, and he actually once
remarked to me that, in order to make provi­
sion for all so-called intellectual devaluations
and hence intellectual emergencies, he had in­
vested his intellectual assets at all possible loca­
tions (in his head) , that in fact he had, at a very
early stage, done everything to make provision
for an unforeseen intellectual indigence, so that
he could at any time have recourse to those
well-invested intellectual assets and be there­
fore intellectually fully independent. He had
always been shocked by the fact that most
people expended their intellectual assets very
early and found themselves, unexpectedly and

78
all of a sudden, faced with nothing, so that for
the rest of their lives they vegetated on their
so-called intellectual subsistence minimum.
Just as merchants invested money, so men of
intellect should invest ideas, and just as a
merchant would watch the course of his busi­
ness, so the man of intellect should watch the
course of his thinking; the merchant would
watch the stock exchange, the man of intellect
the ideas exchange. In this respect the thinker
should act just like the merchant, and, needless
to say, the more shrewdly the better, and
neither the merchant nor the thinker need be
ashamed of acting in such a manner. But just,
as we know, there were only a few top mer­
chants, so there were only a few top thinkers.
As for himself, he had from a very early age
decided not to follow any advice, no matter
from whom, indeed he had made it his rule to
do just what he had been advised against, what
he had been warned against, and it had invari­
ably, though often very much later, turned out
that he had acted correctly by not following
any advice, and not only in a general respect
but also in respect of the intellect. The man of
intellect had to make it his downright pre­
requisite and his principle not to follow any
advice or, at least, to do the exact opposite of
what he was advised to do. Obstinacy right
from the start, developing it more and more,

79
even if it meant totally antagonizing his parents
and his environment, and ultimately even the
total antagonizing of absolutely everything
was, naturally, something the man of intellect
must not flinch from. Right from the start, he
said, he had never made things too easy for
himself, or at least had always tried not to make
things too easy for himself, seeing that every­
one was of course ceaselessly being seduced
into making things too easy for himself, and in
effect everyone was time and again and con­
tinually making things too easy for himself. He
had, even as a child, possibly at first still quite
unconsciously, resolved to live at the highest
possible degree of difficulty, which to this day
he had never failed to do. From the beginning a
child is forced, first by his parents and then by
his teachers, along roundabout routes and in­
deed also along devious routes, steadily and
continuously diverted from his objective, in­
duced to renunciation, yet he had been able
from the start to dig his heels in against that
tendency and ultimately to resist it, it was not
he who had eventually been forced into renun­
ciation but his parents and his teachers, who at
a very early stage and presumably, as he said,
mortally wounded, had withdrawn from him.
First it is a struggle against parents and then a
struggle against teachers that has to be waged
and won, to be waged and won, moreover,

80
with the utmost ruthlessness, unless the young
person wants to be forced into resignation by
parents and teachers and thereby to be des­
troyed and annihilated. Society, he was talking
about human society, was constructed in such a
way that it diverts a young person from his
path, destroying and annihilating him, and if
we look around we do in fact see nothing but
young persons being diverted from their paths
and being destroyed and annihilated. Very few
have actually joined the struggle against their
parents and waged it to the utmost and won it,
or have fought against their teachers and won,
that is fought against society and won, and
thereby, as men of intellect, won everything.
The man of intellect would be well advised,
from the very start, to oppose parents and
teachers and society and altogether everything
in order to, first of all, free himself completely
from those parents and teachers and from that
society, in order, with time, to be able to
observe them and judge them truly and closely
and mercilessly, which, after all, was his task
above all others, that was what, even though
without his consent and actually against his
will, he was here for. A man of intellect could
have no other justification. Only after a
thorough scrutiny of the situation, that is of
the conditions then prevailing at the Divine
Eye, had he come round to discussing the

81
cheap-eaters, not without having first subjected
also my person, meaning my condition, to an
equally thorough scrutiny. The physiognomies
of all four cheap-eaters, Koller said, had been
fundamentally and logically moulded by the
cheap-eaters' decades-long visits to the VPK,
all four had, before anything else, what he,
Koller, called a VPK physiognomy, that is
primarily that VPK physiognomy and only
then their own quite individual native physiog­
nomy, grown on their faces in the course of
their lives, independently of the VPK,
ceaselessly and indeed continually produced on
their faces by their history and by the whole
world and natural history. Increasingly,
however, their VPK physiognomies had come
to the fore and their very own individual ones
had at the same time receded; it was on this
statement that everything he intended to pro­
pound now was based, it was this statement
primarily that had made the cheap-eaters the
central point of his theory of physiognomy and
had made the cheap-eaters, more than any
other example, the ideal one for his purposes.
Of course he might have gone with me to the
Wertheimstein Park and expounded the cheap­
eaters to me there, but on the way there he
would probably have lost the intensity needed
for his discourse; nothing, as I was well aware,
was more fragile than such a complicated

82
scientific subject as the cheap-eaters, indeed it
was supremely difficult to keep such a subject
in one's head for any length of time, let alone to
keep it for another person as well, and so, quite
naturally, he had been compelled to request me
to go with him to the Divine Eye, he actually,
and not just once but several times, said request
me to go with him to the Divine Eye, he had to
demean himself to make such an, as I realize,
undignified utterance in order to expound the
cheap-eaters to me, because to the Wertheim­
stein Park it would have been at least twice as
far as to the Divine Eye, for a moment he had
also considered going to the Zogernitz Casino,
a place well known and familiar to both of us,
but he was afraid that at the Zogernitz Casino,
where I in particular had been a daily visitor for
many years, always more or less content with a
cup of coffee and the latest newspapers and the
company of what I called the Zogernitz regu­
lars, who also were a group of people out of the
same mould, and are so to this day, just as the
VPK crowd and the Divine Eye crowd, and the
suggestion had initially come from him to go
to the Zogernitz, where I had always enjoyed
more advantages than in any other restaurant in
the Nineteenth District and, whenever I go
there, still do, quite apart from the marvellous
garden and the ever fresh Wienerwald air in
that garden of the Zogernitz, but he, Koller,

83
had suddenly been afraid of meeting just that
crowd at the Zogernitz who had been most
repugnant to him lately, that is what he called
the old Zogernitz crowd who have sat in the
Zogernitz day in day out for decades and over
the years have become a human category of
their own, one which was even more repug­
nant to him than the Divine Eye crowd, be­
cause, as he put it a few times, they had, at first
for his political views and with time also for his
consistently pursued scientific work, which the
Zogernitz crowd, so he said, were in the habit
of describing, to his face, as a crazy fad -

anyway, he had for years entertained the

deepest hatred for precisely that Zogernitz
crowd, a continuous hatred which over the past
three or four years had sprung from, as he
believed, their infamous dislike of him, a
hatred he called a continuous intellectual
hatred, because, as he said time and again, they
envied his existence, that is the circumstance
that he was in receipt of an annuity which in
fact gave him lifelong security and was
moreover, each month, adjusted to the so­
called cost ofliving and was hence of absolutely
immutable permanent value, and also the cir­
cumstance that this was actually, directly and
not indirectly, an annuity from the glass manu­
facturer Weller, indeed the Zogernitz crowd
had gone as far as envying him for being bitten

84
by the Weller dog, because they, as they had
allegedly pointed out to him every other mo­
ment, had had to work hard all their lives, and
were still working hard in their advanced age,
having to earn their daily bread to this day by
rather heavy work, whatever that was, while
he, as it were by the accident of the Weller
dog's bite, had been freed from having to earn
his daily bread and, in a manner of speaking,
had fallen buttered side up owing to the
circumstance that on the day in question he had
gone to the Tiirkenschanz Park and not to the
Wertheimstein Park, and could now, com­
pletely carefree, indulge his craziness. The
Zogernitz crowd, with whom in the past, as I
happen to know, he had had a rather good
rapport, had, from a definite moment on­
wards, turned against him, they had suddenly
found fault with everything about him and,
with their unjustified accusations, not left him
alone, so that he had abruptly stopped going to
the Zogernitz, being compelled to stop going
there, in order� as he described it, not to be
destroyed by the Zogernitz crowd, because it,
the Zogernitz crowd, he said, had from that
moment onwards had nothing else on their
minds but the destruction of his person, first
defamation and then distortion and then the
destruction of his person and hence of his
existence, against which he had only been able

85
to defend himself by his sudden non­
appearance there, which meant by the total
suspension of his visits to the Zogernitz, from
that certain moment onwards the most danger­
ous of all people, to him, had been the Zoger­
nitz crowd, if I was to believe what he had so
often told me. It had pursued his defamation
and distortion and destruction, he said, from
the precise moment when he had treated him­
self to a steamer trip to the Wachau and from
the moment when he had, for the very purpose
of this Wachau trip, that is the steamer trip
from Vienna to Melk and back again, pur­
chased an English raincoat which had cost
twice as much as a comparable coat of Austrian
manufacture. They had just stopped short of
begrudging him the Wachau trip, but they had
begrudged the English raincoat, he said;
guilelessly, as he had then been vis-a-vis the
Zogernitz crowd, he had in his excitement told
them about the Wachau trip and moreover,
what had been his biggest mistake, displayed to
them his English raincoat, and this they had
been unable to tolerate. The fact that he could
afford the trip to the Wachau, which in fact he
had never even made because on the day before
setting out he had been taken ill with influenza,
and that he had moreover bought the English
raincoat, actually a very elegant Aquascutum,
had instantly, and actually in a manner most

86
harmful to him, Koller, made the Zogernitz
crowd realize that, with regard to his income,
he was greatly superior to them and that his
opportunities had always been greater than
theirs. In the Zogernitz crowd, he said, he had
been able, in addition to all the other qualities
to be gauged from the Zogernitz crowd, to
study envy. For many years he, Koller, had
actually had a much more intensive contact
with the Zogernitz crowd than with the VPK
crowd, he had felt attracted to them mainly by
their infinitely higher intelligence, he said, be­
cause the Zogernitz crowd had in fact been
more intelligent than the VPK crowd and
hence more intelligent than the cheap-eaters,
besides he had been able, at the Zogernitz, to
read and study the papers undisturbed, which
had never been possible at the VPK because the
VPK had never had any newspapers, which
was due to the fact that the Zogernitz had
always been a cafe, whereas the VPK had
always been just an eating place, but all of a
sudden his planned and booked (though never
in fact undertaken) Wachau trip had brought
about his break with the Zogernitz crowd,
bound to bring it about, Koller said, because
naturally I could no longer have anything to do with
people who envied me for my annuity, who even
envied me for a ridiculous trip to the Wachau and
who even begrudged me an English raincoat. But he

87
had always missed the Zogernitz, very often
wondered in his mind whether he should not
go to the Zogernitz again, because by stopping
his visits to the Zogernitz he had had to forgo
so many (to him) valuable conveniences, even
apart from the newspapers, such as the Zoger­
nitz garden and discourse with the Zogernitz
owner, a woman, which had yielded so many
valuable suggestions for his scientific work,
altogether the whole intellectual atmosphere of
the Zogernitz, but eventually he had resisted
the temptation every time and straight away,
for his self-esteem's sake, dropped the idea of
entering the Zogernitz again. For years his
thinking had been adjusted to the Zogernitz
crowd and had been trained in that habit, down
to the moment when, through the circum­
stances above-outlined, if not fully explained, it
had become impossible for him to go to the
Zogernitz, and for months he had been irritated
by the fact that going to the Zogernitz was now
out of the question for him. It had taken more
than a year for him to resolve to give up the
Zogernitz and in consequence the Zogernitz
crowd and to content himself with the VPK
crowd and hence with the cheap-eaters, which,
he said, naturally meant a step down, but
ultimately also proved a great advantage to me,
because now his eventually mind-destroying
vacillation between the Zogernitz crowd and

88
the VPK crowd was at an end and he had fully
concentrated on the VPK crowd and hence on
the cheap-eaters. Entering the Zogernitz had
become even more impossible for him now
than ever before: that crowd with their hatred
of me and primarily with their hatred of my
ideas, with their hatred of all projects import­
ant to me, would ruin me, destroy me, in no .
time at all. It had therefore been entirely natural
that at the moment he met me he suggested
that we go to the Divine Eye, which in itself
had meant some self-denial, at least an obstacle,
he said. At first he had been reluctant to make
the suggestion, he had not been sure if I would
agree to such a suggestion, which he had in fact
made by way of an imposition, an impossible
suggestion, he said, after all, he had also de­
tested the Divine Eye, indeed, though for
different reasons, no less than the Zogernitz,
but he could not have expounded the cheap­
eaters to me out in the open; that explanation
could only have taken place within a closed room,
and naturally only in a cafe or in a tavern, and if the
Zogernitz was out of the question there really
only remained the Divine Eye. However, he
had just then been in such an almost patho­
logical state of tension, and thus in such a tense
mental and physical state, that, the moment I
reacted to his suggestion, he had forced me to
enter the Divine Eye at once, he had been

89
determined to do that, without much thought,
let alone reflection, and, besides, he had been
embarrassed because of his shabby clothes, his
torn trousers, his dirty j acket, which the week
before, because of his violent movements, had
split at the seams, and ofhis whole physical and
mental condition generally. But he had had no
choice other than to call out to me across the
road and suggest that we go to the Divine Eye.
After all, I knew what he was like and I realized
that it would have been useless to refuse, the
moment he caught sight of me I was at his
mercy. But when all is said and done, I had no
objection to going with him to the Divine Eye,
even though, once I was directly facing him,
I immediately realized that he was in an ex­
tremely nervous and therefore dangerous state.
I could not have refused him unless I wanted
to be struck by him, I know that. I have often
witnessed him physically attacking people who
refused to obey him, I too had been struck by
him with his crutch on several occasions. I have
always put up with it because I knew him and
because I wanted to help him get out of his
state, which naturally was always a pathologi­
cal state. However, while in such a state it was
better that he did not come up against anyone
not familiar with him or his state, but that, as
far as I know, has never happened. He had
repeatedly threatened me with his crutch and

90
also struck out, but he had always apologized
afterwards, though mostly only a few days
later. On our encounter in Billrothstrasse I had
not wished to run that risk and had therefore
immediately followed him into the Divine Eye.
On the way down Billrothstrasse I had natural­
ly let him rush ahead, partly so as not to offend
him or shame him, and partly in order better to
observe him, because I had been shocked by his
whole behaviour. He could not run down
Billrothstrasse fast enough, and all the time I
felt that he might trip himself up with his
crutches and fall down, but of course I had far
underrated his running ability and in the end I
had experienced the greater difficulty in getting
down Billrothstrasse at the pace he set. He had
adopted a cunning method of locomotion,
using his crutches, as I clearly observed on that
occasion, not only to support himself but also
mercilessly to propel himself, at any rate he had
been faster than me and I was hard pressed to
catch up with him. I could of course have left
him the triumph of entering the Divine Eye
first, but I was not disposed to do that and just
before the Divine Eye I overtook him and
passed through the Divine Eye entrance first
and, having reached the Divine Eye entrance,
immediately turned back to look at him and at
once saw through his exhaustion, mercilessly,
which he must have thought tactless. But I was

91
simply not prepared, in that situation, to spare
him, on the contrary, I felt a momentary need
to savour his dreadful situation and his pitiable
condition generally. I knew what he was bound
to feel if, having arrived at the Divine Eye
entrance before him, I immediately turned my
head to look at him. We must not surrender
ourselves totally to the cripple, we must not
capitulate to the cripple, we must assert
ourselves in the face of him, even if we have to
resort to meanness. Thus, even before we
entered the Divine Eye, he had at least made a
contribution. I had demonstrated to him, by
my ruthlessness, by not shrinking from turning
my head to look at him, that his thinking
commanded a very high price, the highest, as I
believe. But I could not have hoped for any,
however short-lived, equality, that would have
been too absurd. The moment of shaming him
had lasted only a few seconds, perhaps only a
fraction of a single second, and the correct
balance had once more been restored, he, Kol­
ler, was quite simply the superior. For a mo­
ment he had seemed to me the most lonely of
men and I would have wished him at the very
least a dog, which would have gone well with
his entire intellectual overbearing and bodily
pitiousness, and I had been reminded of
Schopenhauer. But a dog would never have
been possible for him, for a variety of reasons.

92
Neither a person nor a dog, he had once said to
me. And to afford myself to myself I already live
well above my station, he had said on another
occasion. To me it has always been just a
matter of time, and actually a short matter of
time, how long I would have to pursue a
person until he could be pursued no more
because he had ceased to exist. I have actually
always felt that I was watching him go down­
hill, each time I have seen him he was always
going downhill, there had been no one else I
have, time and again, seen go downhill like
him, time and again, whenever I have seen
him, go downhill. We are all always going
downhill, but we see it in very few people
because we do not want to see it or because,
quite simply, we do not take the trouble to see
it, but Koller was someone I have always
actually seen going downhill. Going downhill
alone and eventually being left alone. From a
certain moment onwards he had divided people
into three categories, the VPK crowd, the
Divine Eye crowd and the Zogernitz crowd,
but not until the moment at which he felt
certain that the VPK crowd were closest to
him, once he had withdrawn from the Zoger­
nitz crowd and felt finally repulsed by the
Divine Eye crowd. He had always assessed the
VPK crowd most highly and always placed
them on the highest rung of mankind, the

93
Divine Eye crowd and the Zogernitz crowd
had, for many years now, been despised by
him. In the end he had even cut himself off
from the VPK crowd and only acknowledged
the cheap-eaters among them. Always very
quickly into the VPK and past everyone else directly
to the cheap-eaters, he once said, disgusted even
by the VPK crowd. To be perfectly honest,
Koller said, the VPK crowd still have the most
solid character, the Divine Eye crowd are the
meanest and the Zogernitz crowd the vilest.
Over a period of ten years he had been left only
with the cheap-eaters, but for a long time he
had not been convinced of their worthiness
either, if I had not suddenly, instead ofgoing to the
Old Ash, gone to the Old Oak, he said. His
physiognomy had been progressively disrupted
by the meanness of the Divine Eye crowd and
actually almost destroyed by the Zogernitz
crowd, so that, if only for the sake of his
physiognomy he had been compelled to with­
draw first from the Divine Eye crowd and
subsequently also from the Zogernitz crowd.
In order to save such an important and unique
study as his physiognomy, the author of such a
study might, step by step, have to withdraw
from everyone, give up all contacts, isolate
himself totally, exist solely for himself, he said.
Only by explaining and expounding the cheap­
eaters to me did he make it possible for himself

94
to write his study of the cheap-eaters, he could
no longer afford any delay and must therefore
expound the cheap-eaters to me at once, because
he intended to write them up immediately
afterwards, what he called his second study
which would have to link up with what he
called his first study, which he had already
written. His physiognomy, he said, consisted
of four studies, of which he had been carrying
three in his head for years, the fourth, and
hence the principal one, had only crystallized
for him when, instead of going to the Old Ash,
he had gone to the Old Oak, and which,
without further ado, he ventured to call The
Cheap-Eaters. The author of such a study, at the
point of only intending to write such a study,
must concentrate everything upon such a study
and on nothing else, and everything within the
author must be focused upon that study, apart
from that study he must not take account of
anything at all unless he wanted to run the risk
of his project foundering even before he had
begun to write his study. He must not permit
himself the slightest detour or the slightest
digression. It was necessary actually to retain in
one's head the whole of nature and the whole of
the science of nature and simultaneously, step
by step, to extract from that nature and from
that science of nature precisely the matter
which fitted the study to be written. Such a

95
study, naturally, would have to discuss not
only its own subject but equally the whole of
nature and the science of nature, which,
however, a mind determined to produce an
essay such as about the cheap-eaters was cap­
able of only rarely, possibly indeed only once
in a lifetime. The leap into such a study, that is
into such an essay, however, was at first
nothing other than a leap into an infinite abyss
which he, Koller, called an infinite scientific
abyss, and to make that leap meant utter
dedication and self-sacrifice. Anyone not
prepared or not able to do this would never
succeed in producing a study like The Cheap­
Eaters, and the same was true of any scholarly
project forced into writing. But any thought
not turned into written form was ultimately
totally worthless, because it could have moved
only its author, if anyone, and could not have
made history, and he, naturally enough, had
the ambition to make history, which had al­
ways been the prime prerequisite of any im­
portant, epoch-making study, as he said. It
was actually only my presence that led him to
remark that The Cheap-Eaters were not merely
important but epoch-making, he could sense
that, and that was what made him take the leap
into the scientific abyss, I could rely on it and
quite simply keep my fingers crossed for him
and hope his leap succeeded. After all, even

96
though much of the time unconsciously, he had
been preparing himself for this study all his life,
that is for the cheap-eaters, and invested into
these cheap-eaters no less than his whole exist­
ence if he consistently pursued the idea of the
cheap-eaters to its end. Perhaps, he said, the
Divine Eye was indeed the most suitable place
for his exposition just because he detested it. He
had leaned back as far as possible and once
more reassured himself about the momentary
situation at the Divine Eye. Since even at that
moment he had, as always, a dread of draughts
he extended his right arm towards the wall and
held his hand in front of the window. Even on
that day he did not omit to perform his so­
called window check, which had become a
habit of his over decades. The windows at the
Divine Eye were dose-fitting and he had no
cause to fear any draughts. Suddenly, it seemed
to me, the crowd at the Divine Eye no longer
bothered him and he motioned to me to move
closer to him if possible. Although he had a
loud voice he had always believed that he was
not being understood and for that reason had
always invited all those he intended to address
to move up to him as close to him as possible,
but not too close, as he had always emphasized at
the same time. I was compelled to think that
quite possibly those cheap-eaters had already
driven him round the bend, but I instantly

97
suppressed this thought and throughout the
time he was talking about the cheap-eaters
urged myself to suppress the thought, although
in fact that thought refused to be suppressed in
the long run. But then I had for years, time and
again, come up against the thought that he had
long been round the bend, and therefore I had
got used to the thought. It was only for a few
moments that he struck me as having gone
round the bend, then again the very opposite of
round the bend, and I gave him my full atten­
tion. He had, he said, mapped out his physiog­
nomy from the very start in such a way that it
now seemed to him to be perfectly related to
the cheap-eaters in all its parts, that it actually
was related to the cheap-eaters, that is to
Einzig, Grill, Goldschmidt and Weninger, of
whom he would, in turn, have to give brief
biographies before going into their further points
of reference. He had, in a manner of speaking,
deciphered the cheap-eaters to me, one by one,
from what he, Koller, called the valid and
evidential existential characteristics of each of
them. Why he chose to start with the business­
man Weninger I do not know, but no doubt this
fact had its appropriate significance, because in
retrospect I realized that he could not have
started with Grill or Goldschmidt, nor even
with Einzig, unless his attempt at least to
adumbrate, if not explain, the cheap-eaters to me

98
was to fail from the outset. The businessman
Weninger, he said, operated a so-called vinegar
bottling plant, inherited from his father, in
Heiligenstadter Strasse, but additionally con­
ducted a series of transactions which Koller
described as opaque transactions, which very
frequently took him, Weninger, into the Wald­
viertel region and up to the Czech frontier,
and which had absolutely nothing to do with
apples, pears or wine; he, Koller, believed that
over the years Weninger had managed to estab­
lish business connections mainly across the
Czech frontier, which were all of them con­
nected with customs evasion and had, on a few
occasions, got him into trouble with the cus­
toms authorities, because Weninger, Koller
said, had been to prison several times for those
transactions which, over the past few years, he
had been able to extend more and more, time
and again being sentenced to rather heavy fines
and rather less heavy imprisonment, Koller
said, yet Weninger had not hesitated to develop
his business activities, which Koller eventually
described as extremely opaque, even further and
to intensify them; businessmen of Weninger's
type, Koller said, were not to be put off from
their machinations even by tough penalties, on
the contrary, the special attraction for those
people, which made them embark on ever
bigger and ever more opaque and ever more

99
dangerous transactions, was the very fact that
they had continually to struggle against the
greatest difficulties, that is clash with the fiscal
authorities and argue with the police. Weninger
was an example of a person who had built not
only his existence, but his whole life, on doing
business and who, as was typical of a type of
man existing along the main roads out of
Vienna, took pleasure in these so-called opaque
transactions, who quite consciously and passion­
ately again and again would sail close to
illegality and eventually to fraud and criminal­
ity, without ever entirely, that is finally, ma­
noeuvring himself into these, and who in fact
would pull off the big deals, that is the great
adventures and hence what Koller called the
great life-fulfilling business achievements,
moreover in complete concealment, while the
lesser ones and the least ones made him suspi­
cious to the customs people and time and again
got him reported to the police. Weninger had a
greater mastery of business matters than any­
one Koller knew, his family lived naturally not
where he conducted his business but where he
conducted his petit-bourgeois existence, that is
a few kilometres outside the city, among the
greenery of the suburbs, and he would always,
no matter when or where, dress as the small,
honourable businessman, always striving to get
ahead but naturally never towards the peaks, a

1 00
so-called practical pepper-and-salt overcoat,
under which, Koller said, he would feel abso­
lutely secure. The fact that he entered the VPK
at noon, and always punctually, in order to eat
at the VPK the simplest of simple dishes was as
much part of Weninger's strategy as the circum­
stance that under his, naturally always a little
dirty and grubby, though never completely dirty
or completely grubby, pepper-and-salt over­
coat he wore a suit and necktie, and naturally
neither the suit nor the necktie were of the
very latest fashion nor of the very best quality,
though again not totally out of fashion nor of
the worst quality. At the table, that is at the
cheap-eaters' corner table, he always had his
left hand resting on the table top, the one on
which he wore his wedding ring, a platinum
ring which, as Weninger had told Koller, a
Hungarian aristocrat and refugee had given
him during the so-called post-war troubles
because Weninger had pulled him out of the
Thaya and saved him from drowning. Wenin­
ger's shoes had always been the same pointed
kind which had long gone out of fashion, but
not always the same pair, Koller said, because
Weninger had bought several pairs of those
shoes, which to him had seemed more fitting
for his business than any others, and he had
worn those four or five pairs in turn, and
Weninger had thought so highly of these shoes

101
that he reportedly remarked to Koller on one
occasion that they were more important to him
for his business than a lot of words. He had
never been without a hat, he had actually worn
a leather hat rubbed by years of wear and shiny
at the spots where it was fingered, to which he
had pinned a thirty-three-year-old aluminium
sports badge which he had, Koller said, won in
a running event at the Flozersteig. Then he was
as slim as a willow wand, now he had for
several decades been fat and flabby. But like
most fat and flabby businessmen he would
move faster and much more supplely than
anyone else. He was the one among the cheap­
eaters who would eat most, very often he
would have not just one but two helpings
served to him. The fact that his business took
him to a lot of places, and mainly to the fruit
growers of Lower Austria, had always pro­
vided the cheap-eaters with a rustic topic of
conversation, which, without Weninger, they
would have had to forgo, because the other
cheap-eaters had no rural contacts. According
to Koller, Weninger had been a shrewd busi­
ness tactician, but at the same time with that
cheerful manner which was especially typical of
small businessmen, he had immediately had the
entree everywhere and access to everybody,
and he had always been welcome, naturally
also with the cheap-eaters, who, whenever

102
they could, would derive advantages from their
relationship with him and hence from his abili­
ties. He, Weninger, had, as it were, been the
economic and generally financial seismograph
among the cheap-eaters, he had introduced
them, who until then had had no inkling of
such matters, into stock-exchange lore and the
stock market, and over the years had told them
hundreds and thousands of what Koller called
police anecdotes, from which they in turn
derived a profit at home. Weninger's jokes he,
Koller, could only describe as suggestive with­
out exception, his intelligence, and not only his
business intelligence, as above-average high,
much higher, for instance, than Grill's or Ein­
zig's, though not higher than that of Gold­
schmidt, which he, Koller, assessed as the
highest among the cheap-eaters. Weninger
would talk a lot and about everything, though
not about his business deals and hence also not
about his business connections, and whatever
he allowed to be glimpsed in that context had
ultimately always been useless. Sundays would
be spent by Weninger, a Catholic, with his
family in his own house, situated in a Nussdorf
vineyard or even further north or west in the
country, which he knew better than any of the
cheap-eaters. He mastered and practised,
according to Koller, the lifelong knack of being
popular and knew how to get the most out of

1 03
life. As a true representative of his class he had
never engaged himself politically to any extent
that might have become in the slightest degree
dangerous to him . Reputedly he owned a small
boathouse on what is known as the Old
Danube, to which, on the few fine and there­
fore warm summer evenings, he would retire
with young girls from the country, in whom,
according to Koller, he was specialized, or else
with girls from Kaisermiihlen, Kagran or
Stammersdorf, whom, Koller said, he liked
best. He subscribed to the Wiener Kurier and
drove a twelve-year-old Volkswagen which,
eight years before, he had bought for little
more than its scrap value. Two days a week,
according to Koller, Tuesdays and Fridays, he
played tarot in what he called a backroom ofhis
vinegar filling plant with some workers from
the industrial bakery across the road from his
vinegar filling plant. His dream at one time had
been a so-called grand tour of India, but he had
given that up some ten years back, at the time
when he realized that journeys round the
world, in close-up, were not worth much more
than a one-hour walk in the Prater. Beyond
anything else in the world Weninger admired
the great ferris wheel and when he felt happy he
would drive down to the Prater for the sole
purpose of operating the so-called Hit-me
Charlie, that, in conjunction with one or two

1 04
glasses of beer drunk at one of the nearby
wooden stalls, gave him the greatest pleasure.
Weninger, disregarding the fact that the other
cheap-eaters also had a predilection for the
Prater, was suffering from a positive Prater
mania, as Koller called it, and he basically never
missed an opportunity of visiting the Prater.
His best deals and his biggest profits had been
made by him, Weninger, in the Prater. When
he was in a particularly good mood, Koller
said, he would sing his so-called scenic railway
song, words and music composed by him,
which very often, at the request of the rest of
the cheap-eaters and altogether the rest of the
VPK guests, he was urged to sing, but he was
not always willing to do so. Weninger was the
most musical of the cheap-eaters. A particular­
ity about him was his gold pocket-watch, at
which he would glance from time to time, even
though he knew it was not going and had not
been going for many years. If Weninger was
asked the exact time he would produce his
pocket-watch and say what the time was.
Weninger always gave the most accurate time,
Koller said, which was as inexplicable to him as
it was to the other cheap-eaters, because his
pocket-watch actually had not shown the time
for years because it had long lost its hands and
its works had stopped. Sometimes the other
cheap-eaters would quite abruptly ask Weninger

1 05
the time, hoping to make him look foolish
at least for once, but until then they had not
managed to catch him, Weninger, out; he had
always been able to tell them the exact time.
How he did it was a mystery to them. They
had no doubt that they were the victims of
some trick which Weninger was very skilfully
hiding from them. The bookseller Goldschmidt
kept the small bookshop in Pokornygasse,
which I have always known without knowing
its owner Goldschmidt. Over the past thirty
years I have been in the bookshop in Pokorny­
gasse without ever having made the acquaint­
ance of its owner Goldschmidt, though I feel
certain that I have seen him, for Koller's de­
scription of Goldschmidt fits the picture of the
man I have seen on several occasions in the
bookshop in Pokornygasse without realizing
that it was Goldschmidt, in other words the
owner of the bookshop in Pokornygasse; it
occurred to me suddenly that I once had even
spoken to Goldschmidt, but I did not mention
it to Koller so as not to make him lose his
thread, for he, Koller, was now adjusted to the
fact that I did not know any of the cheap-eaters,
not even by sight, and I wanted him to develop
his expose in that belief. Goldschmidt, a Jew,
was naturally the most educated among the
cheap-eaters and the closest to him, Koller. A
lean man, Koller said, he was some six foot

106
two tall and for a major portion of their eating
time dominated the cheap-eaters with his
knowledge and his silence. He hardly spoke at
all, and when he spoke it would be just yes or
no, and with that yes or that no he would
without contradiction put a stop to whatever
discussion might have sprung up among the
cheap-eaters. If Goldschmidt intervened in a
discussion, though this would happen only
some three or four times in the whole year, this
would invariably turn into a discussion be­
tween just him and Koller, with the rest of the
cheap-eaters, quite simply because they lacked
the necessary capacity, taking no part at all, but
the cheap-eaters were very good listeners and,
Koller said, they would listen in particular if
Goldschmidt and Koller conducted a discus­
sion. The subjects were predominantly politics,
or of course science or literature or philosophy
or quite simply some so-called run-of-the-mill
topic aimed wholly at relaxation, though this,
Koller said, if the discussion was between him,
Koller, and Goldschmidt, had at least a scien­
tific or a philosophical angle, because he, Kol­
ler, like Goldschmidt, was interested only in a
discourse or a discussion with such a scientific
or philosophical angle. What was striking dur­
ing those discourses or discussions was the
invariable attention of Einzig and Grill, of
whom such a scientific or philosophical angle

1 07
could not, of course, be expected, Koller said,
which, however, never compelled the two,
Einzig and Grill, to remain silent, quite the
contrary. Goldschmidt had been in what was
called the American emigration, his parents had
lost their lives at Buchenwald. In Goldschmidt
the cheap-eaters had always seen the intellect
and in him, Koller, the madness, and, accord­
ing to Koller, they had always taken the
greatest pleasure in seeing intellect and madness
roused against one another and clashing with
one another, that is Goldschmidt and Koller all
of a sudden in an argument about some, either
unexpectedly emerging or pre-existing, sub­
ject. It had not been unusual, Koller said, for
Goldschmidt, without awaiting the conclusion
of a discussion, suddenly to leap to his feet and
rush out of the VPK, determining never to
share a table with Koller again, especially if the
controversy had been about politics. Koller had
been fairly certain that Goldschmidt during the
war, having successfully escaped from Europe
by way of Portugal, had spent many years in
Moscow and there attended first a Communist
primary and later also a Communist high
school. All that could be gauged from Gold­
schmidt's remarks, he, Koller, was not mis­
taken in that respect. But these very circum­
stances of Goldschmidt's, here only hinted at,
distinguished Goldschmidt and had bound

1 08
him, Koller, to Goldschmidt with real sym­
pathy, indeed with a sense of kinship. He not
only respected but loved such people as Gold­
schmidt, Koller said, because they were the
very few in this world who deserved the label
of persons of intellect without reservation.
Goldschmidt lived in a small two-room flat
above his shop and looked entirely after him­
self During the day he was in his bookshop, in
the company of history and literature, and half
the nights in the company of their creators and
detractors, as he, Goldschmidt, reportedly ex­
pressed himself to Koller. He, Goldschmidt,
reportedly told Koller that he was serving
history and literature even though he knew that
by doing so he was serving false masters. He
had become a bookseller because, on the one
hand, he was enough of a masochist for that
purpose, and because, on the other, an uncle, a
brother of his mother's, had left the bookshop
to him. Naturally he was aware, every day and
in effect all the time he had kept the bookshop,
of the historical and intellectual idling associ­
ated with such an occupation for better or
worse, but he had come to terms with it and
when he felt sufficiently nauseated by the pro­
ducts he had been selling for the past three
decades, he would, now and again, find refuge
in one of those historic sentences which a
crazy so-called poet or thinker had written in

109
evidence of his craziness. For a long time,
however, there had no longer been any books
capable of saving him, but only sentences,
individual sentences, from Novalis, for in­
stance, from Montaigne, from Spinoza, or
from Pascal, which he had to clutch at from
time to time in order not to go under. Book­
sellers, he said, were to be pitied more than
anyone else, because on them, more than on
anything else, rested the whole hideousness and
meanness of human history and the whole
helplessness and pitifulness of art and because
they had to be permanently afraid of being
crushed by that anti-human load. The book­
seller who takes his trade seriously was to be
pitied more than any other human being be­
cause day after day and ceaselessly he was
confronted with the absolute pointlessness of
everything that was ever written and because,
more than anyone else, he experienced the
world as hell, Goldschmidt had told Koller.
Yet Goldschmidt was one of those very few
booksellers to whom the concept of bookseller
was still applicable, because booksellers like
Goldschmidt, who took their trade seriously
and who understood bookselling not as an
ordinary business but actually still as a form of
intellectual activity and as a devoted service to
history and literature, had become almost total­
ly extinct. The anti-intellectual hostility which

1 10
dominated everything today, Koller said, had
also, or especially, engulfed the booksellers in
Europe and probably also those in the rest of
the world. What was striking about Gold­
schmidt was his square bald head and his long
gaunt body, supported at table on his over­
long arms. Goldschmidt of course wore spec­
tacles, but even with those lenses, genuine Zeiss
lenses, as Koller said, he did not see well, he
always had to strain to see Koller who was
sitting facing him. Koller had an exceptional
and admirable memory for numbers. Not a
single significant event in history could be
mentioned without him being able to supply its
appropriate date. It was obvious that Koller
had felt attracted to Goldschmidt mainly be­
cause, taken all in all, he was, just as Koller
was, in favour of the abolition of a class-ridden
society and because he was a man of intellect.
On the subject of language he is supposed to
have said that it consisted mainly of words like
weights by which ideas were continually being
weighed down, right to the ground, and could
never therefore, even in a single instance, be
revealed in their full significance and true infin­
ity. Language weighed heavily, and in the most
unfortunate way, upon ideas which deserved to
be retained and in every case reduced them to a
permanent feebleness of the mind, with which,
however, the thinking person had to reconcile

111
himself. Ideas had never yet been reproduced in
their perfection and infinity, Goldschmidt had
said to Koller. That state of affairs would not
change so long as the reproduction of ideas
depended on language. Grill, Koller said, was
employed as a storekeeper in a wholesale iron­
monger's on Doblinger Hauptstrasse and was a
very correct person and an unhappy type. He
had been born in the Tyrol and had come to
Vienna at the age of seventeen, first to a sister
of his mother's in Erzherzog-Karl-Strasse,
right by the so-called Reichsbriicke, to a tene­
ment block, where there were some thousand
rats to each tenant and where even today
poverty and crime were the only basis of
subsistence, straight from the Inn valley to
what Grill invariably called the dregs of
humanity, yet where he, Grill, had been better
able to develop than among the mountain
peasants, in what Koller, too, described as
Vienna's district of dirt and despair, the Second
District, where Grill, with the help of his
relatives, had been able to serve an appren­
ticeship with a rope and cord wholesaler behind
the Northern Railway and actually rise to being
the top employee of the firm, which, Koller
said, was unique in Austria. In the fifties Grill
had been bold enough to change his job over­
night, and with the backing of his savings of
over eighty thousand schillings and in the

1 12
euphoria of his engagement, likewise over­
night, to the daughter of a root-crop labourer
from Ganserndorf had severed his ties with the
rope and cord firm, which at that time was
labouring under major fmancial difficulties,
and had gone into wholesale ironmongery, a
line of business therefore which had always
been regarded as a safe business, if not the
safest, and where he had applied his commer­
cial talent in a manner that suited him. Between
the ages of twenty and thirty Grill had very
quickly and in every possible detail developed
from a mountain person into a big-city person
and very soon into a so-called Leopoldstadt
person, but never, Koller said, from a Leopold­
stadt person into a Dobling person, a circum­
stance which he, Grill, had always regarded as a
shortcoming and had never quite got over. In
the early sixties, Koller said, Grill's wife had
died of what the doctors had reportedly called a
strange unexplored disease which had not occur­
red in Vienna for several decades and which the
doctors immediately, and in what Koller de�
scribed as an improper measure, had used for
their so-called scientific purposes. Grill had
very often, talking to the other cheap-eaters,
mentioned that the doctors had misused his
wife as a demonstration object at the university
hospital, that they had always looked upon his
wife only as a welcome demonstration object

1 13
and never as a fatally sick patient, and that they
were guilty of eventually causing his wife's
premature death in an irresponsible manner, his
wife who, but for the unscrupulousness of the
so-called medical specialists, would still be
alive. His wife's death had plunged Grill into
many years of melancholia and he had never
again emerged from that melancholia. Not
until after his wife's death had Grill come upon
the cheap-eaters Einzig, Goldschmidt and
Weninger, who had helped him over the worst
period. The VPK had saved Grill as it had so
many who, through no fault of their own, had
turned out to be unfortunate. He, Grill, had
never abused his position of trust as a store­
keeper, he had been elected chairman of the
works council and, even before that, had al­
ways acted as the spokesman of the iron­
mongery employees. Short of stature, slim and
possessed of a constant desire to express him­
self, in speaking, as far as possible in what is
called the literary language, he had, from the
start, fitted in well with the cheap-eaters. What
they, the cheap-eaters, admired in him most
was that from the very bottom and, so to
speak, from nothing he had risen to wholesale
ironmongery storekeeper, a position, after all,
which had always commanded their highest
respect. In Grill they appreciated what Koller
called his mathematical adroitness. He lived in a

1 14
very large and very cheap room in Silbergasse
with a view of the nearby Rudolfinerhaus,
Vienna's 'posh hospital', where, as Grill kept
telling Koller, the rich died. With Grill one
might, from time to time, play a game of chess,
and even win without being attacked by him.
He, Grill, had acquired what he himself
thought was an elegant way of walking but
which, Koller said, was not elegant but quite
simply ridiculous, though he, Koller, felt no
need to inform Grill of that fact, as Grill, as a
result of his origins, just because he was a
Tyrolean and had made his way up from the
bottom, had always been exceedingly touchy.
He, Grill, did not hate or despise the big city as
most people who have come from the country,
because he had made a career in it and therefore
had no cause to run it down in the way cleverer
people do. Secretly he, Grill, wrote poetry,
which now and again he would read to the
other cheap-eaters, with a monotony which
ultimately was in line with Grill's suppressed
personality but which was simply unbearable
and should have been permitted only on special
occasions such as Christmas or Easter. Koller
had always been particularly interested in
Grill's dreams and had always listened to Grill's
dreams with the greatest attention because they
had been useful to his scientific endeavours. All
his life Grill had suffered from the fact that he

1 15
had not attended a university, and Koller had
once caught him, at a party in a cafe in the
Naschmarkt, pretending to have been to uni­
versity, and he, Koller, had allowed him that,
subsequently often repeated, lie and had been
unable to begrudge him that occasionally play­
ed trump card of being a university graduate.
Grill's lifelong wish had been a career with a
business school diploma, but Grill had also
realized what it meant to have made his way
from nothing to a wholesale ironmongery
storekeeper. Koller, to Grill's face, solely in
order to give Grill pleasure, had run down
those university graduates who had made uni­
versity studies ridiculous and had dragged
universities and academies down into the mire
they deserved, and in saying that Koller had
simply spoken the truth. He, Koller, had all his
life secretly despised university graduates, even
though Grill of course would not have under­
stood that. When Grill had spoken up it had
invariably been on only two subjects, first, his
late wife, who was buried at the Heiligenstadt
cemetery and for whom he had had a granite
headstone erected for thirty thousand schil­
lings, and next the university career which he
revered beyond anything else, as indeed he did
anything academic, which had always held the
greatest fascination for him. Koller had re­
portedly time and again repeated to Grill that

1 16
adage which states that everybody, no matter
who, carries within himself a supreme wish for
his life, which, however, is never fulfilled. Grill
had had a lifelong wish to go to an academy or
a university, and for him, too, his lifelong wish
had never been fulfilled. On the whole, every­
body existed under these conditions, and prob­
ably, Koller said, they would perish one day of
this unfulfilled wish. But of course there were
also people whose life's ambitions were fulfil­
led and actually in a manner which was
appropriate to them and which made them
happy, Koller said. With Grill he had been able
to have very good conversations about exotic
birds, in which Grill was just as interested as he
was himself, especially of course in parrots, and
he, Koller, had on one occasion gone with Grill
to Schonbrunn solely for the purpose of study­
ing Psittacus erithacus, on a sunny autumn day
suitable for the purpose, Koller said. Another
odd thing about Grill was that, from the instant
onwards when he was earning more than he
was willing to spend, he had collected coins,
more specifically only coins older than eight
hundred years. He, Grill, now had a coin
collection which was highly thought of even by
numismatic experts. Possibly, Koller said, Grill
now lived only for that coin collection. He had,
as Goethe did in his day, several chests of
drawers made specially for his coin collection,

117
and in his free time he would sit looking at
those drawers, which Koller, on a Sunday
afternoon, had once been shown, and he would
be perfectly happy. It was no accident, Koller
said, that the wholesale ironmongery
storekeeper Grill collected coins, in other
words that in his spare time he did the same as
in business hours, except on a higher plane.
When he, Koller, had been with Grill he had
very often, and not only because of their com­
mon hobby of collecting coins, been reminded
of Goethe. He, Grill, had always only had two
programmes on Sundays, which Koller de­
scribed as Grill's principal programmes: in fine
weather he would go to the Heiligenstadt
cemetery to visit his late wife's grave, and in
bad weather he would devote himself wholly
to his coin collection. Grill wore rimless spec­
tacles, already had a so-called half-pate back to
his ears, Koller said, and got his suits from an
outfitter's by the name of The Railwayman,
which was to be found not far from the Franz
Josef railway station, and where a colleague of
his from his apprenticeship days was the man­
ager and hence in a position to let him have at
least a twenty-per-cent discount on each pur­
chase. Einzig, Koller said, had always attached
the greatest importance in all his correspon­
dence to being addressed as von Einzig, and
whenever he had to sign anything he invariably

118
signed himself von Einzig, and also in daily
contact Einzig had always had himself address­
ed by everyone, especially by people of lower
status, as von Einzig, though the cheap-eaters
had never, from the very start, addressed
Einzig as von Einzig and indeed refused, on
Einzig's very first appearance, to title him von
Einzig, from the first moment onwards they
had not lent themselves to that ridiculous busi­
ness and Einzig had unprotestingly submitted
to their demand for the immediate omission of
the von before Einzig. In their midst he had
simply been Herr Einzig and never once Herr
von Einzig, nor of course had he been permitted
by the cheap-eaters to allow himself to be
addressed as von Einzig by the VPK staff.
Einzig was the one about whom Koller knew
least and Einzig had always done all he could
not to allow many glimpses into his life, even
though he had always been very generous with
those very remarks which related to his origins,
though these had always contained so many
contradictions that it always seemed as ifEinzig
had made up and invented a pack of lies about
his origins, as Koller put it. It was certainly true
that Einzig came from Carinthia, the province
where Austrian fancy flowered most luxuriant­
ly, and there was probably no reason to doubt
that Einzig had come to Vienna from the Gail
valley in order, as Koller put it, to sit his way

119
through university in order, eventually, to be
entitled to teach at that very university which
Koller invariably described as Austria's premier
intellect-destroying institution, which, according
to Koller, year after year produced hundreds
and thousands of destroyed intellects, to
whom, in the final account, our country and
state owed its debility and dullwittedness and
ludicrousness. What Koller had always had his
doubts about was whether it was really true
that Einzig, as he ceaselessly and stubbornly
asserted, came from an ancient and, as it were,
old-established noble family and that he was
actually of very high origin, far higher than
indicated by the mere von before his name. But
he, Einzig, had naturally not got far with the
cheap-eaters with his origin-fantasies, and
they, the cheap-eaters, had very quickly seen
through those fantasies as totally unnecessary
fantasies and had not allowed Einzig to bring
those fantasies up again, and thus he, who up to
the moment he had come to the VPK on
Doblinger Hauptstrasse and hence encountered
the cheap-eaters, had drawn his life's support
solely from those fantasies, had suddenly been
forced, Koller said, to put an end to those
ultimately distasteful fantasies and confine him­
self to his factual Viennese situation, that is to
his more or less insignificant existence as a
university teacher. The braggart Einzig had

120
quite naturally been instantly cut to size by the
cheap-eaters to his demonstrable circum­
stances, Koller said, and thereby deprived of
what had until then been his most influential
instrument of power, which the cheap-eaters
had not tolerated a minute longer than necess­
ary and actually, Koller said, had abolished on
the first occasion that Einzig appeared at the
VPK. The cheap-eaters, Koller said, had abol­
ished the monarchy the moment Einzig
appeared. They had granted Einzig a period of
probation, which eventually he came through,
and, presumably because his place among the
cheap-eaters had been worth more to him than
any other, he renounced his privileges of no­
bility, and surrendered himself to the cheap­
eater,s , to whom he felt attracted for whatever
reason, which meant that he had, above all,
surrendered his intellect. However, Koller
clearly remembered how Einzig had initially
confronted the cheap-eaters with his nobility
and had not shrunk from playing the trump
card of his mendacious and fictitious origin.
But the cheap-eaters did not for an instant fall
for Einzig's tactics and instantly and in no
uncertain manner sent Einzig about his busi­
ness, and sent him about his business so un­
ambiguously, that thereafter he never again
tried, as such types are in the habit of trying, to
use nobility for payment, in other words a

1 21
currency which has been out of use for half a
century and which Koller had always described
as common history-soiled counterfeit money.
Einzig, he said, was the weak provincial type of
what is called humble origin, who had donned
the suit of aristocratic origin for his entry into
the great world in order to prevail in it. The
cheap-eaters had not shown the slightest under­
standing for this ploy and had immediately
faced Einzig with the alternative of either tak­
ing his noble-origin suit off at once, at least in
their presence, or leaving their table. Einzig,
contrary to expectation and actually without
hesitation, had taken off his noble-origin suit
and had thus remained with the cheap-eaters.
From that, for Einzig, downright superhuman
self-denial onwards, Einzig, according to Kol­
ler, had talked only about the climate in Carin­
thia and about the natural beauty spots to be
admired there, and not a word about the no­
bility there, but basically, and naturally enough,
he had no longer had any need to talk about
Carinthia, at least not in the presence of the
cheap-eaters, who were not in the least in­
terested in Carinthia, much less than they
might be in Upper Austria or the Tyrol, but
who, as a matter of fact, had very little interest
in the provinces generally because anything to
do with the provinces would have embarrassed
them. Einzig, Koller said, had quite simply

122
wanted to eat cheaply, and that desire he had
only been able to satisfy at the VPK, and once
at the VPK Einzig had probably reasoned that
he was interested only in sitting at the table
which was the dominating table at the VPK,
i.e. the cheap-eaters' table, and therefore he,
Einzig, had had no other choice but to comply
with the demands made at the cheap-eaters'
table, that is to submit to the laws of the
cheap-eaters' table. It was absolutely typical of
Einzig, Koller said, that only on his first VPK
day had he worn a heavy gold signet ring with
a coat of arms, Koller said, on the following
day Einzig had pulled that signet ring off his
finger and slipped it into his jacket pocket,
Koller said, before entering the VPK. To his,
Koller's, certain knowledge Einzig continued
to wear that signet ring, but he invariably
slipped it off and put it in his j acket pocket
before entering the VPK. Einzig was as puny as
his professorship, which he had to fight for
continuously, Koller said. He had a delicate
complexion and was constantly hypernervous
and suffered from continuous tics affecting his
whole body. The fear of losing his professor­
ship, a juridical professorship, as Koller put it,
had driven him to drink over the past few years
and made him bloated. Twice a year he would
attend a treatment centre for alcoholics in the
so-called Helenental south of Vienna, where

1 23
the best wme Is grown, Koller said. They
would miss him each time he was at the
treatment centre for alcoholics, although they
were never quite clear why they did. He had
quite simply, from a certain moment onwards,
been one of them, the exotic bird, as Koller
described him. He had nearly always been able
to control his homosexual leanings which,
since he was too weak to give free rein to this
(for him) quite natural inclination, had always
made him unhappy and exposed him, accord­
ing to Koller, to a truly perverse sense of guilt.
Not Koller himself, but the other cheap-eaters
had described him, Einzig, though of course
not in his presence, as the so-called deviant
among them. The cheap-eaters, this was even­
tually Koller's unshakable belief, had down­
right forced themselves upon him as the principal
chapter of his theory of physiognomy, their
four physiognomies, to which his own had to
be added and analysed by him as the fifth, had
all of a sudden become those so-called primor­
dial illustrations of his theses and of a whole set
of physiognomical ideas now demanding to be
proved; he had always sought for them but,
Koller said, probably because they had been so
close to him, not found them. Now, however,
thanks to the fortunate circumstances that he
had suddenly gone to the Old Oak and not to
the Old Ash, he was m possession of the

1 24
cheap-eaters and of their physiognomies,
which meant solely that, almost on the point of
giving up, he was in possession of his own
physiognomy. His perseverance, which no
doubt had never let him tire, even less let him
really and, as he had said, fatally resign, in his
endeavours to continue and eventually to com­
plete his physiognomy, had paid off. He was
able accurately to fix the moment of his en­
lightenment in the Wertheimstein Park. Lean­
ing back, his artificial leg stretched right out, it
would be easy for him to expound the cheap­
eaters to me, but he had, with his introduction
to the cheap-eaters, which he had felt to be
absolutely necessary and therefore indispens­
able, and thus with his briefly outlined charac­
terization lost a lot of time, and besides he no
longer regarded the Divine Eye as the right
place for his discourse on the cheap-eaters. He
had suddenly realized that it was impossible to
expound the cheap-eaters to me in the Divine
Eye, that would require an absolutely reliable
intellectual place as a prerequisite and the Divine
Eye certainly was not such an absolutely reli­
able intellectual place, which now made it im­
possible for him to expound his cheap-eaters to
me. He thought he might not be able to deliver
his discourse until some later date, possibly
right in the Wertheimstein Park, he now said, where
he was hoping to find all the indispensable

1 25
prerequisites of such a discourse, in that unique
and totally undisturbed intellectual park, as he
was suddenly calling the Wertheimstein Park,
where neither humans nor animals would
disturb him, where everything was on his side,
the whole of nature, the whole of history . In the
W ertheimstein Park, then, he said, he could
also save himself the brief characterization of
the cheap-eaters and could penetrate at once to
the centre of his subject, which of course was
an anti-subject. Whereas it was now becoming
clear to him, at the Divine Eye, that right there,
at the Divine Eye, existed the most unfavour­
able preconditions for his cheap-eaters, he
would there, at the Wertheimstein Park, if
possible as early as the next day, enjoy the
optimal prerequisites. Naturally, its inventor
-
could not immediately or at one single leap pen­
etrate into a subj ect such as the cheap-eaters,
for such a subject was much too complicated
and fragile, he would stake everything on his
second, on, as he called it, his final leap . In point
of fact and beyond any doubt I now had the
impression, as I watched him, that he had been
totally exhausted before even penetrating to his
subject proper and before even embarking on
his discourse about the cheap-eaters. He had
also risen to his feet at once and had wanted to
leave the Divine Eye. If he had had to stay at
the Divine Eye a minute longer he would

1 26
probably have choked on that horror, he had
said to me outside, in front of the Divine Eye.
He would let me know when the moment had
come for expounding the cheap-eaters to me in
the Wertheimstein Park. Perhaps as early as the
following afternoon, he had said before leaving
me. But this did not materialize, for that same
evening he was taken to the university hospital
with a serious head injury, which he suffered in
a fall with his artificial leg on his stairway in
Krottenbachstrasse, in a state of total uncon­
sciousness, as I learned from his doctors, from
which he was not to recover. The cheap-eaters
were lost, like so many products of the intellect
that their inventors have told us about.

1 27