Peter Handke - The Ride Across Lake Constance and Other Plays

VON WULLNOW

Are you standing comfortably, Kilb? We’re only human, after all. ( The businessmen laugh again. QUITT’S WIFE appears. She looks at all of them, then walks diagonally through the room and disappears. To KOERBER-KENT) Do you as a priest also employ female help in your enterprises?

KOERBER-KENT

How do you mean?

VON WULLNOW

I was just thinking about the fact that you aren’t married, neither happily nor at all.

KOERBER-KENT

No, we can’t marry.

VON WULLNOW

I didn’t mean it that way.

QUITT

I don’t understand your allusions.

VON WULLNOW

But you understand that they are allusions?

LUTZ

( Distracting them. ) Of course, women are cheaper. But you have to be careful. Every month a few of them pull a fast one on us.

KOERBER-KENT

By pilfering inventory?

LUTZ

No, by becoming pregnant. Scarcely have they started work when they turn up with child — not out of passion, mind you, but out of cold calculation; and we have to pay the maternity benefits.

VON WULLNOW

One shouldn’t always be talking about the good old days, but things were different in the past. You didn’t even need to talk about the good old days then. Everyone was one big happy family in my grandfather’s shop. They didn’t work for my father, they worked for the shop, and that also meant for themselves — at least that’s the feeling you got, and that’s what mattered. Anyway, our system is the only one in which it is possible to work for oneself. It’s incredible how strong my sense of solidarity was with my workers. It cut through all class differences and thresholds of natural feeling when they made their work easier for themselves by singing songs or urging each other on during particularly difficult jobs, with original chants which, incidentally, should be collected before they are forgotten altogether. Today they get the work over and done with, mutely and indifferently, that’s all. Their thoughts are somewhere else, nothing creative any more, no imagination. I must say I admire our imports from the South. They’re alive during their work, are happy to be together. Work is still part of their life for them. Moreover, in the good old days the workers used to take pride in their products; when they went for their Sunday walks they proudly pointed out to their children anything in the vicinity made by their own hands. Nowadays, most children haven’t the faintest idea what their parents do at work.

KILB

Why, do you want them to point out the bolt in the car which their father personally screwed in, or the stick of margarine Mother wrapped herself?

VON WULLNOW

I don’t have my cane with me. I refuse to touch you with my bare hands.

KOERBER-KENT

I recently had my library repapered. Of course, I helped with the work, and then I noticed the lack of enthusiasm with which the paper hangers were working, despite the fact that I was paying better than minimum wages. Why is it, I asked them, that you can’t develop any passion for your work even though you are paid for it? The good souls didn’t have any answer to that one.

VON WULLNOW

Typical.

(KILB clipping his fingernails in the meantime .)

KOERBER-KENT

They only think of the money. They’ve got nothing in their minds except bread and broads, as I always put it. Instead of enrolling in evening courses or absorbing our cultural heritage, they spend their wages on refrigerators, crystal, and knickknacks. Since they no longer have any respect for the public good — not to use a religious word in this circle — they have become possessed by the devil of personal happiness, as I sometimes say jokingly. And yet there’s no way for them to be personally happy without considering the public good. You’re scarcely born and already you’re pushing into the revolving door of the here and now and can’t push your way back out, I always say. The paper wraps the stone, consumption cracks the character.

VON WULLNOW

A story. No sermon without a little story, right? I know my rhetoric. Which, incidentally, is another art that has gone to the dogs among us … I was walking through the supermarket.

QUITT

You in a supermarket?

VON WULLNOW

Mine, of course. But I wanted to tell a story.

QUITT

Von Wullnow, the supermarket baron, that’s news.

VON WULLNOW

I had to invest, taxes forced us to. I don’t have to explain that to you. And besides, a big chain is just the right market for some of our products. That way we have our own outlets and don’t need to discount to the retailers.

QUITT

“Harald Count von Wullnow Supermarkets.”

VON WULLNOW

We called them Miller-Markets. Anyway, when I went to inspect one of them, I couldn’t help noticing a woman who made herself conspicuous by standing around a long time with an empty shopping cart. I watched her and wondered to myself, because, aside from the furtive glances she was casting about, she seemed almost ladylike. Suddenly she came up to me and said softly, Do you think they still have the giant-size detergent on sale that was advertised last week? Too bad, I thought afterward. She was just my shirt size, I liked her layout. But to lose one’s dignity over a consumer article like that! I felt quite ashamed for the person.

(KILB has placed his hands underneath his armpits and is producing farting noises. )

LUTZ

All I have to say against the consumers is that they aren’t informed. Why don’t they read the business sections in their papers which publicize the Good Housekeeping tests? Why don’t they join the consumer councils? No wonder they can’t tell the products apart. Did you ever watch the faces of housewives during a sale? A mass of mindless, dehumanized, panic-stricken grimaces that don’t even perceive each other any more, staring hypnotically at objects. No logic, no brains, nothing but the seething, stinking subconscious. A happening at the zoo, gentlemen. No awareness, no life, no feeling for quality. I know whereof I speak.

KILB

( Interrupts them .) Fire!

QUITT

( Ignores him .) And whereof are you speaking?

LUTZ

You know very well. We stopped production just now. Our quality product had no chance against your mass-produced one. Your brand is a household name, even our packaging, a three-dimensional picture on a hexagonal cover, was too revolutionary. Consumers are conservative, their curiosity about progress is fly-by-night. That was our first fire — I mean fiasco.

( Looks at KILB.)

QUITT

When your product came on the market, I immediately put ours on the steal-me list.

KOERBER-KENT

Please explain.

QUITT

The steal-me list is a full-page ad which we publish once a week in the major newspapers. It lists the ten products of ours that are shoplifted with the greatest frequency. Simultaneously we send this list as posters to the trade. There they construct a kind of altar display of the listed objects and the poster with the legend SHOPLIFTERS’ HIT PARADE is hung above it. This boosts sales. I immediately put my product at the top of the list and left it there, until Lutz gave up. I must say I’ve grown fond of it in the meantime and look at it in its plain square package with genuine affection. Still, I’m going to stop production on it.

LUTZ

What do you mean?

QUITT

It was a losing proposition for a long time. I just didn’t want you to get a swelled head.

VON WULLNOW

Marvelous, Quitt! That’s the old school spirit, but I can see now how important it is that we reach an agreement in time.

QUITT

Otherwise why would you be here?

VON WULLNOW