Untitled

APPENDICES III
directed. It is sustained by the notion that such contents represent
ready-made facts, to be delivered to your home like commodities.
Sentences like this express not just an attitude to a problem. Rather,
this whole book has become a grappling with a section of everyday life,
an inhabited Here and lived Now. Reality is so greatly neglected that it
must show its colours and name names.
The name is Berlin, which for the author is the city of employees
par excellence; so much so that he is absolutely aware of having made
an important contribution to the physiology of the capital. 'Berlin
today is a city with a pronounced employee culture: i.e. a culture
made by employees for employees and seen by most employees as a
culture. Only in Berlin, where links to roots and the soil are so
reduced that weekend outings can become the height of fashion, may
the reality of salaried employees be grasped.' The weekend is also the
province of sport. The critique of enthusiasm for sports among
employees shows how little the author is disposed to compensate for
his ironic treatment of the cultural ideals of the bien pensants by an all
the more fervent profession of faith in nature far from it. The
mistrust of instinct fostered by the ruling class is here countered
precisely by the writer as protector of unspoiled social instincts. He
has remembered his strength, which consists in seeing through
bourgeois ideologies, if not completely, at least wherever they are still
associated with the petite bourgeoisie. 'The spread of sport', Kracallc
says, 'does not resolve complexes, but is among othe things
symptom of repression on a grand scale; it does not prolllote the
reshaping of social relations, but all in all major of
depoliticization.' And still more decisively in anothn p. 'age: ';\
supposed natural law is erected against the present-day ('("onolllic
system without it being realized that precisely Nature, which is also
embodied in capitalistic desires, is one of that system's most powcrflll
allies; and that its perpetual glorification, moreover, conflicts wi th the
planned organization of economic life.' In line with this hostility to
Nature, the author precisely denounces 'Nature' where conventional
sociology would speak of degenerations. For him a certain traveller in
tobacco products, the personification of jauntiness and worldly
wisdom, is Nature. It is hardly necessary to point out that in so
consistent a thinking through of economics, which exposes the
primitive not to say barbaric character of relations of production and
exchange even in their contemporary abstract forms, the notorious
mechanization takes on a very different emphasis than it has for social
pastors. How much more promising, to this observer, is the soulless
mechanized motion of the unskilled worker, than the thoroughly
organic 'moral pinkness' that, according to the priceless formulation