41-44 The Great Session

Meissen Figurine

These chapters cover the first meeting of those involved in the planning of the Parallel Campaign.  Chapter 41 gives us more detail about Rachel, Diotima's servant, and we see the immediate preparations through her eyes.

Diotima had said to her the previous evening: "Tomorrow we may be making world history here!" and Rachel's whole body was aglow with happiness at being part of a household where such an event could take place -- a great compliment to the event, since Rachel's body, beneath its black uniform, was as exquisite as Meissen porcelain. 

There is a moment of awkwardness at the beginning when Diotima introduces Arnhein to Leinsdorf.  Leinsdorf didn't know Arnheim (a Prussian!) was coming, and Arnhein didn't realize that Leinsdorf hadn't been told about him.  But cultured manners prevail:

Most of the others present had probably noticed the little scene and wondered about Arnheim's presence insofar as they knew who he was; but among well-bred people it is generally assumed that there is sufficient reason for everything, and it is considered poor taste to ask too many prying questions.

The meeting proper begins with a longish speech by Leinsdorf that begins like this:

"What has brought us together," Count Leinsdorf said, "is the shared conviction that a great testimonial arising from the midst of the people themselves must not be left to chance but needs guidance by an influence that sees far into the future from a place with a broad perspective -- in other words, from the top."

Because of Arnheim's presence, Leinsdorf has to modify his speech by removing some of his prepared digs at Prussia.  Diotima then takes the floor to "clarify" what Leinsdort has said:

"We who are gathered here today for the first time do no feel called upon to define this aim as of now, but we are assembled to create first of all an organization to prepare the way for the framing of suggestions leading toward this aim."

This is followed by a silence.  The narrator explains the situation by way of analogy: "Shut birds of different species and song patterns, none of whom have any idea what is going to happen to them, together in a cage, and they will initially be silent in the same way."

Next, a professor confuses everyone by a speech on the "path of history."  The group is rescued by "representatives of the Imperial Privy Purse" who come up with "a list of foundations and endowments to be be expected, in that jubilee year, from His Majesty's private funds."

During a break in the meeting, Ulrich irritates Arnheim by asking him "whether he really believed that anything would come of this campaign."  Meanwhile, Diotima is trying to convince Leinsdorf of the legitimacy of have a Prussian involved in an Austrian campaign.  In her zeal, she comes up with another idea:

Suddenly she came out with the pronouncement that the True Austria was the whole world. The world, she explained, would find no peace until its nations learned to live together on a higher plane, like the Austrian peoples in their Fatherland. A Greater Austria, a Global Austria --- that was the idea His Grace had inspired in her at this happy moment --- the crowning idea the Parallel Campaign had been missing all along!

* * *

After the break, the meeting staggers on: "everyone had looked confident that something conclusive was about to occur. Nobody had given it any real thought, but they all had that look of waiting for something important to happen."  At this point Diotima reveals her plan:

If those present would therefore agree to set up committees, each headed by a delegate from a government department, with representatives of the respective institutions and sectors of the population at his side, the resulting organization would already embody the major moral forces of the world . . . and serve as an instrument through which these forces could flow in and be filtered.  

As for herself, Dioima reserves "the forming of a special committee for the further elaboration of the campaign's fundamental ideas."  

When someone asks "how the specifically Austrian note would come into the campaign as thus conceived," an army general rises to speak and puts in a plug for the military.  He concludes by saying: "a broadly based popular concern with the problems of the army and its equipment would be a decidedly worthy aim."  

The chapter ends with Rachel, who has been peaking into the room through the key hole, declaring that "Now they're talking about war."

Officially the meeting ends with a resolution, suggested by Leinsdorf, that "the people not take action on their own."  The others don't quite see the importance of the resolution, but they don't object to it either.  Besides, the meeting needs to end with some kind of "resolution":  "it would be an uncanny world if events simply slunk off, if there were not a final ceremony to assure that they had indeed taken place."