51-52 The Emptiness of the Emotional Life

In Chapter 51 we learn about the unhappiness of Director Fischel's personal life: "misfortune had decreed that in the course of this marriage the mood of the times would shift away from the old principles of liberalism that had favored Leo Fischel."

Fischel's wife has drifted away from him, even though "her class consciousness would not permit them separate bedrooms."  The narrator sums up Fischel's angst:

But a shared bedroom, with the lights out, puts a man in a situation of an actor having to play before an invisible house the rewarding but by now worn-out role of a hero impersonating a growling lion. For years now, Leo's dark auditorium had not let slip the faintest hint of applause, nor yet the smallest sign of disapproval, and this was surely enough to shatter the strongest nerves.

Even his grown daughter, Gerda, dismisses Fischel: "You're old-fashion, Papa," she says.  The combination has a decidedly negative effect on the banker:

And so, though it far exceeded his need for philosophy, the aging man, left in the lurch by his life-partner and seeing no grounds for abandoning the rational fashion of his youth, began to sense the profound emptiness of emotional life, its formlessness which is eternally changing forms, its slow but relentless overturning that pulls everything with it. 

Which is why, when his wife and daughter talk so much about Arnheim and the Parallel Campaign, the banker "furtively hoped for an event that would at one blow expose the hollow pretense of it all."

* * *

In Chapter 52 Tuzzi is shocked to discovered "that not a single man was to be found in the whole Foreign Ministry who had read a single book of Arnheim's."  He has his press chief "order Arnheim's complete works for the ministry library" and requests "a detailed report on the man Arnheim from the Austrian Embassy in Berlin."

The chapter ends on an ominous note -- for Arnheim, at least.

He [Tuzzi] recalled Voltaire's saying that people use words only to hide their thoughts and use thoughts only to justify the wrongs they have done. Certainly, that is what diplomacy had always been about. But that a person spoke and wrote as much as Arnheim did, to hide his real intentions behind words, was something new; it made Tuzzi uneasy, and he would get to the bottom of it.