He looked up the former party leader in the diplomatic post he now held. He was living ‘according to his station’. The hall looked almost like that of the illustrious Herr von Maerker. Only the party leader’s study had remained the same. Modesty is a virtue. The paperknife, shaped like a cavalry sabre, still lay on the desk. A small dome bulged over the ink-well, which resembled a mosque. The forget-me-not frames still surrounded the two sons in uniform, although happily they had returned home. And the only new object was the large oil-painting of the party leader, painted by one of the leading portraitists of the Reich. What did it matter to the painter? He painted, painted without stopping. Once the Kaiser, twice the beloved general, once a radical. Art had nothing to do with politics. The painters wanted to be left alone in their studios. Art was Christmas, a holiday when all hearts beat in the same rhythm. How handsome the party leader was in the portrait, with his gaze directed to the future of the Fatherland, his right hand supported on the corner of the desk and his left toying with an iron watch-chain, which he had substituted for the gold one! No doubt about it, it was painted grey, it was made of iron. And he did not look like a party leader, but like a leader of parties. The Kaiser had known none, but he knew them all. ‘We have a passionate interest in Russia,’ he began. And, with the satisfaction of a man who speaks in the name of his country, he cited Bismarck, whose reminiscences he had read in all objectivity. Ah, he had always been a non-party man! The Fatherland, like painting, had nothing to do with politics. ‘In Germany,’ replied Friedrich, ‘the so-called Left will probably only succeed in a hundred years in being unrelenting towards their opponents. They are unable to hate. They are unable to become excited. It is their most zealous endeavour, not to defeat the enemy but to understand him. Eventually they come to know him so well that they own him to be right and can no longer attack him.’
The party leader wandered off into the wide domains of world history. It was evident that he saw himself as speaking from a tribune, and that he treated a solitary listener as an entire assembly. He loved it because he did not for a moment forget that he himself was a representative while unfailingly regarding the other, too, as a representative, and he magnified the importance he was wont to ascribe to himself by also attributing great importance to his partner. In the constant hope that each of his utterances was fitted to become a winged word, he now stressed the simple phrases and commonplaces that he had recited to Friedrich years before without pretension and as if by rote, as if they were original ideas. He had evidently, and at the first glance, remained his old self. He still appeared to be wearing the same rust-brown double-breasted jacket, and his trousers still fell in wide folds over wide smooth solid boots, the like of which were no longer to be found in shoe-maker’s shop-windows and consequently looked as if they had been sought for long and zealously. But the very care the man took to be humble echoed the diligence he employed to play a central part in the history of the times. And when he repeated again and again: ‘If only they’d listened to me then,’ or ‘Of course things turned out as I prophesied,’ or ‘The rashness which I have always condemned,’ he appeared to be convinced that his prescience justified the sturdy neglect of his dress. And when, from time to time, he spoke of his country as ‘we’, he believed himself to be equally discreet and blameless in his speech. And yet his ‘we’, his ‘our’, his ‘us’ recalled the way in which the employees of a large department store identify themselves with their firm even though they do not share their master’s income.
Some time later Friedrich was to encounter the party leader at a large assembly of politicians, journalists, diplomats and industrialists, one of those ambassadorial entertainments which are termed ‘a congenial gathering’ in professional circles and newspaper reports. All the men had donned tails, the uniform of congeniality. They ate sandwiches over whose butter was stretched a regular lattice of anchovy strips. Each held a plate or a cup or an empty glass in his hand without knowing why, and all sought discreetly and in vain for a place where they might dispose of these implements. Crafty guests betook themselves to the vicinity of the window-ledges and removed themselves after having deposited their plate in a perilous place, with meek expressions and in the slight anxiety that it might soon fall down and shatter. They only breathed freely when they had gained the opposite corner. The majority, however, stayed riveted to their plates and were consequently unable to be vivacious. The congeniality went from strength to strength.