SOURCE: McKnight, Phillip. “The Absence of Malice: Das Napoleon-Spiel.” In Understanding Christoph Hein, edited by James Hardin, pp. 113–35. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995.

[In the following essay, McKnight analyzes the character Wörle's explanations for how and why he plays games in Das Napoleon-Spiel.]

Das Napoleon-Spiel, 1993 (The Napoleon Game), Hein's most recent novel, appeared as a series in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in the spring of 1993 before the book was released. While he was writing the novel, Hein's attention was diverted by the events of 1989 and especially by his own participation on the committee established to investigate police brutality in the GDR during the demonstrations of 7 and 9 October 1989. The following year, his work on Das Napoleon-Spiel was interrupted by two life-threatening brain operations and the ensuing long rehabilitation period, during which he was able to work only an hour or so each day. He had collapsed on stage during a cultural event as a result of hemorrhaging caused by a blood clot and probably owes his life to the fact that a neurosurgeon happened to be present in the audience and knew what to do while rushing him to the hospital.

In the broadest sense of the term, Das Napoleon-Spiel is an epistolary novel. It consists, however, of only two letters—each written by Friedel Wörle to his lawyer, Mr. Fiarthes. The first letter is written from his prison cell where he awaits his trial for the murder of one Bernhard Bagnall during a ride in the West Berlin subway through the East Berlin sector. The murder weapon is a billiard cue, and Wörle had carefully selected as his victim the most innocuous, neutral individual he could find. The second letter is written shortly after the trial and challenges Fiarthes to a new “game.”

Parts of Wörle's biography bear a loose relationship to Hein's. At war's end, Wörle's parents fled from the Eastern sectors of Germany which had been made a part of Poland. Due to his father's occupation, he was not permitted to study in East Germany, and he went to West Berlin in order to do so. Wörle, unlike Hein however, remains in the West, becomes a successful lawyer and politician, and indulges himself in games of power. Wörle's ultimate game, which he compares to Napoleon's decision to invade Moscow, is his cold-blooded murder of Bagnall and his successful defense of this murder as a blameless instance of manslaughter.

The rapid political changes, the radical changes in day-to-day living, the illness, and the long haggling over which publisher Hein was to work with after unification (Hein himself remained with Aufbau) all failed to take any of the specific edge off Das Napoleon-Spiel. Hein works with his main character from a greater distance than usual, albeit still employing first-person narrative. This is a somewhat perplexing book. Much more difficult to interpret than Hein's earlier prose, Das Napoleon-Spiel leaves the reader with the suspicion that he or she has read an allegorical novel or a parable or a book with undeciphered keys to real-life individuals. It is not likely that Hein had a specific individual in mind, but his experiences with the crassness, the cold, manipulative attitude, and the outright denial of moral responsibility by the once-powerful men interviewed by the committee investigating police brutality undoubtedly influenced his portrayal of Friedel Wörle. The epitome of a man without morals or compassion, Wörle is the most cynical of all characters Hein has ever created, and Hein is a master at portraying cynical characters. Most of his other figures, like Claudia or Kruschkatz, are somehow trapped by their cynicism—a bitterness that seems to have social and political causes—and they are as much the victims of the circumstances which led to their cynical behavior as they are perpetrators of inhumane deeds against the people around them and, even more, against themselves.

THE RULES OF THE GAME

Wörle does not suffer from his cynicism. On the contrary, he thrives on it. It is the essence of his life, and he succeeds at everything he tries to accomplish. He is able to accomplish anything he wishes precisely because he has no moral qualms and because he defines his actions and his life as a game of billiards or pocket billiards, a hustle in which winning is vastly less important than the elements of the game itself—elements that include, above all, the cold, rational calculation of all the possible angles, variations, and reactions effected by other men's normal attitudes when they too are playing the game, men who may have almost as few scruples as Wörle himself. Napoleon would have been an equal, worthy opponent and is the game-master par excellence after which Wörle imagines himself to be molded.

Wörle is driven only by fear of boredom. Winning by itself, for the player, is a closure that can be fatal; it is the continuation of the game itself which keeps him alive, and the stakes and the difficulty of the lie and the stroke must constantly be increased. This boredom, the need to have a game without a predictable outcome, drives Wörle to kill a stranger whom he has determined to be an absolute neutral and then to defend himself by arguing that it was not murder or homicide but “compulsory homicide.” The German words are unerläβliche Tötung. Tötung is also used in the sense of “manslaughter” in German legal terminology, and the term unerläβliche Tötung (“compulsory homicide”) itself is a play on the phrases rechtmässige Tötung (“justifiable homicide”) and fahrlässige Tötung (“involuntary manslaughter”). This compulsory homicide, or obligatory manslaughter, is justified by Wörle in his exhaustive letter to his attorney, Mr. Fiarthes, which he writes in his cell while awaiting trial—a long, rambling, and numbing letter which takes up some 200 pages.

LANGUAGE AS POWER

The very text itself is the most inaccessible of Hein's prose because Wörle is himself a lawyer, and the language he writes is an incredible mixture of a cynical panorama and an egocentric outlook on life, replete with legalese, bureaucratic formulations, and intentionally misleading statements, including long passages in parentheses. The language is often comparable to the euphemistic formulations which emit from official, military, and public life to circumscribe reality or to avoid the impact which more poignant and common descriptions of reality might have on ordinary people. Wörle uses language in the same way he practices billiards: the spin of each word, sentence, and phrase he uses is calculated to impact his colleague Fiarthes in a certain, predictable manner. Likewise, the spin placed on the language by Hein has an impact on the reader as well, a calculated impact which causes his or her disbelief to grow with the increasing realization of the potential for human atrocities contained in this man Wörle. He always calls his shots: he knows he is insulting Fiarthes's sense of decency and makes it apparent that this amuses him, as does his ready admission of the arrogance he takes from the knowledge that Fiarthes, as his attorney, cannot take action to expose his guilt or character on the basis of this letter but is sworn to defend him to the best of his ability and to the letter of the law.

Fiarthes becomes an inextricable part of the game and has no choice but to carom off of the edges with the spin given by Wörle. He is a passive figure in the novel. We never read a letter of his; we never see his actual reaction other than when Wörle himself refers to an expected reaction caused by the words in his letter. Wörle will run the billiard table before Fiarthes ever gets a chance, before anyone else will get a chance, and he will do it with the ball in an impossible lie.

Because of the language, the text is often tedious for the reader—even boring to the critic Volker Hage, for whom Hein's “hero speaks as if he were obligated to fill out an expense account report.”¹ Fritz Rudolf Fries, on the other hand, himself a prominent writer in the former GDR and considerably better informed than Hage, finds the language to function like “flypaper, once you have touched it, you don't get loose so quickly.”² The reader becomes part of the game, part of the parable being constructed by Hein.

Wörle opens his letter by expressing doubt that the truth will help his case. Society wants him to be convicted, but there has to be a proper defense as well, not so much a successful defense as one which satisfies both the law and the public. Wörle indicates that he had suggested that the defense be based on his legal inculpability due to his inability to recognize his deed as a criminal act or to acknowledge guilt. In his mind, the fact that this defense was rejected as absurd and cynical only served to confirm that he would “not be able to win the case with the truth” ([Das Napoleon-Spiel, hereafter cited as NS] 7).

Wörle is convinced that the behavior of the accused, including important non-verbal communication, will play the most prominent role. It had always been his experience as a lawyer that a common thief who provoked the judges with rude behavior had less of a chance of getting off with a light sentence than a charming and accommodating axe murderer: “In the bottom of his heart … the judge would rather free the courteous murderer and let the thief rot in jail” (NS 9). The accused is the main actor, and he has to take care not to be a ham. He cannot attempt to portray his situation as tragic; he must cause his audience to follow him against its will, just as Hein causes his readers, trapped on the flypaper, to reluctantly, and sometimes exasperatedly, follow Wörle's argument. Moreover, the public reaction to the case should not play a role since the judges cannot permit public opinion, itself driven by subjective feelings of revenge and pity, to influence their decisions, which must be—and appear to be—completely objective. Guilt and innocence are therefore subjugated to a legal game, to the manipulation of language according to established court procedures that themselves become more decisive than the facts. Hein calls merit into question. Image, show, and especially the mastery of timely manipulation with prudently loaded language render merit, real character, and truth into a secondary status.

Bernhard Bagnall, a clerk in a department store, lost his life on 21 June 1989 as a result of Wörle. But it is difficult to describe the motive, Wörle writes, choosing his formulation carefully: “it was neither murder nor homicide, but a killing, more precisely, a compulsory homicide” (NS 13)—something altogether different from murder. Bagnall died because Wörle had to protect himself from the experience of loathing and complacency. Implied is his right to “protect” himself and to always defend his self-interest, a principle which Western society holds sacred. Wörle is very much aware of this unspoken principle, and consequently, this really is the most correct answer he can give. He claims that he simply allowed himself to follow through with what most people probably feel like doing at one time or another anyway.

EARLY GAMES

Wörle begins to mix the story of his life into his defense letter, including many details, as he explains, which may appear irrelevant on the surface but which are important in understanding why he killed Bagnall, whom he had never met. Wörle was born in August of 1932 in Stettin, and his father was the owner of a candy factory, Frieder Wörle and Co., which had eighteen employees, almost all female—a situation due in part, perhaps, to the war. His mother was a society lady, and he was raised by a nanny. Wörle soon learned that he could control his nanny by virtue of the fact that his mother did not wish to be disturbed by children's prattle. He quickly discovered that tantrums or other disturbances which found their way to his mother's attention caused the nanny, not him, to be reprimanded, and hence he was able to use this as a leverage to coerce his nanny to follow his will.

Around the age of twelve, he began to hang around his father's place of business. He imagined he would grow up and take over the business—something that would please his father—and would eventually have a comfortable life selling packages of Schoko-Wör candies wrapped in foil. Although at twelve, he was old enough to no longer be teased and called “angel hair” by the women who processed the candies. He took advantage of the situation to go and sit on their laps, pressing his head against their breasts and breathing in their smell. The important point for him was that he knew that they knew he thought he was getting away with something and that he could continue his erotic play of beginning puberty anyway, letting them tease him in the manner they would a younger child in exchange for the not-so-clandestine liberties he took by wiggling around in their laps while they worked on the assembly line. From the very beginning, the objects of the games he plays are not very admirable.

Hein establishes the familiar pattern of a deleterious relationship with women on the part of characters he wishes to implicitly degrade in the reader's mind. This is a further point lost on Volker Hage, who claims that Hein imagines Wörle to possess everything that a successful man in the West could want, one item being “every kind of success with women.”³ Wörle's later “success” with women, which might resemble the sexual adventures of Dallow, is only hinted at, never includes real love, and does not conform to Hein's concept of healthy relationships between human beings. Wörle never marries. The only woman he names in his own narrative, Katja, is a “player” of equal or superior ability, and he beats a hasty retreat, fearing that she will defeat him soundly at his own game. Wörle is threatened by a female who is an equal. This certainly precludes any notion of “success” with women in the sense of successful relationships. Perhaps Hage means “conquests” of women, which has nothing to do with success in any sincere meaning of the word.

Within a year of Wörle's play with the women in his father's chocolate factory, the family flees Stettin, giving up all their possessions except for the few items they could carry. They move in with his father's cousin in Tiefenort, a small town. Evidently the relatives have a strained relationship because his father had disappeared with the bride of his cousin for a couple of hours during the wedding celebration. In spite of his obviously not being welcome, the elder Wörle moves into two rooms upstairs in his cousin's house. The exact meaning of this symbolic exploitation by the elder Wörle remains unclear. Structurally it provides a case of authoritative domination of a morally superior individual with a weaker constitution (the cousin), weaker due to the influence of moral values on his actions (his cousin Wörle is homeless and unfortunate due to the advancing Russians). Wörle's mother, however, is distraught by the new situation and confines herself to her room. A few months later, she dies, and the cause of death, according to Wörle's cynical but accurate view is the loss of the salon and music room where she has entertained society in Stettin—even though this diagnosis would hardly be legally permissible in a coroner's examination. It is nevertheless an analogy that Wörle plants like a seed in the mind of his lawyer, a subtle linguistic distinction to create a distraction.

His father obtains employment as a procurer in a wood-cutting company the day after they arrive. After a year, his father moves in with a widow whose husband has fallen in the war, and he takes over the postage stamp mail-order business she had inherited. She has a son named Johannes, two years younger than Wörle but a head taller. Wörle constantly refers to this stepbrother as “the bastard.” Johannes attacks Wörle and then calls his mother before Wörle can retaliate. Wörle realizes that he has to develop a refined tactic in order to triumph over the “bastard.” A game.

It is the games which keep us alive, he maintains: “Hunger, the quest for fame, and our sexual drive are supposed to keep us alive” (NS 36–37). He has experienced these and found them to be weak motivators: “What was left for me, the thing which keeps me going, is the thrill of the game. It relieves boredom, you know. When the game is over we are dead” (NS 37). Fair play is not possible with his brother: he is not a player and therefore not a real opponent; his brother just wants to win. Wörle will have to lead him into a trap.

Three of Wörle's father's neckties are cut up and strewn about in the garden, an offense carried out in such a manner as to make it look like Wörle is guilty. The problem is that such a conclusion is too obvious, and therefore his father thinks that the stepbrother has done it. Wörle is aware how difficult it is for his father to punish the stepbrother in the mother's presence. His father has made an effort to form a good relationship with the “bastard” for the sake of the widow. But now the stepbrother is whipped in front of his mother by the elder Wörle—a stark contrast to the pedagogical methods of Thomas's father in Horns Ende. Johannes, the “bastard,” is caught totally by surprise, and, seeing Wörle's feigned sympathy, he begins to scream that Wörle was the guilty party, not he. This only makes the situation worse, inasmuch as it appears that Johannes is not “man enough” to take the blame for his act and is shamelessly trying to pin the blame on someone else, his half brother—only adding to his guilt. At this juncture, his own mother reaches over the table to slap him as well. For his part, Wörle shows his indignation at being falsely accused, although he holds this in check in order to demonstrate to his father and the widow some (feigned) brotherly solidarity with his punished stepbrother. Instead of being vengeful and happy that his stepbrother is being punished for denouncing him, he shows that he is aghast and appalled. The “bastard” is broken. He has been conquered. He will not be able to undertake anything without appearing vindictive. He has also lost his privilege as the widow's son, from now on Wörle's father can punish him whenever the occasion presents itself. Wörle can exploit the situation at will; he can make his brother the object or the medium of his games, whichever he chooses.

Three years later, the mail-order business is nationalized, and Wörle's father is named director of the business. His authority is restricted by the new accountant named by the state (a party official was assigned to each factory or business). Wörle continues his little business on the side, which he supports by taking “surplus” stamps out of his father's offices, selling them privately to schoolmates. He takes his stepbrother into the enterprise, a wise move to pre-empt any possibility of being exposed. They sell their stamps at a discount, and the mail-order business suffers a small loss of business. They continue after the business is de-privatized. At that time, the inventory of the firm shows too many stamps which might hamper the “antifascist and democratic education” (NS 45) of their customers and not enough progressive stamps commemorating socialist countries and the Soviet Union.

Wörle has observed that his side business tends to lose customers when they reach puberty, and as he nears the end of his own school years and applies to study law at the university, he turns over the entire “black market” enterprise to the “bastard.” He finds that his status as son of a former capitalist prevents his acceptance at the university and determines to move to Berlin and study law in West Berlin. Meanwhile, the mail-order business experiences new troubles and is not showing a profit. His stepbrother's side business is discovered. Had the juvenile court judge not been a philatelist himself, Johannes would surely have been jailed, inasmuch as the damaged business now belongs to the state and constitutes a federal offense. The “bastard” contributes to the irreparable break with his own family by claiming that Wörle had started the business in the first place. But Johannes has no credibility because of the earlier incident with the ties, and his claim angers the family further, leaving him thoroughly victimized. Again, Wörle has an appropriate analogy: it is not so much malice—indeed, Wörle always insists that a player never acts out of malice—as it is simply an example of the fact that at some point in a bullfight, the bull is pierced by the bullfighter. It is not a case of bloodthirstiness or revenge, just a part of the rules of the game.

Two years later, his father becomes the director of another state-owned concern and joins the party so that the adopted son, Johannes, is able to matriculate at the university in Leipzig, where he studies history—a subject of consequence in Hein's works. Shortly thereafter, Wörle visits his father and the widow in Tiefenort, but he is placed under house arrest for having fled the GDR earlier. His identification papers are confiscated. However, these events place his half brother in a much more difficult situation than the one in which Wörle finds himself. As was standard procedure in the GDR, Johannes is required to break off relations with home in order to avoid contact with Wörle: contact with any Westerners would result in his expulsion from the university. The widow somehow seems to have a vague idea of what had happened: “She had lost her son and instinctively she turned on me, not able to know, however, that I really was the cause of the separation between her and her son” (NS 53). The Wall still has not been built, and Wörle is able to escape back to the West and finish his studies with high honors. He turns down an offer to continue his studies and pursue an academic career. He has studied law in order to learn the rules of the game, and now he wants to play, not fiddle around with improving the rules.

He moves to Boppard, a small town in the Rheinland and obtains employment with the law firm Wieser and Wieser (one of the brothers is deceased). By this time, Wörle's father and the widow have fled the GDR and also settled in Boppard, where his father took advantage of reparations paid by the FRG to those who had lost possessions in the East—he still has documentary proof of his ownership of the candy factory—in order to start up a mail-order business for embroidery. The “bastard” is left with a no-win situation. If he goes to the West, he will be ostracized from the family. If he stays in the East, his career will be severely limited because his entire family has fled the Republic. He remains behind, eventually finding employment as a high-school history teacher. History, although Hein does not make it the object of discourse in this novel, is relegated to a degraded status in the GDR, a harmless place of little influence to which less worthy individuals are assigned. The bastard sibling of society.

THE AURA OF WEALTH AND BEAUTY

Wörle remains in Boppard only a few years before it is time for him to move on to bigger and better things. One case he takes in Boppard, however, is highly instructive for him. He gets the case due to an illness of Wieser's, a case involving the owner and chief executive officer of a large producer of building materials, a third-generation owner who is highly respected in the community. Wörle is struck by his mannerisms and polished reserve; giving the impression of being tired but very alert, he behaves as a man who is unconcerned but not bored. In the smallest movement of his hand, he embodies the third generation of his firm and looks more like a high-church dignitary than a businessman and defendant. Hein's description, never quoting or naming the defendant, indicates that the latter is a man capable of very powerful non-verbal communication.

Wörle reflects that he has always been fascinated with beautiful women and rich men. They have an aura, the perfume of beauty and the aroma of money: “It is something other than what is commonly known as the odor of money, the gently penetrating smell of power and influence, which stinks slightly of greed, avarice, self-enrichment and envy” (NS 64). Beauty and wealth has another scent which attracts us: “A man of culture we can say and we mean this scent, this beauty” (NS 64) which inspires admiration and respect in us. The prosecuting attorney is also taken in by the “man of culture” and is only too happy to lose his case and to congratulate the executive. To Wörle it is clearly evident that his own extremely well-prepared presentation of the case has by no means been the deciding factor. The executive's behavior in court, his straightforward answers, the fact that he has appeared in person on behalf of his firm, all these elements have won the case for him. He is well aware of this fact and feels that he owes nothing to the firm of Wieser and Wieser other than the appropriate legal fees. The young judge is caught in a no-win situation. Whatever he decides, part of the media would have strongly critical opinions to express. A harsh judgement would only manifest that he has overreacted because of his own personal aversion to such wealth and power. Wörle takes mental notes of the judge's predicament and the player's (the defendant's) exploitation of the situation.

Wörle decides to move to Berlin and practice law on his own. He opens his office in October of 1960 with a part-time secretary. On 7 February 1967, he learns from his accountant that he has accumulated his first unencumbered million. Vanity is not the reason for him to report this fact; it has, he claims, a causal relationship to the death of Bernhard Bagnall. The precision of dates used by Hein throughout the story lends a documentary quality to the narrative, a ploy designed to create and enhance Wörle's credibility.

THE SOPHISTICATED PLAYER

The player, Wörle states, “wants to place his bets and, of course, to win” (NS 73). But winning itself has only the purpose of allowing him to bet again. The task is to play; the stakes and the winnings are secondary. “Some games consist of matches that last for years, matches in which fortunes and the lives of people can be wagered. Players plan their strategies like field generals with full authority” (NS 73). Napoleon, he surmises, must have viewed the money and armies of his nation with a certain objective distance. It wasn't his own money or his own army which was at his disposal but the country's, and hence he did not need to be considerate of them as he threw them onto the game board Europe. He could play unreservedly, majestically, and successfully: “A player is one who bets. Perhaps this is the whole truth” (NS 73). He bets his money, his reputation, his reason, his life, but always without worry or fear of loss, and this distinguishes him from common gamblers, careerists, idealists, business executives, and normal people who risk something in order to attain something else, something greater, more beautiful—wealth, power, influence.

“The player just bets, nothing more. Winnings and losings are outside his field of vision” (NS 74). Unfortunately, people who behave exactly the opposite are usually referred to as the players, he states, because they attempt to enrich themselves in a banal manner. This applies to the little swindler on the street as well as to state-licensed lotteries, according to Wörle's analysis. This so-called gambling consists of nothing more than legal contracts with extremely poor business conditions covered over by marketing glamour. A player wants to wager in order to play. The winnings are already boring for him: “A game in which the player cannot intercede and act … is nothing more than an order placed for an unspecified capital return” (NS 74).

As Wörle's wealth amasses, he grows more and more bored. The thought that the game and therefore his life is at an end begins to depress him. The idea of continuing anyway makes him physically ill, and he broods long hours in his office, his firm having taken on other partners by then. He realizes that the game is much more than just a passion for him; it is the center of his life, his life itself. Without this passion, he thinks he might as well shoot himself (Russian roulette, of course). Hein seems to describe the process of addiction. As a gambler and a player, Wörle requires increasing challenges to satisfy his addiction.

Wörle relates his passion for billiards to Fiarthes. He compares it somewhat to the shabby passion of one of his last clients in Boppard, a businessman who has revealed his secret collection of women's panties in confidence to Wörle. Like the businessman, who then was too embarrassed to retain Wörle's services, Wörle thinks that everyone has some little thing to hide, and this is the reason he keeps his billiard table in his house in Kampen, on the island of Sylt. He has another house in Northern Italy as well, in the Toscana, but the house in Kampen is off limits to women guests and other friends. He goes there to be by himself and to play billiards and to solve his problems.

All of Wörle's decisions are made at the billiard table, including how, when, and who (Bagnall) will die. The rest, which Fiarthes views as the actual deed, “is nothing more than the burdensome execution of the plan, the implementation and test run of the game” (NS 94). To Wörle's way of thinking, billiards includes not only the calculation of all the endless variations, the possibilities of striking the ball directly or indirectly, all the spins and possible runs of the ball. Even if you could program a computer with this information, you would be missing the element which is not subject to scientific calculation: the execution of the stroke of the queue on the ball. It is not like chess, where the move itself is only mechanical, he reasons. Not only do you have to plot out the variables and the reaction of your opponent; you must strike the ball correctly, and you can and should do this in such a way as to mislead and deceive you opponent. Wörle asks Fiarthes if he is bored by all this. Wörle is not, as Fiarthes probably thinks, “speaking about billiards, he just wanted to say something about the scene of the crime” (NS 102). As a concept appearing in a novel about the power of language to manipulate reactions, divert attention from the truth, and gain a distinct advantage, the “stroke” on the ball consists of the words chosen carefully to maneuver those who hear them or read them (Fiarthes and Hein's readers) into a position of reluctant collusion.

Not too long after the accumulation of his first million, in March 1967, Wörle decides to change his course. He reduces his activity as a lawyer to a few cases and enters local politics: “A player has no principles and his morals are dependent only on the roll of the balls” (NS 104). These thematic words appear in parentheses to soften their impact discreetly, and they are spoken to introduce Wörle's description of his political career. The subtext carries an implication about the workings of politics in general—i.e., Wörle is a politician, and politicians are often like Wörle.

His entry into politics is characterized by his apparent (real, as defined by his self-proclaimed status as a real player) unselfishness, a character trait often regarded with suspicion in political circles, and his independence—he did not join a political party. He has succeeded in gaining a foothold in non-partisan politics after a year and, by the end of four years, has made himself indispensable in the overall political scene. Winnings and power, as always, do not interest him. He is attracted by politics because its nature requires him to react to constantly changing conditions and relationships. He will spend twenty years in politics, up to about 1988, before he begins to play the game which leads to Bagnall's death.

It is tempting at this point in the novel to begin to look for political allegories. In spite of Wörle's personal biography, the dates of the murder and the trial seem to make it expedient to think of Wörle as somehow representative of the West, as the West German reviewer Volker Hage indeed has done, rejecting at the same time that Hein has captured any truth about life and attitudes in the West.⁴ Although this is ironically reminiscent of East German disclaimers that Hein's earlier works are an accurate representation of life in the GDR, it nevertheless seems that Hein is trying to get at something broader here, at some element which exists in human nature that can take over when human existence is devoid of compassion, principles, morals, and ideals. If this applies to certain aspects of Western society, especially in the economic sector which ascribes to such notions as the maximization of profits for the good of the shareholders, then it applies to other aspects of society as well and in other parts of the world as well. The East German experience of unification, after all, was comprised of disillusionment and of the unfortunate realization that citizens would be exploited as much as possible by legally supported institutions. The Treuhandgesellschaften⁵ often returned property to Western owners' descendents after these forty-five years of separation between East and West Germany. Sometimes they delayed use of the property for years until the matter could be resolved, and in some cases they intentionally stalled promised investments to allow East German-operated concerns to go under, enabling Western companies to move in and buy or invest cheaply. Most unkindly, West Germans came to regard their compatriots in the East as second-class citizens. From the perspective of East Germany—an area in 1993 still struggling with astronomical unemployment figures and lacking the technical education to succeed as well as lacking investment capital—former GDR citizens might really feel as though they are being confronted with people like Wörle, even if he appears in an exaggerated form, almost as a caricature of the problem. Fritz Rudolf Fries conveys some of these notions in his review: “The confessions of this intellectual carpetbagger contain a bottomlessness” into which we all stumble. The case goes much deeper than the opportunism of Wörle; the depth of the abyss is temporarily held up by a story which “documents the ice cold climate of our times.”⁶

FEELINGS AND “THE GAME”

Feelings, according to Wörle, ruin everything: “Whoever enters a game with emotions is lost before he takes the queue in his hand” (NS 114). It is an irreparable handicap to allow emotions and feelings into the game, and whoever does so can never wipe out the damage caused by his attempting to eliminate feelings for the next shot or move. The mistake has already been made, and it will impact the rest of the game for him. It is certainly laudatory to have feelings. And the people with feelings “are quite possibly good persons,” better persons, “but they just aren't real players” (NS 115).

Wörle meets up with only two or three real players during his time in politics. The rest are “idiots, fools, scoundrels and good family men” (NS 116). They want power, money, and fame. But after a while, they must surely realize that they are simply cogs in a well-structured and smooth-functioning bureaucracy and that they are only important and needed when they accurately fulfill the tasks given them. It makes no difference whether they are a small wheel or a big wheel. They have power, to be sure, but only when they perform what is required of them. They have a little power, but only insofar as they remain dependent and not free. This dependency makes them into slaves of the bureaucratic machinery, driven by fear of failure and the need for security. Wörle uses them as training for his games. It would be annoying to simply win such matches. In fact, he loses as often as not as a result of his experimentation with moves and spinoffs. Wörle becomes known in political circles as a “maker of kings,” or, in other quarters, as a Rasputin.⁷

“Whoever plays is always alone” (NS 124), maintains Wörle. If this bothers you, you shouldn't play. You can never win anything with love, but with love it is easy to lose everything. Jealousy, meanness, envy, and even hate can be helpful in some circumstances, as long as you are in control or are occupied with manipulating these traits in others. After all, as Wörle points out to justify his argument, no one would claim that Napoleon was well-loved. His enemies hated him, and his soldiers feared him. To his officers he gave overblown titles. Wörle insists that he has found good years in his life. He has found a game which enables him to live on, but at the same time, he realizes that something is coming to an end and that he is approaching his Moscow. Bagnall's death was unavoidable; he would have fatally endangered himself had he not killed him. Wörle realizes in Kampen at the billiard table that his crime was a question of self-defense and that it is time for Fiarthes to accept this fact.

THE PRINCIPLE OF SELF-INTEREST

Wörle has to overcome his own disgust at the idea of killing someone. This is not so much because he values human life. He has a certain interest in his own life, as long as it is not boring, and the truth is he would be more upset by the loss of two small wooded areas in Berlin where he likes to go for walks than he would be at the report of the violent death of one of his neighbors. This is not a question of morality but of human nature, he maintains. Sure, he would regret the death of other people, but if he were faced with the choice between his house in the Toscana and the life of some thousand unknown people, he wouldn't have to think about it for a second. He would be sorry for the deaths of so many people, but his house cost him a lot of time and money, and its loss would be horrible, a catastrophe. Wörle is a bit sorry that this is the way he thinks, that he is not more noble and humane, but he questions whether thinking otherwise would really be normal for human beings: “It is human to not be all too unselfish” (NS 134). The monstrosity is not the self-serving person but rather the do—good deeds. Even though we admire them, they are strange and puzzling to us: “We would all get along better if we would accept ourselves as what we really are” (NS 134) is Wörle's logical and frighteningly callous maxim. One interpretation of the parable in this story presents itself as the reduction of Adam Smith's time-honored principle of self-interest—already the key to survival in the seventeenth-century philosophies of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, and the fundamental idea behind capitalism—to its basic essence, devoid of all sentimentality: no one can expect Wörle to take any action which runs counter to his self-interest or to fail to take action which supports it.

The killing was unavoidable, and Wörle had to struggle with himself many months before he could bring himself to do it. What would have happened to Napoleon if he had not gone to Moscow, he argues, or even if he had triumphed at Moscow? He would have had to run the administration of the conquered lands, to spend his time keeping them under control, and this task would have bored him; it would have killed him. It was a game of kings for Wörle. He had to structure the match so that it was in balance with the finiteness of his own life.

Wörle complains that he is being given unfair treatment in jail. For his fellow inmates, he contends, being put in prison is like being moved from a hole into a dog's hole. For the homeless man, it is actually an improvement. The conditions of Wörle's own confinement, compared to the standard of living to which he is accustomed, constitute a much more drastic reduction in the quality of his life than they do for the others. The equality fanaticism of the early nineteenth century is long out of date, and he maintains that he really ought to be placed in an apartment leased out to poor families by government agencies. He would pay for it, of course, and not only would the correct proportion of punishment during the time he awaits his trial be restored, but the government would be acting in a financially prudent manner, following its own self-interests. The conditions Wörle has dealt himself to continue the game from within the cell are beginning to disturb him, he informs Fiarthes, and he's not sure if he can really stand the confinement. This comment may well be the deception Wörle uses to elicit the response he desires from Fiarthes. The reader notices an involuntary, momentary lapse into sympathy for Wörle at this point. He seems to be suffering a little bit after all.

FREEDOM

Another digression of Wörle's is a treatise on freedom, in some respects an excellent commentary on Dallow of The Tango Player. The masses don't want freedom; they are born vassals, and to give them freedom would make them permanently unhappy. Under the yoke, they may have been thoughtlessly dissatisfied, but a little freedom makes them nervous and they hasten to find ways to use up their free time, usually by contracting someone else—the leisure time industry, for example—to fill it up for them: “The masses don't want freedom, they want only paradise” (NS 149). That paradise is the place of the lord, the place where all the other vassals are, happy vassals. Who would want to begrudge these vassals getting what they want (attaining the object of their self-interest): security, unshaken values, clear directions on how to behave, and a moral structure with the possibility for reward and punishment and the power to reward and punish. The vassal is subjugated to an external will, year in and year out. He takes directions and fulfills his duties. The task given him from the outside will becomes his happiness, whether in the machine shop or the editor's room, the office of a large company or a local agency. After death he won't have to fool around with travel agencies and the like anymore, and he will still have a heavenly paradise as a member of a society under an outside will, under a judging and commanding Lord. This digression is also an integral part of the letter, according to Wörle. It serves as a contrast to his own concept of freedom, unencumbered by sentimentality, by the need for security (that would be fatal to his personality) or by the need to win. He then proceeds to describe how he made his decision to proceed with the killing.

As Wörle describes it, he left Kampen on 12 May 1988 and set out for his Moscow, hoping to avoid Napoleon's St. Helena, for Napoleon's confinement there eventually killed him. A little over a year later, on 21 June 1989, Wörle killed Bernhard Bagnall. He argues that he is not a murderer or a homicidal maniac—these are terrible people. Napoleon sacrificed over 400,000 men in Russia, and no one ever accused him of being a murderer. It would be a mockery of logic to equate a compulsory killing with murder. People die frequently before their biological clock has run its course, sometimes in a war, sometimes because a stone falls off a building and strikes them in the head. None of these unavoidable killings activate the legal system. The destruction of an army or a city neutralizes the law by virtue of the large scope of the act. Yet in the case of smaller numbers, we are immediately inclined to look for motives and to look for criminal behavior. This is why the person Wörle chose for his killing had to be a completely neutral entity: he had to be representative of the average of the masses. It took him almost a year to find his man, and he often despaired, since everyone he investigated had some minor flaw. Bernhard Bagnall was the perfect ball waiting to be struck by Wörle's queue. The killing took place in public, but he was surprised to see “that Bagnall's sudden disappearance was noticed so quickly” (NS 170). Bagnall's status was irrefutably and absolutely neutral, which made it a “virgin game” (NS 168) unworthy of being degraded by “awkward and ridiculous” (NS 169) references to morality. It seems that in Wörle's mind, Bagnall's “disappearance” should have been more matter-of-fact.

THE ULTIMATE GAME

Every player, according to Wörle, eventually is confronted with a game in which he not only stands there with queue in hand, but in which he is also the ball. He is simultaneously the ball and the player. This “makes his risk incalculable and the chances of victory virtually impossible” (NS 176). His only hope is to create conditions which seduce his opponent into a certain plan of action. When the ball lies motionless on the table, he must make the effort to “leave the contact point which would create the desired spin advantageous to himself when [the ball is] struck by his opponent” (NS 177). There is almost no chance of this strategy's being successful, but if it were to be, what an incredible game: the player as the ball which plays with his opponent. What a thrill to dare to play such a game. And now, Wörle says to his lawyer, he is himself lying on the table (helplessly in prison) and awaiting just such a stroke. Everything has been prepared as best as it could, and now it is all up to Mr. Fiarthes, in whom he places his hope and trust. In order to win, however, the opponent must be an equal, capable of recognizing the strategy and striking the ball on a different point than had been predetermined by the player. Napoleon ran into an equal player and lost. But this fact shouldn't stop either Wörle or Mr. Fiarthes—who, Wörle implies, is not the equal of Napoleon, even though Wörle is audaciously calling Fiarthes's shot for him and challenging him to play it differently.

Wörle finally recounts the killing to his defense attorney. He entered the subway where Bagnall always got on. He had made an extra trip to Kempen and selected a queue stick held together in the middle with a metal screw. The subway car entered the Eastern sector of Berlin and had to slow down for the stations there; it was not allowed to stop or take on or discharge passengers. Wörle took out his queue and seemed to be playing with it. Just as the car began to move out of the last East Berlin station, Wörle placed the half of the queue with the metal screw up on the railing and delivered a precise blow to Bagnall's temple. He died instantly, without a sound. Wörle immediately began to look after him, aware that the witnesses would also report on his fervent, circumspect, and self-sacrificing care of the dead man. He asked them to make room to lay him on the bench and to get something to bind the wound. He also had to prevent one of the passengers from pulling the emergency brake cord in order to avoid being arrested by East German police, which could have ruined his game. When the subway arrived in the first West Berlin station, Kochstraβe (the old location of Checkpoint Charlie), he took Bagnall in his arms and asked everyone to get out with him and to wait for the police as witnesses at the station. Seven of the approximately twenty passengers got out with him, although three of these went ahead and left the station.

Wörle ends his letter to his lawyer here and wishes him good luck with his next shot, which, as the reader sees, is to be played immediately after Wörle's detailed confession, his last preparation of the lay of the ball. It was self-defense, for if he had not been able to play this game, he would not have been able to resolve the excusable and understandable crisis threatening his own life: the irrepressible need to escape boredom, to play a more challenging game. As his lawyer is sworn to confidentiality, Fiarthes, of course, cannot make the contents of the letter known.

INFINITY

The novel has a surprise ending. The killer has, incredibly, gone free, and his own lawyer, as Wörle surmises, is anguishing over the success of his defense of Wörle. In his second, and last, letter to Fiarthes, Wörle tells the defense attorney that the man who has just delivered the missive is waiting for it to be returned. He has been instructed to take it by force, if necessary, although Wörle does not think such will be the case. The prior evening, he had retrieved from his lawyer his first—long and self-incriminating—letter to prevent Fiarthes from copying it after reading this new letter. Moreover, in the second letter, he informs Fiarthes that he will not destroy the long letter, that he intends to publish it. Of course, he will remove incriminating evidence about himself as well as anything that might harm Fiarthes. This will simply be another ball played in the game. He plans to give the manuscript to an author who will publish it in his own name and receive the royalties. He suspects it will not be difficult to find a willing author among the starving writers—and one who can keep quiet, as well. Besides, this writer will not have anything “except a story in which neither your [Fiarthes's] name nor mine occurs and in which one can decipher the story of my case only with a great deal of fantasy” (NS 197). This statement could be an intentionally misleading device on Hein's part, or it could hint at the many former GDR officials who quickly put together a book—usually ghost-written—in order to capitalize on the political atmosphere after the Wall came down and make a quick profit. It is not Hein's normal practice to write a roman à clef, however, even though Wörle states to Fiarthes that precisely this will be done. His characters possess universality and a quality of representativeness of real types. The statement functions to “prepare” the lie of the ball for the reader's response.

The man in the waiting room is none other than Wörle's stepbrother, the “bastard.” The previous November, after the fall of the Wall, his brother had come to West Berlin and looked him up, visiting Wörle in the jail cell. After he explained who he was and that his first journey through the opened Wall had led him to Wörle, the latter welcomed him with opened arms: “Welcome to freedom” (NS 199). These words are spoken to deceive his brother, who naively believes that the West means freedom when, in fact, freedom is the illusion of the masses described earlier by Wörle. Wörle recognizes that his brother, looking for paradise, also needs to subjugate himself to the will of a “lord,” or boss. His stepbrother, of course, is willing to do everything he asks. He had been able to work as a teacher at the university for a while, but when the Warsaw forces marched into Prague, he had expressed his disapproval in front of students. He was dismissed, had to remain unemployed two years, then worked in a chemical factory, and finally was allowed to teach history in a high school, but only on the condition that he take over an undesirable party function in the local union.

The brother has been prepared for his encounter with Fiarthes and is not going to believe anything Fiarthes has to say which might contradict what Wörle has told him. Moreover, he doesn't know anything about the match between Wörle and Fiarthes. Wörle had chosen Fiarthes as his lawyer because he knew of an indiscretion committed by the latter some ten years earlier, a leverage he was able to use to ensure that Fiarthes did not drop the case and thus endanger his game. Of course that's all forgotten now, and Wörle is enjoying continued success in his law offices; numerous clients are seeking him out to represent them after reading the reports of his spectacular trial.

Wörle has a new game for Fiarthes, or perhaps it is the continuation of the previous one. This time no one will be killed, at least not in the literal sense of the word. He is planning to ruin a well-respected citizen, one with impeccable integrity, an educated and enlightened man, very likeable and honored publicly. It will be extremely difficult to ruin him, especially since there is no sign that even the smallest, most insignificant impropriety has ever been committed by the man. This is the very reason Wörle has chosen him to be his next game ball. In order to up the stakes to the maximum difficulty, Wörle now wants Fiarthes to enter the game as the protector of the man to be ruined. His stepbrother has a note which contains the man's name and will read this name to Fiarthes in exchange for the letter Fiarthes is reading at the very moment. Wörle hopes that Fiarthes is convinced to enter the new game as his opponent by warning the man chosen as the victim and doing what he can to prevent Wörle from ruining him. Thus ends the novel.

UND DIESE VERDAMMTE OHNMACHT

Immediately after the opening of the Berlin Wall, Hein had agreed not only to participate in the hearings of the investigating committee which attempted to identify the guilty parties during the police brutality on 7 and 8 October 1989, during the fortieth-year celebration of the GDR, but he additionally agreed to help compile and edit the protocol for publication. This all took place during the writing of Das Napoleon-Spiel. The hearings themselves were characterized by denials on the part of the highest officials in charge at the time—including Egon Krenz, who had replaced Honecker for a short period of time; Günter Schabowski, a member of the Central Committee and the party chief in Berlin; the hated chief of the State Security Police (Stasi), Erich Mielke; and a number of other high-ranking officials such as the attorney general of Berlin, the interior minister, generals, police chiefs, military attorneys, and Stasi officials. The hearings dragged on for many months as the committee attempted to get to the bottom of things, continuing into the spring of 1990, when the first free elections in East Germany and the impending decision to reunite with West Germany rendered the committee's work largely moot. Follow-up work continued on into the fall of 1990, and the proceedings were published in 1991 with the title Und diese verdammte Ohnmacht (And This Damned Helplessness).

Hein wrote in his introduction to the proceedings of the hearings that the public interest had been captured by the elections, the approaching end of the existence of the country, the creation of the new Federal States in the East, reunification, the implementation of the capitalist system, and above all, the introduction of West German marks on the basis of a two-for-one exchange. In November of 1989, the work of the committee had been a mind-boggling provocation and its members were aware that they could easily have spent many years in prison afterwards, but by the spring of 1990, time had rolled over it and obscured its importance. Hein's frustration with the failure of the committee to accomplish its goals is evident in an example he cites: “In the spring of 1990 the commission again recommended the indictment of a high officer of the State Security Police. A few weeks afterwards they learned that the officer indeed was in court, however not as a defendant but as the plaintiff, who requested the release of a confiscated sport motorboat of the Stasi, which he claimed as personal property” (Ohnmacht 11–12).

Members of the committee were never able to determine who gave the orders. If they were to believe the statements made at the hearings, the most powerful men of the country and its security forces, including those in the Politburo, had all secretly been resistance fighters, were not guilty, and were horrified at the events. The deployed Stasi officers could not be identified and located; no one knew who had ordered whom to do what, or even what had happened to the clubs used in the beatings. The state attorneys, sitting in the room next to where prisoners from the demonstrations were held, were unaware of the violence employed against those arrested, didn't hear their screams or see their injuries. The committee was left with the feeling of “damned helplessness,” the precise situation in which Fiarthes finds himself. Further research may some day turn up connections between Wörle and one or more of the politicians or lawyers Hein encountered during his work on the committee. More important is the connection between the feelings of helplessness expressed in Das Napoleon-Spiel and in Hein's report. In such a context, the novel is a commentary on unscrupulous and arrogant behavior by men in power, presented as symptomatic of the time in which we live. Hein had always written about victims in the past and had usually done so with humor. This time, he turned his attention to a perpetrator, and his portrayal is totally devoid of humor.

It is not too difficult to understand the “bastard” as a fairly decent but clearly victimized individual representative of East Germany. Likewise, Fiarthes can be understood as a decent and responsible representative of West Germany, if the reader wishes. But who is the unscrupulous Wörle, a man capable of moving between East and West, a man of wealth and political influence who ruins everyone he chooses to ruin regardless of their place on the spectrum? He is an amoral force, living for the game, and the reader is left to wonder where he will strike next and whether something can be done about it. There is no redeeming social victimization in his biography: nothing happened in his life which caused him to become like he is; he seems more to be an abstract principle which can infiltrate the lives of individuals in society in an insidious manner.

Symbols of disconcerting abstractions appear throughout the text in fragmented form, presenting a temptation to risk badly misinterpreting the story. Hein complained about how distasteful it was for him to be so intricately involved in the political events after the fall of the Wall and how he longed to return to being a writer. It is almost possible to see him as Fiarthes, as someone who has been duped into defending a monster and who now cannot extricate himself. But Hein claims that he “never presents alien monsters”⁸ and thus claims the right to be identified with Wörle as much as with Fiarthes.

Perhaps there is something to this, but a more helpful approach might be to consider Hein's intellectual activity during the writing of Das Napoleon-Spiel and his reaction to the neo-Nazi activity on both sides of the Elbe, his concerns that the outgrowth of the long-lasting Historikerstreit would overturn national guilt and awareness about the past.

Wörle, who always let the “bastard” take the blame, might symbolize the specter of fascism (always linked with capitalism in socialist ideology) raising its head again in Germany during and after unification, a ghost of the Nazi past who succeeds in duping the Germans (Fiarthes) into defending him and who is found not guilty (on legal technicalities) by the judges (historians), setting the monster free once again.

Hein had read numerous Stasi files and was appalled that cold-blooded murder was part of its repertoire as well as that of the secret police in other countries. Secret police are in a position to be self-justified, self-righteous—and should the self-righteous, wherever they are, be willing to “assert their justice, the ruin of all of us and the end of the already so endangered world will be advanced.”⁹ If history is rewritten, as the writer to whom Wörle gives his manuscript will do, to eliminate incriminating references, as Hein believes the Historikerstreit to promote, the stage will be set. In his essay “Die Zeit, die nicht vergehen kann” (“Time Which Cannot Pass Away”), he expressed his concern: “Certainly the interests of both the accused and the plaintiffs are in play during contemplation and evaluation of the past. One side points as vehemently to errors and crimes as does the other endeavor to push the uncontested accomplishments into the foreground, to banalize the unpardonable and to manipulate the unexplainable into an explainable context” (Als Kind 112). The consequences of a successful manipulation of history and people's knowledge of and attitudes towards history are embodied in the disturbing figure of Wörle and his justification of murder as a pardonable killing.

The affinity between this book and Choderlos de Laclos's Les Liasons Dangereuses (1782) can hardly be overlooked. Whereas the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont are vain, professional intriguers—making sexual exploitation the business of their ruthless game and being fully aware that any manifestations of feelings will ruin the play—Wörle is a dangerous 1990s version of the odious immorality of Merteuil and Valmont, equally intelligent, urbane and amusing, and equally disposed to reduce the logic of the heart to cold, cruel, and calculating reason, the unequivocal rationality of power unhampered by moral scruples. Attitudes embodied by Wörle expose human morality at the end of the twentieth century as a silly travesty, a mundane spectacle not worthy of great players' time.

Das Napoleon-Spiel was the first major work published by any of the important former GDR writers still living in the East after Germany was united. A general fear seemed to exist that these writers would have great difficulty succeeding under the new conditions, and critics seemed to expect continuing recriminations against the old GDR in works of fiction. This book certainly inspires fear that people like Wörle may walk among us, and it makes us hope that our society is not degenerating into nothing but a vicious game with high or low stakes, depending on one's point of view and capabilities. It does not fulfill the expectations of the German critics who, after bashing Christa Wolf and others, called for the “elevation” of literature to a purely aesthetic art form without any moral message or socially critical function.¹⁰ If the broader interpretation of Wörle is considered, Hein has done his part to not relativize the Nazi past in such a way as to omit incriminating evidence. At the same time, he touches a nerve about how threatening unscrupulous power which exists beyond good and evil can be to us. Wörle is the principle of barbarianism before which the principle of hope gives ground. He now requests that we bear him no malice. But he will continue, even if we do.

Notes

1. Volker Hage, “Glückliche Knechte,” Der Spiegel 12 April 1993, 239.

2. Fritz Rudolf Fries, “Das Feldherren-Syndrom, Neue Deutsche Literatur 41 (May 1993): 139.

3. Hage 239.

4. Hage 239.

5. Part of the unification agreement between East and West included the establishment of so-called Treuhandgesellschaften, trust unions created to mediate property issues. All the complaints mentioned here continue to be a common thread of what former GDR citizens regard as their ongoing disenfranchisement as citizens of the new Federal Republic of Germany, including their opportunities for financial success.

6. Fries 139.

7. Grigori Efimovich Rasputin (1871–1916), Russian mystic and advisor to Czarina Alexandria, was assassinated. Rasputin was noted for his cunning and duplicity.

8. Christoph Hein, letter to the author, 13 September 1993.

9. Hein, “Ansichtskarte einer deutschen Kleinstadt, leicht retuschiert,” Neue Deutsche Literatur 40.4 (1992): 27.

10. See Der deutsch-deutsche Literaturstreit oder “Freunde, es spricht sich schlecht mit gebundener Zunge,” ed. Karl Deiritz and Hannes Krauss (Hamburg: Luchterhand, 1991).