Fundamentos de la Arquitectura del FPGA

Windisch’s fear that the women are able to achieve with their sexual attractiveness what the men cannot is part o f a general professional disempowerment which largely affects the men of the village. Critics have paid attention in passing to the fact that the characters in

Fasan are named according to their profession. Windisch is the exception among characters who are variously named the carpenter, the nightwatchman, the prayer leader and the pastor. These professions and ofRcal positions are, I believe, o f more significance than has hitherto been acknowledged. Their use parodies a temlency in the Heimat novels to label characters as members of a particular family or household rather than use personal names. The professional titles are ironical reminders o f a work ethic which has been rendered inoperative. It is rare that the reader is presented with the figures actually carrying out the occupation which has been assigned them. The traditional professions diminish in terms o f their exchange value in what has become an economy of sexual favours. The postwoman spends more time reading than delivering letters, the only piece of work the carpenter makes is a coffin for old Mrs Kroner, and the furrier seems to have stuffed more animals than he has made fur coats. The degeneration of traditional professions adds another dimension to the loss of Heimat. The death imagery of the sack draws an important connection between Windisch’s feeling that the end is nigh and his professional life as a miller.

Work played an important role in anti-industrialist support for provincialism. In the blood-and-soil literature, the representations of farming as well as other archaic professions were invested with the function of recapturing a lost unity. Those who partook in the idealisation o f farming and other traditional manual professions (for example miller, furrier) resorted to mythical and trans-historical characterisations in order to present them

as an effective cure for the economic misery o f the petty-bourgeois readers. Uwe Ketelsen writes in his review of folkish National Socialist literature: “In dieser Sparte der regressiven Fluchtliteratur mûssen 'Bauem% überhaupt aile angeblich archaischen Berufe, die Funktion übemehmen, die verlorene Ganzheit über eine angeblich mythische Distanz hin rettend zu reprâsentieren”.*®’ These traditional professions are radically robbed o f any effectiveness in the village economy o f Fasan and this collapse o f labour is one of the factors which hasten the end of Heimat.

This failure o f old-fashioned honest work is made explicit in the case o f Windisch, who is the village miller. Windisch’s ability to produce flour is, as he sees it, the most ethically possible resource available to him which could help him achieve his desire to emigrate. He has made a deal with the mayor to deliver him flour in exchange for the money he needs to apply for a passport. Yet the mayor attaches no value to the sacks and despite endless deposits of them in his yard, which he promises to pay in arrears, little remuneration is forthcoming. Windisch feels cheated: “‘Der zwôlfle Transport seitdem, und zehntausend Lei, und Ostem ist langst gewesai’, denkt sich Windisch” (16). As he is delivering another load at the beginning o f the narrative, the sack “hângt wie ein Schlafender über dem hinteren Rad. ‘Wie ein Toter’, denkt er, ‘hângt der Sack hinter mir*” (12). The depiction of the flour sack as a death sack, which reappears in the scene discussed above, in both instances associated with the motif of ‘the end’, reflects Windisch’s acknowledgment o f his failure in his capacity as ‘honest’ miller to provide for his family in the way which t h ^ expect.

The example o f the carpenter’s family, who employ unethical tactics to receive permission to emigrate strengthens Windisch’s outward resolve to preserve his and his family’s morality. The next time he looks through the window of the carpenter’s house, his wife is alone at the table and the bed is made up with a thick red cover. This setting stands in stark opposition to the previous occasion Windisch peered into the room, when the carpenter was pushing his wife from the table onto the ‘open’ bed. Perhaps it is his aw ar^ess o f this difference which prompts Windisch to recall anoth^ development in the lives o f his neighbours (and between the lines o f Windisch’s train o f thought lies the

Uwe Ketelsen. Vôîkisch-nationale tmd nationalsozialistische Literatur in Detaschland 1890- 1945. Metzler: Stuttgart, 1976, 76-77. It may be pointed out that the Viebig novel quoted above does not participate in such ideology. Bâbbi, the most sympathetically pwtrayed character, realises even as she the success of ho* labour, die necessity of abandcming her crops and moving to the city.

His honesty is only comparative to that of die other men who also want to get a passport and anigrate. Windisch does make use of bribes, but his offerings of flour are in his view more ethical versions of bribery than others who use money and even their wive’s bodies in their bribes, sudi as the carpenter, whose agreement with his wife’s prostitution appears to Windisch to make him more reprehaisible than himself

intimation that this new event accounts for the fact that the marital bed is now ‘zu’). Windisch recalls that the carpento-’s wife *Wird mal zum Pfarrer gerufen wegen dem Taufschein, mal zum Milizmann wegen dem PaB” (51). He has now also found out from his friend, the nightwatchman, how the other families succeed in getting their emigration documents, namely by allowing their wives to submit to the sexual demands o f the pastor and the policeman in exchange for the birth catificates and signatures they require. The nightwatchman also tells him that they will not be interested in his wife since she is too old but that he will have to rely on his daughter instead: “deine Tochter kommt auch noch dran. Der Pfarrer macht sie katholisch, und der Milizmann macht sie staatenlos” (51). All this is going through his mind when he resolves not to give in to such an unethical economy: “Er kriegt Mehl, aber meine Tochter kriegt er nicht” (51).