In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

84 ARRAYS
beauty; they are, more than anyone, worthy of our interest and esteem.
We must salute them: they represent the best of our society" (Caras y
Caretas, October 12).
This positive view of the young, industrious, well-dressed, and invariably
female secretary or sales clerk contrasts starkly with the image of
the factory worker, who-faceless, deprived of agency, and invariably
male-becomes a metonym for what the middle class fears more than
anything else: the anonymity of systems and institutions that absorb all
individuality. [see Individuality vs. Collectivity] The characters in Kafka's
Schloss illustrate this clearly. As soon as K.'s "helpers" Artur and Jeremias
quit, K. realizes that his power over them was only relative, and he
has reason to fear that they will carry negative reports of him to the
powers in the castle, which dominate both master and servants: "Where
is Artur?" asks K. '''The little darling, Artur?" replies Jeremias. "He quit.
You were rather rough on us, you know, and the gentle soul couldn't
take it. He's gone back to the castle to lodge a complaint" (195). If
secretaries stand for the smiling side of the employee's role, the civil
servant embodies its threatening aspects-for his employer, the State, is
the largest and most anonymous system of all. What for some men
makes female employees appealing-namely, their lack of individual
agency-is viewed as a threat when it is associated with male workers.
Men's facelessness evokes the unlimited power of the State.
Conversely, a representative of the State, like the Spanish dictator
Miguel Primo de Rivera, can easily blame the effects of his own and his
government's tyranny on the behavior of civil servants. He promises "not
an absorbing, centralizing, bureaucratic, obstructive State, but a State
that stimulates, supervises, and assists ... State employees should cease
their tyrannical behavior and instead learn how to be helpful" (Primo de
Rivera, 149-150). Since everybody feels threatened by the State and its
bureaucracy, no one gladly takes a government job-despite the financial
security that comes with it. At the age of twenty-five, the physicist
Werner Heisenberg is offered a full professorship at the University of
Leipzig. Resisting both his family's urgings to accept this position and
the temptations of all its academic privileges, Heisenberg opts for the less
prestigious and less financially rewarding-but intellectually more challenging-alternative
of working as Niels Bohr's research associate in
Copenhagen (Cassidy, 216f£.). So long as dictators like Miguel Primo de
Rivera continually stress the distance between themselves and their