In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

EMPLOYEES
Claus, the narrator in Rene Schickele's novel Maria Capponi, belongs to
one of those bourgeois families of prewar Europe who have perfectly
assimilated the mores of the feudal past. Venice has to be the place where
Claus enjoys his first erotic adventures with Maria Capponi, the daughter
of an industrial family from Milan. But the stormy romance of Claus
and Maria does not end in marriage. Only a few days after his engagement
to Doris, a serious young woman from Germany [see Mountaineering],
Claus receives the announcement of Maria's wedding to "General
X." Still, the atmosphere is charged with erotic tension when the
two former lovers meet shortly thereafter during a vacation on the
French Riviera. Maria has every reason to remind Claus of her new
situation: "We must get used to the fact that 1 am now married ... Or
did you mean, Claus, that 1 would remain unmarried until my death,
wandering through your dreams as an employee, so to speak?" (306ff.).
A tone of resentment is apparent in Maria's image of walking through
Claus's dreams like an "employee." But it is not immediately obvious
why she uses this word. A hundred pages further into the novel, it comes
up again when Claus's Alsatian relatives wonder whether their employees
might quit and leave the family's possessions unprotected in the days
following the end of the war: "I reassured them by claiming that no
conscientious employee would desert if a fire were to break out in the
back room of the store" (404).
Schickele's novel is just one example of a strong fascination-if not an
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