guidance. This is all very well and no one would retain a bitter after-taste on their tongue
if this were not the case. In the employment agency for chauffeurs it was explained to
me: certainly, the longer a person is out of work the more likely it is that they will be
found employment. But the owners of valuable automobiles do not willingly trust their
vehicles to a chauffeur who has been out of employment for months on end, but rather
normally demand a man who has been out of work for the shortest possible time. On this
point, we must of course concede and act against our principles... Justice in the low
ground is thus intersected by an act of arbitrary will that is, indeed, anything other than
pure arbitrariness. It travels into the lower strata like a flash of lightning from the serene
heaven of the upper strata. In the upper strata, the individual predominates instead of the
mass and a sense of justice could be adapted to it that decided in detail according to the
circumstances and which would be more precise than the primitive justice. Each one of
them knows that and the reason why it is not factually in force there above, and in
comparison with its caricature the barbaric aspect of the utmost necessity certainly
deserves the unconditional precedence. Yet, due to its provisional nature, it is surrounded
by affliction and the fact that, now as always, questionable basic principles can be
satisfied in a sphere of individual claims removed from its grasp, and it acquires amongst
other things the appearance of inhumanity and increases still further the affliction
surrounding it. A bad individualism puts pressure on the good crudeness, which must
ignore the individual elements. Only with the mass itself can a sense of justice rise to the
higher sphere that is really just.
‘In the interests of a smooth flow of persons, the orders of the hall porter must be
unquestioningly followed.’ This regulation at the courtyard entrance of a business block
complex is sent on in advance of the employment agency, that is to be found in the
background, like the introduction of a book to its own text. What is stated on the door
plate and calculated to have an effect upon the masses is thoroughly elaborated on the
posters in the inside rooms. The posters refer to the elementary needs of life that will
legally come to the masses of unemployed. On the grounds of who knows what plausible
building regulations or other such well considered reasons, smoking is always forbidden
for them, and for still more valid reasons they nonetheless still smoke and for the most
valid reasons the superintending staff close both their eyes to it. Alongside the need to
smoke there is also hunger and love. The metal worker can himself silence each of these
equally in the employment exchange itself. In one of the corners, a canteen has been
installed which offers milk for sale as the main liquid refreshment. Milk is healthy, but
how does one enjoy it? ‘Never without something to eat’, announces a prominently
displayed notice... ‘A glass of milk, drunk down at one go into an empty stomach, forms
there a clump of cheese that is difficult to digest.’ Sandwiches, that are therefore a basic
precondition for healthy milk, are densely piled up on the adjacent buffet. The images of
the clump of cheese and the empty stomach demonstrate in a drastic manner that the
human beings in these spaces stand so nakedly and emptily like the walls, as an object of
hygiene, that through its coarse directness throws away several possibilities. No aura
graciously shrouds the bodily elements, rather the bodies step without any extenuation
into the shrill light of the public sphere and the human beings who belong to these bodies
are still merely systems that with the introduction of milk after the preceding meal will
already function. In the back courts of society the human entrails are hung out like pieces
of washing. It is to them that the posters are also addressed that pontificate upon sexually
Siegfried Kracauer 61