Journey to the East

H.H. ponders the wisdom of continuing the story and decides not to give in to doubt, despite being “confronted by chaos” (51). His decision to continue gives him peace, and he compares his optimism to the feeling he experienced upon embarking on the Journey, which also had no firm destination: “As far as it is now still possible, I will be mindful of the first principal of our great period, never to rely on and let myself be disconcerted by reason, always to know that faith is stronger than so-called reality” (52). If he cannot tell the entire story accurately, he commits to representing whatever fragments he remembers with total authenticity.

A newspaper editor named Lukas—a childhood friend of H.H.’s—meets with him. H.H. says that the Journey to the East had not been treated well by Lukas’s circle: “This singular episode was mostly called, perhaps disrespectfully, ‘The Children’s Crusade’” (53). H.H. does not believe that his task is to overcome Lukas’s skepticism, but to give him corrected information: “For instance, that our League was in no way an off-shoot of the post-war years, but that it had extended throughout the whole of world history” (54). He tells Lukas that Don Quixote, Zoroaster, Plato, Xenophon, and others were all members of the League.

He tells Lukas that he does not know how to write the story of the League. He feels that the memories of the Journey are created from a different fabric than from reality, and they have taken on the character of hallucinations. Lukas says that he understands and feels similarly about his experiences reporting from the front lines of the war. He tells H.H. that the only reason he could write the book about the war was “because it was necessary. I either had to write the book or be reduced to despair; it was the only means of saving me from nothingness, chaos, and suicide” (57). Then Lukas says he cannot say more about it and tells H.H. to leave.

They meet again and Lukas is calm. He tells H.H. that Leo is an unnecessary obstacle in the story and encourages him to cut the character out. H.H. says that he cannot remember Leo’s first name, revealing that Leo was his surname. Lukas finds a man named Andreas Leo in a phone director and tells H.H. to visit him.

H.H. goes to Seilergraben where Andreas Leo lives and asks the neighbors about him. Ultimately, he decides that he does not want to meet him, but he does want to see him. For reasons he cannot explain, H.H. does not want to tell Andreas about his intentions. “It is possible that the practitioners and psychologists who attribute all human action to egoistic desire are right” (60). He begins to see his desire to write of the Journey to the East as an exercise in pure ego, an attempt to save his life by giving it meaning, similar to what happened with Lukas and his war book.