"Seelenarbeit" is the self-help the doctor prescribes for Xaver Zürn's stomach pains, which for lack of physical causes he must diagnose as psychosomatic. For Zürn's symptoms, much like Franz Horn's "lockjaw" in Jenseits der Liebe …, result from the pressures of conforming his self to the role precast for him by those Fates of the modern world, socioeconomic forces….

Though he has retained only the buildings of the old family farm, leaving his brother the land, Zürn is at bottom still a farmer, unhappy with any ties but those to the land. Yet now he finds himself perennially moving about, chauffeuring a rich industrialist and Mozart fanatic around the European economic community. (p. 97)

The ending, like much of the story, has something of the air of resignation, that proverbially quiet desperation, so palpably fixed in that earlier case of the world's ineluctable role-casting power, Max Frisch's...