Read Online Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada - Free Book Online

Führer’s honest intentions. One just had to strip away the corrupt hangers-on and the parasites, who were just out for themselves, and everything would get better. But until such time, he wasn’t taking part in it, not him, and Anna, who was the only person he really talked to, knew that. All right, she had said it in the heat of the moment, he would forget it in time, and he wasn’t the sort to bear grudges.
    Now, standing in the din of the workshop, head slightly raised as he scanned the room from the planing machine to the band saw to the nailers, drills, and conveyor belts, he can feel the news of Otto’s death, and in particular Anna’s and Trudel’s reactions to it, continuing to affect him. He doesn’t really think about it, but he knows instinctively that that layabout of a carpenter, Dollfuss, has already been gone from the workshop for seven minutes, and that the work on his part of the line is grinding to a halt, because he’s popped out either for a smoke or a political harangue. Quangel will give him another three minutes, and if he’s not back then, he’ll go looking for him in person!
    And as he glances up at the hand on the wall clock and sees that in another three minutes Dollfuss will have skipped all of ten minutes, he thinks of the hateful poster over Trudel’s head, and what treason means, and how he might learn more about it, but he also thinks about the fact that he has in his jacket pocket a curt note given him by the porter, summoning Foreman Quangel to report to the office canteen at five o’clock precisely.
    Not that the note unduly bothers him. Earlier, when the factory still made furniture, he was often summoned to the boardroom to discuss the production of some item or other. The office canteen is an unfamiliar venue, but that doesn’t bother him so much as the fact that it’s only six minutes till five and he’d like to have Dollfuss back at his saw before he has to go. So he sets off to find Dollfuss a minute earlier than he’d intended.
    But he finds him neither in the toilets nor in the corridor nor in the adjacent workshop, and by the time he’s back in his own workshop, the clock is showing one minute to five and it’s high time to go to the meeting, if he’s not to be late. Quickly, he brushes the worst of the sawdust off his jacket, and then he heads for the administration building, the ground floor of which houses the office canteen.
    It’s clearly been made ready for a lecture. A speaking platform has been set up, and a long table for committee members, and the whole room is full of rows of chairs. The layout is familiar to him from the meetings of the Arbeitsfront that he’s had to attend, only these are always held in the works canteen. The only other difference is that they sit on rough wooden benches, not cane chairs, and that most of those present wear workman’s blue, like him, whereas here the majority are in uniforms, brown or gray, with a few people in civilian suits sprinkled among them.
    Quangel takes a chair right by the exit, so he can get back to work as soon as possible after the end of the talk. The room is already pretty full, and some of the audience are already sitting down; others are standing in the aisles or along the walls of the hall, talking together in little groups.
    But all of those who are gathered here are wearing the swastika. Quangel seems to be the only one present without the Party badge on his lapel, except for the people in Wehrmacht uniforms, and they have army insignia. He’s probably been invited here by mistake. Quangel turns his head alertly from side to side. He knows a few of the faces. The pale fat fellow already sitting at the committee table is Director Schröder, whom he knows by sight. The little one with the pinched nose and the pince nez is the cashier who hands him his paycheck every Saturday evening, and with whom he’s had a couple of arguments about deductions. Funny, thinks Quangel, he never wears his Party