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

badge when he’s standing by the till!
    But most of the faces are completely unfamiliar to him. They’re probably all managerial or white-collar. Suddenly, Quangel stares hard: in one group he has spotted the man he was just looking for in the toilets and corridors, the carpenter Dollfuss! But Carpenter Dollfuss is not wearing his work clothes, he’s wearing a dark suit and is talking to a couple of men in Party uniforms as though among equals. And Carpenter Dollfuss, the fellow whose incessant chitchat already has drawn Quangel’s attention in the workshop, is also wearing a swastika. So that’s it! thinks Quangel. The man’s a spy. Perhaps he’s not a carpenter at all and his name isn’t Dollfuss, either. Wasn’t Dollfuss the name of the Austrian chancellor, the man they murdered? It’s all rigged—and I didn’t even notice!
    And he starts to wonder whether Dollfuss was already in the workshop at the time that Ladendorff and Tritsch were suspended and there were rumblings about them having been put in a concentration camp.
    Quangel tenses. Careful! he feels his instinct warning him. And: I’m sitting among murderers here. Later on, he thinks: I won’t let them get me. I’m just an old foolish foreman, I don’t know anything about anything. But I’m not going to join them, for all that. I saw the dread that came over Anna this morning, and Trudel; I’m not going to participate in something like that. I don’t want a mother or bride to be put to death on my account. I want no part of this business…
    So Quangel tells himself. In the meantime, the room has filled to the very last chair. The table is occupied by brown jackets and black uniforms, and on the podium is a major or colonel (Quangel has never learned to distinguish different uniforms and badges of rank), speaking about the state of the war.
    Of course it’s going splendidly, victory over France is duly proclaimed, and it can only be a matter of weeks before England is crushed. Then the speaker gradually gets to the point he wants to make: with the front making such great strides, it is all the more urgent that the home front do its duty. What now follows sounds as though the major (or captain or colonel or whatever he is) has come directly from HQ on behalf of the Führer to tell the workforce of Krause & Co. that they will have to up their productivity. The Führer expects them to increase it by 50 percent within three months, and to have doubled it within six. Suggestions from the floor as to how the target could be reached are welcome. Anyone not participating will be viewed as a saboteur and treated accordingly.
    While the speaker pronounces one final Sieg Heil to the Führer, Otto Quangel is thinking, So England will be defeated within a few weeks, the war is done and dusted, and we’re going to double our productivity inside six months. Who comes up with this nonsense?
    But he sits down again and looks at the next speaker, a man in a brown uniform whose chest is thickly bespattered with medals, orders, and decorations. This Party speaker is a completely different sort from his army predecessor. From the get-go, he speaks in a sharp and aggressive way of the poor attitude that still prevails in some industries, in spite of the tremendous victories won by the Führer and the Wehrmacht. He speaks so sharply and aggressively that he seems to scream, and he doesn’t spare the moaners and the pessimists. The very last of them are to be eradicated. They will be riddenover, they’ll get smacked so hard they’ll be looking for their teeth. Suum cuique , it said on the belt buckles in the First War, and To each his own over the gates of the labor camp. There they’ll be reeducated, and anyone who helps get a defeatist man or woman put away will have done something for the German nation, and will be a man after the Führer’s heart.
    “But all of you sitting here,” roars the speaker in conclusion, “foremen, department heads, directors—I