What Baldur Persicke Had to Say

Otto Quangel hurries past the Persicke flat, where 'Sieg Heil!' is being shouted, anxious to avoid a family he has spent ten years avoiding. He reflects that people like the Persickes must keep the Party sweet, and that the way to do it is to inform; he would rather have stowed Ottochen's radios in the cellar, but Anna refused. Inside, sixteen-year-old Baldur — renamed after Schirach, and bound for a Napola school if his father's string-pulling works — lectures the family on a newspaper photograph of Hitler and Göring receiving news of the capitulation. The picture is posed, he says, and the lesson is the Führer's: never let anyone see your cards. He rebukes his father for announcing in front of the postwoman that they will call on Frau Rosenthal for coffee and cake, warns that silent old Quangel upstairs surely has someone he reports to, and hints the old woman may be worth more than cake.

A comic set piece that doubles as the book's method statement. Baldur teaches concealment as a virtue, and the novel spends six hundred pages testing who is best at it. The joke is that he identifies Quangel as the dangerous silent watcher a year before it becomes true.