A Man Called Borkhausen

Otto Quangel walks to the furniture factory trailed by Emil Borkhausen, a lanky idler from the back basement whose calling is to stand wherever there is something to overhear. Quangel turns over Anna's 'You and your Führer', recalling that Hitler ended his four years out of work but that neither of them ever joined the Party — they resented the dues, and the way the worst Party member counted for more than the best ordinary citizen. Borkhausen fishes about the letter from the front, and Quangel says more than he intends: such riches aren't 'worth a single dead body'. Borkhausen grips his arm, threatens denunciation, then asks for ten marks; Quangel refuses both. Borkhausen turns instead to Frau Rosenthal, ringing her bell and finally screaming abuse through the keyhole, until Baldur Persicke catches him, takes him inside and sends him off with twenty marks. Anna, listening at the banister, resolves that those responsible will not get away with it.

Three of the book's predators introduced on one short walk, and its economy established: everybody here is working somebody. Quangel's near-slip shows how thin his caution is under grief. The chapter's real event happens at the balustrade, where Anna acts on her own account for the first time in thirty years.