Part 1 · Chapter 7
Break-in at Night
and we can take our pick of the lot, plus we’re doing a good deed because we’re taking them off a Jewish woman who only stole them in the first place…
Summary
Emil Borkhausen and Enno Kluge drink at the Also Ran, Borkhausen talking Enno into an 'SS-approved' burglary of the absent Frau Rosenthal's flat on Jablonski Strasse. Enno agrees once hunger conjures memories of a stuffed goose neck he imagines waiting in her larder. They slip into the building through a merely closed door and find the flat crammed with the Rosenthals' belongings; Frau Rosenthal herself is nowhere to be found. Enno eats bread and onions, then drinks cognac and schnapps instead of hunting for loot, while Borkhausen ransacks wardrobes for jewellery and cash. Drunk, they agree to check suitcases at the Stettiner Bahnhof and the Anhalter station rather than take them home, and to prise loose a ten-valve radiogram for Borkhausen's wife, Otti. Maudlin with schnapps, they toast the Führer for 'keeping his promises' and congratulate themselves on robbing a Jewish woman for the nation's good, until a sharp voice interrupts: Baldur Persicke, standing in the doorway, has caught them.
Analysis
Comedy curdles the scene deliberately: two hapless drunks bungling a burglary, toasting patriotism between slugs of stolen schnapps, before Persicke's entrance turns farce into danger. Enno's sentimental goose-neck fantasy exposes him as driven by appetite rather than ideology, in its way worse than Borkhausen's greed.