Enno and Emil after the Shock

Borkhausen, patched up by his wife, Otti, broods that Baldur Persicke rigged the burglary to seize the Rosenthal haul for himself, and vows never to forgive him. Enno Kluge wanders Berlin searching for his old flame Tutti, panicking at his bruised reflection, until he finds forty-six marks that Frau Gesch left untouched in his pocket. Outside a café, a stranger tries to con him into stealing a suitcase from Tutti's flat; frightened off by tales of her temper, Enno resolves to reform, no more women, betting, or thieving, and pays for a hotel bed, vowing to become a model worker. As night falls, Fallada surveys the sleeping building: the Persickes, Frau Gesch, the Borkhausens, frightened Frau Rosenthal, Trudel Baumann anxious over her confession, and Anna Quangel lying awake, still certain her husband, Otto, is cold and heartless, while Judge Fromm sits up writing to a lawyer beside his open Plutarch.

The chapter's roll call of the sleeping and the wakeful widens the novel's lens just before it narrows back onto the Quangels, a reminder of how many private catastrophes one building holds. Enno's vow to reform, like Anna's reading of Otto, mistakes a single fright for a change of character.