The Demise of Frau Rosenthal

Frau Rosenthal wakes from a nightmare of fleeing with her son Siegfried, then spends a desperate Sunday alone in retired Judge Fromm's flat, hidden there since Wednesday. Turned away by his deaf cleaning woman, Liese, and refused even her sapphire bracelet as a bribe, she swallows all her sleeping pills and, half-drugged, hallucinates Siegfried climbing the stairs. She lets herself into her own ransacked flat on Jablonski Strasse, where Hitler Youth leader Baldur Persicke spots her and telephones the Gestapo. Inspector Rusch and his man Friedrich arrive; while Friedrich struggles with her over the bracelet in the kitchen, Frau Rosenthal throws herself from the window and dies in the courtyard. Emil Borkhausen steals the bracelet from her hand before the men reach the body, then is himself accused of theft. Rusch, indifferent to her death but alert to profit, lets Baldur loot the flat's radio, phonograph and linen for his silence. Upstairs, the Quangels hear the fall and say nothing.

Fallada intercuts inner collapse with procedural comedy — Rusch's graft, Baldur's greed — so grief and bureaucratic corruption share the same page. Frau Rosenthal's death closes the building's Jewish plotline and exposes everyone else's complicity: Borkhausen's theft, Persicke's opportunism, the Quangels' enforced silence, Fromm's practised concealment.