The Postcards Make Their Way

The blacklisted actor Max Harteisen, once Goebbels's favourite until he contradicted him, finds the Quangels' first card on the office stairwell and panics, convinced he is being watched. He brings it to his attorney and old friend Erwin Toll, who first refuses to touch it, and the two argue over destroying it before handing it to the building's political commissioner, a fox-faced man who flatters Harteisen while noting everything. The commissioner passes the card to a brownshirt, who debates with him whether the writer is a Communist, then on to the Gestapo, where dry, moustached Inspector Escherich takes the case. Escherich deduces from the wording that the writer lost an only son, pins a red flag on his map of Berlin, and explains his patient method to the fox: most cards will be handed in, and the writer will give himself away, card by card. He promises the fox, half in jest, an invitation to the eventual execution.

Introduces the machinery that will hunt the Quangels, staged as farce twice removed from real danger — Harteisen and Toll's mutual suspicion, the fox's flattery — before landing on Escherich, whose calm, sporting patience reframes the novel's stakes as a long game rather than a single chase.