Six Months Later: Enno Kluge

Waiting for a medical certificate to dodge work, the workshy machinist Enno Kluge skulks between the toilet and the crowded waiting room, drawing the fury of the doctor's receptionist, Fräulein Kiesow. Kluge has drifted from his estranged wife Eva to his mistress Lotte, and now hopes a bogus 'war marriage' to the prosperous pet-shop widow Hetty Haberle, to whom he goes by 'Hänschen,' will let him escape work for good. When Kiesow finds a Quangel postcard on the corridor floor near where Kluge kept loitering, she is certain he dropped it; the doctor, secretly sheltering his divorced Jewish wife as a 'housekeeper,' calls the police purely out of fear for himself. Kluge panics at the sight of the arriving sergeant and bolts, is caught and cuffed on the stairs, then tries to deflect suspicion with an invented story about fearing arrest for shirking. Deputy Inspector Schröder, unconvinced Kluge wrote or even understands the card, takes him in regardless.

Kluge's introduction works by contrast — cowardly, opportunistic, utterly unlike Quangel — and sets up the novel's cruellest irony: an innocent man, unequal to the danger closing on him, gets swept into the Hobgoblin case simply because fear makes him look guilty.