Part 2 · Chapter 26
Fear and Terror
No, a man like that wasn’t the man for her. She had to finish with him.
Summary
Over two weeks confined to Hetty's flat for fear of being seen, Enno Kluge proves idle and unreliable, drifting from sorting birdseed to dozing in the cellar, though he charms her customers once allowed to help in the shop. Sent to Dahlem to buy stock, Hetty finds her dressmaker's building bombed and hurries home, only to discover Enno has shut the shop, taken ninety-two marks from the till to bet on a horse named Adebar, and won handsomely. Confronting him, she is angered less by the theft than by his casual dishonesty and his having gone out despite the Gestapo danger; when he lies about not planning the bet in advance, something in her trust breaks. She tells him they must separate, but his weeping collapse — pleading, kneeling, clutching at her — leaves her unable to carry it through that night, and by morning her resolve is already slipping, awaiting only the arrival of Inspector Escherich and Emil Borkhausen.
Analysis
Domestic comedy curdles into foreboding as Kluge's pettiness — birdseed, whistled tunes, a stolen bet — is measured against Hetty's real courage and grief, and the closing line pivots the reader from her private crisis to the external threat closing in, naming both hunters before either appears.
Translator's Note
Horst Wessel was a minor Nazi activist murdered in 1930 in a dispute over back rent or politics – it was never determined. Nevertheless the Nazis made him a martyr, and a song he wrote – ‘Die Fahne hoch’ or ‘Raise high the flag’ – was renamed the Horst Wessel Song and made into the official song of the Nazi Party.
Michael Hofmann's note to this chapter, from the Penguin Classics edition of Alone in Berlin (2009).