Emil Borkhausen and His Son

Borkhausen never means to travel to Munich: he gets off at the first stop, Lichterfelde, and heads back to spy on Hetty Haberle's shop, using his son Kuno-Dieter as a lookout. A string of street boys extract money from him for scraps of information, and Kuno-Dieter himself demands fifty marks before he'll report that the 'little fellow' — Enno — is holed up nearby, taunting his father with 'I'll give you away'. Enraged, Borkhausen beats him savagely on a staircase until Kuno-Dieter's Hitler Youth friends pile on and drive him off; in the melee, the boys steal his entire roll of banknotes. Meanwhile an ex-corporal messenger, Fritsche, arrives to summon Borkhausen to Inspector Escherich, but Borkhausen refuses to leave his post and sends him away. Penniless and humiliated, Borkhausen broods bitterly on his rotten luck — the vanished Rosenthal bracelet, the failed linen break-in — before telephoning Escherich to demand his five-hundred-mark reward and resuming his watch on the house.

Fallada extends his informer economy down to the children, who have learned Borkhausen's own tactics of extraction and betrayal before much else. The beating of Kuno-Dieter shows what that cruelty looks like once it has an object smaller than itself, and sets up the reward call reopening Enno's case.