The Arrest of Anna Quangel

Anna Quangel, feverish, searches for the two postcards she doesn't realise Otto took with him, before Gestapo men break into the unchained flat. In her delirium she takes the raid for a fever dream, telling Escherich, 'you're all part of my dream'. He tests her, reciting the family's first card — 'Mother! The Führer has murdered my son!' — and she flinches before denying everything. Obergruppenführer Prall shakes her against the bedstead until Escherich intervenes, wanting her lucid for questioning. Told the cards were found on Otto, Anna realises with a shock he had them after all, and falls silent. The search continues until someone finds a card hidden in Ottochen's radio-kit book: 'FÜHRER, YOU GIVE THE ORDERS, WE OBEY!' Escherich orders Anna taken away by ambulance under careful watch. Downstairs, Judge Fromm watches the stretcher pass and murmurs, 'One after the other . . . the house is emptying,' naming the Rosenthals, the Persickes, Borkhausen, and now Quangel.

Fallada uses Anna's fever as a device, letting her disbelief stand in for the reader's dread of the inevitable. Escherich and Prall play good cop and bad cop with real menace rather than procedure, and Judge Fromm's closing tally from his window sums the novel's cost so far.