Otto Quangel’s Heaviest Burden

Of the nineteen days Otto Quangel spends in the Gestapo basement before being passed to the examining magistrate, Laub's interrogations are not the worst of it, nor his dread for Anna, sharpened by Laub's mention of Trudel Baumann, nor the drunken SS men who burst in nightly for sport. The hardest burden is his cellmate, Karl Ziemke, 'Karlchen', a former SS killer feigning madness by living as a dog: naked, barking, demanding to be petted, sometimes lunging for his throat. Quangel endures him rather than take his own life, unwilling to spare his captors a verdict or desert Anna. Slowly the 'dog' grows devoted, sharing food and resting his head in Quangel's lap, and Quangel wonders whether the pretence has become real madness. When the order comes to move him on, Karlchen howls and creeps into the corridor after him, his grief softening the guards' usual brutality, and Quangel feels an unexpected pang of regret at leaving this murderer behind.

Fallada suspends the plot to sit inside one man's endurance, ranking Laub's cruelty and his own grief for Anna beneath a grotesque intimacy. Karlchen's devotion complicates the novel's SS-as-monster template; even a killer needs tenderness. The chapter readies Quangel for the gentler, harder test of Reichhardt's kindness.