Otto Quangel’s Second Cellmate

Otto Quangel is moved to remand prison and placed with Dr Reichhardt, a conductor imprisoned for openly refusing every accommodation with the Nazi regime. Reichhardt shares his privileged food, cigarettes, soap and books unasked, and for days Quangel suspects him of spying for the People's Court. The suspicion breaks the night Reichhardt admits, in whispers, his terror of the rope or axe, and his deeper fear for his wife and their three children, the eldest eleven, the youngest four. Quangel realises how much lighter his own burden is, with only Anna to grieve for. The two argue amiably about work: Quangel dismisses conducting as waving a stick while others play, proud of carpentry's permanence, until Reichhardt answers that the joy music gives an audience also endures. When a petty thief sharing their cell tears up Reichhardt's one photograph of his family, Quangel wants to beat him; Reichhardt refuses, insisting he believes in 'goodness, love, and justice' over force.

Reichhardt functions as the novel's counter-model to Quangel's solitary self-reliance; the chapter spends its length dismantling Quangel's suspicion before letting the two men argue as equals. Their carpentry-versus-music debate restates the book's central question, what a life is for, without either conceding the point.