The Good Chaplain

Chaplain Friedrich Lorenz, tubercular and overworked, confronts the prison director over a seventh death from neglect in two weeks, naming the doctor's drunkenness as the cause and reminding him of the night that same doctor nearly let his own son Berthold die of a middle-ear infection. The director grudgingly promises to 'see what he can do'. Walking the prison's iron corridors, Lorenz finds the medical councillor stripping seven trembling prisoners into solitary without examination, and learns in the argument that follows that No. 352, logged as dying of pneumonia, was in fact Karl Hergesell, dead of a fractured skull. Lorenz then reveals, calmly, that he has had his first tubercular haemorrhage. Shaken, the doctor offers to arrange sick leave at once, but Lorenz asks instead that two prisoners, Kraus and little Wendt, be spared solitary confinement, since neither will survive it. Half in earnest and half mocking his uselessness, the doctor agrees to release them that night.

Lorenz works by moral leverage rather than force, trading his own dwindling health for two men's reprieve within a paragraph. The chapter quietly confirms Karl Hergesell's death, glimpsed only as a filing error, before the novel turns to stage his wife's grief. Even institutional callousness runs on private favours here.