The Trial: Prosecutor Pinscher

After a heavy lunch leaves Judge Feisler drowsy, he hands the questioning to Prosecutor Pinscher, a 'yapping terrier' to his 'bloodhound', who demands to know how many lovers Anna Quangel had before her marriage. Over her attorney's objection, she answers coolly: 'Eighty-seven.' The mocking reply flusters Pinscher into calling her a whore and a procuress for her son's affair with the now-dead Trudel. Anna refuses to let Trudel's memory be slandered, denies that she aborted her pregnancy, and turns the court's own weapons on it, asking pointedly about the 'Bubi-drück-mich-verein', the SA's treatment of girls, and the SS raping Jewish women before shooting them. Laughter curdles into deathly silence, then pandemonium: spectators climb into the dock to attack her, and Otto, hampered by his confiscated braces, cannot reach her in time. Anna is dragged out and formally excluded from the rest of her own trial, to remain shackled and in solitary confinement on bread and water every other day.

Anna's 'Eighty-seven' does to Pinscher what Otto's 'Thousand-Year Reich' line did to Feisler: it turns his own instrument against him. Her list of the regime's sanctioned abuses is the novel's most direct political speech, delivered by the character the court has spent the book underestimating.