The Boy

It is early summer 1946. Kuno-Dieter Borkhausen, adopted by the Kienschapers after Karl and Max Kluge failed to return from the war, is now simply Kuno Kienschaper, a farm boy in Brandenburg happily driving the horse Toni into town for a new plough. On the road a ragged, wheezing tramp begs a lift — his biological father, Borkhausen, fishing to see if the boy will let him move in. Kuno plays dumb at first, then drops the pretence and threatens to whip him off the cart and report him to the police as a jailbird and thief. Borkhausen wheedles, then threatens, then slinks away into the cornfields, frightened off for good. Kuno tells Toni that he swore, the day his mother washed him clean, to stay clean himself, and he means to keep that promise. Days later, still shaken, he eventually takes up his scythe for the rye harvest — because, the narrator notes, he had sown good corn.

Fallada closes on continuity rather than martyrdom, choosing the novel's most damaged child as his final image of recovery. Borkhausen's reappearance tests whether the past can reclaim the boy; his whip-raised refusal answers with the book's last word on inherited corruption: it can be refused.