Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada Page B

the least interest in the destination and function of the crates; to him, this new, mindless labor was simply ridiculous. He was a craftsman, whom the grain of a piece of wood or the finish on a nicely carved wardrobe could fill with a deep satisfaction. He had found in such work as much happiness as a person of his cool temperament was capable of finding. Now, he had sunk to being an overseer and a taskmaster who only had to make sure that his workshop fulfilled, and if possible overfulfilled, its quota. In accordance with his nature, he had never spoken to anyone about such feelings as he might have, and his sharp, birdlike face had never betrayed anything of the contempt he felt for this wretched matchwood carpentry. If someone had observed him, he might have noticed that the laconic Quangel had stopped speaking altogether and that in his role as overseer he tended simply to wave things through.
    But then who was there to attend to such a dry and flinty character as Otto Quangel? All his life he had seemed to be no more than a drudge, with no other interest except the work in front of him. He had never had a friend at the plant, never spoken a kindly word to anyone there. Work, nothing but work, never mind if it was men or machines, so long as they worked!
    For all that, he wasn’t disliked, even though his job was to supervise the workshop, and to exhort the men to greater effort. He never swore, and he never went running to the management. If production wasn’t proceeding properly somewhere, he would go to the trouble spot and with a few deft movements silently fix the problem. Or he would go and stand beside a couple of chatterboxes and stay there, his dark eyes fixed on the speakers, until they no longer felt like talking. He seemed to spread an aura of chill. During their short breaks, the workers tried to sit as far away from him as they could, and in that way he enjoyed a sort of automatic respect, which another man could not have won for himself with any amount of shouting and ordering about.
    The factory management was perfectly well aware of what an asset they had in Otto Quangel. His workshop achieved the best scores, there were never any personnel issues, and Quangel always did whatever he was told. He would have been promoted long since if he had only consented to join the Party. But he never did. “I’ve no money to spare for that,” he said. “I need every single mark. I have my family to feed.”
    They might very well smirk at what they termed his money-grubbing attitude. Quangel really seemed to feel every ten pfennigpiece he was forced to contribute at collection time. It cut no ice with him that joining the Party would earn him much more in terms of an increased wage than it would cost in contributions. But this hardworking foreman was politically a hopeless case, and so people didn’t mind leaving him where he was, holding a moderately responsible job, even though he wasn’t in the Party.
    In reality, it wasn’t Otto Quangel’s miserliness that kept him out of the Party. It was true, he was dreadfully persnickety about money matters and would be annoyed for weeks by the tiniest needless expense. But just as he kept scrupulous account of his own affairs, so he did also with the affairs of others, too, and this Party seemed to him to be anything but precise in the way it enacted its so-called principles. The things he had learned from his son’s years at school and in the Hitler Youth, the things he heard from Anna and those he directlyexperienced himself—for instance, that all the best-paid jobs in the factory were held by Party members, who exercise authority over the most able non-Party members—all reinforced in him the conviction that the Party was not scrupulous, was not just, and that therefore he wanted none of it.
    That was another reason why he was so hurt by Anna’s accusation this morning, about “You and your Führer.” It was true, thus far he had been a believer in the