Neumann One

Neumann One is the driver in Werner Pfennig’s wartime unit, a minor figure whose brief appearances set ordinary gestures of care against the violence and brevity of military life. The narration identifies him through his work behind the wheel, his small kindnesses toward Werner, and a haircut scene shadowed by the knowledge that he will die within weeks.

Identity and Introduction

Neumann One is introduced by Neumann Two, who explains the unit’s numbering: he is the driver, while Neumann Two is another man with the same surname. This practical distinction is part of Werner’s abrupt induction into the German Armed Forces. Neumann Two has come on foot to collect Werner from school; after inspecting the boy’s carefully folded uniforms, he takes Werner with him, and the two walk three miles to a village. At a delicatessen, Neumann Two eats two plates of calves’ liver, then buys a dozen hard-boiled eggs and gives Werner four. Neumann One is not present in this episode, but the numbering establishes him as one of the small team Werner is joining.

When the unit is assembled, Neumann One is described as a gap-toothed, thirty-year-old driver. The sergeant, Volkheimer, explains that partisans are attacking trains and that the unit has been sent to locate radio coordination behind those attacks. Werner says he can get the equipment functioning within an hour. Neumann One’s role is thus established in a group organized around transport and radio detection, though the narrative gives him little speech or individual history.

A Routine Gesture in the Campaign

At midmorning, Volkheimer orders the unit to park in Vienna Augarten Park. As the fog clears and the trees show their first blooms, Werner feels feverish. Neumann One declares it time for haircuts, sets a stool on the sidewalk, lays a towel over Walter Bernd’s shoulders, and cuts Bernd’s hair before Werner’s and Neumann Two’s. The scene makes his ordinary trade-like competence briefly visible amid the unit’s wartime routine.

The haircut is accompanied by a counterfactual glimpse of the civilian life Neumann One will not have. The narration imagines that, had he not been scheduled to die ten weeks later during D-Day (Normandy landings), he might have become a barber: a man smelling of talc and whiskey, positioning customers’ heads with a finger in the ear, his clothes covered in clipped hair, postcards of the Alps arranged around a wavering mirror, and a stout wife to whom he remained faithful. These details are presented as a possible future, not as events in his life. Their precision makes the approaching death feel like the severing of an entire ordinary existence.

The Unit’s Violence

The contrast deepens in the account of Volkheimer. While a state-sponsored station plays waltzes from the truck, Werner watches the sergeant close his eyes to the music and recalls him killing radio operators during raids on transmitting shacks. Volkheimer also makes sure Werner has food, bringing him eggs and sharing broth. Neumann One’s haircut belongs to this same uneasy world: domestic routine and small acts of care persist among men whose work is bound to lethal operations.

Later, after the unit enters a home and finds a woman on a bed and a child hidden in a closet, Neumann One shoulders his way out, his eyes described as rancid. The scene does not explain his thoughts or establish what he did inside; it records his visible reaction and departure. Neumann Two, playing senseless trills on his rifle, asks why the occupants hid. Volkheimer gently tucks the child’s foot back into the closet and says there is no radio there. Werner feels nausea rise in his throat. Neumann One’s brief exit leaves him within the unit’s violence but offers no stated justification, confession, or resolution.

Narrative Significance

Neumann One is drawn through economical details rather than a sustained personal arc: a gap in his teeth, the work of driving, a towel and stool, and the imagined barber’s shop he will never own. The haircut scene turns his present action into an image of an unrealized future, while the later departure from the house places him amid the moral damage surrounding the unit’s search for radios. He remains a peripheral character, but the counterfactual account of his death makes his brief, practical presence register as a life cut off rather than merely another soldier removed from the campaign.