Rule requiring boys to work in the mines from age fifteen

The Rule requiring boys to work in the mines from age fifteen is presented as a universal obligation, not a choice: boys are expected to enter mine work as soon as they turn fifteen. At Children’s House, officials frame this future as employment and national service, while Werner Pfennig knows that the mines have already taken his father. The rule’s force lies in that contrast between reassuring public language and the fate it threatens to repeat.

Announcement and Terms

An official from the Labor Ministry visits Children’s House to discuss work opportunities in the mines. Addressing the children, dressed in their cleanest clothes, he explains that all boys, without exception, will work in the mines once they reach fifteen. He presents the arrangement as fixed employment and describes the boys as fortunate to have it. The policy is thus conveyed not as a possibility to consider but as a settled future applying to every boy in the house.

The official also links the mines to national power. He tells the children that their neighborhood’s steel, coal, and coke supply the foundation of the new order, including the bullets and armor of its armed forces. This patriotic framing recasts compulsory labor as a contribution to the nation. Yet the speech’s assurance does not remove the coercion in its terms: the boys are told what will happen to them, not asked what work they want to do.

Werner Pfennig and the Cost of the Rule

For Werner Pfennig, the announcement carries a particular weight. His father died in the mines a mile beneath the house, and his body was never recovered. The official’s promise that boys will be sent underground therefore points not toward an abstract occupation but toward the place where Werner Pfennig’s father was lost. The rule makes that danger feel hereditary: the son is being directed into the same workplace that claimed the father.

During the visit, the official picks up Werner Pfennig’s radio and sets it down without comment. Werner Pfennig experiences the room as constricting, with the ceiling seeming to slip lower and the walls to close in. The gesture does not alter the stated terms of the labor policy, but it sharpens the scene’s imbalance: an official can handle a child’s possession while announcing the course his life must take. Werner Pfennig’s interest in scientific ideas and inventions stands in marked contrast to the predetermined future laid out for him.

Repetition and Enforcement at Home

The rule returns at supper, where a vice minister and his wife are visiting. The vice minister sets aside The Principles of Mechanics, glances at his palms as if the book had dirtied them, and answers Jutta Pfennig’s apparent objection about her brother’s future. He tells her that Werner Pfennig will go into the mines as soon as he turns fifteen, like every other boy in the house. The repetition removes any remaining room to treat the first announcement as a distant prospect or a negotiable suggestion.

The dinner’s ordinary gestures make the pronouncement more chilling. The vice minister’s wife eats liver and wipes the corners of her mouth; the children cut, chew, and swallow in silence. Werner Pfennig stares at the congealed food, feeling the pressure in his chest tighten. The rule is reinforced within a domestic meal, where the powerful visitor can turn a boy’s future into a matter of routine declaration. Together, the two announcements show how compulsory mine labor is normalized—as opportunity in public, and as an unquestionable personal fate when the family’s concern brings it close.