Good evening. Or Heil Hitler if you prefer.

The expression Good evening. Or Heil Hitler if you prefer. condenses a change in what an everyday greeting can mean. First delivered with a boyish air of choice, it accompanies the spread of Nazi allegiance into public life; later, Werner thinks of the same alternative as a sign that nearly everyone is choosing the salute. The phrase’s darkening force comes not from a change in its words but from the shrinking space in which anyone might decline them.

A Greeting Learned in the Street

In Zollverein, in the spring of Werner’s tenth year, the two oldest boys at Children’s House return from the woods as members of the Hitler Youth. They carry slingshots, make spears, rehearse ambushes, and join a gang of miners’ sons in the market square. There, they call to passersby, “Good evening,” followed by “Or heil Hitler, if you prefer!” The second greeting is presented as an option, but the boys’ new uniforms, matching haircuts, and growing enthusiasm for military training make clear which answer their world is beginning to reward.

The performance is at first almost comic. Their salutes look awkward, their outfits verge on ridiculous, and the boys who now swagger with split knuckles had once been small children crying for their mothers. Yet the jokes sit beside more consequential changes: they praise the flag as a guide to a new era, anticipate rifles and tanks, and chide younger children for admiring British or French things. The greeting thus arrives inside a broader everyday education in belonging, one that turns a casual encounter with a passerby into a test of political alignment.

From Playful Formula to Social Pressure

By Werner’s fourteenth birthday in May 1940, Frau Elena’s pudding and the children’s games take place against a changed political atmosphere. The children sing; Frau Elena says, “Time’s up”; and Werner switches off his receiver before everyone prays. Outside, fifteen-year-old boys queue for the mine elevators, preparing to descend into the work that awaits them. In the dormer, looking across the industrial landscape, Werner thinks, “Good evening. Or heil Hitler. Everyone is choosing the latter.” The earlier greeting has become an inward measure of conformity: the apparent choice remains, but the surrounding pressures make its outcome feel settled.

The expression’s movement from the market square into Werner’s thought also changes its scale. What began as a noisy exchange among boys now seems to belong to the whole expanding machinery of Germany, with workers and children alike being drawn into its routines. The line does not describe a formal order to speak in one way; instead, it registers how political expectation can be absorbed into ordinary habits until compliance seems to be the common choice.

Speech, Silence, and Control

The surrounding episodes give that pressure a material edge. In a letter to a professor, Frau Elena wonders whether the radio station still forwards his broadcasts and describes a powerful transmitter in Brandenburg that pushes other stations off the dial. She repeats her brother’s account of how wire, a rectifier, and a speaker might receive a signal—even, she imagines, through the silver in a tooth. The playful possibility of “Songs in your teeth?” stands against the loss of a dependable channel to the outside world. Radio reception, like the greeting, becomes a matter of what can still be heard and said under increasingly restrictive conditions.

In Saint-Malo, the authorities make that control explicit: residents must deliver their radio receivers to 27 rue de Chartres by noon the following day or risk arrest as saboteurs. Marie-Laure LeBlanc must press her father to read the notice aloud, and its threat revives an old anxiety. Elsewhere, resistance takes quieter forms. Madame Ruelle and Madame Guiboux drive out at dusk with a stepladder and ratchet set to rearrange road signs, then return laughing to the house at Number 4 rue Vauborel. Such actions do not erase the risks of occupation, but they show that ordinary routines can also be used to obstruct authority rather than simply echo it.

The Phrase Among Competing Voices

Letters offer another measure of how public language enters private life. Jutta’s letter to Werner, passed through censorship, describes cold, shortages, laundry work, and the reuse of whatever fabric can be found; she encloses the childhood notebook in which he once filled pages with questions and inventions. A separate, heavily censored letter addressed to Jutta ends with “Sieg heil.” The surviving words show how political formulas can appear at the edge of intimate correspondence, while the censor’s marks make visible how much of the private voice has been removed.

The expression’s significance rests in this contrast between a greeting that sounds casual and a society that steadily narrows the choices behind it. The boys’ shouted alternative, Werner’s later thought that everyone is choosing the salute, the controlled airwaves, and the censored letters all trace different routes by which political power reaches daily speech. Against them, the rearranged road signs offer a small counter-image: words and directions can be made to serve something other than obedience.