Werner Pfennig—Volkheimer

Werner Pfennig and Frank Volkheimer are joined first by military necessity: Volkheimer is Werner’s sergeant, and Werner is the radio technician assigned to help locate partisan transmissions. Their relationship changes in texture as the search fails and the men become trapped beneath a city. Volkheimer’s practical confidence in Werner, his hourly checks, and Werner’s instinct to crawl toward him in the dark make their connection a form of comradeship built from work and danger rather than easy intimacy.

Rank, Age, and First Impressions

Werner knows Volkheimer as a young sergeant, no more than twenty, but at dawn the hard, pewter-colored light makes him seem twice that age. The disparity between the two impressions establishes something important about their working relationship: Volkheimer is young, yet the demands of command lend him a burdened authority. He leads a small team that includes the engineer Walter Bernd and two drivers, while Werner arrives as the technician expected to make their equipment useful.

The assignment begins with news of attacks on German trains. Volkheimer explains that partisans are organized and that the captain believes they are coordinating their attacks by radio. When Neumann One remarks that the previous technician found nothing, Werner answers that the equipment is good and that he expects to get both receivers functioning within an hour. Volkheimer’s response is neither a formal commendation nor a speech. A gentleness enters his eyes as he tells Werner, “Pfennig is nothing like our last technician.” The brief recognition marks a shift from evaluating an assigned specialist to placing personal confidence in this particular one.

Trust Tested in the Field

The search turns that confidence into a shared routine. Their Opel bounces along roads scarcely better than cattle trails; every few miles, the team stops on a rise or ridge to set up a transceiver. Bernd and Neumann Two remain with the equipment while Werner and Volkheimer drive a few hundred yards away, forming the base of a triangle. Werner raises the aerial, puts on the headset, and scans frequencies for voices that are not sanctioned. Volkheimer’s command gives Werner’s technical work its purpose, but the work itself depends on Werner listening for what the authorities do not permit to be heard.

The countryside offers no confirmation. Fires mark the horizon; the team hears few voices, and those that emerge from the static are German. Werner often rides facing backward, watching the land they are leaving and looking toward Poland. At night, the search continues in another form: Volkheimer pokes his head into the back of the Opel every hour and meets Werner’s eyes. “Nothing?” he asks. Werner shakes his head and checks batteries, antennas, and fuses again. The repeated question is a small act of contact inside a mission that produces no result. Volkheimer keeps asking; Werner keeps answering with the work he can still do.

For Werner, the failure is especially stark because his earlier work with Dr. Hauptmann at Schulpforta had felt like a game: he could guess Volkheimer’s frequency and tell whether his transmitter was transmitting. Here, he does not know whether, when, or where a transmission exists. He is chasing ghosts as the men spend fuel passing smoldering cottages, damaged artillery pieces, and unmarked graves. Volkheimer’s daily unease grows alongside the evidence that the train attacks continue. Their partnership therefore rests on an increasingly painful contrast: Werner retains the technical habits that once made him feel certain, but the field gives him no answer to offer his sergeant.

Familiarity Without Display

Their closeness also appears in moments that do not advance the search. In the cellar darkness, Werner crawls toward Volkheimer and finds comfort in the presence of his friend’s huge knee. Bernd’s corpse lies somewhere beyond them; the rifle is beside them. The scene reduces companionship to proximity. Werner does not need to see Volkheimer’s face or hear a reassurance: locating him by touch is enough to make the darkness less isolating.

Werner then asks whether Volkheimer ever heard the stories told about him by the boys at Schulpforta. The question reaches back to their shared past and treats Volkheimer not only as a sergeant but as someone with a reputation and a life before this cellar. Volkheimer asks who Werner means. When Werner asks how tall he is, Volkheimer gives a bark of a laugh. It is a brief, unguarded response amid the shelling, and it shows that familiarity between them can surface through teasing rather than confession.

Danger, Dependence, and Silence

The cellar conversation turns from jokes to survival. Werner asks whether Bernd was right about using grenades. Volkheimer’s voice becomes alert as he answers that they would kill the men. Werner recognizes the alternative: they might be crushed. He tries to make out the others across the blackness and wonders whether Volkheimer believes rescue will come, or whether they deserve to be saved. Those doubts belong to Werner’s perception; the scene supplies no corresponding declaration from Volkheimer.

Werner asks, “So we’re just going to wait?” Volkheimer does not answer. Werner asks how long, and the silence remains. Their bond is not resolved by a promise or by an explanation of what Volkheimer feels. Instead, the sequence places Werner beside him in the dark after the practical certainties of rank, equipment, and mission have collapsed. Earlier, Volkheimer’s attention took the form of returning every hour to ask whether Werner had found anything. Here, when Werner needs an answer no instrument can supply, Volkheimer offers none. The relationship’s significance lies in that contrast: work gives them a language of trust, while shared danger brings them close enough for silence itself to become part of their companionship.