Franz decides to stop working

Franz decides to stop working during a long visit to a Jewish family’s home, where he sits, talks, and listens while inwardly marking the moment his resolve takes shape. His refusal is not presented as a practical plan so much as a limit reached: a man cannot give more than he has. The decision gathers force through repeated declarations, a weary reckoning with money and labor, and biblical images of a world in which work itself is cursed.

The Decision at the Jewish Home

Franz sits on a sofa for an hour as conversation continues around him. The narration lingers on his awareness of the scene: he is sitting, they are talking, and he is wondering at himself. His realization arrives like a bookkeeper discovering a miscalculation. He has reached a decision, and is surprised to find that the decision was in him. The scene makes the resolve less a sudden pronouncement than a thought he catches himself having.

As he watches his hosts, Franz concludes that he will not become involved with them. He distinguishes their religious appearance from what he takes to be their real identity, reasoning that their robes do not make them priests and that they cannot fool him. He remembers an earlier visit, when he sat with one of them on the carpet and entertained the possibility of trying something new; now, he tells himself, those days are over. His mistrust and withdrawal are part of the decision itself: no further effort to enter their world, and no further participation in the conversation beyond what is required.

Work, Money, and the Limit of Giving

The refusal becomes explicit in the passage’s language of exhaustion. Franz thinks that a man cannot give more than he has and is not a machine. He repeats the Eleventh Commandment as a rule of self-protection: “Don’t let ’em fool you.” The formulation turns his personal suspicion into a blunt principle. To him, the modest, plain apartment does not make the people in it more trustworthy, and he insists that he knows how to control himself.

Work appears in the scene not as a route to security but as an expenditure that has reached its limit. Franz imagines a pump stuck in sand: others may labor over it as much as they please, but he will no longer contribute. He tells himself that he is drawing retirement pay despite having no pension, a sly, internally contradictory calculation that punctures the possibility of any stable economic arrangement. The declaration is absolute even as its material basis remains obscure: “No more work will be done.”

The talk of money around him gives that refusal a social setting. His hosts become absorbed in the wealth of Feitel’s brother, whose supposed fortunes occupy their attention while Franz is effectively forgotten. One man gazes toward Franz with a dream of gold in his eyes. Outside, two men in shirtsleeves wash an old coach, hauling buckets of water through the yard. Franz looks back at the wealthy man and answers the spectacle inwardly: nobody can give more than what is in him. The contrast between imagined riches and physical work does not produce a new plan; it confirms his decision to stop exerting himself for a world that, in his view, gives no adequate return.

The Curse of Toil

The refusal expands into a biblical register. The serpent descends from the tree, followed by the curse on the serpent, the sorrow of Eve, and the curse placed on Adam’s ground, where thorns and thistles will grow. Labor is thus set beside an older account of punishment: toil is not merely tiring or poorly rewarded but bound to a damaged human condition. The passage does not offer Franz a way out of that condition; instead, the biblical language gives his refusal an emphatic, almost collective voice.

That voice repeats the decision as a refrain: “We shan’t work any more, it’s not worth it, and if hell freezes over we shan’t lift a finger.” The change from Franz’s individual limit to “we” broadens the sound of the declaration without establishing a group or organized action. The repeated promise is forceful, but the scene supplies no practical alternative to work. Its force lies in negation: the refusal to keep giving effort, even when the conditions that might make refusal sustainable remain unresolved.

Leaving for Minna’s House

When Franz rises, the iron crowbar is in his hands. He carries it as he leaves, muttering, and recalls that he has been out of Tegel penitentiary for months. His thoughts jump from the Jewish family’s house to Minna: he remembers having gone to see her and decides to go there now, to look at everything again. The crowbar’s presence is concrete, but the passage does not explain its purpose or turn it into a stated instrument of the decision to stop working.

Outside Minna’s house, Franz prowls and sniffs around while a little girl sits alone on a stone. He repeatedly tells himself that he does not care about Minna and that she can remain with her old man. His words then break into a fragmentary song about sauerkraut, turnips, and wishing that his mother had cooked meat, followed by more cock-a-doodle-doo refrains. This disjointed movement from remembered food to dismissive talk does not settle what he feels or what will happen at the house; it shows him circling it rather than entering it.

The passage closes by turning abruptly from Franz’s muttered fragments to Menelaus and Telemachus: Menelaus speaks, and Telemachus is so saddened that he presses his purple cloak to his eyes. The classical allusion gives the ending an image of grief, but it does not explain Franz’s decision or resolve his encounter with Minna. He has left the sofa and moved toward her house, carrying the crowbar and the refusal to work; the decision’s immediate consequence is movement, not closure.

Narrative Role

The scene makes a private resolve audible by repeating it in several forms: an inward recognition, a maxim about human limits, a refusal of deception, and a collective-sounding refrain against work. Its shifting registers—from sofa conversation and money talk to men hauling water, biblical curses, street-song fragments, and classical allusion—keep the decision from reading like a tidy declaration of independence. Franz’s refusal sounds definitive, yet his next action is to return to an unresolved relationship and circle Minna’s house. The passage places the limit he has announced beside the obligations and past he has not escaped.