We shan’t work any more

“We shan’t work any more” is a moment of refusal in which Franz Biberkopf’s attention to wealth, poverty, and labor turns into a collective-sounding declaration. The phrase does not arrive as a detached maxim: it rises out of a scene of money, work, and observation, then runs directly into the book’s biblical language about the burden of labor.

Wording and Context

The declaration follows a conversation absorbed in the fortune of Feitel’s brother. The two men have become so preoccupied with imagining his wealth that they have forgotten Franz, who is left to consider what a poor man could know about such riches. Outside, two men in shirtsleeves wash an old coach, hauling buckets of water until the yard is flooded. The contrast places imagined abundance beside visible work and gives the refusal its immediate surroundings without reducing it to a simple response to one task.

Franz returns the red-bearded man’s gaze, and the narration moves into the thought that no one can give more than what is in him. It then gathers force in the declaration: “We shan’t work any more, it’s not worth it, and if hell freezes over we shan’t lift a finger.” The shift to “we” makes the refusal sound larger than an individual decision, though the scene does not identify a group speaking together. The accompanying insistence that they will “dig our heels in” gives the words the quality of a stubborn stand rather than a passing complaint.

Repetition and Biblical Resonance

The phrase is repeated almost immediately: “We shan’t work any more, it’s not worth it, and if hell freezes over we shan’t lift a finger.” Repetition turns the declaration into a refrain, while the phrase about hell freezing over intensifies the refusal by making it absolute. The scene’s movement—from the men’s talk of money, to the laborers outside, to Franz’s inward response—keeps the words attached to the economic contrasts surrounding him.

The refusal is followed by an account of the serpent’s descent and the curses on the serpent, Eve, and Adam, including the ground that yields thorns and thistles. This biblical sequence gives the declaration an added tension: work appears not merely as an economic necessity but as part of an inherited condition of hardship. The text does not resolve that tension. Instead, the repeated refusal stands against the curse of labor even as the language that follows places labor within a much older story of human consequence.