Der Anker

Der Anker is Sigurd Altman’s image for the unseen moral attachment that keeps Harry Hole from drifting free of his place in life. In a conversation about values and pain, Altman recasts what Harry dismisses as weakness: beneath conscious argument, inherited and accumulated judgments of right and wrong still hold him fast.

The Hidden Anchor

Altman’s metaphor turns an abstract moral foundation into a physical restraint. An anchor may be out of sight, he explains, yet still prevent movement; likewise, values can remain binding even when a person can no longer identify their source or defend them intellectually. The image does not present morality as a set of principles Harry has consciously chosen. It presents it as something embedded, powerful precisely because it persists beneath awareness.

Altman names the consequence of that attachment as a place in life: the anchor keeps Harry where he is, and that place is his home. The metaphor therefore joins ethical constraint to belonging. What holds Harry back is not merely an argument about good and evil, but a connection to the life and moral world in which he remains situated.

How Values Take Root

Altman proposes several possible origins for this inner sense of right and wrong. It might have been conveyed by parents, encountered in a moral tale read by a grandmother, or formed through a school experience Harry felt was unjust. He does not identify any one of these as Harry’s actual history; instead, he describes morality as the cumulative effect of experiences that may have almost been forgotten.

That accumulation explains why intellectual doubt does not, in Altman’s account, erase moral feeling. Harry may lack arguments that satisfy his intellect, but Altman insists that the values remain deeply rooted. The anchor is thus both hidden and durable: its obscurity does not mean it has ceased to exert force.

The Metaphor’s Place in the Conversation

The image answers Harry’s attempt to reduce his position to weakness and cowardice rather than principle. Altman does not meet that dismissal with an abstract proof. He asks Harry to accept the persistence of feelings and values that reason alone may not recover, and makes acceptance—not escape from the anchor—the immediate task.

Harry looks down at his folded hands and begins to speak of another person’s pain. Altman replies that physical pain is not the worst thing a person can endure, and sets it alongside neither death nor fear of death as the ultimate measure. This exchange places the anchor metaphor within a conversation about suffering, but the passage does not spell out a complete resolution of that suffering. Its decisive claim is narrower: even when Harry cannot readily see the moral ground beneath him, it may still hold him in place.