Füchler

Füchler is a factory night watchman and Hans Reiter’s roommate in Berlin, a man whose illness and bereavement have left him living at the edge of ordinary attachments. Their relationship is brief but consequential: before he dies, Füchler offers Hans his job, helping him leave poorly paid shop work for the rifle factory. The account gives his life weight not through a dramatic cure or reconciliation, but through the quiet transfer of work, belongings, and remembered grief.

Identity and Circumstances

Füchler is about forty and shares a room in a house of workers with Hans, who rents a bed there while working as a stationery-shop clerk. Their schedules keep them apart: Füchler works nights as a factory watchman, while Hans works during the day. The factory had once made shotguns and had since been converted to producing rifles. That change in its output situates Füchler’s livelihood within a working world being reshaped around weapons, though the account does not assign him a political view of the work.

Füchler describes an ailment that may be nervous in origin. Its symptoms vary from night to night: sometimes rheumatism, sometimes heart trouble, sometimes sudden asthma. The narrative does not establish a diagnosis or present the illness as something that can be neatly explained. It appears instead as an unstable bodily condition accompanying his solitary working life and the difficult past he recounts to Hans.

Loss and Years of Wandering

Füchler tells Hans that he was once married and had a son. When the boy was five, he became ill and died soon afterward. The child’s death overwhelmed Füchler. He spent three months mourning in a cellar, then packed his belongings and left without telling anyone. This departure is described as the consequence of grief: the loss does not lead him toward renewed family life but sends him onto Germany’s roads.

For a time, he survives through charity and whatever chance offers. Years later, in Berlin, a friend recognizes him in the street and finds him a job at the factory. The friend, who has since died, had been a supervisor there; Füchler remains in the same workplace as a watchman even after the factory shifts from making shotguns to rifles. His account gives a compact history of bereavement, estrangement, wandering, and an eventual return to settled employment, without suggesting that the job repairs the original loss.

Hans and the Offer of Work

Füchler and Hans get along well when their opposite schedules allow them to meet. One night Hans returns from work and finds Füchler in bed, with a plate of soup brought upstairs by the landlady. Hans immediately understands that his roommate is going to die. The recognition is narrated as a sudden certainty, a moment in which the ordinary shared room becomes the setting for an approaching death.

Before he dies, Füchler tells Hans that he can have the factory job. He asks what Hans earns at the stationery shop; Hans calls it a pittance. Füchler writes a letter of introduction to the new supervisor, recommending Hans’s conduct and claiming to have known him since birth. Hans considers the offer through the rest of his workday, spent unloading boxes of pencils, erasers, and notebooks and sweeping the shopfront. When he returns, he accepts. That same night he visits the factory, speaks with the supervisor, and agrees to a two-week trial period. Füchler dies shortly afterward, so the offer becomes a final practical act between the roommates rather than the beginning of a shared future.

Belongings and Narrative Significance

With no one else to receive Füchler’s belongings, Hans keeps most of them: a coat, two pairs of shoes, a wool scarf, four shirts, various undershirts, and seven pairs of socks. He gives Füchler’s razor to the landlord. Under the bed, inside a cardboard box, he finds several cowboy novels and keeps them for himself. The inventory is precise and unceremonious; what remains of Füchler’s life passes into the hands of the young man who shared his room, with the novels singled out as something Hans chooses to retain.

Füchler’s importance lies less in an extended personal arc than in the consequences of his final generosity. His illness and history of grief meet Hans at a threshold between two kinds of work: the poorly paid stationery shop and the rifle factory that grants him more free time. The job gives Hans a different daily rhythm, while Füchler’s death closes their brief companionship. Through this small exchange of recommendation and possessions, Füchler becomes part of the account of Hans’s Berlin years: a solitary, ill man whose life is not restored, but whose remaining opportunities and objects help shape the life of another.