The Red Handle

By Franz Drollig

Facing the failure of the government to fix the refugee crisis in the European city of Düsselstein, a factory worker, a second-generation Muslim immigrant and a neo-Nazi team up to solve the problem for real... but not like you’d expect.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Franz Drollig
• Release date: Jan 11, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370840366

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The Red Handle

Franz Drollig

Published by Franz Drollig at Smashwords

Copyright 2017, 2018 Franz Drollig

Translation of the poem in chapter 4 was taken from A. S. Kline, Goethe - Faust - Parts I & II. It is the intellectual property of the respective authors.

Chapter 1

Fritz was a thirty-year-old pump factory worker with a beer belly in its early stages. He waited for the subway at the General Hospital station in one of Düsselstein’s outer districts. Sad without an apparent reason, he studied the red handle with a lettering Emergency train stop above it.

The red handle, mounted on a plate, had a round shaft and an oval handle. A little box over it housed the device that transmitted the emergency signal. Above the box was a light bulb covered with transparent plastic. All parts of the device were painted with the same shade of red. This magnificent device had fascinated Fritz since his childhood. The Düsselstein subway system offered fin-de-siècle stations and archaeological excavations, but to Fritz none of that compared to the magic of the emergency brake handle.

Sometimes he thought that perhaps the round shape of the device evoked subconscious images of the female body, and his interest in the device was an expression of his suppressed erotic desires. This certainly could have been the case. Fritz didn’t have a girlfriend, and his prospects of building even a casual relationship looked bleak. His Cupido fired arrows at worker girls and female students of the Düsselstein Main University. The former were sexy but slow-witted, and despite their tender age they showed the first signs of alcohol-induced premature aging. The latter were intelligent and would have made great wives if they hadn’t suppressed their femininity in an ill-conceived emancipation attempt. Fritz’s friends tried to set him up with different women, but those dates inevitably ended in disappointment.

Like many Düsselsteinians of either sex, Fritz found it hard to hold onto the belief that love was the purpose of his being, so he sought meaning in civic society. He failed, however, since none of the political parties in Düsselstein seemed to do anything real. They talked about abstract ideas and prepared programs (which were so similar that in a blind test you couldn’t distinguish Liberal from Nationalist ones). Fritz failed to see, how he could change anything by working in those political parties. The only exception was, perhaps, the Greens, who fought for the preservation of the environment. They regularly staged protests before the offices of big corporations. But Fritz held the opinion that protection of nature wasn’t Düsselstein’s most important problem.

His search for meaning made him so miserable that he couldn’t even enjoy his vacation, the second day of which was now coming to an end. He watched a movie in a mall on the bank of the Danube, had lunch there, and now was returning to his flat in the Meidling district. He didn’t want to talk to friends. He needed solitude to finally figure out what his life was about. He was so desperate for purpose that he even considered suicide—a choice many talented Düsselsteinians made. It was time to pull the red handle, the emergency brake, he thought, but how to go about it? In life the red handle wasn’t as obvious as in the subway station.

It wasn’t a real subway station — the trains rolled in at the same elevation as the cars on the street. There was one track on each side with the platform between them. In the middle of the platform were there was a kiosk with a map of the city, the emergency brake that so fascinated Fritz, and some advertisements. Close to the kiosk stood a girl in her late teens, whom he noticed because she looked as absent-minded as he was confused. A couple of other people were around — retirees in their gray uniforms, patients with their