“When all the soldiers through the town go marching”

“When all the soldiers through the town go marching” is a marching refrain that changes the force of Franz Biberkopf’s movement through Berlin: the beat that first sounds like drill and danger becomes, for a moment, a rhythm of belonging and renewed life. Repeated around his encounter with Reinhold, it ties the city’s streets to military memory, bodily vulnerability, and Franz’s precarious conviction that he can still trust other people.

The refrain as a marching rhythm

The phrase appears as Franz walks through Berlin with “calm, firm steps,” accompanied by the repeated cadence “left right, left right.” The march gives his movement a measure and direction. Rather than stumbling through the city, he keeps step, refuses the imagined commands to break or stop, and finds that he can breathe again. The refrain’s buoyancy is in tension with the effort behind that composure: marching is at once a public, collective rhythm and a way for Franz to hold himself together.

The song-like words turn that rhythm into a comic, insistent chorus: “When all the soldiers through the town go marching, oh why, that’s why, oh just for the sake of the tzingtantara boomtara, oh just for the sake of the tzingtantara tara.” The nonsense syllables imitate the sound of a band, while the repeated question and answer reduce the march to its own momentum. The refrain does not explain Franz’s state so much as propel it. His steady steps and the verbal beat reinforce one another, making the act of continuing feel temporarily sufficient.

Berlin as sound and movement

As the refrain carries Franz through the streets, it also organizes a shifting view of the city. The houses remain still while the wind moves; the march supplies a human rhythm against that static backdrop. The passage then cuts to Reinhold indoors, reading slowly and aloud to help with his stammer. Details of ordinary life intrude into the martial chorus: a newspaper item about the Olympic Games, advice about pumpkin seeds as a remedy for tapeworm, and Reinhold’s careful attention to the text. The refrain thus moves between street and room, public spectacle and private routine, without settling into a single, continuous scene.

Elsewhere in the novel, Berlin is rendered through similarly concrete patterns of movement. Tram routes cross Alexanderplatz; people share temporary paths over planks where roads are torn up; construction machinery pounds the ground as crowds watch. These urban details make the city a place of imposed routes, repeated labor, and mechanical beat. Against that larger soundscape, the soldiers’ march is not simply a song laid over the setting: it is one of the rhythms through which Franz experiences and interprets the streets.

War memory and the wounded body

The refrain darkens when its marching imagery brings a remembered bullet into view. Its words turn from soldiers passing through a town to a soldier struck down: “A bullet flew toward us, meant for me, or meant for you; it hit him, he lay dying, at my feet he was lying, and part of me died too, and part of me died too.” The repeated final phrase makes survival inseparable from loss. The march can sustain Franz, but its language also carries the possibility that someone will fall and that the living will bear the wound afterward.

That memory is set beside Franz’s present body. The narration identifies him as a war veteran with one arm gone, standing at Reinhold’s door; the missing arm is described as having been run over some time earlier. The passage does not explain the loss as a battlefield injury. Instead, the march and the visible disability occupy the same scene, bringing the collective language of soldiers into contact with Franz’s individual vulnerability. Reinhold has a gun in his hand, so the remembered bullet is also charged by an immediate threat, not only by the past.

From guardedness to renewed confidence

After Franz has sat with Reinhold without trembling, the refrain returns with a changed emotional charge. Going downstairs with Reinhold, Franz feels reborn and takes comfort in the people around him: “it’s good to be alive, all of these walking around here are my friends, nobody’s going to do me down, just let ’em try.” The march now accompanies confidence rather than merely discipline. Its rhythm turns a street full of strangers into an imagined community, and Franz’s sense of being alive briefly expands into a belief that he is among friends.

The change is striking because the encounter has not erased the danger surrounding them. Reinhold is associated with Pums’s outfit, and the earlier scene places a gun, a threat, and the memory of violence within reach. Franz’s ease is therefore a moment of feeling, not evidence that the danger has passed. Later that night he dances at the Altes Ballhaus and in a pub with Herbert; although he dances with Eva, the narration says that he is passionately in love with two absent people, Mieze and Reinhold. The refrain’s renewed warmth belongs to this fragile interval of attachment and pleasure. It gives Franz a rhythm in which to feel at home with others, while its own martial and elegiac undertones keep that happiness shadowed by the possibility of injury and loss.