Christmas

Christmas is a seasonal marker in Franz Biberkopf’s changing livelihood and in his sudden withdrawal from ordinary routines. The season brings a shift in what he sells and gives the later account of his disappearance its sharpest contrast: at the time of year when he would normally be out doing business, he is found at home and then vanishes.

Seasonal Work and Partnership

As Christmas comes round, Franz changes course from his earlier trade and sells assorted low-priced goods. For a few hours in the morning or afternoon, he takes to selling shoelaces, first on his own and then alongside Otto Lüders. The work sends the two men up and down the streets and into houses; they ring doorbells and meet up again afterward. Christmas thus appears not as a holiday scene but as a pressure on livelihood, shaping the goods Franz offers and the rhythm of his days.

Otto Lüders brings his own precarious circumstances to this partnership: he has been unemployed for two years, while his wife takes in washing. Lina introduced him to Franz and is his uncle’s relative. The narrative also sets the temporary shoelace business against Lüders’s earlier summer work in Rüdersdorf, where for a few weeks he wore a tasseled costume as Mr. Peppermint Man. These seasonal jobs—summer performance and winter street selling—place the men’s work within a cycle of improvised ways to earn money.

A Pub Visit in the Christmas Period

In a pub scene associated with this period, Franz is unusually buoyant. He devours Lina’s sandwiches and orders pigs’ ears with peas for the three of them before finishing his mouthful. He squeezes Lina so hard that, after the meal, she leaves with her face bright red. Franz then remarks to Otto Lüders that Lina has a home of her own and is always following him around. The scene gives the seasonal account a social, bodily counterpoint to street trading: food is plentiful at the table for a moment, while the relationships among the three are marked by Franz’s rough familiarity and Lina’s departure.

Christmas and Franz’s Disappearance

Christmas sharpens the strangeness of Franz’s later absence. On the afternoon of the day he receives a letter, Lina goes to his room intending to leave him a brown cardigan she has made herself. She expects him to be out, especially at Christmas, when he would normally be doing business. Instead, he sits on his bed with a table pulled up beside it, taking apart his alarm clock. He barely looks at her, has a hangover, and persists in saying that the clock is not working properly, although Lina considers it all right.

Lina leaves the cardigan at the door and goes away worried. When she returns that evening, Franz has paid his rent, packed all his belongings, and left. The landlady knows only that he told her to write Travelling on the police registration form. Christmas therefore frames a reversal from movement to disappearance: the season that had sent Franz out selling finds him withdrawn indoors, fixed on a broken-seeming mechanism, and gone before the day is over.