Franz and Reinhold’s reconciliation is a charged, temporary return to intimacy: Franz experiences their meeting as a new beginning, while Reinhold sees it as a chance to exploit him. The scene’s warmth is real for Franz, but it rests on a dangerous misunderstanding. Their renewed closeness precedes a night of dancing and happiness, even as Reinhold’s private intentions turn the apparent reconciliation into a trap.

Background and Approach

Before going to Reinhold, Franz sits with the brandy Mieze has left in his room and refuses to drink it. He wants to face Reinhold sober, with no tremor in his body and no flicker in his expression. The surrounding narration breaks his resolve into marching rhythms, trumpets, and reports of people dying in disasters. That abrupt movement between his private decision and distant catastrophe gives the visit the quality of an ordeal, though Franz makes his way toward it as if advancing into battle.

He arrives in the evening and finds the door open. Reinhold asks who let him in; Franz answers that nobody did and that there was no need to ring. His insistence that he is not drunk matters to the scene: he has come by choice, not under the influence, and is prepared to meet Reinhold directly. The casual entrance begins an encounter that Franz will regard as one of the best things he has done since the car accident.

The Conversation About the Car

The two men sit facing one another and smoke. Franz is upright and calm, pleased that he is alive and, for once, not trembling. Reinhold brings up what remains unsettled between them: the car. Franz refuses to treat discussion as a way to restore his lost arm. Instead, he says that things turned out all right and that what happened had to happen. His response does not erase the injury; it gives the injury a place in a changed account of his life.

Reinhold presses him about what he has been doing. Franz acknowledges his street selling and says that phase is over; with one arm, he cannot do jobs in the same way as before. He still has his other arm, his head, and his legs, but does not present those facts as a simple cure for his disability. The exchange marks a change in how he understands his prospects: he is no longer trying to resume the same work by sheer force. Reinhold suggests that living as a pimp must be boring, but beneath the conversation he judges Franz as someone who still has fight in him and whom he thinks can be broken.

Affection and Deception

Franz tells Reinhold about Mieze, describing her as a good woman who earns well. Reinhold’s unspoken response exposes the crucial imbalance in the meeting: he decides that he will take Mieze from Franz and leave Franz in trouble. The apparent intimacy therefore contains two opposed purposes. Franz offers personal confidence; Reinhold receives it as information he can use against him.

Franz does not recognize that threat. He is genuinely delighted to be sitting with Reinhold, and privately ranks the encounter above political meetings and nearly above Mieze. His happiness is not merely relief at avoiding another attack: he is attached to the man whose face he is now meeting without fear. When they go downstairs, he feels newly born and imagines the people around him as friends who will not do him down. He also invites Reinhold to go dancing with him and Mieze when she returns from a few days away with her own companion, confidently predicting that she will welcome him.

The Night and Its Reversal

Franz dances through the night, first at the Altes Ballhaus and later in a pub with Herbert. Eva is among the women he dances with, yet his thoughts remain fixed on two people who are absent: Mieze and Reinhold. He loves them both, the narration reveals, although he does not dare tell Reinhold. The dance thus extends the reunion beyond the smoking-room conversation: Franz’s renewed confidence becomes bodily exhilaration and an expansive affection that includes the very person who intends to betray him.

The narrator calls this turn a movement backward. The strong Franz, likened in the narration to a cobra, has appeared again; what looks like recovery is also a return to an older, more dangerous self. The contrast does not cancel Franz’s happiness, but it changes its meaning for the reader. He experiences the meeting as reconciliation and rebirth, while the disclosed intention toward Mieze makes clear that trust has not been restored on equal terms. The night ends in joy for Franz, with the threat still concealed within the renewed bond.