Political polarization in Berlin

Political polarization in Berlin emerges not as an abstract contest between parties but as a daily struggle over work, order, loyalty, and the meaning of past defeat. Through Franz Biberkopf’s newspaper selling and confrontations with Georg, a working-class former comrade, the novel shows how political identities harden in public spaces while remaining unsettled in private. Their disagreement is sharpened by memories of war and revolution, and by propaganda that turns contested events into weapons of accusation.

Political Allegiance in the Street

After turning to populist newspapers, Franz presents himself as a supporter of law and order. He says he has nothing against Jews, yet endorses the order promoted by the Stahlhelm and admires its leaders. His outlook is visible in the places where he sells papers: the exits of the Potsdamer Platz underground station and the passage beneath Alexanderplatz station. Politics reaches him there as printed language addressed to passersby, not as a settled theory he has carefully worked out.

The pamphlets and newspaper excerpts surrounding Franz’s sales sharpen the contrast between political movements. One address urges Germans to shatter illusions and presents truth as a warrior carrying shield and sword. Another account accuses members of the Reichsbanner of attacking a smaller group of National Socialists and killing a comrade, while portraying the accused as liars. A further text calls antisemitism a defense of Bavarian state sovereignty and describes a crowded meeting preceded by a Sturmabteilung band playing marches. These are partisan claims and staged political performances, not neutral accounts: the narrative places their certainty beside the rival claims and lived disputes they seek to organize.

Two Former Comrades, Two Readings of the Past

Franz’s political position is tested most directly in a bar conversation with Georg, a 39-year-old grinder who is locked out of work. Franz uses his armband as an object of argument. He compares its colors with different cigar bands and insists that a label alone cannot determine the quality of what is inside; what matters, he says, is the substance. The comparison lets him defend his chosen emblem while claiming that political symbols are less important than the people and conditions behind them.

Georg answers from their shared wartime history. He reminds Franz that they knew each other from fighting at Arras and Kovno, and says that the armband is part of a larger deception. Franz rejects the premise that the men simply fought together as the story is often told: he recalls a failure of discipline and command, says that he and Georg left the trench, and argues that people at home deserted too. The dispute is therefore not only over which movement deserves allegiance. It is also over what happened in war, who abandoned whom, and whether collective action can be trusted.

Their memories of 1918 and 1919 deepen the split. Georg says that the people were betrayed by their leaders and recalls the killings of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. He points to Russia and Lenin as an example of people acting together. Franz answers that the movement failed and that this failure is enough for him; he will not follow Georg’s political course again. The same history becomes evidence for opposite conclusions: Georg sees betrayal as a reason for solidarity, while Franz sees failure as a reason to withdraw.

The Tavern as a Political Arena

The argument does not remain confined to the two men. At Henschke’s, Franz encounters Georg seated with younger left-wing patrons. They begin singing The Internationale, and Franz initially treats the gathering as a noisy social scene: he keeps eating, notices the smoke, and worries that it may bother a small bird in the pub. When one of the newcomers challenges him to sing, he declines at first, then agrees to perform something of his own. The tavern’s ordinary routines—food, beer, songs, and attention to the bird—share space with political performance and mutual suspicion.

The encounter escalates when a tall patron calls Franz a fascist and demands his armband. Another identifies him with a swastika group. Franz acknowledges the label and tries to explain his position: he argues that order is necessary so factory workers, tradesmen, and others can work and live. The newcomers instead treat the armband as sufficient proof of what he represents. Georg does not step in to reconcile them. The landlord urges Franz to leave, concerned about the disturbance, and Franz departs after offering Georg his hand; Georg does not take it. Their personal estrangement gives the larger political division a concrete consequence: an old friendship cannot survive the meanings now attached to its symbols and memories.

Propaganda, Crowds, and Unequal Security

The novel places these political arguments among the surfaces of urban mass life. Franz’s first hours outside Tegel are marked by the crowd’s movement, shop windows, newspapers, and the tramway; he experiences the city as a swarm in which public life can feel strangely empty. Elsewhere, a packed cinema brings men together to watch a film and laugh, while a night at the Neue Welt gathers civilians, soldiers, families, music, beer, and popular entertainment. Such scenes do not themselves establish a political program, but they show the crowded public world through which slogans, papers, and collective identities circulate.

That public world is materially insecure. Franz receives an official order declaring him a threat to public safety and morals because of his prison sentence, and requiring him to leave Berlin and a wide surrounding area within fourteen days. He avoids immediate expulsion by placing himself under the supervision of an ex-prisoners’ welfare centre, where he must report monthly and where staff say they will investigate whether he is working. The episode does not equate administrative policing with party conflict, but it makes law and order more than a slogan for Franz: state authority directly threatens his ability to remain in the city, even as he presents order as the condition for ordinary work and life.

Later, Alexanderplatz becomes a scene of mass attention focused not on a political speaker but on a pile driver. People watch as it repeatedly drives a pile into the ground, while workers continue their activity by day and night. The image places collective spectatorship and labor beside the earlier scenes of crowds and political gatherings. Berlin’s population is shown not as a single political body but as people assembled around different spectacles, necessities, and claims on their attention.

The Unresolved Meaning of Solidarity

Franz’s break with Georg does not settle the political argument. Franz says he will not dance to the tune of another failed movement, doubts that Georg’s side can accomplish anything, and returns to the language of peace, work, and order. Georg’s appeal to people sticking together remains unanswered. When the argument resurfaces at Henschke’s, revolutionary rhetoric about the oppressed and the workers’ and soldiers’ councils is heard against Franz’s departure; the voices remain adjacent without being reconciled.

Political polarization in Berlin is thus registered through repeated acts of classification: a paper, an armband, a song, a memory of the front, a claim about who betrayed whom. Franz’s insistence that symbols do not determine substance conflicts with the way others read his armband as a public declaration. Georg’s call for solidarity rests on a history Franz interprets as proof of failure. The novel leaves the disagreement open, showing how political language can promise order or collective change while dividing people whose daily conditions and past connections remain closely entangled.