Reinhold—Mieze

Reinhold’s relation with Mieze is a calculated approach that becomes coercive and ends in her murder. He first seeks her out while Franz Biberkopf is away with Karl the tinsmith; later, in Freienwalde, Reinhold uses his history with Franz to pressure and intimidate Mieze, who is ultimately killed after refusing him. The episode makes their connection part of the violence surrounding Franz, while the account of Mieze’s life after her death restores her identity beyond the crime.

The First Visit

Reinhold goes to Mieze’s room at Prenzlauer Tor on a day when he knows Franz is elsewhere. She has never met him face to face. The narration marks the encounter as a turning point: Mieze cannot yet know what the visit will mean, but Reinhold’s presence is presented as bound up with the fate that will reach both her and Franz.

Reinhold asks that Franz not learn of the visit, describing him as touchy, and frames his purpose as concern over Franz’s damaged arm and whether he needs to work. Mieze answers cautiously. She says that others can help Franz financially, while allowing that he may still want work. Reinhold suggests that the work in question is difficult even for men with two sound arms, then says he merely wanted to ask about Franz’s circumstances and that the group will be considerate of him.

The conversation shifts when Reinhold asks whether Mieze knows who he is and reminds her that he and Franz have known each other for a long time, before Franz was with her, when he had other women, including Cilly. Mieze does not treat Franz’s former relationships as a reason to distrust him; she replies that she, too, had someone before Franz and that Franz remains hers. Her response exposes the limit of Reinhold’s attempt to influence her through their shared past: she acknowledges that past without accepting it as a threat to her present attachment.

The Meeting in Freienwalde

In Freienwalde, Mieze meets Reinhold again in the spa gardens, where they sit facing one another after lunch. She is not afraid to see him and meets the encounter openly. On September 1, they walk arm in arm. Reinhold tells her that he had lacked the nerve to ask her out before; Mieze asks about the scars and tattoos on his hands and chest. When he displays a tattoo, an anvil surrounded by a laurel wreath, he presses her to kiss it. She refuses and tries to leave.

Reinhold follows and stops her from getting away, then uses the encounter to undermine her trust in Franz Biberkopf. He calls her Franz’s former partner and insists that her attachment to him does not make her respectable. Mieze objects to Reinhold’s treatment of her and says she wants to go, but he keeps her there and makes clear that she is not free to leave. The scene turns the earlier visit’s indirect probing into direct intimidation: Reinhold exploits what he knows of Franz and their shared criminal past to pressure Mieze.

Reinhold then tells Mieze that Franz once stood lookout for the gang, later refused to work with them, and claimed to be respectable. Reinhold says that he made Franz get into the car and that Franz lost his arm after being put out of it. The disclosure reveals Reinhold’s responsibility for the injury that shapes Franz’s life, while showing how he weaponizes that history against Mieze. She recognizes him as the man who brought Franz misfortune and calls for Franz to help her; Reinhold does not relent.

Murder and Concealment

After the encounter in the hollow, Reinhold kills Mieze and leaves her body concealed in the forest. He covers the place with branches and marks a nearby tree with a handkerchief so he can find it again. About an hour later he returns with Karl the tinsmith. In the dark, they search with torches, dig with spades taken from the car, and bury her beneath sand and branches. Reinhold then gives Karl a valid passport and money, telling him to go into hiding while the commotion passes; the passport is meant to provide Karl with an alibi. Reinhold leaves separately, believing no one has seen him.

The body is found two days later, about a mile from the hollow. Two horticultural workers come forward after reading the newspaper reports: they recall a broad-shouldered man carrying a very heavy box, resting in a hollow, and later sitting there without the box. Their account leads police to search the area. In one hollow they first find a large cardboard box containing clothing and other personal items, but the contents do not match what Mieze had been wearing. The body is soon discovered in another hollow, tightly wrapped and placed inside a box. The search turns the forest into a crime scene, while the witnesses’ ordinary walk through it becomes the first substantial lead in the case.

The police investigation and newspaper coverage expose the distance between the case file and the person who has been lost. Mieze was the daughter of a tram conductor in Bernau. With her mother gone and three children in the household, she had been left to manage on her own. Her trips into Berlin led her to dance halls, then to Eva and a life among people who became her companions. She was first known as Sonja; later, she remained with the one-armed Franz Biberkopf, whom she loved and cared for devotedly. The account stresses that she went to Freienwalde to protect Franz, and that her attachment—not any wrongdoing of her own—placed her in the path of the violence that killed her.

After her identity is established, official procedure reduces her to evidence: an impression is taken of her face and neck, and a wax likeness is made for identification. The narrative sets that technical afterlife against the remembered woman, whose relationships and history cannot be contained by the criminal investigation. Her death is at once a matter for police records and a personal catastrophe for those who knew her; the contrast makes the case’s administrative handling feel especially stark without allowing it to erase the life that preceded it.

Franz’s Confrontation and the Trial

At the Buch asylum, Franz Biberkopf confronts Reinhold over Mieze’s death and over the earlier attack that cost Franz his arm. Reinhold turns the accusation back on him: Franz had brought Mieze into his orbit and, Reinhold claims, had once treated her violently himself. Franz insists that this did not justify killing her. Their exchange makes the relation’s central contradiction plain: Franz recognizes Reinhold as the source of grave harm, yet remains emotionally entangled with him, while Reinhold uses that attachment to taunt and blame him. Franz later presses his eyes shut and regrets having become involved with Reinhold at all.

At Reinhold’s trial with Karl Matter, charged respectively with Mieze’s murder and complicity, Franz appears as a witness but is not indicted. The case concerns Mieze’s death in Freienwalde on September 1, 1928. Deemed recovered and fit to be questioned, Franz testifies that Mieze had no affair with Reinhold and that the two men had been friends. He attributes the crime to Reinhold’s abnormal compulsion concerning women, while acknowledging that he cannot say whether Reinhold had sadistic tendencies; he suspects Mieze resisted him and that Reinhold acted in anger. Franz gives no further account of Reinhold, declining to discuss the injury to his arm or the rupture between them.

The silence does not amount to indifference. From the witness box, Franz looks steadily at Reinhold, who sits between two officers in the dock. Franz feels no pity for him, but the narration describes a strange affection that survives even as Franz knows the harm Reinhold has done. Reinhold, meanwhile, considers exposing the Pums gang if the proceedings turn against him, but reconsiders when he sees its members in the gallery and observes that Franz is behaving decently. Their mutual regard is neither reconciliation nor exoneration: Reinhold’s calculation coexists with dependence on criminal associates, while Franz’s continued attention to him coexists with knowledge of betrayal and violence.

Reinhold is sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment for voluntary manslaughter, with alcoholism, compulsive disposition, and a depraved youth noted in the account. He accepts the sentence. When Eva breaks down at the verdict, overcome by Mieze’s death, Franz turns toward her and crumples in the witness box. The trial closes the criminal case against Reinhold, but it does not resolve the bond that has held Franz’s attention: Mieze’s loss remains present between the two men, and Franz’s surviving affection cannot undo his recognition of Reinhold’s responsibility.