The Salvation Army meeting on Dresdener Straße is the setting for a revealing reversal in Franz Biberkopf and Reinhold’s friendship: Reinhold, usually the one whose private habits puzzle Franz, brings him to a religious meeting and then abruptly flees its call to repentance. The visit opens a conversation about Reinhold’s compulsive pursuit of women, the temporary relief he has found in prayer, and his inability to believe that the relief can last.

Setting and Approach

One evening, Reinhold finds Franz beside the underground station at Alexanderplatz, in front of Landsberger Straße, and asks whether he has plans. Franz points out that the end of the month has not yet arrived and that Cilly is waiting for him, but agrees to go with Reinhold. Their walk is narrated down Alexanderstraße toward Prinzenstraße. Franz keeps asking where they are headed, initially guessing that Reinhold wants to go dancing at Walterchen’s. Instead, Reinhold says he wants to listen to the Salvation Army in Dresdener Straße.

For Franz, this is unexpected. He has not previously spent an evening with the Salvation Army soldiers, and he regards the destination as strange. Reinhold’s choice matters partly because it interrupts the familiar pattern Franz expects from him: the evening is not arranged around dancing or another woman, but around listening to a religious meeting. The scene begins with Reinhold controlling the destination while leaving Franz to discover its purpose along the way.

The Meeting and Reinhold’s Departure

The crucial moment comes at half past nine, when calls begin for people to go to the penitent bench. Reinhold becomes visibly unsettled in the meeting room and rushes out as if pursued. Outside on the steps, he warns Franz that the people there soften a person up until there is no resistance left and he might agree to anything. Franz answers that they will not rope him in so easily. The contrast is immediate: Franz treats the appeal as something he can withstand, while Reinhold’s flight suggests that the invitation has touched a vulnerability he would rather not face.

The meeting does not end the conversation. In the Hackepeter pub in Prinzenstraße, Reinhold grumbles further and then admits that he wants to get away from women. He complains about having to ask Franz to take another girlfriend off his hands, identifying the current woman as the blond Trude. Franz offers to help, even suggesting that he could take Trude and that they could find arrangements for the women Reinhold no longer wants. Reinhold resists this easy solution: the problem, he insists, is not simply how to dispose of one particular relationship.

Prayer and the Repeated Cycle

Reinhold tells Franz that he has already been to the Salvation Army twice and spoken with one of its members. He has tried to keep going and said yes, but then given in. His account of the pattern is sharply repetitive: for about four weeks he is intensely taken with a woman, to the point that he imagines himself almost mad; afterward, he cannot bear to see her and wants her gone. He cannot explain what first makes him desire each woman, and says that even the women are astonished by how suddenly he begins pursuing them.

Prayer has offered a limited reprieve. Reinhold says that after praying, he can pull himself together and that the effect may last six or eight weeks, taking his mind off the cycle for a time. Franz responds with astonishment that Reinhold prayed at all, then suggests he might have remained at the meeting and sat on the bench rather than leaving. Reinhold refuses the suggestion: he says he no longer wants to do it, regards the practice as useless, and does not believe in it. Franz recognizes the impasse in his own way, observing that prayer cannot help someone who does not believe it will help. The Salvation Army meeting is therefore presented neither as a cure nor as a simple joke; it is a place Reinhold has approached in desperation, but from which he cannot accept the offered form of surrender.

Narrative Significance

The location gives the narrative a scene in which Reinhold, rather than Franz, is exposed as a person who cannot master his own habits. At the meeting, his flight comes before his explanation; the later confession supplies the reason for his unease without turning it into a solution. His account makes clear that his pursuit of women is not a series of settled attachments: desire rises abruptly, then gives way to disgust and the demand for separation. Prayer briefly interrupts that sequence, but does not break it.

The exchange also complicates Franz’s readiness to manage the consequences for his friend. He volunteers to take Trude and says he can help with the other women, as though Reinhold’s problem could be solved by reallocating relationships. Reinhold’s objections reveal that the cycle belongs to him, not to any one woman Franz might take away. The Salvation Army meeting thus anchors a disclosure whose effects reach beyond the room: it reveals both Reinhold’s distress and the limits of Franz’s practical offers, while leaving the recurring pattern unresolved.