The Spree is more than a passing landmark in the novel: it is attached both to Otto Bornemann’s elaborate escape from a looming prison sentence and to Mieze’s brief fear of drowning during a night out with Karl the tinsmith. The episodes make the river a point of possibility and danger, but in very different registers. Bornemann uses a body found in its water to manufacture a new identity; Mieze, carried through the night in a car, sees the same water as the end of a pleasure ride that has gone too far.

The River in Bornemann’s Escape

Bornemann’s story begins with the prospect of fifteen years in prison and a chance encounter with a dead man floating in the water. The narration associates the discovery with the Spree, though it does not keep the surrounding geography steady: it first places the episode near Potsdam, then corrects itself, locating Bornemann’s escape near Anklam, at Gorke. It also invokes Neugard in recounting how he came upon the body. Rather than resolving these shifts, the account repeatedly revises its own directions, making the tale feel less like a fixed map than a story retold in motion.

The decisive act is practical and audacious. Bornemann takes his identity papers from his pocket and places them in the dead man’s pocket, so the corpse can stand in for him. In the later retelling, he ties the body to a tree to stop it drifting away, travels to Stettin, buys a ticket to Berlin, and telephones his wife from a pub. She comes with money and clothes; he whispers to her and leaves, while she promises to identify the body. The river’s role is therefore immediate and material: it provides the corpse around which Bornemann constructs his disappearance, while the papers transform that corpse into a false version of himself.

From False Death to a New Name

After the escape, Bornemann settles in Anklam and makes a living selling fish under the name Otto Finke. The change of identity appears to hold: the villagers know him as Finke, while the man officially understood to be dead remains Bornemann. His wife’s response, as the tale presents it, is not simple grief; she considers the possibility that the corpse is her husband and reflects on the little good his long absences and imprisonment had brought her. The staged death thus alters not only his legal identity but the terms on which his family understands his disappearance.

The disguise fails through recognition rather than through any detail of the river or the corpse. Bornemann’s stepdaughter, now grown and working in Anklam, recognizes the fishmonger as her father, although he denies being him. She writes to the criminal police in Berlin, describing how he disowns her and deceives her mother. The account then turns to the consequences for the children: they retain the first part of their name but take their mother’s surname, and the narration invokes the Civil Code rule that an illegitimate child and its father are not considered related. The river episode has set this chain in motion, but family recognition and official correspondence undo the identity Bornemann tried to secure through the body.

Retelling and Revision

The novel returns to Bornemann’s escape after already recounting it. In the later version, the episode becomes a rhyming, almost ballad-like narrative: the corpse is secured to a tree, the escapee goes to Stettin, and his wife arrives with money and clothes. The teller explicitly acknowledges having told the story before, then insists that hearing it again will do no harm. This repetition makes the river scene an example of how a tale can acquire momentum through performance: its sequence is familiar, yet the renewed telling supplies concrete actions and re-emphasizes the deception’s ingenuity.

The unstable place names also matter to the way the story is presented. The narrative corrects its own geography without settling into a single, untroubled account, while returning consistently to the essential maneuver: a dead body receives Bornemann’s papers, and Bornemann leaves under another identity. The Spree belongs to that remembered narrative as the water associated with the corpse, not as a carefully documented setting whose geography the account establishes beyond doubt.

Mieze’s Near-Drowning Fear

In a separate episode, the Spree enters a much more immediate scene. At a private party in Müggelhort, Mieze spends time with Karl the tinsmith, who has brought her along and is showing off his attractive companion. Later they drive away together. The ride is intimate and exhilarating, but Karl is drunk, and Mieze imagines that his old car may go into the Spree. She fears drowning; the thought cuts through the flirtation and makes the danger of the ride explicit.

Her fear does not amount to a break with Franz Biberkopf. In the same passage, Mieze thinks of following her beloved Franz and of the two of them wanting the same thing, even while she kisses Karl and invites further closeness. The contrast is central to the scene: the car carries her into a temporary intimacy, while the imagined river threatens to turn that excursion into an irreversible ending. Unlike Bornemann, she does not use the Spree to escape an established identity; she encounters it as a possible limit to a night whose pleasures have become precarious.

Narrative Significance

Across these episodes, the Spree connects two stories without making them equivalent. Bornemann’s encounter with a corpse initiates a calculated substitution: he uses death as cover, leaves his old name behind, and is eventually exposed by his stepdaughter. Mieze’s episode offers no comparable plan; the river is a feared destination in a dangerous drive, and her attention turns back toward the life and attachment she still expects to continue.

The river’s significance comes from this contrast and from the narrative’s handling of the scenes. One appearance is expanded through corrections, consequences, and a repeated, rhyming retelling; the other flashes up within the speed and intoxication of a night ride. In both, the Spree marks a boundary where ordinary movement can become something more decisive: a staged death and flight in Bornemann’s tale, or the sudden possibility of real death for Mieze.