The Alexanderquelle police raid and Franz Biberkopf’s arrest turns an ordinary Friday-night police roundup into an armed confrontation, and then into the disclosure of a concealed identity. As officers clear the Alexanderquelle pub, an elderly man slips inside, watches the operation, and acquires a gun left on the floor. When the police finally order him out, he refuses and fires at an approaching officer. The force used to subdue him ends the confrontation, but his arrest reveals that the apparent old man is Franz Biberkopf, disguised with a grey wig and already sought in connection with a murder case.

The roundup reaches the Alexanderquelle

The raid is one stop in a broader police operation. Officers first surround the Rückerdiele pub on Rückerstrasse, take its customers away in a truck, and then divide their forces among additional locations. The Alexanderquelle pub, at the corner of Prenzlauer Allee and Münzstrasse, is packed with people collecting themselves after payday: they drink, listen to music and the radio, and continue talking even as detectives enter and announce the roundup. The police take customers away in batches, with vehicles moving back and forth to police headquarters.

The pub’s routine does not immediately yield to the officers’ authority. Customers protest, joke, and ask about work they will miss; a woman in the passage cries that she has not registered at her new address. In the ladies’ toilet, another woman continues screaming while police manage the crowded room. These exchanges make the roundup at once an exercise of state power and a disruption of people’s immediate concerns: wages, employment, paperwork, and getting home. The police keep emptying the pub, but the room remains unsettled, with officers and customers negotiating each departure in turn.

The disguised man waits

At about a quarter to eleven, after the raid has been under way for some time, a grey-haired man enters despite the police presence at the door. The officers’ attention is drawn elsewhere—to people trying to enter and to police marching from across the street—so he passes them and goes upstairs with a beer. Other people remain nearby, laughing and talking as if the operation were not their concern. The man sits alone and observes the nearly emptied room.

His place at the edge of the roundup changes when his foot touches an object beside the wall. It is a gun, apparently abandoned by someone; he picks it up and now has two weapons. He interprets the raid with bitter suspicion, imagining that the decision to make arrests serves police officials’ public image and private advancement, and noting that the operation takes place on a Friday when people have their pay. His comments do not halt the procedure, but they place the state’s orderly operation beside the disorder and self-interest he believes it conceals.

Refusal and gunfire

An officer comes upstairs to hurry the remaining people out and asks the old man whether he has paid. The man replies that he has only just arrived. When told he must leave with the police, he does not move. The officer goes downstairs and confers with the others; after a short interval the police return and again order the man to come with them. The scene tightens around this refusal: the room is nearly empty, the officers are moving quickly, and the man remains seated while the roundup resumes around him.

As the young inspector leads the officers up the steps, the man pulls his left arm from his pocket and fires at the first officer rushing toward him. The narration identifies the gunman as Franz Biberkopf and links his action to his sense that the police have pursued him long enough. He stands, but officers close in and strike him; his thoughts turn to his artificial arm and to the recent loss of Mieze. Before he can fire again, he collapses beside the bannister. He has stopped resisting, and the officers push aside the furniture, turn him over, and discover the artificial arm and two guns. They also find that he is wearing a wig. They pull him to his feet and take him away handcuffed by his left arm.

Identification and consequences

The arrest moves from the pub into the police and court system. Outside, a crowd gathers in Münzstrasse after hearing that shots have been fired. At police headquarters, officers process the people taken in the roundup, check papers, search them, and question them; Franz is brought in for questioning but does not speak. His injuries are noted, and he is presented last and remanded in custody.

The official account of the raid identifies him as a particularly valuable arrest. The artificial right arm and grey wig, considered alongside a photograph already held by the police, expose the disguise: the arrested man is Franz Biberkopf. The investigation connects him to the murder case of Emilie Parsunke in Freienwalde, where he is regarded as a possible accomplice, and records his prior convictions for manslaughter and procurement. The authorities also state that he had evaded the requirement to register with the police. Thus the roundup reveals more than the identity of one armed man: a seemingly routine arrest has brought into custody a person already connected to a serious investigation and long sought by the police.

The sequence contrasts the machinery of mass arrest with the fragile boundary between an unnoticed individual and a public suspect. The pub is emptied through repeated, procedural actions—orders, transport, searches, forms—until the man who slipped past the officers becomes the operation’s most consequential prisoner. His arrest also joins the immediate disturbance to the novel’s earlier pressures: Franz had been expelled from Berlin by an official order and placed under welfare supervision, while the city’s crowds and streets had already overwhelmed him after his release from Tegel. At the Alexanderquelle, his evasion ends not through a planned surrender but in a collision with the police that exposes his disguise and returns him to custody.